HOUSEHOLD GODS by Amy Lane
“My glasses are gone for good, aren’t they?” She murmured mournfully to her husband. Their little suburban house had been ransacked, and they still hadn’t turned up.
“They’ll turn up.” Derek told her, unperturbed. He didn’t even look up from his Sports Illustrated she noted sourly, but it wouldn’t matter if he had.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon….” she murmured, rummaging frantically again under the couch. It was an old, uncomfortable, ugly tapestried hide-a-bed and she mostly loved it—unless, of course, it seemed to be thwarting her. “I’ll clean you, I promise, just cough them up.”
“Who are you talking to, Suze?” He asked suspiciously. Their three children were, wonder of wonders, away at his mother’s for the weekend, and they were the only two in the house.
“Whoever’s listening.” She answered shortly, and began mumbling to the couch again. “You might say a prayer or two yourself, or we’re going to be in the front row at the movies again—you know how you hate that.”
Thoughtfully Derek put down his magazine. “You know, sweetheart, it’s not really healthy to make fun like that. You know God has better things to do with his time than…”
“Than what?” She chuffed, out of temper. “I haven’t seen him intervening in Sarejevo or making it rain in Africa lately. The least he could do is help me find my stupid glasses.”
The lines that traced their way up into Derek’s receding hairline deepened, and Susan braced herself for another lecture. Derek was a youth pastor at their church, and although his integrity was what had first attracted her to him, his sense of humor seemed to have receded with his hair in the last couple of years. “Susan, you know it really concerns me when…”
“Stow it, sweetie-- I found them!.” Thoughtfully, she patted the couch, which had just sort of… coughed them up for her. She had just searched that particular spot a half dozen times— the sofa must have taken pity on her. “Thanks, guy—no hard feelings.” She told it. “I’ve got some Resolve in the kitchen—tomorrow, you & me—it’s a date, right?” For a moment, the old sofa bed took on an unseen glamour, and she found herself feeling affectionate. Maybe, she thought, it wouldn’t get junked when their youngest turned ten. (That had been their cut-off date, the long planned for day when spills would refuse to happen in their house.) Maybe, they’d find a place for it in the game room over the garage, by the ping-pong table and in front of the extra TV. Belatedly she turned to Derek, who was watching her with narrowed eyes and some concern.
“Susan—have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?”
Susan tried very hard not to laugh. She tried to humor him, really she did. She went to church and sang in the choir and taught Sunday school and all that other chaff that went with the grain of believing in a Supreme Being. But she had always reasoned, that just because there existed a GOD, with all of the accompanying possessiveness, didn’t mean there weren’t other, well, little gods, working on their own. GOD, she figured, really did have better things to do than find her glasses, or her car keys, or her sewing needles, or Becky’s raincoat. GOD’s job description really didn’t cover letting her car get her to the station on fumes, or getting Brett into the school play, or losing that stubborn 10 or so pounds that refused to leave her hips. But someone was helping, because against all odds, these things happened. All except the weight on her hips, and she wasn’t quite ready to sacrifice a family pet to achieve that.
“Oh, come on, Derek. I’m talking to the house or to the world in general. People do it all the time. Before you got your certification and lost your sense of perspective, you used to beg it not to rain on golfing Sundays. Don’t tell me you were talking to the big guy, because if he had his way, I’m sure it would rain every Sunday.”
“Susan,” he replied sternly, rising from his seat on the recliner, “I’m warning you, don’t take His…”
“I didn’t use hHis name!” She returned, feeling defensive and hurt. It had happened slowly, this changing, but she was embarrassed to find that she didn’t know the stranger standing across from her. Whimsically she wondered if he still sold real estate, or if that was some bizarre cover for his real identity. Please, she thought, half in exasperation and half in mid-life panic, no one living in California could be that conservative, right?
“Look, Derek, we’re going to miss the movie. I found my glasses without breaking any one of the Ten Commandments, and we’ve got the whole night to ourselves.” She gave him a conciliatory smile and offered him a hand, but Derek was being stubborn.
