Stains

Eleanor Knox

We bought the bed frame at a garage sale, and the mattress we got for cheap off of a friend who needed to get rid of it. The mattress was in good condition. The frame, less so. One leg was shorter than the others so it wobbled whenever someone sat on it, and the white paint was chipped and gray with age. My mom, before she left, called herself the sort-of-handy type. Not so handy she could fix anything properly, but enough to make due with what we had. She sanded it down and slapped a fresh coat of paint on it, affixing a cut open tennis ball to the end of the leg like the desks I had in school. It still wobbled a bit when I turned over in my sleep, but not enough to warrant a better solution. 

When Mom left the first time, I kicked the rotten thing until my toes hurt and the tennis ball flew off into the corner of my room. I let it sit there for a month. The cut in the ball looked like a smile at my expense, as if it was saying “what else did you expect?” The paint chipped and I did not repair it. Neither did my father, who could not call himself the handy type in any sense of the word. 

When Mom came back, months later without explanation or a word of apology, she didn’t notice the destruction. Or she did and she didn’t care. So I dragged off the mattress and shoved the bed onto the front porch, where I spent two afternoons in a row painting it sickly green. The night in between I slept on the couch by the door. She did not leave that night, but the same cannot be said for the next. 

After that, I gave up on my destruction, a mercy I’m sure my poor, soft father was grateful for, though I didn’t know it at the time. He and I patrolled garage sales and thrift stores, buying throw blankets and throw pillows and whatever else we could find. For Christmas, he splurged and bought me a set of 400 thread count sheets. Still sickly green and crooked, I made that bed my oasis. 

I spent sleepless nights and drowsy afternoons there, listening to music in languages I did not speak that captured emotions I could not comprehend. I would sit there until I smelled dinner through the door, usually frozen pizza or canned soup with grilled cheese, and I’d only rise when I heard my father’s gentle knocking. He’d leave the plate outside the door for me to take and eat in bed. We never did family dinners at the rickety dining room table. We hardly ever spoke. But I could hear the television, volume low, from the living room in the moments my door was open. There was something tender in that humming drone, something loving in congealing cheese. 

When I got my first period, the blood soaked through the sheets and into the mattress. Dad didn’t know how to get the stains out, so we blotted it up with wet, crumpled paper towels until it faded from dark red to dull brown. 

The first time I brought a boy over I felt so embarrassed by the stain that I made him fuck me on top of my shabby quilt and I kicked him out before he could ask to sleep over. With every movement the bed shook, to the point where I worried it would break. Dad didn’t say anything the next morning over the breakfast table, though I knew he must have heard us through the walls. The next time I brought a boy over, I shoved a pair of socks under the crooked leg to dampen the sound. 

I spilled so many things on that bed it’s hard to keep track of which stain formed when. Grape soda, apple juice, ramen broth. Eventually I upgraded to cheap boxed wine I found in the back of my father’s closet. Still through all those changes, the bed stayed the same. Even as the green paint, sloppily applied, began to fade and my cheap blankets frayed. Even when we came into a bit of money after my dad got a promotion and I upgraded to real throw pillows with patterns and tassels, those stains never came out. 

Whenever I came home from university to my father’s sad, quiet smile, I slept better in that bed than I could anywhere else. 

Now I’m standing in the front yard, watching that bed burn, eyes watering at the chemical smell of cheap paint burning. The mattress and the blankets and the throw pillows are all safely tucked away in a closet somewhere, but the rickety frame’s time has come. I hope that sleeping on the couch tonight, for the first time in fifteen years, will feel like forgetting. I hope that I never see that shade of sickly green again.