The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (12 page)

If her tone is horribly self-deprecating, Walter doesn't seem to notice. He plunks his mug on the table and drops back in his chair, saying, “It's true, Em. She might need to decode some forks. Isn't that right, Charlotte?”

Charlotte smiles at him weakly.

Walter grins back, then reaches out to erase the smudge of chocolate from Emily's face.

When Charlotte leaves for the book group, Walter and Emily are on the couch, reading. He's sitting on one end, face bent over a magazine. She's lying down, head resting on his lap. Her feet are crossed at the ankle, smothered in thick rag socks, and
she's holding a paperback book over her face. They've refilled their mugs, which sit steaming on coasters on the coffee table beside them. They look more at home here than Charlotte has felt in two months.

“I'm off!” she calls from the foyer.

Emily sits up quickly, swiveling her head around. “Okay, Mom, bye,” she says. “Have a good time. See you when you get back.”

Walter calls over his shoulder, “Put Rita in her place, Charlotte!”

When she goes to open the front door, Charlotte realizes the chain is unhinged. Not only that, the deadbolt is open. The knob is unlocked. She must have been so disoriented last night that she never relocked the door. She stares at the locks for a long minute, the carelessly loose links of the gold chain, the gap between door and sill where the solid brass of the bolt should be. It's the first time she's forgotten to lock her house in twenty-four years.

“Charlotte! What are you doing here?”

This is the reason she had contemplated doing some shopping instead of actually showing up to the book group: having to explain to the others why she's there.

“I thought Emily was in town?” says Rita. The group is meeting at her house this week and is clustered in the living room, a highly coordinated palette of stain-free creams and pale pinks. The perfect color scheme is dotted here and there with bright spinach puffs, lemon squares, cherry pinwheels, each with Saran Wrap coverings tucked like petticoats under the sides of their plates.

“She is,” Charlotte says, as casually as possible.

“Is she still here?”

“Did she leave early?”

“Is she sleeping late?”

“Is something wrong, Charlotte?”

This last question is from Linda Hill, and is the only one that stems from genuine concern. Charlotte looks at Linda, at the deep triangle of wrinkles between her eyes. She thinks of Rachel in the eating disorders clinic in Philadelphia. She knows that, for Linda, “something wrong” can never again be a casual question, but carries the possibilities of serious, once unimaginable, things.

“Nothing's wrong,” she says, for Linda's sake. “Emily's boyfriend showed up last night.”

“I didn't know Emily had a boyfriend!” Rita settles onto a suede ottoman and assumes her “do-tell” pose: bent forward, legs entwined, chin cupped in hand. “How long has it been going on? Is it serious?”

Charlotte has never mentioned Walter to the group, and until now she hasn't stopped to examine why. Swapping news about their children was half the purpose of their meetings, and she'd never hesitated to mention Emily's boyfriends before. Was she embarrassed to admit Emily and Walter lived together? She'd like to believe that was the whole story, but the worse—and perhaps truer—reason was Walter's race. Was it possible she didn't want to admit he was black? To avoid the group's raised eyebrows and skittery responses? Could she be that afraid?

She recalls again the way Walter handled Emily this morning. He was so unfazed by her, challenging her assertions, laughing off her wayward moods. For Charlotte, Emily's dramatics had always provoked an immediate need to appease. But watching Walter, it occurred to her that Emily's angry flashes were not
insurmountable. If anything, they were little burrs, tangles, nothing with real staying power. Walter would entertain them, toy with them, contest them, and Emily's anger would simply be shucked off and set free.

“Where did she meet him?” the group wants to know.

“How old is he?”

“Where does he live?”

“Do you like him?”

“I do,” Charlotte says and realizes, as she says it, that it's true. “His name is Walter. They met at Wesleyan. They graduated in the same class.”

Charlotte pauses and surveys the crowd, their faces hungry for more, and decides to deliver. “Now they live together, in New Hampshire, and he's black.”