“Not,” he said, thumping self-righteously on the couch, “Until we have this out.”
And that was when the couch ate him.
Susan watched in surprise, because it was quick, but not that quick. It wasn’t as though Derek was beamed up or just disappeared poof he was gone. The couch unfolded in one large yawn, tucked her husband in itself nice and neat, and swallowed. It left her standing in a muddle of throw pillows and living room blankets, staring at the place in the air where Derek had been, and wondering what the hell had happened.
“Give him back!” She told it, shocked. Most household furniture didn’t turn on you until after you tried to shove it in the Dumpster.
The couch just sat there, as she mused, couches should do under normal circumstances. But these circumstances weren’t normal.
“Give him back!” She insisted, a little more loudly, reaching under the cushions and grabbing hold of the metal pull bar that (usually) unfolded the couch into a bed. “Ouch, oh hell…” She exclaimed, pulling back to examine her hand. There was blood welling up from a little wedge-shaped puncture wound on her palm.
“Why’d you do that?” She asked, sucking on the ouchie. “I was just trying to get my husband back… we’re going to be late for the movie.” She added that last lamely. If the couch wouldn’t cough Derek up, she suspected that she would have bigger concerns than missing the movie. The couch didn’t move, and she stared at it in the frightening, sublime quiet of their living room. It was a beautiful room. The carpet was a deep teal green. The furniture was oak—a little battered, but handsome, really. One wall was papered in a whimsical, vine-y rose print, and there were houseplants everywhere on oak and glass stands. She had put a lot of heart and soul into this room, right down to the French style sliding glass door and the sky-light that she had spent her wardrobe money on the year before. Her kids didn’t really spill anything in here, she thought inanely. The living room, of any other place in the house was a lovely, peaceful sanctuary from pain and stress and ugliness.
The only thing that didn’t really fit into it was the couch. But what could she do? She made plenty of money as a Loan Officer at the nearby Bank, and Derek was a lawyer, but it wasn’t money that was the problem. That had been her parent’s couch—they had given it to her and Derek when they had rented their first crappy little apartment in downtown Sacramento. Their first child had been conceived on that couch—not sturdy, practical Jonathan, or sweet, sunny Becky. Dreamy, poetic, talented Brett had been conceived on that couch, and she could sense the power in him from the moment he’d first tugged on her breast in search of nourishment. She had lost her virginity on that couch—not to Derek, but to the guy before Derek. He’d been a cast member of a traveling play that had come to her college. She knew they wouldn’t have a future, but her parents were gone for the weekend, and he’d been so, so beautiful. Her past sat itself down on that couch and commented on the rather hazy routine that her life had become. But she had taken good care of it—she had cleaned it’s nubbly brown and green roses and re-stuffed its cushions and paid more than it was exactly worth to have someone come out and re-weld it’s failing joints together.
“Please…” She said softly into the waiting silence. “Please give my husband back.”
Why… it seemed to say, and she caught her breath, because the word had been real, as clear as the plop of a stone in water, that waiting Why had fallen into the silence of the room. You don’t really like him anymore, do you?
“That’s not fair.” She whispered. “I only thought that for a moment—fifteen good years is a long time to let that one thought trap him.”
He never liked me. The couch said petulantly. He thought you were sentimental and stupid for keeping me.
“Men are different.” She told it sincerely. “Men have trouble believing in anything but the Big Guy. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t come back… now, c’mon—cough him up.”
No.
“No?”
No. Go to your movie. Dress up a little—enjoy yourself. And that’s all it would say. Susan cajoled and begged and shouted and chuffed with frustration, but the couch was now as silent as… well, as a piece of furniture.
