“Help me with the piumino,” she says.
My wife is holding an armful of duvet cover, still warm from the dryer. We’re going to stuff the duvet (piumino in Italian) into the cover, an ordeal that makes me long for the simple days of my youth, when bedding consisted of flat sheet, blanket, and bedspread.
Ordinarily I like things ending in -ino and -ini, a diminutive Italian suffix that confers cuteness on just about anything. Even a turd—stronzino—becomes adorable in the Italian diminutive. I do not love the piumino.
“Must I?”
“Yes, you must.”
The problem is fit. We have an oversize cover. It’s too long and too wide—the duvet floats around inside the cover like a slippery manta ray as we pinch it, feeling around for edges, trying to trap the duvet while it is approximately centered. It is a doomed effort, which means eventually either the lower or upper region of our bed will have lots of duvet, capable of achieving incubation-level temperatures.
“I hate this thing,” I say.
“It’s easier.” She’s standing on a chair at the foot of the bed, getting ready to fluff the duvet. “You center it, you poof it, and you’re done,” she says.
“You’re standing on a chair to make the bed. That’s easy?”
“Yes.”
“I hate this thing.”
She fluffs the duvet, parachuting it to the mattress. It takes three or four poofs to get the job done. She climbs down from the chair, says it looks nice. She likes it.
Does she ever. She likes it so much she even leaves it on our bed in the summer. All summer I toss the thing off me all night long. All night she tosses it back on. Some mornings I wake up feeling like poached sole.
I was not yet out of primary school when my mother taught me how to make a bed. I learned to execute hospital corners on both the top sheet and blanket and then smooth a bedspread over the whole, finishing with a crisp tuck under the pillow. Comfort then was measured in foot-pounds of blanket weight you felt piled on in the winter, the heavier the better. If you had feathers, they were in your pillow.
The dispute comes down to your feather orientation: feathers on the bottom or feathers on top.
History suggests humans originally, and through much of recorded time, preferred feathers on the bottom. Feather beds date back to the fourteenth century, though as a rarity, primarily comforting the well-to-do. By the nineteenth century, however, they were more common. The feather “tick” also made its appearance at this time. The tick was essentially a linen or cotton bag full of feathers (fifty pounds of feathers!), which was then laid over a mattress. You would lie on the tick, not pull the tick over you. God was in his heaven, and all the feathers were beneath us.
Not, evidently, on the continent, where the duvet was becoming a thing, popularizing the feathers-on-top orientation. The term “duvet,” meaning “down,” dates back to eighteenth-century French. Samuel Johnson, in 1759, refers with skepticism to an advertisement for duvets, noting, “Promise, large promise, is the soul of an advertisement,” and citing, as an example, “‘duvets for bed-coverings, of down, beyond comparison superior to what is called otter-down’, and indeed such, that its ‘many excellencies cannot be here set forth.’” Johnson, something tells me, did not swing that way.
Mattress historians note that right-thinking Brits and Americans clung to their feathers-on-the-bottom orientation until well into the late twentieth century. In the 1970s, duvets began to appear in department stores in England; in 1987 IKEA opened its first store in London, marketing duvets as “doonas.” That was that. Today, according to the Daily Telegraph, department stores sell seven duvets for every blanket. The Telegraph reports, “Argos, the country’s biggest furniture retailer, does not even sell woolen blankets. Fleecy little throws from man-made fibre, yes, but not a proper, woven piece of Britain. It stocks over 100 different duvets.”
My wife took me to Macy’s the other day, more for company than for my opinion. We went sheet and duvet shopping. This stuff will go on her parents’ bed in Italy, a bed we now sleep on a couple months of the year.
This bed is an instrument of torture. Until recently its wool-stuffed mattresses rested on a bouncy, noisy wire mesh that over time had become fatigued and taken to sagging in the middle. The lumpy mattresses also sloped toward the center, creating a kind of culvert in the middle of the bed. These mattresses were heirlooms to her, pieces of family history she wanted to preserve. She said they just needed to be fluffed.
Fluffed? I pictured us hanging bedding out the window and pummeling our wool mattresses, punishing them for hurting us. Instead, we are now rehabilitating the bed. Persuaded by pain and bad sleep, she relented: The wool mattresses are history. The mesh is next.
But it looks like there will be a duvet.
While I wait beneath a Martha Stewart poster at Macy’s, my wife tests sheets for crispness. She looks at Westport 1000 thread count, pronounces it slimy; Genova 1200 thread count, slippery. Next there’s Bentley 400, Charter Club Opulence 800, and Ralph Lauren RL 624 Sateen, none of them quite right. She says she wants them scratchy. She skips the sheets and moves to duvets.
Martha Stewart looks down on me with that confident smile of hers. She’s wearing pajamas. “It’s already decided,” she says. “You’re getting a duvet.”
“I know that.”
“You know what else is nice,” Martha says, “for accent?”
“I like the scratchy sheets. I’ll give her that.”
“Shams.” She flashes me her Martha smile. “Lots of shams.”
“No.”
“King or queen?”
“Queen. No shams.”
“In a variety of sizes,” she says, “you can fit up to a dozen pillows on your bed.”
My wife steps up to the register, motions me over. She’s picked out a duvet cover. “The duvet,” she says, “will be a special order. Is that okay?”
It’s not. It’s really, really not. But I tell her, “Of course, that will be fine.”