FOUR BEDS by Joan Steinau Lester
In the Eden of infancy the first bed to shelter me, once I vacated the warm amniotic sac, was an old bureau drawer laid at the foot of my parents’ bed. Given their casual housekeeping, plus their enduring resistance to bourgeois habits, they no doubt popped me next to tattered handkerchiefs and threadbare socks. I imagine my infant self tucked in, overshadowed by heaps of shabby underwear; even so, I slumbered peacefully in the spring air, high on an isolated mountain, unaware of my unorthodox housing.
Asheville, North Carolina, where my mother and father were students at experimental Black Mountain College, burst with fragrant blooms that glorious spring of 1940. Azaleas flamed. Lilacs competed with apple and plum blossoms to catch God’s eye. On the remote peaks of the Blue Ridge Mountains, the eastern rampart of the Appalachians, dogwood, sourwood, blackgum flowered. Far away, across an ocean, Nazi boots pounded the cobblestone streets of Europe, but my May 28 arrival, exactly nine months after my parents’ marriage, secured an Army deferral. My young father remained with me, safe in the bosom of the heavenly college.
His birth on February 14, 1917 had been a fitting Valentine’s Day launch for a man who instinctively knew how to nourish an infant, despite the scant tenderness of his own scrabble of a childhood: once locked out for nonpayment of rent from the single room his family inhabited, six decades later the hurt, the bewilderment of that chilly Kentucky afternoon lingered. He and his father, a stern, taciturn man, had slumped outside the locked room. “My bike was in there,” my dad Mort told me, with a face that ripped my gut, “and I needed to ride to my job delivering newspapers, money we depended on for food.” He gulped. “At last the owner let me fetch my bike.” Mort, penniless, had hitchhiked to Black Mountain College after a Louisville high school teacher rhapsodized about the avant-garde school on a mountaintop; it was a felicitous destination, where he memorized classic poetry and met his shy bride, Barbara, herself the daughter of a hard‑up single California mom. At seventeen Barbara had ridden a Greyhound bus, alone, to reach the promised land of progressive education.
And so, in that heart of radical pedagogy, I landed in a second-hand dresser drawer, nestled among frayed undergarments, handkerchiefs, and socks. I spent a great deal of time in my container swaddled in soft infant dresses and baby blankets, for my mother, who’d only just turned twenty, was determined to do right. With her sheet of black hair draping me, she followed every line of the 1940 prescription: pick up baby every four hours to nurse; ignore interval howling, so as not to reinforce unruly pleas for attention; excessive handling leads to a spoiled child. Yet while I was not held as much as I might have liked – and in young adulthood found this a cause to excoriate my diligent mother – her fond gaze and my father’s tender touch somehow lasted through the hours of my banishment, where I squalled endlessly in my wooden box. My disposition turned out to be a sunny one, notwithstanding the four-hour regimen; although in the Kerouacian, Sartre-drenched late ’50s I assumed a brief existential despair, adopting the de rigueur black turtleneck and a melancholic Galois cough, after several years of angst my natural optimism resurged. Perhaps parental behavior does not matter, in the end, as much as we imagine. Or maybe it was the loving quality of their timed touch, after all, that inspired my lifelong joy. Or it may have been the setting of my birth.
Black Mountain College was unusual. The fifty students poured cement and hammered walls for a Studies Building, then mingled after hours with Milton-spouting professors who lodged accessibly in two-room suites adjacent to the student rooms, where I napped in my box. Evenings were crammed with dramas – both scripted and spontaneous. Many students argued about utopian community in long “consensus” meetings, while others stuffed themselves with philosophy, their discussions sparked by an émigré faculty flung from Europe by German bans. Teachers like Josef and Anni Albers, Bauhaus exiles, incubated the innovative spirit. Outside my window, while I lay cocooned, Buckminster Fuller puttered with scraps of wood, pondering a heap of slats he scavenged in the yard. Day after day he experimented, arranging a network of struts in great circles, crisscrossing them into triangles, until one afternoon he triumphed: he constructed a strong, stable sphere, and created the geodesic dome.
Black Mountain students graduated when they could pass self-set exams with questions like, “Why is the sky blue?” my mother often fondly recalled. Once I graduated from my oblong box, I slept in a playpen under a wormy apple tree, watched by my parents’ classmates from the corners of their bohemian eyes. When I could sit upright, my father carried me on his shoulders to the far-away dining room. In the mornings we walked together at dawn, me clutching his sandy hair, riding high above that dear head while he snuffed out the lamps along the magic winding path to the source of many cooking smells. There we found pancakes spattered in butter, dripping with fresh maple syrup; hot porridge, sticky with sweetness; and great platters of fried eggs that slid, yoke up, onto my plate.
