Joe Rukeyser
Pat Sylvia

Beds by Pat Sylvia                                                       

I am staying overnight with my son, Michael and his wife Aria and we’ve all just turned in. This is my first night in the 3-bedroom house they’ve just bought in Framingham, and I can’t help but wonder when and if the room I’m sleeping in will become a baby’s room some day, but I know better than to ask. Michael seems very content with his married life and I do know he appreciates having a little money these days. Here in bed I try to figure out how much he and Aria make together and realize it’s probably double what I made when I was bringing Michael up. As I lie in this too-hard double bed  in which my son and his wife used to sleep together and make love, I hear the murmur/murmur of their voices from the next room and smile here in the dark because I’m  so glad my son has found someone with whom he is happy. However, right now I can’t get comfy and I’m unable to get to sleep. I’m very aware of this firm mattress that is probably good for young bodies but not for this old one. I don’t feel like reading and I start thinking about beds...

After our honeymoon, Dan and I moved to Allentown, PA where he had a job with his father’s construction company. We didn’t have much money and ended up in a tiny apartment on the 2nd floor of a house on a steep hill. We had two rooms: an eat-in kitchen with old, torn linoleum on the floor and a small combination living room/bedroom dominated by a dark, imitation mahogany double bed. The shades at the windows were torn and the furniture old, scratched and unmatching. The sleeping arrangement was strange for us because Dan and I had never spent the night together in one bed. Even on our honeymoon there were twin beds in the hotel.  It was very late when we brought our luggage upstairs and we each went down the hall to the shared bathroom – I inserting a diaphragm because I knew we would be making love on this, our first night in our first home together. I was feeling very grown-up all of a sudden at twenty-one and decided that I would definitely not tell my mother when I called her tomorrow to let her know where we were, that we shared a not-too-clean bathroom with god-knows-who. I knew she would disapprove and think Dan wasn’t a good-enough provider for her daughter. When I got back from washing up, Dan was already in bed wearing a T-shirt and boxer shorts. We got under the covers and when we turned towards each other the whole bed collapsed with a huge bang and fell to the floor. I started to giggle and then laughed hysterically but Dan didn’t think this was very funny and tried to shush me up, but the more he said sh-sh the more I laughed – I couldn’t stop - and we both knew with absolute certainty that the people downstairs had heard the whole thing. We slept on the floor that night and this would be the first of many differences and misunderstandings in our marriage and an indication of what was down the road. Dan liked sex but was a prude and not into exploring or taking chances, or just giving in to lust or the fun of lovemaking. In all the years we were together, I never once saw him naked.

Now I hear Aria next door give her ladylike hoot of laughter and think of her and Michael in that huge king-sized bed of theirs and wonder how they ever find each other with all that space between them, but immediately stop my thinking in that direction because I don’t want to go there - imagining my son and his wife making love.

I was amazed to see what Roger, my second husband, had done in our master bedroom in the new house he’d built for us in Stamford, CT. The room had orange and yellow thin-striped wallpaper hung horizontally. The bed-wall was completely mirrored floor to ceiling and the queen sized bed was low, resting on a platform. I lay down on it and looked around the beautiful and unusual room, realizing the mirror provided a look of spaciousness and elegance. The bed’s attached night stands and all the furniture was white, matching the white shag carpet. Roger’s exquisite taste enabled us to furnish our home at a good cost because of his architect’s discount and I, now in my early 40’s, was very much aware that I’d never lived in such luxury. I also realized that I liked the luxuriousness very much.  On that, our first night in our new home, Roger and I put our little boy to bed in his own large bedroom and then sat down in the lovely sitting room and talked about the house and I felt very adored and cared for that first night there. However, I closed my eyes to our nakedness while we made love because all that mirror took a lot of time to get used to, reflecting, as it did, our beautiful intimacies (aa well as the very ugly ones, as it turned out.) 

Michael and Aria are still murmuring quietly now, hardly more than a whisper, as I think about Larry’s bed. The first time my third husband and I made love was at my place. I’d invited Larry over for supper and the kissing had gotten hot and heavy so we walked upstairs to my bedroom where, in anticipation, I’d made the bed with fancy sheets. Larry got undressed immediately and lay relaxed and naked on the bed watching me undress by candlelight as self conscious of my body as he obviously was not of his. Love making with Larry was wonderful fun, exciting and satisfying. The next weekend he invited me to his place, a run-down, un-charming farm house. When we went to bed, the sheets were clean but the mattress was so lumpy and soft that there was no getting comfortable. After making love and falling asleep we rolled and bumped into each other all night long. I was grainy-eyed the next morning but pretended I had slept just fine, because I didn’t want to sound like the cranky lady I was becoming at sixty-four and also because I was falling in lust with this man who was to become my third husband, and thought that if things went well, I could convince him to buy a bigger and better bed, which we eventually did.  

