What If We’re Gonna Have Eight Kids

Box Spring

The apartment had one window.

That was the first thing. Not the radiator, which clicked like a metronome someone had left on. Not the kitchen, which was a corner with a sink and two feet of counter and a refrigerator that hummed loud enough to hear from the bed. Not the bathroom, which was a closet with a toilet and a showerhead and no room to turn around with the door closed. The window. West-facing. Winter light came through it thin and gray, the kind of light that makes everything look like a photograph from a long time ago.

Ethan carried the last box up three flights of stairs. Sixteen steps per flight. I counted on the second day because I had nothing else to count. The stairs were narrow — my shoulder brushed the wall going up and the railing coming down. The box spring would not fit. I knew that before we tried. Ethan did not know that until we tried.

We unpacked for two days. His boxes had labels written in Sharpie: KITCHEN, BOOKS, CLOTHES, OFFICE. My boxes had labels in my handwriting, neater: kitchen, books, winter clothes, teaching materials, misc. The bookshelf was the first thing we assembled. IKEA Bräda, $39, the kind that leans against the wall and lists to one side if you put too many hardcovers on the right. We argued about whose books went where for twenty minutes. Not a real argument. The kind of negotiation that feels like a game when you are twenty-two and newly married and the only thing at stake is shelf space.

He had engineering textbooks. I had children's literature. We compromised: his on the bottom, mine on top. I found a book I didn't recognize wedged between two of his — a battered copy of *The Catcher in the Rye* with someone else's name on the inside cover.

"Whose is this?"

"Marcus. From junior year. He left it at my place and I never gave it back."

"Are you going to return it?"

"No."

We both had the same cheap spatula. Gray plastic, $2.99 from Target. His had a melted spot on the handle. Mine had a crack near the blade. We kept both and threw away the good one, because by the time we found it buried in a box of kitchen stuff we had already decided the cracked one was mine and the melted one was his, and switching felt like admitting we had made a mistake.

The radiator clicked. The window let in gray light. The apartment smelled like cardboard and the ghost of the previous tenant's air freshener — something pine-scented, chemical, clinging to the walls. We ate peanut butter sandwiches for lunch because the pots were still in boxes and the delivery from Pho Saigon hadn't arrived yet.

"It's small," Ethan said, standing in the middle of the room with his hands on his hips.

"It's perfect for two," I said.

I meant it.

---

The box spring arrived on a Tuesday.

Ethan had ordered it online — queen-size, firm, $189 with free delivery. The delivery guys left it on the landing outside the apartment door because the elevator was broken and they were not carrying it up three flights. Ethan tipped them anyway. Twenty dollars. I watched from the doorway.

"We've got this," he said.

We did not have this.

The staircase turned. That was the problem. Not the width — the turn. A queen box spring is sixty inches wide and eighty inches long and made of wood and fabric and the stubbornness of American manufacturing standards. The landing was forty-two inches across. I measured. Ethan did not measure. Ethan believed in the power of angles.

He tried it flat. The top corner hit the wall two steps below the turn.

He tried it vertical. The bottom edge scraped the ceiling plaster and left a white mark the landlord would definitely notice.

He tried it diagonal. The box spring wedged itself into the turn like it had been designed for that specific staircase, that specific landing, that specific wrong angle. It was stuck. Not stuck in a way that wiggling would fix. Stuck in a way that required either a saw or a miracle.

A woman on the second floor watched from her doorway. She had curlers in her hair and a cat in her arms. She did not say anything. She just watched.

"What if we—" Ethan started.

"No."

"You didn't let me finish."

"You were going to say 'tilt it.'"

"I was going to say 'tilt it and then rotate.'"

"That's what you said last time. And the time before that."

He looked at the box spring. The box spring looked back. It had been in that stairwell for forty-five minutes and it had no intention of leaving.

Ethan sat down on it. Right there on the third-floor landing, on the box spring that wouldn't fit, with the curler-woman watching and the cat watching and the white mark on the ceiling. He put his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

I sat down next to him.

For a while neither of us said anything. The radiator in our apartment clicked through the wall. The cat meowed once, low and unimpressed. The curler-woman closed her door.

"I'm going to measure the staircase," Ethan said.

"Ethan."

"I bet if we take the fabric off—"

"Ethan. It's fine."

And I meant it. That was the thing. I said *it's fine* and it was actually fine. The box spring was stuck. We would figure it out. Maybe we'd saw it in half. Maybe we'd leave it in the hallway and sleep on the mattress on the floor. Maybe we'd sell it and buy two twins. The options were infinite and none of them mattered because we were sitting on a box spring in a narrow hallway in December, and Ethan's shoulder was touching mine, and I was laughing. Not at him. At the situation. At the curler-woman. At the cat. At the white mark on the ceiling. At the fact that we had been married for three weeks and this was our first real problem and it was a piece of furniture.

Ethan started laughing too. The kind that builds from the stomach. He leaned back against the wall and the box spring creaked under him and that made him laugh harder.

"We're idiots," he said.

"We're married idiots."

"That's worse."

"That's better."

His phone buzzed in his pocket. He pulled it out, glanced at the screen — some notification from the startup, something about a supplier timeline — and put it back.

Later. All of it could be later.

---

We slept on the mattress on the floor that night.

No box spring. No bed frame. The delivery from Pho Saigon had arrived, so we ate on the floor too — summer rolls and chicken pho, the containers spread out like a picnic, chopsticks in hand, no plates because the dishes were still in a box somewhere and neither of us felt like looking for them.

The apartment looked like a disaster zone. Boxes against every wall. The bookshelf listing slightly to the right. The radiator clicking its slow, irregular rhythm. The one window showing nothing but the dark and the streetlight on the corner and a piece of sky the color of a bruise.

"It's like camping," Ethan said, stirring his pho with a chopstick.

"Indoor camping." I picked up a summer roll. "The hardest kind."

He laughed. The sound filled the apartment — not because it was loud, but because the apartment was small enough that every sound filled it. The radiator clicked. The refrigerator hummed. Outside, a bus went by and the window rattled.

We ate without talking for a while. The pho was good. The summer rolls were better. The floor was hard under the mattress but we had blankets and each other and the kind of tiredness that comes from carrying boxes and fighting furniture and the first month of being married in a one-window apartment in December.

Ethan leaned back against the wall. I leaned against him. His arm went around my shoulder the way it had on the bench outside Julio's, the way it did when he forgot he was supposed to be doing something else. He wasn't doing something else tonight. He was here. The phone was on the counter, face-down, not buzzing.

The apartment was small. A studio that fit two people and a box spring's worth of ambition and not much else. The rent was $875 a month, split down the middle, and the shower ran cold for thirty seconds before it got warm, and the radiator clicked all night, and the previous tenant's pine air freshener was still faintly there under the smell of pho and cardboard.

It was perfect. For two.

I closed my eyes. Ethan's breathing was even. The radiator clicked. The window was dark. The boxes were everywhere. Nothing was where it was supposed to be. The box spring was still on the landing. The white mark was still on the ceiling. The curler-woman was probably asleep.

It was still this easy.