The Marriage Bed of Olive

The most private object in the house, asked to do the most public job. [SPOILER: When Odysseus comes back washed and changed, Penelope tells the servants to make up the bed for the stranger in the hall — outside their chamber, somewhere comfortable. He goes rigid. Something cracks open in him. That bed, he says. That bed cannot be moved. He built it with his own hands when they were young, in the room he chose for them, around an olive tree still rooted in the earth below the floor. He shaped the trunk into a bedpost. He planed and polished it smooth. No one could move that bed unless they cut the tree. No one could move it unless they cut the life out of it. Two people in the world knew that. She had set the trap. She watched him walk into it. His face went stripped bare, the face of a man who has just remembered something that can never be remade. No impostor. No liar. No one alive but him. Then she crossed the room. The bed is the cunning of a woman testing the king of cunning, and it is also the thing his hands made twenty years ago to mean we live here, together, and the room is built around us. The roots are still in the ground. The room came back to its purpose.]