Stories. Make your bed; Lie in it.

I love thee not; therefore pursue me not.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act II, Sc. 1

Thinking about beds again. Still. Perhaps because, as I sleep so poorly, I experience for much of any given night the bed as a bed. Perhaps because remembering stories has brought back someone I hadn't looked at closely for a ton of time. Perhaps because in a letter a friend talked about important people, past and present.
So, a tiny story about an unmade bed and a friend.
And the necessary backstory.
Because I want us to understand him.

I watch the western sky, the sun is sinking.
The geese are flying south, it sets me thinking.
I did not miss you much, I did not suffer,
What did not kill me just made me tougher.
Sting

Rick was a debater and, lacking a harsher, brighter, sharper term, I'll call him my friend. Debaters are, in my experience, pushy, bossy people who never for a moment question whether they might be wrong or mistaken, regardless of which side of a question they argue, and Rick was born debating. I was not a debater but at the time this tiny story takes place I was on the speech team, in fact, I had a speech and debate scholarship, because of Rick. Because he bossed and pushed me onto the team, dragged me (I'm not exaggerating here, pulled and pushed and manhandled me) into Dr. Parnell's office (I love you still, Dr. Parnell) where, after recomposing himself (our journey had left us both a bit...mussed), he informed the good doctor that I desired to try for the team and would now recite a poem.
A tense, slightly surreal moment followed.
Dr. Parnell was very surprised and very polite (and a good, good person, not at all bossy or pushy and consequently hurting for talent on his team. The next year Richard Wheeler would be the coach and he would be marvelous and wonderful and bossy and pushy and have a big, successful team and I love him still, too). He put down his pen, turned a bit from his desk, steepled his fingers, smiled encouragingly and gave me his full attention. Like this was all very normal.
While I do admire a man who awards me his undivided focus, at that moment I was busy with my own focus, my internal counsel divided as to whether I should murder Rick while I was clearly not in my right mind and said murder would, by any competent jury, be excused as a crime of passion in self defense or wait till later, when though it would be a cold-blooded crime, premeditated, it would lack witnesses. A counsel divided just stands there.

It was a weird moment, tense, as I have said, and it stretched out kind of too far because I was not only angry, I had not asked for this and I was scared. Really scared to say a stupid poem for this slender, mild academic who was now looking kindly, carefully, away from the awkward, seething, mute stranger at his side and glancing politely but questioningly over at his star debater. Something? Anything? Since Rick just stood, his back against the door, arms folded, mouth closed, ostentatiously calming his breathing, giving me silent glare for silent glare, Dr. Parnell turned back to me to wait with calm hands and only slightly raised eyebrows, clearly communicating that he was a gifted teacher who lived to help young people reach their full potential, however oddly they went at it, and that he was there for me.
Whenever.

I found I couldn't hate Rick more than I wanted to like Dr, Parnell, that I couldn't scratch Rick's eyes out or burst into tears or faint on this lovely man so I just caved, collapsed, crumbled, and said the damn poem.

For that small, small act of succumbing I received in exchange all the surprised applause, admiring, sincere praise and monetary rewards a freshman girl could desire. As, I suppose, Rick had known I would. Well, probably not, on reflection, all the monetary rewards a freshman girl could desire; not all of those, no, but more than than I had seen coming in the brief, fierce struggle down the quiet hall of the old administration building to Dr. Parnell's office. Rick had not mentioned scholarships, but as Dr. Parnell happily questioned me, discovering I had been a Sterling Scholar in English, reflecting that I knew my way around spoken English, even in verse form and that there was certainly money in that, Rick gave me one firm nod. Yes. As it should be. And off they went, Rick and the doctor praising my recitation to the skies and commending each other for discovering me and plotting my imminent addition to the team, while I got to be simultaneously livid (discovery?!? hey, you guys know I'm still here, right? what am I suddenly, an object?) and secretly, terribly, pleased (hey! they like me! they really like me! and I've just become an...an..object! coool). This was precisely the way things always turned out with Rick. Huge rewards in return for what any sane person would describe as small, unimportant losses. Like being forced to audition.
It was horrible.

