Bedroom Sets
By
Fred L. Taulbee Jr.
2173 words
Copyright 2010 Fred L. Taulbee Jr.
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***
Darla was the sun and the sea and the beach and bikinis. Sunburns, drinking in the afternoon. She was the hair that rose on the back of my neck when I touched her. She was the shudder of excitement that ran through my body and sometimes made me tremble.
She moved in. I called it that. But she wouldn’t. She still had her own place, but she slept and ate at mine. At first I gave her a drawer of her own in the orange maplewood dresser that had been my father’s. A few months later she brought in her own dresser, which didn’t nearly match the dresser and the rest of my dad’s bedroom set. She wanted to get rid of my bedroom set and get something more modern without the scratches or the loose and missing knobs. My dad had given the bedroom set to me when I was twelve. The idea of getting rid of it had never occurred to me.
I didn’t even have the bedframe set up because it was a twin. “Try having sex on a twin bed when you’re in your mid-twenties,” I told the man at the mattress store when I bought my first full-size bed. A twin bed was fine for sex in your teens and early twenties, but people in their mid-twenties needed a few inches away from each other to really sleep. I stored the frame in pieces under the full-size bed.
***
About six months after Darla really moved in—my words again—I was set to grad teach my first ever class at eight in the morning. I had slapped the snooze alarm three times and was running late. I put on my glasses in the dark and looked at the nightstand. In the light of the alarm clock I could see the scratched surface, and I could make out the bottom drawer pointing at an angle toward the ceiling. I couldn’t see the back of the drawer, but I knew it was angling down into the cubbyhole. I thought maybe I should just get rid of it all.
I put on an old pair of jeans and tried on three shirts one after the other, hanging the discarded ones on doorhandles. When I finally chose a shirt, it wouldn’t work anyway because I finally accepted the fact that the pants were too tight on me—middle age, here I come. I threw the jeans on the floor and got the gray suit out from the far end of the closet. The suit’s a bit too much, but if I’m late the professional look might balance it out—hopefully. I took off the shirt I wore and put on a t-shirt, a white dress shirt and a tie, trying three different ties till I felt comfortable with the color, and tying that tie three times till I got it right. And I headed for the hallway.
“Clean up after yourself,” came Darla’s sleepy voice. “I’m tired of doing it for you. And close the drawers.”
He looked at her. This isn’t the time to tell me to do it, I thought. Pick a time when I’m not going to my first day on the job.
What I told her was, “I’ll do it when I get back.”
“You know I can’t sit around here all day looking at it. It’ll drive me crazy.”
I stood at the doorway and looked at her. When she talked she had never even opened her eyes. She could very well have been sleeptalking. Her little girl hair draped across her cheek. It was straight and blonde like the sun when it’s yellow. Her eyes, though closed were like the water in the Bahamas is supposed to be, clear and blue. And she had a cute upturned Vargas nose.
I threw the shirts on hangers and put them back in the closet. I folded the now-pre-middle-age jeans and put them on the closet shelf above the hanging clothes. I was about to brush the white socks under the bed with my shoe, but picked them up and put them in my dresser drawer. I closed all the dresser drawers quietly as I looked at her.
I stopped in the bathroom, put the bathmat back on the rim of the tub and my towel on the towel bar. In the kitchen I washed my cereal bowl and my orange juice glass and grabbed the trash on the way out.
A few months afterward Darla moved out. She left her dresser. I got rid of it. I wasn’t sure when it had ended with Darla or why, or even how. I had theories. There are always theories when people break up, I thought, but I could never be sure which was the right one.
***
Cecilia was stolen moments and quick loving, a crawl through a window once a week or so. She was beat-the-clock love before her boyfriend got home. She was a redhead and she burned like fire. And when she left her boyfriend and moved in, she was change-the-bedding-the-next-day loving.
Eight months into it, I came home from meeting my friends at the bar. I emptied my pockets and put everything in the thin top drawer of my dresser. I had to open it by pulling on the screws, and even then the drawer screeched lightly, wood on wood. The loose knobs from the other drawers rolled around inside. The runner that the drawer sat on had been pushed to the back of the drawer hole again.
I undressed for bed, pulled each shoe off with the opposite foot, unbuttoned my cargo pants and let them fall with a thud of wallet and a jangle of keys. I looked over at Cecilia, but she didn’t move.
Cecilia had bought a chair for the bedroom—“to sit on while you put on clothes,” she had told me. To hang clothes on, I told myself right then, almost laughing out loud, as I took off my t-shirt and sweater together and threw them on the chair.
