Couches - The Jewish Standard

In old age, where I surprisingly find myself now, looking back is more common than looking forward. Memories pour in unsolicited, like this tale, or is it tail, of couches. Yes. Couches!

The good news is that the couch in our Herzliya apartment survived us. After 22 years of nonstop abuse, it was still in fine condition, suitable for our newlywed grandson Josh and his bride Shosh to adopt and move to the Holy City. After all, the couch was a Durian, one of India’s most reputable brands, and that young couple were soon to embark on a yearlong sojourn in New Delhi. The pieces did come together! They would use the couch for a few months and then sell it at the time of their departure. No doubt it would remain in perfect condition. The Indian back story added to the intrigue of it all.

Here is the history of that sectional sofa, a history that can be found only here, dear readers! It was built in Jodhpur, a furniture manufacturing center in Rajasthan. Its owners were Indian diplomats who imported it to Israel’s wealthiest city, Herzliya Pituach, a place of embassy bigwigs and extravagant homes overlooking the Mediterranean seashore.

After a short stay, the couple was recalled to India, choosing to sell their furniture, including their couch, which ultimately, with some haggling, became our couch. It was then in perfect condition, and it is now a historic piece of our family life and lore. Can a couch deliver emotion? Certainly ours did! And today, after what I just did here in New Jersey to our splendid new leather loveseat, I miss that treasured Indian sofa even more.

We haven’t been too lucky, or careful, with couches. This Durian, a huge solid sectional, was an anomaly indeed. It withstood abuse after abuse and lived to tell the tale. It is now lost to us forever. I do not know where it abides. Or even if it still abides. War came to our homeland and it remains still. Lots more than couches have been destroyed.

At first I didn’t love it, thinking it uninspired and boring. It was plain beige with no ornamentation, but it was delightfully comfortable, which certainly was a redeeming feature. It still had to prove itself to me, which ultimately it did. When we finally parted ways, honestly, it looked as perfect as the day we had first acquired it. During frequent boisterous grandchildren’s visits, including, happily, numerous babies with their spit-ups and diaper changes, and the older children with their endless removal of the pillows to erect various treacherous towers and tunnels, not to mention forts and military encampments, all while being constantly submerged under cookie crumbs and Bamba, drowning in apple juice, and fashioning artwork with disparate media like Play-Doh or oil paint, that sofa was still, somehow, absolutely perfect. It even survived challenges from Magic Markers, probably the most evil stain of all! And, topping it all off was that, unlike American sofas today, the pillows were all reversible. If it ever was necessary, each pillow could be reversed in a simple magical ploy.

I can’t tell you why, but it was one of the many miracles of life in Ha Aretz. We all know that nes gadol haya sham! It really was a great miracle that happened there. You just couldn’t do anything at all to damage that sofa, which, in addition, had the virtue of seating at least 12 and featured recliners to meet the needs of its tired owners. It was really divine!

Our sofa-luck was not international, however. Nes gadol was lo po! Sofa miracles don’t happen here, at least to us. We’ve had, and continue to have, a long and torturous history of sofa destruction in this great Garden State. And to be brutally honest, most of the abuse, and ultimate need for replacement, was due to us and not any of our progeny.

It started with sofa number 1, a custom-made, ridiculously expensive golden silk creation that we put in the living room of our first apartment on Huntington Terrace in Newark. It had delusions of grandeur and belonged on Park Avenue under the care of a live-in housekeeper, not a mongrel. The problem was that mongrel, our dog, Gringo, who loved it as much as we did. When we went to work every day, she pretended to be morose, but in truth, she was really counting the seconds until the front door closed and we were safely gone. Then she leaped onto the couch, where she spent the major part of the day, only leaving for brief sojourns to the bedroom so she could move her DNA to the bed.

You may ask how I figured out this whole scheme. So easy! She was a shedder. Wherever she went, she left ample hairy clues at the crime scene, but was wise enough to always look innocent and be on her own little doggie bed when we arrived home.

The duplicity of that mutt, who had been rescued from the slums, making her a bonafide slumdog, was such that she would walk us to the door daily, whimpering, pretending that she cared that we were leaving, instilling profound guilt in us. As we descended the single flight of stairs to leave the building, we were escorted by her pain and suffering, by pathetic screams loud enough to wake up any of our neighbors who might still be sleeping. One day I apologized to Dottie, from across the hall, telling her how sorry we were that Gringo was so bereft when we left that she cried all day. Dottie had a good laugh and ratted on Gringo.

The true story was that as soon as Gringo heard the downstairs door closed, signaling our exit, she stopped her shrieking and retired to her boudoir, in this case our fabulous silk couch, where she reclined like a princess until our respective homecomings. Then, as the front door announced our return, she leaped off the couch or bed and resumed her drama-queen performance. These were all instinctive as she had certainly never learned them from her errant and not very virtuous mother, overburdened with numerous litters, who had deserted her at an extraordinarily young age.

The moral of that anecdote is that while Gringo got caught in a daily lie, our couch was the victim of her paws and slobbering. Soiled and shamed, it had to go. Clearly Gringo had to go too, but we kept her for the next 15 years or so, and even took her round-trip to Israel.

The next couch we treated with Scotch-Guard. It was a busy fabric, designed to conceal stains, which we didn’t expect anyway since we had paid extra for that stain protection. We let our four kids have free rein and ultimately realized that the fabric was not concealing any stains at all.

Do you all remember Bamberger’s? It was a very reliable store! I called them and told them that we were not happy with the couch we had bought from them. Could they have a look? They came and they volunteered to replace the couch, for free! An offer we just could not refuse.

We decided that our family needed black vinyl that would never show stains from kids or dogs or anything. So that’s what we got, and we were happy with it for a couple of years of hard living. But you won’t believe what happened. The black started turning green. I kid you not. Soon enough the whole couch was mottled with some of it black and some of it green.

Our friends at Bamberger’s came back and treated us to another couch. So here’s to Bam’s!

But this story does not have a hoped-for happy ending. Does anyone know how to get rid of ballpoint ink on a leather loveseat?

Rosanne Skopp of West Orange is a wife, mother of four, grandmother of 14, and great-grandmother of eight. She is a graduate of Rutgers University and a dual citizen of the United States and Israel. She is a lifelong blogger, writing blogs before anyone knew what a blog was! She welcomes email at rosanne.skopp@gmail.com

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