
Do you still have the sofa?
The morning is early. Merv’s throat tickled him and so he coughed and so I woke. Annie visited for her secret morning petting. As a cat with a feral reputation to protect, she has to resort to dark stealth, coming up from the base of the bed to lie on one chest or the other, letting one hand or another know of this place, near a whisker, or that place, near an ear, or the silky length of her body, to get the attention. We arose, me, and Annie, and Judge, and followed the long hall down to the back stairs.
I sit now, fire lighting my work, in the dark, just a car driving by, caught in a window reflection, the house on our right lit in one window, the house on the left, no lights at all. Annie has stayed out. Judge dozes at my feet.
A friend visited in the early afternoon and described the breaking of her ankle. “I always told him he needed to put up a rail on those stairs. And then I fell.” “Did that get him to put it up?” I asked. “Oh he had already put it up. But I didn’t use it,” she answered. I puzzled out the story, the role of the rail, the message of the fall and the break, and gave up.
A neighbor visited in the late afternoon and described the breaking of her wrist. I had remembered the break, and had cast blame on their long driveway up the hill to their house. “Oh no, that is not where I broke it,” she protested, and exonerated the driveway. “I was walking down Griswold Hill. It was covered with ice but I was able to find good footing. Then a car came and I jumped to get out the way and fell. It was friends who hopped out of the car and helped me up and home and said “How fortunate that we came by when we did.” She never told them the part the car played in the fall.
“Do you have the sofa that was in the little room in our house,” a childhood friend asked me at the Election Eve Spaghetti Supper on Tuesday. She thinks of it as her house. I think of it as my Grandmother’s house, for they bought it after my grandmother died. It had been the big house where all the family furniture ended up when anyone died. Until the house where I am became that place. I sit now, under the old mantel clock that came out of that house. I sit at Grandma’s kitchen table. The old books and bookcase are up on the third floor. The blocks and games are close by. Grandma’s silverware is in a drawer, her napkins in another.
The friend went on. “They say somebody died on that sofa.” “Oh yes,” I responded. “It is right outside our bedroom door. My Grandmother died on that sofa. My Dad was by her side. He had called the hospital across the street and everyone was out to lunch, so they never came. He always blamed the hospital. Never donated a penny when they built the new one.” Oh,” she said, “My father was on the ambulance crew for the hospital. Maybe this was the plan to get your grandmother’s house.”
I didn’t think that was very likely. Her father had never been part of Dad’s story of blame. The fault was the hospital’s. The judgement was on the hospital. The sofa, though, got no blame. The sofa was the innocent by-stander in the story. And so it came to this house and got sat on in the TV room on Saturday mornings for cartoons, and evenings for ‘Bonanza’ and lights low for dates. My mother devised a folding table that would slip under a built in desk she commissioned. The table never folded up, though. It held her typewriter and her correspondence and her files and clippings and books to read and magazines. It held plates of cinnamon toast and glasses of milk when the grandchildren came to visit. It sat in front of the sofa my grandmother had died on.
The sofa, actually, is not comfortable. I do not know how my mother sat on it and worked. She did, though and the sofa and the folding table stayed in front of the TV till she broke her hip and needed a first floor bedroom. We cleared off the table and folded it up and slid it under her built in desk and installed a hospital bed, and in that room, years and Alzheimer’s later, she died. I don’t blame the room. Or the bed. Or the sofa.
The sofa is not comfortable and so we moved it upstairs where at the moment it provides a resting place for the skeletons, before their journey to the third floor tower room and the long wait until their annual outing. The skeletons didn’t complain about the sofa.
I sit on an old caned kitchen chair and look out the window at dawn. I see a white landscape. Ice on the trees. Snow on the ground. Annie will want to come in. I will want to put another log on the fire. I will hold tight to the railing when I go down the porch stairs. I will gingerly place my feet on firm grounding when I walk. And find no reason, I hope, to cast blame. Good morning! Be careful! It is icy out there!