Things We Didn't Say Yesterday #6

It wasn't a metaphor. It was a bed.

He tried to remember when the bed became a battlefield complete with a demilitarized zone. They'd started the marriage with a hand-me-down double-size bed that sloped from both sides to the middle. It was convenient, though, especially in the first apartment where the heater often didn't heat. She had often remarked--at least back then--that she enjoyed waking in the middle of the night to find her backside pressed against his. It was as though they reinforced each other, and each of them kept watch on one side of the bed.

A warmer apartment and a bit more cash brought a larger, queen-sized bed--this one new, without slopes, expensive, complete with headboard that kept their heads off one or another wall at night. "It's still cozy," she had said, "and I can always find you. It's nice." But though he had wondered openly about the gap between them, he also appreciated the extra open space on warm nights. Or after an argument when they both needed to sleep but didn't want to sleep next to each other. On those nights, in fact, whenever their legs would touch as one of them shifted in bed, she would jerk away as though she'd been shot.

Then, when they had finally come the point of dividing furniture when things were over, they had to consider the king-size bed, something that she had found at a Macy's sale one Friday afternoon not long after they had moved to their suburban house. The next morning he watched with some sadness as the deliverymen removed the queen and set up the king. The bed was immense; it took up nearly half the bedroom. That first night in the bed he had listened to her breath from so far away. Their lives together hadn't been smooth for the past few months, and their legs hadn't touched in a long time.

"You can have the bed," she had said as they listed what they owned, a "his" list and a "hers" list on a legal-sized yellow pad.

"No, it means too much to you," he'd said. "I've always thought that you bought the bed to get away from me at night as much as you did during the day. The space between us in that bed was a metaphor for the space between us in our relationship."

She had looked at him. "You believe that? How do you come up with this stuff, anyway? It's a bed. That's all. It was never a metaphor for anything. Do you want the bed, or not?"

He shook his head. "No. It symbolizes something I don't like."

"Now it's a symbol? Fine." She wrote "bed" on the "hers" side of the legal pad. "God, Chris, you need to grow up."