BED STORIES

When Bob’s daughter, a year older than me, was dying of cancer, we took her son home with us.  Partly this was for the boy and partly it was for Bob whose own son had been lost in a divorce at about that age and partly it was to help manage  the daughter's recovery from surgery.  I made a pallet for the boy in what we called the “Indian Room.”  We hadn’t thought ahead enough to buy a bed for him.

Unfortunately, the room was also used to store Bob’s anatomy skeleton, a plastic reproduction that hung under a dust sheet with its feet sticking out under the cover — across from the boy’s eyes.  A while after turning in, a finger poked me.  “That skellington is just too much.  Can I sleep with you?”  I bailed him into the middle where he settled into our body heat and went straight off to sleep.

Long ago I saw a short video about a bed on wheels that was used as a stage for a life.  The person was born in the bed, grew up in the bed, made love in the bed, was sick and recovered in the bed, finally grew old and died in the bed.  Meanwhile the bed rolled through time, its changing bedding flapping.

In some times and places beds have been group family platforms, even with fires under them for heat.  Sometimes people have taken hot stones or bricks under the covers or used smoldering embers in long-handled pans to slide back and forth under the covers to pre-warm them.  When I was small, we had hot water bottles with flannel covers.  No one had invented heating pads.  Our bedrooms were not heated, but it was relatively mild in Oregon and we had homemade quilts.

As a single adult I used electric blankets until I discovered that the cats would get shocks if they clawed them.  Then I switched to electric mattress pads that are thick and built to accept weight.  People must have thought to try using both types at once because the directions specifically forbid that.  

I admit that in the first Montana winter I freaked out and began to sleep with Bob.  I was a virgin and it was as much about reassurance as sex, though sex was not neglected.  His house was rented from his mother and furnished with cheap second-hand items.  The bed was sheet metal printed to look like wood.  His mother lived across the street and was in charge of the bedding.  She came daily to make the bed after checking for evidence.  She did his laundry and must have noticed that he didn’t wear pajamas anymore.

At one time my predecessor, a little blonde three years younger than me, was staying in one upstairs bedroom and Bob’s son, whom she preferred to Bob, was staying in the other.  None of this was according to social standards but no one intervened.  Bob’s bedroom was downstairs off the main living room.  I kept closing the bedroom door, but Bob would open it back up because of needing the heat.

One morning the blonde woke early and came downstairs before Bob and I were up.  There was nothing to do but move in as close as I could under the covers and hope she didn’t notice.  She stopped to wish Bob good morning — by now she had decided to treat him as a “good dad” after growing up with a very bad abusing dad which explained a lot.  No one of us let on that I was there but they must have been making faces and mouthing words.  What was I thinking?  I wasn’t.

Bob’s mom didn’t object to me because I was an educated Scots-Irish good girl — I WAS good except for breaking the rules about sex in this one case.  She despised the blonde as low-class and sullied.  When she scolded her errant son (more than forty years old) his response was to build himself a house with a room in it meant for the blonde.  She never lived in it.  I did.

Because the family owned and ran the Browning Merc, no relative bought anything anywhere else.  Continuing to visit Bob’s new house until he took her key away, she put an electric sheet on the bed.  It was flimsy but warm.  The house was behind the Scriver Studio and Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife and was built with twice as heavy wood as was usual.  We kept a lot of animals. 

I was sometimes pretty unhappy.  One old rancher told me decades later, “I always thought Scriver used his women too hard.”  At the time a rancher told Bob I was a young woman who was meant to be bred -- like a cow.  Human babies were not wanted so Bob brought a series of animal babies, which he mothered as much as I did.  One spring he and “the boys” — which was how we referred to the grown Blackfeet men who were the crew -- spent a day digging up a den of foxes.  I was napping when he dropped a cub onto me.  

The pretty little creature found that the space behind books on the shelves made good dens.  She ate her share of the gophers we hunted every morning to feed the captive eagle and she slept with us.  When she was teething, she severed all the wires in the electric sheet.  So much for that.  We left the windows open and there were no screens, so she jumped out at night and was back to sleep by dawn.  One night she just didn’t come back.  By then she was sexual and smelly.

Another predecessor came back into Bob’s life.  He had been in love with the way she was, though she was his second wife’s sister so they never had sex.  She was glamorous, the former wife of an Alberta hockey star and used to luxury.  But she claimed to be sad and never to have had good sex.  She came to pose for Bob's sculpture and stayed with us, somehow in bed with us.

The two of them claimed that she had come into bed with her sister and him as well.  So he played the role of the teacher, which he once was -- which is how he married his first wife, his student,  because she was pregnant.  I was arranged in the middle of this bed-trio and Bob used me to demonstrate how to make love.  He rubbed my back gently (which he usually never did) and I played along by writhing and moaning a bit.  She tactfully admired us.  We never went farther.

Why didn’t I object, leave, or push things to climax?  I was a “good girl” because I was passive but only in terms of what I did.  I actively took note of everything.  This former sister-in-law was merely a fox with no fur and I would use her petite, brunette, French-Canadian glamour in stories.  Her psychology was the real subject — not how to take her to climax, but how to account for how she was: her lack of education, her desire for what she called “clout,” her hour of self-care every morning which meant we had to use the basement bathroom in the shop.

I was a cat, watching and not accepting social judgements because it seemed more important to understand it all.  In the process — it WAS a process — I separated.  Maybe I’d always been separate.  I think about that, too.  It's about writing.