Sleep Talkin' Man (10 page)

Ohhh, Snuffleupagus.
You're such a hairy cunt.

I've heard it said that sleep talking may be genetic. Perhaps there is something to this. Adam's mother doesn't quite talk in her sleep, but she does have her own special sleep behaviors. She sometimes has nightmares, in which she begins to scream. Now, in her dream, it's a horror-movie scream. But the sound that actually comes out of her sleeping body can only be described as someone trying to do an impersonation of a siren, a rapid “WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO WOO!” Not a nice awakening for anyone else sleeping in the house. She's also been known to carry out brief, amusing actions from a dream. One night, for example, Adam's father woke up to find her sitting up, punching at the air. She woke up suddenly and when he asked what she was doing, she replied “I decked the au pair.”

I've recently started to wonder whether sleep talking is contagious. In these past couple of years, since Sleep Talkin' Man emerged and became a hot topic of conversation among family and friends, we've had a number of people in our lives—Adam's father included—start talking in their sleep for the first time! Sounds to me like their subconsciouses are jealous of Adam's subconscious.

Vampire penguins?
Zombie guinea pigs?
We're done for … done for.

If you were previously unfamiliar with the term, you have probably now pieced together the meaning of “chunder-bucket” for yourself. If not, think barf bag and you'll be on the right track. This sort of utterance makes me so thankful that I'm married to Adam, who courted me with the utmost determination to make me his wife, rather than STM, who associates married life with perpetual vomiting.

From the moment that he came through the airport doors on our first reunion, Adam was intent on marrying me. He was not perturbed by the cynics of the world, including the one that was, it would seem, lying dormant in his own subconscious.

Adam started dropping marriage into the conversation from the second day of that first visit
(you remember, the one where we were just getting together for a friendly cup of coffee). He didn't talk about it, in a serious heart-to-heart. Nor did he toss it out there in jokey, offhand comments, as though testing the waters. He simply referred to our future life together as a part of normal conversation, as a foregone conclusion, with utter confidence in the rightness of it.

But I needed a bit of convincing. On that first visit, I wasn't sure how I felt: I had a lot of baggage from our shared past that needed unpacking and discarding. I also needed some time to reconcile Adam at thirty-four with the eighteen-year-old boy with whom I had first fallen in love. It was a lot to work through. So whenever Adam confidently asserted the inevitability of our future nuptials, I changed the subject without pretense of subtlety. I wasn't denying, but I certainly wasn't confirming.

Adam returned home from our six-day coffee date without any proclamations of love or assurances of a future from me. We had three more weeks of nightly Skyping, and then I, still quite unsure of my feelings, flew over to his stomping
grounds to bring in the New Year. It was on December 30, on the escalator of the Tate Modern, that the last of my doubts fell away and I knew I was unquestionably in love with Adam. The certainty hit me all at once, the same way I instantly felt his presence on that first night in Israel half of our lifetimes ago.

It was two weeks later, during his second visit to the States, that Adam next mentioned our future marriage. This time I responded shyly with something like, “That … could … maybe … happen.” Adam is a guy who can spot an opportunity. In that moment, he got down on one knee, took my hand, and asked me to marry him. Well, first he had to brush some popcorn and candy wrappers out of the way, seeing as we were sitting in a Brooklyn movie theatre waiting for
Juno
to start. It may not have been every girl's romantic dream, but for me it was perfect.

I didn't feel like I could truly get engaged without my parents ever having met the man in question, so we decided that we were engaged to be engaged and thus, to fully win my hand, Adam fearlessly, and awkwardly, faced each of my family
members, one at a time. We scheduled a trip down to New Jersey.

First stop: Dad's house. My father lives in my South Jersey hometown, on a little body of water that, when I was a kid, was referred to as “the sandwash” and was where teenagers went to have sex and do drugs. Now, “Shadow Lake” is the idyllic setting for a handful of upper middle-class homes of doctors and lawyers.

It was a crisp Saturday afternoon, the day after we arrived. At this point, we had been there less than twenty-four hours, eight of which had been spent sleeping. So Adam had racked up, let's say, ten hours getting to know my Dad. The lake was frozen, and Adam and I were down on the jetty skipping rocks across the ice when my dad wandered down with some stale bagels to feed the ducks (given the passion that the Shadow Lake birds habitually show for bagels, I'm convinced they're Jewish ducks). Since we were just a few hours shy of leaving, it seemed like the right time for me to make myself scarce so that the men could talk.

