It's Time For Bed
Three quarters of a good night's sleep.
My sons are totally normal boys who hate each other’s guts. Their theme song is “Anything You Can Do I Can Do Better” as they try to one-up each other at every possible moment. Despite the six year age difference, they have a codependent relationship in which they crave each other’s’ company just so they have a sparring partner. I acknowledge that this brotherly competition is common. My husband reminds us all the time that when he and his brother were growing up, they competed for everything, too. “You and your brothers were the same I bet,” he says, at which point I say, “Not like this.”
They compete for everything. First one to reach the couch. Who can eat the spiciest pepper. First one to give the dog one hundred kisses. Who can lay the smelliest fart. Which one can empty the dishwasher fastest without breaking plates or glasses. Who’s taller (though those six years and twenty-two inches of difference have predetermined the winner). So it did not surprise me when my second grader proudly announced that he needed a bigger bed because he now stretches from pillow to foot board, so he must be as tall, if not taller, than his brother. He’s in a twin, while Freshman sleeps in a full-size. “You need to buy me a bigger bed.”
“Oh, because you’ve outgrown your twin bed?”
“I need a bed like him,” he said, pointing to the neighboring room. “What size bed does he have?”
“The bed he has is called a full size.”
“What size bed did you have when you were a kid?” he asked. I had to pause and think, and then the memory came flooding back to me.
“Actually, I slept in a three-quarter bed,” I explained. I realized how long it has been since I recalled that bed frame, an antique spool bed handmade out of tiger maple by a Prevo family predecessor. Though it was an odd size—as named, it measured between a twin and a full—it nearly filled my cold childhood bedroom under the eaves. “The mattress used to tear my clothes,” I continued, rubbing my right thigh where its metal spring had poked through and scratched me countless times. “It had a hole in it.”
“How did you sleep on it with a hole in it?” Second Grade wondered. I explained that the mattress and bed did not have a big empty gap in the middle, but that the metal supports inside had broken apart. The sharp end of a spring gouged through the blue-striped ticking. “What’s a spring?” he continued, and I realized that he had never seen the inside of a conventional mattress. Where and why would he? His dads sleep on a fancy air mattress (thank you Christian for the deal on the Sleep Number) and his brother has an Instagram-famous foam one.
Behind our house on Brimfield Street, down past the garden, sat a swampy copse of trees which was a prelude for a more robust forest beyond the Marley’s apple orchard. Until about the age of eight, that bog was the extent of my explorations of the wild. Not only could we shove rotted tree trunks over with mere kid power—“Timber!” we shouted, copying Yosemite Sam from Looney Tunes—but we could pretend to drive a rusty decomposing car abandoned there in the Twenties or Thirties. Apparently previous owners of our property had used the swamp as a junkyard, and it also contained a few corroded metal mattress frames. The ticking and stuffing were long gone, so we treated them like trampolines. I centered my sneakers on two of the springs and jumped up and down. We knew what they were (my father probably told us) but their appearance jived with depictions of old mattresses from—you guessed it—old Looney Tunes cartoons. One day my brother Brian, the Marley kids, and I stacked a few of them together to make a truly dangerous spring tower for mega-jumping. We were likely spared several conks on the head and possible broken bones by the fact that the stack teetered so much we could barely climb on top.
I knew what mattress skeletons looked like, so when Daddy redid my bedroom (I slept on the couch for the summer while he worked slowly on it) and set up the antique family bedstead there I understood why the three-quarter mattress was so painful. My youngest brother Jacob had grown out of his toddler bed, and rather than shell out money on a new one, my father dragged the old Prevo antique out of storage to use in my room. I was a weird kid (obviously, right?) and I appreciated aged things. Our family lived with and used antiques in every room. There were not precious items: we could not afford new furniture, and we needed them. There was no shame in hand-me-downs (unless we’re talking clothes, then I protested). My mother’s parents loved Colonial furniture. Grampa Prevo, especially, loved the Ethan Allan brand, but in some cases their furniture was actually from a time when Vermont was one of the original thirteen. Everything in our living room, except for the couch and the TV set, was vintage, but not in a fancy way. We had brown furniture before the Grandmillenial trend, made it cool again. (We even had a few lace doilies on tables and curio cabinets that slowly turned brown, too, and became part of the dust-scape of our house.)
According to unsubstantiated family lore, a distant Prevo relative painstakingly made a spool bedstead by hand with slabs of honey-colored tiger maple, a beautiful wood with brown striations. The side rails attached to the head and foot board with long metal rods, and the naked box spring sat on wooden crossbars. It was very easy to put together and take apart. The bedposts and foot board boasted bumpy carved bars that looked as if they were made by gluing two spools end to end, or so my dad explained. The closest and most popular modern iteration would be a Jenny Lind bed (though this one on Etsy is very close and makes me doubt the whole myth of it being handmade). A smoothly varnished tympanum and more spool spindles made up the headboard, though the left corner had a deep crack that threatened the strength and stability of the entire apparatus. Each post was topped with a five-foot pyramid of spools, which made great places to hang clothes, puppets, and hats. Another benefit of the bed was that it sat quite tall, and I filled the entire underside with stacks of board games, books, and Lego sets.
