Where the folding chairs sleep

Banquet chairs collapse into a stack against the cinderblock wall by six most evenings, one volunteer levering them upright and folding them flat in a motion practiced long enough to look unconscious. The stack leans, always, a few degrees off true, corrected weekly by whoever notices it before the next event. Each chair is a steel tube frame with a vinyl pad gone the color of weak tea, screws visible at the seams where the padding was reupholstered once, a decade back, by someone with a staple gun and more patience than skill. The stacking hardware, a simple hook and catch at each leg, allows up to twelve chairs before the tower leans past what one person can carry alone; the fellowship hall's own record, according to a handwritten note taped inside the closet door, stands at nineteen, achieved once and never repeated. Between events the chairs live folded in a closet barely wide enough for the stack, wedged between the coat rack and a box of extension cords, and their flat storage profile is the entire justification for the design, comfort a distant second consideration behind stackability. A chair pulled for a funeral reception gets wiped down first; a chair pulled for a potluck generally does not, and neither group seems to mind the difference. Nineteen dollars new, according to a receipt still rubber banded to the closet shelf, which puts the whole stack's replacement cost somewhere under a used car, a comparison the budget committee made exactly once, in passing, before returning to the agenda.

Beatrice Womack