The Pink Couch

I remember the first time I saw that pink couch.

I was in Goodwill with Ellen. She was wandering around the men’s section, looking for a black leather jacket in the middle of summer, as she did. I saw her black hair bobbing up and down through the aisles across the store, and every now and then, she’d lift a piece of clothing up high in the air in the hopes it would reach my sightline for approval. Most of the time, I shook my head no. It was hard to get lucky in the Goodwill.

I was in the section with all the tchotchkes (you know, the plastic candelabras and porcelain baby figurines and all that stuff that probably ends up being haunted after a few years) when I turned a corner and saw it.

The most perfect pink couch.

It was mid-century, stylish enough to fit in with the rest of the miscellaneous decor in my place. The cushions were thin but still plush enough to be comfortable for all the hours on it I’d spend binging Cheers. Everyone in the store was ignoring it, but I couldn’t understand why. Here was this glorious piece of 1960s architecture, and it was sitting in the middle of the Goodwill, untouched and unseen.

Except I saw it. And I loved it.

I peeked at the price tag. $50. Holy shit. It was a steal.

I pulled one of the volunteers aside. “Excuse me,” I asked, “Is this couch being held by anyone?”

The older woman fiddled with one of her bleach-blonde curls and studied the price tag. “Nope,” she said, smiling up at me, “It’s all yours. And It’s 50% off day, so you get it for half.”

“$25 for a couch?” Now, this was lucky. “Wow. I wonder if it’ll fit in my place. I’ll have to think about it.”

The older woman adjusted the glasses on her nose and took a closer look at the tag, ignoring my hesitation.

“Oh, I’m sorry,” she finally said, and my heart fell. It was being held by someone, wasn’t it? Some adorable blonde girl who collected vintage mugs across town had called making sure that no one would sell the couch she’d seen that was going to go perfectly next to her Tiffany blue record player and her collection of ‘40s swing music on vinyl. Sigh.

“What,” I asked, “It’s not for sale?”

The lady removed her glasses and straightened up. “Nah, it’s just got a green sticker on it. It’s double-down day.”

“I don’t know what that means,” I told her.

She cleared her throat and gestured at the couch, “Well, that means it’s double-double. You know, half-off half-off. This couch is twelve bucks.”

I gulped. The mystery, the magic of this strange piece of furniture was working. That wonderful feeling of destiny you only feel on truly special shopping days was kicking in: when every stoplight on the way to your destination is green, when everything you want is on sale, when the perfect item manifests itself in the forgotten corner of the thrift store. I felt like fairy dust was settling around me and there was no way— no way I’d be leaving here without that pink couch trailing behind me.

“I’ll take it,” I said with conviction, and I ripped off the bottom of the price tag and trudged to the front of the store.

---

Ellen and I stood out back with two of the volunteers, studying the inside of my dingy SUV.

“You sure that’s as low as those seats’ll go down?” One of the guys asked, leaning against the side of my car and shaking his head.

“That’s as low as they go,” I assured him.

“It’s not gonna happen, boss,” the other guy said, looking from the couch, which was glowing in the sun outside the loading dock, and my car, which was a mid-size SUV and had no chance of fitting the pink behemoth within.

“You guys got a truck back home?”

Ellen and I shook our heads.

“You girls got boyfriends that can come help you?” The other guy asked. Ellen let out a laugh that sounded like a car sputtering down the road.

“Are you joking?” Ellen took a step closer to him, “Is it 1951? We don’t need a guy to help us load this into the car.”

“I’m telling you, lady, it’s not gonna fit.”

Heart pounding, I set a hand on my new couch. “Oh, it’ll fit,” I assured him, “We’ll make sure of it.”

It took Ellen and I a half an hour to get the couch into my car. We had to pull around the corner and drag the couch away from the loading dock, considering we were clogging up the donation lane, arguing with the volunteers who assured us the couch just would not fit in the SUV. Technically, they were right.

Ellen was in charge of using my tow rope (the only thing we could find) to secure the couch to everything she could within the back of the Hyundai. She looped it around the couch legs, hooked it onto one of the roof handles, and tied the latch down halfway with some cheap bungee cords I managed to buy at the Home Depot next door. A third of the couch still stuck out the back of the car, and Ellen and I just looked at each other, unsure of how to deal with this final obstacle.

“I’ve got it,” she finally said, reaching up into my hair to untie the red bandana I’d been using to push back my baby hairs. She tied it around the couch leg that was sticking out the back.

“That’s what you’re supposed to do, right? As a precaution.”

I laughed. “Let’s just hope that bandana doesn’t ending up crashing through someone’s windshield on the way home.”

So, we did it. Ellen sat in the back with the couch, twisting her body around it to make extra sure the tow rope wouldn’t give out. I drove slower than I’d ever driven before, and other motorists zoomed around me, blaring their horns at the girls with the giant pink couch sticking out the back of their tiny car.

Finally, we made it back to my apartment. I re-tied the bandana back into my dark hair and we used the adrenaline that was still pumping through our veins to double up on the strength we’d need to carry the couch up the stairs. It was too long to fit around the corner of my door, so I had to break into the toolbox my father had given me for my birthday— the one I hadn’t opened yet— so that I could take my door off its hinges.

The day was becoming an amalgam of experiences I never thought I’d do, but did. Driving with a massive object hanging out into the road. Dismantling my front door. Buying a giant, pink, beautiful monstrosity for twelve dollars.

Ellen and I spent five minutes in my apartment just staring at the couch, studying it, admiring it, and realizing just how single we were...and loving it.

I had bought a pink couch and transported it to my apartment without the man; without the truck. It was me and Ellen against the world, and sitting here before us was the raw proof of it.

I told myself I’d never get rid of it.

I never broke that promise to myself, not even when everything changed.

---

The pink couch had not been a hit with either of my past relationships. Greg said that it was too uncomfortable to make out on and months later, Vince told me that I didn’t “have enough pillows on it”, which I always thought was a really weird, specific complaint to make about something I loved so much.

Regardless, both of them sat on the brown chair beside my pink couch when they broke up with me (separate incidents, of course) avoiding the pink cushions entirely when they’d finally decided to say goodbye. I always thought that was symbolic, but maybe I was just looking into it too much.

Despite the fact that I was single now, I liked being alone. I liked living alone. I liked my apartment on the ground floor with the big picture window that overlooked the grass courtyard where people brought their dogs by on walks and grilled out in the summertime. I liked spending my Sundays folding laundry in front of season four of Friends, which I’d already watched five times before. I liked when I came home from a late night with my friends and sat on the counter with a jar of pickles at 3:00 a.m. I liked that there was no one there to tell me that eating pickles that late would give me heartburn nightmares. I liked figuring that out for myself.

I never knew that it couldn’t last forever. I was okay with my money; I wasn’t like my brother Todd, who spent everything he made on beer and trips to the coast or ski passes for the weekend. I was smart; the only thing I ever really splurged on was the occasional online shopping binge, but come on. Who could blame me?

The apartment was expensive, but not overbearingly so. Ellen and I lived in the same building; it was old, going on 100 years, and the heat never worked in the winter and the A/C never worked in the summer, but it had charm. It had history. It was easy to forget about bills amongst all the exposed brick and original hardwood floors.

When I spent that lazy July after Vince broke up with me huddled on the pink couch in front of my TV, cooking eggs for myself at midnight, I never thought that it would be my last. I never knew that a month later, I’d be one in a house of five.

But hey, things don’t usually pan out just the way you think they will. And pink couches?

Their magic doesn’t last forever.