Sleep, page 5
It did seem to be a mole. It was definitely a mole. But Margaret kept feeling at the same time that it was part of Jane. She couldn’t be sure until she saw the cat again that she was alive, safe, whole. Biddy and Danny wanted to bury the mole, give it a funeral, but she wouldn’t let them. They had to find the cat first.
They searched the house—under the beds and sofas, in the basement where the litter box was—and then the yard, under all the bushes and the porch.
At last there she was in the grass near the toolshed, every inch of her unharmed tail waving proudly in the air. “Janey,” Margaret called, and went to pick her up, to bury her face against the cat’s soft back. But the cat was busy with something in her paws, punishing or playing with something that looked exactly like a bit of her own self, biting and batting it down in the dirt.
Oh god—don’t look—the mole.
Biddy covered her eyes and screamed. Danny grabbed Margaret’s hand and pulled her back, away from the horror on the lawn. They ran to the porch, and by the time they got there, their shrieks had turned to laughter. “Jane!” Danny was saying. “What a beast!”
“Thirsty?” Margaret’s dad said, not bothering to ask what they were running from because kids were always running from something. He was standing at the patio table with Mr. Murphy and a blender full of strawberry daiquiris.
Their dads had grown up together. It was easier to imagine the dads before they were dads—the jobs they’d had, the jokes they’d made. It was the mothers who’d come out of nowhere, who’d had to be found, wooed, incorporated. But it was the mothers Margaret and Biddy cared about.
Now Margaret’s dad handed her a glass of strawberry daiquiri. Biddy and Danny said no thanks, they wanted sodas. The drink tasted cold, then sweet, then bitter.
“All right, Hugh,” Mr. Murphy said, “now let’s deflower this virgin.”
“Ew, Dad,” said Biddy, and the dads laughed, because this was a favorite gag: making their daughters uncomfortable. Margaret’s dad picked up a golden bottle, and the liquor glugged into the blender just when Mrs. Murphy walked out.
“Hugh! What are you doing? I already added the rum.”
“Oh shit.” Her dad put down the bottle. “I thought you made it virgin for the kids?”
“No! Not this batch. Margaret, you’re not drinking that, are you?”
She lowered her cup. Danny swiped it and chugged.
“I can’t taste any rum,” he said.
“Margaret, please tell me you didn’t drink any.”
“I didn’t get to drink any,” Biddy said.
“Your mother is going to kill me.”
“Oh, Becks, she’s perfectly fine,” Margaret’s dad said. “In fact: Where’s Neal? He’s actually old enough to try this.”
“Hugh,” Mr. Murphy said, “you remember that time with the Long Islands—”
“Oh boy. Were we even in high school?”
“Am I drunk?” Danny asked.
“Could everyone please try to be serious?” Mrs. Murphy looked around. “Hugh, Frank, finish this off with me. Margaret, I think we’d better not mention this to your mother.”
“Don’t worry, Mrs. Murphy, I won’t.”
The grown-ups divided up the evidence, and Mrs. Murphy took the empty pitcher back inside.
“This is so unfair,” Biddy said. She sniffed the cup. “What do you feel like?” she asked Danny.
“Like nothing, really. Like a little fun.”
“Walk in a line and touch your nose.”
Danny had drunk out of her cup—that was what Margaret was thinking. He’d put his mouth right there where hers had been. She wished she could take it back now, run her tongue along the rim.
“What if one of those mole things climbs on us while we’re sleeping?” Biddy asked. All summer they’d been planning to camp out on the porch, the four kids, and this was the night.
“Obviously Jane will kill it,” Danny said. “Can you believe we were worried about Jane? That cat is savage.”
“What about wolves?”
“Don’t be dumb, there aren’t any wolves in New Jersey.”
“Margaret said there were wolves.”
“I just said what if…Besides, whenever you’re afraid of one thing, it’s always a totally different thing.”
Danny nodded, like that was a smart thing to say, and Margaret’s mouth tasted all over again of daiquiri.
“Is that supposed to make me feel better?” Biddy said. “Come on, let’s just sleep inside like normal.”
“Don’t be a baby,” Margaret said. “You promised.”
* * *
—
After dinner Elizabeth oversaw the thorough application of bug spray. If they needed to come inside, it was perfectly fine. But Margaret wasn’t afraid; she would never go inside, and Biddy would never leave her. Though in case anything crawled up, Margaret agreed to put her sleeping bag on the outside, the dangerous side, near the porch railing.
The boys were in the living room playing Nintendo. They were allowed to stay up as late as they wanted because they were twelve and thirteen, which wasn’t fair; ten wasn’t that much younger. She and Biddy had complained about it, loudly, all through dinner. But truthfully she was happy to be away from Neal. Since the camera, she had spoken to her brother only when she had to. It was surprising how easy it was to stop speaking to him; she just left any room he was in.
But she wasn’t thinking about that now. She was trying not to think about it. She was happy to be alone with Biddy, happy to be out late with a flashlight in the strange night air that got inside her sleeping bag and made her shiver.
