Sleep, page 9
She had finally, between contractions, picked up her own overnight bag and walked out the door, the picture of entitlement. By the time they made it to the hospital, she was listing against the walls.
* * *
—
Ridiculous to be resentful of that still. This was what came of lingering. What on earth were the girls doing? Helen was lying on the floor coloring. One sock was on one foot. Jo was in the bathroom. “Ezra, can you help with Helen, please?” she asked him, in the fed-up-wife voice she knew he hated.
“You don’t have to use that voice,” he said, as she’d known he would. “I’m already helping,” he said, though he wasn’t.
“JoJo, what are you doing? We need to go eat dinner.”
“I want some scream.”
“What?”
“Some scream.” She was rooting around in the medicine cabinet. She knocked over a bottle of mouthwash. Band-Aids and hair ties rained down.
“What?”
“Some scream.”
Margaret was trying but failing to pick things up faster than Jo knocked them down. A jar of antiaging moisturizer clanked into the sink, the overnight evidence of Ezra’s girlfriend. Margaret was worried it had cracked, but it hadn’t. She picked it up and thought about opening it. She wanted to know what it smelled like. But that would be weird and invasive. She opened it anyway. It smelled good—warm and citrusy, like cream and oranges. She badly wanted to touch it, but that would be weird and invasive and perhaps even, in the girlfriend’s eyes, unsanitary. She touched it anyway—stuck just the tip of a finger into the whipped pearlescence.
She was happy that Ezra had a girlfriend. Delighted, actually. Though the thought of her—a teacher named Anaya who wrote out grocery lists for elaborate dinners with different-colored gel pens that he persisted in magneting to his refrigerator—did seed a terrible panic that in ten years he would be happily remarried while Margaret would be alone with a vibrator with cat hair sticking to it. “What birthday is it?” she’d asked Ezra, about Anaya’s celebration that night. The answer: her thirtieth. Margaret rubbed the cream into the skin between her eyes, into the wrinkle that was forming there.
Jo knocked over Ezra’s electric razor, and his beard trimmings went everywhere. “Okay, enough, enough,” she said. “Jo, stop touching everything.” Guiltily, she put her finger back into the cream and smoothed the surface flat, as if covering up a bootprint in the snow. She screwed the top back on and tried to remember which shelf it had fallen from. “I’m begging you, go get your socks.”
“Some scream,” Jo said. She was holding up a tube of toothpaste.
“She means sunscreen,” Helen called from the other room.
Ah. “You don’t need sunscreen, JoJo,” Margaret said, taking the toothpaste from her hand. “It’s dinnertime, the sun is already going down.”
“I like it,” Jo said.
This was demonstrably false. Every morning before camp Margaret had to forcibly hold Jo down to get lotion on her face while she kicked and screamed. Alternatively, Margaret could sometimes swipe some on, nonconsensually, if she was distracted enough by the TV or breakfast. But usually that ended with Jo screaming anyway and rubbing it into her own outraged eyes.
“Tomorrow morning we can put on so much sunscreen, I promise,” Margaret promised. “Shoes and socks!” she said again, in a bright desperate voice. She picked Jo up and notched her onto a hip, moved sideways through the door so she wouldn’t bump her head.
Helen stood in her single sock, taping her picture up against the window. The sky outside was golden with late-day sun, but the light stopped abruptly at the glass. Inside was already beginning the blue evening, shadows padding the corners of the room. On the couch was Ezra, watching her, looking more cheerful than she’d seen him in weeks.
“Mommy, come see,” Helen said. “I drew a picture of Grandma’s house.”
Three
14
Elizabeth stopped right where she was, and so Margaret had to stop too. They were in a hurry, but this was more important: her mother had to have the last word. But Margaret too had to have the last word. She dug her heels into the floor, down into the stone of the station concourse. Commuters in their routine rush streamed around them, the flow splashed through with antic rivulets of anxiety, the darting men about to miss their trains. But neither Margaret nor her mother moved.
