Beds I’ve Made
I bent to adjust the sheets, tucking them at the bottom in a way that I hoped would please my mother, but she was already behind me, sighing, “It’s almost time for the bus.” Her hand pressed my back to steer me away from the bed. “Move,” she said.
Eyeing the disarray, she adjusted the edge of the sheet to the corner of the mattress, then slightly lifted the mattress and tucked the hanging piece of my sheet under it. On the other side of the bed she held the corner to form a crisp angle and tucked in the sheet along the side of the mattress. She picked up the bedspread from the floor where I had left it, and with a quick parachute flutter, laid it over the bed, then smoothed the flat expanse with her hand. She finished with a karate chop to the spread under the pillows, leaving a tight double mound at the top of the bed.
My sheets came from JCPenney, and my pillows weren’t fluffy and fat, like those in magazines, but worn and flattened by years of use. When I got old enough to change the sheets with any regularity, I noticed for the first time the brown, amoeba-shaped stains on my pillows and mattress, embarrassing evidence of childish drool and vomit. Maybe they sold new pillows in stores, but it never occurred to me to ask for one. Accepting what you have, even when it is inadequate, is what I thought everyone did. You “made do,” as my mother said.
When I was in graduate school I lived with a woman who, when she was out of sorts, went shopping for bed linens. She talked about sheets like they were a science, using a language to describe fabric that I had never noticed, like thread count and pima cotton, double ply and twill. She explained thread count as if it were an equation: horizontal and vertical threads per square inch equaled a softer feel on my hands, and a shockingly higher price tag. She swore that the mulberry silk Charmeuse sheets made sex feel like butter. The checkered flannel sheets held a gentle nap that made her bed so cozy that she had once kicked out her boyfriend late at night so that she didn’t have to share her bed with him. The Egyptian cotton sheets were monogrammed in a raised soft stitch, so luxurious that she reserved them only for homecomings. “Hotel sheets,” she grumbled, “are the worst part about vacations.”
For the first time, I saw pillows and shams of mismatched colors and mixed, intricate weaves spanning the top of a bed. Sitting among them was like sprawling in a private landscape of cotton, silk and lush velvet, an unfamiliar extravagance. I owned two sets of cotton polyester blend sheets, the sheets I thought were the only kind until I knew her, and sheets I had never considered being unhappy with. Practical, like my mother, I reasoned that I could only sleep on a single set of sheets at any given time. It made no sense to own so many sets of sheets, and to pay so much for them. With her linens budget I could buy my books for the semester and even have some left over for groceries.
I made do for much of my adult life. I lived with no furniture in a dining room and a stained, sagging sofa in a family room for a decade, even when the man I was married to made a considerable income. A cabinet didn’t latch in the kitchen of a house we owned for years, and instead of replacing the latch, I made sure to fill the cabinet with plastic containers that were safe for my toddlers. At the time, I thought I was too busy raising children to fix the brokenness of my home. I made do with an ailing water heater, a defective cabinet and sagging sofa; and when marriage turned out to be a flat, vomity pillow, I tucked it up under my head and slept on it.
One of the first rules in the playbook of making do was an unflinching acceptance of the consequences of poor decision making. You’ve made your bed, now lie in it, traces to a French proverb first used in 1590: “As one makes one’s bed, so one finds it,” indicating that the only acceptable response to a bad decision was resignation.
Bad marriages range in badness. Some are violent and manipulative, others empty and loveless. My marriage was bad because neither of us were self-aware enough to realize and articulate what we wanted in a relationship. He preferred large quantities of television, war movies and baseball, and I preferred women.
The problem with my preference was one of timing; it was 1985 and there was no Internet to tell me that a few brave lesbians, a word I knew but had no idea how to cultivate as an identity, had found creative ways to claim motherhood outside of marriage. Taught to resign to hard truths, I accepted the cultural expectation that I had to marry to have children, which meant my secret attraction to women would leave me nowhere but childless.
After a string of bad dates, and nearly thirty, I met a man who casually invited me to go to a christening party for the baby of a friend. As we drove up to the house, a group of children playing in the front yard ran in unison toward us, yelling the nickname that his close friends called him, a shortened syllable from his long last name. “Swing us around,” they chanted as we got out of the car.