Biddy kept hearing sounds, asking, “What was that?” in the voice she imagined teenage girls used in horror movies. Margaret knocked her knuckles against the railing when Biddy wasn’t looking. “I think I heard footsteps,” she said, making a wide-eyed face. “Is someone out there?” The headlights of a car roved down the street and over her face. Biddy froze and then threw her pillow at Margaret. “It was you, I know it.”
They played Would You Rather. “Would you rather have tiny wings on your back or tiny horns on your head?”
“Would you rather have tiny horns on your head or a tiny tail?”
“Would you rather die or never be born?”
“Would you rather have to wash your mouth out with dish soap before and after every meal or have every meal only ever be broccoli? But not the tops of the broccoli, only the stalks. And no ranch.”
Biddy was a master. Biddy made you cringe. Every option she came up with was equally horrifying, but you had to pick something, you had to choose. They took turns making terrible choices until they got sleepy, then quiet.
Margaret thought about the goat in its pen and all the wilderness between them. Foxes, probably, and trundling possums, and raccoons poking their heads out of trees. The bats, everywhere wheeling. Along the tree line, lightning bugs were igniting, setting green fires in their bellies. That was how they communicated, Margaret knew from school. She wondered what it would be like to talk that way, if words were something you could see. You couldn’t pretend you hadn’t heard. But then again, you could see and still not care. Or you could be looking the wrong way or blinking. Flash flash what? She fell asleep.
* * *
—
A noise. She thought first of the animals, but it was a human sound. It was necessary that she not move until she knew what it was. She had kicked her way out of the sleeping bag at some point, and the night air was slick. Someone was awake; someone was moving around. Danny? Maybe Danny wanted to sleep near her. Maybe he would lie close and when she woke in the morning he would look at her in a new way, like she was a princess in a bower. The plastic hiss of a sleeping bag, a creak, the shifting air, a hovering presence. She lay stiller than sleeping, stiller than breathing.
A finger was touching her. She should have jumped up, rolled away, curled into a ball, shouted. But in her confusion or fear she didn’t. And then it was too late; almost immediately, it was too late.
It was just a finger, but she couldn’t have stopped it or dodged it or flung it aside; some power had tapered to a point to pin her down, to keep her frozen there. The finger touched her breast, or what was almost a breast, touched the nipple, and then kept touching, down her ribs and belly and lower, to the flat space between her legs.
Her body locked into an even more rigid paralysis. It must have been noticeable, the lack of movement its own kind of movement, the tension so extreme it couldn’t possibly have looked natural. Because the finger lifted. There was the sense of a withdrawal, a footstep.
Part of her was safe in the darkness, part of her wasn’t. It was like the beam of the flashlight, the line of the finger down her body, like everything it touched was lit, stripped, cut away. Biddy was safe and sleeping. Her mother, her father, probably, were sleeping. She would have to look for herself, and so she did; she made herself slit an eye. She saw a shirt, elbows, the blank back of a diminishing head. It wasn’t Danny. It was Neal.
* * *
It was Neal who would come into her bedroom six, seven, maybe eight times that bad summer. He would only ever put his hands on her, only ever when she was sleeping, only until she stirred and flinched and felt the blanket around her knees like shallow water. There was a sparking, shrinking feeling in the spots where he had touched her, like the spots in your vision after a bright light strobes past or a ringing in your ears after a violent sound. It kept happening like that after he was done.
She didn’t count the times she slept straight through to morning and wondered only after—because the door was cracked, though she was sure she’d shut it tight; because the blanket seemed folded down, not kicked away—if he had come and gone without her knowing. And those were the worst days. It was not good to wake that way.
She knew that it would happen again if she did not move to stop it, and yet she did not move to stop it, did not scream during, did not tell after. She did that for Elizabeth. She kept the lights on. She kept awake as best she could into the long hours of the adult evening and then later, past that, into the dark bereft. She pushed things against the door—backpacks filled with books, her bedside table—until Elizabeth yelled at her about fire hazards, very dangerous fire hazards, and so she had to stop.
In the fall, then, three times in a row she headed him off, heard his footsteps coming and stomped coughing around the blazing room. Each time he turned back from the door, and after the third he gave up, losing interest or bowing to her vigilance. She won, though what happened remained a secret and sleep a peril.
That first night, she lay awake long after the sleeping bag hissed again. She waited until all was quiet, and then she set her face toward the yard, toward the deeper blackness there. Here lies Margaret, here Margaret used to lie.
Two
8
The girls were sleeping—they had fought so hard over whose turn it was to take the top bunk that in the end they were both in the bottom, sleeping head to foot. Margaret went in to check on them. Helen was turtled under the blankets. Jo was the opposite—legs bare, her arms thrown one way and her hair the other.
She had spent half an hour tidying the apartment; it was so small it never took much longer. She could disinfect the whole place with half a packet of Clorox wipes if she wanted to and sometimes did. There were two small white bedrooms with airshaft views and a sunny living room with five feet of kitchen against one wall and a couch against the other. Between them was a pinkish rug with a pattern so faded it was only a rumor, darker patches that could as well have been stains or shadows as design.