The three-quarter bed used to be a common size and matching mattresses were easy to buy. Since that size had disappeared from use, my mattress was avery old and had seen better days, but could not be replaced easily. The mattress had an extreme wallow—you could also describe it as a trench—and as a lifelong stomach sleeper I always positioned my right side in the dip and my left leg thrown up and over the side. I soon found that the mattress’ largest hole lined up with my right thigh. Flipping it fixed the poking spring issue, but not the depression. Too much stuffing had escaped from the main body to make it puffy and supportive. The antique box spring below did not offer much assistance, either.
After a few weeks, I found that sleeping on it regularly only made the holes worse. Over the years, the twisted metal tip of a broken inner spring wormed its way towards daylight and seemed to become sharper and sharper. I awoke one morning with a two-inch rip in my favorite pair of sage-green flannel pajamas where the evil hook-end had held tight as I shifted my body. Using the mattress nightly encouraged other springs to break, too. A hole near my toes scraped my feet.
After I came out and started dating, my boyfriend gifted me a lovely pair of green paisley boxer shorts from Victoria’s Secret (no idea why he went into a Victoria’s Secret in the first place).
I was over pajamas by then and slept in underwear only, and one morning I woke to a sizeable rip—again, right thigh—in my new favorite boxers. He understood how I had ripped them, of course. The tear was a reminder of all the times we winced and rearranged ourselves in the middle of make-out sessions, tumbling to avoid the broken spring while clamping our mouths together. This teenage activity also tested the durability of the cracked headboard and loosening spindles. I swear that if you Google the sound effect of a vigorously rhythmic squeaking bed, you’ll hear what my bedroom sounded like. It was so loud. As my room did not have a door, I had to be extremely careful about certain movements and activities lest my entire family discover what my boyfriend and I were doing in there. “We’re just studying, Daddy.”
All through my teens, only once do I remember receiving a brand new pair of sheets (dark blue paisley: it was the early Nineties what else can I say). Most of the time I slept on hand-me-down bedding my grandmother used to own. Though I did not love how they looked, they had grown incredibly soft with time, cementing my love for cotton percale sheets. Every fitted sheet, however, took on that telltale hole right in the same spot, as if a giant moth had taken one huge bite in precisely the same place on each one.
Once I went to college, for good the second time around, Jacob took over my room. I came home on a break to find that one of the bed’s legs had split in two, and he had bound the halves together with twine. When my mother moved to Virginia in the mid-Nineties she planned to use the spool bedstead as her own, and found a company that manufactured new three-quarter mattress. I got to sleep on the Thigh Gouger 3000 but she had a nice, new mattress.
The tiger maple spool bed made its way into storage while my mother moved to the Grand Canyon with only what would fit in her car, and then Jacob rescued it from a non-temperature-controlled storage unit for use in his empty bedroom. I slept on it a few more times when I visited him, until one of his guests seriously damaged it, unintentionally. The pieces lay in his guest bedroom for a while, and he chucked Mattress #2.
After my mother passed away, we packed most of her belongings into Jacob’s basement. I had hopes for the bed. As a family heirloom, it deserved to be restored…except who would use it? Who would restore it and mends its cracks, and how much would that cost? My other idea was to turn it into a piece of art. The triangular headboard might make an interesting wall sculpture. Not that I have the wall space for it even now.
“Or we just toss it,” Jacob and I said, exhausted physically and emotionally by having to move Mommy’s stuff for the third time. Though a family heirloom, I found the bed difficult to work into modern life with its odd size and fragility. We had enough beds in our house; Jacob was in the same predicament. It’s just a pile of wood, I told myself. Just beautiful scraps of wood that we don’t have use for. If I keep something so large purely for sentimental reasons, I open up the door to hoarding and will turn into my parents…
Said hoarder came to the rescue. Father came with his pickup truck to save it from our callous plan to cart it off to the dump with the bulk of my mother’s stuff. She was a packrat’s packrat. The largest cardboard box in her “estate” held her collection of greeting cards and letters she saved from every holiday since we were children. It was an incredibly touching discovery, believe me. A parent’s love is boundless, and if that parent runs on the sentimental size, they are prone to having giant boxes containing forty years of Hallmark cards too. It’s so sweet, but…what are your heirs supposed to do with it?
My dad has the tiger maple spool bed pieces somewhere in his house, shoved among his and his wife’s piles of stuff. I feel a certain amount of relief, as the decision is out of my hands for a few years. I know for certain I have not seen the last of the bedstead. Even without its spooky skeletal box spring, someone could salvage the maple pieces and create new crossbars, slap on a new oddly sized mattress, and let a child sleep on it for a few more years. I just don’t know which child or of which generation they will be a member.
For now, my second grader will sleep on his non-antique twin bed for a few more years, at the very least. A three-quarter bed would fit in his room, though it would be much like my childhood room on Brimfield Street: more bed than room. His mattress is wonderfully firm, free of broken springs or holes, and does not scratch his leg or ruin sheets and PJ’s. He can jump on it without causing it to collapse. On the other hand, it was made in a factory and is definitely not tiger maple. Will he and his brother remember their first bed, their first room of their own? Will they recall all the hours we have spent reading night-night books , and the mornings I wake them for school with a soundtrack of chipwave songs and YouTube clips they adore?
What matching memories do I have? I ask myself. I remember the bed, the depression in the mattress, the doorless room under the eaves. I’ve forgotten what bedtime was like before the room was redecorated. Maybe it was forgettable. Why do I remember the work my parents put into redecorating the room but not my parents in the room?
If my sons forget the Raymour & Flanigan bed but remember the times we have shared in their rooms, I can live with that.
This Week’s Song
Listen to that bed squeak sample become part of the rhythm!
!