Oil tanker or trim little schooner

The night before our Bahamas cruise, in our Tampa Bay hotel, we slept in a king-size bed. I have never understood the appeal. It feels like an oil tanker: I’d rather ride to sleep in a trim little schooner.

When we’d been married two years, Jim was offered a job interview with Ford in Detroit. We were such hicks then, even though Jim had grown up near the University of Chicago in Hyde Park and I in the sophisticated suburbs of New Jersey. Very budget-conscious, we packed canned food for the trip, bread and peanut butter and crackers, not expecting an expense account. The secretary in charge of reimbursements couldn’t believe we had spent nothing on food.

We chuckle about it now. We were such babes in the woods.

The hotel was fancier than any I’d ever stayed in, perhaps to this day. I felt bad getting cracker crumbs on the carpet. The bed was enormous. I suppose many people in America had a king-size bed, but it was new to us.

I still don’t like king-size beds. We started married life in a sublet studio apartment of a Princeton grad student. Our honeymoon trip, at Camp Liahona, the family campground owned by the Church, was kiboshed when our Nova’s water pump broke just outside of town. Back to the sublet we went, where we had a wonderful first week of marriage, soaking up reunion lectures at Jim’s alma mater.

In August we drove to Chicago and moved into married student housing at the University of Chicago. Jim’s dad had negotiated the purchase of much of the furniture of the departing tenant couple. A white vinyl pullout couch, four painted oak chairs, a drop-leaf table, and a double bed with wooden headboard and foot board. We were told that the mattress was old and needed replacing. They were embarrassed to sell it to us. We kept it for six years. When we did finally carry it out on the curb for trash pickup, it started to rain and as I watched out the window I realized with a pang that there was no going back.

Each of our six children was conceived between those head and foot boards and we still have the frame to this day, though I think we’re on our third or fourth mattress. (The current one is from Bed In A BoxBedInABox and came wrapped in strong plastic. When we unwrapped it, the foam unrolled and inflated as we watched. Within a month my chronic back pain had disappeared.)

The few times we have slept on king-size mattresses, when we stay at an upscale hotel, have left me mystified. What do people see in them? Perhaps because I have slept on a small bed for forty-four years, I’ve developed the habit of only inhabiting a few square feet of mattress. King-size beds are wasted on me.

And too, isn’t a point of sharing a marriage bed to be close to each other? There’s plenty of room in our bed for no-contact sleeping, but it always feels very cozy.

I mean no criticism to those who need more space to sleep. And it is fortuitous that I prefer a double bed. Our 1895 house was not built for king-size beds. To get even just the double-bed box spring up the staircase when we moved in in 1993, our friend, Marc Butler, had to remove the window frame at the stair landing. Four people were needed to hoist the box spring into the window from the garden and pull it through the window frame. If we ever do get rid of it, we’ll have to chop it up first.