The Game Was To Guess The Words

Lit Salon Unveils WITD's Latest Feature by Jocelyn Lovelle

Hello Beautifuls!

Yesterday a wonderful thing happened.

Jeannine Ouellette

published a new essay of mine on her Lit Salon. I spent most of the day in a beautiful daze, reading comments and responding. This piece resonated with people. 

I am reposting it here on Hello Beautifuls today so readers who aren’t on Substack or don’t follow Jeannine can experience it too.

If you just subscribed because of this essay, thank you! I'm so thrilled you're here, and you'll have a brand new essay from me next week. Thank you for your love and support. It means more to me than you probably know. Or maybe you do. ❤️

For subscribers who aren't new as of yesterday, I am thrilled you are here too. No matter when you joined, your love and support mean the world to me too. 🙏

I invite you to leave a comment and tell us how this piece resonated for you. 

The Game Was To Guess The Words

When my mother was a young woman she slept in a mahogany four-poster bed her father made, with a husband who broke her heart. When she left—even though she wanted to stay—my mother took a very little bit of money, her clothes, and the bed. 

While my parents were still married, I slept in the dark mahogany four-poster bed, and when my grandmother would visit, she slept in it with me. "Come on in Babydoll," she would say, "let's get back to back." First, we lined up our shoulder blades and spines, and then our hips, and finally our feet, so that the bones in my 10-year-old-body met the bones in her 70-year-old-body in all the same places. 

The skin of my grandmother’s feet was thick and cool and smooth, with rough edges at her heels and hard full-moon calluses below her big toes. In the summer she wore sandals and I could see her feet, swollen and ugly, covered with purple and blue veins. But in bed, where only the feel of them existed, my grandmother’s feet felt like home. 

We would lie like that, my grandmother taking deep breaths, exhaling a small prayer: "It feels so good to get flat." Her heart beat through her thin skin, through her ribs, through my nightgown, speaking in the dark directly to my heart, telling me the story of a life of work and joy, disappointment and wonder, loving and breaking, of a heart winding down at night into the softness of sleep.

Often, in that same four-poster bed, my best friend would spend the night with me. Her name was Amber, and she and I would write on each other's backs, messages of silliness or love, with the tips of our fingers. The game was to guess the words, but, really, the game was to feel the light pressure tattooing a song into our skin, our spine, our ribs. My heart would beat faster when it was my turn to be drawn upon. I loved the feel of her fingertips, tickling and warm, writing a message that would speak to me in my sleep. 

I do not remember where the four-poster mahogany bed went after my parents divorced. It just disappeared. What I do remember is how my mother bought herself a white wrought iron frame with bright brass globes on the posts, and how I slept on a plain frame with no headboard. But my bedroom walls were beautifully papered. 

When I got married, my mother gave me the mahogany four-poster bed and told me to never give it away. So my new husband and I carried that bed, piece by piece, up the two flights of stairs in the townhouse in La Jolla. But the bed is not where we got pregnant.

That happened on the floor of a friend's house, a moment of unexpected quiet, just the two of us left behind. Him needing reassurance, release, me needing to please. Our agreement solidified in sexual currency. The diaphragm hastily wriggled into place, my thin red dress with the tiny white flowers—my favorite—pushed up over my hips, the carpet making its mark on one low knob of my spine. The intensity of his need pushing me farther away, my thoughts on the small fire burning my skin, my voice making encouraging sounds, my body feeling something stir, but not enough. Waiting, thinking of clouds, thinking about wanting to be where I was, but not knowing how. Thinking of my grandmother's cool feet, waiting for the burning to stop. 

When we sold the La Jolla townhouse to pay for a year driving through Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, and Costa Rica, my once-husband and I moved ourselves and the bed, temporarily, to his parent's house in Carmel to prepare for our trip. The parents, his and mine, thought we were out of our minds, that we would die at the hands of guerillas. Our friends, some of them, thought we were daring. Others of them thought we were crazy. We thought it was the only way to stay sane.

We slept in the four-poster bed in Carmel as weeks turned into months. It was easy to stay, with a view of the hills and the ocean, easy to eat cracked crab with melted butter and drink good Chardonnay on the deck watching the sunset over the Pacific. A storybook life without the storybook ending.

The year-long drive turned into a year living in Costa Rica, then two, then five, then eight. It was easy to stay in Costa Rica, too. There was no cracked crab, but there was ahi pulled out of the ocean, dirt roads, warm water, businesses to run, friendships, catamarans, endless parties, and tropical sunsets. After 10 years, we finally returned to California and moved the bed from Carmel to Menlo Park. We installed it in the upstairs nook-turned-bedroom in the quirky 1940s house we rented from a landlord who knew not the laws of tenant privacy—a landlord who would ride his bike into our driveway and up to our back door every evening to make sure we were not poaching the ripening artichokes he made clear were not part of the rental agreement.

It was as we left that house that I finally left the four-poster bed, glaze cracked from age and storage and heat and moisture, pruny, like skin submerged too long under water. I'd slept in that bed—my feet running with nowhere to go, stopped short by the thick dead end of the footboard, the headboard looming over me, my skull pressed up against it time and again—for too long. 

I didn’t set out to betray my mother's request by giving the bed away. What I remember is how it got loaded, with so many other pieces of furniture, into a friend's truck as we moved out of the quirky house where we'd held impromptu dinner parties on the flat roof watching the sunset. One truckload was going to our new place. The other truckload to Goodwill. What I remember is thinking I never wanted to sleep in that bed again. What I remember is telling the friend it was part of the load going to the new house.

But did I? 

I only know the bed didn’t make it to the new house, which would be the last place my once-husband and I would live together. The place where, on a Saturday morning in late May, just before my birthday, I would wake up in a bed loaned to us, and my once-husband would ask me, "What do you want to do today?" And the messages sent so long ago from my grandmother's heart, from my friend's fingertips, would finally be freed from the confines of wood and sadness and history, to make their way up my spine and back to my heart and I would look at him, reading the paper next to me, and say, "I don't want to be married anymore."

And in that moment, I would understand that the betrayal would have been holding on, just because someone else had asked me not to let go.

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