Pillow Talk

       (Originally posted at joecsmolen.com 1/9/2022)

He couldn’t understand what he was seeing, but it didn’t seem to matter much. It looked like their house, but the way he used to imagine it would look, from up in the top of the big spruce – where he always meant to climb. He recognized their red steel roof, but it was just too far down there. He remembered a long time ago, watching late night TV and then all of a sudden, the whole TV would shrink to dinky, like it was fifty feet away – like down at the end of a tunnel. His eyes were just tired. It was just time to shut the thing off.

He'd made their bed. It was just a double bed. She had a habit of crowding him with her furnace during the night and he’d wake up sweating - which wouldn’t have happened if they had a King. But she never would hear of it. He was glad now. He didn’t have to make the giant bed he used to be so sure he wanted.

He remembered he just got done making their bed again, but this time stopped and stood in their bedroom doorway and looked back at it. There wasn’t anything any more but only one pillow – a forlorn-looking thing, he thought to himself.

He couldn’t imagine at all what he was seeing. He was closer. But how could he be seeing down into their attic again? It weirded him out. It’d been a lo-o-ong time, but his hands had built every square inch of their house. He should know what he was seeing. Maybe it was just the distance.

Back when he retired, he and his wife looked at each other and almost in unison, warned, “I don’t want to build a house with you.”

Eons after their house was finished, at a garage sale, she got a really nice old fashioned cable-fed Anemometer. The endless summer was tailing off and she wanted to measure the Winter storms. After breakfast and a lotta coffee, to install her Anemometer cable, and to avoid tearing-up the drywall of their bedroom ceiling, he drug the cable into the tomb-like, bedroom attic. She tried to stop him. She said she could just re-sell the Anemometer.

But like way back in the 1990s, an article in Smithsonian Magazine had posed the question, “What should a man of eighty expect from himself?” He’d learned that with enough coffee, the answer was, “Quite a bit.”

He was eighty-one when he climbed into the attic with her Anemometer cable. Clear way over outside the bathroom door, he positioned his ladder under the attic access hatch. His knees didn’t like ladders, but he adjusted his LED head lamp and started aloft. Orienting himself as he lifted himself into the darkness, he saw his LED play way back in there amongst the shadows where he would be spelunking. In that direction, he expected the overhead clearance would become vanishingly small.

It did. He couldn’t damage the drywall exposed between the truss webs. He had to be careful where he placed his weight. He bridged his body rigidly, like he was doing push-ups - truss to truss. He started to sweat. The going got claustrophobic. Then, he realized he left the end of the Anemometer cable somewhere behind him. In what felt like an endless push-up position, he reversed back over three trusses. It was only six feet, but he was sweating hard now; it was pouring over the lenses of his reading glasses. He fumbled in the shadows for the bitter end of the cable.

 The going got worst at his destination over their bedroom. He’d forgotten the complexity of the roof framing just outside their bedroom door. He had to worm his way. On his belly, he’d just barely passed through into the area above their bedroom, when he felt the sharp stab of his right hamstring cramping and shortening-up and doubling his now useless leg.

He couldn’t move. Below him in their bedroom, he could hear the worry in her muffled voice – demanding something, something, something – he couldn’t tell what. Worse, his teeth started to float. It wasn’t like he was in a coffin, though. In a coffin, you’re on your back.

Before his head-lamp burned out, he had a long time to just lay there and try to massage his hamstring and study the Engineer’s Certification Stamp on the roof truss right in front of his face - before the rescue tip of her keyhole saw appeared from below, cutting an escape opening through the drywall of their bedroom ceiling.

Suddenly now, thinking back about the Anemometer cable, he understood part of what he was seeing – like a far-off TV. It was a sky-view of the patch she’d made nearly ten years ago in the drywall of their bedroom ceiling. Made him plenty mad when she did it.  She said there was a good reason the Smithsonian article stopped at eighty. She was right. At eighty-one, he was past his pull date.

Now, right down through her ceiling patch, he could see his pillow, too – small, rectangular, crumpled - and isolated – like he was out over the ocean, flying in a search plane – exactly like he’d just spotted a speck survival raft – only his pillow - the raft - was alone and empty.

He had a lumpy pillow for years now – like full of dryer balls. He felt powerless to fluff it. She always did. Even when he made her mad sometimes, and she slept it off downstairs, she left his pillow fluffy. It was never fluffy any more. He wasn’t up to that. His pillow was just forlorn. But none of it seemed important any more. Why should it?

But what! Here was something for sure worth going back down to look at. He could see down there his own face. It was true. He knew he should have shaved and here his depressed sloppiness was, blowing up in his face like a Pringles can crammed with spring-loaded gag snakes. And he knew the back of the woman’s head he was seeing above his own face. He knew the scar at the crown of her head, the one she tried to hide with her hair. She hadn’t in years, but it looked like she was trying to wake him up. Over her shoulder, he could see that both her hands were shaking him.

She stopped shaking him and stood up and went and got his pillow and just before she lifted his head and slid his pillow under it, she paused and fluffed-out the dryer balls.

He knew she would be asking him something. Where had she come from? She would want to know why he was laying on the bare floor at their bedroom door. He couldn’t imagine where she came from. She deserved an explanation. There was no carpet at their bedroom door to sleep on. It was cold and hard. He would have to tell her he just didn’t know why he was sleeping there.

He decided to go back down and put her heart at rest. It seemed he should know what his pillow was doing on the floor outside their bedroom door, but he went and picked it up and fluffed it and kneaded the dryer balls extra so she wouldn’t think he didn’t care anymore. He couldn’t stand her thinking that. He carried his pillow around and placed it in his normal spot – there on the far side of their bed. Last, he went in the bathroom and shaved.

It felt good to crawl back into their bed all set to go.