The apartment had been renovated for roommates in their twenties, not mothers and children. So there was no hall closet for a vacuum cleaner, no bathtub, and a stove so doll-size it was basically decorative. The rooms did not reward close inspection. Gaps under the windowsills and behind the radiators bulged creamily with the insulation she’d sprayed from a can to keep out the drafts and the mice. But she liked living with the girls in those white boxes, how snug it felt. Shipshape, she sometimes let herself think.
What was it about watching her children sleep that made Margaret feel so safe? It was like she was both the mother keeping watch and a third girl in the bed, like she was standing guard over herself too. Helen shifted under the covers. She had brought Margaret running with the cry of “Mommy!” but it was only a dream. She was murmuring now. Margaret couldn’t make out the words, just the cadence of a complaint. When the girls were sleeping at their father’s, did they know to call out “Daddy” in the night? No, Margaret knew they didn’t, knew it was always Margaret they first shouted for, whether she was there to answer or not. She battened down the pain, watched until the child settled back to quiet.
She had to get some work done. She dimmed the hallway light to the agreed-upon dimness, took her laptop back to the couch, and began reading. Dear editor, please consider. Dear editor, the time has come to. Dear Margaret, I never wanted to have to tell this story. Dear sirs.
Someone shrieked. Outside the open window Thursday night went past, the sound like blue buffetings of fresh air. She wished she could be out there too, going somewhere, with the night air lifting up her skirt. She felt antsy in a way that was almost hormonal, a teenage itch. She couldn’t make out what people were saying, but it didn’t matter, she got the gist. Someone was slagging someone else, someone was telling an outraged story, someone was discussing the logistics of the night. Distance abstracted the language from the units of its content, turned it into tone and meter and nothing else. She was surprised how much she could understand without understanding a word.
Once, she’d heard a man speaking, his voice abnormally deep and loud—stentorian, she thought. It was an Elizabeth kind of word, and she could hear her mother’s voice in her head for a moment, clearer than the man outside. He wasn’t talking to anyone else, you could tell. She thought, at first, a madman. Each phrase seemed to draw up the next, a dissonance that built and built and hung there, suspended, until he spoke again, answering. That was when she realized, no—an actor. He was reciting. She’d been folding laundry; she stopped and listened. “Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow—” she wished. “To die, to sleep; to sleep, perchance—” Nope, she couldn’t make it out. Yet she was moved by the voice without knowing what it said.
She submitted to her inbox, opened another email, read the pitch: “I decided I finally had to share what happened to me because what ensued was a textbook case of the everyday violence women experience in places like offices and literary events. It speaks to the traumatizing effects of toxic male power…” She skimmed the submission. Lord, it was long; it just kept going. She skipped to the end, to the call to action: We can no longer, the cost of silence, the head in the sand, the blind eye. “We must not continue to be complicit in the violence lest we let the perpetrators win.”
It had been a few months since the Harvey Weinstein news had broken. She was the only senior editor on staff who was also a woman, so as long as the news cycle lasted, it was her job to tell all the variations on the story, to find new ones in ever more nuanced and disturbing iterations. She edited essays about predators at school, at work, on sidewalks and subways, at concerts and grocery stores, reassessments of desire, reassessments of consent. She believed, of course, in the importance of telling these stories. But she didn’t experience the full shock and outrage that others seemed to feel. She wasn’t surprised—that was the trouble. If anything, she was relieved.
Of course the men were wrong. But they were wrong in a tidy way. These were not the kinds of transgressions that proved that underneath the guise of human love and caregiving was a roiling pit of filthy horror. That other people were so shocked—it comforted her. The hidden truth was coming out, and one thing it revealed was that the world was not as sick as Margaret had feared, that in fact it was full of still-innocent people. The bad news had broken, and it was not quite as bad as she had always thought it would be.
She didn’t want Jo and Helen to know about Harvey Weinstein. Not yet. But if she was going to have to pick an introductory predator, a sort of textbook example, he was a good choice. In a perverted way, she liked to look at pictures of him. He was so big and lumpy, with that bulbous nose and medievally pitted skin. What had he had, the pox? It was reassuring how much he looked like an actual monster, an A-list demon. His awfulness was so predictable, so easy to imagine, it didn’t frighten her. How could she prepare her children for the awfulness that couldn’t be imagined? How could she prepare them without ruining their lives? Ezra, their father, wouldn’t help. He had no experience of such things; she was the worst thing that had ever happened to him.
She knew she couldn’t tell anyone about this sense of relief. Recently, in her cubicle, she had turned to the young editorial assistant next to her and said that it was just not possible for her to read the word survivor without hearing that song by Destiny’s Child. The woman had covered her mouth and said, “Oh my god. Margaret.”
Or maybe she was just tired. The stories that she edited seemed too neatly packaged. And that was her fault, of course. She was the one who made sure they had all the right components, that they were different enough to keep readers interested but not so different that they weren’t recognizably the same thing. It made her think of the cardboard and clear-plastic containers the girls’ toys came in—Happy Hour Predatory Ken Doll, with fashions and accessories. If the story departed too far from the standard, it wouldn’t be relevant. It might not even be believable.
