The Couch
Halina Duraj
I live at the intersection of a quiet street and a busy street, four blocks from the ocean. The quiet street slopes downhill, and its sidewalk is wide enough for a car. In fact, sometimes people park on it—summer nights busy with beach tourists. This evening there’s plenty of parking on the quiet street, but a car—small, beige, economical—pulls onto the sidewalk. A large gray couch hunkers on the car’s roof, strapped with yellow rope.
A man in a porkpie hat and suspenders gets out of the driver’s side and begins untying the rope. In the backseat, a guitar case rests on boxes and suitcases. A woman emerges from the passenger side and works at her section of the rope, glancing up and down the street. She’s barefoot, wearing a tank top and a long, sequin-spangled skirt. When she sees me watching her through the window, she waves as if she knows me. She gestures for me to come outside. I don’t move. She says something to the man and starts jogging toward my door. I wonder if she’s a new neighbor about to ask my help to unload the couch into a house nearby. Rain has been threatening all day—gargantuan gray clouds, a hint of steel in the air.
I open my door before she can knock. She’s at the bottom step, raising the hem of her skirt as if preparing to climb. “There you are,” she says, as if she’s been looking for me. Rose-vine tattoos climb her arms. Dream-catcher earrings dangle to her shoulders.
“Do you mind if I leave this couch here on your sidewalk?” she asks. “Someone was giving it away for free, and my dad needs a new couch. He lives just a few blocks away, but he’s not answering his phone. Someone else might want it if he doesn’t come get it. I’ll put a ‘free’ sign on it. Would that be okay? Do you mind?”
I do mind. But I cannot answer because I am thinking.
Do I have a right to mind? What is my relationship to the sidewalk, which belongs to the city, and yet somehow this woman thinks I have authority over? Where does my property end and the city’s begin? Is the sidewalk outside my house my responsibility even if it isn’t my property? If it were snowing, I’d have to shovel it and salt it and be liable for anyone who got injured on my ice.
People leave stuff for free on this corner all the time, and I don’t mind that, but they do it at the very corner, by the stop sign, not on the sidewalk right up against my retaining wall, where the man and the woman seem to be already in the process of unloading the couch, even though I haven’t said yet whether I mind or not.
I tell the woman that people leave free things on the corner so I guess it’s all right, and I go back inside. I immediately regret that I was not more direct. I should have said, “Move it there, by the stop sign.” I should have said: “Why don’t you leave it in front of your father’s house, if your father really does need a couch, if he even lives near here, if you even have a father.” But I do not think of that until the woman slinks from my steps.
They leave the couch exactly where they’d begun to unload it, on the sidewalk outside my living room window. Not on the corner, not by the stop sign. Maybe six inches closer to the stop sign. I keep expecting they’ll pick up the couch and move it to the actual corner. But they’ve already driven away.
I run outside and look around for the car. Nowhere in sight.
A small cardboard sign rests against the cushions. It’s the size of a large index card, with “free” written in black Sharpie, a heart outlined beside the word. It’s the heart that makes me shove the couch, but it doesn’t budge.
Somehow this man and woman have made the couch my problem. If it stays here, up against my lawn’s retaining wall, people might think it’s mine, that I want to sit and stare into the windows of the houses across the street. What if someone saw me shoving the couch and assumed I was dumping? I could get ticketed and fined. The “free” sign is so tiny, no one driving by will notice it. I will have to make a giant “free” sign for a couch that isn’t mine. I look up at my living room window; my cat sits on the sill, swishing her tail, watching me.
I shove harder. The couch won’t glide smoothly. I try to drag it in a zig-zag pattern. I imagine everyone in the neighborhood looking at me, wondering why I allowed this to be left here, why I’m moving someone else’s junk. I push with my hip and hands; I shudder at the thought of bed bugs.
I nudge-push-pull the couch to the corner, return to my living room, draw the blinds, strip to my underwear, and toss my clothes on the back steps. I will throw them in the washer in their own hot load.
I wash my hands in scalding water and put on clean clothes and obsessively look through the living room window. Is it gone? Is it gone? I see a few cars slow as they pass. Drivers lean out, staring at the couch, measuring, judging, speeding up again.
I get panicky at the thought of a waterlogged couch sitting on this corner forever, reminding me daily of my inability to say no to strangers. I won’t let it. I’ll call 1-800-JUNK and pay the removal fee myself before I live with this much longer.
The sky darkens, the sun sets behind storm clouds. More people slow, some pull over to the curb, pause, then drive on. Take it, I pray, so this brief episode of my life, what it shows me about me—pushover, doormat—can end. A young man walks by, his arm in a sling. He stops at the couch, holding his phone in his sling-hand, and pokes at the screen with his other hand. He switches the phone to the good hand and holds it to his ear. Through my open window, I hear him say, “Dude, there’s a free couch here. Seems in pretty good shape.”
Let the dude come before the rain, I pray.
I sit on my own couch and stroke my cat, who curls like a nautilus on the cushion beside me. I watch dumb TV. Every few minutes I pop up from my couch and check the other couch. Still there, still there. I open a beer and drink it. I open another beer and drink that.
The rain comes down hard. The cat darts under the couch and howls. I get on my knees and try to comfort her, then coax her out with treats, with the hair ties she loves to bat and chase, with a feather dangled on a string. I glance out the window at the sky and marvel at the great sheets of water streaming down the street, the gutters roiling. The rain is so dramatic that for a moment I forget about the couch. The street is a wet slant of river—swift and glossy, reflecting houselights and streetlights and headlights.
Then I remember the couch and feel despair. Surely it’s waterlogged by now. I look out the window but don’t see the couch on the sidewalk. Maybe everything looks different just because it’s dark and raining.
I cover my head with my hands and run onto the steps to check. The couch is gone—as if it had never been. Or as if the river running downhill had swept it up and carried it off to the ocean at the end of the street.
Despite my relief, I sleep fitfully. I wake to cloudless skies, a clear day. I make coffee and throw the front door open, stand on the porch, take deep breaths of cool salty air. Then I stand on the sidewalk of the quiet street to see sailboats pass. I imagine the couch out there, floating, a velvety perch for pelicans and cormorants. Or for a cat in dream-catcher earrings, an owl in a porkpie hat, strumming a guitar. I imagine the cat and owl so intensely I’m pretty sure I’m not imagining them anymore. I fetch my binoculars.
At my back door, I step over yesterday’s clothes in a crumpled, sodden pile, as if whoever’d been wearing them had dissolved in the rain.
Halina Duraj’s work has appeared in The Harvard Review, The Sun, Ecotone, and the 2014 PEN/O. Henry Prize anthology. Her debut story collection, The Family Cannon, was published by Augury Books. She teaches literature and writing at the University of San Diego.