Dress up? She fumed, fifteen minutes later. The drama of the situation had worn off, and practicalities had set in and she had found herself having to go potty like it was any other day and she was about to leave the house. Dress up? She took a good look in the bathroom mirror. The couch was right—she was wearing sweats and a T-shirt. What could it hurt, she thought idly, to do her make-up a little different, put on a summer dress, and do her glossy (dyed) brown hair just a little differently tonight than she always did. After all, it wasn’t everyday that your self-righteous prig of a… scratch that, that yourhusband was ingested by furniture. She could take half an hour to spruce up and then go out to dinner and catch the later show? Why not, she wondered hysterically—consider it a last fling with fun, before the police came in and accused her of kidnapping her husband, because the truth was just a little too weird. Or a lot too weird actually.
Forty-five minutes later, she had to admit, she felt pretty good. Derek hadn’t approved of this dress—the skirt was just too darn short, but it was printed in flowers and fun and it didn’t seem to mind that her hips were too wide and that her chest sagged. The dress forgave her for being thirty-eight, and the couch seemed to forgive her for talking to inanimate objects—if her husband would only come back and vouch for her sanity, it had the makings of a pretty good day.
She enjoyed The Matrix, which was the movie she had wanted to see in the first place, and she thought of the irony of all that religious symbolism being appreciated by a heathen such as herself. Afterwards she went out dancing at a local country line-dance bar and that was enjoyable too. She danced, she laughed, and she had her too-wide, domestic butt pinched by at least two cowboys who were too young and too cute to be any threat to her bliss. She even had a drink (or three?) and smoked a cigarette for the first time since college. But when she walked back into her hallway at 2:37 in the morning, smelling of margaritas, smoke, and sweat, she could feel the silence when she opened the door.
The house was never silent, she realized, unnerved. The kids were always there, or Derek was breathing somewhere, but even if they weren’t, there was music or television or the fluency of her thoughts as they stretched in nubile ways into the quiet corners of her home. But tonight it was silent. Her fantasies, it seemed, were in abeyance, much like her life, as long as Derek was lounging in the pit of the couch.
In a moment, the fun and craziness drained out of her, and she sank slowly, sadly onto the couch. Why? The couch had asked—why indeed, she wondered. Derek had been a faithful husband, she told herself righteously, but the words fell flat in the vault of her mind. They had no echoes, no resonance, no meaning. Fidelity was not what mattered, she realized with a slight shock, and dismally, she rested her chin on the worn-soft arm of the battered sofa. Derek had proposed to her on this couch, she remembered suddenly. Like a silk scarf from a sleeve, she summoned him there beside her, looking earnest and young, his glasses thick, and flop sweat popping out on his brow. She had been going to say no. We can do wonderful things, he had said, his twenty something voice breaking with the strain. Imagine, you and me, and the home we could build—the world’s all magic when I’m with you, Susan.
He had been earnest and well meaning, but that wasn’t what had changed her mind. It was that word--magic. How long, she thought sadly, had it been since she had placed a name on that thing she believed in with all her heart? Magic. It had been magic that had conceived their children. Even if Brett was the only one with fathomless eyes, the other two had their own special sorcery that skittered in quieter ways. Magic. It had been magic that had conjured this room out of an amalgam of Sears catalogues, rummage sales, and the peace of her own heart. Magic. It had been magic that had winged the last fifteen years of her life right by, leaving her stepping into middle age dazed by the flash and chaos of her well-spent youth.
“Magic.” She said out loud, into the silence that muffled the house like snow. “There was magic in Derek, until he stopped believing in it. He conjured a future for us like a magician conjures rabbits. He could summon a laugh from me like a Warlock summons a familiar. His heart beat in time with the stars—My God, there was magic in that man.” And with the earnest invocation, the silence was listening. In fact, the Universe itself seemed to hold its breath.
“Couch—please send my husband back.”
There was a sigh, a breath of sweet, high mountain air passing through her suburban house in the valley, and as she breathed in, closing her eyes gently, she suddenly knew he was there, beside her. She opened her eyes and stared at his muddled face, his beloved muddled face, and smiled. And like a sorcerer’s best trick, he summoned an answering smile of his own.
