Mattresses Are Us

The first time I slept with Rob at his house, I was astonished by his bed. Though king-sized, it was so lumpy that I couldn’t imagine how he had slept on it for decades. He, however, had no complaint. He had found the mattress eons before at an estate-sale, and having grown up with few comforts and having worked in refugee camps as a young doctor, it was good enough—especially with the double-layer of foam toppers he had added several years back.

At first, I kept quiet. I didn’t want to be difficult. After all, doesn’t any relationship require accommodation? But it wasn’t easy. Aside from the lumps, Rob had put bricks on the floor under the headboard to tilt the bed at an angle and offset the effects of his heartburn. To keep from sliding south during the night, I learned to lie on my side with my torso wedged between the swells and my arm tight around his waist.

Rob and I were boomers who had met on a public health study tour of Cuba years earlier. We had weathered my divorce and his, and become frequent travelers across two states to be together. With the arrival of the pandemic, our desire for mutual comfort pushed us over the bumps of hesitation, and we chose to live together full-time, alternating between our two locations in Maryland and North Carolina.

As nights in Rob’s bed waxed, my tolerance for the mattress waned. I dared raise complaint. No, I asserted, I didn’t want a used mattress from Craig’s list. He couldn’t persuade me that buying second hand was a good idea just because we regularly slept on mattresses in hotels. Nor could I adopt his global perspective that we were lucky to have mattresses at all, though, as a former Peace Corps volunteer, I knew this was true. With reluctance, Rob agreed to visit a mattress store. I suggested that we down-size to a queen since this would be less expensive.

Rob is thrifty. That’s the word he prefers, though to me another word comes to mind. He’s also a philanthropist who considers a purchase self-indulgent if it involves unnecessary spending that could be better directed to building schools in Sierra Leon or houses in Haiti. The same moral sensibilities that drew me to him are a challenge to accommodate. I try to curb my more profligate style when it comes to joint purchases, though at times this too feels like trying to sleep on a lumpy bed. So, when a soft foam mattress that cost only $800 felt good enough in the store, I squelched my spendthrift longing for box springs and a pillow top, and we had it delivered.

The painful contortions that ensued for us both could only be assuaged with immersions in his bought-used hot tub. We persevered for weeks until, when I wasn’t looking, Rob called the store for a free exchange and came home with an even softer mattress—a marshmallow of a bed that grabbed and held us in position through the night. Was it the pillows causing his morning neck aches, he wondered, as he dragged more and more of them onto the ever-slanted bed.

We retreated to North Carolina where we slept not much better, on the long-ago-but- no-longer luxurious bed of my recently deceased parents.

Mattresses dominated my fantasy life, pushing aside worries about rising Covid numbers. A mattress isn’t a mere mattress after all. It’s the home plate we return to after running the bases of the day, the cradle where in slumber our feet find each other’s. It is where—snuggled under quilts, we feel protected from the world beyond.

I determined to upgrade. I went online. I sought tips on my neighborhood list-serve. Infinite options fueled my ruminations.

“Try to stay under $1000,” Rob advised, “and avoid brick and mortar stores where you’re paying for overhead.” Although he quickly rescinded the mentioned price limit, I couldn’t not remember it. After a dozen hours wandering the virtual hallways of the mattress industry, I decided on a $1200 box spring mattress from an online supplier that claimed to sell high end at low price. It arrived with “white gloves” delivery and the same white gloves agreeably removed the failed foam slab to the basement.

The new mattress was very firm. I felt hopeful. But hard was no better than soft, and when I awoke unable to move my neck, I knew this bed was no solution and that neither pillows nor toppers would make it so.

“What would life be without tribulation?” Rob remarked, willing to settle. Not me. I called the company. They agreed to refund our purchase and promised to call back to arrange for pickup. Their call never came and after a few weeks of nighttime suffering, we hauled it to the mattress graveyard in the basement, heaved it on top of the marshmallow one, and retreated again to my house.

There, over lunch a friend shared that she was eager to dispense with the bed in which her husband had died. It was a good brand and less than a year old. Ready to try anything, we agreed to move my dead parents’ mattress to Rob’s house and claim my friend’s dead husband bed for our North Carolina home. Alas, it was the worst of the worst. We sank deeply into its maw at night, only to claw our way out of our indentations in the morning. Our joints hurt. Making love was beyond consideration.

Residual concerns about what Rob would think disintegrated. I ordered a top-of- the line mattress for big bucks.

Our new mattress boasts 640 individually wrapped coils beneath three layers of soft, perforated foam that promise “all over ergonomic relief.” A layer reinforced with strategically placed gel pods provides lumbar support. We now rise with only the normal twinges of aging bodies, although Rob still adjusts his comfort by loading a pile of pillows onto his side and heaving them overboard one by one during the night.

Rob never chastised me for my extravagance. “It’s infrastructure,” he conceded.

 

Jeanne Lemkau: “I am a recently retired clinical psychologist who taught at a medical school in Ohio for 25 years and practiced psychotherapy for almost twice as long. I now live in Chapel Hill, North Carolina where I write, paint, and enjoy a good night’s sleep.”