Roll Over and Over and Over Two Writers Share Their Beds

Nina wants to write about sharing beds. I’m not sure I want to get into this intimate
space. I’ve shared too many beds in my life, or maybe I’m worried I haven’t shared enough.

“How many have you shared?” I ask her, wondering if I could come up with a concrete
number for myself. I hum the beginning of a song, “There were ten in the bed...”

“Melissa, we’ve been sharing beds with some person or another for decades,” she says.
“Don’t you remember being a kid...?”

Childhood Illnesses

When you got sick, mom kept you warm at night. Your eight-year-old body shivered
against her white nighty as she placed a cool washcloth over your forehead and whispered you’d
be okay, that this would pass into tomorrow when she’d make you soup and let you stay home from
school. Together, in that twin bed, you were safe with her by your side, and the fever kept at bay
with liquid Tylenol that she’d tip into your mouth gently like a kiss goodnight. She would stroke
your tangled hair, keep a basin handy for puke, and never once berate you for taking away a
night’s sleep since you knew she had work in the morning. She loved you with every whispered
“drink this,” “rest now,” and with a physical closeness that felt like a hug.

“If I knew I’d be spending so much time in a twin bed, I would have bought a better
one,” I say to Nina, from a bed full of Squishmallows and stuffies, with dinosaur sheets and an
Ikea comforter. “We needed to be ready for sick nights or nightmares and my kid had outgrown
his converted crib bed and we bought the $60 one we found on Amazon.”

“You need an upgrade, for when they get old enough for sleepovers.” Nina climbs into
bed and two stuffies fall out. “There were nine in the bed...”

Sleepover Dramas

Thara and I lay belly down on my bed, legs bent up and feet swinging left to right. Rachael
sits on the floor and draws in a notebook.

Thara and I have to work on a video project for French class tomorrow. I’m excited
because I get to see David. He’s on the badminton team, the best player on the team. I’m the
worst. Rachael keeps scribbling, poetry or doodles, I can’t tell from my angle.

I grab the notebook from Rachael and draw a square, write MASH across the top. She
names four jobs, four numbers and four boys. She closes her eyes and I draw a swirl on the page
until she says stop. I count the layers of the swirl and eliminate items from the categories until
it’s just Apartment, writer, four kids and David.

“I think I have a crush on him,” Rachael says.

She never has crushes.

“I like him,” I say.

“You’re just saying that because I said it,” Rachael says. “You always have a thousand
crushes.”

That might be true, but David has been riding his bike to my house when he gets off work
and he made me a mix tape of U2 songs. And he’s shooting my French project in the morning
with his video camera even though he’s not even in the class. I don’t say any of this to Rachael.

When she tries to climb into the double bed with Thara and me, I say, “I don’t think
there’s room. You can get the sleeping bag down from my closet, though.”

At this moment we both stare at each other. I’m sleepy but alert, like a child struggling to
stay awake and not miss the fun.

“I wasn’t allowed to go to sleepovers. My parents picked me up at ten. I could feel each
girl waiting for me to leave so they could talk about me,” Nina says. “Soon invitations dried
up.”

“How long does someone need to be in the bed to consider it shared?” I ask, knowing
there have been times that didn’t last the night. “There were eight in the bed...”

Friends Become Lovers

Dawn's light streamed onto the bed, a tangle of cold twisted sheets where our bodies had
been entwined, the apartment a borrowed space, as all collegiate spaces typically are, this
moment borrowed as well. I study your muscular back and note the distance between us growing
with the rising sun. Gin made you do it, you’d later say. We shared a night; we shared a bed.
Your heart hammered against mine, your heat matching my own. We knew each other so I’d
forgotten to worry you’d wake up with that look I’d gotten with other men, of “oh you,” of polite
apology, of swift goodbyes. Post-nut clarity had no vision of me in mind; I was always the one
that was there, not the one they wanted. I thought we were more, but gin made you stay, and
when we were through you told me with juniper on your breath and a high five, that it was fun
and could I move over so you could get a little rest. I watched you move away, the bed suddenly
larger for your absence, and the loss of your weight pressed against me left abandoned in an
ocean of sheets, mired in self-doubt and loneliness, alone in our once shared space.

