body bed, bed boat

There was no family bed, as there was no family. What she remembers is sleeping in the window seat of her father’s girlfriends house, his former student. They pushed the straight backs of two wooden chairs against the side of the window seat so she wouldn’t roll over and fall out. There were only two times, that she knows of, when she laid in bed with her mother who was not a sleep-in-the-same-bed kind of mother.

She remembers being invited into her mother’s bed once, or perhaps her mother acquiesced to her pleads. It was the middle of the night; she wasn’t feeling well. For some reason, that night, her mother reneged on the unspoken rule that her mother’s bed, like a big white boat tucked into the corner of the house, was a threshold she was not allowed to cross. And so, strangely, in the middle of the night, she found herself taking the running leap needed to get aboard. There, in no man’s land, her small body was acutely aware of the vastness of the white boat bed. She lay stock still, listening to her mother breathe. She dare not roll over. She dare not reach out. She dare not sleep. She felt her mother’s body, inches away, but far enough to be another continent. She lay there, not quite happy, but convincing herself of some kind of happiness. In hollow apprehension, she feared being told to leave. And so, she compacted herself into solid rock so she would not hear her mother say, Time for you to go back to your room.

The second time she slept in the same bed as her mother was the day before her mother died. By then, her mother had turned her body around so that her head was at the foot of the bed, something she had never done while living. This somehow perfectly signaled the upside-downness of this time. It was in this upside-downness, when she could not sleep through her mother’s rhythmic humming, that she lay down in her mother’s bed with her feet at the foot of the bed, next to her mother’s humming head. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. Hmm. This was her mother’s dying mantra. She wanted some kind of closeness, some kind of death-coming epiphany, but as is the case with epiphanies, she did not get what she she thought she needed. What she got was lying there, again, just like that night when she was young, but inverted, not daring to touch or to speak or to move, or to hope too much.

But unlike that time so many years ago, this time, her own daughter, groggy from a rough sleep on a lumpy living room sofa, joined her in the wee hours of the morning and snuggled into her. Her mother was her own islet on one side of the big white boat bed, while she and her daughter were beach and cove, curved into together, gently overlapping. This is the way body and bed work with mothers and daughters. Sometimes they separate us like islands, and sometimes they crash us into each other like waves onto sand, and sometimes both happen at the same time.