The Slippery Year

by Melanie Gideon

  We wait until they’re completely out of sight to make our run for it. And as we’re jogging down the path Renee whispers, “Take it to your grave. We will never tell them we came early.”

  “Or that you got a $250 speeding ticket,” I add.

  We swear on it.

  That night at dinner Renee says, “So the Indigo Girls were amazing?”

  “Closer to Wine,” I say, reaching for the bottle.

  “We are ridiculous—the World Cup. I should have known,” she says, rolling her eyes.

  “It’s not our fault. If we had sent them when they were seven we’d be old hands at this by now,” I say “We’d probably show up the day after camp was over.”

  “No, we broke the rules,” she says.

  “What rules?”

  “The letting-your-kids-go rules. It would have embarrassed them so much if they had seen us.”

  “One day we’ll tell them and they’ll laugh. They’ll think it’s funny.”

  “When?”

  “When they drop off their kids at camp and arrive a night early to pick them up.”

  Saturday morning we get there at just the right time. Not too early. Not too late. Adrenaline floods through me, but I force myself to stroll slowly up to Ben’s cabin. He’s standing out in front, dribbling a soccer ball.

  “Hi, Ben,” I say casually, trying to keep the emotion out of my voice. I don’t want to embarrass him in front of the other boys.

  We lock eyes and then he turns around and walks the other way. I stand there for a moment, stunned. Then I go after him.

  “Hey, Ben.” I grab him.

  He looks at me blankly. I sweep him up and hug him.

  “Hi, sweetheart. Hi,” I say.

  He’s stiff and shows absolutely no emotion. When he sees his father, however, he flies into his arms, shrieking, “Dad!”

  I try not to show I’m hurt, but I do a very poor job of it. I sulk through the World Cup and lunch. Ben keeps his distance, but when he thinks I’m not paying attention I catch him staring at me. When we get into the car he climbs into my lap.

  “I was so confused. When I saw you it felt like you never left,” he says. “I didn’t know what day it was. I had been waiting so long for you to come get me and then suddenly you were there.”

  Once I heard a child-rearing expert say that “I see” was the only response you should ever give your children, if in fact you wanted them to reveal themselves to you.

  “I see,” I say.

  “I didn’t wash my hair. I lost my water shoes. I only brushed my teeth three times,” he says.

  “I see,” I say again.

  “I didn’t eat the Gummi Bears,” he says. He frowns. “I don’t like Gummi Bears.”

  “You love Gummi Bears!”

  “You love Gummi Bears,” he says. “I love Skittles.”

  And so the conversation goes, all the way home. Ben asserting his independence—telling us that he is his own person with his own private life and we are not allowed anymore to decide what his favorite candy is or what he will be for Halloween.

  The future stretches out in front of me. I see myself making more mistakes, not fewer. Holding on when I should be letting go. Letting go when I should be holding on. The first nine years were the easy ones—when I could, for the most part, protect him from everything; when I was always in the next room when he took a shower, ready to run in and rinse the soap out of his eyes.

  “I’ve decided I don’t want to be a comedian when I grow up anymore,” he says. “It feels bad when you tell a joke and nobody laughs.”

  “It’s a tough career. You have to have a thick skin,” I say.

  “I don’t have a thick skin,” he says after a while.

  “Me neither,” I say.

  I turn my face away from him, thinking Oh God, oh God, oh God, not yet.

  July

  MARRIAGE CHANGES PASSION. SUDDENLY YOU’RE IN BED WITH A RELATIVE.

  I can’t remember who thought this saying up, but I’m sure it was a woman who was lying awake while her spouse snored loudly beside her.

  This is not 1973, I remind myself. This is not some hotel in Chatham. You are not on your family’s annual vacation to the Cape and this is not your sister lying next to you in the same bed, hogging all the blankets, breathing on you and periodically slamming her leg against the mattress so hard the entire bed shakes. No, this is your husband—the man that you love, the man that you voluntarily chose to spend the next one hundred years sleeping beside, which right now, at three in the morning, seems like a very bad choice, but what did you know? Who can predict these things? He slept like a dead person (and so did you) until your early thirties, at which point you stopped sleeping and he started driving his pigs to market in the middle of the night.

