Unholy Night

Ouch. It's That Couch. A Seasonal Paean to the Sofa Bed.

By Henry Allen, Washington Post Staff Writer

December 19, 1996

This is the season of the sofa bed, the hideaway, the convertible couch and the semi-bohemian hospital module known as the futon.

Family and friends gather for the holidays. They drink their host's wine, they demand to be chauffeured to museums. (Why is it that with relatives, taxis are taboo, an insult, an abomination?) They argue for so long about how long to cook the turkey that it gets overcooked until it crumbles like marzipan at the first touch of a carving knife. The host's revenge is the sofa bed.

God rest ye on your sofa bed,

Though frame and springs dismay,

Remember grunge, lost pens and toys

Poke you awake 'til day,

With aching back through sleepless hours,

When stale, thin mattress sways,

O untidy discomfort that annoys,

(Discomfort annoys)

O untidy discomfort that annoys.

No one is proud to own or sleep in a sofa bed.

The unfolding of a sofa bed is a display of pettiness, as in petit bourgeois — your house is too small, your relatives are too cheap to stay in a motel, and most of all, you are irredeemably middle class — always trying to turn squalid smallness into a combination of the tasteful and the grand and achieving only the nice. Rich people have spare bedrooms and ancient button-tufted things called daybeds. Poor people can't afford sofa beds. And so the sofa bed is the totem of the lumpen middle class.

Joy to the world, the couch unfurled . . .

The sofa bed opens in an unlikely sequence reminiscent of a praying mantis being ironed flat. Your fingers get pinched. Then the bottom sheet, fitted to a very thin mattress, causes the mattress corners to rise and converge until your host, Uncle Bob, flattens it again with blankets smelling of mothballs and souvenir throw pillows disguised by pillowcases.

"Is that going to be okay?" he asks.

"After a drive like that I could sleep anywhere," you say, intending a courtesy but realizing that you've just put Uncle Bob's hide-a-bed in the same sleepability league with a foxhole.

"Listen, guys, you take our bed and Marge and I will take this one," Uncle Bob says. "I'm serious. I sleep down here sometimes when my back is out. It feels good, don't ask me why."

"We're fine. Seriously."

"Marge gets allergic to the cat hair on the top of the couch there, but she can take one of her pills and . . . "

"Seriously, Bob, we're set. All we need is a ride down to the museum tomorrow morning."

Uncle Bob turns out the lights. In the first moments of sofa-bed darkness, with your hip searching for a soft spot as if it had a nervous system of its own, the room seems hermetically sealed, even claustrophobic. This is the same room where your little niece played "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on the Tonette only hours ago, and Uncle Bob proved that he could still tear a telephone book in half: a room meant for joy and welcome, frequently the living room, but often known as the family, rumpus, Florida or lanai room.

Now it closes in on you.

In the dark, your heightened sense of smell detects an olfactory midden heap of fermented cookie crumbs, wet dogs, candle wax, Play-Doh, popcorn, Lemon Pledge, wall-mounted Glade Air Fresheners, a palimpsest of old perfumes and spilled diet soda, old wallpaper glue and dust. You'd open a window but Uncle Bob has asked you not to, now that the mildew smell you complained about last year has been cleaned out of the ventilation system.

You wear your underclothes and your bathrobe so you won't be caught naked in the morning by the kids heading for the television. You feel cramped and a little dirty. You can't tell whether you're too hot or too cold. You wonder if you smell mildew.

O unholy night, with cousins gently whining . . .

The French had Proust, we have the sofa bed to provide a metaphysical study of the layers of sleep. For instance, when you finally do fall asleep, you dream that you're still awake in a sofa bed, trying to fall asleep, so when you awaken, minutes or hours later, you fear you're either caught in a repeating dream, or you haven't slept at all, or you're having an experience of deja vu. Convinced falsely that you're awake now, you dream you've just had a sofa-bed nightmare you can't remember. (Proust got a 3,600-page novel out of this stuff — a novel that begins, "For a long time I used to go to bed early.")

When truly awake, you discover that Grandpa, attempting to navigate his usual path to the bathroom, has just barked his shin on the bed frame. Moaning and limping, he finds another route to the bathroom. When he exits, he leaves the light on to shine in your eyes.

"We'll have to turn out the light," your bed mate whispers when Grandpa is back in his own bed.

"I think Grandpa has to leave it on or he'll walk into the bed again."

"He didn't leave it on before."

"Fine. Turn it off, and next time he'll fall and break a hip."

"No, he'll fall on us, and we'll have to turn on the light and see him without his teeth."

You hear a long throat clearing from Grandpa's room, a noise like a snow shovel scraping on a sidewalk.

"Whun are you peobble togging about? Hi cand get to sleep."

You whisper, "See? He's got his teeth out."

Aunt Marge appears in her terry-cloth bathrobe and calls toward Grandpa's room, "You all right, Grandpa?"

"Fide, tankyou."

"Why did you want the bathroom light on?" Aunt Marge asks you. "You'll never get to sleep that way." She moves across the room to neaten something up — her tutelary creed demands that she never leave a room without neatening something up. Her shin hits the sofa-bed frame. She gasps.

"Don't mind me," she says as she sits on the bed and rocks in pain. "Just go back to sleep."

Uncle Bob, his shadow stretched long by the bathroom light, enters to bellow into the darkness, "What the hell is going on?"

"Shut up, Bob!" says Aunt Marge. "You're worse than Grandpa."

Half an hour later everyone's back in bed and the bathroom light is out, but it's only a matter of time before Grandpa's bladder tops off and you're awakened anew by either collision or glare. You notice your eyes watering, your nose closing. You don't have a cat allergy but somehow Uncle Bob has talked you into one.

These three springs of sofa bed are

Bearing guests who traversed afar,

Frame that pinches, fit for grinches,

Better to sleep in the car.

(Chorus)

O, couch asunder, horrid night,

Glare from left-on bathroom light,

Restless panting, bedmate ranting,

Is family worth this awful night?

You wake up. It is morning. The room is filled with the dull glare you associate with beach houses the day after the hurricane. Could you have possibly slept that long? The smells, the claustrophobia and the layers of dreams have left you feeling like you'd like to brush not just your teeth but your whole body, inside and out. In the next room, watching cartoons, are your mouth-breathing nieces and nephews.

Quietly chanting her mantra of "Don't mind me," Aunt Marge pads about, neatening up.

You sit up, feel your butt sink into a slack spot, rock yourself over the frame and stand up. You tie your bathrobe and head for the bathroom.

"Grandpa's in there, don't even think about it," the kids say, without looking away from the cartoons.

Uncle Bob strides in.

"How'd you sleep?"

"Just fine."

"I sleep here when my back is out, I don't know . . . "

"You said."

While you stand by the window taking deep breaths through your nose, Uncle Bob folds up the bed. You hear the light snap of a pair of glasses breaking — your glasses.

"Big day!" Uncle Bob booms. "Get you folks down to the museum, then Marge wants us over to see her group do their songs and dances from many lands."

You won't see much without your glasses, but right now you'd do anything to get out of this house.

Grandpa wanders back from the bathroom. He hikes his pajama leg and shows you the bruise where he barked his shin.

"Call me an old curmudgeon," Grandpa says, "but my theory is that if they made these sofa beds just a little more comfortable, you folks would want to move in for good."

But then what would you have to look forward to for the holidays, the season of the sofa bed, the longest nights of the year?

Away in a manger, with no sofa bed,

The little Lord Jesus lay down his sweet head.

Then Castro and Jennifer made hideaways.

"No thanks," said Lord Jesus, "I'll sleep in the hay."