Horrible and every time a huge defeat, but the defeats never made any difference except for differences like this one, for example; thanks to Rick's machinations I suddenly had a full scholarship handed to me, which was HUGE since we were poor at home and it would never, in a zillion years, have occurred to me to try for one myself. I would not have thought I merited any such thing. Never would have crossed my mind. When I say it made no difference I mean it made no difference to Rick. I so, so, didn't want him to shove me onto a better place (again!), to force me into being (once more) infinitely better off, because. Because. Because I felt a deep moral obligation to resist. Afraid that if he succeeded he would think he ruled the world and, hellfire and damnation, I was not going to be a part of any world Rick ruled. Trouble was, he did rule the world, and he knew he ruled it. He would be just the same, to me, the very same, the day after he had smoothed my way at school (perhaps, perhaps, even made it possible for me to continue) as he had been the day before and would be two weeks hence. Had I triumphed in my little rebellion, preventing him giving me that desperately needed help, he then would have been, with me, the selfsame Rick of the day before. He would notice neither my gratitude nor my vexation. Monarchs do not require, thanks anyway, appreciation for improving the lives of their subjects, it's what they were born to do, but neither do they ask approval or permission for their plans. They execute; you benefit. Had I thwarted his intervention on my behalf, he, as king of the world, would have been well within his acknowledged rights to have committed me forthwith to a lunatic asylum. Not a voice would have been raised in my defense. Not one. Not, of course, that Rick would ever have told, mentioned in any way either that he helped me or that I resisted. Had I pushed him away hard enough, unbreakably stony and silently unyielding in Dr. Parnell's office, Rick would have just looked at me, then held the door open for me as we left, made pleasant conversation or not as he walked me to my dorm and disappeared from my life for a month. Or shown up the next day sitting with his feet on my grandmother's quilt, his homework spread all over my bed, ignoring me at close range. Or brought me lunch and left it on my desk. Or asked me to the Winter Ball. Or brought a truly hot date to hang out in my living room. Or none of these. Just as he would if he succeeded.

I see myself never writing fiction. Harder than I can do to wrestle someone I knew onto a (virtual) page and bind him there with words. How impossible to build a man from the ground, flesh him out to the full. Of course, I could simplify. Yes, that must be what sometimes happens. I've read those books.

Rick was not simple. One evening after a fracas (never one to back down, me) with the football-playing boyfriend of my (former) cheerleader roommate I stumbled out to the big common room, too angry even to see tables and chairs. I have a bad temper and though I'm better now, at this point in my life I believe I had several bad tempers warring even with each other. Sat with my back to the room, face to the bricks, melting, dissolving, consumed. Rick was suddenly crouching beside me, remote, curious. Asking what was wrong with me. How did he do that? Materialize like that? And how did he choose his moments? I was unable to give complete responses but could indicate I'd had a set to. Rick stood and considered me from that altitude then held out his hand. "Come on, there's someone you need to meet." Sorry, Rick, not this time, oh, so not in the mood. I didn't deign to look at him or his hand. He calmly used it to haul me up and begin dragging me. I became compliant quickly; it was embarrassing when he did that. He took me across the dark campus, humming Primary songs, and knocked at an office door (yep, we've seen this before). A small, homely, sandy haired man answered, delighted to see Rick. Rick said, "She needs to talk," and closed the door with me on the inside. The man sat down smiling, as if all this were perfectly commonplace. Perhaps it was, certainly judging from my experience Rick may have spent much of his sophomore year dragging struggling freshman girls into the offices of wonderful teachers and counselors.
This man was one, a wonderful teacher and counselor, and a father and a bishop and after he asked me what was on my mind I talked to him for two hours. It was already late when I started. I have no idea how he led any sort of life, helping people willy-nilly that way, but he saved my life, that night and many times after that night. When I finally opened the door to leave, all cried out and floating on the peace that bishop had poured into me, Rick was sitting on the floor, his back against the wall, staring into the distance, waiting. He got up without a word and walked me a very little of the way home. I ran the rest alone, always terrified in the dark.

