Bunk Bed Assembly

I am assembling a bunk bed in an otherwise empty bedroom and the metaphors abound. I am profoundly aware that I am stacking bed frames and stories upon stories upon stories.

I am here because I chose this hard, this stack of hards. I chose to leave a marriage of 17 years this last year. In this, I am not heroic. I am merely a woman who could not see a future where she could model good parenting and good partnership simultaneously, given the way a life’s fabric can shred and fray. I am here, perhaps, because I lacked imagination of a future where we rebuilt our sinking IKEA bed plank by plank. Or maybe I am here because I leaned in to my imagination, where I believed I might be capable of starting over, of co-parenting and reducing the atmospheric tension, and betting on myself.

This bunk bed will not build itself, which is fine as I enjoy the tedious meditation of Allen wrenching screws and double-checking instruction manual diagrams. My co-worker tells me I should invite a friend over to help me, but I have always enjoyed the solitude of a manual task. The times when I have had to share a job and to communicate to someone else the precise logistical maneuvers I intend to make, (rather than simply winging it) has always exposed my feverish independence. I am a firstborn with a stubborn streak and yet I am utterly at peace as I hex key my way through each bar and beam of this bunked contraption.

My bunkmate of 17 years was remarkably gifted in curiosity. He wanted to know how a thing was made, how the machine was engineered, what made a person tick. He knew how to build a thing before he set about doing the dang thing. He knew what people needed before they knew themselves. I could never project so far; my high beams were always too dim. I muddled through, killing plants and misassembling dressers so that the drawers clunked off the rails every time they opened.

This bunk bed is not a twinset but a full-over-full mattress bunk bed for the children whose limbs and senses of self are growing. Their inward and outward journeys are bewildering and beautiful to me. I am the woman who once lied on their bedroom floors for hours until they were fast asleep, but now I assemble the beds they will prefer I never come near, not even to wash the sheets they deny ever need to be washed. They are close siblings and will not allow the other to be left behind, but they will undoubtedly fight over who will get stuck with top bunk. They will stay up late debating the deeper meanings of Kendrick Lamar lyrics. Bars, man.

I carry long metal spindles and hook them into the strange catch-holes of this bedframe. This bunk bed was bought with Amazon gift cards from thankful student families who could not possibly have known how they are allowing me to build something new for my little family. How they are giving my children, and perhaps their mom, as well, a place to find rest.

Big Drive-Thru Energy

What you need to know is that I’m a good-ish driver. Except when I’m stressed, which is 89% of the time. In a stress zone behind the wheel, I do things like chew up the insides of my mouth and sweat buckets and become cartoonishly startled when someone honks. I’ve amassed a number of speeding tickets (not proud) and totaled a car before (super not proud) and even drove a motorscooter into a garage door (bought someone a new one who is not me) but I’m trying to be a better, more steady, more circumspect driver. Then my oldest kid wants to show me a video, probably a TikTok that makes a subtle reference to a classic meme that I need explained to me, and said kid is doing so whilst riding passenger, and my number one parenting strategy is to become intrigued by the things that dazzle my children. I just should probably make exceptions to doing that when I’m, e.g. operating a moving vehicle. Ah! There’s the addendum. 

That addendum obviously eluded me sometime in July, which is why when we were exiting the Rockland Wendy’s (where we had just purchased a highly nutritious meal that totally did not include a Frosty that was masquerading as a meal replacement) it was so strange when we noticed a car pulling up the narrow exit lane in the opposite direction. 

Like what the heck, did this driver not know this was an exit only lane? 

We were about to crash into an oncoming car, when lo! I realized that because of my TikToking While Driving, I was actually driving through the Drive-Thru in the wrong direction. 

Not only was I blocking a whole stream of cars, but I had passed all signage and windows and other Giant Throbbing Clues that would have easily tipped me off that I was the bozo. 

As I tried to reverse on a curve, a feat that should not be attended by any old station wagon whipping amateur, my oldest child and I waved hello to the drive-thru cashier who had seen us advance in the wrong direction and now reverse in the right direction. His 15 ½ year-old face was one of bemusement. Apparently I was his first. 

We then passed a bright bay window of all the rest of the employees, whose collective age was 17. They had gathered to see what I hope was the highlight of their whole collective summer: a woman and her kid in a Subaru who apparently don’t know how drive-thrus work. YOU SAW IT HERE FIRST, FOLKS. I believe they were even grabbing their phones to document this seminal moment on TikTok. Full Circle! Also, we are no longer welcome at the Rockland Wendy’s.

The Pest

I did not want to admit anything when the dishwashing sponge began to disintegrate, because sponges fritter away so easily, catching on the prongs of dinner forks. When the pears in the fruit bowl became pockmarked, I wanted to blame my children, always so fickle about food.

When we found teeth marks in the avocado -- clear chomps through the peel to the soft fruit within -- my husband named what I did not want to say aloud.

Because I had already seen the rat. The charcoal colored rodent was too large to be a mouse, too rotund to be a squirrel. He appeared in the spring, just after the quarantine orders began following surging cases of COVID-19. He hobbled across the front lawn of the boarding school where we live in faculty housing. He descended unhurriedly into a sewage drain. I watched and knew unequivocally that I would see that rat again.

After the avocado evidence in our kitchen, we alerted the facilities management of the boarding school. I was so ashamed--we had only lived on campus a couple of years, and the prior resident of our faculty home had lived to 100 years until he expired in that same house. I was sure he had never had a rat problem. The facilities folks tried to comfort me. The restaurants are all closed, they shrugged. Where else can rats go but into our homes? 

Traps were set. Holes were patched. The rat still visited every night. 

My son and I decided to stay up late to see if we could detect from where the rat was emerging in the kitchen. With all but one light off, we watched from our perch on the living room sofa. Within minutes we saw the rat slink from behind the radiator and begin his evening rotation, flirting with the peanut butter in a trap, nosing around for other crumbs, and gamely hopping up on surfaces I never wanted to touch again. I began to imagine my son telling his college roommate about the house he had once lived in, describing this very night when he and his mom waited up for a rat.

I couldn’t go into the kitchen that night. I felt stranded on the sofa, until I eventually made a beeline for the bathroom, but then I marooned myself on the toilet for 15 minutes after convincing myself that a radiator pipe was indeed the rat lying in wait for me. 

We hid every particle of food we could manage but still we saw droppings. Facilities planted poison box traps outside of our house and one evening I saw a deranged squirrel pirouetting outside of the box. 

The next morning, my husband said, “I put some compost on your box garden. And I saved you a surprise.” 

I assumed a tomato had finally ripened in the raised bed.
Instead I found a dead baby rat face down next to the green pepper plant. All these months, my home had been a rat’s playground, but now the place that I had been tilling life had become a coffin. 

It was time for a burial.

I thought how I might talk to one of my students if they were having this same pestilence in their apartment. I began to speak gently to myself, reminding myself that this was a terrible thing, but this was not a reflection of myself as a terrible person.

A terrible person would not have buried the baby rat, after all.  

When did we see the last of the rats? I cannot say. The intrusion came at a time when we all felt significantly more vulnerable than usual. 

I have heard and read accounts of people who were careful, so careful, but still contracted COVID-19. Something about their stories, the soft lament in their voices, the hands-up surrender of their tone--it was so familiar. The virus, like the rats, practically knocked at our front doors. Our defenses were up, but not strong enough. 

After the rats, I understand hypervigilance and how it exhausts a system. I know what it means to bring in the big guns because every other lockstop has failed. I know how it feels to believe myself a bad steward of property, and for the helpers to remind me that it could have happened to any of us. It was all just a terrible time to have a terrible time.