I pulled my briefs down to my ankles, and pulled off each sock as I stepped out of my underwear. Still buzzing, I looked down at the pile of clothes, the pants on the outside, the underwear on the inside, then the socks inside the legholes of the underwear. I could see the hardwood floor at the bottom. The image amazed me, like a spinning hypnotic wheel or the infinite regression of two mirrors on opposite walls. I held in a giggle. In the morning, I could just jump up out of bed and land in everything and be half dressed, just like that. I sat down on the bed and put my glasses on my nightstand.
I didn’t even know she had woken up. The first sign was her hand on my back pushing me out of bed before I could lie completely down.
“Go take a shower. You smell like smoke.”
I walked to the bathroom and looked still-drunkenly back at her lying in bed going back to sleep. The moonlight seeped in through the sides of the blinds and her hair seemed more magenta than orange-red. I liked the curve of her jaw, her bedroom eyes, even when they were closed, and the light freckles I couldn’t see in the near dark but knew were there.
I took a shower and went to bed.
Six months later she was gone. I wasn’t sure why or even how it happened. We just grew apart, I told myself. I kept the chair.
***
Beth was sex on Friday afternoons. She was let’s cook in, no cable, Red Stripe beer, drink, dance, get stoned, low maintenance lifestyle, high maintenance loving. We argued and had sex—a lot and usually in that order.
I woke one morning to go to class. I had been teaching for eight years, three at a small college and five at a big university in the city. I could get tenure if I could quit trying to change everything and quit expressing my opinions so openly and so often.
I tried on my gray suit from grad school but it didn’t fit anymore. I didn’t think it would. It’s official, I thought. Welcome to middle age. I put on the black one I had bought for—and hadn’t worn since—my dad’s funeral. It needed rechristening for other duties and today was as good a day as any.
I kept the gray suit on the hanger but didn’t re-hang it in the closet. My first try at a pair of shoes didn’t feel as good as I knew the new ones would. I left the rejects under the chair I used for changing clothes. A pair of gray socks lay on the hardwood floor. I slid them just under the bed so I’d see them later. Then I quietly closed all the dresser drawers while I watched Beth.
One day I would give the bedroom set to my son when I had one, but I wouldn’t continue the name. I was a “Jr.,” so my son would be “the third” and everybody would just call him “Trey” and that was no name. It was a number. I had to give him something my father had, so my son would get the bedroom set and maybe my son’s son would get it too.
I walked past the bathroom. My towel was on the towel bar, but the bathmat was on the floor. In the kitchen, I ignored the dishes and grabbed the trash.
Beth came in wearing her big terrycloth robe and headed like a lab rat to her coffee pot. “I didn’t even hear you get up,” she said. “You should pick up your stuff in the bedroom and the bathroom and do your dishes before you leave.”
I was headed for the door, but turned around and looked at her for some time.
I walked over to her, gently grabbed her by her robe right at her hip, tugged her to me, and I kissed her, exactly like I had done the first time we kissed.
Half a minute later, she said, “What was I saying?”
“I have to go. I’m going to be late.” And I walked to the door. I looked back once more and said, “Let’s go to Papa Hassan’s to eat tonight.”
Her eyes lit up just slightly, as if she had taken her first sip of coffee. Then she smiled and squinted in what I knew was mock suspicion. “Why?”
“I don’t know. I love you.”
“Okay. I love you too,” she said.
***
I learned how to fix wooden furniture and redid the bedroom set. I put the drawer runners back in place so they slid in nicely. I fixed all the knobs on the dresser and nightstand. I repaired the bottom nightstand drawer that angled toward the ceiling. I replaced the pieces of wood on the inside of the bed frame where the three original slats lay to hold up the bed. The only thing I couldn’t fix was a small split in the side of the dresser. It wasn’t much, just about an inch long. But it pained me that it wasn’t perfect.
One day my son asked me how and when I knew Mom was “the one.” my first thought was, Did I ask questions like that when I was thirteen? Then I remembered, No, I asked my dad that when I was in my twenties.
Then I thought for some time. I couldn’t pinpoint the exact time I was certain I “had” her. My dad had known when he had “had” my mom, but I always wondered if my dad really knew or not. I wondered, since men always had to have an answer for everything, if maybe my father had white-lied. Maybe he didn’t know and just pulled one of a half dozen life scenes out of his head and said, That was the time I knew for sure.
I thought of a half dozen events between my wife and myself, and remembered the morning I had kissed her while she made her coffee and I was leaving for work. That was when things changed for me, for us. All the petty things didn’t matter to either of us even though we mentioned them, discussed them and sometimes argued over them. That was when I knew for sure that she was the one for me. And I told the story to my son.
I can still see Beth that morning, the way the sun bounced off the walls and lit her softly. She has a face like an angel and without makeup, and without the angry lines some people have between their brows or the wrinkles from frowning. Everything was soft and smooth. She had smiled at me. She had said something to me as I was trying to leave, but it never registered, like a dream you lose grasp of when you wake.
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