The Wall Unit
wall unit is the bastard of the furniture family, I read today in a magazine aspiring to be opinion-making in interior design. I flew into a kind of rage. Who would dare to hierarchize the world of home furnishings, thus demoting the wall unit to the ranks of subpar product on a furniture industry scale? The vitriol of the assertion got me thinking. Where had this sudden attack on the wall unit come from--the wall unit, which in fact ought not to inspire any particular reaction at all? I think the problem lies in the status of the wall unit as furnishing but not exactly as something that is and is not, as a kind of hiatus in a world of chairs and tables, sort of neither the apple nor the orange, and yet the functionality of the wall unit is as obvious as a splatter of ink on a white sheet. The wall unit eludes classification, fulfilling two different functions, each to a certain extent. it's a bed, but it isn't that comfortable; it's storage, with drawers, but it doesn't hold that much; it's practical, but ... Well, there you have it. Show me your wall unit, and I'll tell you who you are. My .first wall unit was a humble particleboard thing. had a couple of drawers with brass keys. The bed, which came out of hiding every night like a blushing bride, hesitantly, reluctantly, was hard--quite severe, re-ally--and promoted placid, conventional dreams. Before my dad and brother first brought the wall unit into my room, we spent the entire afternoon debating where to put it so as to reconcile the room to it, so as to keep the peace between the space and the new thing. Yet by the next day our worst fears had been realized: upon being released into the room, the wall unit took over, absorbed it, completely and absolutely dominated it. We tried to move the wall unit around, diminish its power by placing it at a less efficacious angle, in an awkward position, but each attempt ended in defeat. That day we kept going into the room to look at the wall unit, trying to get some distance from it, saying things like, It sure is big, or It's just a piece of furniture, and other seemingly insignificant things that were in fact attempts at assuaging our intense anxiety. stood there like a renegade amidst the older, more established furniture. stood alone, a furnishing unto itself, in need of no complement, unlike the table, or the chair, or the clothes rack. The brutality of the wall unit issued from a kind of particular perversity: it was ordinary, absolutely transparent, banal, to such a degree that it actually derided its ordinariness, as though aping it. Suddenly all the other furniture seemed terribly conservative in comparison, unbearably conservative, and our first impulse was to throw the tables and chests of drawers and chairs out the window, though my mom talked us out of it. Cultivating, embellishing, adorning the wall unit with familiar trinkets, making friends with it by lending it our features, and thus transforming an angular mismatch into a round presence--this was another option. We covered it with crap: a little clay bank, picture frames, fake flowers, a transistor radio, a couple of books. We arranged these things on the wall unit's shelves and populated its drawers sock by sock. For a second it seemed we'd done it: the wall unit beamed at us like a good friend, but after just a second, something creaked, and the fake flowers fell out of their vase--which was a sign that we were not going to get off so easy. I feared night, and I put off the moment when I would have to approach the wall unit, open it up, lie down. …