Beth crouched and peeled back the duvet, inspecting beneath the bed as if examining a neglected wound. A wound it was. A rectangular minefield of shame, its perimeter traced by the doomed bedframe.
Passed down from the multigenerational milk farm on Beth’s Indiana side, the bed was a solid oak reminder of people more capable than Beth and Jeffrey. Of folks who plucked their own chicken and made vinegar pie. Made the vinegar that went into the pie. Like turning water into wine and then turning that into pie. Who took their time with things like furniture, examining and strategizing, dividing the labor so that one polished and the other repaired these things they presumed would live on forever.
At first, Beth and Jeffrey slept in this bed like two twigs placed together, the knobs of their knees, and elbows sticking into one another. Then, they were like train tracks, a good foot apart, the children sleeping between them. Finally, as the children left and it was only the pets left, the dog, as if charged with finalizing the deal, drew a line down the center of the bed with his long hound body, providing a separation one could not blame the other for.
Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the bed had followed a similar course to their marriage—a deep chip here, a jagged crack there, a hatchwork of scratches. Mauled at the corners where two separate dogs chewed. And then, the bracket of wood that held the planks in place on Jeffrey’s side broke.
The bracket was a hardy strip of wood, nailed in place by some plucky wood-smith, some slender relative of Beth’s that trusted the frame would hold up, built to withstand slight, turn-of-the-century bodies. Beth’s Indiana side wouldn’t have accounted for children using the bed as a boxing ring. Nor would they have accounted for the bouncy, hearty sex that Beth and Jeffrey once had; sex then would have had minimal bounce. It would also have been assumed that the bed, for the most part and in the absence of a protracted illness, would lie dormant, empty in a square of Midwest light as the men and womenfolk tended to the demands of the farm, and would not have been subjected to long Saturday lie-ins, hours of afternoon weeping and sulking, frequent naps, reconciliatory cuddling, and snow-day fort building.
They also wouldn’t have tossed and turned. They would have been too tired. They would have been tossing and turning things all day. Hay. Chicken necks. The smell of planted fields, of their day’s good works, filtering in through the window, assurances of a deserved, long rest. Beth touched her nose to the bedframe and breathed deep, thinking of an endless field, crops shivering in the warm wind, carrying scent. She’d lived on the farm as a girl.
The brackets broke as Jeffrey turned in a huff one night, more abruptly than usual, propelled by some late-night thought that kept him up. They both suffered from this, a malaise of sleeplessness that one passed to the other, an accumulation of worries both shared and suffered separately: bills, kids, Beth’s operation, her itchy skin. Both rotating like chickens on a spit. Jeffrey—what was his worry that night? The license plate renewal? The mouse? The overdraft fees? That huff, that crack, and suddenly a multigenerational continuity was interrupted in the night.
Was that when it all started?
Or maybe it started when Beth, determined to emulate her predecessors who had shared the bed like twigs and didn’t give in to hopelessness, fortified the bed on Jeffrey’s side with a tower of books. As Jeffrey showered, she quickly sandwiched Everything Found in Hardware Stores between Eric Bogosian’s Sex, Drugs and Rock n’ Roll and the Egyptian Book of the Dead and rested the slats against the stack. It was a good fix. A plucky, vinegar-pie move. Just temporary, she’d said then, full of plans to learn a little woodworking and fix it properly. But then she grew tired again. There was the quiet harassment of her job at the circulation desk in the library down the street. The high protein diet that left her cranky and hopeless. The worry over the mouse.
Over time, the books began to slide, leaving sleeping Jeffrey listed at an angle, one arm and knee thrown toward Beth’s side as he sought higher ground in his sleep. Now, she’d wished she hadn’t tried to fix the bed, let him reach for her in the night, throw an arm around her waist, find love. But feeling the judgment of her faultless ancestors, Beth periodically shouldered beneath the bed, straightened the stack of books, righted the ship.
