The Altar

It didn’t take long for Aurora to fill the dresser top with her designer perfume bottles, glittering gemstone earrings, viles of cosmetic serum, and array of silk scarves. On days when her waist looked thicker and hair looked thinner, damp tissues littered the space between her beauty items. 

It was an unusual dresser, made with soft birchwood painted a dusty shade of reddish pink, like a strawberry birthday cake or faded blood stain. The robust bronze knobs on the six drawers were the shape of eyeballs and had door knocker-like handles that clanged and clattered when the drawers moved. The strangest part was the cluster of carved pink roses that spread across the middle two drawers. These roses were intricately carved, with buttery, plump petals, serrated leaves, and violently pointed thorns. There was something significant about them, something otherworldly yet homey.

Aurora’s mother made comments on how strange and unsightly the dresser was, but Aurora ignored her. Reacting would only trigger her mother’s primal ferocity to eat her young. Instead, she lit a cigarette and fiddled with her earrings on the dresser. Her mother crooned that she was glad Aurora took her advice to pick up smoking to keep her slender figure and stop that “adolescent chub.”

So Aurora smoked, and smoked, and did her makeup, and smoked, and cinched her waist, and smoked, and dabbed serums on her skin, and smoked, and went on dates, and smoked, and went to church, and smoked, and got engaged, and smoked, and got married, and smoked, and got pregnant. She stopped smoking then. She didn’t need a slender figure while growing a life, two lives, actually. She let the weight come on and nourished the babies with turkey legs and Jell-O and happily let her dresses out and bought bigger underwear. 

After Jasmine and Jessie were born, she went right back to the dresser and grabbed her pack to light a cigarette, incensing the room after nine months of purity. She never got her slender figure back, not while smoking a pack a day, and not when she started smoking two packs a day. Before her girls turned 20, Aurora’s lungs were blacker than her bible cover and weighted with unholy sludge. In her final days, she cursed cigarettes and cursed her serums and cursed her mother. She passed a week before their birthday. 

Jasmine got the dresser. It didn’t take long for a raw pile of wet tissues and depression food to grace the top. For now, Aurora’s smaller belongings were out of sight. Jasmine thought of her mother's sparkling crystals and lavish perfume bottles that used to sit atop the dresser. She pictured the dainty glass jars filled with mysterious goops and goos her mother used on herself. And she convulsed in ugly sobs again. Months later, when she finally exhausted her tears, she cleared the dresser top of sadness and replaced it with her happiness — poetry. Milton’s Paradise Lost, Plath’s Ariel, Dante’s Inferno, Dickinson’s complete works, Frost’s selected poems, and Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet all lived on the dusty pink dresser. 

The poetry and dresser went with Jasmine to her first apartment. She draped her something borrowed over it, Aurora’s wedding veil. It hung over her beloved books as she got ready for the ceremony, the crown lined with teardrop diamonds as sharp as the carved rose thorns. She let tears ruin her makeup, thinking how her mom would’ve loved seeing the veil on her. She would’ve adjusted the crown for her and cooed that she looked like an angel. She would’ve been elated at the sight of Jasmine in a frou-frou dress, the kind she raised Hell over wearing before church as a child. But Jasmine walked down the aisle to the rest of her life without her mother in the pews. 

The dresser came to her first house on Star Sea Lane, where she had her only daughter, Ella, and then her second on Matthew Place, where Jasmine died. She outlived her mother by some 50 years. Her skin puckered and creased in ways her mother’s never did, in ways her mother would’ve hated. Her poetry collection stopped growing. She’d been meaning to buy Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, but would never indulge in those sweet verses. On her final evening, laying in her bed with Ella, she remembered anxiously swirling her fingers along the rose carvings as she confessed that it was in fact her who cut the hair off Jessie’s doll. She saw her mother browsing the dresser’s lipsticks before Mass on Sunday, spending the better part of two hours primping herself for public consumption. And she slipped away thinking of the glittering diamond and ruby earrings her father would leave on the pink dresser as a shimmery offering to her mother. 

Ella took the dresser to her house. It didn’t take long for her to clutter the top with her tear-filled tissues, wine-stained coffee mugs, and nibbled-on crackers. The numbness enveloped her. She prayed to a God she had never believed in to take care of her mother. She prayed over the altar where her mother had kept her poetic scripture and where her mother’s mother had cast beauty spells with gemstones, lipstick, and retinol. 