As Adam tells it, they had been tearing off pieces
of bagel and tossing them onto the ice for a while when he took a deep breath and said, “Skip, there is something I want to ask you. I would like to—”

“Yes!” my father jumped in with alarming eagerness, “You can marry my daughter!”

Adam, who had prepared himself for a serious moment, was flustered. “Oh, uh, well, OK then,” he said, and took his bear hug like a man.

Having now covered the principal topic at hand, neither of them had any idea what was supposed to happen next. So, they went back to tossing bits of bagel to the ducks. The problem with this course of action was that the ducks had never, in fact, come to the jetty at all. So there they were, a man and his future son-in-law, loitering awkwardly in the middle of an ever-increasing semicircle of baked goods, desperately wishing that the woman they both loved would come back and rescue them.

I, having never been in this situation, was feeling extremely shy, and had taken to hiding in the house. Adam and I had never discussed what was supposed to happen after he asked, and I had no intention of going back out and risk interrupting
the manly heart-to-heart that I assumed must define such occasions.

To their credit, they stuck it out until not a crumb of bagel was left in the bag. They gazed a few moments longer across the expanse of bagel lumps until Dad said, “Hmmm. I guess she's not coming back.” And they trudged back up to the house.

Next, we drove up to my mom's in central Jersey. Again, we gave it about two meals' worth of getting-to-know-you time before Adam brought up our future plans. Luckily, two meals gets you surprisingly far in getting to know my mom. She's immediately familiar and welcoming, the kind of parent that all of her teenage kids' friends called “Mom.” Even so, it's nerve wracking to put in a request for marriage on first meeting with any parent. Sunday afternoon rolled around, and Adam knew he couldn't put it off any longer. My mother was rushing around the kitchen, cooking for a dinner party. It wasn't ideal, but Adam feared it would be his last opportunity to catch her alone. I was waiting just around the corner from the kitchen, out
of immediate sight, but within earshot. Adam, in his awkwardness, expressed his intentions in ridiculously posh, outdated terms. Something like, “Patti, I'm sure that you've become aware of my intentions toward your daughter, and I would like your permission to have her hand in marriage.” It must have sounded fantastically British to my mother, like something out of a Jane Austen novel. She paused in her chopping, the knife hovering above the carrots. “Are you planning to treat her wonderfully and make her happy?” she asked. “Umm … yes? I am,” Adam awkwardly affirmed. “Oh,” she said, “well then, she's all yours.” They shared a nice welcome-to-the-family hug—although, she still had the knife in her hand, so I guess it could have gone either way. As Mom returned to her chopping and Adam came around the corner from the kitchen, I saw him do a Rocky Balboa over-the-head double fist pump of triumph.

Two down; one to go.

In hindsight I can appreciate that I made an error with my brother. With my mom and dad, I waited until they met Adam before there was
any whisper of marriage. Adam is totally guileless and (in my totally unbiased opinion) utterly loveable, and anyone who saw us together instinctively knew that we belonged together. But in my brother's case, I just called and told him that I was engaged. His lukewarm, skeptical reaction was not all that I would have hoped for.

Put yourself in Jason's place. Your sister tells you that she is going to marry a foreigner who only six weeks ago she saw for the first time since having her heart broken by him a decade and a half before. Add to this that you generally believe this sister to be impulsive and not always possessing perfect judgment, on top of which you're an emotionally cautious kind of guy to begin with. You can imagine, then, that Jason was a little suspicious. I believe that, in short, my brother figured this was a guy gunning for a green card. “I'm sorry I can't respond with the hoots of congratulations that you were probably hoping for,” he said. “That's OK,” I replied, “you should respond however you feel.” I was confident, you see, that he would thaw the moment he met Adam.

So, parents covered, I took Adam up to Boston. On our second night, we were out at a pool hall when my brother tricked me into giving him some man-to-man time with Adam. “Tamar wants to talk to you about something,” he said, handing me his cell phone with his girlfriend on the other end. I took it across the room, where I could hear better. A theatre director, Jason always knows how to inject just the right amount of drama to communicate his point effectively to his audience: He bent down, aimed carefully, took his shot, righted himself, planted the end of his cue firmly on the ground, and pinned Adam with an accusatory gaze. “So,” he said evenly, “What is it that you want from my sister?”