Go to bed.
It seems that one should know how to get into bed. Especially when the bed is an item of long-standing acquaintance, not some cantilevered affair with differentiated heat settings, possibly requiring stairs or a specialized license. No, just a bed: Queen-sized, pillows at the head, blanket at the foot.
There’s so much in these late middle years for which no one prepared me. Not the increased level of difficulty in parsing the spines of my 1,000-odd CDs, even with glasses on, nor the genuine attachment that a former world-wanderer — once happily dependent on the kindness of strangers — now finds in assaying the most efficient route from point A to point B, nor the equally genuine irritation to be found in losing an entire 10 minutes by accidentally taking Western, which runs too far east.
Until one’s middle years, Americans are cossetted by counsel. Childhood is remarked, noted, and dissected in slices of weeks, months, and years; adolescence brings guidance and warnings less granular but more dire; talk of our twenties crashes loudly through the door almost before the years themselves arrive, what with Education and Profession and Ugly Bumping; and then of course the chupa or priest or court clerk, all depending on your background but each remarkably similar, when you really think about it, in their approach to the joining of two human lives.
Up until this point — and even taking into consideration my own shockingly late troth-plighting, at age 31— getting into bed was a simple affair. You pulled back the sheets; you pulled up the sheets; you were in. What you did next was nobody’s business but your own.
The decision to introduce progeny onto the scene, however, throws a uniquely comical hitch into a pregnant person’s approach to bedtime, perhaps the first hint that one had heretofore been sleeping in hubris. There are discomforts that can’t be anticipated or explained to anyone who may have spent the night beside you, unmolested by pregnancy, and as you grow larger, quite without your input or say-so, it becomes increasingly hard to know just where all the body parts will find their rest, either the wee ones luxuriating on your spleen, or the larger ones, pushed aside by the wee ones. I tried to remedy the situation by introducing a body pillow to the mix, the kind of temporary solution that introduces surprising complications even as it solves the temporary problem. Who has room for an extra body?
By then, you are (or I was) middle-aged, or very nearly, and the jokes about not going out as late, or as much, or at all, sting a little with their inaccuracy, tempered only by their accuracy. One gets under sheets that are already littered with stray small bodies, made of either plastic or flesh, but one presumes — nay, clings to the hope — that this too is temporary. Soon, you assure yourself, you will know in advance what your bed holds.
But while you were sleeping, well or poorly or not at all, another reality padded up and cuddled in: the slow but inexorable accretion of wonky body parts — starting, perhaps, with the low-back pain for which you’re already doing PT, or the shocking plantar fasciitis in your right heel, or the inexplicable stiffness behind your left shoulder which means you now have precisely two sleeping positions available to you, and as you settle in it becomes clear that not just tonight but whenever you sleep on your back the heel is going to ache, just beneath the ruff of dry skin you can never polish into anything remotely soft, so you lie, mostly, on your right side. And then one day, somehow, you wake up perky, and you go out walking, briskly, ignoring the recalcitrant heel and enjoying the early morning sun and the smooth feeling of your muscles as they perambulate, in miraculous concert, to the park, and BLAMO you are on the concrete, where one is not meant to be, and you’re bleeding profusely from your right temple and your right cheek and your right knee, but you can make it back home, and your startled spouse can take you to Urgent Care, and it could have been so much worse, really, would you like to see the photos? But come the night and it’s time to get into bed, there’s no way in.
You stand, and you consider — you ache and want only to sleep, but yet you must consider. Lead with your ass, throw the uninjured leg up, arrange sheets and pillows, gingerly introduce the bandaged knee to the six square inches of space afforded by the sheet now tenting gently over the body pillow (which, to your surprise, never left the bed), arrange face on hand on pillow, and hope that exhaustion will be enough. Exhaustion and the pill that no one told you that you, too, would be taking on more nights than you might otherwise wish.
No one warns you that by the time you’re in your late middle years, you will have accumulated and collected, lain bare and uncovered, so many of these nagging failures of the flesh and small calamities of functionality that your bed will, on many nights, become not a place of respite but a source of affliction. That your body is failing, and in an act of universal injustice, will not even be allowed to fail comfortably.
I was 35 years old when a body pillow became the third partner in my marriage. The stretch and yawn and vast span of time since has been populated by children (they do, at least, tell you about children) but it has also been full of breakfast and lamps and loud music and cars gone to the mechanics and shopping for a new one and other people’s bodies betraying them and mistakes and sorrows and joys that were so long ago that I don’t remember whose they were anymore, even as I remember enough to smile or weep. Not because I’m old, because I’m not, but because decades are long and there have been rather more of them than there used to be.
My father was 35 years old when he died. I imagine no one warned him about brain cancer as he played college ball and joined the Air Force and became a teacher and fell in love, and anyway, how can you warn a man so young that the day is quickly approaching on which his wife and three children will function without him, his side of the bed empty, the quotidian contents of the next decades and the ones after those taken from him slowly and then, to borrow from an author he never got to read, all at once.
I apply cream to my heel and a medicated patch to my back, swallow my pill and shift my pillows, and perch on the edge. I fold, I unfold, I creak, and take into my arms the partner I always hold, even as the other one washes dishes downstairs. No one told me the decades would be so long, every night.