He was not nice to me. He made fun of me, cruelly. I walked into my bedroom from the bathroom, dressing for a dance in a borrowed formal, and he was just there, sitting at my desk. He looked up from his book, ignoring my spluttering and shock to look me over, asked if I would marry him, and went back to his reading. I said something hard and empty and scathing. It didn't matter. It never mattered what I said. The thing about Rick was that nothing made a dent. I know, I kicked and kicked. If you fail to leave a mark you vanish without a trace.

"I'm singing at church," he said. "Come." I went with Jane who was a year older than me and had been Rick's friend since the year before and loved him. I loved Jane. He came in, saw us, nodded, sat with other girls. Stood up to sing with boys I didn't know, making them look like children though they had returned from their missions and he had yet to go. Stood with his hand in his pocket, calm, offhand, waiting like nothing. And when they sang, he sang the solos. I guess the shock showed on my face, and he saw it. Royalty does not smirk when it is acting royally but the thing they do that is smirking is what he did. "He can sing," I said to Jane. "He can sing." She smiled at me with too-bright eyes, the special, happy sadness of a wonderful girl best friends with a man who will not love her. "Silly," she said kindly to me, "of course he can sing. How else do you think he played Danny last year?" He did? He acts? Too? I hadn't known. He had played the lead in Grease and quarrelled fiercely, continuously, with the director; the blond girl who played Sandy had been his girlfriend and wasn't anymore. I don't think he spoke to her that year. He stood in the church, singing like a miracle, like a dream. Left without talking to us.

Now you know a little about this friend. Only you don't know how silly he was, sillier than anyone could possibly be while looking for all the world like America's ambassador to France. You know how Edward-the-Vampire can get people to do things by smiling at them and leaning forward while he talks? Rick could do that for reals and he was every bit as dangerous. I don't know how to write about him smart and funny, clever and kind, making everyone in the room (especially, but not exclusively, the girls) feel like they were special and known. I can't write that stuff, I don't know how. Would I say, we all went on a hayride and Rick was there on the wagon and no one minded that he isn't in our ward and he was just so much fun! So dear! Made us laugh all evening! Even the Priesthood brethren! Helped everyone down from the wagon and complimented everyone and sat with his arm around everyone and brought them treats! What a guy! And he looks so mature for his age! There, now can you see it? I made that up, but it would be something like that. Arm around everyone. Just don't try to be the girl sitting next to him. Just don't try.

Do I entice you? Do I speak you fair?
Or rather do I not in plainest truth
Tell you I do not nor I cannot love you?
Midsummer, Act II, Sc.1

He did look older than the rest of us. I marked my eighteenth birthday during the months I knew Rick. He was nineteen and not on a mission, but should have been, he told me. Should have been gone. I made him show me his driver's licence. One of the few times he really smiled at me. About me. I thought it was the moustache that made him look so much older till a day I came trudging home from class to find him reading on the (former) cheerleader roommate's bed. (You don't get plot like this at BYU.) He kept his head down while I worked through the roll of irritation and exasperation (privacy, locked doors, personal space, why bother, where is my chocolate?). Our customary ritual of greeting. Then he looked up slowly and I didn't know him because the moustache was gone and because he looked oddly...real. Exposed. Wary? Hurtable. Still immeasurably older than me, immeasurably distant, the beautiful Governor Royal of the Eastern Seaboard, beloved for his flawless management of all matters from weather to birthday presents yet pained in his glorious soul that while his books of poems were critically acclaimed, the populous had not embraced them and poetry is so edifying for a populous. Ah well, he would only be pained in secret, only show a sliver of it here, on my roommate's bed.
"You shaved," I said. "I did," he answered. "I like this better," I said and that was brave and a gift. "It'll grow back," he said.

"I don't have a partner so you're debating with me. I entered us."
Snow was hosting a speech meet and I was there to say my poem and help Dr. Parnell. That's all I was there for.
"I don't have a partner so you're debating with me. I entered us. Here's our number."

