I Thought of Box Springs

I thought of box springs as uncultured or belonging to someone else’s culture, a religious culture maybe. I got it from my parents. They always had foam or cotton mattresses. They call decorative objects geegaws. I understood there was something dishonest in the box spring’s shiny quilted fabric, patterned with rosebuds or lace.

The box spring I owned, however, I also got from my parents, in that they paid for it, three hundred dollars from Sears, as a thirtieth birthday gift. It was the only kind you could get in the city where I was living. Men from Sears delivered it to my apartment and carried it–first the box, then the mattress–up to my room. It didn’t have a frame, that ungainly metal apparatus meant to be concealed by a skirt, and anyway I didn’t want one.

In that apartment, I had a large window with no shade from the wide dirty street, and parquet floors, another thing my parents disdained. I had a boyfriend who was an alcoholic, and he would fall asleep with a two-liter bottle of pop next to the bed to drink from any time he woke up. He was flamboyantly messy even when sober, he cooked like he wanted to make it impossible for anyone to use the kitchen ever again, and of course he was worse drunk. Not long after I got the box spring, he knocked a two-liter bottle of Dr. Pepper over in his sleep and in the morning there was a splashed brown stain on one side of the fabric to the height of a few inches.

Fifteen years later, the stain was still visible, and I was tired of the way the box spring bounced when someone got into or out of bed, waking the other person up. I had brought it with me to a different city, where I lived with a better boyfriend and two kids. I was at work, trying to find an alleged 1,085 unread emails in my inbox, scrolling and scrolling, seeing nothing bolded, tired and irritable because of a bad sleep the night before. I thought, fifteen years is long enough for a mattress, and I went to a furniture website and bought a foam mattress and a bed frame.

The new mattress was delivered the same day as the pandemic. It came in a machine-packed cylinder that needed 72 hours to decompress. We pushed all the furniture to the edges of the living room to give it space. By the time the 72 hours were up, we had seen a coyote sauntering down the sidewalk outside. There was no garbage pickup for the old box spring so we dragged it into the yard and let the kids use it as a trampoline. It got rained on and dried out. The kids jumped and jumped. They jumped and sang a song called “What’s My Butt Called, None of Your Business.” The box spring started to smell but we pretended not to notice. Sometimes I turned my Zoom camera off and laid down on it, watching no planes fly over. When there was pickup again and the garbage men took the box spring away, the Dr. Pepper stain had been lost under a tide of grey mildew. What must they think of us? I wondered.



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Fiona King Foster lives in Toronto, Ontario.