"Are you going to write about Jen and the Sleeper Sofa?" my husband asked me the other day. He doesn't often weigh in on my blog subject matter, but there may have been another story he wanted to keep off the internet, and thought steering me to write about the closest I've ever come to being in a real-life I Love Lucy episode would do the trick.
"Oh god no," I said. "It's just not funny. I still have emotional scars. And both Jen and the main staircase still have physical scars. Jen's son is scared of me and we'll never get Ironman Movers to show up at our house again, even when if we move."
"Too soon?"
"Yes. Too soon."
So I won't write about Jen and the Sleeper Sofa. I won't tell you how we decided to turn my study/second-tier guest room into a real bedroom and ended up with a bunch of perfectly good but displaced furniture. I won't tell you about the heart-wrenching decision to give away a gorgeous Ethan Allen leather sleeper sofa with extra-layer mattress that made guests feel like they were sleeping in a real bed. And I won't mention that I started to feel pretty good about parting with that piece of furniture when our friend Jen said she would love it. And she would pay for the movers to haul it downstairs and into a truck that she would also provide and that she would drive it lovingly to her house in Sunnyvale and use it in her Airbnb and I would feel really good about the sleeper sofa's new future and I wouldn't miss it at all and the whole situation wouldn't give me chest pains because I used to be poor and rearranging rooms and giving perfectly good furniture away makes me physically sick. Because it would be whole. It would be intact. It would be usable and used. Sat in and lied on. And well taken care of. It had a future, goddamn it.
Giving away the other displaced furniture wasn't as painful as what happened in the end to the sleeper sofa ( which as you now probably suspect, doesn't end very well. If I were to tell you what happened with Jen and the Sleeper Sofa, you would cringe, believe me. But I can't tell you, because: Too soon). Most of the other victims of the room rearrangement - two upholstered chairs, a desk, desk chair and credenza - got sent to a consignment shop.
That consignment shop would have killed to get that sleeper sofa. They probably would have hired a crane to get it out of our house in one piece. But no. We had to give it to Jen, because we wanted her to have it; we wanted it to be in a loving home with teenagers sprawled on it, and guests waking up refreshed and having a nice cup of tea.One other piece of our unwanted furniture, a big entertainment center, had its own set of problems. It was easily transportable, in great condition, but no one wanted it.
"No one wants traditional furniture anymore," the guy at Goodwill said.
"Is it mid-century modern? If not, we can't deal," the guy at Purple Heart said.
"Is it one of those big monster entertainment centers with a big space for a huge TV and a bunch of cabinets and shelves?" the lady at Salvation Army asked me.
"Nooo, heck no, actually it's -"
"Could you send me the dimensions? Or better yet, a picture?" she interrupted me.
"Thanks anyway. Have a nice day," I said, hanging up.
The only reason that entertainment center isn't still sitting in the middle of the guest bedroom to this day is that I renamed it a cabinet and got St. Vincent DePaul to send a truck to pick it up. I learned that if you want to get rid of furniture, you never use the word entertainment center and you stay vague on measurements. I also learned that the truck driver pick-up guy doesn't know mid-century modern from furniture made of Legos and he doesn't have the authority to refuse something he's been sent to pick up.
I wouldn't have donated my sleeper sofa to one of these picky charities if they were the last people on earth, if they were a bunch of engineering math geniuses who could figure out a way to get the sleeper sofa down our bottom staircase in one piece, because somehow it had been taken up that staircase when we moved into the house, obviously, so weird that the Ironman Mover guys couldn't figure out how to get it down the same way it came up. Plus the sleeper sofa could easily have been mid-century modern with the right throw pillows.I know the truth now. People come over here to my house, act all gushy and compliment us on our furniture, but then when I'm looking to give it away, everybody's like, "Oh, it's nice. For someone. Not me, of course."
The sleeper sofa was different. It was the perfect style, in impeccable condition, a color that would go with anything, and our dog only threw up on it once. Everyone wanted it. Jen got first dibs because she jumped on hiring Ironman and borrowed a truck and got her son to help her. But among all of us - and we had a house full that day, including the dog walker, who had some ideas of her own - no one could figure out how to get the sleeper sofa down the steps. Calls were made. Advice was sought. Ironman tried many different twists and turns to get it down the curvy staircase. They removed one of the feet, but couldn't get the other three feet off. They removed the innards and thought that with a hollow center, it could be threaded over the bannister. No one was willing to spend $1,000 for a crane. We were running out of options. And time. We had all been working on this for going on four hours. Ironman's truck had to be moved before the parking ban took effect. We all stood around squeezing our foreheads and wringing our hands. And then there was a flurry of activity, like a flock of birds that had spent half the day gathered around a rotting carcass on the highway just realized they were all late for happy hour. The parking cops zeroed in, the movers grabbed their tools and ran for the truck, tossing the mattress into Jen's truck. Jen and her son and I threw the cushions in her truck too and they sped away with their useless collection of couch parts. I ran around in little circles like a lone Keystone Cop, and then went back inside, where I came face to foam with the outer portion of the sleeper sofa - the shell - standing in the middle of my living room, on its side, a Saran-Wrapped leather tower of failure. I was having a party in two days. I swallowed hard and called our general contractor and asked him to come over. "And bring your saw," I said.Still too soon.
In next week's episode, Jen and Diane go to work on a candy assembly line.