Maybe he looked back at me sheepishly before he joined the children and swung one after another in circles while the others squealed “Me next!” Maybe the push of my body for children stamped that image of him inside my brain: a man encircled by children, their arms hopeful tendrils reaching for sunlight. And maybe it was the sharp truth of resignation. If it’s got to be a man, this one would do.
When Odysseus had been away for twenty years, fighting wars in far away countries, his wife Penelope wasn’t sure the man who returned and claimed to be her husband was who he said he was; so as a test, she suggested they move their bed, outraging Odysseus because he had built the bed around an olive tree, making the bed immovable. His knowledge of the bed’s permanence proved his identity to his skeptical wife. Because of Odysseus’ bed, the marriage bed has come to symbolize the permanence of the marriage union.
I knew that violating a marriage bed was one of the most shameful failings of a wife or husband, but the problem I couldn’t figure out was why marriage felt as uncomfortable as the ill-fitting clothes my mother had sewn me as a child. The flouncy red skirt she made me had been the right size, but it felt so wrong on my body that I recoiled every time I had to wear it. The marriage bed brought that same resistance from my body: a quiet balking even as I surrendered and made do.
Shortly after marriage we moved to Boston; my husband travelled all week and I found myself in a new city with a new job and an empty apartment. I began staying late at work to talk to a handsome Argentine man. Married to an American, a new citizen himself, his homesickness for his country felt familiar to the unexplained longing I felt in my chest. One night after we became involved, he recalled the way he moved on the streets of Buenos Aires with a forthright, brash swagger, which he imitated for me by getting out of bed to stand and take large, purposeful strides across the room, his cigarette blazing too close to his fingers. He confessed he didn’t understand why he was unable to replicate that same posture on the streets of Boston, why, in a foreign city, his own body felt so wrong.
For years after the brief affair, I assumed it had been our mutual homesickness and lackluster marriages that connected us, the usual props of infidelity. My body had felt as counterfeit in the marriage bed as his in a foreign city, and I didn’t understand why. The only explanation was that something must be wrong with me. I resolved to try harder. I dug in, recommitted myself to making the marriage work, had two babies in two years after we moved to Virginia, kept myself too busy to pay attention to the low, warbled bass note throbbing inside me.
The truth is, repression is a powerful thing and I had forgotten the woman I briefly loved before my daughter and sons came to me. My husband turned out to be the good father I predicted, albeit an absent one. After taking on a European assignment his travel increased, leaving me at home alone for weeks with our three young children. When he was home, I struggled to find a place for him in our routines. At night I lay in our king-sized bed listening to him snore, uncomfortable and frustrated. Claiming to sleep hot, he habitually jerked the top sheet off himself, leaving me to forage for the end of the sheet and pull it above my shoulders without waking him. Inevitably, when I woke to go to the bathroom at night, one end of the fitted sheet had popped loose from the corner, leaving my head and pillow atop the yellowed mattress cover. In the morning, the heavy comforter balanced crookedly on my side of the bed. Most days I didn’t bother to make the bed after I got out of it.
For optimal sleep, studies show that the bed should not be used for work, eating, or watching television, but when my husband was out of town, my bed was a hub for hanging out with my children. When he was home, the children did their homework at the kitchen table while my husband and I washed the dishes. But when he was away, life with my children was a freer, truer one. We left the dirty dishes on the table, and sprawled together in my unmade bed. I called out spelling words, checked backpacks for book orders and project assignments, and negotiated bath times. I asked about new scrapes on their scrawny knees, the haphazard arc of ink on a dirty arm. Later, after tucking in the children, I poured a glass of wine and crawled into bed and talked on the phone to friends, then slept soundly on those mussed, dirty sheets, almost happy.
I lowered my five year old daughter over the edge of the bed with the top sheet we had tied to her baby brother’s blanket. We were playing our escape game, and my daughter was crawling over a mountain ledge to slip away from a charging bear. We listened to her favorite animal noises CD with the volume high: crickets and bullfrogs and lonesome owls, crackling fires, a distant howling of wolves, and occasional cracks of thunder. Every night we pretended we were camping alone in a dense forest, a storm threatening, huddled together in the underbrush of my unmade bed. At every new noise she pulled the comforter over our heads. “Did you hear that?” she asked in mock terror. We plotted our escape every night, propped pillows to shield us, fashioned sheets into tee-pees or ropes. Sometimes our best escape was to lie quietly, immobile, breathing against one another, making ourselves small in our shadowy warm hollow, thunder in the distance.
