Furniture Fun

June 21, 2021

We all have our hopes and dreams, our triumphs and defeats, our moments of pure exhilaration, of bewilderment, of disappointment and despair. We at times take ourselves too seriously, become preoccupied with trivia, fail to see enough of the world around us or take the long view. I remind myself of all this. Sometimes, though, we pirouette from the sublime to the absurd. Absurd is where we are right now.

I was still looking back wistfully on our Tennessee road trip when our new sofa was delivered. It didn’t fit in the room, didn’t even come close. While we stared, stunned, the delivery guys tossed it back on the truck and drove away.

We knew we would need furniture for our new South Carolina home when, still in Virginia, we gave away our old stuff. The sofa we had owned for 25 years went to a gang of young guys who didn’t speak English, but saw our ad offering it for free. They showed up in a pickup truck shorter than the sofa, but managed to tie it down securely enough to drive away slowly.

We set out to replace the sofa in early April, after moving into this place. The idea was to create a sort of den-TV room in one of the spare bedrooms. We looked at furniture store websites. I measured the length of the wall in the room where we planned to stow the new sofa—well over eight feet or 96 inches. Looked simple.

We landed at Rooms To Go, which is big in the Southeast. A salesman hit us up as soon as we walked in. We strolled impatiently with him past extravagant displays of sectional sofas, bedframes, and giant cushioned chairs. We had thought about getting a sofabed, but dropped the idea when we saw the prices. 

We found a sofa we liked, in a color we thought would work with the room. I said let’s stop looking. The price seemed reasonable and we tacked on the maintenance contract and delivery. We paid for it. Then the salesman advised it couldn’t be delivered until June 12.

Why the delay, we asked. The factory is in Florida, he said. They get to these things when they get to them. We grumbled, but left.

June 12 arrived with a flurry of emails and text messages announcing the delivery was imminent. I removed the door to the room in which we wanted the sofa. The delivery guys hauled it through the front door and down the hall. That’s as far as they got. The sofa was ten inches longer than the height of the doorframe, which I had never considered checking. “You need an ‘apartment sofa,’” the head honcho said. “Go back to the store and pick one, we’ll bring it right over.” He sent a text to the store about the failed delivery. That was the last we saw of our sofa.

“Apartment sofa?” What’s that, we wondered. We shlepped back to the store, ten miles of hellish traffic and summer heat. Our salesman stared for a moment, then recognized us. “Apartment sofa—that’s just an expression,” he said. “We have sofas and we have loveseats.” We now knew a full-size sofa wouldn’t work. Sandy looked at loveseats; nothing in the color we wanted. She said we’ll think about it.

“Try Big Lots,” our Colorado daughter suggested. We drove over there, a huge, slightly grim place crammed with off-label durable goods, furniture, and discount groceries and housewares. I saw more employees than customers.

We spotted a loveseat close to the right color. The price was about $250 less than the Rooms To Go sofa. At that point I was interested, showing my own priorities. A saleswoman approached. “We have one of these in stock if you want to pick it up today,” she said. I was not in the mood for hoisting furniture. But I took a tape measure and in the broiling sun checked the dimensions of the van. The loveseat would fit lengthwise if we took the center seats out. I wasn’t sure about height and width. “How about store delivery,” I asked, sweating.

Store delivery meant, like everything else in life, creating an account on the store website, a user ID, and a password. Sandy had done that at home but couldn’t remember the password. She handed me her phone. Squinting, I got to the internet. I set up an account and a password, the one I use with all accounts I’ll never use again. I tapped “Next.” The phone lost the internet. The saleswoman took the phone and expertly maneuvered back to the website and tapped a few times. Saying nothing but still holding the phone, she turned and walked to the front of the store.

We slouched on the loveseat we wanted to buy, waiting. Finally she was back. “I’m sorry, the system crashed. You’ll have to call customer service. Or, if you have a computer at home, you can try going to the site when it comes back up and ordering online. The store delivery price is $149.” I recalled Rooms to Go had charged $59 for delivery. Why so much, I asked. “We use a third-party contractor for deliveries. You have to go to their ‘app’ to arrange delivery. We don’t have any control over that. It probably would take four weeks.”

I could take the center seats, each weighing about 50 pounds, out of the van to make room for the Big Lots loveseat—a complicated, backbreaking chore. But we’re not sure if they’ll still have the one unit in stock. Then too, they have a cart at the store, but how would I get it in the house?

The next morning we pushed a loveseat we already own from the living room into the space in which we had planned to put the sofa. Then we canceled the Rooms To Go order. That day in April has receded into the distant past. We’re getting used to the long empty space formerly occupied by the loveseat we shifted to the back room.

Yesterday, in a quiet moment, we stepped back to another world. We talked about the Tennessee trip. Summoning long-dormant memories, Sandy said that the students at her elementary school in Winchester and the nuns who taught there believed the building was haunted. Suddenly, she said, the church next to the school burned down. I smiled at the anecdote, rich with the history and mystery of that remote place, and quit thinking about furniture.