“Stop shouting at me,” Elizabeth said, “and come back here.” Margaret never shouted. Did she? Why was her mother always accusing her of shouting, just because she wouldn’t give in? She would never give in. She stood as tall as she could; she looked proud and disdainful. She was ten paces off; she thought of honor, and pistols cocked and aimed, and blood in the snow. Whatever happened now, she would not walk back to Elizabeth.
Margaret had wanted to wait for the train in the Amtrak concourse; Elizabeth had insisted they go down to the New Jersey Transit waiting area, that they would head off the lines that way and be sure to find better seats. Why Elizabeth had even insisted on coming into the city that day was a mystery. She had said something about shopping but also, confusingly, something about a doctor. She carried no bags. “We’ll ride the train home together,” she’d said. “Start the birthday weekend early. Won’t that be nice?” And Margaret had said, “Mm-hmm.” She wasn’t even saying that her mother was wrong about New Jersey Transit, only that they were sure to get seats regardless, that it didn’t matter, that honestly, it made no difference whatsoever.
Elizabeth was looking around the concourse as if for allies, as if hoping to catch someone’s eye so she could plead for their sympathy, so she could gather their defenses to her side. All yellow hair and golden buttons shining from her pale blue dress of eyelash tweed, she mustered her charm about her. But no one paused; no one looked.
Ha! This was Margaret’s city. The city frightened Elizabeth, but it did not frighten Margaret, and sometimes that made her feel magnanimous pity toward her mother and sometimes it made her feel glorious and vengeful. “Don’t be so anxious,” she liked to say to her mother, when they were here together, on an outing, waiting for the subway or a car, trying to get through the crowd to a restaurant or museum; “everything is totally fine”—knowing it filled Elizabeth with a sizzling red mist of absolute rage.
* * *
—
Margaret knew she should be more sympathetic to her mother’s fears. Planes, trains, intersections, ski mountain chairlifts—they all made Elizabeth nervous, and it wasn’t hard to guess why: Because of all that traveling with the parents who hadn’t loved her better. Because of being dragged to Europe in new dresses when all she wanted was mass at 4:00 and dinner at 5:00. But couldn’t she just get over it?
What Elizabeth liked was houses: big houses with elaborate basement storage systems and curtains with tassels and trim. She never hired a decorator—she picked everything out herself. And Margaret, even at her most resentful, was proud of that. She felt that her mother was, in a sense, an artist. Like when you saw the line of a painting, or read a sentence, and you knew that only one person could have made that mark, only one person would have done it quite that way. You opened the door to Elizabeth’s house and bam, there was an antique cabinet painted with scenes of medieval Florence, topped with the white-on-green-grass of family wedding photos, and dangling from one of its handles a Christmas ornament—a wooden soldier doll that flung his legs in the air when you pulled the string between them, as if dancing along to a song called “Elizabeth.”
You had to respect it. It just wasn’t Margaret’s style. The older she got, the more she suspected it was sumptuous in a way that tipped, almost, into bad taste. For instance: What was with all the Chinese villages? Margaret swore, every time she visited, yet another armchair had been reupholstered with pagodas and people in Oriental hats. This was maybe racist, right? But she couldn’t tell her mother that. It was a beautiful print, she would say. She was only coordinating colors.
Margaret didn’t think of going there as going home anymore. Her parents had renovated the house so many times. It was a very gracious house now with sunlight in the foyer and the right number of bathrooms and its own swimming pool dug out of the yard, but there was something blurred about it—you knew it had been something else before and something else before that, and that was disorienting, you couldn’t quite trust it. The back staircase: gone; a new half bath; a bigger kitchen with (count them) three separate ovens; something her family unironically called the great room.
It had been a few years now since the last redo. Margaret wondered what Elizabeth would do next. A new chair. A new addition. But always, in theory, the same home. She must have liked the idea of change in small, controlled doses. Or maybe she was just bored and had too much money.
