Marta and I started off our Friday night at Jordan’s furniture looking at mattresses and bedroom sets. This is already funny if you know about our fear of domestication. Our worst case scenario for the next ten years is that we get good jobs, make good money and buy houses and cars and find husbands and make children. We have these fantastic dreams of travel and adventure and we are afraid that the simple life will creep up on us a little at a time, taking us over until we are tethered to a materialistic and mundane existence like mosquitoes on flypaper.
Dramatic, maybe, but if such domestication is indeed some sort of virus to be avoided, I’m afraid shopping for furniture has got to be a pretty serious symptom. Suddenly, you have these not-so-mobile objects to be responsible for and the more you pay for them, the worse you’ll feel about leaving them.
But there we were, looking at beds and mattresses to furnish the new apartments we’ll move into in the next month. We went from bed to bed, pushing on the tops with the palms of our hands before tentatively sitting and then laying down on them. Every one of them felt like some sort of magic wonder cloud compared to the Alcatraz style “mattress” I’ve been sleeping on these days.
Here’s the tricky thing about shopping for stuff that is already out of your price range: the numbers all start to seem the same. A $600 mattress set is the same as a $1400 mattress set because you don’t have either amount of money. The kind gentleman in the fakie doctor’s coat who works there prescribing expensive bedding to shoppers explained the various financing options to me.
“Wait a minute. You’re telling me I don’t have to pay for this baby for a whole year?” I asked, patting a Beautyrest. Luke, the “Sleep Technician” confirmed this. At first, this was exciting news. I paused and thought about all the wonderful nights of solid, restful sleep I could get. I made my own little Simmons commercial in my mind where I could see myself sleeping with this dumb-ass grin on my face because I am so happy on my new free-for-a-year mattress.
Luke walked me over to a little machine near the door where I could type in my information and get preapproved for this sweet deal. I very nearly fell for it too, but just in the nick of time I saw what he was doing. I realized that he is not Luke the Sleep Technician at all but Luke the Prince of Darkness trying to trick me into financing expensive purchases one at a time. A mattress today, a house with a while picket fence tomorrow. I don’t THINK so! Nice try, gypsy!
Suddenly, I didn’t remember why we came to this Jordan’s Furniture joint in the first place. I tactfully declined the credit approval thing for the moment, saying that we’d like to look around some more first. I took Marta and we made a B-line out of there. That’s a lie. We didn’t make a B-line. It was more of a scribbly, loopy, crazy line because as soon as we got out of the mattress section, we were in the bedroom furniture section and everything was so pretty that I forgot about Luke the Sleep Technician Devil and his no-payments-for-a-year mattresses.
Soon, we lost all sense of time, purpose and self, wandering around with our tongues hanging down to our chests, talking nonsense and saying things like “Oh that set would be so great for a guest room- but I think I would want it in the darker wood.”
Occasionally we’d catch our reflection in the mirrors of the vanity tables and we'd think that those girls looked vaguely familiar. Were they those feminist world travelers who wanted to live modest lives in far away countries? We didn’t know, but we did know that those little girl bunk beds that looked like pink houses were adorable and I was just sure that little Ella and Alexandra, my unborn, yet apparently named daughters, would fight over the top bunk.
Before I had the chance to slap myself across the face for thinking this way, someone came on the loud speak to announce that the store was closing. I pretended not to be devastated and Marta and I made our way to the car, making a quick detour to look at oriental rugs.
We sat in the car for a moment plotting our next move. The night was young- 10pm on a Friday- and we weren’t ready to go home yet. We pretended to think seriously about it for a few moments, as though there were many options at that hour besides going to a bar. We decided not to resist the inevitable but thought we would shake it up a bit by going to a bar in a different town- we are adventurers after all.
Some cocktails, some live music and a little dancing are quite a sufficient antidote to the poison of a trip to Jordan’s, I discovered. Later that night, I crawled into bed on my uncomfortable mattress and had no trouble getting or staying asleep. I woke up gently at 8:00 in the morning surprised that I had slept through the night.
This started me thinking about some other mattress financing options. Instead of figuring out how much my monthly payments would be to sleep soundly on a new Beautyrest, I started calculating how much I would need to spend on vodka for the same effect on my old mattress. That way, I wouldn’t get myself into debt AND if I suddenly decided to flit away to Europe or North Africa or somewhere, I wouldn’t have to worry about leaving behind an expensive mattress or bringing it with me. And a new alcohol problem is easy enough to pack, I figured.
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