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The Bed

It was the bed of his mother and father who had laid side by side in their underwear in an atmosphere of perfume and flatulence for thirty years before they died. They had not spoken much to him, unless blows from a thick leather strop qualified as language, and in a way the beatings were a form of speech. His parents, frenzied faces crowding him into a corner while one or the other rained down blows on his nakedness as he stood shrieking yet obediently in place, had become a familiar form of incantation suggestive of religious gathering, and he the perennial sacrifice. The Gods to whom they made offering in the form of his wounds were the old dark figures of their own childhood: a grandfather with a savage temper and a gimp leg, the result of being lifted upside down by one leg in infancy and shook hard to stop his wailing, the woman screeching at the baby: "Shut dat stupid mouth awready!" to no avail, which made her shake harder; a grandmother who had been raped and beaten nearly to death in the old country by a marauding band of peasant boys.

They had, in turn, heaped their own abuse on the heads of their children --his parents-- who in turn passed it on, distilled, to him. He had understood all that, even as a youth, and later, as a man had earned a four year degree in psychology at a university. Yet knowing these things did not help him to restrain the ruthless tide of memory and hurt that seemed to lift him bodily from the bed and hurl him out into the world in search of someone to share the bed with.

Always, he found someone. Sometimes he didn't ask their names. Sometimes they shrieked their names to him but he didn't care and no one heard: he saw to that. Ten years worth of egg cartons lined the walls, while the seams of the windows were caulked air tight and the padded door secured by a triple lock. No one who entered ever left. Meat bones hair went out in bags, every last drop. Between visitors he'd spend as much as three months scrubbing every millimeter of surface with heavy duty industrial cleaners, some of them quite pungent, and though the room was kept at a perpetually cold temperature by the same air conditioners that his parents had kept running for over twenty years, the acrid sting of ammonia and lye in the room turned his gagged visitors' wildly darting eyes a painful red, and he kept on the nightstand a small bottle of Visine eye drops which he gently applied to their inflamed whites until the brightness was restored.

Handily, the sturdy, seemingly indestructible bed of carved mahogany had tall posts at the head and foot. He kept it polished to a high gleam with Lemon Pledge and periodic applications of wood wax to highlight the windmills carved into the headboard. It was a Dutch scene with trees and houses and little figures of toiling peasants in winged caps and wooden shoes but what stood out for him, what he paid particular caressing attention to when cleaning were the windmill's blades spread-eagle to the elements. These he buffed and polished slowly, meditatively, for hours on end. When he laid his visitors down and one by one secured their limbs by handcuffs to the posts he'd tell them: "You're on the windmill now. You're on the windmill" with a sort of grave pride, for he considered them privileged to be so admitted into such a profoundly personal aspect of his life story, but as he gave them entrance he began to feel a gradual build-up of illness in his solar plexus, a queasy sick feeling that rose in his chest to his throat and head and which made him so dizzy that he had to slump down into the E-Z Boy recliner where his father would occasionally spend several hours in his boxer shorts, smoking cigarettes, drinking whiskey and watching baseball. He would then rise at the game's conclusion, stagger into his son's room, drag him out by the hair, haul him into the bedroom and ram his head repeatedly against the windmill headboard, and did other things, so hard that once they took him, albeit reluctantly, to the emergency room where a young intern who suspected possible brain damage insisted on X-rays, which his parents refused, they claimed on religious grounds. The intern made them sign a release absolving him of responsibility, which they gladly did. The whole matter was quickly forgotten.

In the E-Z Boy his parents raged inside his head: Why have you brought this person here? Are you trying to get us in trouble? You can't let him leave. In your own parent's bed you bring this whore! Is this how we raised you? But I only want to play, he pleaded.

Once he brought one home to introduce as a fiancée in an effort to show he was grown up, win their respect.

His mother took up the razor-edged hunting knife herself, snatching it from his hand.

There, she laughed, do you still want to marry her now? She's not so pretty is she?

Whereupon his father tore the knife from her hand, opened the girl and began to unpack, mumbling angrily: And what's this? And this? And look at this! And this, what is this?

Afterwards he sat on the floor and cried.

He himself was methodical in the performance of his ceremonies.

He laid everything neatly away, wrapped in its own plastic.

None of the girls he brought home were good enough for his mother, who, with a brief disdainful glance, summed them up and sneered: "When are you going to find a real woman?"

He got so sick of this that for an entire year he brought home only school age boys, three in all.

