Sofa People
The first time I saw Rose was the first time I saw Jimmy. They were sitting on their porches, Rose on hers, Jimmy on his. Their neighbor Layla was there too sitting on her porch as far away from Jimmy and Rose as she could sit with her girl Ambrosia cross-legged rocking like she always does, slowly turning the pages of her little cardboard book of colors like she always does.
The way their three little row houses sort of leaned in toward each other and the way the paint peeled and some of the windows were covered with cardboard, the row might as easily have been empty. But those folk not talking, just feeling what little breeze there was, each one of them with a ragged sofa on their porch—it was better than trudging along the train track ready to die of thirst and seeing nothing but more track.
“Can you spare a glass of water?” I asked and I had my hands on the post and I see now that I tried to look good for the man Jimmy, innocent for the old woman Rose, and interested only in water for the young woman Layla until I had things figured out. Not that I thought of it that way at the time, but my brain sort of chatters to me all the time if I’m not paying attention to something like reading my book or cutting an onion, which is fine if I’m just remembering things but it gets in the way sometimes if I’m trying to listen to a sermon or a radio show because it’s always like two people are talking at the same time.
Rose wiped her face but Jimmy answered first with his thumb pointing toward the back screen door. “Glass’s inside.”
If I only had a second to describe the world or tell a story I’d say that’s how it came about that somebody started growing inside me. But things seemed leisurely in those days since I had almost nothing else to do.
So I went on inside. I thought he’d said “glasses” but he said “glass’s” and I could only find one glass and it was dirty so if he didn’t have that man’s look about him I’d have drunk straight from the faucet.
The water was tepid. I should have let it run longer and bubble up from the cooler parts below Memphis but I was thirsty. I looked around. Was I glad that I didn’t see any signs of a woman? It didn’t really occur to me that way at the time, but maybe. That’s what I mean about the chatter.
The sofas outside were the colors of a squash (Rose’s), a green bean (Jimmy’s), and a fresh-dug yam (Layla’s). They were tilted but stable like everything else in my life at the time.
Jimmy’s house was a bone of a house lodged between two houses that were bones of houses. I thought as I left that first day and almost stepped into the mess of a dead raccoon sprawled on the railroad track that their houses were like three broken ribs stuck off to the side of the railroad spine.
So I got my water and took a couple of eyefuls of Jimmy’s spare little shack, all dull gray, covered in faded old sheets to keep the stuffing of various things in, and out of the drab background the chemical-blue eye of a computer screen with its soft hum stared. Hmmmm, I said to myself and put the glass in his empty dirty sink.
I pushed open the flimsy frame of the screen door like every old screen door that catches at the top and then lets go and slams into the wall stretching the spring across the hinge.
“Sorry,” I said. But nobody had jumped.
“You care to sit a spell?” Rose asked from the next porch.
And for some reason I said, “No, ma’am, thank you.” And thank you to Jimmy for the water. And I nodded to Layla but she wasn’t paying me no mind and neither was Ambrosia who sat there rocking with such swings I thought the girl would rock right off the porch. Layla was my age or younger. Lord, I thought, Ambrosia must be six. What’d Layla do? Have her when she was thirteen?
That was when I turned and waved and almost stepped into the mess of the half-rotten raccoon I mentioned.
I stayed in a shelter for ladies in Memphis and strolled out past the three houses every now and then whenever we got bored of playing the used video game someone left with a bag of socks and canned goods one weekend with a note that said they hoped God would bless us all in the coming year. When Jimmy came around to asking me to stay he did it from his sofa right in front of Rose, Layla, and Ambrosia like they were all too tired from the heat to care. I didn’t have anything but what I wore, so I climbed up on Jimmy’s porch and sat on the lower end of his sofa colored like a green bean, and I started staring across the tracks waiting for the train like everybody else.
Somehow when a little donkey walked by the front porches and continued on around to the other side I wasn’t surprised and nobody said anything about it. At the time I didn’t even bother asking.
One Month Free
It didn’t take me much time to learn that Jimmy had four parts to his day. Working at the butcher shop. Sitting on the sofa. Loving my body. Working on his computer.
I had never used a computer and Jimmy eventually showed me all kinds of things, some good, some bad, some I can’t think about. He got the computer for nearly nothing through a help-the-poor shebang. Then he set up a plan to get a month free from the Internet service, then switched to another month free from someone else, and so on, then back to the first company.
Watching Jimmy in the daytime you’d never know the kinds of things he found on that computer in the nighttime. I’ve always been able to sit for a long time and not get bored or get fidgety. So I was still enough for him to forget me while he sat with all the lights out, glowing in the blue like baby Jesus in the manger.
Jimmy in front of the computer screen was like me in front of a magazine rack. I told him that once, but when he was watching the computer he hardly heard a thing.
He said the computer was how he was getting out. I didn’t ask him what he was getting out of because some things you get out of but you don’t have to move, like owing money. Other things I didn’t want to think about at the time.
There were all sorts of educational programs. When I first moved in he was mostly looking at meat-processing sites. They’d give him ideas about how to be a better butcher. I couldn’t hardly look at the stuff. All the details of animals strung up by their back feet or thrown into a crate by their legs in the case of chickens was better left to professionals, if you ask me. He agreed it took time to get a stomach for the work. And maybe not everyone can handle it. But if you can, it can become a favorite thing to do.
Well, let him have it. I’d find another job.
He claimed he could learn anything on the computer. Watching him, I believed it. But some things are best not known. I once saw him at the butcher counter in the store when he didn’t know I was watching. I was proud of him. He was very professional-looking and crisp in his cutting and the way he ripped the white paper to wrap up the meat then stuck on the price tag all in one motion. It was like he protected people from knowing how the meat got there. But he watched it all, every detail, on the computer.
Later on when I told him Rose was likely gonna die he got on the computer and started finding all sorts of sites to buy coffins. Then he got the idea that between his strong stomach and the knowledge he could get at on the computer he might just preserve her himself. Or cremate her, which was ridiculous because he’d have to do it in the yard and there are always people walking down the tracks and train conductors with their faces hanging out the window staring at everything passing by since they don’t have to steer. I said they were not likely to be happy with that. And he asked who They was. And I said the people that made the law, invented the Internet, wrote commercials, and prepared
