Count Dracula’s Slab

 

Not long after I’d fallen in the night, my husband declared we needed a new mattress. He wanted to get a smaller mattress so I didn’t need to climb into the bed. He wanted to lower the bed as much as we could with an adjustable bed frame, removing the bed slats from our beautiful cherry poster bed so the mattress would be lower to the floor.

I argued against this. We did not need a new mattress. The mattress had nothing to do with my fall. I fell because I was half asleep and trying to look upside down under the bed, not because I was trying to climb into the bed.

But he would not be swayed. We were out and he drove us to a mattress store. I thought we were just going to look.

“I want the firmest mattress you have,” he told the sales woman. She led him to an ultra-firm Beauty Rest mattress.

It felt like a rock.

We tried out a few other mattresses, but he determined the first one we tried was the one he wanted. And he wanted it then.

“What are you doing?” I said. “We don’t need a new mattress.”

“I want something for my back, ok? This will help my back.”

Ah. So it had nothing to do with my fall. He was just using that as an excuse.

The mattress came the following week. The nice delivery people set up the new adjustable bed frame, put the mattress in the mattress encasement, and tossed the mattress onto the bed frame.

I added a mattress pad and the bed linens. I told myself it would be fine. I sleep on a bed wedge anyway, one that’s eight inches thick at the top, and oversized, and then I have pillows under my legs, so it shouldn’t matter about the mattress, right?

Wrong.

That mattress was like sleeping on stone. Count Dracula wouldn’t have been able to sleep on that slab of granite. My back went into multiple muscle spasms. I could hardly stand up.

This went on for three days and my husband called the mattress place and said we needed to return the mattress. “My wife doesn’t like it,” he said.

They told us the agreement said we had to try it for 30 days before we could return the mattress.

I suggested I would stay at a hotel for the next 21 days. One with a nice soft mattress.

He went to Walmart and bought a foam mattress topper. I told him just to get a twin for me, but when he came back with a queen, I knew the truth.

The mattress hurt his back, too.

“It doesn’t feel as good as I thought it would,” he mumbled when I confronted him.

Fortunately, the mattress sales woman took pity on us and agreed that I would probably never find a good night’s sleep on Count Dracula’s slab.

So back we went. And things got weirder.