It was 7:58 AM when I woke up at my mother's house. At first, I didn't know why I was awake. It was dark in the room. Dark and quiet.
I rolled over. That's when I smelled it. Coffee.
I thought, Mom must be up. That coffee-smell, though—it was awful strong. It was black and heavy. I thought, Mom must really need some caffeine this morning.
That's when I head the rolling gurgle of percolation. I opened my eyes, and there it was again—the sound of water being warmed and sucked through a filter. I didn't understand what was going on. I'd spent many a night on my mother's couch, and I'd never been startled awake by her coffee maker. It's quiet. It's unassuming. If I hadn't had a problem with it when I was in the living room, which is right next to the kitchen, then why would I be having a problem with it now, when I was asleep on the top bunk of the bed in my brother's room? The new coffee maker sound was loud and obtrusive. It smelled like it was right under my nose.
I moved my body to the edge of the bed, which was framed off by wooden slats like the old bunk bed we had in our camper. I peered through the frame. The door was shut. There was absolutely no reason I should have been smelling or hearing coffee from the kitchen.
That's when I saw it. It was my brother's hand, and it was extending from the bottom bunk. He was fumbling for something, reaching for something. The thing he was reaching for was a coffee maker. It was sitting on his bedside table, right next to his alarm clock. The green light was on. The carafe was filling with black liquid. My brother was brewing coffee in his bedroom.
It hadn't been my idea to spend the night in Adam's room. When I decided to spend the night at my mother's, I asked her to haul out the inflatable mattress. She frowned when I made that request. "It gets awful cold out here at night," she said of the living room. "Don't you want to spend the night in your brother's room?"
I asked her if my brother was going to be home because if he was, the answer was no, no, I did not, thanks anyway.
"Come on," she said. "You can sleep on the top bunk. It's so warm in there. It's like a sauna."
I said okay. I said fine. I said sure. I'd slept without incident in that top bunk once before. I felt more comfortable there than I did whenever I was asked to sleep in my brother's bedroom at my mother's old apartment. I'd always requested that she change the sheets before I came over. She would roll her eyes, but I told her that he was a teenage boy and he had blown up a magazine picture of Britney Spears to a size so big that it covered the entire ceiling above his bed—God only knows what he did under those sheets. I wasn't about to sleep under them.
The bed in the second bedroom of my mother's new place—a trailer she bought with her boyfriend—belongs not only to my brother, but also to my mother's boyfriend's son. He's a black belt. He's eleven years old. He's chubby and rolly-polly. Once, when my mother and I were in her bedroom painting our toenails matching shades of Burgundy Bounce, he had skipped across the threshold and collapsed next to us. He wanted to chat. He wanted to gossip. He wanted to know what color we had chosen to paint our nails. After he left I looked over at my mother and raised my eyebrows. "Hmmm," I said.
She shrugged. "He's just eleven," she said.
"And gay," I said. "I'm pretty sure that child is gay."
I feel that many things offer proof to my assumption, but the best is the top bunk. Before the boyfriend's son moved in (for three nights a week), my brother had pictures of Hooters girls on his wall. He had a bulletin board decorated in Beatles memorabilia. He had a picture of a legs-spread Jenna Jameson on the back of his door. Those things went away when the eleven year old moved in. After that, the room was filled with stuffed animals. The top bunk especially. There is a giant and droopy dog in the lower corner, five teddy bears at the head. Lining the wooden slats of its edge are no less than twelve Beanie Babies. It's the Beanie Babies that get me every single time.
They're delicate things, these Beanies. They are extra-fuzzy and tiny and sweet. There are bears with angel wings, bears holding hearts. There are bunnies with carrots, bunnies with eggs. They are things that little girls would collect.
When I brought this up, my mother told me I was being crazy. She said, "Oh, Jess. They're just stuffed animals! Your brother had stuffed animals!"
Yes, but they were different. Adam's stuffed animals were dinosaurs or menacing-looking dogs. He had stuffed animals that growled and huffed. His non-plush toys were things like dump trucks and tractors he liked to fill with popcorn that needed transporting from his bedroom to the living room. He liked mud and Power Wheels.
My mother, though, went on to defend the boyfriend's son. "But he likes those trading cards," she said. "You know—those cartoon ones."
Which means he's five short years away from morphing into a full-fledged D&D nerd (sorry, Matty Clay).
But it doesn't matter if he's gay or if he isn't, or if people are in denial about it or not—what really matters is it was his bed that I spent the night in last night. I was one with the animals. I woke up several times during the night with a Beanie Baby clenched in my fist or a teddy bear leaning against my forehead. There were times I thought I was hallucinating or that I'd somehow ended up in a bad dream where I was being crushed to death by fuzzy plush things.
But I wasn't. I was just wedged in a bed beside twenty-five stuffed animals that belonged to a eleven year old totally-not-gay black belt. And then it was 7:58 AM and my brother was waking up to brew coffee in his bedside coffee machine like that was totally normal. I wanted to close my eyes and go back to sleep and forget that I was on a top bunk in my brother's room, not so far from the see-through container where he stores his condoms (light blue, maybe Trojans). I wanted it to be a normal time to wake up so I could go take a shower and get ready for the day of shopping my mother and I had ahead of us. I couldn't fall back asleep, though. I waited through my brother's rolling out of bed and pouring himself a mug of the coffee. I waited through his digging through his drawers to find clothes for the day. But nothing. No sleep. And I kept bumping into the giant drooping dog at the foot of the bed.
I got out of bed and walked into the kitchen, where my brother was standing over a bowl of cereal. He had his MP3 player stuck into his ears, and he was nodding to an invisible beat.
"GOOD MORNING," he shouted over the music only he could hear.
"Yeah," I said. "Morning."
"I HAVE TO TAKE A CRAP," he said. "AND THEN I AM GETTING INTO THE SHOWER. DO YOU NEED TO USE THE BATHROOM BEFORE I DO ANY OF THAT?"
And that, all of that—the mountain of plush bedmates, the giant and looming stuffed dog, the bedroom-brewed coffee at 7:58 AM—was the start of my weekend. It made me all the more grateful that in a few, few days I will be landing in Minneapolis and getting all geared up for a big weekend back home.
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2 comments:
I hope you accepted that warning and took possession of the bathroom before your brother closed himself in and violated the Geneva convention.
That's the real reason for a warning like that.
Trust me, I did. I know not to screw around with that warning.
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