A Chair of One’s Own

She returned home from school and was very tense. Yet another day when she didn’t have any fun at school. No one was home yet. In class they called her “latchkey” because she always returned to an empty apartment. Her parents came back late and her brother was already in college and didn’t live with them any longer. But she wasn’t really alone. Her grandmother lived around the corner at the end of their street. She loved her grandmother very much. She called her ‘Nona,’ grandmother in Ladino (a language spoken by Jews of Spanish descent). She changed from slacks into a skirt and left the house. She walked quickly to Nona’s apartment and went directly to the dining room, where “her” chair stood in a corner. It was a beautiful dark brown wooden chair full of magnificent carvings of lions and other figures. She sat on it with the little movement she had learned to make that fluttered her skirt upward and then, as she sat, allowed it to fall beautifully spread out around her just like the dresses depicted in old painted portraits of queens.

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The chair was where she could relax. Surrounded by the figures carved on its high back and arm rests and the crown-like feature at its top, she felt safe, as if encircled by bodyguards. Only here was she free to be herself. Slowly, she spread her palms and moved them forward over the armrests stroking along the manes of the carved lions until she touched the ends of the armrests, where the lions’ heads ended in gaping mouths. She always liked to put her fingers in their mouths. She felt a strength begin to grow inside her as if this daring act was played with real tamed lions that surrendered to her. Yes, it’s her chair. Everyone knows it. She is the only one who sits on it. It is her nook of serenity, where she is the queen. Here she can breathe and feel inner peace spread within her.