Those idyllic Black Mountain years became enshrined in family myth. After we moved away, my parents recounted their glories: how calf-deep in mud, with blue jeans rolled to the knee, all one giddy summer they’d dug trenches for the Studies Building. Or the rainy night they helped a gay professor flee, scooping him into a borrowed Ford before the sheriff, or a lynch mob, could seize him in the morning. And then there was the happy subject of my birth. “In a drawer?” I asked worriedly, at five or six, imagining myself shut up in a closed bureau. Daddy and I lounged on our tiny screened‑in back porch, listening to an announcer’s comforting drone on the radio: “Two balls, one strike.” Ice dripped inside the squat burnished-red ice box nearby, while we could see Mummy on the inner porch, braving the terrifying hand-crank washing machine, with its two rollers set to catch her long black hair and suck her in. “The drawer was a place to keep you safe,” my father said, “since we had no money for a bassinet. We wrapped you, we wound you up like a ball of string.” Daddy laughed. “You seemed to like it. Greta, the art professor, showed us how. We were terrified you’d break, but she slapped you down like a pancake and folded you up.”
Those early months must have lit my passion for swaddling. I still wind myself in shawls and curl under covers when my spirit craves refreshment, for every nest since has held me as securely as that first wooden box. I’ve crawled in and out of numberless beds in my sixty-seven years; none disappointed, although several occupants did. But each bed has transmitted a faint echo, wrapping me in a sweet afterglow of that original, delicious shelter, the imprint of my Black Mountain College dresser drawer.
I’ve always been ferocious about my beds. Yet this hankering to burrow is a little-known proclivity, since out of bed I am ever in motion, like a hummingbird. Most who know me would not suspect my predilection, though I’ve long been aware of my fondness for the prone position, especially one involving the hospitality of covers.
Over the course of my life, the desire has grown, but at the age of thirty-seven, when I enrolled in a doctoral program at the University of Massachusetts, I surprised even myself by lying, immobilized, every Saturday, comforted above and below by the press of blankets and mattress. I don’t know how the children managed; I did stir myself to drive my son for early-morning ice hockey practice with his bag of gear bigger than he, at a shrimpy ten. He would be all suited up, his shoulders scraping the walls, his little head poking out of his purple jersey, his sweet gaggle-tooth poking its way across his upper teeth. “Ma,” he’d say, urgently, standing by my bed with his hockey stick at attention. “It’s 6:15. We have to go.” I staggered up. “No, don’t put your jacket on over your bathrobe,” he’d tug at me. “What if somebody sees?”
I didn’t care. All I wanted was to plunge back into the warmth of my bed. That nest consisted of an old mattress on a wooden platform I’d had built by a carpenter friend back on Martha’s Vineyard when I’d been married to the children’s father. For the only time in my life I’d attained this one piece of custom furniture. Before that peak I’d shopped at the Salvation Army for beds and chairs, or created them myself out of cots lined with foam or quilts thrown over tired seats. Used to personal home-improvement, I made my own furniture or slathered any room that needed a coat of paint, the way my parents had, the way everybody I knew did. But suddenly, in the late ’60s, we had money from the sale of my husband’s books. It was the era of black rage: Look Out Whitey, Black Power’s Gonna Get Your Mama flew off the bookstore shelves, allowing us to move to a quiet island full of whiteys.
Sky, our carpenter, was the handsome, blue-eyed husband of a young redhead who helped me start a Free School for the children at the Gay Head Town Hall. Sky, a charismatic local druggie on whom all the out-of‑town women had crushes, crafted a sturdy plain-plank bed for us, boxy, but made to last. Once my husband and I bought a good mattress – new – I slumbered in peace. In fact, I made sure to retire early, since by then I’d begun to avoid sex, a result of my constant rage at his infidelities. Soon he left us for a woman who, claiming her Native American roots, walked barefoot all the time, even through Boston winters. Stunned by grief, I was nonetheless impressed, trying to imagine the toughness of her feet, the resolve in her heart.
The bed was a treasure. Now, nibbled by loneliness, I played cards – Hearts and Gin Rummy – with the children, ages three and five, until all hours. Buoyant with the pleasure of our games, I finally bundled them into their own beds, which I’d moved into my room for company. I nestled on top of my platform and fine mattress, while they slept peacefully nearby. It was a nightly slumber party.
Several years later, after husband and I had definitively split and I trundled off the island, moving self and children into the bowels of Brooklyn, it turned out that after all the trouble of moving my bed, with the expense and drama of hauling it on the ferry, my new husband refused it. “I won’t lie on a bed that you’ve slept in with another man!” he declared, arm around me. Tyrone was persuasive, a muscular man with the impressive ex‑con credentials to back up his opinions – quite unlike my skinny, intellectual first husband – so I carted the wooden box over to the storefront that housed my Brooklyn Free School. There, for five happy years, its pine planks served as stage, morning meeting place, castle, fort, and eventually even the bed of a giant Brooklyn Bridge model we built. I loved that platform more with every passing year, with every group of five-year-olds who swung their legs over its edges, kids who, by spring, had grown up on that large wooden square.
