about two years ago elly and i decided we needed a new mattress
or maybe elly decided it because i didnt pay much attention to the
problem
we had an old mattress wed had it for years and the salesman
wed bought it from had assured us it would last us a lifetime and it
was getting older and lumpy or lumpy in some places and hollowed out
in others and i just assumed it was part of a normal process of aging
it was getting older we were getting older and wed get used to it but
eleanor has a bad back and she was getting desperate to get rid of
this mattress that had lived with us for such a long time and so
lotally that i thought i knew all its high points and low points its
eminences and pitfalls and i was sure that at night my body
worked its way carefully around the lumps dodging the precipices
and moving to solider ground whenever it could
but maybe eleanor
sleeps more heavily than i do i have a feeling that i spent much of
my life at night avoiding the pitfalls of this mattress that i was used
to and it was a skill id acquired over the ten or fifteen years of this
mattress’ life so I felt there was no reason to get rid of this mattress
that had been promised to us by a salesman who said it would last the
rest of our lives i figured we were going to live long lives i didnt
think we were anywhere close to dying so neither was the mattress
but eleanor kept waking up with backaches
still i figured it was a good mattress and that elly just didnt have
enough skill at avoiding the lumps it never occurred to me that the
mattress was at fault so i didnt do anything and elly didnt do
anything because shes not into consumer products and hates to go
shopping but by the end of a year elly convinced me because she
has a sensitive back and i dont that she had a more accurate
understanding of this business than i did so I said sure eleanor
lets get a new mattress were rebuilding the house as long as
were going to have a new house we may as well have a new mattress
but eleanor said how will i know its a good one i dont want to get
another mattress that gets hollowed and lumpy and gives me backaches
when i wake up how will i know how to get a good one
i said well open the yellow pages and well look up mattresses and
therell be several places that sell them and ill close my eyes and
point a finger at one of these places and it will be a place that has
lots of mattresses where we can make a choice as to what constitutes
a good one by lying on them
Copyright © 2005 by David Antin. From i never knew what time it was. Reprinted with permission of the University of California Press.