The tissues were scuffled off the dresser and replaced with trinkets from Ella’s travels — a tiny golden dragon from Tokyo, tamarind lollipops from Uttar Pradesh, a petite flask of holy water from the Vatican, a crow skull from Les Cayes, a supple stone from the River Ganga, sacred candles from Bolivar Square. She traveled to rid the numbness inside her; she traveled to do what her mother and grandmother never did. 

Nestled among her dresser-top totems were two poetry books, worn with love, and a few pairs of illustrious earrings, a deep ocean in each gem. Ella thought of her mother rearranging her poetry, sliding a book out to skim a specific poem and then slipping it back in its place. She’d leave funny little notes on the dresser with poem ideas, like “blackberries as dreams” or “sassy weeds in the garden.” Although she never met her grandmother, her mother would recall simple stories of her for Ella. Every time Jasmine wore a pair of Aurora’s earrings or Ella asked to borrow a spritz of perfume, she’d mention a time her mother had worn them with matching heels or where she’d found the rare freesia fragrance. Ella could feel them — two angels floating, two witches hovering — above her altar.

While placing her newest relic on the dresser, Ella heard her calling. About half a year later, she listened, and about a year after that, she brought Jane home, and the numbness inside her evaporated into an effervescent kind of love. A holy kind of love. Jane was eleven and, so far, Ella had learned that she hated hot dogs, hated reading, hated her fosters, hated church, hated showers, hated school, and hated sitting in the backseat of cars (although she still wasn’t allowed to sit up front). But Ella promised her she’d never have to eat a hot dog again.

Jane’s curiosity naturally drew her toward the rose dresser’s landscape of treasures. She jostled the collection of foreign coins sitting in a tiny ceramic bowl from Chichen-Itza, rubbed the head of a Buddha figurine, tapped the rounded peak of a seashell from Barbados. Her fingers fiddled with dangling ruby earrings and flipped through pages of poetry. 

When they returned from a weekend trip to Maine, Jane gave the altar her first offering — a golf-ball-sized snow globe with a little lighthouse inside. A tiny blue lobster sat on the sandy shore in front of the lighthouse. She assessed the sea of mementos, and then gingerly placed the snow globe beside Sylvia Plath’s collected works. Ella felt the spell flourish in the air as the snow globe settled among the generations of talismans, the simple objects that had given her peace in her travels, given her mother meaning during her long life, given her grandmother confidence in a cruel world. 

Jane put her hands in her pockets and surveyed the dresser with its new addition, her initiation complete. Ella thought of all the minuscule pieces of life Jane would bring to the dresser: dried prom corsages, movie theater tickets, beaded friendship bracelets. The prayers for her crush to like her or for a car on her 16th birthday whispered over the carved roses and thorns. Ella knew the heartbreak, the havoc, and the Hell waiting for this precious, precocious girl, things she couldn’t save her curious soul from. All she could do was build this sanctuary for her. 

But on her 16th birthday, Jane didn’t get a car. She didn’t get a cake either. Ella found her in her room, lying on her bed motionless with Sylvia Plath’s Ariel splayed open on the corner of the mattress, a brief note to Ella scrawled in the margins.”I love you, Mom.” The dresser never held her dried prom corsage, her high school graduation cap tassel, or her something borrowed. Ella lived with this sickening, engulfing pain for the rest of her life. She pushed her travel trinkets to the back corner of the dresser top. Framed pictures of Jane adorned the new shrine, surrounded by tissues soaked in a mother’s grief. When Ella left the world, she was looking at Jane’s photographed smile and a tiny blue lobster in a snow globe. Antique diamond earrings glittered in the sun just behind the globe, resting on a shabby Walt Whitman book. 

The dresser was one of the last things to go at the estate sale, but someone eventually bought the musty pink wood with roses knifed into it. She took the altar home to line it with offerings, pray for miracles over it, worship her feminity beside it, and confess her sins in her private sanctuary. And it didn’t take long for the dresser to host her tearful tissues, beauty spells, scripture, and talismans of adventure.