The perfectly made bed
I can not be productive on a rainy day.
This morning I accomplished a few things. I went to the post office. I went grocery shopping. I went to garden and nursery center to buy some soil and pots for transplanting the beans and squashes and things. I started a fire. I did some things, but I have not been productive.
A couple days ago I made the bed. I was struck by a memory from childhood as I went back and forth from one side of the bed to the other. One year, when I was in middle school, my aunt and uncle took my two younger brothers and I to their condo for a long weekend. I don’t remember where they lived. They weren’t even married at that point, I don’t think. So perhaps Uncle Jay wasn’t my uncle at that point.
On a morning before we were headed out to the large county fair I followed my Aunt Sue to the master bedroom. I had just taken a shower. There was some White Rain shampoo. I had used it for the first time and decided I didn’t like the way it made my scalp feel. I would avoid White Rain brands in the future, even when they were on sale.
She was making the bed. Carefully, meticulously, she smoothed out all the wrinkles of the fitted sheet. She tucked in the bottom corners of the top sheet. I offered to help with the endeavor, but she refused. It was quite clear she had a system for doing these sorts of things and that my efforts to help, my intrusion, would only be a hindrance. After she’d evened out the sides such that each of the corners nearest the headboard were equidistant from the floor, she pulled the top sheet taut and swiftly tucked the excess under the mattress. She stood at the foot of the bed, studying the florals to be sure the pattern ran parallel to the sides of the mattress. More smoothing and retucking happens.
I asserted that the bed didn’t have to be perfect. She and Uncle Jay were only going to get into it again later and mess it all up again. Why make the bed at all?
She laughed. “It has to be perfect,” she said. “Trust me. You’ll understand when you’re older.”
This memory came flooding back with such clarity the other day while I was making my own bed, tucking the sheets under perfectly, meticulously sizing up the floral pattern, adjusting the top sheet, and evening out the comforter just so. What did she mean by that? I’m older, but I’m still not sure I understand.
Did she mean to say I would be just as anal as she when I grew up? Would I understand the important of perfect bed making when I shared it with someone else? Or did she already know what I now know about seducing men with a perfectly made bed?
Men love a clean house. They don’t want to be part of making the house clean. They just want it to be clean. There’s nothing that gets a man hotter than coming home after a long day of procrastinating at work to a house that’s neat and tidy and a bedroom with a perfectly made bed.
Why are five-start hotels five-star? The answer is easy: the perfectly made bed. Fluffy, perfectly placed pillows, turned down top blanket, and complimentary chocolates on the shams make this the dreamiest place where dreams are dreamed. No one stops to think the woman who actually made the bed has a mustache and a hunchback; it’s so sexy when you walk into that clean, unmussed room, throw back the blankets and flick on the television.
It’s sexy to rip off the sheets of a perfectly made bed and get busy tearing off the evenly tucked sheets. Men think the bed has been perfectly made for them and them alone. They’re not sure how it got made (It’s possible their mother dropped in just to tidy up the bedroom), but it got made and now it needs to be trashed.
Of course the bed will get messed up again. That’s the POINT. It’s just not as fun to mess it up if it’s already messy.
So, is that what she meant? I’d like to ask her, but I don’t think she’d remember her mental/emotional state at the time, much less the encounter itself. Like the bed that takes every bit of concentration and dexterity one can muster in the five minutes of its making and is then destroyed with out a thought in a matter of seconds, these moments and others are scattered and squandered in the vastness of lost memories.