Nina looks sad and I want to reach across from my side of the bed to comfort her, to rub
her back the way my dad did when I was a kid and had trouble falling asleep, the way I do with
my six-year-old son now.

“I know that look,” I tell her instead. “There were seven in the bed...”

Almost One-Night Stand

“It’s late,” Daniel says.

“I should get going,” I say.

I stand. He stands.

“You could stay in my room. I promise not to jump your bones.”

I wonder if I misheard him, but I don’t care because I want to sleep with him, either
literally or metaphorically.

In his room, he takes off his glasses and places them carefully on the nightstand. His snug,
faded jeans stay on, as do my pipe-legged skater jeans, the cheap long-sleeve gray shirt from Old
Navy and the expensive Victoria’s Secret bra that is at least two cup sizes too small. I’m sure I
smell like cherry blossom body spray. He smells like cigarettes and whiskey, and rain seeped
into the damp green sweater that matches the green of his eyes. I get lost in those eyes, and I’ve
been lost a lot since I arrived in Northern Ireland. He puts his arm around me and I wait for the
inevitable move he will make. We just spoon as we fall asleep, my mouth still sweet with the
taste of fuzzy navels made with cheap orange drink.

In the middle of the night, we wake up, and I turn toward him and we start to kiss, his
mouth wet and sloppy against mine. He’s turned on and he presses against me through his jeans,
presses against the seam of my jeans in just the right spot. Even though it's freezing in the room,
I am flushed and warm from Daniel’s body.

“And then what happens?” Nina says cocooning as she pulls crisp white sheets off my toes
and around her body.

“And then he says we should just be friends and I leave for London and share a hotel room
with two other American girls for three days.”

I don’t tell Nina I have a thing for fancy hotel beds, for what can happen in them. That’s
for other stories.

“Hotels make me long for someone to come change my sheets daily,” Nina says.
“Resetting the night before and preparing for what’s to come next.”

I think of the last hotel I stayed in, unable to fall asleep on my own, but Nina has jumped
into the next bed and I follow. “There were six in the bed...”

Pregnancy Insomnia

I had a swollen belly, swollen ankles, and the mass of my child weighing heavily on my
bladder. Sharing the bed with a fetus was challenging for a side sleeper whose unbalanced
weight had me falling onto my back like a beached whale. My husband a weary buoy in the ever-
shifting tide of the mattress’ waves as I tossed and turned. The bed landscape of extra blankets
and body pillows hitting him like flotsam and jetsam. I needed something to hold me steady,
something that did not groan against my weight and heat. I needed a wall.

“But if I’m against the wall, how will I go to the bathroom? I’d have to wake you every
time to get out of bed. Walking in this state is nearly impossible so climbing over is truly
impossible,” I complained.

The solution was a wooden divider padded on both sides for me to push my then 220-
pound mass against, baby and all. “The Motherboard” shared the bed with us for the next three
months. A separator that supported both our needs for an uninterrupted night’s sleep. Well, if
you don’t count the heartburn, the baby kicks, the multiple bathroom trips, the bloating, the
itching, the heat... oh there was still heat of other kinds, too.

I know the heat Nina’s talking about. I didn’t feel that during my pregnancy or during the
months of breastfeeding when milk leaked all over the sheets at night. I feel it now, in my mid-forties when I write sexy stories for lit mags, and think about Alexander Skärsgard in "True Blood.”

“My friend Rachael was right. I’m awful for having all these crushes, right?” I say to
Nina. “Even though I love the man who sleeps next to me in bed every night, I’ve always got a
crush on someone, somewhere.”

“There were five in the bed...”

