Bedmaking

When the sheets were warm out of the dryer, I always heard my name – a call to my parents’ room where the mattress pad lay exposed and the rust colored comforter showed me its lighter underbelly, tossed over the foot of the sleigh bed. Mom and I would begin the fortnightly tussle with the fitted sheet.

“Is this the right way do you think?”

“Yes. Wait. No.”

“I think I’ve got it.”

“Are you sure?”

It would begin to take its rectangular shape as we hooked it around the four corners. Then one of us would grab the flat sheet and fling it out. This reminded me of the parachute game in gym class, and I would sometimes duck a little to look across the bed at mom underneath our fleeting canopy.

“Make sure to tuck it in all the way or dad won’t sleep well,” she would always say. At a certain age I would roll my eyes and reply, “I know, mom.” Together, we’d lift the bottom end of the mattress. When I was littler, I couldn’t get it as high as she could. Into middle school, I’d hoist it up as far as my arm could extend. Though, no matter how high or low I’d gotten it, I’d still wrap the purple-flowered linen tight around the end so that it wouldn’t come undone and wrap around dad’s feet, pulling him into consciousness.

We would put the pillows (memory foam and particularly difficult to pillowcase) on top of the flat sheet. I thought this was stupid. It seemed to me that it would make that first get-into-bed more difficult. You might forget that the sheet was underneath the pillow and wind up on top of it, having to get back out, feet on cold hardwood, and rearrange everything in the dark. I asked her once why she did it this way and the only reason she gave was “that’s how my mom did it.”

In the apartment I live in now, when I have freshly washed sheets (less often than mom’s mandatory two week rotation), I walk around my bed several times, uncrumpling the fitted sheet and parachuting the flat one, though there’s no one on the other side to look at. The pillows go on last, only covered by my quilt. When I get into bed that night, I raise the pillow, fold back the sheet, and think of home.

Even when I return to my parents’ house for holidays and breaks, I am enlisted to help make the bed. In the laundry room, we get one sheet out of the dryer and call for either of the two sister cats, who were adopted soon after I left for college. Sometimes mom will shake a bag of their treats, teasing them out of their beds. Whoever gets there first gets to take a ride. (It tends to be Lucy, who is very food-motivated.) I set Lucy in the middle of the sheet and we hold the corners tight, raising her up, and begin to swing her slowly.

“Rock-a-bye baby on the treetop, when the wind blows the cradle will rock…” Lucy’s pupils swell as she realizes this is not the treat that she showed up for. She chirps a few times, sprawled, until we set her down as gently as we can, singing “cradle and all” with a ritardando.

Mom gathers the rest of the warm sheets, a dryer sheet sometimes wrapped in the folds, and I follow her down the hall as she carries the bundle.

“Make sure to tuck it in all the way or dad won’t sleep well,” I say, as we lift the mattress for the flat sheet. She rolls her eyes.