The Coffee Table and the Maple Tree

On the edge of our seats, worn cushions the only furniture in an otherwise empty room, we eat out of politeness. The coconut is pleasant and familiar, the fried tapioca novel. My tongue puzzles over the flavor, the texture, as I study her hair, a little unkempt, her glasses, thick-framed, and her face, at once vibrant and sullen, at once aged and youthful. She is seventy years of life, seventy years of wisdom one only attains by embracing the bad cards she was dealt.

Feisty. She was always feisty. I scan my memories and find her standing at a table of sweets, years ago, after much of the crowd had left celebrations for navratri, the Hindu festival for the goddesses. She eyed the desserts one by one, glanced at my mother and me conspicuously, and, settling on a cashew-flavored delight, proclaimed, “To hell with diabetes!”

I admired her spirit. I still do.

Her husband is quiet. He always has been, lost in proofs and theorems, planning out his next lecture, conjuring and solving problems in that professorial way. She knows that we know his silence today is not scholarly contemplation, but a departure from a former self. He asked for our names not because he has not seen us in years, but because he does not remember who we are.

We hear the story of her life as bricolage. One moment, her mother is widowed young by her father who never took his medicines. One moment, she has congestive heart failure and 57% lung function. One moment, her eighteen-year-old self is married and finds herself in a new land, a new era. One moment, her brother has invited them to spend the rest of their days in California, but she would miss the seasons too much, the life spurting from the trees as the dead of winter gives way to the marvel of spring. It wouldn’t feel like Christmastime, she says, under sunshine and palm trees. It remains unspoken that he gets lost walking in the neighborhood where they have spent the last fifty years.

They are selling the house and moving to India. There is a Chinese saying, she tells us, about the fallen leaves returning to their roots. She can’t remember quite how it goes, but she gazes out to the patient maple tree in the front yard, and we all can picture its leaves yellowing and browning in the fall, drifting downwards, and laying themselves to their final rest on the ground, where they will disintegrate and find their way to the trunk’s tentacles below.

They planted that tree together forty-two years ago, she says proudly, when they first bought this home. I imagine the young couple, he with a full head of hair and she hoping for the children they would never have, with shovels and a sapling. Forty-two rings of tree trunk later, I imagine that every nook and cranny of the house, every floorboard, every piece of furniture, including the ones we are about to load into the car today, has its own story.