Having Company Over

    I was walking through the living room. My parents had company over. I was young. I could walk, but I could barely speak. There were maybe six or eight people over. Half of them were sitting at the bar. We had a bar. My parents would always sit there when they had company over. My father would stand behind the bar, like he was a bartender. He looked like he controlled everything. The lights were low. The carpeting was multi-colored -- it was black with some different shades of brown and a little grey and white in it. In the light it looked like there were things in the carpet, like it wasn’t clean.

    I was little. I don’t remember faces. I remember knee-caps. That’s all a one-year old sees. I remember walking through the living room, between the bar chairs and the white couches. The bar chairs looked like barrels with red leather where the seat would be. The white couches looked old. They were my grandmother’s. As I was walking, a woman came in front of me. For some reason I think she had short blonde hair, but all I really remember about her is that she was fat. She had fat knee-caps.

    She asked me when my birthday was. I said, “June.”

    I remember that she got excited that I told her my birthday was in June. She turned toward the bar and started telling people that I just told her that my birthday was in June. I couldn’t understand what she was getting so excited about.

Copyright Janet Kuypers.
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