  Snoring is just snoring. But there’s a medical diagnosis for the twitching. PLMD—Periodic Limb Movement Disorder. As a result of my husband’s snoring and PLMD I have developed IWTFKYD—I Want To Fucking Kill You Disorder. All my girlfriends have it. They may not admit it, but they do. It’s a silent epidemic.

  My sleep deprivation has only gotten worse in the past couple of years.

  “Get used to it,” my doctor said at my last checkup when I asked her for a prescription for Ambien.

  “Forget the drugs. Get some earplugs. Men snore more when they get older and women sleep lighter. You’re lucky he’s too young for prostate problems. By the time he’s fifty he’ll be getting up two or three times a night. How old is your mattress? Maybe you need a new one. A firm mattress sometimes helps.”

  I think about this conversation as my husband’s leg slams down on the bed again, so hard I am propelled out of my wife-sized hole, across the mattress and into his extra-large-husband-sized hole.

  “Too hot,” he says and pushes me away.

  “We need a new mattress,” I say, crawling back over to my side.

  “Turn down the volume,” he says.

  “The TV’s not on.”

  “What’s that noise?”

  He woke himself up with his snoring. If I weren’t so tired I’d be laughing hysterically.

  “We’re getting a new mattress. Tomorrow,” I say.

  “Fine,” he says.

  “There’s a name for your disorder. Would you like to know what it is?”

  “I do not have a disorder,” he says. “You have a disorder.”

  “If I have a disorder it’s because of your disorder. Your disorder gave me a disorder.”

  He starts snoring again. I punch him in the back lightly. And then I punch him in the back a little harder. All this middle-of-the-night rage is really bad for a person. I have to do something about my IWTFKYD, or my marriage is doomed.

  May I ask,” says Steve at Sleep Galaxy, “a slightly personal question? What is the difference in weight between the two of you?”

  “A hundred pounds give or take,” says my husband.

  “That’s what I thought,” says Steve. “I’m very good at guessing people’s weight. What are you, about a buck eighty-five?”

  “Close,” says my husband.

  Did Steve just wink at me? I’m glad this is a mattress store and not a ski rental hut where not disclosing my true weight is a matter of malfunctioning bindings and resulting torn anterior cruciate ligaments. Oh, the power of suggestion. If my husband is 185 that would make me—well—tiny. Tiny is a very good frame of mind to go shopping in, but I’m sure Steve knows that.

  “Maybe we don’t need a king,” I say. “Maybe we could manage with a queen.” For my fifth-grade-sized self.

  “We’re getting a king,” says my husband.

  “Memory foam,” says Steve. “That’s what I recommend for couples who have such a size differential. There’s something for everybody in this bed.” He looks at me. “Let me guess. The entire mattress shakes whenever he rolls over?”

  How did he know?

  He pulls down a dusty wineglass from a bookshelf. “Imagine this is filled.” He places
the glass on the mattress. “Now jump on it,” he says.

  “Oh, no, I couldn’t,” I say.

  “Go ahead. Get on,” he urges me. “Jump!”

  I look at my husband. He shrugs. So I climb on the bed in my stocking feet and jump gently and then a little bit harder. I feel ridiculous doing this, but Steve makes his point; the wineglass goes nowhere. I climb off the mattress sheepishly.

  “And for you,” says Steve, looking at my husband, “what are you, about six-two—the most important thing is support. With memory foam you won’t have any pressure points. People tell me it’s like sleeping in a hand. Imagine. A giant’s hand. Cupped. Like so.”

  He presses his hands together like he’s holding a bird’s nest.

  “$2,000. Wow. That’s some sticker shock. I guess that’s what you get when you wait this long,” says my husband.