Elizabeth’s parents had spent a fortune on a series of pieds-à-terre and then on an assisted living apartment in South Beach. Margaret remembered, vaguely, her one and only visit: how her grandparents had sat stiffly in armchairs and complimented Neal on being handsome and polite, as old people always did. When they went away for good and died, they left Elizabeth a lot of money. It paid for the big house, and for the endless improvements to the house, and still there was more left over.
The people who’d owned the house before them had been artists. Elizabeth, who’d majored in art history at Barnard, had probably liked the idea of that. But she hadn’t liked the art they left behind. Margaret had been six the first time she’d entered the house, following the boxes of their possessions through the door and into the dining room. There she saw, at the head of their own familiar table, a life-size sculpture of a totally naked man. She’d stared for only a moment before Elizabeth had ordered the movers to take the statue away, but she remembered him as beautiful, his body tense with muscle, his monumental face staring out the window.
The room held nothing now but the dining set and the Christmas china, a picture of horses, a picture of an angel. Still, whenever they sat there on holidays, no matter what else had changed, Margaret couldn’t help but see, in place of whoever was carving the roast, that indifferent stone cock.
* * *
—
Struggling against Elizabeth always made her feel like a teenager—weak, and mad about it. What must Helen and Jo be thinking as she gripped them by the hands? This wasn’t a safe place for stopping. She could feel them being tugged this way and that by the current of the crowd, eddying uncertainly about her legs. They could go one way or another, but the going was imperative. They wanted to get on the train. They were excited about a summer weekend at the big house in New Jersey. They didn’t know that in the past it had been a different sort of house. They liked their grandparents. They liked their cousin and their uncle Neal.
“I’m sorry Mommy and Grandma are disagreeing,” she told them quietly. Helen shrugged. Jo didn’t seem to be paying attention; she was watching the slow-motion chomp of the escalator teeth. Margaret could never quite tell if grown-up disagreements (she didn’t like to call them arguments) upset them. They must, because she remembered her own agony as a child in moments like these. She would have been staring at the station floor, wishing she could fall right through it into the squirming rat pits below. But when she asked her children if they were bothered—by a tense interaction between Margaret and her mother, or Margaret and Ezra—they would never say. She tried not to force it. Maybe they were as stubborn as she was. “Mom,” she said to Elizabeth, “you’re being ridiculous.” (She knew she would hate that.) “Let’s just go,” she said.
People somehow kept walking between them, as if they couldn’t feel the leaden air, the high-pressure front their battling wills were creating. She knew exactly what her mother wanted to say now. She could practically see the word in Elizabeth’s mouth, passing like a sour lozenge from one cheek to the other, but she was trying hard not to let it out, and Margaret appreciated it, that was something at least—the word bitch.
If her mother would only come now, Margaret felt, she would be quiet. They would go down the stairs toward New Jersey Transit. They would stoop through the low-ceilinged hallway, where the light was such a grimy yellow it might have traveled, as if from a distant star, straight from the 1990s. And they would wait in the tunnels for the submission of the train, the roaring body coming to heel, hissing, ticking, compliant, tame. They would enter and take their seats.
“Come back here,” Elizabeth said again, but Margaret would not, would never. The world was on her side now, both instinct and reason tilted toward her. She was standing by the stairs they had to go down—that, in fact, Elizabeth had insisted they go down! Margaret could stand there until they missed their train, if her mother wanted to. Point number two: the children were holding her hands. It was wrong to make them take sides, wrong to conscript them into this endless battle against Elizabeth. It was wrong and yet they were her children, they were holding her hands. Speaking, purely, of the arrangement of their four bodies on the floor of the concourse, it was three against one. And Elizabeth knew it too. She was weakening, Margaret could see it. Sensing her power, she took one step backward.
