"You slept on this?" the guy in the Red Sox cap pulled over a black knit hat asked incredulously.
"Yup," I said, laughing, a little incredulous myself once I saw the mattress wobbling down the hallway: its blue ticking torn; someone's old stitches in three spots; holes and shredded material in the place where the mattress handles had once been.
These days, newlyweds often expect to have everything new from the git-go -- TVs, DVDs, cell phones, all in duplicate, as well as a stereo system, a microwave, and a beautiful large new bed. Back when I started out, most of us knew we'd start with attic cast-offs. Even now, decades later, I still have things from the beginning of my life as a real adult. Some were once new, like the two small, square teak plates from my best high school friend -- I still use them every day -- and others were not. Although the mattress was in the "not" category, it remained "serviceable-enough" for years.
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It was lumpy and saggy and I had started to cling to one edge to stay atop for the night, but I held on until the night the two-by-four that supported the box spring clunked to the floor, and the box spring -- but miraculously not the mattress -- followed. But how to find the perfect mattress, now that was the challenge, particularly given that I had no experience purchasing mattresses, and my intention was that this one would last the rest of my life.
I read about pillow-tops, Euro-tops, latex, memory foam, continuous coils, pocketed coils, and more things than you want to hear about. I watched TV commercials about mattresses that would change my life. I lay on so many mattresses in so many stores, returning to lie and stretch, turn and shift, that people began to ask me questions, initially thinking I might work there. I'm guessing they must have thought I was a mattress-tester, hoping that salespeople "knew" what they were talking about from experience. Coatless, shoeless, in loose-fitting clothes, I'd curl up on my side the way my research told me was the healthiest way to sleep.
After I made my decision (queen-sized, latex foam with no coils), the salesman asked my name. He wrote it down slowly on his pad and then looked up.
"You'll never believe this," he said, "but just this morning my daughter handed me a picture she drew of the family. There was her mom, and me, her about-to-be-born baby brother, my daughter, and someone called 'Princess Annaliese.'"
Princess Annaliese? I hardly run into an "anyone Annaliese." I thought it was an omen about the mattress. My friend with a four-year-old granddaughter tells me now there actually is a new doll called Princess Annaliese. And, god help me, it's a Barbie!
If it's true what they say, that a mattress really does change your life, this could be some adjustment.
Annaliese Jakimides (pronounced "jah KIH mih deez") is a writer and artist living in Bangor. You can read more of her work in The Essential Hip Mama: Writing from the Cutting Edge of Parenting, published by Seal Press.