Flabbergasted is such a luscious word. Say it to yourself with concentration and lots of breath support. Webster tells me it's 18th century slang, probably from flabby and aghast. Those words were me. Fabulous. The stuff of fable. I'd never seen, never seen, a debate round. "Oh, sweetie," he said, hands tight and supportive on both my arms, "it doesn't matter what you say because I'll be speaking second. And anyway, it's too late. What are you worried about?" looking at me carefully, "You look terrific. And I'll buy you lunch."
Lunch. Hmm.
"What's the resolution?" I ask carefully.
"Mmm?" He's flipping through note cards. "Ask Gary."
Gary is Dr. Parnell, who tells me I am a lifesaver and administers emergency aid. And tells me the room number. Rick is waiting at the table in the front of the room, impatient. I say, "You didn't tell me the room number." "Hurry," he says, "you're the first speaker, remember? I know I told you that."

After, I wait to stop shaking and for Rick to talk to me. Something? Anything? He's shaking hands with the other team, who come shake hands with my shaking hands and are very nice, and now he's talking to the judges who he knows, who smile at me, and now he's gathering stuff. Nothing.
"Was it alright?" I ask.
"It was fine. Why?" He's being an idiot.
"Did I do alright?"
"You were great. We didn't forfeit the round." (That kills a team score.) "And I told you, it didn't matter what you said." He is finishing, looking at me, impassive and also curious. "You speak really well. Your thought processes are very strange. Lunch?"
Yes.

But his wallet is in his jeans pocket in his room and he has to help with tabulation but we can still get lunch if I will run and get his money. Run means run, lunch is only an hour. I excel at running in heels (after all these years science has shown how good it is for us, sprinting on our toes). And I'm hungry and he owes me.

This is the story I set out to tell, not Rick ruling the world or the speech meet or our lunch or the rest of the day or how he left school after finals or how he would call me, sometimes, looking for Jane. Just the story of me getting his wallet.

I had forgotten about his room and it set me back a bit. He and his roommate were conducting an experiment, determining what would happen if no one ever hung up clothing again. Lesser people have toyed with this same project in an unscientific and haphazard way (a badly conducted version is going on not twenty feet from where I now sit typing); these two proposed a rigorous application of the scientific method. Question, hypothesis, careful documentation. They took pictures, posted a notebook for ease in recording observations. The pile of clothing completely filled the space between the unmade beds and spilled up onto them. (Not making beds was part of this, too. Of course.) You could open the door but that was it. I mentioned, I think, how silly Rick could be, well, he had told me the jeans were on the floor between the beds but there was no longer a floor. Time was wasting and I worked fast, grabbing with my right hand and, as everything in the pile proved not to be jeans with a wallet in them, chucking stuff onto the bed at my left. I'd gone about a third of the way into the pile and was actually reaching into the back pocket of a pair of jeans for what I was fairly sure was my lunch ticket when I became aware of the most awful creeping horror. The clothing I had been piling onto the unmade bed was moving. Slowly, shifting, without apparent direction. And it started breathing, moaning a little, now moving more and moving faster. I was clawing my way through the door (with the wallet) when a gym shoe flashed out from under the crawly, tumbling mass and I saw all. Rick's roommate, indistinguishable amidst his own experiment's apparatus, had been napping in the petri dish and I had buried him under a mountain of scientific evidence.

Tempt not too much the hatred of my spirit,
For I am sick when I do look on thee.
Midsummer, Act II, Sc.1

