Like I said, green is the best color.
The Green Sofa
The green sofa has been destroyed. I don’t think he meant to. It was just collateral damage. It was a symbol.
It was deep emerald green, like oak trees after a rain. It glowed sensuously in the lamp light of evening. It was old, not quite antique, but a take on the antiques from the turn of the century. It was a solid camelback with three seat cushions, rolled arms and carved lions’ feet of burnished oak. The rayon velvet was nearly unmarked with only two slight burn marks on the cushions. I kept those hidden underneath. It was plush but not easily crushed like the cheaper velvet on a lot of modern upholstery. The cushions were down-wrapped foam so it was super comfy to sit or sleep on. It really was perfect. The only thing missing was heavy silk fringe.
I wasn’t really in the market for a sofa. I just happened upon it in a backroom of the auction house. I had driven by the place a few times and was curious. I’d never been in that kind of place and wondered what it was like. I had to find the seller, who was cranky, moving furniture from place to place for the upcoming auction. Looking back I realized that he was going to auction off the sofa, but probably got a better price out of me than he would have otherwise. He seemed surprised that anyone wanted it. He had pushed it to the back of a corner room and I had to move a chair, and fantastic old birdcage, and shove over a rolled carpet just to see it completely. It did have a faint odor of cat pee, but I knew that was workable with some baking soda and vinegar. I dragged him over and asked what he wanted for it.
I had no money. We were broke. My husband had given up a pretty good job at his dad’s firm so we could move back to Chico. It was that or I was going to leave him and take the boys with me. I was sick to death of Reno, and saw that his job was sapping him of his strength and that his soul was getting big holes in it. I could actually see that: what had been a glowing column of light was fading and there were chasms developing. But he was intent on meeting his dad’s expectations to become the leader of the firm if he could simply make it through 5 or 10 years in the Reno office. I had had enough. I needed to go home, and Chico was that for me.
The owner of the sofa looked it over, flipped the cushions and peered under the bottom to see if the struts and springs were sound. I hadn’t thought to do that and wondered if I should have. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I was going to buy the sofa somehow, no matter what. I just had to make the case to my husband.
The guy tipped his head. “How about…” I held my breath. “Please,” I thought, “don’t say something crazy…” “I’ll take $200 for it, as is.”
Well, I didn’t have $200.
“I’ll take it,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation. I am such a wheeler and dealer. I could have said, “I’ll go as high as $100, but no more…” or something to that effect. People do that. They negotiate. But me? I either take it or I don’t. I’m too proud to negotiate. I suppose that’s one reason my husband was always so skeptical of my purchases.
Did I mention that the sofa was green?
So I dashed home and convinced my husband that we needed a new sofa and I had found the perfect thing and it was only $200 bucks and that he should come with me to the auction house and check it out. If he really, really hated it then I would forget all about it and we would live with the crummy $39 dollar thrift store orange and brown plaid couch that we had right now.
He agreed.
Stunned, I pushed everyone into the van to see the sofa that minute, worried that some other crazy lady would find it and buy it out from underneath me. Or that my husband would change his mind. He did that sometimes just when you were getting really excited about something out of the ordinary. He would put his hands on his hips and say, “I don’t thing we’re going to ‘fill in the blank’.” I hated that. How can someone do that? Unless they hold all the power. We all finally started fighting back by saying, “Well that’s fine if you don’t want to, but we are, so have a nice time by yourself…” Suddenly it would be his idea to go ahead and do whatever. “Whatever,” we would say.
The very first thing my husband said was, “It’s very green.”
Not, “It’s a pretty shade of green,” or, “What a great sofa,” or anything like that. Just, “It’s very green.” It was not a compliment. It was a condemnation. What I heard was, “You idiot, what makes you think I would ever condescend to your taste in furniture and spend $200 bucks on this piece of junk, let alone allow you to bring this garbage into our house to infect the lives of our children with your ridiculous taste.” That’s how I remember it. Years later I would learn that he actually liked the sofa, and the green. But at that moment he couldn’t let me know that. Once again his grip tightened on the wallet that held our money in his pocket. Once again I was left to beg or convince or coerce him to let me have something I wanted if only because I wanted it, not for any other reason.
