Sleep, page 2
“Girls!” Around the corner came Margaret’s father, already dressed in another white polo. He palmed the top of her head in his direction and glanced a kiss. “Cooking,” he said. “Enough for me?”
He picked a golden one off the stack with a fork, and raw batter oozed up around the tines. “Leave this to the professionals,” he said. They were pleased. They considered their fathers’ pancakes a tribute to them—the only thing they cooked that wasn’t meat. He took over the skillet, turned down the flame, slipped the half-cooked pancakes back onto the heat. “Everybody sleep okay? No bumps in the night?”
“Where’s Mom?” she asked.
“Your mother’s not feeling well.”
So it was one of those days.
Her mouth was full of pancake when her brother, Neal, walked in—Neal with Jane the cat in his arms. He was petting the cat, running his hand down her back and over her tail. It bothered Margaret, though she didn’t know why; there was nothing obscene about it. And Jane was purring.
“Morning, Dad,” he said.
“Help yourself,” their father said. “But could you not pet the cat at the table?”
Neal dumped her to the floor.
Anyone who looked at Neal and Margaret knew they were brother and sister, and yet people talked about Neal being handsome and they did not talk about her being pretty. Maybe her features worked better on a boy, or maybe, at thirteen, he had just grown into them better. Almost all grown-ups admired Neal. He was like a grown-up himself, in the way that he always knew how to be polite. Other kids teased him, which made the grown-ups like him more. It seemed to Margaret that it was Neal’s fault he didn’t have more friends, but old people seemed to disagree, seemed to think that the kids in their ignorance were missing some rare quality. Elizabeth loved him more because he was so unlikable. That was just the kind of thing that mothers did.
The girls finished and ran hot water over their plates, sticky with the fake syrup’s sweet chemicals. A click and a whoosh and the AC switched on, and Mrs. Murphy honked from the driveway.
* * *
—
After Biddy left, Margaret went upstairs to Elizabeth with a plate of pancakes like it was Mother’s Day. She’d had the idea to pour the syrup into an egg cup so the pancakes wouldn’t get soggy, and she was proud of this, of how careful she’d been, and of the goblet of amber nectar that rippled as she walked.
She loved her mother’s bedroom, how it was as fancy and formal as the dining room downstairs, with no mess or clutter, no clothes thrown over the back of a chair, no pocket junk on the dresser. There was a satin bedspread in robin’s-egg blue that Elizabeth didn’t even use as a blanket, just folded down to the foot of the bed each night. On the dresser were treasures: a silver mirror and a silver comb; a shallow bowl clinking with cuff links; an obelisk of perfume. Anything small and delicate and precious to her mother was irresistible to Margaret, and sometimes she was allowed to pick these things up and look at them, and sometimes she was not. But she must never touch the glass box at the center. It locked with a miniature key like for a girl’s diary, and inside were the antique dueling pistols her parents had given each other one anniversary. A gold plaque on top read—romantically, worryingly—
Hugh and Elizabeth
’til death do us part.
Her mother was in bed; the room was dark. Margaret put the plate on the dresser and climbed up next to her. “Mom?” She touched her shoulder, then lifted her hand off, touched and lifted. “Mom, are you asleep?”
“Hello, my darling.”
“I brought you breakfast.”
“Is it late?”
“Pretty late.”
Elizabeth rolled over and propped herself half up against the pillows, rubbing her face with her hands. “Hand me my robe.”
Margaret bounced down and lifted the robe off the hook on the inside of the closet door. It was so fine and silky, touching it was like touching her mother’s skin.
“How was the sleepover?”
“Fun.”
“Have you done your chores?”
“I’m going to.”
Margaret looked at the novels stacked on her mother’s side of the bed. They were all about English girls who worked in bookstores during the war, or about English girls who worked as nurses during the war, or about Italian girls who fell in love with dukes. She hoped Elizabeth wouldn’t tell her to go.
Almost a year ago, Elizabeth had stayed in bed for days and days. She had taken too many pills one morning after the kids went to school, Margaret knew, because Elizabeth had told her. She had explained all about it one morning, the two of them sitting in bed as if at story time.
