Our marriage has been cursed with crappy mattresses. I’m beginning to take that as a sign. We bought our first mattress together, after we moved out of my bachelorette pad and into our first apartment in Ohio. It was a rush job. Not just the marriage or the move but the mattress, as well. The guy in the mattress store was lonely. He talked non-stop to my husband. I think it was his first week away from the bottle and he needed to talk so he wouldn’t drink.
My husband has this annoying personality flaw. He can’t cut anyone off in a conversation except me because he knows me so well and he feels comfortable doing it. He’ll cut me off but he won’t tell this lonely salesman who’s talking about adhesives and tire treads and weather and traffic and a dog he used to own and purebreds vs mutts and how he used to work as a mechanic but he was let go for drinking on the job and then his wife left him and here he is selling mattresses. Except he’s not selling mattresses. I’m the only one shopping and he’s ignoring me. He tells me nothing about the mattresses.
I am testing out all the mattresses, wondering what they’re made of. Springs? Recycled tire rims? His ex-wife? I can’t tell which one is comfortable. I’m pregnant. None of them are comfortable. But I know I want something firm and I know I want something cheap because that’s all we could afford. So our first mattress was purchased to get someone to stop talking and get out of the store before sunset. It was a nightmare mattress. It had this lonely, divorced chatterbox’s voodoo all over it. In a few years, plumbing pipes and old train parts, things that don’t belong in a bedroom, let alone a mattress, started protruding from the thin fabric and I talked Skye into picking out another one with me.
No wait! I know what happened! Someone gave us a mattress with a bedframe. We wanted the bedframe but not the mattress. But the mattress came with it and it didn’t have any stains. Just bad karma. The couple had gotten divorced. So the mattress had invisible divorce stains all over it. Where the first mattress was sleeping on crumpled up recycled cars, this one was a hammock and like the lady who gave it to us, without any backbone or support, whatsoever.
It was an easy sales pitch to talk Skye out of the free mattress and into a new one. A pillow top! One we both tried out in the store, without a salesman trying to have a three-way with us. Now that I think about it, I should be mad at Skye for choosing to talk to some boring guy with a comb over who can’t shut up, instead of climbing in bed with me with mattress number one.
I am building a case for mattress number four. I think if I bring up the previous mattress blunders he’s going to shy away from the subject. But my new angle is to get a KING-size bed!! Because he breathes too loudly.
This lovely seed was planted by my mother and I shall thank her for this long after she is gone. When I went on the cruise with my Dad she said, before “how was it” or “did you have fun”, “You shared a bed?” I thought I had upset her. I thought I’d committed some incestuous sin. I wanted to say, “Mom! The mattress was old and there were depressions where our bodies lay, divided by a ridge, from overuse that made a natural divider!” But she had not been coming from that very awkward incestuous accusation angle whatsoever. Thank God! Because I was sure we did nothing wrong and I didn’t want to have an argument about incest with my mother. She was merely concerned about the proximity of my ears to my father’s mouth. He snores.
I said, “Oh, that! Oh. I can sleep through that. I found it comforting. I knew he was still alive.” It was too late. The words came out and I couldn’t put them back. But it was true. There were times when his breathing was silent and I looked over at him and his chest was not moving. I explained this to my mother and she knew exactly what I was talking about. She has had the same thoughts. And then he gasps for air and then we sigh with relief.
I can sleep through my father’s snoring but not my husband’s windstorm nostril breathing. It’s the pitch. It’s one of those pitches that keeps me awake for hours, laying there wondering if I should tell him to roll over, or maybe attempt to gently grab him by his chin and his forehead and without waking him turn his head 180 degrees. There’s always my pillow. I could use that as a divider. Or place it gently over his face and press until the noise ceases. But I think he’d wake up and ask, “What are you DOING!??” And that would be awkward. “Um….I couldn’t sleep?” Bat eyelashes. Smile sheepish, innocent smile.
My mother recommends a king-sized bed over suffocating one’s spouse. She has always been levelheaded that way. So I will upgrade to a larger bed. He will go for that. He won’t go for a new queen-sized mattress because we’ve gone over that road so many times he has erected permanent roadblocks. And if I use the “I can’t sleep with you breathing with your head right next to me,” that will only annoy him. If I use, “We need more room to frolic,” he might go for it but he might know I’m tricking him. But I will eek out any remaining hope he has for frolic potential. And I will get that new mattress. Yea. He’ll see through it.
My backup plan if he sees right through the feeble frolic potential plan, which he will, is a more plausible plan. To snore. I will fake snore. But I’m going to have to do it right away, like seconds after my head hits the pillow, which isn’t my usual pattern, so I better make it sound authentic. He usually falls asleep minutes after his head hits the pillow and I still think he’s awake and I ask him a question like, “What are you thinking?” Wait. That’s not true. Anyone who knows we’ve been married for 14 years will know right away that that’s not true.
Scratch that. I really don’t want to know what he’s thinking. But I have discovered that he falls asleep within minutes after his head sinks into the pillow because I may have asked him some benign question or perhaps wanted to talk about my latest complicated problem to get it off my chest so I can sleep and discovered that while he was awake at the beginning of the sentence, he’s asleep by the middle and he opens his already blood shot lids and says, “I had just fallen asleep!”
I don’t ask what he’s thinking because he’ll tell me and I pretend to be interested and meanwhile I’m thinking something completely different, but act like I’m listening and he mumbles out some dates but they roll around in my head like marbles with no divot in which to rest. I can’t remember dates unless I see them written down.
Then the next morning, before the sun is up, after I’ve finally fallen asleep, I feel this wet scratchy thing press down on my cheek and I am dreaming so I assume it’s a giant insect from the rainforest and I swat it away and hurt his feelings. He ignores that he jolted me from a sound sleep and proceeds to repeat the dates he’d rattled off the day before. He wakes me up to tell me that our son has a doctor appointment late in the afternoon and not to forget.
After laying there for 20-minutes stewing about the fact that he woke me up after I’d just finally nodded off to sleep because I could not fall asleep due to his loud breathing, I call him back on his cell phone after he has left the house and I tell him never to wake me up to tell me something anymore because I can’t sleep in the same room as him and I didn’t sleep at all last night and he says don’t blame me that you couldn’t sleep and I had to wake you up and tell you because you don’t pay any attention to the calendar and I say well you could have waited until I was awake and called me in the middle of the day and he says something defensive like don’t generalize and say I always wake you up to tell you something and I say stop being so defensive and let me talk and he says you were blaming me that you couldn’t sleep and I say because you breath so loud!! This was the perfect time to say, “And we need a king sized bed!” Turn the argument into something productive. Something we can do. This is the way his engineer mind works. If we’re going to argue about something, it is only with the idea of fixing it.
But I didn’t suggest the fix. I hung up. And so maybe today won’t be the time to bring up the king- sized bed. But maybe it’s the perfect time. All the other times I’ve brought up “new mattress,” we were getting along. And it hasn’t worked. But maybe if we buy this mattress because we’re fighting over not being able to sleep, it would put a voodoo on the mattress. We’d end up giving it away to some young couple in need of a better mattress because we are splitting up and we don’t want that cursed mattress anymore.
I couldn’t do that to them. It’s bad enough starting out with a good mattress.
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