Grace and I had bunk beds. They were bought second-hand. I’m not sure if it was a garage sale or an ad in the paper. I have a vague memory of visiting a stranger’s house with my dad. The house was white painted wood and tall and right up on its driveway with no side-yard.
Wooden slats were stacked in our station wagon and two mattresses were strapped to the roof.
The mattresses were printed with a pattern of sepia cowboy pictures.
I remember Dad putting them together. He had to figure out how to do it.
I demanded the top bunk from the fist mere hint of suggestion that we were getting bunk beds. There was no ladder, but I could climb onto our toy box, from there onto Grace’s headboard, then up over my headboard.
When I later saw other people’s bunk beds with ladders, I felt my poverty in its lack, but I also felt smug. I didn’t NEED a ladder.
I did need some help with not falling out of bed. Somehow, having never fallen out of any bed before, I could not stay on my top bunk. I would wake on hitting the floor and cry. Aunt Susie got a railing from the hospital where she worked and Dad put that on the bed. I didn’t like the railing – it didn’t match.
I wriggled along and against the railing, testing its weaknesses. That night, I contrived to fall out of bed despite the railing. So it went back to the hospital.
I only fell out of the bed once more after that. I’d had my fill, I guess.
The mattresses were just blocks of orange foam. They sank into thinness in the middle and you could feel the wooden frame. Dad extended their lives by nailing particle board to the bottoms. This also made it easier to put the mattresses in their frames, since the solid press-wood sheet made it from side to side. The slats we’d used before varied in length and there was always one short one falling onto Grace in the night.
I nailed an orange crate to the wall over my bunk and filled it with paperbacks. I hid things in the drop ceiling. Toys, my diary. My bed was my room. Gracie’s bed was her room. We would visit each other, or kick each other out. Grace’s bunk was darker and more private, better for secret-sharing. She almost always hung a blanket or a sheet as a wall.
We learned to take the bunks apart and reassemble them. We’d take the mattresses off and use the bed frame as a jungle gym. We’d hang blankets and make a puppet theatre or haunted house. One time, ill-advisedly, we tried to turn the upper bunk into a slide.
When our older sister left for college, there was suddenly an extra bedroom in the house. I claimed it, and Terri’s old bed. Grace still slept in her bunk in what had been our room. Eventually the old foam mattresses were so bad she stacked them on top of each other, and then Dad gave in and bought a new single mattress.
In the winter time, when there was no heat, Grace would join me in my bigger bed and we would sleep back-to-back, our frozen toes tucked behind each other’s knees.
Then it was time for Grace and me to leave home ourselves, and go on to the exciting world of dorm beds until we achieved the independence of buying our first furniture. First I took Terri’s old bed, that had been Dad’s old bed, but it broke apart during a party at my first apartment. I bought a new bed – the one I still have – at Pier One. I love my bed. It is my sanctuary and snuggle place.
But sometimes I miss the effort of climbing, and the transformation of a room when viewed from above, the laundry become hills and the toys farmhouses. I felt special, alone, a sentry. Sleeping in a bunk bed was sleeping in an adventure.
Perhaps that’s why I fell out of bed so much.
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