“Sometimes you have to do something extreme so people understand how much pain you’re in,” Elizabeth had said. People meant Dad. It was because of The Affair. Elizabeth used capital letters to talk about it, and so Margaret and Neal did too. Their father did not talk about it at all, though he was the one who’d done it, had it—The Affair.
But Margaret hadn’t entirely understood if the pills were somehow an accident—if maybe Elizabeth had been so upset that she’d gotten confused and eaten a big handful of pills instead of something else, some normal food, like popcorn. It was Neal who told her no: that Elizabeth had done it on purpose because Elizabeth had wanted to die. He had turned off the TV to tell her that. He hadn’t cried, so she didn’t either. “You can’t tell anyone,” he’d told her. “Not even Biddy.”
Elizabeth said their father went away because he was a coward. Neal said he’d come back soon. Their mother stayed in the bedroom. It was much easier to keep the secret than she’d thought it would be. Mrs. Murphy came to check on them. She would stop by in the afternoons, put a casserole or pizza on the counter, disappear upstairs. Three times she picked them up and took them to the swimming pool, where they played sharks and minnows with Biddy and Danny.
“Okay, guys?” she would say when she dropped them back off in the driveway. And to Neal: “Take good care of your sister.”
Eventually someone must have called their dad’s sister Aunt Daphne, because she drove up from Delaware and took them to stay with her for a week or two. When Aunt Daphne brought them home again, school was about to start, and their father was back, and Elizabeth was up in Margaret’s closet, pulling out sundresses. “It’s an absolute pigsty in here. None of these can possibly fit you anymore,” she was saying, and Margaret had cannonballed on the bed for joy.
She was a kid back then. But she was big enough to understand that when Mrs. Murphy brought the casseroles but not her daughter, it was because she didn’t want Biddy in their house. She didn’t want her to know that things had gone so wrong. And that made sense, though that first big secret was a crack in the mirror of their friendship, worse than England, worse than pretending she hadn’t woken up first.
Margaret hoped, since Elizabeth hadn’t died, that she no longer wanted to. But probably sometimes she still did, at least a little bit, and probably it was on days like these, when she didn’t want to come out of the bedroom.
“I wasn’t in my right mind,” Elizabeth had said when she told Margaret about the pills. It hadn’t occurred to Margaret before then that you had more than one mind to be in. It was now something that she worried about: protecting, like the pistols in the glass box, the right mind of Elizabeth.
* * *
—
When she handed her mother the robe, Elizabeth grabbed her arm. “Margaret,” she gasped, “you are absolutely covered in mosquito bites.”
All over the white underside of her arm, where the tan never reached, were bright red welts. “It’s not that bad…” She’d been scratching all morning without noticing.
Her mother held on to the arm, turning it this way and that under the whip of sunlight that made it through the curtains. “You got devoured. What will Biddy’s mother say? We have to get rid of those disgusting bats. The least they could do is keep the mosquitoes off you.”
The fussing made the itching worse. Elizabeth put a finger, carefully, right on a bite, and the itch burned up Margaret’s arm, so hot everywhere she could feel it behind her eyelids. But she didn’t pull away.
Her mother’s touch, the whip of light, the close attention. Margaret wanted to cry. Briskly Elizabeth said, “Go into my medicine cabinet and put some hydrocortisone on those right now.”
You always feel sadder when you look into a mirror. It’s because to the sadness in yourself is added the more generous sadness you feel for another person. Poor thing, Margaret thought about her reflection. The girl in the mirror looked like she was suffering from something much worse than whatever was bothering Margaret.
Weird, Margaret thought, how the ins and outs and shapes and holes clustered at the front of a head made up something this nakedly expressive of thinking and feeling—the face. All that thinking and feeling, Margaret knew, was what Elizabeth was talking about when she said, “Stop making that face.” Stop making that face, Margaret thought now at the girl in the mirror. Her eyes were too small and too far apart, and there was something wrong with the mouth; it was all twisted up and trembling. Stop making that face. She splashed cold water on it. She forgot about the hydrocortisone. When she went back into the bedroom, her mother was gone.