While tucking my six-year-old son’s dinosaur sheets under him one night he suddenly burst into tears.
“What’s wrong baby?” I touched his cheeks with the outside of my curled fingers. He moved his head off the pillow and into my lap. In the gurgle of crying he murmured, “I miss my light-up shoes.”
None of the first-graders wore light-up shoes anymore. Reluctantly, he had chosen to replace his kindergarten shoes—white Velcro shoes with basketballs and footballs dancing on the sides just above the lights that blinked every time he took a step—with more practical Air Jordans.
“You can have light-up shoes if you want them, “ I said. “Who cares about those other kids?” But I knew he understood: my son was grieving the new boy he had to become, the boy who must outgrow light-up shoes.
After crying he lifted his head from my lap and looked at me. “My heart was giving me lots of cries tonight,” he said, smiling, his lashes still wet.
Later, I walked downstairs where my husband had dug into the sofa, watching ESPN like every night, his body square, grudging.
“You’re making him into such a baby,” he sneered.
For years, when my children were young, I tucked them in bed in their separate rooms, but by morning they had migrated into my middle child’s room, trailing their blankets and comforters with them. When I went in the room to wake them for school, I found my daughter and youngest son lying on the floor, in a pile of blankets under the mini Christmas tree my son insisted on keeping on a table year round, the tiny lights glowing above them. “Why can’t they sleep in their own beds?” my husband grumbled. But I secretly loved their late night gathering, gently stepping over arms and legs to wake each of them in the morning, reminding them to collect their blankets before going downstairs. Over breakfast they told stories about the scary night noises they heard or the funny words one of them mumbled in their sleep. When would their lives ever again be so easy, I thought, that a communal bed on the floor remedied every nighttime worry?
When each of my children turned ten, I instituted a rite of passage, allowing them to have ten friends sleep over, and buying each of them a new bed for their birthdays. Having negotiated and won my case to spend money on new furniture for my daughter, I drove an hour to a furniture maker and ordered an oak highboy dresser, two nightstands, and spindled bed frame that sat so high it required a step stool fashioned in the same knotty oak. Four years later when my son turned ten, I ordered him a corner desk, a matching headboard, and a dresser from an unfinished furniture store, and spent two hours deciding between poplar or birch finishes and painted or stained drawer pulls.
My children’s beds, like my stubborn insistence on making do with an empty marriage, got less stable through the years. When I bought my daughter’s bed, I imagined how it would travel with her through the years, from her ten year old too-big room over the garage, to various apartments throughout college and her moving-around years. One day, maybe, it would land in a spare bedroom in a house she owned, and she would tell a friend who had commented on how well made and beautiful it was: “I’ve had this bed for thirty years;” and then the bed will have been what I hoped it would be, a spot of comfort and reliability, steady as my arms around her.
By the time my third child turned ten, the only new bed he got was a queen-sized mattress that I ordered over the phone and which two sweating, grunting men delivered a few days later, setting the heavy box springs down into a cheap metal frame, sighing.
When friends now ask me how I stayed in a bad marriage so long, I say it’s because I didn’t want to give up tucking my children in bed at night. A divorce meant shared custody and two weeks every month away from them. By then, the undercurrent of unhappiness had become so familiar that staying seemed less a sacrifice than missing their bedtimes.
My father always tucked me in after lying beside me in my narrow twin bed while I talked to him about my day. Before he left, he put his mouth to my ear and whispered “sleep tight.” When I tucked in my children, the last thing I said to each of them were those same words.
One origin of the phrase sleep tight roots it in bed architecture of the sixteenth century. Mattresses were filled with straw, leaves, or pine needles and placed on top of a latticework of ropes tied across a bed frame. The ropes frequently had to be tightened by turning wooden dowels to keep the mattress from sagging. “Sleep tight” is a reference to those tight ropes: supporting, lifting, pushing up at the center, holding out against the heavy slump.