If only Elizabeth would come now. If only they could stay on the train forever and never get to the house in the suburbs, then maybe they could get along. The girls could build a nest of jackets to sleep in and chat up the conductor until he let them wear his hat and steer. Elizabeth could—what? Reorganize everyone’s luggage.
She wouldn’t have time to talk about the divorce or the girls’ need for more space and stability. Margaret in turn wouldn’t be filled with the desperate temptation to throw her own childhood back in her face, the things she’d borne in silence to spare her mother’s feelings. And the stations would pass by unmentioned, undwelled-upon, like the wrong note in a conversation, something a generous person shrugged off, forgot. They would move on through the mudflats, past the sullen factories burning off whatever it was they had to burn off. And Margaret would let Elizabeth talk about how she had been right—they had headed off the lines—because she would know that she had won: there was nothing to argue about.
15
Leaning against the threshold of her old bedroom, she watched the girls sleep. The curtains were different. The blanket was different. But the bed was the same number of footsteps from the door, the window the same black squares of pure suburban night. Outside, unseen, the wind muddled the branches of the cherry tree. They’d arrived in time for Hugh’s roast chicken, and the girls had had the rare luxury of a bath in Elizabeth’s great cauldron of a tub. In a few minutes Biddy was coming to get her, to take her out for a drink.
Biddy had moved back to the neighborhood when her daughter, Alice, was born and lived in a sweet yellow house with her husband, Steve. They were no longer bothered by the fact that their lives had diverged. This was because they were grown-ups; they didn’t need to dress like twins to be friends. Though she had to admit it would have been harder if one of them hadn’t had children. Motherhood allowed difference because it made them so categorically the same.
Her relief now at getting away from Elizabeth’s house fizzed up so hard it made her feel a little drunk. She should get a little drunk.
She went downstairs, by the chess set made of lead and the soldier doll dangling from the cabinet. She passed the glass box that kept the antique dueling pistols, which stood now on a side table surrounded by baby pictures, and touched the words ’til death do us part. The older she got, the less romantic it seemed, that dare between two people who should never have been armed in the first place. She found them in front of the TV, their backs to her, watching a Viking heft a broadsword.
“Hey, do you mind if I go out for a bit? Biddy’s coming to get me. The kids are fast asleep.”
Elizabeth turned around and laid her arm on the back of the couch. “Turn the volume down,” she told Margaret’s father. “Not down, Hugh, I said off.”
Then: “We were hoping to spend some time with you, Margaret.”
Warlords flickered as they looked at each other across the expanse of the great room. It was the train station concourse all over again. This would never be happening, they all knew, if Margaret was still somebody’s wife.
Her dad broke the tension, broke it with the blessed ease of someone who didn’t notice, or was pretending not to notice, that there was tension in the first place: “Tell Biddy to come in and say hi.”
“Absolutely,” she said as he unmuted the show and she went outside to wait.
* * *
—
The dark smelled damp and sweet as watered flowers. The toolshed, the roses, the coiled green hose, the bushes dense with memory—it was all too precise to be real, as if each backyard landmark had been reconstructed to her exact specifications, just for Margaret, just to trick or delight her. Elizabeth didn’t do her own gardening anymore—she had a lady she paid to plant and weed—but the flowers were the same as always. The new pool was tucked out of sight. She tried to see where the lawn ended, what happened there at the property line, but all she could see was gloom and darker gloom. She ducked. Something overhead—a swoop, an unbirdlike unflutter. She covered her hair with one hand and looked up. Nothing.
For years, the attic had been infested with bats, the upside-down masses of them living right above her bedroom. You couldn’t pretend they weren’t there, because there was evidence: a pile of guano accumulating day by day near the eaves outside her bedroom window. If she was patient and timed it just right, she could see them spill out of the house like black runoff, straight out of the gutter and into the gloaming. Seeing them was better than not seeing them, and seeing them as a colony was better than imagining one alone, crawling headfirst down the wall, fiddling with its dark little hands along her windowsill, its face…No, not even in nightmares did it have a face.
