Buying
furniture is stressful. Too stressful. I’ve driven across
French-speaking Canada alone with no map, I’ve worked and taken graduate
courses
full-time, and I even watched a Vin Diesel movie once, which was
perhaps the most arduous undertaking of all. And I would do it all again
if it meant never having to buy another mattress.
When
I walked into the furniture store last week it inspired flashbacks I
thought were the sole domain of war veterans and the wrongfully
imprisoned.
The showrooms at these places sort of look like living rooms at first,
which I suppose is to make them seem inviting. Take a closer look,
though, and you notice that that there are way too many loveseats and
the ottomans have spawned like tuna; everything
is arranged artfully, but pointed toward nothing at all. It’s what a
room would look like if 12 unfocused people with expensive taste all
lived together in one of M.C. Escher’s optical illusion paintings. And
there’s no TV. It’s disorienting.
In
the midst of this confusion you’re expected to make an important
commitment. Choosing a new mattress or recliner isn’t like buying a new
T-shirt -- if you’re unhappy with it you can’t just re-wrap it and give
it to your least favorite cousin at Christmas. You’re selecting at item
that not only contributes to the aesthetic of your home, but is meant
to support the weight of your body in a state
of rest, meaning form and function have to converge with military
precision. That’s a lot of pressure. Fail to do your homework and you
risk getting stuck with a pricey lump of space-sucking uselessness, and
warranty or no warranty, it’s going to be a hassle
to make an exchange. It’s like choosing a spouse, only a La-Z-Boy
doesn’t eat all your Fig Newtons without asking.
Mattress
shopping is especially difficult, moreso when you’re a light sleeper
with a mutinous back. You oftentimes don’t get a sense of how
a mattress will treat you until you’ve spent a night or two lying on
one, and yet when you’re at the furniture store you have perhaps 10
minutes to make a decision, 20 if you know how to flirt with the
salesperson. (This trick has come in quite handy.) Condensing
the selection process so dramatically is confounding to the senses;
rather than lying on a bed in a state of sleepiness or relaxation,
you’re forced to bring attentiveness and focus to the proceedings, which
frankly is sort of a buzzkill. The only time you’re
supposed to bring intense focus into the bedroom is if there’s an
expensive dinner and formalwear involved.
So
there I was, in the store’s sleep center, trying to decide how to spend
my nights. What struck me were the options. There were way, way
too many of them. Not so long ago in human history, beds were a simple
thing: a bunch of feathers or horsehair stuffed into a person-sized bag
and thrown on the floor like a rug. At least that’s what I imagine when I
ponder such things, which is never.
How
far we’ve come. Now there are traditional coil mattresses, memory foam
mattresses, hybrid mattresses, mattresses that bend and recline,
mattresses with cooling gel, mattresses that vibrate, and mattresses
that have memorized the collected works of H.P. Lovecraft. We’re a few
years away from having beds that shuffle cards and play the ukulele.
The
only good strategy for making an informed choice is to spend some time
on each one, which is a guaranteed way to look like an idiot. “It
takes about 10 minutes to get an idea of how you’ll respond to a
mattress,” the salesperson told me, and feeling the need to exercise
diligence, I took her at her word. I hopped on the coil mattress first.
Ten minutes later, the memory foam. Ten minutes after
that, the hybrid. And on and on, until I’d lain on so many beds I felt
like a world traveler, or a Frenchman. The sleep center ceiling has 75
eggshell-colored tiles, by the way. In case you were wondering.
Selecting
the mattress was the most important step, but it wasn’t the last one.
Sullen-looking, muscular men still had to deliver it, which
is generally an awkward experience. Whenever heavy objects are being
lifted and moved around, a certain masculine instinct kicks in -- you
want to help out, to heave and grunt and sweat along with the other
guys. But movers are professionals. They don’t need
the help, and probably don’t want it. Which means I have to stand there
with my hands in my pockets, nervously shifting my weight from foot to
foot as I “supervise” their progress, saying things like “Yep, right
there,” and “A little to the left.” Sometimes
I’ll grunt approvingly as if I have some sort of hidden moving
expertise, which I don’t, and they know I don’t. The whole thing is a
charade, an act that’s meant to convey one message: I am not a dweeb.
Except I am.
At
least I’m a dweeb with a nice bed. The identities of our homes are
forged as much by furniture as by the physical spaces themselves, so
in a way, snagging the right piece can bring us a step closer to the
mental image we have of ourselves. A loveseat cocked at just the right
angle, an end table festooned with comforting bric-a-brac -- these
things matter to us, superficial as they are, and
so when the movers are gone and we’re left with our new purchase, a
strange sense of peace prevails. It’s the kind of calm one rarely
experiences outside of a remote monastery, one in which all the monks
have taken a sacred vow of silence.
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