Musical Chairs

Musical Chairs

You would think that, because men are physically more capable to move furniture, they'd be the ones rearranging living rooms at a whim. Instead, we're the ones tripping over a sneaky couch on the way to the bathroom. This paradox has led me to probe the psyche of the sexes—to understand why and how women communicate through furniture . . . why it is that guys can move things, but gals breathe to move things.

Let's start with my living room: four walls, two windows, a door and two arches. Every time relatives visit, those are the only things in the same place. Thankfully, they live two states away and only make it for Christmas. Even then, I don't think they've ever seen the tree in the same place for two consecutive Decembers. In fact, you can date the unwrapping pictures by where the couch is.

Well, Mom can. I think she keeps track of when and where each piece sits. "No, no—you can't put the hutch there: it hasn't been on the mural side of the room in the last six months."

Placement is everything. Like a family reunion, you have to be careful not to seat Aunt Armchair next to Sister Lampshade or Cousin Couch facing Uncle Flatfoot. And like a family reunion, relationships change every year. My Grandma's furniture rarely moves, which explains why we have reunions down at the pond.

It is hereditary—this moving gene. That's why women have children. First, they need accomplices. "Mom, why are we moving the furniture?"

"Because, dear, it can't move itself. Wouldn't you get tired looking at the same wall all your life?"

This despite furniture having no eyes. But in sympathy, as if for a pet in the city, we ease what little suffering we can for it—and for Mom, the wellspring of all compassion.

Second, children come with more rooms of more furniture. I think of our blue room, which has belonged to each of my five siblings at one time or another. Just when I thought that a dresser had earned its keep, Mom pulled a new one from the unemployment line. And just when I got used to it being one occupant's room, Mom got pregnant—giving her months of waddling days to create moving schematics. Thankfully, I was the only boy for thirteen years, and my room was my room until I traded it for a dorm pad.

Third, they need more people to convince of the viability of their eccentric trait. If you wade through all the other eccentricities of the gender, you, too, will decipher the common denominator that alone can be this gene. If the moving bug could be accepted, women wouldn't have to contrive excuses for their other idiosyncrasies.

Take, for instance, seasonal wardrobes. Guys don't have spring shirts and autumn trousers. We have shorts and a leather jacket—swim trunks if we're lucky. Girls, on the other hand, need enough outfits to equal an attic box for each season.

My sisters have an attic ceremony a month before each season starts. They giddily pull out all their sun dresses in March (despite the Indian spring) and lay them in hand-me-down piles all over their loft. I used to think it a post-tornado mourning, even though Faith and Emily smiled too much to be victims. But now I know that they truly were hurting from an uncontrollable force of nature: the moving bug—the overwhelming compulsion to move their clothes into and out of boxes and to move those boxes up and down the stairs. In this way it must also be responsible for the female-centricity of the fashion industry.

The auto industry must have obtained this genetic information long before any FDA researchers, for they developed symptom treatment decades ago. In the seventies it was the station wagon. Experiments with this fostered the minivan, the moving-mom-mobile. More genetic engineering rendered the SUV, a street hiker for the old woman who lived in a shoe. And while some pray for the weary soccer moms who drive their kids all over creation, I don't feel one bit sorry for them. Maybe they actually do live in their taxis—between ballet and baseball, horsemanship and hockey, pep band and piano practice; but I think they thrive on the whole people-moving thing.

I don't believe my sisters, either. They tell me that shower duration is directly proportional to hair length. "We have way more hair than you."

I'll grant them a couple extra minutes. More likely, though, shower length is directly proportional to the amount of sills and shampoo bottles in the tub area. The math for my family includes six women (each with their own conditioner), four ledges, and a windowsill. And every once in a while, they get fancy and put stuff on the back of the toilet. It's different every time I get behind the curtain, and I can only imagine the amount of time it takes one of the George women not only to find their specific product but also to rearrange it so that the others can spend precious hot-water time reversing their mayhem.

I think the moving heredity explains why women spend so much time in the garden as well. My sisters started at a very young age to join my mom, moving the dirt and the impatiens in the front bed. Moving the garden hose, moving the sprinkler, moving the stones collected from our vacations. I can read Mom’s summer to-do lists even now—under my column: "lunch dishes," and under Emily's: "Rotate the sprinkler every hour." It was moving boot camp sweetened by a uniform of bathing suits.

Now I know what you're thinking—that my little brother started early in the sandbox, moving Tonkas and cup-buildings. But boys move things for them to stay where they’re placed. Which is why you could've seen Emily or Toby running around the house in front of the screams of someone who had seen his Timmytown wrecked by a garden hose or Frisbee—because sand cities are meant to last 'til the next rain.

Just ask Noah. He assigned each species a specific cubicle for the duration of their world cruise—elephants on concourse three, cobras in the barrel hold, cheetahs near the gym.

But no-o, Mrs. Noah had to keep them rotating cell blocks—the real reason Mr. Hippo got sea sick all over Mrs. Camel.

The Bible indicates that the inventor of the wheel was a woman, too. It lists the innovators of music and smithing and construction, but not transportation. Surely, it would have told us who invented the wheel. Probably, though, just like Mrs. Noah, her bright scheme fell under the shadow of her patriarch. Or maybe it was Mrs. Noah herself: somehow they had to tote all the barrels of land girdles and flood robes off Mount Ararat.

We only know it had to precede the Babel scattering, which undoubtedly derived from the woman's desire to move out of the visiting proximity of her mother-in-law.

Surprisingly, the Bible does segregate in some of its sermons. If Jesus had called any woman disciples, he couldn't have given his charge by the Bethany fig tree: "But also if ye shall say to this mountain, Be thou removed, and be cast into the sea; it shall be done." But it may account for Jesus' calming garden words to Mary Magdalene, who did not ask the angels where her savior had gone but where they had moved him.

In other historical contexts, the effect of women in the spotlight only further shows the effects of this not-so-recessive trait. Queen Isabella and Columbus—how many more spices does a woman who doesn't cook need? A better bet would be a new source for imported furniture. Mary, Queen of Scotts had how many heads re-moved. Consider Queen Elizabeth against the Armada—sending out her navy simply to protect its moving room.

And don't forget how Julius Caesar discovered the power of Cleopatra's entice for relocation. Thankfully, the world-wise conqueror knew better. He returned to Rome—far away from the revolutionary decorating tastes of Alexandria and the home of the nomads.