Clean Sheets

Clean Sheets

There is one thing that everyone loves, and that is clean sheets. For me, there is nothing better than slipping between the fresh smell of soft linens, and curling up with my diary before I go to sleep. Tonight, however, my sheets aren’t fresh, and as I sit down to write in my diary, my thoughts drift back to a day where I felt similarly dissatisfied with my bed that I had left rumpled and unmade, and I had to lie in.
It was a typical day for me. I was in a good mood, or at least, I put up the good façade of a good mood. I had just gotten home from shopping with my mom. Yeah, I know; sounds lame. Most teenagers wouldn’t be caught dead shopping with their mothers. However, I like to think that I’m smarter than the rest of my peers in that respect, because they all seem to forget that one bonus about shopping with mom that cancels out all the possible negatives: she buys. Especially if it’s on sale. For me, that’s wonderful. As a clothes fanatic and a hopeful fashion designer, sales at fabric stores and the mall are a beautiful thing, and are only improved upon by the presence of my mother to buy the stuff for me.
Thus, I walked into the house feeling quite chipper when we arrived home. It almost made up for the fact that it had been almost two months since I had done anything with my best friend, and that I felt very abandoned by she I had once called my sister. I don’t know if my mom saw through the façade that day, and that’s why she took me shopping, or if she was just PMS-ing and needed to spend money. Whatever the reason, it did improve my mood somewhat, if only temporarily.
I sashayed into the house and swept upstairs to my room with a shopping bag from Joann Fabrics in one hand, a bag from JCPenney in the other. I set them gently on my futon bed, then slipped off my coat and gloves and tossed them into the bunk above. I was just pulling out the fabric I had gotten, which was going to be for a formal dress I was designing, when my mom yelled six simple words up the stairs that until then, I never knew could have so many meanings for me.
“There’s a letter here for you!” she yelled brightly from the kitchen.
My head snapped up like a wary doe’s. “A letter?” I questioned. The dam-façade was threatened by the oozing of my muddy memories; I could almost feel it cracking from the pressure as I tried to keep my voice casual.
“Yep,” she answered, and didn’t say anything more as she went back to the kitchen.
I knew before I even went down there who it was from. Had it been anyone else, she would have said as much. She would have said, “It’s from MSU,” or, “It’s from Central,” or “It’s another useless college mailer.” No, it was from him. My good mood was quickly turning dark, like pounding raindrops throwing mud up onto what previously were freshly washed sheets, snapping on the line in the breeze.
I walked downstairs, hoping I seemed casual. She handed me the small, cream-colored, Hallmark stationary envelope without saying a word. I had bought him that stationary, before he left. I went back upstairs, trying to maintain the front until I got to the safety of my bedroom.
I closed the door, sank down onto my clothes strewn floor, next to my purse and shoes, which lay where I had left them. I carefully opened the envelope. It had been awhile since one had come, a couple of months. I wasn’t expecting it. The last one had been so angry, and enraged, telling me I was a blasphemous sinner that was headed straight for damnation because I had rejected “The Church.”
I read the letter, and I cried. Actually, “cry” is an understatement. I bawled, like a baby. I don’t really know why, because I didn’t love him anymore, so what difference did it really make? But I did. Then, without thinking, I stuck my hand into the purse beside me, pulled out my cell phone, and called Alex. She would help me, she had to. It didn’t matter that we hadn’t spent any time together in months, she would help.
Her mom picked up the phone at her house. “Hello?”
“Is Alex there?” I asked, trying to sound normal and failing miserably.
“Just a minute,” she said, slightly puzzled. There was quiet as she put her hand over the mouthpiece, and handed the phone off.
“Hello?” Alex said in obvious confusion.
“I- I just got a letter,” I stuttered between hiccups.
“From him?” she questioned.
I nodded, like an idiot, then realized the uselessness of the gesture in my current conversation. “Yeah.” I sniffled. “Can you come over?” I asked, wiping tears off my face with the back of my hand.
“Yeah, sure,” she replied.
“I’ll be there in five.”
“Ok,” she said.
I pressed ‘end’, dropped my phone in the purse, slipped on my clogs, coat, grabbed my keys. I clattered downstairs. “Going to pick up Alex,” I said in distracted explanation as my mom stared in puzzlement from where she sat on the sofa, the home phone to her ear, and the muted TV glowing in the dark. “Everything ok?” she asked.
“Fine,” I replied shortly. She didn’t notice the tear streaks in the dim light.
