The Swinging Door

I think about the power of materials things as I stand near the kitchen door and watch siblings bicker and loose control over plates and forks, knives and soup bowls. One says that it is impossible to split the set because six settings are not enough to throw a proper dinner party. I can see everything is locked in the glass menagerie located against the wall, unopened and unused by anyone in the family.

Because the parents had not brought them out for important guests, college graduations or even the birth of a first grandchild, the dinnerware, utensils and wine glasses had become powerful, even magical. It is their power that weakens the bond between the siblings for none is willing to relinquish their claim to the plates and silverware they have never touched. They, too, will 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 and useless except to reflect victory and to show the social status. The dinnerware proves that the owners are no longer nouveau riche, but an established and prestigious family with impeccable taste.

As the kitchen door swings open, a prim maid dressed in a bleached white uniform enters the room. She is the newly hired domestic of one of the children, brought over to serve coffee and au d’oeuvres while they distribute the inheritance. She holds a silver tray on top of which I can see two small porcelain pitchers. The smell of fresh coffee and steamed milk escapes through the small openings between the pouring hole and the dainty tops. Around the matching sugar bowl there is a symphony of miniature saucers with cloth napkins. Quietly, she asks and pours each one of us a cup of coffee and, almost unnoticed; she walks back into the kitchen.

The door remains ajar. I sip my coffee standing, in silence, so that I can hear a phone conversation between the maid and a relative in the adjacent room. I am completely absorbed by her words, drawn in by the excited peaks in her tone of voice when she talks about this new job, the elegance of the family, the beauty of the apartment… Now she will be able to send money to her mother, for the care of her two children. She just can’t believe that after two years of starving, of not having enough money to buy a bus ticket into the city to look for a job that she could get such lucky break. She thanks God and all the saints for her good fortune. Fortuna, I repeat.

As I stand, in between these two worlds that are separated only by a hollow swinging door, I grasp the meaning of relativity, the dividing power, or curse, of material things and the beauty of true wealth. I leave silently through the kitchen and out the back service door, thanking the maid, as I walk out of the marble covered mansion.