The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (17 page)

“What on earth for?”

“To build a fire.”

“No.” Charlotte shakes her head. “Absolutely not.”

“Why not?”

“Because it's two in the morning. You're going to bed.”

“Why are you suddenly treating me like I'm fifteen?”

“Because you're acting like you're fifteen!” she hisses.

“You're the one who said you wanted to use your fireplace tonight.”

“Don't pretend you're doing this for my sake.” Charlotte's voice is trembling. “I'm going to bed. And you are too.” She presses her lips together. “Remember, you are a guest in this house.”

Emily stares at her for a long minute. Neither looks away.
Then Emily shakes her head. “Whatever,” she says, and tilts her chin back to look at the sky.

She's been drinking, Charlotte decides. She's been drinking and compromising this baby.

“Stars here suck.” Emily wraps her arms around her knees. “In New Hampshire there are tons of them. They're everywhere. They look so close you could touch them.”

She's compromising this baby, Charlotte thinks, compromising it knowingly. Maybe even doing it out of spite. She's never cared what I think, never listened to what I say.

“Here you can hardly see the stars because of all the shit in the air. But in New Hampshire there's no smog, no buildings, no factories on the side of the highway pumping pollution into the atmosphere … up there it's totally pure.” Emily stretches her arms toward the sky.

“I spoke to your father.”

Her head snaps up. “What?”

“I called your father.”

“When?”

“Tonight.”

“You called Joe?”

Charlotte nods.

“You told him?”

She nods again. Then steels herself for the attack, the kind of rebuke Walter got for betraying her this afternoon. Instead, her daughter seems to shrink inward, arms lowering, face crumpling. Her voice drops to a whisper. “What did he say?”

And in that moment, as clearly as she perceived her own ineffectualness just moments before, Charlotte realizes there
is
one person with influence over Emily: Joe. Emily adores him, idolizes him like children do whose parents are distant, and therefore romanticized.
The parents they see once or twice a year, who aren't involved in the menial things, the day-to-day things, the rainy nights in February when the homework's unfinished and the oil burner's acting up and there's nothing for dinner but hot dogs (which your daughter won't eat, but which you boil for yourself, wrapped in a heel of wheat bread) and a single can of lentil soup that your daughter slurps while sitting cross-legged at the kitchen table complaining of cramps and scowling at her algebra, which she finds not only technically confusing but morally unfair. Time spent with Joe was fun time, vacation time; it was the not-real life. As much as Charlotte knows her daughter loves her—sees her as a lovable, endearingly uncool mom to whom she can tell anything—she loves her father in a different way. She wants to please him. To make him proud. She is afraid of letting him down. Her mother's pride is never in question; her mother compliments her, agrees with her always, acts like an echo of herself. But her father is a separate person, with a separate coast, wife, beach, and arsenal of opinions. Her father is the one who holds sway.

“He said to tell you”—Charlotte picks her words carefully, trying to remember exactly what Joe said—“that he wants to come out and talk to you about it.”

“He wants to fly out here?” Emily sounds alarmed.

“That's what he said.”

“Who? Just him?”

At first Charlotte isn't sure what she's asking, then it hits her: Valerie. She hadn't even thought to ask. “I'm not sure,” she says, the very thought of it making her nauseous. “I think just him. I'm pretty sure he meant just the four of us—you, Walter, Dad, and me.”

Emily looks at her knees. Charlotte wonders if she's disappointed.

Quietly, Emily asks, “Was he mad?”

“Oh, no,” Charlotte says quickly. “He's not mad.” Though she knows it's not her reassurance Emily is looking for. “He just—” What were Joe's exact words? His perfect blend of reason and affection? “He just wants to talk things through. Because it's a big decision. A hard decision.”

“What did he think I should do? Did he say?”

“He was—well, he was divided.”

Emily lets her head fall back, eyes to the sky, but only for a moment. When she lifts her head again, her eyes are full of tears. “Did he sound disappointed?”

“Oh, honey.” Charlotte takes a fervent step toward her. “He isn't disappointed. In fact, I remember him saying those exact words. He said to tell you he's not disappointed. He isn't. I promise.”

From behind her, Charlotte hears the sounds of Walter approaching, wet grass shushing, twigs snapping under his feet. When he steps onto the patio holding a log in each hand, Emily reaches her arms up like a child. Without a word, Walter drops the logs, sending them rolling around the patio. He kneels in front of her. Emily falls forward, pressing her face into his neck.

C
harlotte's house feels different now. Though it's sealed up as before, it no longer feels contained. Certain rooms, objects, have new memories attached. The coffeemaker. The patio. The flowered seat cushions. Voices in the stairwell have faces and names. Charlotte is not alone in her house. There's a stir of memory, a sense of history. Her house has been opened up and the world is seeping in.

Since Sunday, when Emily and Walter left, Charlotte has been clinging fiercely to her routines. This new life feels so fragile, so unpredictable, she must maneuver carefully to preserve what little order she has left. Grocery shopping on Monday. Bills on Tuesday. Laundry on Wednesday. Ten pages of reading each night for the book group. And on Friday afternoon, at 2:00
P.M.,
her appointment at Pretty Nails.

She consults her watch: 1:18
P.M.
Grabbing coat and gloves from the hall closet, her eyes graze the calendar hanging on the back of the door. On the twenty-sixth, she's drawn a tiny asterisk. She was going to write something, but when she faced the calendar, pen poised, she didn't know what to put down. This
impending visit is something she could not have begun to picture, even in her most irrational middle-of-the-night imaginings. Yet now, she finds it hard
not
to think about: a speck in her peripheral vision, voice in the back of her head.