He hemmed and hawed. We wandered the lot looking at all the other interesting pieces of furniture and artsy odds and ends. The boys had fun finding cool junk, and my husband had plenty of time to let me sweat out whether he was going to allow this purchase, and how he would do so without letting me win.
As I said, years later, in the heat of an argument, when I brought up the green sofa, he made out that it was something he agreed to and supported, rather than another one of my crazy ideas that he went along with to make me happy.
But we all came to love that sofa, even my husband. He could stretch his whole 6’2” frame with room to spare – that kind of did it for him. My father loved it. He said it was the most comfortable sofa he had ever slept on. The boys loved to jump on the down-wrapped seat cushions. And everyone loved the color. It was sumptuous. It was comfy. It epitomized my taste and personality. It was definitely my sofa.
We bought it obviously, or there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. By the time the guy came back, my husband realized that I had accepted the price and the deal was all but done. He wrote a check and we made arrangements to have it delivered. I couldn’t help but notice that the auctioneer seemed relieved to have it gone. I could have negotiated, I realized, but done is done. I was so happy. I didn’t care if we could have shaved $50 or so off the price. Considering the years of service it gave us, what would another $50 have meant? But we couldn’t know that at the time.
We lived with that sofa for more than 20 years. That’s like $10 a year. I picked other furniture over the years to go alone with it. Drapes, accent pillows, lamps, you name it. The green sofa was the centerpiece of every living room from then on. It’s even in one of my paintings for god’ sake. A self-portrait at that. How do you value such a thing?
During the divorce it was a bone of contention. There were a lot of bones. My son wanted to stay with his dad. I wanted him to come with me. I took our daughter who was less than two when we split, and moved back to Chico. Again. He wanted to keep everything. I decided it wasn’t worth the fight, and that I would find another sofa once I was resettled. But, after a couple of months, I came back and got it and left him and my son with the futon couch. I didn’t count on the bitterness that would follow the loss of the green sofa. I expected the rest – the fights over money and custody and the pots and pans. But the sofa was mine – that was a given.
And so it was. It moved with me. It continued to be the centerpiece of my homes for years to come. 5 different living rooms altogether. Poor thing got dragged all over Chico and then Lake County. It had been a part of our family, but it was now a part of mine. Which is why I wanted to give it to my son Dan when he set up a nice duplex in Santa Cruz. I offered it to him. Well, more like I asked him to take care of it. I was moving into a tiny studio in the foothills above Marysville for a new teaching job. He and a friend were coming up from Santa Cruz to help me move and the green sofa was a kind of payment for helping out. I thought he was happy to have it, and I was happy it was staying in the family. I hoped that someday I would have room again for it and that he might be willing to give it back.
How does a sofa take such a major role in a person’s life, I wonder? Was it the color, the design, the comfort? Or was it the memories, the days and nights spent in its velvet embrace? Like, the time the kids were jumping on it and one of them busted a wooden strut so that from then on they couldn’t bounce too hard on that one spot? The nights my dad slept on it, snoring so loudly the kids complained the next day? (Pete would say it was the most comfortable sofa he had ever slept on). Memories of countless times a friend would perch on the upholstered rolled arm, not yet ready to leave, still chatting away? A night when a visiting violinist played mad fiddle tunes while sitting on that same arm with one leg slung over the side? The time the staff pulled it away from the wall and used it as a barrier in an out of control game of Candy Wars at Christmas? It was many moments: the snuggling, sniffling, giggling, crying, munching, talking, loving family moments that happened on that particular green sofa in the center of our lives.
