The Bed Is Just To Hold The Pillows Up

I finally punched through my favorite bed sheet the other day. I've been sleeping on it for twenty years, and it was getting so thin I could read the Do Not Remove tag on the mattress through it. It was the softest, smoothest sheet ever, the kind of sheet that makes you wiggle like you're treading water in the morning instead of getting up, just so you can feel it some more. It was soft as a baby's bottom without any of the effluent, mostly. I was so crushed to see the hole that I briefly considered keeping the sheet but avoiding the thin spot. Then I realized that whatever portion of me had thinned out the sheet was not likely to voluntarily relocate in my sleep.

I have another set of sheets, and they're pretty good, but not as good. The good ones didn't quite fit the mattress, and kept poinking off at the corners. The not-as-good ones fit just fine. The trouble is you can't tell if you have the really good sheets until you've bought them and opened them up. They can say stuff on the packaging but it doesn't mean anything. Egyptian cotton? Good for side-sleepers, I assume. Thread count? Please. There's no guarantee your 500 threads per square inch aren't all sticking straight up. Or that your sheet isn't as dense as a pair of Carhartts. And they won't let you feel the sheets in the store. The best you can hope for is if your sheets are all made up on an abbreviated display bed, and you can strip down and crawl in for a few seconds, but usually, in your better department stores, they send over some lady from Fragrances to spray you down. I've heard.

The set I just brought home is typical. It's a cube. It's not remotely squishy. It's encased in a transparent plastic suitcase all its own, with a zipper and everything. When you open it up it slides out all square. And then it folds out like one of those old Christmas Life-Savers books, and if you dig at it long enough, you'll discover it has been folded around heavy-duty cardboard to maintain squaritude. They pay some tiny person in Indonesia fifteen cents a day to cardboardize your sheets and then the store puts a lock on the little zipper so you can't open it up and feel them. Oh, it's packaged all to hell. You can tell the company sincerely wanted to add polystyrene foam and microbeads to the packaging and edge the plastic suitcase in baby seal fur, but Marketing intervened and insisted everything be transparent. At any rate, you have to throw the little suitcase away, preferably directly in the ocean where it can eventually choke an albatross. Because you're never, ever going to wad your sheets back into the sucker.

At least I was able to purchase a sheet set that didn't include four pillowcases and a pair of shams. We only use the two pillows, and they're not even king-size, though our bed is. Dave wanted something he could locate both ends of, so he got a queen, and mine is even smaller. When I make up the bed, it looks like I'm hiding a Tic-Tac in there. All I use in a pillow is the corner. I'm a stomach sleeper, and I fold the point under and wad up a fist-sized portion to mold to my eye socket and temple--just enough to keep my nostrils off the mattress. I don't even use the center portion of the pillow. That's just there to give me four corners to choose from.

Since my entire pillow inventory could be the size of a stuffed sock, I have always wondered why beds come with so many pillows now. I thought it was just for show. You have your regular pillows, you have your extra set of regular pillows, you have your throws, your tubulars, and your shams, all in attractive coordinating fabrics that aren't too matchy-matchy. What are they for? Are they bolsters to keep you from sailing off the bed? Are they cat deflectors? First thing I do when I encounter a bed with this many pillows is find the skinniest squishiest one and throw the rest on the floor. But at some point it occurred to me that my guests might actually enjoy pillows.  So I got a few extra for the guest room. OMG.

They use them. They orchestrate them. They want them. They, like me, have body parts all over them that need to be molded or contained, and they will draft every available pillow to give them an edge on insomnia. I may hate fat pillows because they force me to crank my head back like Jake the Alligator Man, but other people need as many different pillows as they can get. I won't argue: you have to go with what works. I need to keep my nostrils from being mashed into the mattress, and if my guests have something personal on them that needs propping up, it's no business of mine.

The Dust-Mite-Laden Arms Of Morpheus

I found a helpful article in the paper the other day on how to pull together the perfect bedroom look, and I devoured it, looking for the answer to the biggest mystery: why shams? They didn't say. What struck me instead was the categorical statement that you should replace your pillows every one or two years. There was some kind of reason. Your pillow molecules will mutiny, assemble a dust-mite cavalry, and take you down in the middle of the night, or something. Immediately this struck me as the sort of science that comes straight from the marketing department. Like "lather, rinse, repeat." Or the received wisdom that a diamond engagement ring should set you back two months' pay. Or the latest from Taco Bell: Fourth Meal. (This last legitimizes the enormous fat-and-salt porkathon you scarf down at two in the morning to soak up some of the alcohol, and just in time, too, because people were in danger of starting to worry about diabetes.)

Well, Dave and I haven't replaced our pillows for as long as we've known each other, at least--36 years. And neither one of us wants to replace our pillow, which is absurd, because he totally should.

His pillow is the skinned and flayed remainder of its former self, just a pillow gut pile with the ticking long gone. It is a gray, dingy remnant of folded-over batting whose only dignity is conferred upon it by the pillowcase that holds it together. Mine, on the other hand, still has its entire outer cover, if not all its original innards.

Dave is a man of great courage and loyalty who would stop a bullet with his forehead to save a friend. However, his sense of loyalty is not limited to those with the customary supply of consciousness. He befriends inanimate objects all the time. Pieces of fluff, rocks that look like they have noses, and wind-up Fred Flintstones, every one becomes his "little buddy." In all likelihood he looks at his disreputable rag of a pillow and sees a congregation of dust bunnies, arms linked, little buddies in formation, and would no more discard it (or them) than he would kick Pootie (#1 Little Buddy) to the curb for being a Lakers fan. Ditching his pillow would not be an act of hygiene: it would be a betrayal.

If my pillow is not my original childhood pillow, it has to be close. It is a thin squashable scrap of ticking half-filled with Archaeopteryx feathers and every night I mold it into a popcorn-shaped sculpture designed to keep my face nearly straight down while allowing a little breathing passageway. I am a stomach sleeper.

I cannot fall asleep on my back. Sometimes that's where I end up, and I can tell because I'm occasionally in that position when I wake up due to some horrible racket that always quits just when I come to. It is possible for me to fall asleep on my side, but it is too dispiriting to watch my belly set sail for distant shores across the mattress and my boobs pool out like a short stack of pancakes. So most of the time I fall asleep face down. I've been doing this since I was wee. Probably my parents put me in the crib that way hoping it might save them college expenses one day. I know for a fact that I wasn't in their original plan.

But my scrawny little pillow doesn't make my bed look good. It makes my be look like Brigitte Bardot's bustier on a six-year-old. What makes a bed look good, according to reliable sources that sell such things, is a mountain of pillows adorned with cases and shams in coordinating colors, textures, and patterns, including stripes, plaids, and florals, but nothing too matchy-matchy. In other words, the look that sends me into despair when I see it in my motel room. I have to evict all but one pillow and then find a corner of it and wheedle it into a little one-inch nose prop while the rest of the pillow floats above my head like a thought balloon.

But the secret that lies inside my laundered pillowcase is a lifetime of skin cells, drool, and other DNA. If I found it on the "free" table in a garage sale, I'd be horrified. But it's all mine. I've got almost sixty years of personal bacteria in there. My little buddies. I can't abandon them now.