The Orphan Guest

by Michele Gazollo

“What is there more kindly than the feeling between host and guest?”
Aeschylus

The Orphan Guest

Recently, while shopping in a big-box store and fending off the existential sadness that routinely visits me there, I heard myself called a guest. The term hit me like a waft of cold air. We are now guests, though there is still no one to greet us or ask about our welfare. Congratulations! There are bright signs welcoming us, and we have a new, coy bit of jargon to add to the ever-expanding lexicon of manipulative words.

At the Beijing IKEA store, guests arrive with thermoses and picnic baskets to spend the day with friends in mock living rooms. I admire their brazenness. They don’t come there to buy; they come to entertain. IKEA is trying to figure out what to do with these visitors, recognizing that every guest, deftly handled, is on the path to being a customer.

The store in which I find myself is achingly large. The air is unremarkable and the lighting is harsh. My eyes hurt, I feel small, and the music makes me nervous. For the first few strides I feel like an insect traversing a field. The aisles are too wide, the carts are too wonky, the signs are too high, and the hosts seem to be hiding behind the merchandise. I want to cry out, but that would be primitive. As time goes on I feel less like a guest or even an insect than an orphan marooned in a cold country, lighting matches to stay warm. When I scan the huge plain of a parking lot for the car that will take me away I feel a bit of my life has been stolen, in exchange for bread and milk.

I go home, light a fire, sit by the hearth, and comfort myself with a story.

I’ve been in places where I felt like a guest, and I’ve seen them in the movies. The hardware store may be dark and the owner may be grumpy, but I still like going there, even for a box of nails. It’s an outing. I like the bakeries where they wear white coats, and lift up the pastries with tongs, or the butchers where they wrap the meat with paper and string, remember my name and never call me a guest.

If I had no pride I could always crash a living room vignette in a big-box store—if only the couches were worth sitting on—and brazenly enjoy myself.

But to be called a guest, I need only drive a mile.  

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