Once in a while I feel as if a tsunami is forming at a great distance, getting closer every day, and it’s focused on me.
I don’t know its speed or when it will arrive. I don’t know its power. Will it hit me full force or in a series of large waves? That’s what was at the back of my mind.
My wife, Sandy, and I are teachers. We have good days and bad, good weeks and bad. I feel as if the week I just went through has hit me with a large wave, every day. By the end of the school day on Friday, I was exhausted, drowning, but too tired to swim or care. A hell-of-a-week for sure.
Luckily, Sandy had a better week and offered to drive the three-hour trip for our weekend visit with her mom and dad. Knowing that I didn’t have to drive, I took a lung-filling breath of relief, then exhaled with a grateful sigh.
We arrived after dark, unloaded the luggage, then sat at the dinner table talking. Mom had made one of my favorite meals, Sukiyaki, consisting of rice, mushrooms, thin sliced vegetables, beef chunks and soy sauce.
As Sandy and I finished the meal, Colleen (Sandy’s sister) and her husband Bob arrived for our combined weekend visit. They had already had their dinner, so we all sat in the living room and caught up on all the news that everyone had to offer.
Colleen must have had a worse week, plus the start of a migraine, So she excused herself and went upstairs to bed.
The conversation continued with Sandy talking about some excitement in school with her kids. I was drifting off and not paying attention, but her story produced loud laughter, which startled me, so I focused.
Bob is a car salesman, and he almost always has funny stories to tell about his customers or about his colleagues, and jokes he’s heard from those people.
By now my eyelids had anchors on them as if they were attempting to pull me down into a deep sleep. I felt my head bob downward, then quickly upward. That woke me and had to excuse myself. I needed sleep. I said good night and departed up the stairs, exhausted and in a mental fog.
On the way up the stairs my legs felt heavy. I felt as if I was moving in slow-motion. My head felt so heavy that I had to look downward, dropping my chin to my chest. When I did that my neck muscles relaxed so the discomfort eased. I could still hear the chatter from the living room and hoped I hadn’t been impolite by suddenly leaving.
At the summit of the stairs there was no light, so I staggered to the last room on the left, which is the one Sandy and I always slept in. I was grateful for that fact because I didn’t need any light to enter the room or walk to the bed. I like “easy,” sometimes I even love “easy,” with no focused thinking and minimal energy involved. All I had to think about was the week of school and I desperately wanted to block that out for a few hours. I’d feel much better in the morning.
I quietly approached the opposite side of the bed from the door. Sandy preferred the side closest to the door. I leaned my back against the wall anticipating the softness and give of the mattress. It was a relief because I knew that soon I’d be prone, relaxed, and asleep.
I removed my shoes, socks, shirt and pants, everything except my boxer shorts, then gently got into bed, not wanting to create a disturbance. My head sank into the wonderfully soft and cool pillow as if it were a refrigerated marshmallow. The cool softness embraced my neck, head and cheeks, an added relief to follow my relaxing prone position. The mattress accommodated my body nicely. With my head sunk deeply into the pillow, I was now in a cool, comfortable embrace.
I could feel myself drifting away toward an oncoming dream. I felt light as if floating, then I . . . What? Did I just hear Sandy’s voice? The voice again, said, “Bill. Is that you?”
Impatiently, I said, “Of course it’s me. Go to sleep.”
“Bill, you’re in the wrong bed,” Colleen said.
That surprising, declarative sentence sent an electric shock like lightning through my head. I even had a mental image of the white, zig-zag flash of light penetrating my neck. My stomach muscles suddenly tensed, and I performed the fastest sit-up of my life. I sat on the edge of the bed to clear my head. Then clear-headed, I said, “Oh, Shit!”
I got out of bed, picked up all my clothes and removed myself from the room quickly. I went to the other bedroom, threw my clothes on the floor, climbed into bed. I thought, No one told me about the bed switch. Fuck it. I’ll offer a better apology in the morning. So tired was I that in few seconds I was asleep, lying on a different soft mattress and another cool marshmallow.
I slept late that next morning, so when I woke up and cleared my head, I thought I had a bad dream. Getting into bed with my sister-in-law? Did I really do that? I shook my head, focused my thoughts, and concluded, “Yes. That’s what I did.” I didn’t know what to expect when I went downstairs and found everyone sitting around the breakfast table.
Most had finished their breakfast and were socializing. When I appeared, Sandy turned her head and looked at me strangely. Colleen put her head down and didn’t look at me. Bob looked mad and I thought, “Oh, shit!” for the second time in a few hours. Both my in-laws stared at me, as if wanting an explanation. All I could offer was, “I was tired. Not thinking.”
A cacophony of loud laughter assaulted me. Colleen wasn’t just looking down sadly, she was hiding her laughter. Bob’s laugh seemed louder, probably because I was standing next to him. He turned toward me and said, with a good actor’s straight face, “What the hell were you doing in bed with my wife, Bill? Why were you trying to sleep with her?”
I froze with all the laughter directed at me, then finally smiled and said, for the third time, “Oh, shit! This was all a set-up. Very funny. Really. I really mean that. You all caught me off guard and that’s funny. I can imagine the look on my face.”
“No, you can’t my wife responded,” then the laughter started all over again. Sandy pulled out a chair next to her and patted the seat, letting me know where to sit. I sat. The laughing decreased to giggling and finally the giggling stopped. I smiled. It really was funny. I thought, “Maybe someday, I’ll write about it.”
“You want scrambled or over easy,” Sandy said as she got up and walked to the oven.
“Scrambled, like my mind,” I chuckled.
*****
To this very day, more than twenty years later, it’s still an often-occurring joke. I was in bed with my sister-in-law, and, yes, it’s still funny for everyone involved.
NOTE: The names have not been changed in order to heighten the comical effect of that situation.
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