The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (18 page)

By the time she climbed into the backseat of Mr. Freeman's car, Charlotte felt lightheaded. She touched her forehead, as her mother would have; it was clammy. She didn't say a word the entire ride, but Becky didn't seem to notice. It wasn't unusual for Charlotte not to say much. While her friend chattered away, Charlotte stared out the window at the world and felt how insignificant she was.

It might have been that same afternoon that Charlotte began
to feel the first leanings toward what would appear, in the eyes of the world, noncommittal. Wishy-washy. On the surface it seemed like passivity, like softness of character, but in reality there was nothing soft about it. The puzzle was this: how could Charlotte believe in anything for sure if there were other people who believed just as surely in its opposite?

Shortly after
Double Trouble,
Charlotte began punctuating almost every statement with “I think.”

“My mother? She's at the supermarket (I think).”

“I have a math test tomorrow (I think).”

She spoke these endings at a whisper, to be heard only by herself and God (if there was one). They were disclaimers: safeguards against lying by mistake. Although her mother
should
have been at the store at that moment, there was always the possibility that she wasn't. Maybe she got a flat tire. Maybe she realized, passing the liquor store on Route 30, that her husband had drunk the last of the brandy and so stopped there first. And though she had every reason to
think
her math test would take place the next day, a tornado could strike the school. Mr. Bakersfield, her math teacher, could die in his sleep.

The world began to feel like a very fragile place, a fearful place, one where nothing was under anyone's control. Charlotte's “I think's became more urgent, more frequent. Now and then she realized she'd spoken one too loudly when she elicited a curious look from someone: a librarian, the mailman, a cashier. Then one June evening her father, sitting in his reading chair, folded down the top right corner of his
New York Times.
“Charlotte, my dear,” he said. He spoke with the top half of his face only. “It's time you put an end to that whispering.” Then he shook the paper upright and disappeared behind it.

Now, staring at the tiny asterisk, Charlotte shoves the closet
shut. She checks her watch: 1:30. Right on time. As she's unlocking the front door, she hears the phone ring and pauses. If she picks it up, she might be late, but—what if it's Emily?

“Hello?”

“Hey! Charlotte!”

“Walter?” Charlotte feels her breath catch. “What happened? Is something wrong?”

“No, no, nothing's wrong.”

“Where are you?”

“I'm at work.” As if to confirm it, she hears a metallic screech in the background. “Listen, I only have a minute. I just wanted to tell you something.”

Charlotte feels her heart flail against her rib cage as she prepares for the worst.

“I hooked you up to the Internet.”

She blinks. “You what?”

“When I was messing with your computer last weekend, that's what I was doing, seeing if you had a modem, and you do, so I plugged you into the phone jack—”

Charlotte lets her purse sag by her feet.

“—then I called and got you hooked up. You could get on right now. Check the play listings in New York.” She can hear the smile in his voice. “Just joking.”

“Oh.”

“But seriously, you can get e-mail. Buy books, look up recipes. Whatever.”

“Well, thank you—that was thoughtful.” She glances at the laptop sitting innocently on the shelf by the window, newly possessed of these hidden capabilities. Sure enough, a thin silver cord is coiled on the floor, plugged into a jack concealed somewhere beneath the table. There's something almost sinister
about it, technology slithering into her house without permission.

“Charlotte?” Walter says. “You all right?”

For some reason, the question makes her eyes fill. “Oh, I'm fine, fine. I'm just heading out the—”

“Oh, sorry—”

“No, no, I didn't mean—I'm just distracted.” She swipes quickly at her eyes.

“Well, listen, it's really easy to get online. Do you have ten seconds? I can tell you fast. First, just turn on the computer like usual.”

Charlotte grabs for the stubby pencil and multicolored block of Post-it notes squatting by the phone. Running along the top border, the Post-its say: “Home Sweet Home!” She starts scribbling.

“You'll see a little picture on the side of the screen. Internet, Internet Explorer, something like that. Click on it, then it dials up the—” His voice is drowned out by a high metal whine, like a buzzsaw. Charlotte holds the pencil still, waiting. “—and just type in what you want to know.”

