The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (19 page)

Shirley stands and moves toward the hand dryers, a signal Charlotte should follow. Charlotte uncrosses her legs with difficulty. The left one has fallen asleep. As she struggles from her chair, the little boy looks up at her. Charlotte pauses. She smiles at the boy, a smile that feels too eager, too bright, too much; she can feel it twisting oddly on her face. But the boy smiles back just the same, a grand smile, toothless and drooling and exuberant. Charlotte feels her eyes water again.

“Miss?”

Charlotte hobbles toward Shirley, murmuring apologies. Obediently, she offers up her limp hands, lets Shirley lay them inside the dryer like fish on a grill. Charlotte smiles, grateful and embarrassed. With her wet nails baking, leg tingling, eyes brimming, she is unable to do a thing about it when a tear escapes and races down her cheek.

“Mom? Is that you?”

Charlotte can't blame Emily for sounding confused. She knows how out of character it is to be calling on a Saturday night. In fact, Charlotte doesn't think she's ever called Emily on a Saturday night. Certainly not since she moved into the alternative living arrangement. There's something about a Saturday that feels more forbidden than a Friday, couched in the middle of the ambiguous stretch of weekend hours. But tonight she couldn't help herself.

“Is something wrong?” Emily says, her confusion edged with concern.

“Not at all!” The words feel so forced, Charlotte thinks her voice might break. She pauses, takes a breath. “I just wanted to call and say hello.”

On the other end of the line, Emily is waiting. She knows the call was motivated by more than this, and Charlotte agrees, it
was. The need was something physical, primal, not a need for words but for sound: the sound of her daughter's voice. But this she couldn't bring herself to say.

“I just wanted to thank Walter,” Charlotte says, opting out. “For the Internet.”

“The what?”

She's surprised Walter hasn't told her, and hopes it's okay that she just did. “Well,” she hesitates. “Walter called yesterday.”

“Oh God,” Emily moans. Charlotte can practically hear her eyes rolling. “What did he do now?”

“He, well, he set me up on the Internet. On your old laptop. Last weekend.” Charlotte pauses. “I thought he would have said something.”

“Are you kidding?” Emily laughs. “Walter? Mr. Do-gooddeeds and-take-no-credit? God, he's so perfect. Isn't he so ridiculously perfect?” She laughs again, then adds, “It's almost annoying.” Which sounds like a joke, but isn't quite.

“Oh,” Charlotte says.

“Did you want to talk to him?”

“That's all right. You can just tell him for me. Tell him thanks.”

“Uh-huh.”

Charlotte takes a breath. “So how are you doing?”

“How am I doing?”

Her tone is instantly suspicious. She probably assumes Charlotte is calling to probe for information, when she actually wants to hear nothing serious at all. Her “how are you doing” was delivered not with emphasis on the
are,
or even the
you,
but the
doing.
Emily's students. Lessons. Snack times. Weekend plans. She wants Emily to speak to her the way she always has: like a verbal journal, relaying the daily litany of her life.

But tonight she isn't forthcoming. She uses colorless phrases like “the usual” and “nothing much.” Listening to her, Charlotte desperately wishes she'd never been so adamant about this baby. She feels tears prying at her eyes, bites down hard on her lip.

“Mom?” Emily says. Her voice is wary. “You okay?”

“Oh, sure,” Charlotte says, furiously blinking. “Don't worry about me.”

It's not exactly a lie—she doesn't actually say she's okay, because she's not okay—yet she isn't being honest. If she were, she might tell Emily how hard this week has been. She might tell her how, though she's been clinging to familiar routines, they aren't working like they used to. How she no longer gets the same satisfaction from a good deal at the Super Fresh: two-for-one soup, plastic wrap for 99 cents. How in the evenings, when she settles on the couch at the exact moment
Jeopardy!
is starting and the dishwasher is churning and the patio light is snapping to life, she doesn't feel her usual sense of accomplishment. What she feels is empty.