In the movies, women just walk out of marriages, but I stayed. On weekends when he was home, I stood in the kitchen peeling apples or spreading peanut butter, trying to imagine a way out without forfeiting the bedtime ritual with my children. One night I dreamed that I discovered a secret floor in our house, forgotten and unused, full of cobwebs and furniture covered in dusty tarps—just upstairs from my children so I could slink down every night at bedtime.
The bed I made do with was the convenient, safest choice. The slump of it held me snugly in place, and then its sag became suction, a sinkhole, a channel in the middle too wide to cross. How could I get out of that bed when there was a husband who travelled every week, children to take to practices and appointments, meals to cook, a son who wrote his worries in a book he hid under his pillow, a daughter whose teenage depression throbbed beneath her heart? How could I crawl out of that bed when forces bigger than gravity pushed me back in?
Making do had required years of not paying attention, but one day in the sulking dusk light of a therapist’s office, I found myself noticing her eyes, how gently they rested on mine, open and compassionate, so different from the defensive, averted eyes of my husband. In that brief moment of attentiveness, electrical pulses leapt across my brain’s synapses to find a way back to a thicket of memories tangled in a dark neural back alley, and the woman I had loved before I was married surfaced, her delicate mouth, her earnest blue eyes.
Following that memory, clutching at it, barely holding on, was a risky, outrageous fantasy: the extravagance of a woman’s love again, the wildness of a bed we could make together, a cradle of linens and satins and the soft fold of flannel holding us tight in the glare of a new day.
There was no secret floor above my house, so I moved into my daughter’s second floor bedroom, down the hall from my sons. Like every mother’s best plan for her children, my vision of my daughter’s oak bed following her to college didn’t pan out. After she moved out of the house, I slept in her bed for almost three years, waiting for the right time to leave, reading under a bare lamp, curled in her old quilt, listening for the heavy sounds of my husband’s feet downstairs when he wasn’t travelling. On the headboard I taped a piece of paper where I had written a reminder from Eleanor Roosevelt: “You must do the thing you think you cannot do.”
My youngest son used a large floor fan to sleep and it hummed behind his closed door every night, loud as an engine. In the early morning when I woke him for school, I found his leg, a new man’s leg—thick and hairy—protruding from his comforter, which lay under the detached edges of the Roger Federer poster above his bed flapping frantically in the wind.
One night near the end of my exile in my daughter’s bed, I walked across my son’s littered floor to kiss him goodnight, stepping over chip bags and empty Gatorade bottles, Xbox games, and dirty clothes. When I arrived in front of the fan, the large blades blowing so hard my hair flew over my face, I suddenly threw up my arms in mock terror, and arched my chest forward, as if the center of my body had been caught in the vortex of a tornado.
A howl of laughter came from my son, who sat up in bed, his mouth a wide-open grin as he watched me play out the scene. Taking shaky steps, my arms whirling, waist bending, I pretended to steady my body like Dorothy before the twister hit, shielding my face as the wind blew me in circles, and finally falling forward on his bed as our eyes locked and our laughter bellowed like hiccups.
We replayed this ritual often at bedtime; sometimes my son flailed in the strong winds, sometimes I did. When his father was home, we stifled our giggles, even when we knew the noise of the fan would drown them out. Then one night I realized that my teenage son and I had always had a relationship separate from the one he had with his father, and that I didn’t need a noisy fan and a room down the hall to maintain that relationship, and that I was going to die if I drowned out one more thing.
In the days before I left, sleeping on my daughter’s old Little Mermaid sheets, crippled by fear of leaving, I dreamed again of the secret attic room above my house. This time, beyond that room was a door with light streaming under it. I opened the door to find a clean, well-lit kitchen where a woman, her face bright, forgiving, relieved, stood at a stove stirring a pot, smiling at me as I stepped into the room, reminding me she had kept my plants alive. “I’ve been waiting for you,” she said.
It wasn’t the one woman I loved before the marriage, or the first woman I loved after I left the marriage, who were waiting for me in the lighted kitchen of my dream. The woman who waited for me, the woman who needed to be found, was me.