My Planet: Finding Humor in the Oddest Places

Furniture Fight

When you move, your head fills with idiotic dreams. You get rid of perfectly good furniture, thinking that when you arrive in your new home you will magically acquire the good taste and cash needed to redecorate. Har.

Last week my husband and I, tired of standing up in front of the TV, found ourselves in a hip, modern furniture store called Design Within Reach. This is a place that sells $3,000 sofas rather than the $10,000 sofas that professional interior designers will reach for. I fell for a three-seater in maroon leather. I motioned to Ed, who was submerged in a chair that resembled the bottom half of a terrifying orange bivalve.

“It’s only $3,000,” I called. Ed stretched his arm out in the direction of the $3,000 sofa. “I can’t reach.” As we left, the woman handed me a swatch of the leather, as though perhaps it were possible to grow a sofa from a small cutting.

Ed and I realized that before we could argue about whether we could afford the sofa, we needed to spend some time arguing about how big it should be and where it was going to go. Ed wanted to line the sofa up alongside an armchair against one wall. This is a distinctly male school of thought as regards living room decor: All large seating items are to be placed against a wall, facing the television. This way, if the lights go out while you are returning from the refrigerator, you need only place one hand upon a wall and begin walking. Eventually you’ll hit a place to sit down and nap until the power is back on and the TV is working again.

I pointed out that if three or four people wanted to have a conversation in these seats, they would need to constantly lean forward or back to see around one another’s heads. I explained the concept of the “conversation pit,” wherein you arrange the sofa and chairs at right angles, so that you can easily see each other while talking. Ed said some disparaging things about women and their endless need to talk, and I replied with an unflattering statement about men and TV-watching. We were in a different kind of conversation pit, the kind the Romans would toss poorly muscled, verbally inclined gladiators into and then watch to see who remained standing.

A few days later, a friend gave us some home décor magazines. These consist of hundreds of pictures of imaginative, tastefully decorated interiors. The pictures are meant to give you ideas for your own home, but mostly they make you feel really, really bad about it. Also, though it isn’t written down anywhere, the magazines imply that you will need to clear out all personal belongings except bowls of lemons and vases of artfully arranged twigs. Who are these strange, monklike lemon-eaters? Where are their piles of bills, their overdue videos, their newspapers from last March?

One article suggested cutting out pieces of paper in the dimensions of the furniture we were considering. We could then move these around the floor in different configurations. Ed cut out a sofa, two armchairs, a coffee table. Then he set to work on two more large, square paper cutouts. “Ottomans,” explained Ed. “I mean ottomen.”

This is a long-standing disagreement between us. I’m a leg-curler-under. Ed is a leg-stretcher-outer. Ed would put an ottoman in front of the toilet if he could. His idea of a winning business venture is to open a store that sells only ottomans and call it The Ottoman Empire.

Two weeks passed. Still we had no furniture. Ed sat down on the paper sofa and patted the space beside him. We lit a fire in the fireplace. In the spirit of compromise, Ed crumpled up a paper ottoman and threw it on the flames. I moved a paper armchair over against the wall. Tomorrow we’d buy some twigs. It was beginning to feel like home.