If she were being honest, she could tell her about the self-doubt that's been plaguing her night and day. How even the most innocent exchange can arouse it. How when the bag boy at the Super Fresh numbly recited, “Paper or plastic?” she worried about the implications, weighing the question for a full minute. She could tell her how she's been inundated with babies and mothers and even—black people. African Americans. African-Americans. How she isn't even sure what word to use, or what punctuation, but in the five days since Emily and Walter's visit she thinks she's seen more black people than she has in her entire life. She would admit that today, all day, Saturday, she stayed inside on purpose. That although she drummed up reasons for it—it was drizzling outside, she felt a tickle in her throat—the truth was, she just didn't dare leave.

And yet she feels no calmer in here. There's a restlessness
inside her, like a moth batting at a lightbulb. A feeling not unlike being unable to sleep that persists in every waking hour.

“Mom?”

She missed what Emily was saying. Something about a sleeping bag? A camping trip, maybe?

“Are you there?”

“I'm here,” Charlotte says quickly. “I'm listening.”

Emily pauses. “Is there something you want to say?”

She could tell her all of it, Charlotte thinks. Tell her everything, this minute. Her eyes comb the living room, grasping at solid objects. She wants just this: the concrete world. She doesn't want it disrupted. She knows that to speak her feelings out loud is to confirm them—once said, they have always been said. Still, she might feel better to have shared them.

“I—” She falters. “I just wanted to make sure we're—”

“Hold on a sec, Mom,” Emily says, and Charlotte hears a voice in the background. It's not Walter; one of the roommates, probably. Charlotte hears a muffled laugh and wonders irrationally if they are laughing about her. A picture of Emily's surroundings rises in her mind. Lumps of multicolored candle wax. Burning incense sticks. Full-bellied wine glasses, the bottoms stained deep red. She hears Emily say, “Be there in a minute,” followed by a thump.

“Sorry,” she says, returning.

Charlotte stares at her lap.

“What were you saying?”

“Nothing.” Her nerve is gone.

“No, what was it?”

“It was—I just wanted to see how you were.”

Emily pauses. Then Charlotte hears a click she knows all too well: tongue ring on teeth.

“I shouldn't have called so late in the first place.”

“I don't care if you call me late,” Emily says. “It's
not
late.”

“Still,” Charlotte says, trying to keep her voice from trembling. “I should let you go.”

The closed laptop stares blankly up at her from the kitchen table. The red numbers on the oven clock glow 10:48. Slowly, Charlotte peels the Post-it from the laptop cover and sticks it on the windowsill. Through the slats of the blinds, she can see a sliver of parking lot. The matching porch lights of her neighbors' houses. The belly of the moon, just over half full. She opens up the laptop and, with one fingertip, wipes off the dusty screen.

She consults the series of aging notes and signs affixed to the machine. Years ago, when Emily passed on the computer, she'd known that even the slightest confusion about turning it on would be enough to make Charlotte give up. So she'd taped arrows to the sides, directing Charlotte to the back left corner. Next to the button itself, she stuck the words:
TURN ME ON!

Charlotte finds the button and presses it. The machine emits a tone both sharp and shaky, as if snapping to extreme alertness from a deep, deep sleep. The screen awakens to a recurring pattern of geometric gray shapes. Then the machine begins to hum, hesitantly at first, surging and faltering like a car engine in the cold.

Charlotte watches as a dribbling of words and objects emerge on the screen. She consults her Post-it.
Little picture,
it says.
Internet. Click it.
She focuses on the blue lowercase “e” that says “Internet Explorer” and prods the plastic ball, inching the arrow across the screen. With the arrow centered in the “e,” she pushes down. At once, the computer emits a startling series of noises—“Dialing,” it
says—the strenuous zapping and pinging like something out of a video game.

The refrigerator starts humming, as if sensing a companion. New ice churns somewhere in its belly. Then, without warning, she finds herself looking at an entirely new screen, smothered with pictures and photos and headlines:
Entertainment Shopping Money Get A Job Find An Apartment.
The sheer amount of stimuli is enough to make her shut it off and crawl to bed. But there, along the top, she sees an island of empty space, a long blank column bracketed by the words
Search
and
Find.

