This past weekend we went to IKEA to get a standing makeup mirror. My son had broken the one my grandma argued a VS sales rep into giving her over twenty years ago at a Chinese grocery store checkout. I found a similar one at IKEA.
We walked the familiar path through the showroom and passed the display where the IKEA LACK side tables sit.
My husband and I both stopped.
The $9.99 yellow tag was gone. The classic 21” x 21” LACK, the one we had lived on for 13 years, now costs $16.99!! We looked around. The $9.99 version is still there, but it is a completely different table. 13 x 13 inches. Only 40% of what it used to be.
We both said it at almost the same time: our $9.99 table is gone!
During my 13 years in the U.S. on visa, I moved across 7 states: New Hampshire, New York, Connecticut, New Jersey, Vermont, Massachusetts, Maryland. Within states I moved too, sometimes to dodge a rent renewal spike, sometimes because a landlord had other plans. Manhattan to Long Island City to further out in Queens. Fort Lee to central New Jersey and back to Fort Lee. Every move left me a little smaller somehow, a little more hollowed out.
My husband and I learned one rule early: do not buy anything you would hesitate to throw away. No expensive furniture. Nothing that would cost money to store, money to move, nothing you would mourn when you left it on the curb. Buy cheap. Stay light. We have no home and do not know where tomorrow will take us. Do not get attached.
So for 13 years, we lived on IKEA LACK tables. $9.99 each. Whenever I moved to a new state I threw the old ones away and bought new ones from the nearest IKEA. They were our coffee table, our nightstand, my son’s nightstand, the side table in the living room, the console near the entrance where we dropped our keys. The “bookshelf” (lol) next to my writing desk. My son would sometimes sit on the floor next to it, move away the small stack of books I kept there, and eat snacks or draw.
Back home where I grew up, my bedroom had an entire wall of books. My dad had two more walls in his study. When my parents moved to a larger place after I left, they had rooms used almost entirely for storage, my dad’s books and mine. During my 13 years on visa, I owned probably fewer than twenty paper books, though I had three different Kindles. Books are not expensive to buy. They are expensive to move, expensive to store, and almost impossible to leave behind without it hurting. The only “bookshelf” I had for 13 years was a $9.99 LACK table.
The LACK tables carried the weight of 13 years. They became our silent, visible partners in all of it: the moving, the feeling small, the not knowing.
There were moments I got so tired of seeing them everywhere that I wanted to buy something real. My husband would say: imagine if we have to move again. And I would let it go. But somewhere underneath the practicality, all those LACK tables spread throughout our space were saying something to me. Not out loud but every day in every room: you don’t deserve.
When my son was six or seven, a friend from work, Jimmy, had us over. The adults talked in the kitchen while my son chased Jimmy’s cat. On the way home, my son said, in a voice I still remember: Mommy, Jimmy has a really really beautiful coffee table. It’s very very long and it’s stone.
My heart dropped. I thought about our rental, our crowded space, my son hunched on the floor next to a LACK table. I wondered if he would always think of Jimmy’s stone coffee table whenever he sat down to snack.
I texted Jimmy about it this evening before sitting down to write. He texted back: I don’t have a stone coffee table. Could it be the island? I realized immediately, yes. Of course. We had no kitchen island in any of those rentals. My son had never seen one. He thought the island was a coffee table. An enormous, stone, beautiful coffee table.
Jimmy texted: sorry my island made you feel so inadequate.
I wrote back: haha it’s pretty funny now. But it was so sad then.
Before we moved into our first permanent home in this country, I put 5 or 6 LACK tables together, about to throw them away. I took a pencil and wrote on the leg of each one the first letter of each of our names and the month and year. M, V, S. Then I snapped one leg off and kept it.
In our new home, my husband built me a whole wall of bookshelves by hand. He finished the last piece on my birthday. I had already been buying paper books for months, stacking them on the floor, waiting. On that birthday I did nothing but arrange my books on the shelves.
The LACK table leg is on the lowest shelf now, tucked behind some Chinese books I shipped from home.
Standing in IKEA that afternoon, looking at the new $9.99 table, I tried to figure out what I was actually feeling. Definitely not inadequacy. Something closer to gratitude. That table was there for all of it: the moves, the not knowing, my son on the floor eating snacks next to what I called a “bookshelf”.
The new $9.99 IKEA table is now 40% of the original size. The life we built on top of it turned out to be more.
Stranger in a Strange Land 