“Derek,” She said earnestly, joyfully. “Derek, we’re never getting rid of this couch.”
“They’ll turn up.” Derek told her, unperturbed. He didn’t even look up from his Sports Illustrated she noted sourly, but it wouldn’t matter if he had.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon, c’mon….” she murmured, rummaging frantically again under the couch. It was an old, uncomfortable, ugly tapestried hide-a-bed and she mostly loved it—unless, of course, it seemed to be thwarting her. “I’ll clean you, I promise, just cough them up.”
“Who are you talking to, Suze?” He asked suspiciously. Their three children were, wonder of wonders, away at his mother’s for the weekend, and they were the only two in the house.
“Whoever’s listening.” She answered shortly, and began mumbling to the couch again. “You might say a prayer or two yourself, or we’re going to be in the front row at the movies again—you know how you hate that.”
Thoughtfully Derek put down his magazine. “You know, sweetheart, it’s not really healthy to make fun like that. You know God has better things to do with his time than…”
“Than what?” She chuffed, out of temper. “I haven’t seen him intervening in Sarejevo or making it rain in Africa lately. The least he could do is help me find my stupid glasses.”
The lines that traced their way up into Derek’s receding hairline deepened, and Susan braced herself for another lecture. Derek was a youth pastor at their church, and although his integrity was what had first attracted her to him, his sense of humor seemed to have receded with his hair in the last couple of years. “Susan, you know it really concerns me when…”
“Stow it, sweetie-- I found them!.” Thoughtfully, she patted the couch, which had just sort of… coughed them up for her. She had just searched that particular spot a half dozen times— the sofa must have taken pity on her. “Thanks, guy—no hard feelings.” She told it. “I’ve got some Resolve in the kitchen—tomorrow, you & me—it’s a date, right?” For a moment, the old sofa bed took on an unseen glamour, and she found herself feeling affectionate. Maybe, she thought, it wouldn’t get junked when their youngest turned ten. (That had been their cut-off date, the long planned for day when spills would refuse to happen in their house.) Maybe, they’d find a place for it in the game room over the garage, by the ping-pong table and in front of the extra TV. Belatedly she turned to Derek, who was watching her with narrowed eyes and some concern.
“Susan—have you ever considered seeing a psychiatrist?”
Susan tried very hard not to laugh. She tried to humor him, really she did. She went to church and sang in the choir and taught Sunday school and all that other chaff that went with the grain of believing in a Supreme Being. But she had always reasoned, that just because there existed a GOD, with all of the accompanying possessiveness, didn’t mean there weren’t other, well, little gods, working on their own. GOD, she figured, really did have better things to do than find her glasses, or her car keys, or her sewing needles, or Becky’s raincoat. GOD’s job description really didn’t cover letting her car get her to the station on fumes, or getting Brett into the school play, or losing that stubborn 10 or so pounds that refused to leave her hips. But someone was helping, because against all odds, these things happened. All except the weight on her hips, and she wasn’t quite ready to sacrifice a family pet to achieve that.
“Oh, come on, Derek. I’m talking to the house or to the world in general. People do it all the time. Before you got your certification and lost your sense of perspective, you used to beg it not to rain on golfing Sundays. Don’t tell me you were talking to the big guy, because if he had his way, I’m sure it would rain every Sunday.”
“Susan,” he replied sternly, rising from his seat on the recliner, “I’m warning you, don’t take His…”
“I didn’t use hHis name!” She returned, feeling defensive and hurt. It had happened slowly, this changing, but she was embarrassed to find that she didn’t know the stranger standing across from her. Whimsically she wondered if he still sold real estate, or if that was some bizarre cover for his real identity. Please, she thought, half in exasperation and half in mid-life panic, no one living in California could be that conservative, right?
“Look, Derek, we’re going to miss the movie. I found my glasses without breaking any one of the Ten Commandments, and we’ve got the whole night to ourselves.” She gave him a conciliatory smile and offered him a hand, but Derek was being stubborn.
