Laurel disliked her childhood bed. She was one of those kids who never needed to sleep much, and her mother was one of those parents who believed in a child’s bedtime for the parents more than for the child, so she spent too much time in it awake. She hated how narrow it was.

She was forced to develop sleep fantasies, to pass the time and also send herself under. Cozy scripts that had her nesting in a tree bough, a perfect cave, a horse-drawn sleigh.

Her friends had full-size beds. When they spent the night at their houses there was room for both girls. When they were at Laurel’s house, one of them had to sleep on the floor.

She liked going away to college but she despised the dormitory bed. As soon as she was permitted her own apartment she found the money to buy a double. But it wasn’t much money and it was a lumpy double; she could stretch diagonally but she couldn’t get comfortable.

Laurel may have married for the bed. She and Bill wanted to live together, and they knew all four parents would have trouble with that, so they made a no-strings marriage deal. He started it. He proposed. It was on a sunny morning after their usual romping good sex. They woke up in his dorm room in his big waterbed, and they both knew they wanted to keep waking up together like that. He climbed out of the bed (then framed sandbox-like, on the floor) and picked his way through their discarded clothes to his dresser, where he fetched the ring he’d already bought at some pawnshop, and then he dangle-walked back to Laurel and posed the question. She stretched out into the mattress as she said yes.

That bed was odd-sized – Bill had won it in a Benzedrine- and bourbon-fueled marathon Monopoly game – and they spent their engagement summer making a beautiful raised frame for it in the same odd size. They built the frame of clear golden oak and it featured a half-moon headboard, and because Bill was the one with a job that summer, Laurel did almost all of the semi-circular shaping. A year later when the mattress sprouted a leak, they had to sweet-talk a manufacturer in So. San Francisco into fast-fabricating a new odd-sized water mattress, to fit the frame they loved so much.

Bill and Laurel almost didn’t find an apartment by the date of the wedding. That was one of their tensions, because they’d already budgeted for the honeymoon and they needed to spend the first two nights in their own place. They wanted it that way regardless of money: their first marital sex in their special bed. Bill and the best man ended up moving the bed in the morning of the ceremony. They went from there straight to the barber. When they explained what they’d been doing that had them so hot and hurried, the barber said:

“Ah, the marriage bed! Lovely place, at first. But here’s the thing, boys,” and he pointed to the tall glass container that held used black combs in blue solution. “Imagine you have a jar like that,” he instructed. “If you put a bean into it each time that you have sex for the first year of your marriage, and then you remove a bean every time you do it with your wife after that year, I’ll bet you any amount that you’ll die with beans in the jar!” And he laughed so hard he bent forward.

Then he cut their hair and trimmed their beards. This was in 1972; any salonista could style hair, but one had to be a card-carrying member of the barber’s union to shave a face.

There were beans in the jar when Laurel and Bill divorced. By then she had moved on to Tom. But she still loved the bed. Tom was kinkier than Bill. Bill was always willing, but Tom had ideas of his own. Discreetly he added small pegs to unseen parts of the bed frame and he hung a picture that reversed to a plastic mirror above the bed, but not discreetly enough. Bill noticed them once long after the split, when he was upstairs because of something about the kids, and his face twisted with fresh grief.