Behind the Swinging Door

Material things, like antique silverware plated in gold, have power; the power to define a couple’s social status, the power to glorify a special occasion and the power to divide a family. I leaned against the frame of the kitchen door and watched siblings who grew up together loose control over plates and forks, knives and soup bowls. One said that it is impossible to split a set because a couple of plates are simply not enough when one is throwing a dinner party. None of them had actually ever used any of the utensils they were fighting over, for they had been kept locked in a glass menagerie. Their parents refused to use them even when they had guests, a graduation from college or their first grandchild. Lack of use had made them more valuable, magical, or maybe just cursed. They loved each other dearly, but not one of them would relinquish their claim to the plates and silverware they had never touched. I knew that they, too, would never use them, but place them inside a more modern menagerie in the dinning room of one of their spacious apartments. And just like them, their children would peer through the glass at the shinny pattern, the intertwined letters of their grandparent’s last names and the different colored wine glasses made from French crystal. Untouchable, unusable, useless except to reflect victory over the others and a definite social status that stretched, now, into the second generation. Their family had become established, blue blood, no longer nouveau-riche, the plates and silverware reflected that and whoever kept them would be considered, automatically, a wealthy person with impeccable taste.

The kitchen door swung open, through which came a prim maid dressed in a bleached white uniform offering coffee with milk and sugar on a silver tray. I held the door open as she went back into the kitchen. When I let go, it remained ajar enough so that I overheard the phone ringing and the maid’s ensuing conversation with a close relative. I became drawn, completely absorbed by her words, her story, the stark contrast of her reality with what was happening in the adjacent room. Through tears of joy, she told her niece she had finally found a job which enabled her to send money back home to her family so that they could buy food and clothing. She related how over the last two years she could not even afford the bus ticket into the city to look for work and she was ecstatic and kept thanking God and all the saints for her good fortune. Fortune. As I stood there, in between these two worlds separated by a hollow swinging door, I grasped the meaning of relativity, the dividing power of material things and the beauty of true wealth. I left silently through the kitchen and thanked the maid as I walked out of the marble covered mansion.