The bed Oprah sleeps on.
So, we need a mattress. A box spring, too. Marshall’s mattress, which, though a series of twists of fate, used to be mine, is kind of, I believe the technical term is “mooshy,” and has developed a great big crater at the center, so we always wake up in each other’s ever-lovin’ arms whether we want to or not. And Marshall has a bad back, too, so he’s compensated for a while with a precise arrangement of pillows beneath and surrounding his person. It’s, well, weird, Henshaw.

So we agreed that our Christmas present to one another this year would be a new bed set-up. Last night, while strolling down to the wine shop for a bottle, we passed by a mattress store and decided to go in and browse. The store was brightly lit and went back a mile. It was silent, chilly, and the lighting was sort of bluish white. One salesman stood at the counter and greeted us, his lone visitors, apparently, in quite some time. As we gave a practiced, noncommittal, “Hello,” avoiding eye contact like you do, he followed us around his counter.
“So, uh, you guys. How are you, this evening?”
“Oh, fine, fine,” we said, poking at the first mattress, a Memoryfoam Deluxe Triple Decker Hoagie sort of deal. Glanced at the price tag. Six-thousand dollars. Strolled on.

“So, uhhh,” said the salesman, “I hope you don’t mind my asking—” in a queer, embarrassed tone, like maybe he was being filmed by his managers and had to get this hated line right, “but are you looking for a bed for the two of you, or for guests?”
“For us,” we said. “But we’re really just browsing.” In fact, we had to meet some friends for dinner in just a couple of minutes and had just stopped in on a whim, we said. Marshall lay down on a bed about four beds back, and I followed suit. The salesman followed along behind awkwardly, closing in: three, then two beds behind us, observing us as we turned from our backs to our sides.

“Well—and my manager likes for me to ask this—do you already share a bed,” he said woodenly, “I mean, do you share one and do you like it or not?”


Yes, we shared a bed.

Oh, okay, he said, and then some silence followed as we sat up and lay down again. The salesmen then turned to the mattress of the bed he stood at the foot of, hesitated, and then spoke. “Watch this,” he said, and folded the mattress in two and then let it spring back. “If this had been a traditional mattress, I would have just bought it. I mean, that would have ruined it.” We watched him, propping our heads up on our hands as we lay on our own chosen bed of the moment. Then we got up, nodded, and strolled on. Then paused, at random, before another bed, and looked at the price tag, also far, far out of our price range. The awkwardness was having the secondary effect of causing us not to look at each other, either. The salesman pointed to the bed we now stood in front of.

“That one is made of the same material as this one, and works on a power base, too. And that one, that’s the bed Oprah sleeps on. It works with a power base, as well.”

I tried to make a joke while still avoiding eye contact with the man: Oprah comes in here every night? Wow! The salesman just nodded and smiled. The effect, I fear, of my comment, in the ensuing weird silence, was one of bullying. Marshall glanced again at his cell phone for effect. The price of all these mattress sets: $2,500 and up.

We walked further from the man and sat down on another bed, running our hands over the surface of the mattress like customers at a fruit stand. This mattress set had a remote control sitting on top, which Marshall quickly grabbed and began examining. The salesman followed us up the aisle.

“Uh, that one, too, works with a power base.” Marshal began to fiddle with the remote, and the man patted the foot of the bed, “Here. Lie down. Both of you.” We were already angling ourselves into supine positions and the salesman accidentally slapped Marshall’s ankle. He motioned for the remote and Marshall gave it to him. He pushed a button. The bottom part of the bed began to shiver and shake a little, vibrating under our ankles. Then the top half, under our shoulder blades. It was loud. The salesman stood at our feet, observing our relaxation. We didn’t comment.

“This is the power base. It’s just meant for relaxation,” he said. Then he shut it off, looking at us still. I swung my legs from the bed. The salesman asked, “What are you—I mean, do you know what you’re having for dinner?”

I looked over at Marshall, suddenly afraid we’d blurt out conflicting stories simultaneously. Our lie was already transparent, but the constantly shifting power balance in the room still made me want to avoid the equivalent of our sitting, so deep into his store, now, on one of his beds, saying, “We are lying to you.”

So, “I don’t know!” I blurted out. Then, with a new, practiced air of laziness, a woman just rising from bed after all, and stretching her arms, “We’re going to the Ethiopian place up the road,” I said. “Do you know it?” This might have been plausible, I thought. Perfectly plausible we’d never eaten Ethiopian food in our lives and had no idea what we were in for.

“Wow, yeah,” he said. “I had Thai food last night! Good! But boy, was it expensive!” This man’s enthusiasm was cardboard-thin. He didn’t want to be having this conversation.

Neither, of course, did we. We made our excuses and left: 6:42. Time, precisely, to meet our friends, it seemed.