I gave up that lovely green sofa to my son to care for as his own. He packed it into the back of a black truck with the cushions between it and a Queen size mattress and box springs, and some gorgeous bed linens he had asked for, and he drove off into the deep September night.
A week later he got the courage up to tell me what had happened.
When they finally pulled into his apartment in Santa Cruz they saw that the bed linens and the sofa’s seat cushions had blown out of the truck. They remembered cars honking and flashing their lights at them on Hwy 680, but never realized what was wrong. They were exhausted from the days of packing and moving. They just wanted to get home.
He could barely tell me. I knew he was actually unnerved about telling me, so I pretended it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was, after all, just an old sofa. Maybe he could have new cushions made, maybe of a fabric that worked with the antique green rayon velvet? Not much of a chance of him doing that, I could tell. Well maybe one long foam cushion in neon tie-dye just for fun until I could figure out a better solution? He seemed to feel badly, to recognize that he had done something wrong, but was disinterested in fixing it. I felt like we could still recover from the near disaster. But I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
Not having seat cushions rendered the sofa useless. So, he pushed it out into the back yard of his duplex where it languished for months. In the wet Santa Cruz winter and foggy spring it sat, not even covered with a tarp, just sitting there exposed. When he ultimately moved out, left it behind for his furious room mate to deal with. And he never once called to tell me. I would have rented or borrowed a truck, driven down there and rescued her. But he didn’t tell me until it was far too late – it was moldy and wet and torn and rotting.
He killed it. He killed the green sofa, and I was so upset I could barely talk about it. Once, about a year later I tried to make a joke about it, but I realized I had hit a nerve that was better left alone.
It’s been a few years now and I’m pretty much over it. I don’t blame him. I can’t. How can I? The sofa was my responsibility in the end, not his. And it was, after all, just a sofa. A 1960’s green rayon velvet sofa with carved oak lions’ feet. My green sofa, our green sofa, The Green Sofa.
The Green Sofa
The green sofa has been destroyed. I don’t think he meant to. It was just collateral damage. It was a symbol.
It was deep emerald green, like oak trees after a rain. It glowed sensuously in the lamp light of evening. It was old, not quite antique, but a take on the antiques from the turn of the century. It was a solid camelback with three seat cushions, rolled arms and carved lions’ feet of burnished oak. The rayon velvet was nearly unmarked with only two slight burn marks on the cushions. I kept those hidden underneath. It was plush but not easily crushed like the cheaper velvet on a lot of modern upholstery. The cushions were down-wrapped foam so it was super comfy to sit or sleep on. It really was perfect. The only thing missing was heavy silk fringe.
I wasn’t really in the market for a sofa. I just happened upon it in a backroom of the auction house. I had driven by the place a few times and was curious. I’d never been in that kind of place and wondered what it was like. I had to find the seller, who was cranky, moving furniture from place to place for the upcoming auction. Looking back I realized that he was going to auction off the sofa, but probably got a better price out of me than he would have otherwise. He seemed surprised that anyone wanted it. He had pushed it to the back of a corner room and I had to move a chair, and fantastic old birdcage, and shove over a rolled carpet just to see it completely. It did have a faint odor of cat pee, but I knew that was workable with some baking soda and vinegar. I dragged him over and asked what he wanted for it.
I had no money. We were broke. My husband had given up a pretty good job at his dad’s firm so we could move back to Chico. It was that or I was going to leave him and take the boys with me. I was sick to death of Reno, and saw that his job was sapping him of his strength and that his soul was getting big holes in it. I could actually see that: what had been a glowing column of light was fading and there were chasms developing. But he was intent on meeting his dad’s expectations to become the leader of the firm if he could simply make it through 5 or 10 years in the Reno office. I had had enough. I needed to go home, and Chico was that for me.
The owner of the sofa looked it over, flipped the cushions and peered under the bottom to see if the struts and springs were sound. I hadn’t thought to do that and wondered if I should have. But it wouldn’t have mattered. I was going to buy the sofa somehow, no matter what. I just had to make the case to my husband.
