Fault Lines

As long as I can recall, my mother’s den has housed a large antique armoire—an old, monumental piece of pine furniture stained a distinctive turquoise green. While I was home in Vancouver for a visit over the holidays, my mother moved to a house with a narrow staircase. To maneuver the armoire up the stairs, she sawed off its top half, leaving a long, rough cut along its midline. When my father, long separated from my mother, happened to stop by the new house, she breezily pointed the cut out to him. The juxtaposition of my mother’s cavalier pronouncement with my father’s pained response prompted me to ask about the significance of this emotionally charged object. The armoire had once been part of a large collection of Canadiana antiques that my parents had amassed together—a collection that was dismantled and split between them at the time of their divorce. Now, twenty-five years later, the schism that divided the armoire in two seemed somehow to belatedly bear witness to the fissuring of my family and its collection.

Since most objects acquire a protracted familiarity through habits of use, I had previously taken little notice of the armoire past a vague sense of its functional place in the various interiors that housed it while I was growing up. Through each move that my mother and I made following the divorce, it remained part of the hazy backdrop of my home life, barely registering in my consciousness. It was only with this final move of my mother’s, made almost a decade after I had left home, that the armoire and its place in my family’s history came into the foreground for the first time. A toddler during the divorce, I was too young at the time to apprehend the implications of the split beyond my own bewilderment. The cut down the middle of the armoire made me newly cognizant of an enduring emotional legacy left behind by the fragmentation of my family. The fractured armoire both incarnated and bequeathed this painful familial inheritance. At the same time, it was a testamentary fragment of the collection that it once had been a part of, and to which I was also an heir.

The vast collection of Canadiana antiques that my parents accumulated had filled my early childhood home and spilled over into a small antique store that they ran together in Vancouver. Most of the country furniture and folk art came from Ontario, Quebec, and the Maritimes, where early French and British pioneers were settling in the 1800s. Along with “primitive” pine furniture such as the armoire, their collection included antique decoys, quilts, hooked rugs, and folk art. After a less than-amicable divorce my parents had remained at an irresolvable impasse. As a source of livelihood, the antiques in the store could be assigned a monetary value and divided according to the terms of a business transaction. But as an assemblage of art and artifacts that also formed the basis of a home life, their private collection had an order and an integrity that transcended any value assigned to the individual parts that comprised the whole. How, I now asked for the first time, was this home collection divided when they split up? While a biweekly schedule of joint custody allotted my time between the two new households, the furniture and art could not be easily shared. Finally, my mother recounted, she rented a U-Haul when my father was at work and loaded half the contents of the house into the van; the armoire was the largest piece that she took. In this way, the collection was unceremoniously dissolved. The objects that had once seemed to constitute a cohesive unit, with our family as its unifying reference point, were now atomized into individually charged sites of contention, but also poignant reminders of an earlier intimacy. My father describes the loss of half the collection as being as excruciating as the divorce itself, a sentiment that can perhaps be better understood if one considers Jean Baudrillard’s claim that the collection and, in particular, the antique, represent...