When I moved again some years later, my new boyfriend drove a U‑Haul up to Amherst where I was to attend university without husband # 2, who’d proved to be a bit too forceful, and once more the bed became my own, with the added baptism of the school children’s dents. Once again I snuggled over the familiar boards. Mattresses might come and go, wearing thin, growing lumps, but my sturdy wooden bed carried me into the future.
The bedroom of the drafty four-room apartment I rented, only blocks from campus, was so cold that one night during that long first winter, my shoes merged with the icy floor. Years in an overheated New York apartment had thinned my blood; I huddled deeper under the covers. Winter wore on. On January 20, a blizzard dropped 27 inches of snow and froze our pipes; two weeks later, in “the storm of the century,” a Nor’easter blew in another three feet, clogging the streets with snow. Without heat, water, or electricity, I sewed my first quilt, hand-stitching a thick blue cover dotted with pink flowers onto an old blanket, and nestled merrily under the covers until spring, creeping out for classes or to cook meals for the children.
That winter, though, warmth entered my life, when I met Carole. We spent time together for several months, even took a quick road-trip to Provincetown in her old Audi, before we launched ourselves onto her bed.
That morning I crept out of my first-floor apartment at six, leaving my young teens a note with instructions to make their own scrambled eggs for breakfast; I drove across town and squeaked open the front door of my new lover’s home. Tiptoeing up three stairs of the split-level ranch house to reach her first-floor bedroom, I was proud of myself for initiating the romantic dawn tryst, for my bravery at planning this rendezvous-in‑the-bed. At age forty, after two marriages, two children, and numerous heartbreaks, it seemed I had found true love: a kind, intelligent sweetheart, one who already demonstrated care for my children, one as eager to heal the world as I. It might be that indeed we’d make a pair.
But once inside the room I’d come to penetrate, after I slid into bed beside her, my hip bones got a rude awakening. Carole slept on a futon. A thin pad filled with scraps of old cotton, much like the proverbial pallet on the floor. The gauze of romance instantly began to fray, rubbing against the solidity of her rock-hard bed. Where was the bed of my imagination with the lover of my dreams nestled inside it, softly cushioned by its pillowing kindness, cradling me in her arms? Instead, Carole and I lay side by side, fidgeting on the concrete pad, unable to find a comfortable position.
Plus, the bed reeked of chemicals, “a sprayed‑on fire-retardant,” she explained, shyly admitting she’d bought the futon in anticipation of our sharing it. I sneezed, I held my nose, I tried to ignore it, but the futon was a problem. Honestly, how far could this relationship go; could I be with a partner who liked to sleep on a brick, who skimped on comfort in the bedroom, when a cozy, sheltering bed meant so much to me?
Yet I was determined to proceed, and although my bones ached and my nose ran, I decided to ignore the discomfort, until a second problem thrust itself into my eyes. Her room, which I’d only visited briefly once before, toward evening, glowed in the early light: a yellow desk gleamed under her window; a vivid red and yellow bedspread splashed with gaudy flowers was thrown over us; we lay on loud green-striped sheets. My tastes tended toward soft lavender, gentle pink, light sky blue, colors that soothed, while my paramour’s room vibrated with an intense array of deep crimsons, oranges, hot yellows. How alien it felt.
My bones aching from the thin futon, my eyes scratching from its chemicals and throbbing with the pulsing colors, I turned on her. I’m not comfortable, I said, warily. I don’t feel at home. She nodded, caressed my hip, and within a week sold her futon, replacing it with a firm-but-soft normal mattress.
See, she pulled me down onto her bed at my next visit. This is how much I care about you. Yes, I nodded, grateful. Surprised by such kindness.
But the colors, she said, that’s who I am. I can’t mute them. Well, I huffed, fearing that these garish primary colors lacked sophistication, lacked the subtle intellectual sensibility I craved, we’ll see.
Still, I began to call on her once or twice a week, creeping in at dawn, each time surprising her with my presence, each time overcoming my alarm when her bright room slashed my eyes. Only after five or six visits was I able to acknowledge my true discomfort: It was her gender. Carole was my first female lover.
Daughter of pure freedom that I was, though, I tried to convince myself that one could make a free-will choice about all matters, even those of the heart. When my old friend Maria questioned my new, surprising choice, I told her I had tried making love with a woman once. It was a drunken mutual grope between my marriages, I confided, on a night – after the babies were in bed – when another Free School teacher and I stayed up late drinking endless bottles of wine. She was soft, I whispered to Maria, giggling, without that thing always poking, poking at me.
But how can you just decide you’re a lesbian? she asked.
