Sofa

A sofa, the site of a family’s history, receives and gives a second life.

- Cezanne Cardona Morales

My parents conceived me on a sofa in a department store. My mother worked in the underwear section and was a second-year nursing student. My father worked in the household appliances, hardware, and gardening section and was a fifth-year social sciences student. They’d hardly been dating a month, and they’d never worked the same shift. Until that morning in May, no one saw them enter the warehouse holding hands—the store wouldn’t open to the public for another hour. No one heard them either, despite the fact that the sofa still had a plastic covering on the cushions to protect it from any stains. The sofa was more cream than yellow; it had solid wood legs and fit three people comfortably. Though my parents didn’t intend it, that morning there were already three of us.

As soon as my mother knew she was pregnant, she bought the sofa. It was the first thing my parents got on credit, and the only piece of furniture that was delivered to the house they rented with an option to buy in Levittown’s Second Section. My father hauled the rest in his Mazda pickup to save on delivery charges. Not that it mattered much that my father hauled their bed in his pickup; my mother slept on the sofa for most of her pregnancy, because of awful heartburn. “It was worth it,” my mother told me, because I took my first steps clinging to that sofa. Sometime later, I used the cushions as steps to get onto the TV stand and jump to the floor, like someone demonstrating the laws of gravity with his chin.