That's my little story. That's it. That's what I thought of for years, if I thought of Rick at all. The lost wallet and the haunted bed. Till I tried to put it down here, just a funny storylet, and discovered I had to explain, justify, reveal, something, anything, lest anyone assume from what I said that not hanging up his clothes summed up this person I have renamed Rick so that I could write about him without his permission. In writing we rule the world; I work without his assent, I protest to myself that I needn't justify my memories. Sometimes, trying to show you how I saw him and burdened by only the memories I have, some secret, some faded, I spun little scenes that never were, but that were as really him as anything that ever happened. He made me take all those out, stay scrupulously truthful. I felt him laughing at me for using words I cannot spell, guesses so bad spell check runs amok in a hundred false directions. He always mocked my odd vocabulary; "That would be a word you've never heard spoken, right?" and corrected the pronunciation. He scared me into caution. He really was funny. Making me take a history class held in the late afternoon he promised, "It doesn't matter which half you sleep through, the other half will be amazing." The gift of that professor was so great I was a history major for two whole terms. And I held back, here, the unbelievable stories, how he took me to a formal and spent the whole time talking to other girls, dancing with them and me sort of alongside, then the elaborate, fantastical compliments he paid me when I threw a fit about it, apparently expecting me to believe the story he spun, that the depth and danger of my charms left him no alternative. And how he turned away again. And how I carried those compliments for weeks, for a year. Stuff of fables. But I wanted to tell the truth. I wanted what I said to matter.

What is the force that binds the stars?
I wore this mask to hide my scars.
What is the power that pulls the tides?
I never could find a place to hide.
What moves the earth around the sun?
What could I do but run and run and run?
Afraid to love, afraid to fail,
A mast without a sail.
The moon's a fingernail and slowly sinking,
Another day goes by and now I'm thinking,
That this indifference was my invention
When everything I did sought your attention.
You were my compass star, you were my measure,
You were a pirate's map, a buried treasure.
If this was all correct, the last thing I'd expect,
The prosecution rests, it's time that I confessed,
I must have loved you.

Ghost Story
Sting

Meditations. By the Numbers.

Things I don't count.
Times I replay a favorite song.
Minutes spent sitting in a car talking to a friend.
Pairs of underwear and socks.
Cost of sending packages to a boy in Hong Kong.
Time lost to housework because I was dancing.
Calories from fresh fruits or veggies.
Mint leaves for garnish on 180 pieces of cake at a wedding.
The times I rake my lawn every fall.
Cost of supplies used at church.
Compliments.
Number of gifts for you as opposed to me. Unless you care.
Trips to my kids' schools.
Times I check to see if I've gotten an answer from a friend.
Favors for people I love.
Calories in a bite/slice/layer of the best wedding cake. Ever.
Coins in my change.

Things I count.
Books read.
Quail or deer or fish in a stream.
One hour of hard walking.
Beats in a song.
Times something was really not all it was cracked up to be.
Amount of food brought to a meal vs. number of people in the family.
Seconds in the space between lightening and thunder.
Weekly trips to the temple.
Kids in my care.
Actors vs. characters.
Minutes, backwards, between when I have to be there and when I will have to leave.
Items per child for Christmas stockings.
Costume changes.
Mispronunciations in movies. Especially church movies.
Favors for people who irritate me.
Good restaurants in Provo.
Bills given as change.
Dresses I think actually look good on me.
Belts, gloves, swords, boots, daggers.
Times, in a single casual conversation, someone uses a troubling word like fat or coping or paralyzed or drowning or if.
Times I think the painter isn't listening to the answer to a question he asked.

Things I cannot count.
Times I have misspelled the word sentence.
Number of words I regularly misspell.
Times, in prayer, I have spoken the words, "please help..."
Number of prayers with the words, "please help..." which have been answered.
Help from friends.
Times I have lain awake between the hours of three and five a.m.
All the perfectly beautiful walks.
Times, in a public place, I have not noticed someone who then assumed I was avoiding them.
Kisses from children.
Times in rehearsal I have said, "Do it again."
Weeds pulled.
Times I have missed mistakes even though I reread it a thousand times.
All the ways I dislike cleaning my kitchen.
The joys of a well-turned sentence.
Times I have said, "This is really good food."
Wishes made on stars, candles, dandy lion fluff, coins, wishbones, eyelashes.
Wishes I have never told lest they not come true.
The number of questions I can ask my kids to which their answer will be, "almost."

Things I must not count.
Number of times my children have answered "almost."
Times we have escaped certain death.
Times I nearly really hurt someone.
Times I was right, like I said all along.
Times I really hurt someone.
The number of times I just forgot to reread it.
Other people's blessings.
Dusty surfaces.
Chickens, unhatched.
Ways people should be helping me.
My flaws.
Good things I really could be doing.
Nights of sound, unbroken sleep.
Books I finished, anyway, to see how they would end.
Times, in conversation, I have failed a friend.
Times I think the painter isn't listening to the answer to a question he asked.