3
She would never again know so little or have so little to do. The mothers had signed up Neal and Danny for a Model UN camp all summer (Neal: into it; Danny: furious) and Biddy had swim team, but Margaret wasn’t doing anything. She emptied and loaded the dishwasher, took out the trash, emptied and loaded the dishwasher. She went to the pool with Biddy. She read, endlessly, in the yard, books about special children doing magic. She daydreamed about Danny, and about JTT from Home Improvement, and about Calvin O’Keefe from A Wrinkle in Time.
She owned a book of poems called A Child’s Garden of Verses. It had a red fabric cover and had belonged to her mother growing up. It was a treasure because Elizabeth had won it as a prize at school, the all-girls boarding school she’d gone to when she was even younger than Margaret. Most of the students came from faraway places, but not Elizabeth. Her parents lived right there in town. But her father was an important businessman and her mother threw many parties, and a child at home was a lot of bother. They wanted their daughter mostly on holidays, Elizabeth said, when they went to Europe and bought her very beautiful clothes. Both her parents were dead now and it was tragic, like a story. Imagine: having to live at school! Margaret was grateful that no one made her do that. Though in fact Elizabeth always said she had liked the school. It suited her, the kilts and dorms and order, and mass at 4:00 and dinner at 5:00, and the magisterial headmistress with chalk-white fingers who awarded her the book of poems, on the inside cover of which, in a schoolgirl cursive significant as a celebrity autograph, she had written the name Elizabeth.
Margaret knew a lot of the poems by heart, and sometimes they played in her head like pop songs. She liked even better a poem that her own teacher had read to her: Margaret are you grieving over Goldengrove unleaving? That was a tree. She said that to herself a lot. Margaret, are you grieving? Oh! It was beautiful.
Her historical education came primarily from the American Girl Doll books, which is why she associated the Revolution with redheads climbing trees. About slavery she knew that it was very bad and long ago; about politics she knew only the president’s name. She knew about abortion, or at least that people carried posters about abortion. She knew who Kristi Yamaguchi was. The family had one computer, in a corner of the living room, which she had to use to play a game that taught typing and the multiplication tables. Twice with Biddy she had braved the alarm of the dial-up to go on the internet and been equally bored and disturbed by what they’d found there. In health class she had colored in diagrams about puberty but had no idea what it would feel like when her own body changed. They made it sound like it was all little things, hair and pimples, pores and follicles. But she knew it was a bigger deal—more like disappearing, cell by cell, until you were replaced by a whole new body.
She often wondered: What was the point of her? She was ten years old.
* * *
One morning Margaret was doing nothing as usual when a car pulled fast into the driveway and Mrs. Ricci from down the road tumbled out. Neal was at camp, their father was at work, and Elizabeth was somewhere in the garden, pulling things out or putting things in. It was only Margaret who saw.
Mrs. Ricci had long hair even though she was a grown-up and had always been sweet to Margaret because she had sons and no daughters, though she probably liked it that way. They lived in a giant brick house behind an iron fence with a driveway that went in a circle around an actual fountain, which Elizabeth thought was very ostentatious, but that was not to be repeated.
“Margaret, get your mother. It’s an emergency.”
She was ready. She ran around the corner, shouting, “Mom!” And there was Elizabeth, rising from the flower bed. Elizabeth strode down the driveway; she would take care of what was wrong.
Margaret stopped on the porch steps, a polite distance away, and watched the mothers, waiting for their orders. “Lost,” she could hear, “sometime last night…” Something must have happened to one of the Ricci boys, some gruesome injury—to shy Philip or bullying Jeremy, neither of whom Margaret liked, but neither of whom she wanted hurt or dead either. Mrs. Ricci put her hands up in her hair and started shaking her head from side to side. A mosquito had flown into Margaret’s ear once and gotten stuck in the wax, buzzing right by her brain, and she had shaken her head just like that and screamed.