I was at Alex’s in five minutes, and she got in the car in her pajamas. “Are you alright?” she asked in concern. “Is Keven alright?”
“Yeah, I’m a little better,” I answered.
“I was so worried, I thought he had succeeded with that road plan of his,” Alex said. “I told my mom I thought he was gone, just to get out of the house.”
“No, he’s not dead,” I answered. The perspective Alex put on things made it seem a little better. She was right, at least he hadn’t walked too close to the road like he had threatened, just so that he could get picked off by a semi-truck in Idaho. I laughed shortly. “Definitely not.”
“Ok…” she said slowly, trailing off in confusion.
“He wants to get back together,” I said simply.
“Oh no…” she said.
I nodded, now a successful gesture, as tears started again. “What on earth do I say to that? Of all the times he could have sent this, now he does, and-”
“Drive,” Alex said calmly. She gestured to the road. “Look at that, please, and two hands on the wheel.”
I nodded again, and it was no time at all before we pulled into my driveway. We came through the front door like a herd of buffalo. Alex had her backpack, though I didn’t understand why.
“Hi girls,” my mom said cheerily.
“Hi Mom,” we said in distracted unison. We went straight upstairs to my room.
“May I read it?” she asked, dropping her backpack by the closet as I shut the door.
“It’s in my purse,” I said, gesturing lamely to the bag where I had left it next to the door. I slumped down onto the futon bed in a heap of despair.
She read the letter. When she was done, she was almost crying too. “How do you react to that?” she muttered irritably. She set the letter aside, and looked up at me where I sat on the opposite end of the futon bed, wrapped in a BYU Idaho blanket Keven had sent me when he was at college the previous year, and clutching the teddy bear he had given me for Valentine’s day. They were reminders of the past that I wasn’t ready to let go. They were from when it hadn’t made a difference that he and I were two different religions, when it hadn’t mattered that he was Mormon and I was just your average teenager trying to figure out what the hell I was. That had changed though when he left. Mormons are expected when they are nineteen to go on a two year mission trip, and they leave everything behind, their entire family and life, to “devote their lives to Heavenly Father.” Or something like that. It was when he had left that I had started to realize one thing: I couldn’t go on pretending that I was going to become a Mormon and be there for him when he got home. I couldn’t accept the religion, couldn’t make that sort of commitment, wasn’t ready for the engagement he sought when I was only seventeen years old. So I broke it off, via letter, because Mormon missionaries aren’t allowed to call anyone except home on Christmas and Mother’s Day. I still loved him, but I couldn’t bridge the religious gap between us. I suppose that explains why I cried when I got the letter, and was sitting there wrapped in that pink blanket and clutching the teddy bear he gave me.
“I suck Elyse, yah know that?” Alex said sadly, shaking her head.
I was stunned.
“I miss my bed,” she joked, stretching out on the futon. Back when we had spent at least half the days of the week at one another’s houses, we had always joked that the futon bed was “hers.” When she met her boyfriend Chris though, we had stopped hanging out. She was too busy with him, and school, and everything else, while I was too busy trying to sort out the shattered pieces of my life and pick myself up out of my sinkhole of depression.
“You don’t suck,” I said, though for a split second I had to agree.
“I failed you,” she said. “I never realized…”
“It’s ok,” I said. “You’ve been busy.” I didn’t add ‘with Chris.’
I didn’t have to. She understood. Being best friends for thirteen years has something to do with things like that. We can almost read each others minds, finish each other’s sentences half the time; people used to think we were twins when we were younger. My mother always used to say we were “like two peas in a pod,” though of late it had felt more like two lonely peas in a giant washtub, separated by the sea of shells.
She said nothing. Instead, she grabbed her pillow, crawled to the end of the bed where I half sat, and fluffed her pillow up beside me before she pulled up the covers. She was laying on her side, looking up at me, all ready for a sleepover like we used to have before the mudslide of life hit us and swept us apart.
I followed suit. We stared at each other, then she said, “I’ve missed this.”
“Sleepovers?”
“Yeah.” She sniffled, and wiped away tears. “And I’m going to miss this when you’re gone at State next year.”
“Me too,” I said. Now I was crying too.
“I didn’t want all this to happen like this, and I don’t want it to keep happening, but I feel like I can’t stop it,” she said, hiccupping. She didn’t bother to wipe away tears that were fast soaking the bright pink pillow case.
“I know,” I said. “I always thought this would last forever, high school, and even the distant thought of college… we’d be headed off to that together, so it didn’t matter.”