Things I don't count anymore.
To three, with my kids.
Stairs.
Kisses.
Compliments.
Days till deadlines.
Days till major holidays.
Times I have lost this weight.
My toys. Then your toys.
Times I have gained this weight.
Candles on my birthday cake.
Grey hairs before I pull them out.
Times I have finished a book and not been able to hand it to the person who needs to read it next.

Things I wish I didn't count.
Polite, kind, happy strangers.
Times certain rooms in this house have been clean.
Clean, pleasant, public restrooms in the UK.
Favors for people I dislike.
Ice cubes in Europe.
Dinner invitations.
That one sweet waiter in Paris.
Prompt, well worded responses.
Times I laugh out loud in a "comedy."
Times people have told me, "You'll adore this book; I cried and cried."

Things I should start counting.
Days till deadlines.
Days till major holidays.
Hours of sleep beginning no later than 10 p.m.
Times spent standing in lines to acquire things I may not actually want.
Money spent for services I never use.
Books checked out at any given moment.
Times someone rescues me.
Times I say "oh, sorry" when I really mean "you go think about something else now."
Trips, per year, to the dentist.
Times I can sit and be perfectly still.
Times I have talked to someone till I could neither sit up nor think straight but never run out of things to say.
Times I ate the rest of it, all of it, anyway.
Times I have finished a book and felt the world pause while I savor a perfect rightness of being.

Meditations. Not About Sleeping

When I was about five my mom taught me to make my bed by myself. A new sister was sucking up all the available energy and my mom needed more help. Also, she always liked teaching me to do stuff for myself. This trait must pass in the maternal line and she passed it to me. What would you do, how would you spell it, what is your plan, what have you tried so far, what do you think? Trying to get my kids to do it for themselves. Anyway, there I was at five, standing on the wall side of my pulled-out-from-the-wall bed, and my mom on the room side introducing me to doing this for myself. Her making the bed with forward, introduction, footnotes, commentary, afterward and bibliography; me making copious mental notes and frantic mnemonic devices. I'm doing this alone next time and forever after and who would ever have guessed there was a method, an order to it, a system, standards?

I have such a sharp little memory of those first solo days, standing at the bottom corner of my bed where I'd have to push myself between it and the wall, surveying the vast bedscape in the deep despair of someone too, too short for the task at hand. There was just so much of it and it had, somehow, I didn't remember how, become so chaotic in the night, seemingly without my cooperation or even permission. I was too short to see across the hugeness of the twin bed (called twin because the other little sister, not the new demanding one, had a bed exactly like it across the room from mine); I mean, I could see that there was another side to my bed but not all the way over the far edge. Any wandering thing of about my own size or smaller could have crouched on the yonder side in the triangle point where bed came to floor, unseen till I made my small-steps way around to push or pull whatever bedclothes layer came next in the straightening process, and if that crouching thing were a nasty thing (as seemed all too likely when I was five years old and laboring mightily all alone in my room making an enormous bed for seven hours every day) then at my approach the croucher might just scuttle, chuckling, to the next side around, keeping cunningly ahead of my small self, making no noise other than the very same soft rustling of sheets that my bed-making was making, too. Or so it seemed to me.