To this his parents offered no comment but sat by icily, sure that the aberration would pass. It did. It was no fun. He went back to women, who looked like transplanted Midwestern cheerleaders, bubbly slender professionals with long straight silken brown hair, gentle brown eyes tinged with melancholy and full pouting lips. The last detail was crucial: without a lush red bloom for a mouth he didn't even bother about them, like fish thrown back only they never knew the hook had been in, his sun-tinted dark window rolled up in a dingy white Toyota air-conditioned to feel as cold as the bedroom, with Mom and Pop riding in back, each berating his ears with a ceaseless outpouring of driving instructions which he followed to the letter. If they spotted one they jerked his ear: "There's a Miss Tolbert! Perfect!", but here he drew the line, for this was his decision alone to make. Only he could tell if a candidate qualified to serve as a Miss Tolbert. "You never saw Miss Tolbert!" he hissed "I'll tell you if it's a Miss Tolbert or not!" Mostly they weren't. Real Miss Tolberts were so uncommon. There had to be a certain air of Upper Middle Class privilege about such a one; to seem to have been raised on Grade A milk in a Michigan suburb, which is where Miss Tolbert hailed from. He took the longest with the real Miss Tolbert: about two weeks during which he squeezed every last drop of intimacy out of her, knowing that, after all, she was by then about twenty five years older then when he had known her in Junior High School. That's a lot of catching up to do. All the fake Miss Tolberts to follow were to be roughly of the age that she had been as his teacher, exactly twenty five, as he had learned that age from her during their last time together, in an hour of conversation, when he had, with great difficulty, peeled away the gray duct tape from her mouth, wanting to see her lips one last time. This was in the first week. He had to lean his ear close to catch her gasped answers to his questions, questions whose urgency he made well understood.

"Please," she whispered, her cracked, dry lips barely able to move.

"Miss Tolbert," he said forlornly, "Do you remember that book we read by Hemmingway? It was called..." He winced, trying to recall.

She waited, barely daring to breathe, her right eye sideways-peeled on the Westinghouse steam iron in his hand. It was white hot from a morning-long immersion in fire, and he held it away from the bed not to singe the rubber sheets on which she lay stretched--the same sort of sheets he slept on to protect against his bedwetting. She was trussed in his old back brace, the one his mother had made him wear, and which she had mail ordered from a two inch illustrated ad next to the Frederick's of Hollywood clip-out form in back of True Men Adventure Magazine. The iron was also his mother's, the impress of which now covered Miss Tolbert's once white skin with red snow boot tracks of a drunken hunter weaving through the virgin white of the Northern woods.

Not once had she fainted; he was too smart for that. Neither was she going mad, his applications spaced to permit her sanity to regain a foothold, counter the inevitable slipping one could expect as the result of a difficult trial.

"Farewell Arms" she gasped.

"To...Arms. Farewell to Arms." He nodded earnestly.

"Please"

"O.K. Miss Tolbert. You're as neatly pressed as a freshly washed sheet but only on one side. A job only half done is a job not done at all, you told me that November when you made my mother sign my failed math test."

Her eyes bulged as he wrapped duct tape with satisfactory cling around her mouth and cheeks. He wound it several times completely around her head, leaving vents for breath. And undoing her handcuffs and ropes, flipped her over as easily as a child and cuffed her up, to do the other side, which took a week more: "This is what they did to me. And after the pressing they locked me in the linen pantry for a whole day and night with my brace on. The one you're wearing. Don't stoop your shoulders, 'Stoopie'. O.K.?"

The original Miss Tolbert had been the best. The others were just repeats and though he could rise with them as high and sometimes even higher then he had with the real Miss Tolbert, he'd grow quickly bored and have to turn the fake over to his parents to finish the job, while he glanced at the clock and the calendar hoping they'd get it over with already: they were always so slow.

As slow as the time they had weathered lying there when alive, flies crawling on their ears, a single sunbeam slanting from a broken Venetian blind fading by translucent agonizing degrees into black and blue night. And still they wouldn't let him turn from the corner where he stood, his face an inch from the wall, his calves, buttocks and neck striped with bright red welts and yellowish bruises. The television was on and in slow succession he missed Car 54 Where Are You?, Leave It To Beaver, F Troop, and The Wild Wild West, all his favorite shows and at the end of which, leaving the picture on, but lowering the volume, he heard the wooden slide of the dresser draw opening. "Maybe we should have had a daughter, what do you say?" his father asked his wife, in that fakey voice he used whenever he did this. His mother attempted to inject the usual hardy, humorous note into the proceeding: "At least she'd have helped with the dishes. No one lifts a finger around here to help me." Flickering shadows of a program cast his thirteen year old silhouette on the wall. He despised the shape of himself. Then he felt the underthings strike his back and without turning around he reached behind, lifted them up and put on a tan-colored, padded wire-reinforced brassiere embroidered with flowers, and black silk panties. Then they threw him the nylon stockings and he slipped into them. His rosy erection protruded past the elastic panty line. "Can I come to bed now?" he sobbed, tears ribboning his cheeks, and to his father's grave wordless nod he crawled into bed between them and gasped happily as they closed around his grin.

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