“I miss being a little kid, and destroying shit and getting away with it,” she said.
“I miss playing dolls,” I said, looking up at the collection that sat atop my bookcase.
“I miss the old life,” she said.
“The carefree summer days…” The dangerous cloudy dust of nostalgia was sweeping in, I could feel it, but couldn’t stop it.
“Endless summer sleepeovers.”
“Sometimes five nights in a row,” I added.
“And it never mattered, there was always all the time in the world,” she said.
“And now it feels like since we’re going to be split up in August, it doesn’t matter anymore, there’s no sense in hanging onto a friendship we just will have to let go. Because even though we don’t want to, and we’ll try not to, it will end up that way.”
“It sucks,” she said.
“It blows,” I agreed.
“Where’s the Kleenex?” she asked.
“If it was up your butt you’d know,” I replied laughingly, through the tears.
“No kidding, that would hurt like hell,” she said, sitting up and locating them. She grabbed them off my book case next to the bed.
“Speaking of, did you watch Grey’s Anatomy the other night?” I asked.
“I don’t know if I want to know where this is going,” she said in a mockingly cautious tone.
“Some guy ate Barbie doll heads because he got pleasure from when they passed,” I said, laughing. “And they had to operate, and they pulled out fourteen Barbie doll heads.”
“Sick!” she squealed. “Real Barbie doll heads?”
“Yup, and they were all disgusting, and the head resident was sad because some of them came off collectable dolls,” I continued, now sniffling between gales of laughter.
For some reason, it was hilarious. I suppose that’s what happens when you’ve been friends since you were the age that you still wet your pants at school. We were juveniles again, just for a little bit, laughing at potty humor, laughing at “crap” like we had as third graders on the bus. And what was more, we were allowed to laugh at it. We could still get away with it because no matter what, being best friends for thirteen years overrides all social stigmas and standards.
“God, wouldn’t that be a way to go though?” she gasped between giggles. “Man dies from bad bowels,” she said, mimicking a headline.
“Innards exploded from blockage due to Barbie doll heads,” I stammered, wheezing and holding my stomach.
We roared with laughter. “That’s so sick, on so many levels,” she finally said as we calmed down. Then she started to laugh again. “Remember when we used to rip the heads off Barbie dolls though?”
“Oh my gosh, that was so funny!” I said, laughing at the ridiculous memory.
“Destroying stuff was funny in general,” she said, chuckling. That was something Alex and I had been experts at all throughout our lives, was destruction. Together, we could wreck anything we laid hands on. It just happened whenever we were in the same place and our minds started working on the same plane. Which, even as recently as six months ago, we had been together a lot. So, we destroyed a lot.
“We haven’t wrecked anything in awhile,” I said, pouting.
“Yeah, I wanna shred something,” she said. “Remember the dismembered stuffed rabbit?”
“Yup,” I said. I reached up and ripped down one of the piles of les that hung on the bunk bed post. It exploded onto the bed, sending little silk flowers and beads everywhere.
“Yay!” she cheered. We proceeded to fling the little flowers everywhere, and made a huge mess of them while we laughed like little kids. We threw them in each others hair, then laughed some more. It was absolutely ludicrous, two seventeen year old girls sitting in bed, throwing silk flowers at each other.
“What if someone ate these?” I suggested mischievously.
“Oh, with the Barbie heads!” Alex added.
We dissolved into a discombobulated heap of giggles, pink sheets, and silk flowers, and we couldn’t stop even when we started crying again.
The rest of the night passed in similar fashion. It was a blender of emotions, everything from powerful aching sadness, to hysterically funny madness. We cried until we laughed, then laughed until we cried. The wall that had been inadvertently carved between us by the mudslide of life was slowly eroded away by our tears and laughter. The masks that had slowly formed over the months crumbled, and even though we acted immature at times, we also both came to the most mature realization. While we were crying because we were sad, and laughing because we were glad, there was another reason for both; it was the bittersweet realization that we had shaped one another. We had been there for each other through it all, the break-ups, and the breakdowns, the roller-coasters and the merry-go-rounds. Keven’s letter may not have served the purpose he intended, because it didn’t bring him and I back together. It did however, bring another friendship back together, and for that, I couldn’t be more grateful. Though we’re not “two peas in a pod” anymore, that doesn’t matter, because we’ve matured beyond that. We’ve graduated beyond the pod, been shelled, and now, as the silt settles in the washtub full of tears, one thing is clear; we will always be friends, no matter what. And just looking back and knowing that makes those sheets come clean and billow gently in the breeze.