“Okay, well, I’m just the assistant manager. The manager, Jim, he’ll be in, tomorrow.” These were the saleman’s parting words. For the rest of the night, we tried to figure them out. What was he telling us? Was he just trying to ensure he’d get a commission? Or was he apologizing for his poor sales skills, letting us know that if we returned, it would be to a superior sales technician and experience? Was he so very self-abasing that this was his way of telling us how to complain to his superior about his poor salesmanship? Oh, the times are hard. Coming back to the car from the wine shop, I clutched the paper-bag-swathed bottle recommended to us by the brusque owner there for our dinner at home. Neither of us looked into the mattress shop’s windows as we walked the other way through its bath of blue-white light.

Rooted to the place that you spring from.
And so I am.
Henshaw, I’ve been remiss. I could tell you I’ve been busy. I could tell you I’ve been working like a squirrel among the oak leaves on my thesis, that I’ve been singing and playing music with my friends, that I’ve been packing for another great, big move, that I’ve been feverishly sick abed and then lashed with bouts of insomnia during which I still didn’t write—

And all this would be true, but it’s no excuse.

I really wanted to write you about the insomnia, about its varied forms: the fitful thrashing caused by the codeine-containing cough remedy, the dry-throatedness caused by radiator heat in an old house, the perfect midnight alertness caused by oversleep during day during sickness, all this and the usual, caused by hamsterwheelbrain. This all seemed interesting for a moment, then it didn’t.

I wanted to write you about how much I’ve come to love my Beachtown friends, and how sad I’ve grown that a good life must be broken apart, in order to move forward. And then that started to sound eerily familiar, and my own sister told me, “This is a pattern with you,” and then I got embarrassed about it and just wrote nothing.

So now I’m in Atlanta again. I’ve moved back, and in with Marshall, my sweet, sweet b’friend and now I'm sitting at my computer, listening to Lois Reitzes talk all sultrily about Camille San Saens. We have a house with a porch and two cats who haven’t met yet. Dangercat’s residing in the bedroom for now, suspicious and pacing. Marshall’s cat, Enoch, a 16-pound cumulonimbus cloud of a cat, saunters lopsidedly by the bedroom door, but seems not to notice the foreign male cat smell—- or, I posit, does not care. He wobbles up and meows for his meals and for affection. He rests on the couch. Such is the life of Enoch.

On the way down here, I listened to friends’ mixed cds and got all choked up and teary, and then resolute. And, lo and behold, it’s good to be back. Atlanta is a city of wretched planning and sprawl; it is also the city whose street map is blueprinted in my mind when I close my eyes. The roller coaster of 75/85’s Grady curve, Mayor Franklin’s metal street plates (pothole resolution of the future!), the layout of the enormous produce section at the Dekalb County Farmer’s Market, where we went on a shopping spree yesterday along with half the city, these are the landmarks that somehow comfort me.

Marshall and I, we’re having a blast rearranging the house. My little corner of the office is cozy, and yesterday, as we schlepped his mint-green kitchen table down to the basement, I realized the potential there: “Craft center! Craft center!” I started chanting. A forest of mod podge and fabric and paper. Ah, yes. It shall be.

And I’m re-learning Atlanta. It’s been just two-and-a-half years, and this house is in a familiar neighborhood, but there are all these nifty back road shortcuts to friends’ houses and to unfamiliar Publixes, and these require routes with which I’m wholly unfamiliar. I’d like to announce with pride to my fellow Atlanta denizens out there: I’ve been here 48 hours, and have not once driven on Moreland Avenue, the nightmare main drag that this neighborhood surrounds.

I’m going to see how long I can keep this up, in our current frenzy of thrift store furniture shopping and eating at a different friend or family member’s house each night. Tonight we go to my sister’s house, to see my nieces and the first floor of their house, whose every inch, square and spare, the girls have apparently swathed beyond recognition in Christmas decoration.

I’m still nervous, but it’s good to be back, Henshaw, to finish out my final semester from afar and ease myself back in to the Big World. I’m excited to share a life and a home with Marshall; in some ways, I’ve become the person I never thought I would, and it’s funny to see that in these pages: I am in love with and living with a a technical writer--which, as a profession, is about half-a-click away from the computer programmers I whined about when I was 26, and we are fixing up a house in a neighborhood in which, yes, we are the lightest-complected people around. And if the two of us did have a dog and if there were a dogpark, and if we had salaries that would allow for some real home improvements, I would totally be one of the home improvement chatters. Well, to an extent. Then I guess I still would get bored. I'd rather talk crafts. Or music. I guess some things don't change. At any rate, life is good and we are all lucky people. I miss you Carolina folk this much (that's a lot), and I’ll write again soon.