Year Six: The Furniture Wars

My aunt eventually ran out of rooms to remodel and decorate after the upper story had been redone. The front lawn was left to the landscapers, and the back yard was now a swimming pool, its diving board coincidentally placed exactly where my meticulously-planned herb garden had been the year before. Since my aunt neither swims nor cooks, this change did not affect her in the slightest, and I consoled myself with the fact that my plants would have soon died under her care, in any case. My orchid had lasted all of one month once I left for university after surviving her first attempt on its life, so there would have been little hope for the curry. I am not sure whether her attack on my room spawned from an unquenchable desire to render every portion of the house intolerable, or a sense of vengeance that could no longer be focused on living things only loosely related to me. Either way, the result was the same; the Furniture Wars had begun.

My first hint that something was wrong was given over the phone, several months before I would be able to make it home to retaliate. She told me she had started buying new furniture for my room. It began when she noted my bedframe was crooked and squeaky, and progressed from there to items she simply didn't like. I spent the next few weeks cursing all the vigorous sex my high school boyfriend and I'd had, and wondered if she would have completely ignored my room had we not accidentally stripped the screws holding my bed together. She called me up to tell me about all the new items she'd bought without my approval, and then mentioned "The Thingy."

"You'll like the new bedframe. It's a little too big for your mattress, so you'll either need a new one or a larger comforter. We can go shopping when you get back. We're still waiting on The Thingy, though..."
"...The Thingy?"
"Yes. I don't remember what it's called. You put your clothes in it."
"Like a dresser?"
"Well, not quite. It's kind of stairsteppy, and tall..."

I was kept in the dark for a full year regarding the actual identity of The Thingy. Unfortunately, even more redecoration occurred in that uncertain interim. Next came two woven end tables, matching woven lamps, and a lot of red earthenware pots. I listened in mounting horror as she kept describing all the details she had changed, imagining my room slowly morphing into some sort of subterranean tomb, full to the brim with straw and terracotta. Her announcement that she had gotten me new "Egyptian cotton" sheets only worsened the imagery; I have a tendency to tangle myself in my sheets when asleep, a process which I had jokingly referred to as "self-mummification" for years. I spent my entire plane flight home for Winter Break dreading what I would find lurking in my basement. In the end, I settled on a scenario somewhere between the Cask of Amontillado and everything I knew of Tutankhamen the Third. Especially the curses.

Luckily, what I was presented with was not nearly as bad as I had feared. While these were certainly not items I would have chosen myself, they also were not what Fam would have chosen for herself, and as a result were tolerable for both parties. The final product was more Bohemian than I would have liked, but I was mostly happy to have a finished room again for the first time in two years. That is, until I discovered my new room came complete with its own ulterior motive:

Do you want new bookshelves?"Fam asked me when we were admiring the room together.
"Yeah, actually, that would be nice. These are starting to look a little battered."
"Okay. We'll look into it, even though you're here for HOW many days out of the year, exactly?"
"Well, I'll take this stuff with me when I finally move out. You're helping to furnish my first apartment!"
"No, this is going to be the guest bedroom."
"...."
"What?"
"So, basically, without even asking me about it, you're replacing my stuff with new stuff that isn't actually mine."
"Well, I don't know."

Hey, do you like your new room? Great! It's actually the guest bedroom, but we're letting you use the stuff for now. She apologized for it later once what she had actually told me sank into her brain, but still. Ow. It was said, and now I really kind of hate the bedroom.

I wasn't completely surprised by this turn of events, since she had done something similar to me earlier that year with my birthday present. Since my birthday is in February, I always tell my family what I want at Christmas so they can plan accordingly. I asked them for a digital camera that year, and they both seemed perfectly fine with it until it was brought up again in January.

"I don't think we're going to get you that. What else do you want?"
"That's the only thing I want. I don't want anything else."
"Since when should you get what you want for your birthday?"

The conversation ended there, because I hung up on her. The next morning I woke up and found $800 deposited into my checking account. That was her form of an apology, which I used to buy a digital camera, accessories, birthday dinner out, and new clothing. Needless to say, I was not surprised when the day after the "welcome to the guest bedroom!" discussion, I was taken comforter shopping and allowed to buy a $400, hand-made cover and pillow set.

It is odd to have a family so reliant upon tangible apologies. I have gone swimming in their apologies, taken pictures with their apologies, slept underneath their apologies, and worn their apologies on my ears, neck, and wrists. By this count they have said sorry quite frequently, but I have no memory, and no written record, of them actually saying the words to my face in a non-sarcastic manner. I have thought about this a great deal and concluded that I would much rather have heard their remorse than be constantly surrounded by it. It's not healthy to have a bathing suit that makes you feel bitter emotionally for reasons that have nothing to do with teenage body-image issues.

Despite these chronic communication problems, there were occasional signs that made me wonder if she did actually have a pretty good idea of what was going on. One such clue I found on my brand new, as-yet unspoilt-by-naughty-deeds bedframe:

Wonderful.

There is a factory label on my bed that reads: "Screw after assembly. Do not overexert."

If I had been in her place, I would have known exactly why my old bedframe was so shoddy, and would have left that label on as a subtle bit of humor after assembling the new one. I spent a few days wondering if this were the case, and whether I really had gotten away with all the things I thought I had in years past. Then, the Toast Incident occurred.

I am moving out tomorrow. So, I open the slidey thing we keep the toaster in because I like toast, right? A fucking OVULATION TEST falls out on my hand. Why on the TOASTER?

I hate toast. >.< Note to self- finding an ovulation test on the toaster does not improve the appetite."It was a hard decision between that and "So Fam, are you fertile?" But I was afraid she'd tell me if I wrote down the second one.

She giggled unabashedly at me when she saw the note the next morning, and said "I put that there so you wouldn't find it." Once that happened, I was forever convinced that her thought processes were far too different from my own for her decisions to be made for reasons I could comprehend. It was a reassuring epiphany.

As Year Seven would prove, I did indeed understand little about the inner workings of Fam's mind. The newly-discovered identity of "The Thingy" was an indicator, as were several embarrassing conversations we had concerning the impending divorce proceedings. What I had been predicting for years had finally come to pass.