“Not,” he said, thumping self-righteously on the couch, “Until we have this out.”
And that was when the couch ate him.
Susan watched in surprise, because it was quick, but not that quick. It wasn’t as though Derek was beamed up or just disappeared poof he was gone. The couch unfolded in one large yawn, tucked her husband in itself nice and neat, and swallowed. It left her standing in a muddle of throw pillows and living room blankets, staring at the place in the air where Derek had been, and wondering what the hell had happened.
“Give him back!” She told it, shocked. Most household furniture didn’t turn on you until after you tried to shove it in the Dumpster.
The couch just sat there, as she mused, couches should do under normal circumstances. But these circumstances weren’t normal.
“Give him back!” She insisted, a little more loudly, reaching under the cushions and grabbing hold of the metal pull bar that (usually) unfolded the couch into a bed. “Ouch, oh hell…” She exclaimed, pulling back to examine her hand. There was blood welling up from a little wedge-shaped puncture wound on her palm.
“Why’d you do that?” She asked, sucking on the ouchie. “I was just trying to get my husband back… we’re going to be late for the movie.” She added that last lamely. If the couch wouldn’t cough Derek up, she suspected that she would have bigger concerns than missing the movie. The couch didn’t move, and she stared at it in the frightening, sublime quiet of their living room. It was a beautiful room. The carpet was a deep teal green. The furniture was oak—a little battered, but handsome, really. One wall was papered in a whimsical, vine-y rose print, and there were houseplants everywhere on oak and glass stands. She had put a lot of heart and soul into this room, right down to the French style sliding glass door and the sky-light that she had spent her wardrobe money on the year before. Her kids didn’t really spill anything in here, she thought inanely. The living room, of any other place in the house was a lovely, peaceful sanctuary from pain and stress and ugliness.
The only thing that didn’t really fit into it was the couch. But what could she do? She made plenty of money as a Loan Officer at the nearby Bank, and Derek was a lawyer, but it wasn’t money that was the problem. That had been her parent’s couch—they had given it to her and Derek when they had rented their first crappy little apartment in downtown Sacramento. Their first child had been conceived on that couch—not sturdy, practical Jonathan, or sweet, sunny Becky. Dreamy, poetic, talented Brett had been conceived on that couch, and she could sense the power in him from the moment he’d first tugged on her breast in search of nourishment. She had lost her virginity on that couch—not to Derek, but to the guy before Derek. He’d been a cast member of a traveling play that had come to her college. She knew they wouldn’t have a future, but her parents were gone for the weekend, and he’d been so, so beautiful. Her past sat itself down on that couch and commented on the rather hazy routine that her life had become. But she had taken good care of it—she had cleaned it’s nubbly brown and green roses and re-stuffed its cushions and paid more than it was exactly worth to have someone come out and re-weld it’s failing joints together.
“Please…” She said softly into the waiting silence. “Please give my husband back.”
Why… it seemed to say, and she caught her breath, because the word had been real, as clear as the plop of a stone in water, that waiting Why had fallen into the silence of the room. You don’t really like him anymore, do you?
“That’s not fair.” She whispered. “I only thought that for a moment—fifteen good years is a long time to let that one thought trap him.”
He never liked me. The couch said petulantly. He thought you were sentimental and stupid for keeping me.
“Men are different.” She told it sincerely. “Men have trouble believing in anything but the Big Guy. That doesn’t mean he shouldn’t come back… now, c’mon—cough him up.”
No.
“No?”
No. Go to your movie. Dress up a little—enjoy yourself. And that’s all it would say. Susan cajoled and begged and shouted and chuffed with frustration, but the couch was now as silent as… well, as a piece of furniture.