The guy tipped his head. “How about…” I held my breath. “Please,” I thought, “don’t say something crazy…” “I’ll take $200 for it, as is.”
Well, I didn’t have $200.
“I’ll take it,” I said, without a moment’s hesitation. I am such a wheeler and dealer. I could have said, “I’ll go as high as $100, but no more…” or something to that effect. People do that. They negotiate. But me? I either take it or I don’t. I’m too proud to negotiate. I suppose that’s one reason my husband was always so skeptical of my purchases.
Did I mention that the sofa was green?
So I dashed home and convinced my husband that we needed a new sofa and I had found the perfect thing and it was only $200 bucks and that he should come with me to the auction house and check it out. If he really, really hated it then I would forget all about it and we would live with the crummy $39 dollar thrift store orange and brown plaid couch that we had right now.
He agreed.
Stunned, I pushed everyone into the van to see the sofa that minute, worried that some other crazy lady would find it and buy it out from underneath me. Or that my husband would change his mind. He did that sometimes just when you were getting really excited about something out of the ordinary. He would put his hands on his hips and say, “I don’t thing we’re going to ‘fill in the blank’.” I hated that. How can someone do that? Unless they hold all the power. We all finally started fighting back by saying, “Well that’s fine if you don’t want to, but we are, so have a nice time by yourself…” Suddenly it would be his idea to go ahead and do whatever. “Whatever,” we would say.
The very first thing my husband said was, “It’s very green.”
Not, “It’s a pretty shade of green,” or, “What a great sofa,” or anything like that. Just, “It’s very green.” It was not a compliment. It was a condemnation. What I heard was, “You idiot, what makes you think I would ever condescend to your taste in furniture and spend $200 bucks on this piece of junk, let alone allow you to bring this garbage into our house to infect the lives of our children with your ridiculous taste.” That’s how I remember it. Years later I would learn that he actually liked the sofa, and the green. But at that moment he couldn’t let me know that. Once again his grip tightened on the wallet that held our money in his pocket. Once again I was left to beg or convince or coerce him to let me have something I wanted if only because I wanted it, not for any other reason.
He hemmed and hawed. We wandered the lot looking at all the other interesting pieces of furniture and artsy odds and ends. The boys had fun finding cool junk, and my husband had plenty of time to let me sweat out whether he was going to allow this purchase, and how he would do so without letting me win.
As I said, years later, in the heat of an argument, when I brought up the green sofa, he made out that it was something he agreed to and supported, rather than another one of my crazy ideas that he went along with to make me happy.
But we all came to love that sofa, even my husband. He could stretch his whole 6’2” frame with room to spare – that kind of did it for him. My father loved it. He said it was the most comfortable sofa he had ever slept on. The boys loved to jump on the down-wrapped seat cushions. And everyone loved the color. It was sumptuous. It was comfy. It epitomized my taste and personality. It was definitely my sofa.
We bought it obviously, or there wouldn’t be much of a story to tell. By the time the guy came back, my husband realized that I had accepted the price and the deal was all but done. He wrote a check and we made arrangements to have it delivered. I couldn’t help but notice that the auctioneer seemed relieved to have it gone. I could have negotiated, I realized, but done is done. I was so happy. I didn’t care if we could have shaved $50 or so off the price. Considering the years of service it gave us, what would another $50 have meant? But we couldn’t know that at the time.
We lived with that sofa for more than 20 years. That’s like $10 a year. I picked other furniture over the years to go alone with it. Drapes, accent pillows, lamps, you name it. The green sofa was the centerpiece of every living room from then on. It’s even in one of my paintings for god’ sake. A self-portrait at that. How do you value such a thing?
