My father looked at me. ‘What we need to do here, Jim, is take the mattress and box spring off the bed frame under here,’ my father said, ‘and expose the frame.’ He took time out to explain that the bed’s bottom mattress was hard-framed and known uniformly as a box spring. I was looking at my sneakers and making my feet alternately pigeon-toed and then penguin-toed on the bedroom’s blue carpet. My father drank some of his tomato juice and looked down at the edge of the bed’s metal frame and felt along the outline of his jaw, where his commercial studio makeup ended abruptly at the turtleneck collar of his white commercial tunic.
‘The frame on this bed is old,’ he told me. ‘It’s probably older than you are. Right now I’m thinking the thing’s bolts have maybe started coming loose, and that’s what’s gibbering and squeaking at night.’ He finished his tomato juice and held the glass out for me to take and put somewhere. ‘So we want to move all this top crap out of the way, entirely’ — he gestured with one arm — ‘entirely out of the way, get it out of the room, and expose the frame, and see if we don’t maybe just need to tighten up the bolts.’
I wasn’t sure where to put my father’s empty glass, which had juice residue and grains of pepper along the inside’s sides. I poked at the mattress and box spring a little bit with my foot. ‘Are you sure it isn’t just the mattress?’ I said. The bed’s frame’s bolts struck me as a rather exotic first-order explanation for the squeaking.
My father gestured broadly. ‘Synchronícity surrounds me. Concord,’ he said. ‘Because that’s what your mother thinks it is, also.’ My mother was using both hands to take the blue pillowcases off all five of their pillows, again using her chin as a clamp. The pillows were all the overplump polyester fiberfill kind, because of my father’s allergies.
‘Great minds think alike,’ my father said.
Neither of my parents had any interest in hard science, though a great uncle had accidentally electrocuted himself with a field series generator he was seeking to patent.
My mother stacked the pillows on top of the neatly folded bedding on her dresser. She had to get up on her tiptoes to put the folded pillowcases on top of the pillows. I had started to move to help her, but I couldn’t decide where to put the empty tomato juice glass.
‘But you just want to hope it isn’t the mattress,’ father said. ‘Or the box spring.’
My mother sat down on the foot of the bed and got out another long cigarette and lit it. She carried a little leatherette snap-case for both her cigarettes and her lighter.
My father said, ‘Because a new frame, even if we can’t get the bolts squared away on this one and I have to go get a new one. A new frame. It wouldn’t be too bad, see. Even top-shelf bed frames aren’t that expensive. But new mattresses are outrageously expensive.’ He looked at my mother. ‘And I mean fucking outrageous.’ He looked down at the back of my mother’s head. ‘And we bought a new box spring for this sad excuse for a bed not five years ago.’ He was looking down at the back of my mother’s head as if he wanted to confirm that she was listening. My mother had crossed her legs and was looking with a certain concentration either at or out the master bedroom window. Our home’s whole subdivision was spread along a severe hillside, which meant that the view from my parents’ bedroom on the first floor was of just sky and sun and a foreshortened declivity of lawn. The lawn sloped at an average angle of 55° and had to be mowed horizontally. None of the subdivision’s lawns had trees yet. ‘Of course that was during a seldom-discussed point in time when your mother had to assume the burden of assuming responsibility for finances in the household,’ my father said. He was now perspiring very heavily, but still had his white professional toupee on, and still looked at my mother.
My father acted, throughout our time in California, as both symbol and spokesman for the Glad F.P.R. Co.’s Individual Sandwich Bag Division. He was the first of two actors to portray the Man from Glad. He was inserted several times a month in a mock-up of a car interior, where he would be filmed in a tight trans-windshield shot receiving an emergency radio summons to some household that was having a portable-food-storage problem. He was then inserted opposite an actress in a generic kitchen-interior set, where he would explain how a particular species of Glad Sandwich Bag was precisely what the doctor ordered for the particular portable-food-storage problem at issue. In his vaguely medical uniform of all white, he carried an air of authority and great evident conviction, and earned what I always gathered was an impressive salary, for those times, and received, for the first time in his career, fan mail, some of which bordered on the disturbing, and which he sometimes liked to read out loud at night in the living room, loudly and dramatically, sitting up with a nightcap and fan mail long after my mother and I had gone to bed.
I asked whether I could excuse myself for a moment to take my father’s empty tomato juice glass out to the kitchen sink. I was worried that the residue along the inside sides of the tumbler would harden into the kind of precipitate that would be hard to wash off.
‘For Christ’s sake Jim just put the thing down,’ my father said.
I put the tumbler down on the bedroom carpet over next to the base of my mother’s dresser, pressing down to create a kind of circular receptacle for it in the carpet. My mother stood up and went back over by the bedroom window with her ashtray. We could tell she was getting out of our way.
My father cracked his knuckles and studied the path between the bed and the bedroom door.
I said I understood my part here to be to help my father move the mattress and box spring off the suspect bed frame and well out of the way. My father cracked his knuckles and replied that I was becoming almost fright-eningly quick and perceptive. He went around between the foot of the bed and my mother at the window. He said, ‘I want to let’s just stack it all out in the hall, to get it the hell out of here and give us some room to maneuver.’
‘Right,’ I said.
My father and I were now on opposite sides of my parents’ bed. My father rubbed his hands together and bent and worked his hands between the mattress and box spring and began to lift the mattress up from his side of the bed. When his side of the mattress had risen to the height of his shoulders, he somehow inverted his hands and began pushing his side up rather than lifting it. The top of his wig disappeared behind the rising mattress, and his side rose in an arc to almost the height of the white ceiling, exceeded 90°, toppled over, and began to fall over down toward me. The mattress’s overall movement was like the crest of a breaking wave, I remember. I spread my arms and took the impact of the mattress with my chest and face, supporting the angled mattress with my chest, outspread arms, and face. All I could see was an extreme close-up of the woodland floral pattern of the mattress protector.
The mattress, a Simmons Beauty Rest whose tag said that it could not by law be removed, now formed the hypotenuse of a right dihedral triangle whose legs were myself and the bed’s box spring. I remember visualizing and considering this triangle. My legs were trembling under the mattress’s canted weight. My father exhorted me to hold and support the mattress. The respectively sharp plastic and meaty human smells of the mattress and protector were very distinct because my nose was mashed up against them.
My father came around to my side of the bed, and together we pushed the mattress back up until it stood up at 90° again. We edged carefully apart and each took one end of the upright mattress and began jockeying it off the bed and out the bedroom door into the uncarpeted hallway.