Chair shopping is blissful for these women. Perhaps I am not asking the right questions, or maybe, I have no right to ask any questions. Then, each time, the little book surprises me. What would they do with that one chair when they were all home together? Who would get to sit in it? Why didn’t Rosa and her family want their nice house fullof sofas and chairs back after the fire? Was this somehow about the state of single mothers in Ronald Reagan’s America, a way to argue for self-sufficiency and sacrifice in the face of adversity in apolitical way? Shouldn’t they be investing this money? Why wouldn’t this family of three want enough room to entertain, to have friends over, to structure and build a new life that looked just like the old one lost in the fire-or better? Did they have to learn to do with less, to accept and pretend that their poverty was enough for them? She doesn’t want a pair of chairs-she is planning to need just one. I wonder, why she wants just one beautiful floral armchair, a detail I had never thought about as a girl. Poignantly, after the fire, the elderly grandmother thanks their neighbors saying, “It is lucky that we are young and can start all over.” And they do.Įven though Rosa narrates the book, these days I wonder about her mother’s story. There doesn’t seem to be any support or otherwise from the father. The book refers to him only obliquely, as the narrator mentions the “other grandfather” who helps after the fire by bringing a rug-a detail that makes it clear simultaneously that there was a father somewhere in their lives, and that the grandmother who lives in the home is currently on her own, too. Rosa’s father’s absence is simply not addressed. The primary relationships in A Chair for My Mother are between mother and daughter, the girl and her mother, and her mother’s mother.
Rosa, the daughter and narrator, helped her mother at the restaurant peeling onions and filling the catsup bottles. Mother counted out half of the coins from her tips working in the diner. The grandmother put aside change from the difference between fruits and vegetables on sale and her fixed income. This tragedy is the impetus that leads them to decide to save for a whole year to purchase one place to sit for a household of three. Mother and daughter are on the way home from buying new pumps and sandals and enjoying tulips when they see that their house is on fire. The single chair at its center was purchased by three generations of women saving coins for a year in a big pickle jar brought home from mother’s waitress job at The Blue Tile Diner. I didn’t notice many of the key details of the story when I was a kid. As we reread it bedtime after bedtime, the book has made me probe the limits of my own feminist imagination, as both a mother and a museum curator responsible for explaining to the public what chairs and other things may really mean. What does this chair mean? A Chair for My Mother is a story about the pleasures and pressures of single motherhood in the 1980s, of independence and intimacy, of how people chose to live in their homes and families, embodied in their desire for a beautiful, bright, overstuffed armchair. It is an unexpectedly weird little story from 1982 about a family overcoming a fire and saving up coins in a huge jar for a whole year to buy one perfect chair. A Chair for my Mother by Vera Williams is one of my favorites. When I have been very good, my four-year-old son will sometimes suggest that we add one of my childhood books to the bedtime pile.
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