“All right,” she says dubiously.

“Did you get all that?”

“I think so.”

“Listen, call me if you can't figure it out. Or else I'll show you next weekend. Once you get the hang of it, you'll use it all the time.”

“I'm sure I will.”

“All right, take it easy—” His last few words are smothered by a burst of noise.

Carefully, Charlotte replaces the receiver. She looks down at her scattering of notes. Edging the bottom border of the Post-it
block are little pictures meant to evoke home: a latticed pie crust, a doormat, a kitten. She rereads what she wrote:
little picture, Internet, click it,
and, in larger, sprawling letters,
WHAT YOU WANT TO KNOW.

She looks up from her notes then, glances down at herself: buttoned coat, muffler tucked around her neck, purse sitting at her feet like a pet waiting to be fed. Where was she going? It's a Friday. One-thirty. She was on her way to her appointment.

And now it's 1:38. She's late.

The weekly manicures began some twenty years ago. An effort, on Joe's part, to get Charlotte to stop picking at her fingernails. “If they look pretty to begin with,” he said, with a pinched smile, “maybe you'll keep them that way.”

Not surprisingly, Joe's strategy backfired; Charlotte was soon picking and nibbling more than ever. The surprising part was, she loved getting her nails done. She began actually looking forward to her weekly appointments. There was something comforting about the process: the dependable cause-and-effect, the transformation from ragged squares to shapely, shiny pink ovals.

The manicurists never mentioned Charlotte's abused cuticles, and this, too, was part of why she liked going. They were petite Asian women who smiled mildly and worked diligently. They rarely spoke to her at all. It was the opposite of being at the hairdresser, where Charlotte felt a constant pressure to make small talk or—depending on the quality of conversation around her—share intimacies and forge some kind of womanly bond. She spent most of her six-week trim and dye jobs feeling awkward, trying to avoid eye contact with the hairdresser in the mirror.

But at Pretty Nails, Charlotte felt no pressure. What she felt
was an absence of herself. She didn't have to say or do or think. She could be docile, merely an extension of her hands, which were treated like objects, moved, soaked, scraped, buffed, picked up, put down. She didn't even mind the brief hand massage, so impersonal was the kneading of skin and prodding of bone.

Today, though, she doesn't feel her usual calmness. She is ten minutes late, a result of Walter's call, and is now winded from half-jogging to the salon from her car. As she perches at one of the tiny tables, her breaths are wheezy, and the sound makes her uncomfortable. It prevents her from being invisible. She tries to focus on the manicurist—Shirley, according to her nameplate—who has her head bent over Charlotte's hands, exposing a shiny black scalp and arrow-straight part. The pose reminds Charlotte of Emily's brief stint as a palm reader. In fifth grade, Emily and her friend Gretchen Myers would sit in the kitchen every day after school, practicing their palm-reading while Charlotte made dinner.

“One … two …,” Emily would count, excruciatingly slowly, hunched over Gretchen's palm. “Three … four.” She would look up then and, in her
abracadabra
voice, intone: “You … shall … have … four … babies.”

The girls delivered all their predictions in what they called their
abracadabra
voices: deep, spooky, some variation on the disembodied man on Nickelodeon who counseled Mork from Ork. The voice had a dash of the biblical too, probably modeled after Gretchen's exposure to Sunday school. The
abracadabra
voice always rang with authority, despite the fact that the predictions changed daily and the palms never did.

“One … two …” Emily ducked down again, scrutinizing some intersection of tiny lines. “Three. You shall have three husbands,” she pronounced; then her voice returned to normal. “That's not bad.”

Then one night, when Charlotte was tucking her in, Emily asked if she could read her palm. Charlotte had obliged, of course; truth be told, she was tickled to be asked. She perched on the side of the bed while Emily grasped her palm in her sturdy little fingers. In the trapezoid of light from her Mickey Mouse lamp, Emily bent her head, loose hair tumbling over her pajamas, while Charlotte waited patiently for her tally of future pets and babies and husbands. After several minutes, Emily spoke in a low, ghostly
abracadabra
: “You … shall … not … be … sad.”