And other beds: The many, many remarkably comfortable too-large beds in the countless hotel rooms I occupied on business trips around the country during my working years when I often thought how nice it would be to share that certain luxuriousness with someone I cared for. And the double bed Cynthia and I were forced to share on our trip to London. Best friends we were, but it was not comfortable for either one of us to sleep together in that teeny tiny room, where each night we curled up as far away from the other as possible. And the first water bed I ever slept on with my Irish friend Bob. We had gone to Maine for a little vacation, and found a B&B. The bed wasn’t fully inflated so we rolled uncontrolled around in it laughing hysterically most of the night – there was absolutely no way we could even think about lovemaking under the circumstances.. And the bed I shared with my daughter for one night and one night only. It was in her first apartment after she graduated college and there was no place else for me to sleep. After the first night, she chose to sleep on the short loveseat - preferring it to sharing a bed with her mother. And the coziness of the very narrow bed on the Pullman train I took to college and back. I loved the rocking and wheel-noise and slept with the shade half open and watching towns and fields roll by from New York to Chicago and back again.

I’m finally drifting, drifting off in this sweet-smelling bedroom. The children – my son and his wife – are quiet and  probably asleep, and now a few tears seep in sorrow for myself; not so much for not having anyone to love or hold me this night, but for all that pillow talk intimacy and for the murmurings – oh, those sweet and lovely murmurings.

PAT SYLVIA is a writer and professional educator After retiring from the corporate world as a business consultant to management, she moved to Rockport, MA and began tutoring in ESL programs and at the Rockport High School where she also runs an annual Writing the College Essay workshop. Pat’s writes memoir, poetry, and flash fiction. She has been running memoir writing groups for four years and recently designed and facilitated her first writing retreat – an experience that will hopefully be repeated on a semi-annual basis. Pat future plans include the publication of an anthology of memoirs written by the members of her workshops – past and present..

Snow
by Joe Rukeyser

In the lowering afternoon darkness snow began to fall. And, with it, midwinter blew itself across the flat, desolate, landscape of the South Bronx. By four o’clock, wind-blown snow drifts would cover the small Quonset hut we lived in, isolating us from hope and any contact with the outside.

There must have been hundreds of these temporary, cheap, prefabricated houses (a lot like Iroquois long houses) built by the navy in clusters among the old cemeteries and landfills as an encampment along a barren stretch of Bruckner Boulevard. They were purposely disconnected from the real neighborhoods of the city with permanent homes, sidewalks, stores, post offices, movie theaters, and trees.

My parents and I had recently moved into one of these rough corrugated metal-covered huts, my father having just been discharged from the army at the end of World War II. Like the other veteran’s families, we had two small rooms: a kitchen-living area near the entrance and a bedroom with a cramped bathroom, behind it.

It is the day after Christmas 1947.

My mother is standing by the door in the dim morning light as my father leaves for work. Her pale gray cardigan sweater is pulled tightly around her and she watches as he walks down the short blacktop path to the street and our faded green DeSoto. She holds me in her arms against her hip, even though I am big enough to stand by myself. It is cold and there are goosebumps on my arms under the long sleeves of my pajamas.

“Marty, call me. Please be careful”, she calls to him. “Don’t you think you should stay home today? Marty?.”

He turns his head, his gloved hand holding the snap brim of his hat against the wind, and looks back toward us, smiling but he says nothing. As he walks around to the driver’s side of the car, the wind blows open his long army-green wool overcoat, flapping it at his knees.

The sky is like pillows of lead; the air is filled with the smell of approaching snow.

She puts me down as she leans further out the door. “Marty, maybe you shouldn’t go.”

This time he does not turn. He opens the car door and climbs in behind the wheel with only a glance in our direction as he puts the key in and pushes the starter button. He looks down the empty street ahead of him. The engine winds, catches, and whirs.

I wrap my arm around my mother’s leg through her cold cotton housedress. We wait and watch as the car wheels turn slowly, hesitating, and then the DeSoto moves resolutely away from us, exhaling vapor into the still air behind it.

We watch until there is no more DeSoto to see. Until there is no hope that the brake lights will brighten and he will stop and come back.

There are no other cars moving on the narrow road and there is no movement on the dirt path that runs along beside it. A thin string of colored lights on the house next door goes out and someone turns a light on in their front room and pulls up the shade.

My mother ducks her head back and closes the door, turns the latch, and we feel the heat of the room fill the space in the entrance again. She stands staring at the door as if it will open again or as if she could see through it to the road and the parkway beyond.

They had talked all morning as my father shaved and got dressed.

“Marty,” she said, “Please stay home today, nobody else will be there. It looks like it might snow.”

I wanted him to tell her he would stay home. I wanted her to stop asking him.

Later, she sat at the table with him, talking to him as he ate his oatmeal, his head dipped down towards the bowl. He said that he had to go, that if he didn’t go to work, he wouldn’t get paid and then he pushed the empty bowl toward the middle of the table and got up to get his coat. He said that if it got bad out he would come home early.

I watch her now from my seat at the table. She pulls aside the window curtain, looks out into the gray air and, disappointedly, lets the curtain fall, she sighs, turning back to look at me.

“Finish your breakfast,” she says as she goes to the sink.