Dress up? She fumed, fifteen minutes later. The drama of the situation had worn off, and practicalities had set in and she had found herself having to go potty like it was any other day and she was about to leave the house. Dress up? She took a good look in the bathroom mirror. The couch was right—she was wearing sweats and a T-shirt. What could it hurt, she thought idly, to do her make-up a little different, put on a summer dress, and do her glossy (dyed) brown hair just a little differently tonight than she always did. After all, it wasn’t everyday that your self-righteous prig of a… scratch that, that yourhusband was ingested by furniture. She could take half an hour to spruce up and then go out to dinner and catch the later show? Why not, she wondered hysterically—consider it a last fling with fun, before the police came in and accused her of kidnapping her husband, because the truth was just a little too weird. Or a lot too weird actually.
Forty-five minutes later, she had to admit, she felt pretty good. Derek hadn’t approved of this dress—the skirt was just too darn short, but it was printed in flowers and fun and it didn’t seem to mind that her hips were too wide and that her chest sagged. The dress forgave her for being thirty-eight, and the couch seemed to forgive her for talking to inanimate objects—if her husband would only come back and vouch for her sanity, it had the makings of a pretty good day.
She enjoyed The Matrix, which was the movie she had wanted to see in the first place, and she thought of the irony of all that religious symbolism being appreciated by a heathen such as herself. Afterwards she went out dancing at a local country line-dance bar and that was enjoyable too. She danced, she laughed, and she had her too-wide, domestic butt pinched by at least two cowboys who were too young and too cute to be any threat to her bliss. She even had a drink (or three?) and smoked a cigarette for the first time since college. But when she walked back into her hallway at 2:37 in the morning, smelling of margaritas, smoke, and sweat, she could feel the silence when she opened the door.
The house was never silent, she realized, unnerved. The kids were always there, or Derek was breathing somewhere, but even if they weren’t, there was music or television or the fluency of her thoughts as they stretched in nubile ways into the quiet corners of her home. But tonight it was silent. Her fantasies, it seemed, were in abeyance, much like her life, as long as Derek was lounging in the pit of the couch.
In a moment, the fun and craziness drained out of her, and she sank slowly, sadly onto the couch. Why? The couch had asked—why indeed, she wondered. Derek had been a faithful husband, she told herself righteously, but the words fell flat in the vault of her mind. They had no echoes, no resonance, no meaning. Fidelity was not what mattered, she realized with a slight shock, and dismally, she rested her chin on the worn-soft arm of the battered sofa. Derek had proposed to her on this couch, she remembered suddenly. Like a silk scarf from a sleeve, she summoned him there beside her, looking earnest and young, his glasses thick, and flop sweat popping out on his brow. She had been going to say no. We can do wonderful things, he had said, his twenty something voice breaking with the strain. Imagine, you and me, and the home we could build—the world’s all magic when I’m with you, Susan.
He had been earnest and well meaning, but that wasn’t what had changed her mind. It was that word--magic. How long, she thought sadly, had it been since she had placed a name on that thing she believed in with all her heart? Magic. It had been magic that had conceived their children. Even if Brett was the only one with fathomless eyes, the other two had their own special sorcery that skittered in quieter ways. Magic. It had been magic that had conjured this room out of an amalgam of Sears catalogues, rummage sales, and the peace of her own heart. Magic. It had been magic that had winged the last fifteen years of her life right by, leaving her stepping into middle age dazed by the flash and chaos of her well-spent youth.
“Magic.” She said out loud, into the silence that muffled the house like snow. “There was magic in Derek, until he stopped believing in it. He conjured a future for us like a magician conjures rabbits. He could summon a laugh from me like a Warlock summons a familiar. His heart beat in time with the stars—My God, there was magic in that man.” And with the earnest invocation, the silence was listening. In fact, the Universe itself seemed to hold its breath.
“Couch—please send my husband back.”
There was a sigh, a breath of sweet, high mountain air passing through her suburban house in the valley, and as she breathed in, closing her eyes gently, she suddenly knew he was there, beside her. She opened her eyes and stared at his muddled face, his beloved muddled face, and smiled. And like a sorcerer’s best trick, he summoned an answering smile of his own.
“Derek,” She said earnestly, joyfully. “Derek, we’re never getting rid of this couch.”
