Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007

Cover of Oregon Humanities Fall/Winter 2007
Kathleen Holt
EDITOR
Jennifer Viviano
GRAPHIC DESIGN
Leigh van der Werff
PUBLICATIONS ASSISTANT
Allison Dubinsky
COPY EDITOR
Editorial Advisory Board
Tom Booth
Brian Doyle
Debra Gwartney
Julia Heydon
Marianne Keddington-Lang
Guy Maynard
Win McCormack
Camela Raymond
Kate Sage
Linny Stovall
Rich Wandschneider
Curt Yehnert

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A Place to Sleep

A bed--no matter how crowded or temporary--makes a home

By Betty Lynch Husted

Not long ago I heard a story on National Public Radio about a man my own age, someone easily mistaken for a college professor, who has been homeless for six years. Occasionally, he said, he gets house-sitting jobs for friends. The hardest parts are the last few nights as he counts down the hours he gets to spend in a real bed--a comfortable place to lay his body.

Listening, I remembered the Chinese calligraphy teacher in Mark Salzman's book Iron & Silk. When Salzman asks him what two things he thinks about most, the teacher says, "Eating and sleeping." He is amazed that young Salzman, a recent Yale graduate who has come to China to teach English and to study martial arts, thinks most about being liked, especially by women, and about mastering something well enough to earn recognition for it. "But these goals can be achieved so easily!" the teacher says. "All you have to do is be kind and work hard. But to eat and sleep well, that is a difficult wish, because you cannot control these things yourself."

A place to sleep. Such a basic human need: a place to lay your body, a place from which you hope to awaken, saved once again from insanity, even death, by that sojourn in an alternate reality. Do the sociologists have it all wrong? Maybe the simplest way to determine social class is to forget all those questions about money and education and position and power and ask instead, "How much time do you spend thinking about where you will sleep?"

When I was in high school, a teacher told us that in Calcutta, thousands of people had to curl up for the night in doorways. We couldn't imagine it. At last count in Pendleton, the small Eastern Oregon town where I live now, there were one hundred and fifty homeless students. Most of them were not sleeping in cars or under bridges or in the willow thickets down along the river levee; they were able to enroll in school because many of their families had found temporary emergency shelter through the Salvation Army or were crowding into an apartment with this relative, then that friend, people nearly as desperate as themselves. Every one of them probably agreed with the Chinese calligrapher's observation: that eating and sleeping are a difficult wish. And I doubt that any of these students felt the comfort of the childhood story my mother read to me the winter that we left the countryside for a tiny, one-room house in town: "I wondered where I would sleep tonight--but when my bed came in, I was all right."

Tonight, I'm sleeping on the hide-a-bed in my aunt's basement--my home away from home, the place I stay when I visit my mother, who has made what she thinks will be her final move, into an assisted-living apartment. It's 2:00 a.m. Footsteps overhead: Aunt Carolyn must be taking her book down to the living room couch. "Did you get any sleep?" she will ask me in the morning, her forehead wrinkling exactly like my mother's does when she's worried. If Mom weren't ten years older than Carolyn, they would have been mistaken for twins.

"Your mother was a mother to me, too," Aunt Carolyn says when my sister and I try to thank her now for driving Mom to another doctor's appointment or a college jazz concert or her physical therapy. We thank her for dropping by Mom's small apartment nearly every day. But Carolyn doesn't do it for us; she does it because, as she explained to me earlier today, "She gave me the only mothering I had." It's as if our mother has three daughters, not two. Before she was married--when she was still dating my father--Mom would climb into the small bed she shared with eight-year-old Carolyn and whisper the secrets of her grown-up evening, how she and the man who would be my father had walked all around the dark streets hand in hand, singing "Winter Wonderland." And later, when Carolyn came up the mountain to visit the little one-room log cabin where my parents were living, Mom simply slid closer to Dad to make room for her sister in the bed.