Traveling miles round and round acres of twin bed is what I remember most from those early days of bedmaking, toiling from one side of the bed to the other working the sheet (pull up this side, progress around the bed which has been shoved away from the wall, now pull up the other side), then the blanket, (pull on this side, journey to the bed's other side, pull, straighten, smooth), fold the sheet top over the blanket top (plod around to fold down the sheet top on the other side), haul away on the bedspread which outweighed me by about half (pull up on this side, walk, walk, pull up on the other and fold down, alllll the way around again to the far edge of the world, fold down on that side too), place the pillow, fold bedspread over pillow on this side (trek back to cover the pillow on the other side), smooth the whole surface (the size of Connecticut), push the bed back against the wall. I thought I was pretty good at it when all was said and done, as good as my mom, anyway, but the process took too much of my days and left me so winded I traditionally treated myself to a rest for a while after, lying on the floor alongside my newly neatened bed, looking carefully through the bedspread tassels to the under of my bed where so many brave belongings lived and protected me, colonists courageously holding the line, preventing any evil developing in the underscape. Thinking about it now that I am old, I'm no way sure my belongings were feeling courageous in their hearts. Bravery is all tangled up with volition and free will. My toys and clothes and trash were probably being brave the way Greek slaves thunked down in a colony on the edge of the empire and held there at sword point were brave. If you can't leave the scary hinterlands into which you've been placed, well, you've still got to raise your crops and your children and when the barbarians come a-marauding you take up the sword to defend as best you can the place where you're stuck. If your sword also protects the people living fat and happy in the heartland capitol and they call you brave and a hero, goody for them. I had set my lesser treasures in the underbed to protect me and they couldn't leave. My heroes.

Evil lurking belowdecks was a real and constant danger, and all due to those cursed thick bedspread tassels. We all, the little sister, myself and even my parents, had extreme bedspreads my grandmother sent us from Italy. The wool of a thousand wildly hairy sheep. The shipping must have been horrendous; they weighed the earth, it was like sleeping under one of those lead blankets they cuddle on you in x-ray rooms, only huge. Like the beautiful glass paperweight with the glass flower garden in its bottom that my grandparents sent from Murano, only instead of going on stacks of papers on a desk, these went on the beds to keep sheets and blankets and sisters from blowing away when strong winds swept through our house, say, on account of a carelessly opened door. Bedweights. In unimaginably far off Italy, Grandma still knew about the Santa Ana winds and prepared us accordingly. My parents' gold and white spread must have been bespoke, must have been custom made for their California king size bed. The little sister and I had spreads with big fat florals worked in blood red and its sister color, blood pink, heavily woven and ending in thick, thick tassels all around the bottom. (I needn't even mention that if people, certainly small girls, are going to brave the harsh winters of southern California they will surely require monstrous wool tapestries harvested from medieval Italian castles if they even hope to stay alive through the bitter nights. It's common knowledge.)

During daylight hours those tassels were a gift, indispensable for endless braiding practice, a life skill at which doughty orphans, enchanted princesses, sea captains' brave daughters and any other girl of merit possessing long hair or little sisters must exhibit great mastery and cunning. But at night, oh, at night any vile, bloodthirsty or vicious thingy (it needn't even be tiny, just small enough in one of its dimensions to snick into the underbed) might silently, gently slide its hands or paws or talons between and then softly around two of those puffy, bloody-pinky wool tails, push them soundlessly aside and come swaggering out like a mean teenager through a bamboo bead bedroom-door curtain (I had seen such teenagers on television) while I, far above in the dead center of my bed, held down helpless beneath the spread and all unawares in the dark, would be hard pressed to spot the beasty so I could scream before it fairly came upon me. And all the while I knew, unkindest cut of all, those same weak and silly tassels were simply withholding, by a whim of their structure, the stout nighttime protection a sensible, solid, all-the-way-to-the-floor spread (a quilt for instance, and this explains our ancestors' reliance on them) would by its very nature have provided, sweeping unbroken to the carpet on all sides of my bed, containing and confining the under ghouls behind dependable continuous fabric walls (which is why in castles they're called curtain walls (what a lot we're learning today!)). Burdened as I was managing those the treacherous tassels, self protection alone led me to encourage, nay, require aggressive underbed development and my bedroom planning and zoning committees allowed absolutely solid population density in such an at-risk area. My mom, capable in so many arenas, has an oddly difficult time grasping planning principles like these and this was a sore spot between us for years. My own children slept in beds I had built for them that have no under at all. In fact, if you look through my house what you won't see is much under. I like furniture solid all the way to the ground. Who needs dust and lost shoes and forgotten library books and spider holes and child-begotten food storage and hauntings? Under is just asking for trouble.