Jeffrey said he’d call a handyman, but he never did. Instead, she’d catch him at 3:00am eating toast with blankness on his face, or standing in the yard, staring up at the sky. She’d hide in her long T-shirt at the far end of the hallway, listening to the scrape of butter against bread long into the night. Who was he, this madman? The suddenly very old madman? And was she just as old? Just as mad? The latter thought consumed her more than the former. The long look in the mirror the next day, the hair coloring appointment. No thought for Jeffrey. The survival instinct, stronger in farmfolk, had to be. The preserves, the self-preservation. Deep in her bones. The stocking away of goods into putrid cellars.
Jeffrey was not like her. He was easy, always smiling, ever generous, always asking after people. Carrying groceries for the neighbors Beth avoided. Rounding up his purchases at Walgreens to donate to charity funds. She’d met him at the library. He’d been slim then. A weeping willow, she’d thought at first—his head listed to the side, hair stringy and limp, hanging toward the ground. He regarded her silently at the very end of the mystery section where she was shelving Agatha Christie, a slip of paper in his hand. Court-ordered community service. Book-shelving as punishment for a spray-painted peace sign at an inopportune hour. She was to take him under her wing for the day, a post-it note from her boss said. Young Jeffrey regarded her as if she’d fallen from the sky, without history, without fault, there to instruct him. He marveled at her knowledge of books, of the alphabet, of system and order. Beth found herself blushing. Young, willowy Jeffrey laughed at her jokes. She gathered up his adoration, squirreled it away and away again, for years.
Was it her? Had she bled his goodness dry? Did the depression grow in its absence?
Or maybe it was the bed. This damned bed. Maybe the tilt of the bed, the constant crookedness of his spine, triggered some change in him. Did the neurons in his brain all fall to one side, the other side empty, arid, a breeding ground for the wee-hour toast and bouts of weeping? Or had it always been in his eyes: the distraction, the sadness? How had she missed it? The young tilt of his head was lost—she’d noticed that much. Maybe she’d unknowingly been trying to force the tilt back into him. And maybe that was love enough.
Beth dove forth and wrestled with the mattress, the box spring, heaving it all upward against the wall. The floor beneath the mattress was abloom, nearly alive with debris. Dog hair, cat hair, parakeet feathers; socks, ribbons, coins, all the hair barrettes that went missing over the years, the bobby pins. Various types of fuzz, foam. A lost earring. An Amtrack ticket stub from their trip to the Grand Canyon, crumpled bookmarks. And Beth’s Under-the-Bed books, the books she was embarrassed to read. The Chick Lit, the Self-Help, consumed in secret and stashed.
Under the bed, the corners of rooms, the places not noticed: here is where debris collected, weblike, dreamlike, decades old. Paper receipts from a night out in 1992, the yellowed cellophane of restaurant peppermints, caught in an apron of dust and dog hair, woven together as if by a spider intent on catching memories, not flies.
She paused and closed her eyes, feeling her form materialize in a square of Indiana light. Now she was a girl, listening to her grandmother scrape paint from a wicker chair. A girl with no husband, no history, no piles of debris to remind her of what had been, what was lost, what she’d failed to notice. The ancestors, the owners of this bed would have taken note of every crevice. Assessed a room with Protestant rigor, no errant suspender or pantaloons left lying, collecting dust. They attended to every aspect of a room and of life—large and small. You could see it in their faces, the old photographs. We’ve accounted for it all, their dour, disapproving faces said. The floors, the lives.
The lives. Beth opened her eyes. Her life, here in abundant, filthy evidence. But was it filth? These soft, dusty poofs of memory, motes carrying secrets—dark and bitter, light and sweet, passing from decade to decade, heirlooms themselves, but truer to life in their transience.
Beth kicked the bedframe apart with her thick, farmgirl legs. She pinned one of the barrettes to her hair. Collected the train ticket, put a parakeet feather in her jewelry box. She ran the broom through the rectangle of dust, freeing it from the bed’s perimeter, until the floor gleamed with clean and sun.
When Jeffrey recovered, she would have a good bed for him. Something cheap, but sturdy. IKEA, Amazon, it didn’t matter. They would have a nap in the new bed, press together like twigs, let the dust collect beneath for as long as they might last in it.
