BERICK: If you give a girl a column

So I sit down with my notebook or my laptop, I’m on my bed or at a café or at the library, and I start to write a column. I’ve been thinking about it all week. When something happens or doesn’t happen. When I catch or miss a bus, when I get a really great cup of coffee or a terrible one. When I walk outside my apartment and a collage of college paraphernalia is scattered over my sidewalk in beer bottle tones, or when that guy with tunes on his bike rides by. Sometimes, like this week, I haven’t thought about anything suitable, and I wander back through the last semester, colors and tastes and things someone yelled outside my window at 2 a.m. Sunday morning. This week, when I mentally wander my room, I rest every couple steps on my chair. No, not that one, that one is covered in clothing and books for final papers &- but the other chair by the window that has just a few strains of black on its wood-stained frame. I realize I have to write about this chair.

I adopt a lot of things. I’ve never stopped for Greenpeace or Save the Children but I stop for debris all the time. I scoop up flowers and bottle caps and toy cars, a pearl necklace and once, in my laundry room, a chair. It was so New England. It had visibly strong wooden joints. It was sturdy and Puritanical, looked like it was comfortable but just barely. I didn’t sit in it &-&- everyone knows that monsters and bed bugs live in Allston basements. I had to exorcise it first. So I took it upstairs, put some newspaper under its legs and called my dad. My dad may have some concerns for his little girl, but he can also tell me immediately what to do with an adopted chair. There is only a slight pause. “What kind of chair?” Maybe he’s imagining worse than bed bugs. “Wood? Oh, you need some sand paper, 200 or 150, they come in different textures . . .” and he’s off.

The hardware stores must do very well. Like Subway, they must pump their smell around the store; sawdust and paint and maybe adrenaline. I’ll buy anything and I did. I bought bed bug repellant for the exorcism &- it looked radioactive so I figured it would work. I bought paint &- white, because why not go with the Protestant theme? &- and wood stain, sandpaper, a mask. I meant business. This was procrastination and I was serious about it. Plus, Allston specters can sneak in through the nose and mouth and steal your soul. When this happens, you will be tormented by a stale beer smell and only henceforth be satisfied when in a basement party &-&- terrifying. I knew the day would come when my father would tell me how to fix something over the phone. First it was my attitude toward homework. Instead of shouting it up the stairs, he began to say it over the phone: “Just take it one thing at a time” or “if you’d started you’d be done by now.”

Here I adjust myself in my chair. Have I gotten its dimensions right? Now it seems like a loyal housebroken companion. I’ve taken away the newspaper and though it isn’t white yet, it looks cleaner and more welcoming, if only slightly. I now could have bought it distressed, an important stage in the life of any girl’s home goods. Boys’ furnishings have to look hereditary, sorry fellows.

Sitting with my chair, when I still had it relegated to the stairwell, I filtered into the living rooms of five or six of my neighbors, like John, my 4-year-old neighbor I can always hear, even through my iPod isolation. But in the stairwell, life echoed along with my sanding. I heard intimacies up to my friends on the third floor and down to the disgruntled dryers and the waiting peanut butter mousetraps. This was nice, but a little scary, as though I was suddenly the monster in the basement listening through the porous walls. All one has to do is step into the stairwell for longer than it takes to carry out the trash. The only thing I would need to become the Harriett the Spy of my building was sit out there. But in Allston, privacy is precious. I’d be more like “Harriett the Thief,” besides my chair wasn’t sit-worthy yet. So I put on my iPod and kept sanding.

I realize now that this is my last column, and no matter that its competition is lengthy papers, I still need to smooth it out, get the rough bits. I call my dad again. It’s late and I’m tired. I need him to say “you’d be done by now,” or “you can do it,” or anything, really. (By late, I mean 10 p.m. I’ve really gotten older this semester). In the middle of my call I realize I’ve figured it out. All I really need is a cup of black tea, which of course we don’t have. So in other words, all I really need is a run to Tedeschi’s. I tell my dad. He doesn’t say no, so I can tell he thinks this is at least a halfway decent idea. As I walk out the door I realize I did and did not need to call him.

He offers a piece of wisdom. “Remember what Willy Loman said,” he says, referring to the main character in “Death of a Salesman.” I’m a little nervous. “Death of a Salesman” is a sad tale of children who forsake their parents and end up the worse for it.

“What, Dad? What did Willy Loman say?”

He thinks for a minute. Near-silence on the line &- maybe my mom is giving him a critical look, or maybe he is giving a critical look to one of the cats.

“I don’t actually remember.”

Phew. “OK, Dad. I love you. Goodnight.”

Julia Berick is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences and a weekly columnist for The Daily Free Press. She can be reached at berick.j@gmail.com.