The “Middle” Marriage Bed

The king-size Tempurpedic was the Cadillac of bedroom options when we bought it—
lying side by side in the showroom for the test drive. Our bodies sank into the memory foam like
wine bottles packed for shipping. Hubby turned, I turned, and nary a whisper of movement
penetrated either end. It promised us a whole night’s sleep unencumbered by another’s slumber.
It promised us deep sleep with REM-filled dreams. It would be the largest, most expensive bed
purchase of our lives. We had kids and in-laws moving in. Didn’t we deserve the best? That
night we christened the mattress. Its kingliness elevated the stature of our master bedroom and
added to our performance but something was off. There was a dullness to the motions, a lack of
springiness. Like the bed absorbed each thrust, the lack of rebound was unsatisfying. Over a
decade of consistency and guaranteed release, this Tempurpedic was throwing a wet blanket over
the works. Would we be choosing sleep over sex?

“We tested out the sleep number bed,” I say, my body sinking into the fourteen-year-old
mattress that belonged to my husband before we started dating. “When my husband said he was
delirious from lack of sleep and blamed my snoring. We didn’t buy the $10K bed and instead
picked up a $30 wedge pillow from Wal-Mart.”

“Fourteen years is a long time for a mattress and a marriage. Two seven-year itches. I
hope the wedge pillow helped. But snoring’s nothing compared to years of lost sleep to babies,
toddlers.”

“There were four in the bed...”

Parent Trapped

Why couldn’t she just crawl into the bed like a normal child? Why was she there at the
foot of the bed at two in the morning like a child in a horror film? Why was she silently sucking
her fingers as she watched us? Wasn’t she cold? Wouldn’t she want the warmth of the parental
bed? To be sandwiched between her parents in a loving bundle? Instead, she saw me startle, eyes
wide, heart pounding at her sudden presence in the cold, dark room. She reached out her hand,
and I took it. She led me back to her room, to her full-sized futon bed next to a crib where only
her dolls slept. She climbed in and knew I would follow. She would continue to suck her fingers
with one hand and would stroke my hair with the other. She would curl a lock of “momma hair”
around her tiny fingers again and again and again until she’d fall asleep. Only then would I rest.
I’d never berate her that I had to work in the morning. The truth was, I wanted to be there to
soothe her. This moment of ours was precious and brought me back to all those nights when the
only thing that kept illness/loneliness/sadness at bay was someone with me, keeping me warm,
sharing my bed.

Even if for just one night.

“There were three in the bed...”

Before Dawn

My alarm hasn’t gone off yet when Lucas comes into my room. He’s all elbows and knees,
at this age, with a long, lanky body that stretches to three-fourths of mine. I scoot to the center of the bed to avoid the sharp points of his limbs, and he climbs in, a warm little brick against me.

It is a rare morning when he lets me curl my arm around him and settles into those soft
breaths that let me know he’s falling asleep. He wasn’t a baby who would sleep in our bed, even
before he was born, when I curled against the C-shaped pregnancy pillow, my breasts swollen
and full, when he would stretch from my bladder into my ribcage. He’s never been still.

He sleepily turns to me and throws a hand against my cheek.

“I love you, Momma.”

“I love you, too, Bug.”

“How long does this last?” I ask Nina. “When will he stop crawling into my bed and
letting me hold him?”

“It’s not a hard stop as much as a pause,” Nina says. “When a child starts moving within
the cycle of shared beds. When he trades Squishmallows for game controllers, furries for fist
bumps and whatever else is cool and eventually trades his room for a dorm room and beyond.
Some come back, with pets and kids in tow to share in love and hugs.”

“I might be nearly seventy before it happens if I live that long,” I say to Nina. “The curse of
having a child at almost thirty-nine.”

But I imagine this, my son as an adult, with a toddler that has the same dimpled chin as
me, as my father, and Nina’s children with children who have the same dark eyes and hair, with
pillows piled around us to make a fort or a spaceship, or just to prop us up as small hands
grapple with worn board books. And we’d sing the song, “There were two in the bed and the
little one said roll over.” And I hope that I’ll never be the only one in the bed again, lonely.