Joe couldn't fly out next weekend, a lecture he's giving at a conference in Oakland, so they decided they would meet the following Saturday. Just one night: Saturday night. Emily had been clear on this. Charlotte had worried she might try to bring the group to New Hampshire, but she hadn't mentioned it. Maybe she wanted to remain in control of her own leaving. Seattle was too far, obviously. By default, they were coming to Charlotte's.

Charlotte had talked to Joe twice since Sunday. Once (she called him) to say Emily was open to his visit. Once (he called her) to solidify the details. Their conversations had been cordial, friendly; she was surprised to find none of the tension from their last call seemed to reverberate. If anything, there was less tension between them. This was a curious thing about conflict, and one she didn't think she'd ever understand: that differences of opinion could remain just that. That sometimes there was no resolve, no closure. Here were Emily and Walter experiencing this enormous difference of opinion, and yet they carried on, kissing and teasing, wrapped in each other's arms.

Much as Charlotte doesn't understand it, this must be how relationships survive. For how can two people agree on everything? How can they reach consensus on every point? Of course, her marriage ended for
lack
of conflict—having hardly any disagreements at all. She considers her parents' marriage; they never disagreed, not that she observed. If it's true what they say (or what Emily says they say) about your parents' relationship serving as a model for all your future relationships, it's no wonder
Joe's undercurrent of anger always made Charlotte nervous. It's no wonder she not only found the prospect of fighting with her husband alarming, but viewed it as a flaw.

She gazes at the October picture, a little girl in dress-up clothes: floppy hat, pearls, high heels. She'd bought the calendar because the photos reminded her of Emily as a child, always acting older than she was. She was always remarkably assured about relationships, matter-of-fact about what she called the “essential qualities in a man” (a phrase she'd coined at age thirteen and used from that point forward). Though the qualities fluctuated—from “musical ability” to “awareness of his spiritual side”—the matter-of-factness never did. Charlotte remembers once, when Emily was a sophomore in high school (with “ambition” and “desire to travel” ranking at the top of her list), listening to her explain her breakup with Peter McCann.

“We're just really different,” Emily had said. She was stirring brown sugar into a bowl of oatmeal while Charlotte rinsed dishes at the sink.

“Yes,” Charlotte agreed. Over the past few months, she'd observed poor Peter with a twinge of sympathy, knowing he wouldn't last. When he laughed hard, it sounded like a whimper. “I can see that.”

“And not different in a good way.”

Charlotte stopped, dish in hand, faucet running. “How can you tell if you're different in a good way?”

“You just can.” Emily shrugged, raising a heaping spoonful of oatmeal to her mouth. “You can feel it. In your gut.”

The gut: that elusive place located somewhere around her middle, the place she'd carried Emily for nine months and that she was now, twenty-two years later, trying in vain to disguise under control-top pantyhose. The gut eluded Charlotte. Listening
to it, living by it, literally
feeling
something in it—she had no idea what this was like. Maybe her gut didn't work. Maybe when Emily was growing in there, her presence had become so strong that it lingered even now, so that it was she—instead of the all-knowing gut—that dictated what Charlotte felt.

“I mean, there will always be differences,” Emily had said, spreading the A section of the Sunday paper across the kitchen table. “It's just about striking the right balance. Not too different, not too the same. You want to make sure you agree on the big things. It's all about priorities.”

Oh, the assurance of it.
You want to. It's all about.
Charlotte knew this was Joe's influence—and, most likely, his new wife's. Charlotte used to torture herself imagining Joe and Valerie sitting on their deck, candidly discussing marriage and relationships and things like “striking the right balance.” At the time, she was critical of this kind of openness. But now she wonders if she should be grateful. For if not them helping Emily navigate relationships, then who?

This is the precise fear that's been lodged in the back of Charlotte's mind ever since she spoke to Joe: that she, as a mother, is inadequate. She remembers how Joe sounded on the phone, the practiced way he delivered advice about their daughter, and doesn't think she could ever speak like that. She knows she is a loving mother, that her daughter means the world to her, but as far as advising Emily on complex decisions, preparing her for difficult situations—Charlotte has been so busy trying to prevent them she never stopped to equip Emily for dealing with them if they arrived.

And now, she's estranged her. They've spoken twice this week; both times blunt, perfunctory. On Sunday, Emily called to let Charlotte know they arrived safely. On Tuesday, Charlotte called
to tell her the details of Joe's visit. As the week wore on, she's started to wish she'd never said anything about the baby. After a lifetime of shirking strong opinions, she went out on a limb, and now look what happened. Much as she feels convinced of her rightness, Charlotte knows full well that there are equally strong—maybe even equally valid—opinions besides her own.

The first time she discovered this, she was ten and had just gone to see the movie
Double Trouble
with her friend Becky Freeman. Charlotte was very sure, watching this movie, that it was a terrible movie. But as the lights came up and they gathered their coats, Becky exclaimed: “Wasn't that great?”

Charlotte smiled, thinking she was joking, then realized, seeing her bright, flushed face, that she meant it.

“What's so funny?” Becky asked. “I loved it. Didn't you?”

Charlotte said nothing—which wasn't the same thing as lying—but she was reeling inside. As surely as she knew
Double Trouble
was a terrible movie, Charlotte realized that Becky knew just as surely it was a great one. It struck her then, crossing the gummy lobby carpet, that for every thing she knew to be true in the world, there were hundreds—maybe millions—of people who felt otherwise, and felt it with the same certainty she did. And what was worse, these people would think Charlotte just as wrong, just as utterly misguided, as she thought them.