By the time Carolyn was born, the youngest child of six, my grandmother's depression had deepened. Two weeks before Carolyn's fifteenth birthday, and a year before I was born, this grandmother I never met jumped from the Orofino bridge into the January current of Idaho's Clearwater River. "When they pulled Emily out on the other side, there by the cemetery," a more distant relative told me once, "she may have still been alive. I can't remember."

After their mother died, Carolyn rode the bus to the Bremerton shipyards, where she could live with another sister, help with a new baby, and go to high school. When she returned at sixteen, her father had remarried. "And that summer was such a hard time for your folks," Carolyn said. I can only imagine. The war in Europe had just ended and my recently drafted thirty-year-old father had been sent home before he finished boot camp; my sister was a toddler and I was a newborn. They had no money. "It can't have been easy for them to take me in. But they made a little cot for me on the back porch."

I lie in the darkness as Carolyn's house settles and creaks above me. Is this what it comes down to? Does the confidence to walk freely under the sun grow out of the knowledge that you have a place to sleep when night returns? My mind drifts to a homeless man I met in the laundromat, and those people wrapped in mildewed sleeping bags down by the levee. The newspaper headline: "Eighteen Beds Cut from Treatment Center."

I close my eyes, thinking of Aunt Carolyn's hands spreading the blue- and pink-flowered coverlet over my mother's new bed at the assisted-living center, her fingers smoothing it into beauty, resting a moment at the corners to tuck in the soft Grandmother Spider-patterned Pendleton blanket. The blue loveseat, that new blue chair. And a Princess daybed, white with tiny pink roses. "I want her to have nice things, things of her own. A girl's room," Carolyn had said as we helped my mother move. "She's never had one before."

My mother had a bed she could call her own only once when she was a girl, the year she was fifteen. That summer she had landed a Depression-era job in the Orofino Hospital kitchen as a tray girl; finally she could afford to buy her textbooks. The winter before, during what should have been her freshman year of high school if there had been enough money for English and math books, she had slept in the sunken hole of a broken-spring couch while her three brothers kicked and groaned and shivered under their shared blanket.

She walked to the hospital at 5:00 a.m., and at eleven o'clock, after breakfast had been prepared and hauled up hand over hand on the dumbwaiter and the thick, heavy crockery had been retrieved and washed, the cook often said, "Why don't you go lie down on my bed for an hour?" The cook had a room in the hospital with a bed and nightstand; so did the laundress and the janitor. All three had children, but the job was seven days a week and since they had to live there, the beds were part of their pay. One sent her children to live with her sister; the other paid a woman to care for them. The janitor's wife and two boys lived in town and he could go home for dinner sometimes, but he, too, had to be close by in case accidents came in--a young sawyer or choker setter too badly mangled to manage the stairs--and he was needed to pull the elevator rope, which weighed even more than the dumbwaiter did when it was loaded with six trays.

"When did you get to go home, Mom?" I asked her.

"When the work was done. Oh, I guess usually about nine. The cook and the laundress were both so good to me ... and Mr. Benson, too. I can still hear the nurse calling him. Benson! Benson! Another dirty job to clean up!"

Hospital beds drift across the ceiling and dissolve in the gray strip of light above the blinds. I must have slept.

Tomorrow I will be home again, slipping under the comforter and back into my husband's arms. All night we will roll together, turning first his way and then mine. Sharing the queen-size bed, we will float in a deep green pool between stretches of whitewater.

"Your house would fit inside my garage!" a woman once told me. Still, who needs more than this? Two bedrooms: one for sleeping, one for writing. And jammed into the corner between the desk and the file cabinet, a second bed, a smaller one--a space I keep for visiting friends, out-of-town poets, children, and people who are weary to desperation, about to fold. Anyone who needs a place to lie down, a place to sleep.

Published in the Fall/Winter 2007 issue of Oregon Humanities.

© 2007 Oregon Council for the Humanities