Every few minutes, she stops to walk to the window again. She looks out, sighs, and turns back to what she had been doing. This is how we spend the day. I sit at the table with books, or lunch, or crayons and she does her work and her watching.

By mid-afternoon the first few quiet flakes begin to fall. My mother has begun to cook our dinner and the heat of the oven makes the air in the room tick.

The phone has not rung all day. He has not called. Every so often my mother picks up the heavy black receiver from the table beside her bed and listens for a dial tone, checking to see if it is working, and then places it back on its cradle.

This time she sits on the bed, holds the receiver to her ear and turns the black rotary dial and waits, her forefinger pressed to her lips. I sit next to her and can hear the thrumming as the phone rings on the other end.

“Fairbanks Four Eight thousand,” I hear a young, bright, woman’s voice say.

My mother takes a breath and quickly says, “Hello, can I please speak to Marty?”

“One moment please.” My mother looks at me and then away, to the wall.

“Hello? Yes, Marty is back in production and cannot come to the phone. May I ask who’s calling?”

“This is his wife. Can you please ask him to call me as soon as he can?”

“I sure will, Gloria. Bye now.”

My mother holds the phone to her mouth as if about to say something and then she presses it against her chest for a moment before putting it down. She stands next to the bed now, looking at the phone, turning her wedding ring around her ring finger with her thumb.

She reaches for the phone again and calls back. This time she says, “It’s very important.” And waits. This time my father comes to the phone.

“Marty,” she says. “Why didn’t you call me?” I have been waiting all day.”

I hear his voice but cannot hear what he is saying.

“When are you coming home; its getting late? Don’t you see it is snowing?”

Again, his muffled voice.

“Yes it is. I can see it. It’s not just flurries. There is a foot on the ground. Please, Marty… I know you have to go. Don’t hang up. I want you home. I will have dinner ready at six. Please don’t be late.”

The receiver goes down hard and my mother holds her hands tightly in front of her at her waist. She rubs the back of one hand with the other and then clasps them together, whitening the skin at her knuckles as she walks through the curtain into the kitchen. I follow her and she picks me up, holding me close to her chest.

We sit at the table again. She has stopped cooking and she holds me in her lap and her head in her hand. I feel her warm breath against my cheek. We rock slowly back and forth. The wind has begun to press now, in whipping gusts, against the door. I turn and hold her with my arms around her shoulders.

“It will be okay,” I say.

She gets up, holding me against her hip and goes again to the window. The snow now has covered it and blocked any view of the outside. It feels as though the wind is throwing snow in fists-full against the window.

Putting me down beside her, my mother steps to the door and turns the doorknob. She pulls the door towards her a few inches and looks out to see if my father is coming down the street and then, suddenly blown in by the wind, the door swings open and the snow falls inward, tumbling around our legs, covering our shoes. Thick white snow fills the narrow entrance way. She pushes back on the door, packing the snow against the doorframe into a solid wall which holds the door open.

The wind now blows unhindered through the open door and blowing snow rushes in with force, matting the snow against her arm and legs, stinging my face. She pushes again. The door does not budge. I put my hands on the door and push with her from behind. It does not move.

Gusts blow by us ripping the napkins and cups off of the table and flapping the bedroom curtain, blowing without resistance into the bedroom, swirling around the bed and lifting the heavy brown covers. The lamp is toppled off of the table by the bed and the light goes out.

Snow now covers the floor, forming a puddle near the oven, its heat no longer able to warm the room.

My mother cries, “Where is he?!” She picks me up and carries me into the dark bedroom and I stand on the bed while she puts on my snow suit, boots, and soft leather hat with the ear flaps. Her hands are shaking. She pulls her brown cloth coat from the narrow closet and puts it on. Tears fill her eyes and run over her cheeks. Her lips are pressed firmly together, wrinkling her chin. She sinks to the bed and holds me to her side. My face and my hands hurt with the cold.

“What has happened to him?” she cries. “Why is he doing this to me?”

Why is he doing this to her? I think, and move closer to her.

There is no more inside and outside. It is all one constant swirl of wind and snow. We huddle together on the edge of the bed, our faces turned away from the door, our backs against the wind.

The light in the kitchen flickers once and a pot slides across the stove and hits the floor.

Picking me up, my mother carries me back toward the door, past the pot on the floor, her hand blocking the wind from my face, stepping through the slippery mat of snow and green peas. “Where is he?” she cries. It is too cold to stand near the door and we go back to the bedroom but she cannot see out from there. So we again go to the door. Back and forth, and each time as we approach the door, “Where is he?“ she pleads.

And then he is there. He is caked in white. His hat and coat are frosted with ice and snow. He pushes the door inward and kicks the mounds of snow away with the side of his leg. He turns, braces his shoulder against the wooden door, and pushes against the wind. It slams shut. The frigid, racing, air stops. It is silent. We stand together in a dirty puddle of melting snow, watching him.

He looks at my mother in her coat and at me in my snowsuit and then at the debris on the linoleum.

“Where have you been?” she says.

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