Beds

The prompt was to describe all of the beds I've slept in, and so -- 

My childhood bed faced my sister’s, and was positioned underneath a huge wall-hung wooden bookshelf. I worried about earthquakes in that bed, and laughed after my father left the room the night he spanked me through a thick pink woolen blanket with satin trim. When I had a bad chest cold my parents would dose me with neosinephrine drops, which they’d administer by laying me on the bed in their room, draping my head backward over the edge, nostrils to the ceiling. They’d take me back to my room and lift my bed into an angle by propping it onto a typewriter case. I loved the cozy well in the center of the bed that I carved out over the years, roughly circular, then oval as I grew taller.

I visited my sister once at her apartment when I was 4 and she was 18. She shared an apartment with a stewardess, and they lined the walls of their living room with white butcher paper so that they could draw on the walls. Her bed must have been slept in by hundreds of people. At night we needed to perch on the sides of the bed or face rolling into a hole in the center. To this day sleeping in other peoples’ beds creeps me out.

My mom would not let me take my bedding to college with me, but I did get new sheets. When I moved out of the dorm, I saved my money and bought a queen sized futon. Mom said that I was to buy an extra long twin (unspoken: harder to negotiate “the deed” in). I let her know that since I was paying for it, it would be my choice.

I wanted a different bed eventually. My sister had a cast iron bed, a double, that came in 4 pieces that fit like a jigsaw puzzle on the corners. She wrapped it in cardboard and twine and sent it to me via Greyhound bus. I bought my first real mattress, and I slept in that bed for the next 20 years, until we realized that we wanted more real estate and the mattress was kaput. It felt like sleeping on a lightly padded chain link fence, and wires were shredding our pillows. Guess it wasn't high priority!

We had a different, puffy bed for a while, graduating to a queen size.

Then a friend told us about her bed, advertised on our local NPR station. “It’s like sleeping on angel butts,” she said. So we bought one. Horrific. We felt old and our bodies hurt. After several adjustments and many restful nights sleep on our Ikea sofabed, we kept the frame and bought a new mattress at Ikea. It’s still in use.

For various reasons, including keeping cats separated, I sleep on the cast iron bed with one cat and my husband sleeps on the un angel-butted bed with the other two cats.

So ends the story of the beds.