The Mattress
(Nan Goldin, Empty beds, Boston 1979 [from The Ballad of Sexual Dependency].)
His mattress is blue, slightly yellowed, and decorated with one of those vintage floral designs that suggests it is several decades old. It reminds me of the bare, cystic mattresses my father put on the bunk beds in the cabin up north. Whenever my brother or I shifted in our sleeping bag the coils squealed, making a high-pitch, tinny sound exactly like our family’s Maltese whenever one of us accidentally stepped on her paw. He peels off the Ikea bed sheets I bought him as a Valentine’s Day gift last year. There is a dark, oblong stain on the mattress. He notices me staring at the stain. It’s applesauce, he explains while avoiding making eye contact.
Oh, ok, I say, before adding, Maybe it’s time for a new mattress. How old is this one?
I think this might have been my parents’ mattress, he says and, predicting my critique, preemptively adds, It’s about being middle class and living below my means, which my parents instilled in me.
Your parents would probably tell you it's time to get a new mattress.
They have, I think.
I don’t push further. I can’t relate, of course, because my parents instilled the opposite despite their frequent warnings against credit card debt and devotion to Dave Ramsey’s “7 Baby Steps” (who I met once when he visited my church, quietly sheltering behind my mom when he asked if I wanted a photo together.) They believe in small pleasures, the right to a trip to the movie theater, indulging in a Bloomin’ Onion at Outback Steakhouse, or buying a larger TV on Black Friday. The gulf between their words and actions was a space of permission. I applied for my first credit card at eighteen and bought myself a pair of cat-eye Yves Saint Laurent sunglasses that I dropped while getting out of my friend’s car and scratched the lenses. I scrubbed them with toothpaste that night, a trick I found online for buffing out scratches. They only worsened. I tried soaking them in nail polish remover, another trick from the same article, but the acetone melted the lenses and frame. The acetate softened and became gooey in my hands like droplets of tree sap that droop before hardening into amber-colored nipples. So I bought a replacement pair.
My credit card was mostly for luxuries. This was an important distinction to me. The few times I used it to pay for groceries or a utility bill, I felt that my financial situation was dire, perhaps irrecoverable. I used it to buy a lavender-scented mattress topper after a man I was regularly sleeping with complained that my mattress’ sagging coils made his body ache and a set of linen bed sheets from Crate & Barrel, which I stained yellow after days of feverishly sweating in bed with a nasty bout of the flu. My mattress was a decade old. But I considered it a necessity. My comforter was even older, a hand-me-down from my parents. The cotton fabric was a faded charcoal gray and covered in large pinkish-white lilies. It was a relic of the 90s, possibly the same bed set on which I was conceived.
My bed frame was another necessity. It originally belonged to my Great Aunt Bev. Renee offered it to me after Bev’s dementia worsened and she moved into their house. My mom lived with Bev for a few years. Bev encouraged her to write and, when she later learned that I was interested in being a writer as a pre-teen, she bought me a subscription to Writer’s Digest. My dad helped me paint it white to match my other furniture and carried it up three flights of stairs to the two-bedroom apartment I shared with Azora. We bumped the posts against the brick walls a few times during the climb and scratched the fresh coat of paint. The frame needed a box spring and was too large for my bedroom. But I kept it anyway. My Great Aunt Bev is dead now. And I no longer have her bed frame.
When I quit the Art Institute, I used my PTO payout to buy a new mattress. I rarely traveled; I couldn’t afford to on my pitiful salary. And I rarely took time off with the naive hope that my commitment would be rewarded with a promotion. I tried to leverage a job offer for a promotion. Instead, my manager suggested that I could do more work for the same salary. I quit and joked the museum owed me the mattress as a reparation after I developed crippling insomnia. If I managed to fall asleep, I dreamt I was writing thank-you letters to museum trustees or checking donor lists to ensure the names were all spelled correctly. Inevitably a mistake slipped through (a handful of names out of thousands) and our director, a failed lawyer turned nonprofit fundraiser who boasted about weekend trips to Europe to attend music festivals, scheduled a meeting where we groveled for forgiveness against the unspoken threat of termination.
I used to sleep with this guy who once made me watch the Red Hot Chili Pepper’s 2016 Lollapalooza performance before we fucked. He told me that his dad bought his mattress as a gift and told him to always invest in his bed since we spend a third of our lives sleeping. I stopped seeing him after he floated the possibility of doing pup play together. But I thought about this advice and his endearing reverence for his father while unpacking my new memory foam mattress.
I love laying in my bed even while awake, writing on my laptop, reading, lounging, and masturbating. I will probably spend at least half my life in bed. Maybe I will even die in bed. I try to find a statistic online to determine the likelihood of this fate. Instead, I discover that most Americans die in hospitals, nursing facilities or hospice care. Ok, I probably won’t die in my own bed. But there’s enough of a chance to justify this purchase.
Anyway, Zach, my point is that it’s probably time to buy a new mattress.