It caught Charlotte off guard; she'd never heard their kitchen-table predictions go beyond the countable.

“You shall smile every day,” Emily went on. “You shall go on dates and fall in love.”

Charlotte was touched, saddened, stunned. Were these the things her daughter secretly wished for her? Things she truly felt, in her gut, but probably thought she was inventing?

“You shall sit on a nice beach. You shall do good on
Jeopardy.
And before bed … you shall let Emily have a Chipwich.” Then she snuck a glance upward, and they both laughed.

“Water?”

Charlotte looks up. Shirley is gesturing to a cooler in the corner.

“Oh, no,” Charlotte says. “I'm fine.”

The wheezing must be distracting, Charlotte thinks, and smiles apologetically. As she crosses one leg over the other, an effort to make herself less conspicuous, she jostles the dish of nail-polish remover and spills it onto the table.

“Oh!”

A few customers look over.

“I'm sorry,” Charlotte says. From out of nowhere, another
manicurist flutters over with a handful of paper towels. “I'm so sorry.”

Now Charlotte's leg hurts, but she doesn't dare move again. She feels too pronounced: all breath and body. Her eyes roam to a sign that says WE DO PEDICURE. A drawing of a lotus flower in a brass frame. She alights on a little boy sitting on the floor, a row of toys lined up on the rug beside him: action figures, baseball cards, a shiny truck with oversized wheels. Charlotte watches as he picks up a wedge of cards and crunches them in his chubby fists. He grabs an action figure, picks up the truck, and bangs the two together like cymbals.

“Ssshhh,” one of the manicurists says every so often, without looking up. It's not clear which one is the boy's mother; it seems they all are.

This little boy is typical of Charlotte's new world. In the same way, after Joe left, she noticed married couples constantly, this week she's been inundated with babies and mothers. They're everywhere: book covers, TV shows, crossing in front of her car in the street. On Wednesday, Oprah did a show on new techniques in breast-feeding.
People
's cover story was “Hollywood Moms!” In the supermarket, Charlotte found herself in line behind a woman with two young children. She watched, riveted, the seemingly unconscious way this mother tended to them—touching their cheeks, wiping their noses, giving them Honey Grahams to gnaw on—all while unloading her cart and paying her bill. She never once appeared to look at them directly.

It wasn't the first time she'd witnessed this kind of maternal sixth sense. The first time she met Joe's family, more than thirty people were gathered at his mother's house for dinner. To Charlotte, the scene was chaos: children running wild, screaming, giggling, brandishing foods and toys as weapons. Sometimes
they tumbled to the floor, indulged in the requisite cry, then righted themselves and barreled on.

Charlotte perched on the edge of a love seat. She felt Joe's hand moving at the small of her back—his hands were always on her, always moving—but she couldn't focus on him, or the adult conversation around her. She was too busy fearing for these children's lives. She was terrified one might run into the corner of the coffee table or smack into a doorjamb or go flying down the basement stairs. But to her amazement, their mothers barely seemed to be paying attention. The longer she watched, though, the more she realized these mothers were actually aware of the children's every move. When one ran by needing attention, the mother would simply extend an arm—still nodding along in conversation, slathering a cracker with cheese, never skipping a beat—and gather the child in her lap, wipe its nose, dry its tears, and set it free.

Now, seeing this little boy and listening to his chorus of mothers, Charlotte doubts she ever cultivated this instinct. Did she ever, as a young mother, sense Emily's irritation and slip a pacifier in her mouth, part of a fluid choreography of chopping vegetables for dinner? What she remembers is just the opposite: hovering over Emily's crib, watching as she crossed the street, never taking her eyes off her child for a minute.

“Miss?”

Charlotte looks up.

“Done.” Shirley emphasizes the word in a way that indicates she's said it before.

“Done? Already?” Charlotte looks down at her hands and, sure enough, there are pearly pink islands marooned amid the clutter of her bitten skin. It happened so quickly. She feels sad to have missed it. “I guess I wasn't paying attention.”