She refers to her notes again, even though she knows just what they say:
WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW.

Tentatively, she moves her cursor into the empty box. She thinks for a moment, then types:
I want to know how to have a better relationship with my daughter.
She pushes her cursor to the end of the box and taps
Find.
A long list appears in response. Her eyes scan the wealth of options, articles, authors, information—she can't begin to take it all in.

She bites down on the inside of her cheek, repositions her cursor. Types:
I want to know the correct spelling: African American or African-American?
Clicks:
Find.
Again, a list of answers unscrolls on her screen. The concept is so simple: type a question, send it off, and be told the answer. To be
told,
she thinks, savoring the word. To be
told.
To empty all her ambiguities and worries and uncertainties into an anonymous box on a computer screen—fling them into space.

Charlotte begins typing faster, one question on top of another.
I want to know the latest a pregnant woman can safely get an abortion.
Click:
Find.

I want to know what a feeling in the gut means.

I want to know about interracial dating.

Alternative learning environments.

Mindfulness.

Political correctness.

Arugula.

Bulimia.

Fur.

God.

It will be hours before she lifts her head, feeling surprised at how late it's gotten, how many hours have slipped by without her notice. The computer screen will stare back at her, glowing benignly in the dark. When she turns it off and makes her way to bed, she will fall asleep instantly. Because while she used to fear the imaginary, now it's the real she's afraid of. And the danger is much, much greater. Maybe true danger has simply never touched her life before, and now that it has, it's cracked her imaginary world wide open.

C
harlotte holds her breath as the taxi pulls up. Even though she feels certain that Valerie isn't coming, she braces herself as Joe steps out, waiting for a long, thin calf to emerge behind him. She waits as Joe walks around to the trunk, waits as he slings his bag over his shoulder, peels bills from his wallet, pays the driver, slams the door. Only then does she let out a sigh of relief. Joe is alone.

Quickly, Charlotte turns to the hall mirror for a final once-over: straight denim skirt, pale blue rollneck sweater. She feels silly to have bought a new outfit, but tells herself she needed one anyway; the timing was just convenient. The trickier rationalization was the rescheduling of her hair appointment. (“A family reunion,” she explained to the colorist, Cynthia, who regarded her skeptically as she swathed her head in foil. “An unexpected one.”) Regardless, her hair is now freshly de-grayed. Her fingernails are buffed and Shell Pink.

Joe raps at the front door, his old confident
rat-a-tat-tat.

Charlotte waits a measured beat—about as long as it would have taken her to walk in from another room where, presumably,
she had been doing something other than watching him arrive—and opens the door.

“Hello, Joe.”

“Hi, Char.” Joe grins, then corrects himself. “I mean, Charlotte.”

He looks about the same as the last time she saw him, at Wesleyan. Stylishly unkempt clothes, slightly cocky smile, brown hair swept back as if he's just raked his fingers through it. But then, Joe has never seemed to change much physically. His appearance seems to originate in his personality, in a liquid charm and easy talkativeness that necessitates lanky legs, loose arms, that requires room to roam.

Charlotte steels herself for a hug, having been caught off guard with Walter. But, as suspected, she needn't have worried. Despite the many years that have passed since they were married, Joe and Charlotte have never hugged or kissed hello. This can't be unusual, Charlotte reasons, with couples who are divorced (“couples” seeming the wrong word, somehow, for what they used to be). The difference with them is that the distance doesn't stem from old resentment or hostility, from anger that's taken the place of passion. It's the opposite: a chaste kiss or platonic hug would be too blatant a reminder of what was always missing in their marriage, of the passion that was really never there to begin with.

Joe steps inside. Charlotte closes the door and, for the second time in two weeks, watches the receding bumper of a Millville Taxicab. Maybe it is, in fact,
the
Millville Taxicab. And she is its sole customer lately. She wonders if her neighbors have noticed, if they are wondering who this strange man is who just stepped out of the taxi, is clearly not from the East Coast, and has disappeared inside Charlotte's—