  “You’re not alone. Some people come in, they haven’t bought a new mattress for thirty years,” says Steve. “Life is too short to not sleep well. And you folks have a lot of life ahead of you. How about I throw in two memory foam pillows for free so you can have the whole foam experience?”

  You’re getting a new mattress?” says Ben later that day. “Can I have your old one?”

  “You don’t want the old one. That piece of crap is going to the dump,” says my husband. “Besides, your mattress is fine.”

  Ben makes a face. “It’s just that I’m nine. And it’s getting a little small for me.”

  “Get used to it. You’ll be sleeping in it until you go to college,” I say.

  “Can I sleep in the new bed, too?” asks Ben.

  “No,” says my husband. “You have your own bed.”

  “Well, maybe just once,” I say. “When you’re out of town on business. He’s curious. He’s never slept on memory foam.”

  “We’ve never slept on memory foam,” says my husband, rubbing his hands together, giving me the eye.

  Do you smell that?” I ask my husband a few days later after we have settled in for our first night in our new bed.

  Imagine a place. A place of nighttime renewal said the video on the memory foam Web site, which I’ve been visiting for days and can now recite by heart.

  “What?”

  “That odor,” I say.

  Where stress is relieved.

  “I don’t smell anything.”

  “It smells like rubber. Like gas. Like a kickball. And faintly like a cow field.”

  And what if you could go there? Tonight.

  “I’m hot. Is it hot in here?” asks my husband.

  “Don’t sweat on the mattress. What if we have to return it? They won’t take it back if it’s stained.”

  And every night.

  “Jesus, I think it’s the mattress. It’s breathing. It’s conducting heat.”

  I leap out of bed.

  “Where are you going?” he asks.

  Wouldn’t you want to go there?

  “To get a plastic garbage bag.”

  “Why?”

  “To put beneath you.”

  “I just paid two-thousand dollars for this mattress. I am not sleeping on a plastic bag.”

  I go into the kitchen and get the bag. I walk back into the bedroom. “Get up,” I say. “I’ll put it under the sheet. You’ll hardly feel it.”

  “This is ridiculous,” says my husband, trying to claw his way out of his memory foam hole. “This mattress is like quicksand.”

  Imagine a place of no sex. What if you could go to that place? Tonight and every night.

  Steve does not seem surprised to see us.

  “The memory foam is not for everybody, I’ll give you that,” he says. “It takes a while to get used to.”

  “It has this funny smell,” I say.

  “Oh, that smell?” he says. “It goes away, I’m told.”

  “You never told us it would smell.”

  He shrugs. “It’s like cilantro. Some people think it tastes like soap. Some people love it.”

  “I think we need an ordinary mattress,” says my husband. “A back-to-basics mattress. Something retro.”

  “How’s this for retro? How about a mattress that has all the style and romance of Hollywood’s most romantic era?” says Steve.

  “That sounds like a little too much style for us,” says my husband.

  “It’s called the Pureloom.”

  The mattress is edged in gold. It’s nearly sixteen inches thick. It’s covered with the plushest of pillow-tops.

  “No,” my husband says.

  “Handcrafted,” Steve says. “Go ahead. Get on.”

  “No,” says my husband again.

  I lie down on the mattress and groan.

  “Damn,” says my husband.

  “I’ll give you guys a few minutes,” says Steve.

  “Just try it,” I say.

  My husband rolls his eyes and gets on. Then he tucks his hand between his knees and falls asleep. Fifteen minutes later I go find Steve.

  “How much more?”

  “A few hundred.”

  “How many more hundred?”

  “Ten hundred.”

  “A thousand!”

  “You’ll have this bed for life. It’s the kind of bed you hand down to your children. Trust me.”

  I give him my credit card.

  I do not tell my husband we’ve spent $3,000 on this mattress. I keep it to myself, but by the time we get home the price seems obscene and I think I should cancel the order. I call my friend Robin for some advice.

  “I just spent $3,000 on a mattress,” I say. “I should return it, right?”

