Where Unloved Sofas Came to Die

Visiting my grandmother in Georgia meant going with her to the furniture store where she worked. My brother and sister and I loved to roam the showroom and look at all the new furniture, grouped as if in rooms throughout the display area. We liked to decide what pieces we liked best, what we would buy if we were rich, and how we would decorate our dream houses.  Then, when it was time to open the store, my grandma would get us situated in the back room so she could talk to customers. The back room was not as nice at the showroom. It was home to the furniture they hadn’t sold and couldn’t sell. It was a last stop for old and hideous couches. Most of these couches had been on sale for years and still hadn’t been snatched up: hideous, scratchy fabrics that not even livestock would have been interested in lounging on, foul studies in Naugahyde, patterns that looked like some mutant animal had been killed for its lurid pelt. 

 

 The tables in the back room were either ugly or scratched and were homes to ugly ashtrays sitting in what looked like plaid bean bags. When I became a dramatic teenager and a smoker, I contributed to the stench of those ashtrays, filling them up with my lipsticked Virginia Slims butts while I daydreamed about marrying the boys I liked and picking out furniture for our house. Soap operas flickered on the ancient TV that was as big and heavy as a washing machine. Even while we were “shopping,” and ‘decorating,” and “watching TV,” I wondered if what we were really doing in this store was waiting. Where was our father we hadn’t seen in years?  Was there a chance he might show up to visit his mother and see us too. Did he even know we were here? So every time a new customer walked into the store, I looked up to see if it was Papa.

 

In case you got thirsty, the back room had a Coke machine that dispensed the good, green bottled Cokes made from sugar cane. Next to it was a snack machine full of peanut butter crackers, Hostess Snow Balls, and pecan twirls.  If you hit the front of the machine after you put your coins in but before your selection dropped, sometimes it would issue two of whatever you picked. The words stenciled on the machine read “Don’t go around hungry.”