“Good grief, Anika!” I said, after being shown the new house in the brand new American compound. “You yourself have three bedrooms to call your own! When I was your age,” I continued, as she rolled her eyes to the back of her head, “I slept on a sofa!”
“You did? Why?” asked Anika, my 12 year old great granddaughter. Her grandparents and aunt raised her from an early age, so she grew up as the only child in a household of adults. There were few material things she wanted that she didn’t get, sometimes in duplicate and even triplicate!
“Because we were nine people living in a small house with three tiny bedrooms,” I answered.
“Nine people! Where did they all sleep? Who were they?”Anika asked, astonished.
And so began my story. “Well, my mother and father had a bedroom. My four brothers shared a bedroom. My oldest sister, Lucy, had a small bedroom and my middle sister, Helen, and I slept on the sleeper sofa in the living room.”
My mother liked to use uncommon words and called it the divan. “Time to make out the divan,” she would tell us at bedtime.
“Wow!” exclaimed Anika. “What was it like?”
“It was crowded!” I said.
“No, I mean what was the sleeper sofa like?”
It was pretty much constructed of right angles, covered in some kind of velvety maroon fabric. You pulled up the sides to make it out into the sleeper. When we ‘made it out’ one side would not go down all the way, but stuck up about an inch.” I sighed and said, “ We made it out every night and it never made out level. I don’t know why that was, but it made an interesting challenge for me, the youngest.”
Anika became pensive, “A challenge?”
“It challenged me because in our family the older ones had preference. That meant the older ones could boss the younger ones, so Helen said I had to take the higher side. Another rule in our house, among the girls, was that you couldn’t touch when you went to bed. If Helen or I begged Lucy to let us sleep with her she would draw an invisible line down the middle of the bed and say, ‘if you so much as get a toe across this line, you go back to the sofa!’ We quickly discovered the price we paid wasn’t worth the pleasure of sleeping in a real bed. Helen used that same rule on the sleeper sofa, which had a natural division. I would inevitably roll to the middle if I didn’t cling to the edge! The challenge for me then was to make sure I didn’t drift down across the divan’s divide.”
My mind flashed back to cold, cold nights, trying to stay warm. How I eagerly anticipated summertime when my sleeping arrangements were more agreeable!
“In summer,” I continued, “I would sleep outside or in the basement. But in winter I struggled to keep myself tucked in while hanging on to the edge of the sofa.”
“Oh, okay,” responded Anika, giving a little yawn.
“Eventually,” I said, as I raised my voice a notch, “Lucy got married and Helen got promoted to the bedroom, and in 1952, Helen married and I finally enjoyed the luxury of my own room with a real bed! So there you are Miss three bedroom baby!”
*Written in November 2018*
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