Junior year of college, I found a solution to this problem: platonic bed sharing, the act of welcoming a person you’re attracted to into your bed for a night that contains everything but sex. You will laugh. You will cuddle. You will avoid all the humiliations and unwanted noises that accompany amateur sex.
Sharing beds platonically offered me the chance to show off my nightclothes like a 1950s housewife and experience a frisson of passion, minus the invasion of my insides. It was efficient, like what pioneers do to stay warm on icy mountain passes. The only question was to spoon or not to spoon. The next day I felt the warmth of having been wanted, minus the terrible flashes of dick, balls, and spit that played on a loop the day after a real sexual encounter.
Of course at the time I was doing it, I had none of this self-awareness about my own motives and considered platonic bed sharing my lot: not ugly enough to be repulsive and not beautiful enough to seal the deal. My bed was a rest stop for the lonely, and I was the spinster innkeeper.
I shared a bed with my sister, Grace, until I was seventeen years old. She was afraid to sleep alone and would begin asking me around 5:00 P.M. every day whether she could sleep with me. I put on a big show of saying no, taking pleasure in watching her beg and sulk, but eventually I always relented. Her sticky, muscly little body thrashed beside me every night as I read Anne Sexton, watched reruns of SNL, sometimes even as I slipped my hand into my underwear to figure some stuff out. Grace had the comforting, sleep-inducing properties of a hot-water bottle or a cat.
I always pretended to hate it. I complained to my parents: “No other teenagers have to share beds unless they’re REALLY POOR! Someone please get her to sleep alone! She’s ruining my life!” After all, she had her own bed that she chose not to sleep in. “Take it up with her,” they said, well aware that I, too, got something out of the arrangement.
The truth is I had no right to complain, having been affected by childhood “sleep issues” so severe that my father says he didn’t experience an uninterrupted night’s rest between 1986 and 1998. To me, sleep equaled death. How was closing your eyes and losing consciousness any different from death? What separated temporary loss of consciousness from permanent obliteration? I could not face this prospect by myself, so every night I’d have to be dragged kicking and screaming to my room, where I demanded a series of tuck-in rituals so elaborate that I’m shocked my parents never hit me (hard).
Then around 1:00 A.M., once my parents were finally asleep, I would creep into their room and kick my father out of bed, settling into the warmth of his spot and passing out beside my mother, the brief guilt of displacing him far outweighed by the joy of no longer being alone. It only occurred to me recently that this was probably my way of making sure my parents didn’t ever have sex again.
My poor father, desperate to end the cold war that had broken out around sleep in our house, told me that if I retired at nine every night and stayed peacefully in my room he would wake me at 3:00 A.M. and carry me into his own. This seemed reasonable: I wouldn’t have the opportunity to be dead for too many hours by myself, and he would stop yelling at me quite so much. He kept his end up, dutifully rising at 3:00 A.M. to come and move me.
Then one night, when I was eleven, he didn’t. I didn’t notice, until I awoke at 7:00 A.M. to the sounds of our morning, Grace already downstairs enjoying organic frozen waffles and Cartoon Network. I looked around groggily, outraged by the light streaming in through my window.
“YOU BROKE YOUR PROMISE,” I sobbed.
“But you were okay,” he pointed out. I couldn’t argue. He was right. It was a relief not to have seen the world at 3:00 A.M.
As soon as my issues disappeared, Grace’s replaced them, as if sleep disorders were a family business being passed down through the ages. And though I persisted in complaining, I still secretly cherished her presence in my bed. The light snoring, the way she put herself to sleep by counting cracks in the ceiling, noting them with a mousy sound that is best spelled like this: Miep Miep Miep. The way her little pajama top rode up over her belly. My baby girl. I was keeping her safe until morning.
It all began with Jared Krauter. He was the first thing I noticed at the New School orientation, leaning against the wall talking to a girl with a buzz cut—his anime eyes, his flared women’s jeans, his thick helmet of Prince Valiant hair. He was the first guy I’d seen in Keds, and I was moved by the confidence it took for him to wear delicate lady shoes. I was moved by his entire being. If I’d been alone, I would have slid down the back of a door and sighed like Natalie Wood in Splendor in the Grass.
This was not technically the first time I’d seen Jared. He was a city kid, and he used to hang around outside my high school waiting for his friend from camp. Every time I spotted him I’d think to myself, That is one hot piece of ass.