This past fall I have felt like one of the pieces of beat-up wooden furniture my dad used to buy from people in Germany—once he drove to someone’s barn to get a big solid-pine dresser with two drawers and two doors. When he bought it, it was covered in many layers of paint, and it took him weeks out on the balcony to strip and sand and pry all the bits of paint off before you could see the beautiful plain wood. Then he rubbed it all over with beeswax until it gleamed and smelled like wild honey, and then he brought it inside and it sat, glowing, in the living rooms of all the houses we lived in after that. It even went in a container and rode on a ship from Germany to Oregon, and now it is in our living room, because my parents didn’t have room for it at their new house (and maybe also because they knew I loved it).
I feel like that dresser before the refinishing, like I’ve had a lot of owners and they all had different taste in colors, and all used oil-based paint, and laid it on thick. Some of the layers make me want to struggle to match an ideal I have, some make me want to fight an expectation I believe the world has of me, some create darkness that makes it hard to see anything. But they all make it feel impossible to take a moment and simply be in it, to accept it as what it is and start from where I am. And as the splinters in Hans Christian Andersen’s Snow Queen distort the vision of those in whose eyes they lodge, the layers under which I am living project outward onto everything I look at. Our neighborhood becomes not a place in which particular people live, but a generic and unchangeable rich suburb. My marriage becomes not a living relationship but a competition of photographs. Our house is not a gift and a home but a complex series of traps, a thing that will eat me whole if I let it.
It feels incredible, when I write the layers out, that I could take them seriously. It feels even more incredible that I can be aware of what a layer is, of what it is telling me about my world or myself, of how it is sucking the light of my life, and yet feel unable to get out from under it. Here is where the metaphor of the dresser has been helpful: I have been wanting to step out from under the layers as though they are blankets, as though a few shrugs and a sidestep ought to get me clear. But if I think of them instead as layers of paint, then this is a piecemeal, inch-by-square-inch process. It takes care because you don’t want to gouge the wood. Different tools will work on different parts: deglosser everywhere. But then a sanding machine on the large flat surfaces, a sanding block on the smaller flat surfaces, paint knives and wads of sandpaper and hours of sweaty patience on the scrollwork at the corners. And you can be through all the layers, down to the wood, in one place, and not even through the muddy beige outer layer in another place.
The layers that make me saddest are the ones that have to do with Lucy. I have been realizing that her curious, patient, eloquent toddler self is not delighting me as much as I’m pretty sure it could be. The first paint-removal forays will go toward figuring out what’s up with that.
For now, a moment of recent delight: Toof! Is her word for Tschüs, which is bye in German. This trip she has learned to open doors, if they have handles rather than knobs. She will reach up on tip-toe, open the door, maneuver herself out, reach up on tiptoe again, and then wave with her free hand through the narrowing gap and say “Toof! Bah-bah!” as she pulls it shut from the outside. Then there is the whap-whap-whap of her feet smacking down the hall, getting fainter, and then pausing and getting louder again. And then the handle depresses and the door cracks open and she comes in and grins at me and turns around to do it again.