So are top sheets on beds. As good as the best gifts the painter has given me is the culture of the duvet, though in this house we call them by their Danish name which I'm far too indolent to try and figure out how to reproduce here. Growing up in my mother's house I never knew, never had any idea, about such things. Learning to pull up and fold down sheets at five years old, my construct of heaven had people sleeping under big soft quilts, like you do when you are lying sick on the sofa with a thermometer or when you take a nap, with nary a top sheet or woolen bedweight in sight. My mama may have sympathized but she told me, rightly, that the quilts would become dirty used in such a disrespectful manner and need near constant washing which would wear them out before their time. I bowed to this unanswerable wisdom while I lived at home but when I went to college the same grandmother who had sent the tormenting Italian tassels into my little life made me a cheerful new going-away-from-home quilt (she had taken up quilt making and transformed seamlessly from the source of night-terror producing bedweights to a maker of round-the-bed all-night protection) under which I brazenly slept with absolutely no top sheet whatever. Sizzle. And washed it accordingly. I still have that quilt, it looks like a leaf skeleton. My children sleep under duvets in the winter, quilts in the summer. Pull it up, smooth it out and it's made. The quilts do have to be washed often and no, they won't live long, they are brave heroes of our lives, buying us precious lifetime with lost years of quilt usefulness, courageous because they have to be.

But. The youngest has a tiny room right now and is sleeping against the ceiling with her desk and bureau and lounging space in an under so big it is transformed to something else all together, a room of its own. The middle one, in her new larger room, asked for the double bed she long ago unearthed dusty and rusty in a crazy shed in a deep backlot in Kanosh. She now has an under at once too small for storage and just big enough to suck up forever expensive dance shoes. The oldest sleeps across the world from us in whatever is missionary issue in Hong Kong. And this summer the painter confessed he prefers sleeping under a sheet in hot weather and I have found a quilt I like to have on the bed right now...so. Pull up and smooth, walk around allllll the way to the other side, repeat ad nauseum. The bed proportionately as large, now that I am grown and it is a king, as it ever was. I try always to remember to get the painter to help me make our bed before he leaves for the other house. It's far more than twice the work for one person to make a king sized bed than it is for two, but once it's tidy I can make the bed while he's gone with less effort than I use making it with his help. This has to do with the morning state of the unmade bed. Apparently I sleep in a bed like a letter sleeps in an envelope, which is odd, as I don't sleep either deeply or well. The painter sleeps the dreamless sleep of either the blessed or the damned, I don't know which, both are spoken of as deep, but whichever, he really messes up a bed. Here in our own house we don't mess about and bother with folding back the top sheet, just pull it straight up. A tiny rebellion. As soon the nights cool I'll get out my down comforter and sleep in heaven. Pull up, smooth, walk away.


Noah's photos

Life. 18 Days; A Lament

And it's
about time for school
again.
But I'm kicking, not ready,
because I've never liked school, ever, I
ceaselessly, tirelessly, seek to evade summer's ending.
Don't get me wrong,
everybody has to do it, and we will, too.
Federal law and all.
Girls have their notebooks and pencils
hidden away, where they don't
have to look at them, but could grab them,
in an emergency,
if we're taken by surprise.
In case
it's cool when that first day comes, jeans just purchased.
In case it's not, last year's jeans cut off.
It
just
kills me,
knowing how much
life's about to be frittered away,
mainly waiting for other kids.
Most of the school day, in all honesty.
Neither of them hates it.
Optimistic, upbeat,
pretty and (sufficiently)
popular, well behaved and
quiet students. They'll be fine. I'm
reading this
stuff in
Time magazine, that long, lazy summer breaks hurt
underprivileged kids. I'm sure it's right. I'm sorry. I know
very
well about summer slump, I taught my own slackers. It's ec
xactly as the talking heads are telling it.

(But
I am riven
knowing how
young my girls never will be again.
Senior year, seventh grade.)

You're running too fast, stop now, slow down.
You should have nothing but time. C'mon.
Yellow sun, white hot days, red melon, blue nights.
Zoo, anyone?


I think Eden took these pictures