It is a rare day that Rita Curran is speechless, and in the silence that befalls the cream-and-pale-pink living room Charlotte feels a surprising sense of satisfaction, followed by a prickle of guilt. For which is worse: not mentioning Walter at all, or trotting him out for his shock value? To mention him and
not
mention his race would have felt deceitful somehow—as if she were embarrassed by it and deliberately concealing information. Then again, if she were being truly honest, she could tell them so much more. How Walter makes her nervous. How she doesn't know how to read him. How simply being near him has her in a constant state of self-beratement, doubt, worry, fear that she's offended him, said or done the wrong thing.

Charlotte looks at her lap. Her brain is tired. All this debating, analyzing, second-guessing-her life has never involved issues like these before. Not that she hasn't lived in a state of constant worry, God knows she has, but those worries revolved around what to make for dinner, how to dress for weather, how
to structure her evening so she finished loading the dishwasher at the exact moment
Jeopardy!
began. Issues of political correctness—” PC,” as Emily calls it—are so complex. There are so many rules. She wonders if there's a manual she can buy for this sort of thing.

Kit Hapley breaks the silence. “Well, I think it's
wonderful.
” Her tone is overly, annoyingly sincere, designed to convey her evolved liberal-mindedness.

“Yes,” the others murmur. “Wonderful.”

Charlotte bites into a spinach puff.

“So,” says Rita, going for the dirt, “where are the lovebirds now?”

“I don't know,” Charlotte admits, swallowing. “I thought I'd give them some privacy. He just arrived last night, after all.”

This time there's no question she's acting cooler than she is. But she's not about to admit her real reason for leaving: that she felt she was in the way, an intrusion in her own home. That she feels her daughter and her boyfriend have more of a right to be in her new condo than she does.

Suddenly, from the front porch, there is a stampede of footsteps. The door bursts open to admit a flood of teenage boys.

“Shoes!” Rita yells, on autopilot. “Shoes by the door, please!”

A mound of shoes materializes next to the umbrella stand: sneakers with shiny swollen casings, sandals with Velcro black straps flapping like loose tongues. The swarm of bodies migrates from the doorway to the plate of M&M brownies, their hands smothering it like a Betty Crocker commercial.

“Just one!” Rita commands. “One only!”

The crowd heads for the basement in a mass of jostling bodies, low laughter, socked feet, brownies devoured whole. They thunder down the carpeted stairs, gone as quickly as they
appeared, leaving behind a stir of warmth and energy, crumbs and shoes in an endearing disarray. From the basement, the bass line of the stereo starts thumping through the floor.

Rita marches to the basement door, opens it, flicks the lights on and off. “Volume!”

A beat later, the music goes down.

“Thank you!” she calls, and shuts the door.

This, Charlotte thinks, is raising boys. It is avoiding stains, controlling portions, turning music down. Raising girls is about the intangibles, the moods and feelings and secret thoughts that swim beneath the skin, just out of reach. Even the tangible things happen on the inside: getting periods, counting calories, having sex. Boys are nicked, scratched, punched, wrapped in a condom, put in a sling. With a girl, there is so much more a mother doesn't see. Charlotte glances at Linda Hill, who flashes her a smile of what looks like empathy.

“Well!” Rita resumes her chair and smiles brightly, opening her book. “Shall we begin?”

Back at the condo, Charlotte tries to sense the presence of sex. She's not sure what she's searching for exactly: a stray sock, a shirt tossed carelessly over a chair back, or something less definable. A smell, maybe. A stir of passion in the air. But the couch is folded up neatly (this must have been Walter's doing). Coffee mugs are rinsed and set upside down in the dishwasher. Everything is tidied, replaced, repackaged, as it was before.

And yet, there is a tremor of something. Charlotte can feel it. Not necessarily sexual, but the feeling of something made vulnerable, exposed. The blinds in the living room and kitchen are open, light filling the rooms in unfamiliar patterns—short white stripes brightening the floors, long pale bands yawning down
the bookshelves. The patio door has been cracked open, letting the autumn air leak inside, air that carries with it the smells of distant fires, the sharpness of coming cold. Charlotte peeks through the opening in the sliding door, expecting to see Emily or Walter or both, but the patio is deserted. They've assembled the chairs, though; each aluminum frame is now softened with a cushion of twining vines and purple flowers.