During the divorce it was a bone of contention. There were a lot of bones. My son wanted to stay with his dad. I wanted him to come with me. I took our daughter who was less than two when we split, and moved back to Chico. Again. He wanted to keep everything. I decided it wasn’t worth the fight, and that I would find another sofa once I was resettled. But, after a couple of months, I came back and got it and left him and my son with the futon couch. I didn’t count on the bitterness that would follow the loss of the green sofa. I expected the rest – the fights over money and custody and the pots and pans. But the sofa was mine – that was a given.
And so it was. It moved with me. It continued to be the centerpiece of my homes for years to come. 5 different living rooms altogether. Poor thing got dragged all over Chico and then Lake County. It had been a part of our family, but it was now a part of mine. Which is why I wanted to give it to my son Dan when he set up a nice duplex in Santa Cruz. I offered it to him. Well, more like I asked him to take care of it. I was moving into a tiny studio in the foothills above Marysville for a new teaching job. He and a friend were coming up from Santa Cruz to help me move and the green sofa was a kind of payment for helping out. I thought he was happy to have it, and I was happy it was staying in the family. I hoped that someday I would have room again for it and that he might be willing to give it back.
How does a sofa take such a major role in a person’s life, I wonder? Was it the color, the design, the comfort? Or was it the memories, the days and nights spent in its velvet embrace? Like, the time the kids were jumping on it and one of them busted a wooden strut so that from then on they couldn’t bounce too hard on that one spot? The nights my dad slept on it, snoring so loudly the kids complained the next day? (Pete would say it was the most comfortable sofa he had ever slept on). Memories of countless times a friend would perch on the upholstered rolled arm, not yet ready to leave, still chatting away? A night when a visiting violinist played mad fiddle tunes while sitting on that same arm with one leg slung over the side? The time the staff pulled it away from the wall and used it as a barrier in an out of control game of Candy Wars at Christmas? It was many moments: the snuggling, sniffling, giggling, crying, munching, talking, loving family moments that happened on that particular green sofa in the center of our lives.
I gave up that lovely green sofa to my son to care for as his own. He packed it into the back of a black truck with the cushions between it and a Queen size mattress and box springs, and some gorgeous bed linens he had asked for, and he drove off into the deep September night.
A week later he got the courage up to tell me what had happened.
When they finally pulled into his apartment in Santa Cruz they saw that the bed linens and the sofa’s seat cushions had blown out of the truck. They remembered cars honking and flashing their lights at them on Hwy 680, but never realized what was wrong. They were exhausted from the days of packing and moving. They just wanted to get home.
He could barely tell me. I knew he was actually unnerved about telling me, so I pretended it wasn’t that big of a deal. It was, after all, just an old sofa. Maybe he could have new cushions made, maybe of a fabric that worked with the antique green rayon velvet? Not much of a chance of him doing that, I could tell. Well maybe one long foam cushion in neon tie-dye just for fun until I could figure out a better solution? He seemed to feel badly, to recognize that he had done something wrong, but was disinterested in fixing it. I felt like we could still recover from the near disaster. But I wasn’t prepared for what came next.
Not having seat cushions rendered the sofa useless. So, he pushed it out into the back yard of his duplex where it languished for months. In the wet Santa Cruz winter and foggy spring it sat, not even covered with a tarp, just sitting there exposed. When he ultimately moved out, left it behind for his furious room mate to deal with. And he never once called to tell me. I would have rented or borrowed a truck, driven down there and rescued her. But he didn’t tell me until it was far too late – it was moldy and wet and torn and rotting.
He killed it. He killed the green sofa, and I was so upset I could barely talk about it. Once, about a year later I tried to make a joke about it, but I realized I had hit a nerve that was better left alone.
It’s been a few years now and I’m pretty much over it. I don’t blame him. I can’t. How can I? The sofa was my responsibility in the end, not his. And it was, after all, just a sofa. A 1960’s green rayon velvet sofa with carved oak lions’ feet. My green sofa, our green sofa, The Green Sofa.
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