Mrs. Ricci and her mother were friends, but not really. They always said “Let’s get together” if they ran into each other. If Elizabeth was watering the flowers by the road, Mrs. Ricci would slow down in her car and say “Your roses are bliss.” But the families had been invited to each other’s houses only a few times. Elizabeth didn’t seem to need a lot of friends.
So it was surprising when Elizabeth hugged Mrs. Ricci, pressed her tight against her chest and held her there. One of Elizabeth’s hands was on Mrs. Ricci’s back, rubbing up and down, the other cupping the back of her head. Elizabeth was (and this was also surprising) much smaller than Mrs. Ricci. All Margaret could see of her mother were her two hands and a bit of blond hair wisping over Mrs. Ricci’s shoulder. She watched in wonder the mother in her mother’s arms. The only adult she’d ever seen cry before was Elizabeth.
“We’ve looked everywhere,” Mrs. Ricci said, pulling away. “What if she was stolen?”
Stolen? She who?
Elizabeth, having given comfort, was all action. “Have you called Animal Control? Okay, I’ll do that now. And then I’ll help you look. Don’t worry, she’ll turn up.”
It was an emergency, but it wasn’t Philip or Jeremy who was missing. It was Gambol, their pet pygmy goat.
Gambol lived in a pen in the Riccis’ backyard and in theory ate sugar cubes and peppermints out of the palm of your hand, though the few times Margaret had been over to the house, the goat had refused to come anywhere near the fence. They had the goat because Mr. Ricci was allergic to dogs and cats but it was important for children to grow up knowing how to take care of animals. Mrs. Ricci said that as if the goat made the house a farm, like the boys were up at dawn with a bucket in each hand, though everyone knew that this was New Jersey and only pretend.
The goat had a pink collar that read Gambol, and her name was also on a gold plaque on the gate of her pen, the gate that Mrs. Ricci was saying now had been mysteriously opened in the night. The goat was so tiny—only as tall as Margaret’s knees—not just tiny but freakishly so. People wouldn’t expect it. They would run her over in their car before their brains said, What was that? Was that a little goat?
* * *
—
An old man Margaret didn’t know was walking up their driveway, though people didn’t walk up driveways here; it wasn’t that kind of neighborhood. He had gray curls, like her dad’s would someday be, but longer and messier than he would let them get. A short-sleeved button-up tucked over a big, hard belly into blue jeans, the blue jeans tucked into work boots.
“Daddy,” Mrs. Ricci said.
“Saw the car from the street,” the man said. “I walked the road from the back and didn’t spot her. Just going to do another loop. Expanding the search party?”
He shook Elizabeth’s hand. “Don’t think we met before; I’m Stu Elkins, Jeannie’s father, from Maryland.”
It was strange to think of Mrs. Ricci having a father.
“So nice to meet you,” Elizabeth said. “I was just about to call Animal Control.”
“Good idea,” the man said, nodding.
Elizabeth sniffed, like maybe it wasn’t a good idea, or who was he to say so. Margaret understood; Elizabeth wanted to be the one in charge—and she should be, she deserved to be. She was using that tone she used with Margaret’s dad, when she was telling him how to fix a situation at work that seemed hard but really wasn’t. Elizabeth had never had a job as far as Margaret knew, but if she had, she would have been very good at it. Margaret was proud to have such a competent mother, a mother who didn’t fall to pieces when the crisis was someone else’s problem.
“Margaret, come here,” Elizabeth said. “Why don’t you help Mr. Elkins look around on foot while Mrs. Ricci and I drive.”
She didn’t want to. With a stranger? She wanted to stay with the mothers. But it wasn’t a question.
“My daughter,” Elizabeth said, gesturing an introduction. “I’ll just go in and make this call and get you a glass of water, Jeannie.”
Margaret stayed where she was. She looked at Elizabeth, but her mother was already gone. Mrs. Ricci was leaning against the car, taking big breaths with her eyes shut and a hand against her chest.