From the bathroom, Charlotte hears a squeak and the rush of water hitting the tub floor. She tenses. Is that where they are? Maybe the reason the house felt so undisrupted is that they've contained their disruption to the bathtub, slipping under the new lavender bubbles, letting the room fill with thick steam. But would they really risk it? Maybe they expected Charlotte home much later. Or maybe, for them, sharing a bath doesn't seem out of line. Maybe they will emerge any minute now, Walter with chest bared, towel slung around his waist, wooden cross resting on his breastbone. Emily will be drowning in a towel, hair piled messily on top of her head, bare legs covered with the downy hairs she refuses to shave.

Charlotte steps onto the garden patio. She sits down carefully in one of the chairs, hears a faint hiss as the puffy cushion deflates beneath her. It is pleasant out here, she has to admit. She should use it more often.

“Hey.”

Charlotte jumps and looks over her shoulder. There's Walter, filling the doorframe, arms over his head and hands gripping the sill. To her relief, he's fully dressed and dry. Emily must be in the tub alone.

“Sorry.” He steps outside. “Did I scare you? Again?”

Was that an edge to his voice? Did he think it was suspicious, her tendency to jump at his presence? That her alarm was somehing
personal? Something racial? With every word out of her mouth, every move she makes, Charlotte feels like she is trapped in another quandary of political correctness.

“Oh, no,” she says. “Just lost in thought, I guess.”

“I was checking out your laptop.” Walter moves to the other side of the table and drops into the empty chair. “Hope you don't mind.”

“Oh.” Her mind flits nervously to the few journal entries she'd attempted to “open new” and “save as”—what was in them? Could he have read them?

“Em said it'd be okay,” he adds.

“Oh, it is,” she assures him, trying to appear unfazed. The truth was, she would rather Walter be scouring her journal entries, even snooping in her medicine cabinet, than in the tub with her daughter, a bath glove, and an assortment of products from Bed, Bath and Beyond. “No problem at all.”

“How was the book group?”

“Oh, you know.” What would he say if she told him that he was a highlight of the afternoon? “The usual.”

“Rita acting up?”

“Rita was being Rita. Finding symbolism everywhere, of course. Today she was particularly interested in the toaster as a metaphor for giving birth.”

Walter smiles, but it is a tight smile, without his earlier exuberance. In fact, his smile looks a little sad. Charlotte wonders if he and Emily had a fight while she was gone. He's staring into the yard, a tidy square of clipped grass with a few balled bushes, identical to the clipped grass and balled bushes of the condos on either side. He's probably comparing it to their garden in New Hampshire, Charlotte thinks. A real garden, one with vegetables and flowers and roots and, well, purpose.

Walter leans forward, elbows on his knees. “Listen, Charlotte.”

She looks at him in surprise. “Yes?”

He opens his mouth as if to say more, then licks his lips and looks down at his hands. The long fingers are knotted loosely, cradled between his knees, a casual approximation of prayer. It's the same way Joe used to hold his hands on the rare occasions he found himself in churches: weddings, christenings, Charlotte's parents' funerals. At her father's, he'd been sitting beside her; at her mother's, a year after the divorce, he'd slumped like a distant cousin in the back of the church.

“Man, this isn't easy,” Walter says, laughing a little. When he sits back and licks his lips again, Charlotte realizes he is nervous. His nervousness makes her nervous.

“Walter? What is it?”

He inhales deeply through his nose, then leans forward again. “Okay. Here it is. There's something I want to talk to you about.”

Suddenly she can hear her heart.

“It's actually the reason I wanted to come down here this weekend.” His hands are flat now, palm to palm, fingers pressed tightly together. “To talk to you.”

So overwhelming is Charlotte's fear that she senses herself beginning to detach as he speaks, her body shutting down automatically, like an iron left on by mistake. She surveys the yard, recording it, memorizing it, storing it away for future use. Because at the same time she is living this moment, she is suddenly, acutely aware that this lawn, this afternoon, these flowered chair cushions, are about to become the trappings of a significant memory for the rest of her life. From inside, she hears the faint trickle of the tub: warm water to keep the bath from going cool, dribbling down Emily's feet.