Confinements

50 Confinements by Kathleen M. Jacobs Last spring I bought a new, creamcolored sofa. The cotton fabric has a small ripple design in it, like an ocean wave. The loose cushions are downfilled , and when I fall asleep on them I dream of things soft, airy, and lightweight , like newly-blossomed honeysuckle bushes that grew outside my bedroom window when I was a child, and early morning walks on the beach just before sunrise when my footprints are the first ones on the white, sandy beaches. Every time my mother visits she stands in my living room, and looks at the sofa, and shakes her head. Last Saturday morning I asked her if she had a crick in her neck. She said, "That's okay, make fun." She doesn't understand why anyone would ever buy a cream-colored sofa. And, of course, she thinks that anyone who falls asleep on a cream-colored sofa is just plain stupid. She couldn't quite figure out what was wrong with my last sofa. Twelve years ago when I bought it, I liked it. It was a blend of polyester and cotton. The colors were a mixture of dark brown, rust, and pea green. The decorators called the mixture "earth tones." Whenever I fell asleep on this sofa, I had to "make it up" as I did my bed, with cotton sheets, because I found I was allergic to polyester . I dreamed of my fourth grade teacher, Sister Genevieve, a nun with dandruff, who punished me after I brought a bag of barbecued chips into her classroom. My punishment was to push a piece of chalk with my nose, throughout all the rows of desks. She hated the smell of barbecued chips. They made her sick. My mother liked this first sofa. It had attached foam cushions, and you could sit on it and read the Sunday paper without worrying about "that dirty ink" getting all over the fabric. Now, with the new sofa, she sits on the floor and reads the paper. Sometimes, when my father sits on the sofa he falls asleep. His semibald head starts to fall back, and when it does he uses the back of the sofa as a headrest. My mother rushes to his side 51 to wake him and scolds, "The grease from your hair will soil that fabric." I wonder what he dreamed of? Twelve years ago, I was fresh out of college and worked as a legal secretary in a small mining community. My "office" had a pea-green metal desk and file cabinet, a worktable made from a discarded plywood door, and a small imitation wood cabinet whose sliding doors were reversed so that every time you opened them your fingers got smashed. The view from my single, narrow, cracked window was of two old houses dating back to the late 1800s. One of them was barely visible because of the overgrown, bug-infested shrubbery . The other house had a beautiful bay window upstairs, dressed with sheer, white lace curtains. Whenever I looked at the bay window, those curtains would almost send a whiff of freshness to overshadow the stench emanating from the passing coal trucks. About the same time I bought the new, ripple-designed, cream-colored sofa I rented an upstairs room above a bakery out in the country. The aroma from the bakery drifted upstairs every morning— cinnamon buns, blueberry muffins, chocolate tortes, and a variety of freshbrewed coffees. The owners were a young, adventurous couple in their early thirties who decided to move from the overcrowded city to Bluegrass country. They used only pure ingredients and baked their tempting pastries in an early clay oven, fueled by a massive fireplace. The single window in my room occupied almost the entire wall, so that the early morning sun bathed me in its warmth. The view encompassed open, luscious green, rolling hills, strewn with cream-colored sheep, honeysuckle bushes, and a clear, sparkling, flowing creek. Bindweed "Si^c years' deep cultivation is necesary to contain it." By August, the peonies support its knot and swirl, smothered armatures of stem and leaf-twist, bloom's dull litter, while even the fence...