Maybe it’s time to live more rationally, I said hotly, with the hubris of a ’60s veteran. After all, we’d changed the social order; couldn’t we change ourselves? I gave up cigarettes at thirty-two, caffeine at thirty-five. Why not now, at forty, give up men?
Maria’s eyes darted around my yard and she gulped her Bustello, which wasn’t like her. Her style was to sip, sip, sip, right into the night. Café culture, she reminded me when I asked how she could sleep after all that caffeine. We don’t go to bed at ten p.m. like you Anglos, we know how to have a good time! She brushed a rose petal from the lip of her cup and poured a refill.
So why not explore something else? I asked evenly. A relationship that might be more egalitarian.
I’m not sure you can choose to be a lesbian, Maria said. People are born gay.
I can so choose. Why not? I was furious. People get to choose their religions. Why can’t I choose my partner? Like we used to believe we had to stay in our own race or religion for marriage, we thought we had to choose opposite-sex partners.
I argued choice at every point, already a missionary for same-sex love, preaching the gospel when I’d barely tasted it.
That’s true, she agreed. But . . . She stopped, evidently puzzled. I thought you liked sex with men.
I did. It’s not the sex I didn’t like. It was the sexism.
Oh. She nodded.
Still, despite my determination to will myself out of the habit of men, there were moments when I faltered. In my new lover’s soft-yet-firm bed, though she lay naked against me, I always wore my panties. The thought of pressing our twin skins together – entirely – was simply too fearsome. Though I’d been raised by atheists and was then a Marxist myself, I found myself trembling, shocked to hear words reverberating in my brain: God will strike me dead. The panties were my talisman, the lucky charm that, if retained on my body, would ward off divine retaliation for my sin. Covered even partially, I must have thought God wouldn’t notice the rest of my unclothed body.
But Carole was patient, I was resolved (and in love), and somehow, with the help of a good therapist, we got through it.
We’ve never slept on a futon since, although today, twenty-six years later, we do have a futon in our guest room. It’s an especially bulky one, six-inches thick, and guests comment on its comfort. We ourselves sleep nude on a California King Simmons Beautyrest mattress with exactly the right amount of pillow-top padding, and God doesn’t seem to mind.
The color scheme of our home tends toward pastel – pale yellow walls in our living room, opal in the bedroom – although Carole’s study, and her clothing, blaze with the bold colors she loves, the same bright combinations my late friend Maria wore. But Carole is content, as am I, and she’s still my first and only woman lover. A providential choice.
Carole had no qualms about the shadows of previous loves lingering over my bed. She and I slept on my platform, topped by a mattress an earlier lover had lugged from Boston, tied to the top of his car after he found it on sale at $199. This man had the pleasure of sleeping on the bed only briefly, three months at best, before I asked him to leave. (He had two unfortunate habits: dropping his clothes to the bedroom floor in the evening, then expecting to find them on hangers, in the closet, by morning; and speaking harshly to my daughter, who, at twelve, was used to more respect.) But I retained the saggy, thin pad, and never once lamented either the state of the mattress or the lack of the man.
With Carole, my only spousal sleeping problem arose: my snore was “like a train,” she complained, which rammed through her nights. Still we snoozed together on that wooden plank for ten years, hauling it to our first home-purchase, a rambling farmhouse on the Vermont border. We slept on the platform until we moved cross-country in 1991 and left all our possessions behind, abandoning the bed to the bulk-purchaser who bought up our entire household.
The platform, by then splintering but still strong, had seen me through twenty-four years; over three times as long as either of my first two marriages, the ones to men; longer even than the amazing years my children lived with me. It was hard to say good-bye.
But Carole and I found a new platform in Berkeley, one with a fancy headboard full of small drawers and cubbies, a warren of cubicles for novels awaiting their turns, unread New Yorkers, and pads of paper to log the inspired midnight idea. Carole has even tucked a wooden backscratcher into its recesses, for those late-night moments when she can’t induce me to rake my nails over her skin. Now going into its seventeenth year, this bed looks as though it will last for the duration, and probably remain, stolid and sturdy, long after California has melted into the sea. I still plunge into its kindness with delight each evening; my ferocity has not diminished, nor my attachment waned, to platform # 2. Over decades of change in my life – some of it raucous, some of it sweet – one constant endures: the firm support of my platform beds. Suffused with gratitude, humble with praise, I, in turn, remain loyal to them. Each has carried a whiff of that first dresser drawer, a scent of old wood that imprinted me with pleasure, beguiling me with the solace of a refuge that never fails to revive.
Joan Steinau Lester’s most recent book is Fire In My Soul, a biography of Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton. Her commentaries have been featured on NPR’s All Things Considered and Marketplace and her columns have appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Chicago Tribune, New York Times Syndicate, San Francisco Chronicle, Cosmopolitan, and Black Issues in Higher Education.