Images of a Mattress

Short Fiction | Travis Tyler Madden

It is when you’re making your bed one morning that you realize; it is how many sides of your bed are touching the walls that indicate where you are in life. 

Georgia Parker-West, you think of yourself as you look at that impressive bedspread, the floral design you would have thought was so boring when you were younger, you’re a grown woman now. You hate to sound exactly like your mother, like, surely, every parent, but it all happened so fast (ugh). You can still remember years ago, how different your room looked by comparison. Even though you were more of a tomboy, your bed still had pink sheets, a bed skirt, a night light. All of that is gone now, replaced by the regal drapery of your purple comforter, the fancy quilt, a hundred throw pillows. Adulthood.

I’m old, you think. Not negatively, at least not the recklessly negative everyone else associates with age. But there is a longing, a sudden realization of how much time has passed, of the different person you’ve become.

There is one thing about the sight of your bed that’s never changed. The constant in your life, what can always be found near you, in your room, in your bed, is a book. As a little girl, you wore out your copy of Treasure Island, damn the fact that it was “for boys,” that little ladies were supposed to read things like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (though you read that too, you read everything). You remember its cracked spine and worn-out pages, its dog-eared corners, and the hours upon hours you spent looking for buried treasure within its pages and out in your own backyard.

The books surrounding your bed are vastly different now. Biographies of past presidents next to chick-lit, once-dusty tomes you found in used bookstores. 

Your bed itself has changed at a similar pace. You remember your high school frame, three-sided and metal, perfect for stringing out-of-season Christmas lights. You would have girlfriends over for sleepovers, set the lights to a timer, each of you falling asleep one by one, friends strewn about the floor, you in bed, lights keeping away the ever-encroaching reality none of you were quite ready to face. You remember wanting to be grown so badly, wanting to be an adult, only to, moments later, think Not yet. Not so soon. Tell me I still have time to be like this.  

The only time someone else would sleep in your bed would be if only one friend was over, because you never wanted anyone to feel left out or like you loved them less. 

In college, like everyone else, you used your bed for everything. The memories are so clear, it’s like you’re standing before it now. You can see yourself sitting cross-legged on that canyon- and mountain-ridden dormitory mattress, textbooks strewn about you, betraying the intelligence of a girl who, on the surface, appeared to be just like everyone else. The poster that hung over your bed was a generic Starry Night, because you thought it was simple. Harmless. Something that could likely be found on any other dorm wall. And yet you shared your bed with Chemistry 304, Literature of the African Diaspora, and many a famous dead writer; Poe, Wilde, Blake. 

There were the nights you piled as many people as humanly possible onto that mattress, arms and legs spilling off, everyone bound together under blankets, watching bargain bin copies of movies of all kinds on the biggest screen you had; Kirsten’s thirteen-inch laptop. Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast. Star Wars. Casablanca. Anything poor college kids could get their hands on. 

Your first apartment felt different than the dorm because it was more yours (as much as anything rented can be). The art you hung above your head was a framed copy of Man Ray’s Explosante-fixe – Prou del Pilar. There were still books piled around your bedroom, but they were titles picked up at independent bookstores, books whose authors you’d actually met, talked to, learned about firsthand. 

Things changed again when you began sharing a bed with a spouse. Though you’d hoped and believed that Aaron would be the one, he wasn’t. Nevertheless, when he moved in, you had to learn how to let things go, to let them stop being yours, and begin to share. A childhood lesson absorbed again in adulthood. You did that a couple times, with Aaron, and with Jason, and, finally, lastly, permanently, with Scott.

Now, there is a bowl on your side of the bed where you put your engagement rings at night because they’d always end up getting snagged on the quilt Scott’s mother gave you, the one you want her to see you’re using. There are your reading glasses perched on top of your copy of some random airport paperback thriller, something you want to read just for a little bit of escapism, to take your mind off of everything else. It’s next to the empty mug of tea you forgot to take downstairs last night, the bag dried and shriveled at the bottom. 

And now, you have another copy of Treasure Island, though it is not yours, not on your bed. It is on your daughter’s bed. Lydia’s bed. You walk into her room, stop in her doorway, and gaze upon the book, the bed, even though she is not there. Lydia’s bed reminds you of yours when you were her age. The pink, the bed skirt, the poster, the stuffed animals, and yet there are muddy boots at the foot of the bed. It is all so similar. Right down to the book. It is worn like yours, loved like yours. You know that this moment will pass too quickly, so you try to take a picture of it, to preserve it for all time; the sight of your daughter’s bed, and the sound of her and her father outside, playing in the backyard, the sounds of screams, and of plastic swords clashing.