  “That depends. Does the mattress have a name?”

  “Allessandra,” I say.

  She sighs. “Allessandra. That’s so exotic. Ours is probably called Ira. Is it amazing?”

  “I’ve never felt anything like it.”

  “Then keep it. You’re going to spend a third of every day on that mattress. Can I come visit Allessandra?”

  “Yes. She’ll be here tomorrow.”

  “Let me know once she’s settled in and I’ll pop by for a quick nap. I’d offer up Ira’s services, but he’s a nebbishy little thing.”

  “I’m so excited,” I say. “I know this is ridiculous, but I feel like it’s the beginning of a new life. For us both!”

  I never knew it could be like this,” I say to my husband a few days later as we are preparing for bed. “I’m happy. I’m so happy.”

  I’ve been sleeping all night long. I barely hear his snoring. In fact, I think he’s stopped snoring. It’s a miracle.

  “It’s too bad we can’t see the headboard anymore,” says my husband. “The curly maple headboard that my oldest friend handcrafted just for us for our tenth wedding anniversary.”

  “You can see it—just press down on the mattress. There. Like that. A whole three inches is exposed. Give me a hand, will you?”

  He hauls me up on the bed. “You need a stepstool.”

  I haven’t told my husband, but I’m having an affair with our mattress. I think about her all day long. Anytime I get a chance I go visit her. The first thing I do is strip her of her sheets. I prefer to see her undressed, in her natural form. The way I first saw her in the mattress store. That’s how she is best appreciated. Her thoroughbred lines. Her Belgian jersey knit, hand-tied pillow-top.

  I’m going to have to be careful. There have been a few times when my husband has caught me trying to sneak off to bed at seven.

  “Don’t disappear. We have things to do,” he says.

  “Like what?”

  “Bills and weeding and what about that back rub you promised me?”

  “I’ll give it to you on the bed,” I tell him.

  “No, thank you,” he says. “I would like it here. On the floor. By the way, I’ve been asked to go to Singapore. I’ll be gone for two weeks. Do you want to come? You said you always wanted to see the East.”

  “Two weeks is a very quick trip to Singapore. You’re barely over
the jet lag and then you have to come back. I think I’ll just stay here. Hold the fort,” I say, while inside I’m thinking, Holy crap! I get the bed all to myself for fourteen nights.

  Space. I crave it. I have only one child and one husband, but still, it feels like such a limited and precious commodity.

  The first night my husband is gone, Ben grabs his pillow and crawls into my bed.

  “What are you doing?” I ask him.

  “I’m sleeping with you tonight.”

  “You most certainly are not,” I say.

  “You said I could,” he says. “When Daddy went on a business trip.”

  “I did?”

  “Yes,” he says.

  “Look,” I say. “We are not a family bed kind of family. Besides, you kick.”

  “I don’t kick. Anymore.”

  “Yes, you do.”

  “Fine,” he huffs and rolls out of bed.

  “Sleep tight,” I yell to him as he trudges down the hall.

  While my husband is in Singapore I stretch out into that bed. I live into it. I dream. I know this kind of dreaming is dangerous. I am not fantasizing about being with another man but about having my own bed for the rest of my life. Does this count as cheating? Who cares? I feel like I’m on my honeymoon.

  But all too soon the honeymoon is over. Once my husband returns home he mentions something about a crick in his neck. Then he asks if his constant snoring is bothering me.

  Then he asks if I would mind if he put a piece of plywood beneath the mattress, on just his side. Then he asks if it’s possible to beat the pillow-top off a mattress with a broom. Just bat it down a little bit so it’s not quite so soft.

  And then one morning he says, very quietly, “I know you love this mattress, but I hate it. I haven’t had one good’s night sleep since we got it. I’m really sorry, but we have to return it.”

  The problem is we are past the thirty-day comfort guarantee, which as far as I’m concerned is a great problem to have because we are not returning this mattress.

  We go back to Sleep Galaxy. Steve pretends he’s never seen us.