epilogue: the ottomans

This week the city did the big yearly junk collection for our neighborhood. Or as the city calls it, the Bulky Collection. You can put nearly anything in your front yard except for cardboard, dead cats, or small children, and they will pick it up.
It was fascinating to drive around the neighborhood early on Sunday evening and see the sorts of things the neighbors had put in their front yards: a broken ice-cream maker, some old charcoal grills, sofas, chairs, mattresses, washing machines, porch swings, a broken bike rack, and wood in all shapes and colors. Seeing all these sofas in front of people’s houses reminded me of King of the Hill.
On Sunday night, we put out a wicker sofa and chair with broken legs and seats, and a wooden rack for plants.

It was equally fascinating to see the trucks that drove around the neighborhood Sunday night, scoping out all the junk and taking whatever they fancied. I think this is great, because whatever they take can be reused and doesn’t go into a landfill or anything. One woman stopped in front of our house and took the plant rack, telling me she could use it to display items in her booth at Citywide Garage Sale.
Monday morning, I remembered a few more items in the garage that I had been dying to get rid of, some of which the former owners of the house had left in the garage. I lugged a chair, some flowered cushions, a couple of ratty thin rugs, and an old fireplace screen out to the curb to join the wicker sofa and chair.
I talked to my boyfriend later that morning via IM and told him about removing the extra furniture, which he hadn’t realized I’d done. He thought someone from another neighborhood must have dumped the stuff in front of our house to take advantage of the junk collection.
I then told him that I’d put out his ottomans but if they weren’t out there, I guessed some scavenging truck must have taken them away quickly.
Now I have to tell you about these ottomans. My boyfriend moved in with two ottomans and there wasn’t really any room for them in the house, so he prudently stored them in the garage. The ottomans were beige with brown and orange stripes. My boyfriend’s cat had loved them very much, so in some places they had been scratched to the point where you could see the foam underneath.
I had occasionally made comments implying that the ottomans were the wagon-wheel coffee table of our relationship, which if you’ve ever seen When Harry Met Sally you will understand perfectly. If you haven’t, let’s just say I had no objection to their being stored in the garage. I supposed that if my boyfriend was really devoted to them, eventually we could cover them with a fabric that matched the sofa and put them in the living room, although honestly, even if they were precious and beautiful antiques, it would have been difficult to find space for them in the living room.
Anyway, the ottomans were living in the garage with other furniture and boxes of stuff that neither of us were sure we wanted, but we didn’t want to get rid of right now because if it turned out we hated living with each other, we might well need that stuff again.
Of course, I would never take any of my boyfriend’s stuff and put it out for the junk collection. That was just my little joke. And my boyfriend realized that right away. I made another joke about the neighborhood cat taking one of the ottomans home with him, and that was that.
I got home from work on Monday and noticed that while the city hadn’t yet picked up the junk, someone had taken the floral cushions. Also, my boyfriend had mowed the front yard and then set the chairs and sofa out so they faced the street in a cute sort of way. I thanked him for mowing the lawn, told him about the cushions, and made another silly joke about the ottomans. He left to run some errands. I was reading in my room and semi-fell asleep.
Suddenly I heard the garage door opening and other loud noises. What the hell was my boyfriend doing in there? I was not quite awake and I stumbled into the kitchen, where he was just coming in from the garage. He walked over to his computer to check email. I looked in the garage and didn’t see anything different at first.
Then I looked at the front yard and saw the ottomans stacked up next to the sofa and chairs.
Oh, hell. I thought. This is all my fault. I made fun of his ottomans and now he’s put them outside and for the rest of my life, I will hear about how I made him get rid of those damn things. I’d had lunch earlier that day with a bunch of married guys all talking about what their wives made them do, or wouldn’t let them do, and did this mean we were drifting into that horrible sort of relationship dynamic? I should never have said anything bad about the ottomans. After all, he hadn’t picked on any of my furniture. I was mean. I was nagging. I was a horrible stereotype.
I walked up to him at his computer, still feeling groggy from my nap, and said, “What was going on in the garage?”
He didn’t turn around from the computer monitor. “I put out those hassocks. They’re really torn up and I don’t think we’ll ever use them.”
“Is this my fault? Because I made fun of them?”
“No. Stop it. I told you they are all torn up.”
He’d told me something a few weeks ago about mice potentially being in the garage at one point. I am paranoid about rodents of any kind.
“Torn up? Were there mice in there?”
“Honey, I think you’re still half-asleep. Why don’t you go sit on the sofa?”
He had a point. I walked over to the sofa in the living room (not the wicker sofa in front of the house, of course) and almost fell asleep again. I still felt bad about his throwing away the ottomans, but it was obvious he didn’t want to talk about it.
Tuesday morning, I noticed all the furniture was still out in front of the house. I was leaving the house to go to work and thought, “I wonder how torn up those ottomans really are?”
I walked over to the furniture. The ottomans were in fact pretty beat up. Really, they were just squares of foam with material over them. If we wanted new ones it probably wouldn’t cost a lot to get more. And you could see a lot of the foam square under the ripped-up material. They were in terrible shape. But I still felt a little guilty about possibly contributing to my boyfriend throwing away part of the few pieces of furniture he owned.
Suddenly I realized what this meant, though. If he was throwing away furniture we weren’t using, that wouldn’t work in the house, then that meant he believed he would stay in the house for awhile. He wasn’t thinking of moving out, he was planning to be in my house with me long-term. The furniture in the garage was meant as insurance in case we didn’t suit each other, and if he was throwing it away, he felt less of a need for such insurance.
I mean, I know we love each other and we both like living together, but seeing that proof in a couple of torn-up ottomans out on the lawn somehow made it a little more real. Saturday marked four months that we have been living together, and we seem to be getting along beautifully, much better than I would have anticipated.
Either that or he really did think the ottomans were so torn as to be entirely unusable. Or that they could be replaced so cheaply, if he did move out, that it wasn’t worth saving them. Once he reads this entry, that may be what he tells me.
What can I say, I prefer the more romantic theory.

[Entry originally written May 4, 2004. Photo taken May 5.]