MY COUCH WAS NO SLOUCH.By Lawrence Eisenberg Published In New Choices, November 1996 The couch was 90 inches long, 32 inches high and 43 inches deep, in a mostly-blue paisley. On the day it arrived-- December 10, 1967--the sky was overcast, with a few snowflakes. This didn't faze the deliverymen, one operating a crane from the roof of our high-rise, the second sitting on the couch as it was hoisted up 28 floors from the street. At the window, I held up my two-year-old son, Paul, who thought this was some magical game as he pointed excitedly, saying words like up, cow (couch) and fwy (fly). His older sister, Mindy, was on the phone with a friend, giving a floor-by-floor commentary in the cadences of a sports announcer. My wife, Barbara, "tsked," convinced that the couch--and the man on it--would never make it and that any second we would hear a crash echoing across the Hudson River to New Jersey. Miraculously, the couch arrived at our floor and the deliveryman bounded onto the terrace and smoothly pulled it through the door to our living room. We applauded. For the rest of the day, while Psam, our Siamese cat, explored this new toy, we took turns posing on the couch, adjusting its position and examining it. ("It's larger/ Twenty three years later, the luxurious fabric was faded, tattered and patched. We'd been tired of it for a long time, but hadn't seen anything we liked better. Finally we found a new couch, and at 8 o'clock on a spring morning in 1990, the day before it was to be delivered, my now-nearly-25-year-old son, Paul, and I prepared to take the old couch down to the street for the Sanitation Department pickup. It would be a quick trip, I assured him, and he'd have no problem making it to work on time. We got the couch partially through the front door, but discovered we couldn't manuever a turn into the hallway. Luckily, the man across the hall, who was just leaving, allowed us to push it a little way into his apartment so we could get it completely out of ours. Moving it briskly to the elevator, we found that it wouldn't fit inside. I don't know why this was a surprise; since the couch had been hoisted up originally, I should have remembered that it was too deep for the elevator. Maybe I had convinced myself that, like some people, furniture shrank when it got older. Carrying it down 28 flights wasn't an option, and now we couldn't even get it back into the apartment because the man across the hall had left the building. The only solution was to saw it in half. "This'll take three seconds," I told Paul. Alerting our neighbors to the noise I was about to make, I brought my electric saw and other tools out to the hall. As I turned the couch on its side, I noticed a hole in the back, burrowed 19 years earlier by Mindy's hamsters, Dorothy and Sherman, who'd escaped from their cage one night. The fact that it was damaged made me feel more comfortable about maiming this piece of furniture, though I wasn't being consciously philosophical at the time. Sawing through the wooden beams in the center of the underside wasn't difficult and only took about 10 minutes. Then I discovered that beneath the beams the seating area was bound by sets of steel springs tightly tied together by strong cord. My misgivings--and nervous perspiration--began as I went through the long, tedious job of severing each set. But no triumph waited at the end: the halves wouldn't part, because the upholstered seat was still holding them together. Before I could even get to the upholstery, I realized, I had to remove several dozen staples. Eventually I cut through, but the halves still wouldn't budge; the horsehair between the cushions and springs was binding them together. Fighting despair and a peculiar sense of guilt--I hadn't expected to learn this much about the couch's personal anatomy--I upended it again, muttering, "Why me?" Paul said, "What about me?" as he went inside to phone his office to say he'd be late. Though we loved each other and, except for his four years away at college, had spent most of his life together, we were on opposite sides of a gap that was, at least generational, and probably emotional as well. Over the years of his growing up we had fallen into a pattern of sharing progressively less about our feelings--a standard rite of passage between father and son--and, without warning, our relationship had become one of early memories and recent vague impressions. It hadn't occurred to me that his agonizing over this problem might be as profound as mine. While he was making the call, I used a scissor on the horsehair, but it didn't work. Switching to a carving knife, I tried to slice through, but it resisted and I nicked my finger. Like a maniac, I began stabbing and cursing. "Easy, dad," Paul said, taking over the knife. And, 92 minutes after we'd begun, the couch, finally, was in two parts. As we righted the halves, a shower of objects, from somewhere inside, clattered to the floor: A tiny toy motorcycle that had belonged to Paul; hairclips; a curl of stenotype tape from the season Mindy had studied court stenography; part of a Halloween card from long-estranged friends; a silly arcade photo strip of both kids; two catnip mice; a hotel from Monopoly. Ignoring the time, the curious stares of deliverymen, and the rubble of sawdust, staples and horsehair, Paul and I sat on the floor, reaching across a generation--and a lot of years of uncompared emotional notes--as we examined these mementoes, each calling up other memories. It dawned on me that when the couch had first arrived, Paul could only say about eleven words. Now he was an editor at a journalism foundation. The couch had seen us through all the intervening years. And I realized, finally, that it wasn't just an old piece of furniture to be dumped out on the curb next to the anonymous garbage of strangers. This was a tough couch, a New York couch, holding on desperately, refusing, like any old person, to leave its home and, finally, to be mutilated. More importantly, it was a part of our family, the centerpiece for joy and crisis, declarations of love, quarrels, reconciliations. Paul had sat here, playing Chutes and Ladders. Our cats, first Psam, then his successor, Looney Tunes, had scratched, shed and thrown up on it. Mindy's dates had poised on the edge, enduring our scrutiny. When we gave a reception for her wedding in 1985, guests lounged on it, one aunt commenting, "You throw such a fancy party with this couch?" Echoing from my childhood were the voices of other people saying, "You mustn't get too attached to possessions because then they own you." I wondered how you avoided that. The replacement couch, now twelve years old, cost seven times as much as the original and fit into the elevator. Covered in lush navy velvet, the little beauty calls itself a sofa. I just can't get close to it. # Copyright Lawrence Eisenberg. 2008. All Rights Reserved # Copywright Lawrence Eisenberg. 2008. All Rights Reserved |
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