The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (2 page)

After the divorce, Joe had stayed in the area until Emily was thirteen, picking her up on alternate weekends and Wednesdays, splitting holidays evenly down the middle. Then the year Emily started high school, he moved to Seattle and began claiming Thanksgivings and Augusts. Even now, standing in her bedroom at 2:34
A.M.
in the middle of October, the very thought of August makes Charlotte's chest constrict. She used to dread that month—the longest and emptiest of all the months. TV shows were all reruns. Neighbors were all on beach vacations. The air was thick with humidity, and her air conditioner made a nerve-racking rattle. And, worst of all, Emily's birthday was on August 27. Every year Charlotte missed it. Every year thirty-four days—thirty-one in August, plus three for Labor Day weekend—were filled with little else than waiting for her daughter to come home (and worrying every year that she wouldn't). Every Labor Day, when her daughter stepped into Newark Airport, Charlotte's lungs would relax for the first time since July.

On Emily's first night home, Charlotte always cooked the same belated birthday dinner. The presents she'd already mailed, sent overnight on August 26 to arrive in Seattle on the twenty-seventh. As much as Charlotte hated the thought of Joe and Valerie watching Emily open those presents, it was important that Emily receive them on her actual birthday. Charlotte agonized over them. She refrained from sending anything too practical, like the hairbands or rag socks she might have thrown in if Emily were at home. She knew she couldn't compete with the gifts Valerie sent at Christmastime—beaded handbags from Chile, silver bangles from Mexico, essential oils, multicolored candles made of seaweed and vegetable wax—things Charlotte would never have bought, much less
found,
in the labyrinth of the Millville Mall. The best she could do was send gifts that
were, if not exotic, at least not frumpy. A T-shirt from the Gap. A book by Madeleine L'Engle. Matching melon-scented soaps and lotions from Bath and Body Works. Still, when Emily called to thank her, Charlotte couldn't help picturing Valerie in the background, picking over her gifts with an arched eyebrow and a laugh stifled behind her hand.

Of all the long and excruciating Augusts, the summer Emily turned sixteen was the hardest. Never would Charlotte have believed as a young mother—nursing her baby, changing her diapers, walking her through training bras and maxi-pads, temper tantrums and
Where Babies Come From
—that she would not be seeing that baby the day she turned sixteen. It was the day she wasn't a child anymore, the culmination of all those years of crying, pouting, bleeding girlhood. Charlotte wanted to be the one to do something special, something memorable. She had
earned
it. Instead, her daughter was three thousand miles away, turning sixteen with a woman Charlotte barely knew. She had spent the day trying to distract herself. She watched
Oprah.
She read
People.
She spoke to Emily on the phone, chewing the insides of her cheeks to keep from crying. Joe and Valerie—this is what Emily called them, she'd started calling her father “Joe” the year he moved to the West Coast—were taking her out to dinner, she said, someplace “hip.” Charlotte spent the night imagining the three of them sitting on the dock of a boat, or at a sidewalk café, Joe and Valerie sneaking Emily sips of cocktails, a frothy, celebratory pink.

That Labor Day, when Emily arrived home, she seemed to have aged much more than thirty-four days. She was wearing clothes Charlotte didn't recognize, clumpy brown sandals and faded jeans patched at the knees. A silver hoop was buried in the flesh of her upper ear, and the patchwork duffel bag slung over
her shoulder was crammed with bootleg CDs, sacks of flavored coffee, T-shirts for bands called Mudhoney and Mother Love Bone. (The burned coffee smell had permeated everything in her duffel and would linger in Charlotte's laundry room for weeks.) That night, Charlotte served the usual, carefully meatless belated birthday dinner: oriental salad, vegetable lasagna, and chocolate raspberry torte. Afterward, Emily usually went to her room, chaining herself to the phone to catch up with her friends, but that summer she sat at the kitchen table until midnight. Her body was “on Seattle time,” she said, as she brewed cup after cup of Seattle's Best brand coffee—in flavors like hazelnut, French vanilla, chocolate almond—playing her new CDs and talking about grunge music while the curtains in the windows stirred in the thick summer breeze. Charlotte watched her, nodded exuberantly, but she was only half listening. In truth, she felt like crying. Not out of sadness, or loneliness, but sheer joy and thankfulness, that her daughter was here, real, returned, to unstick Charlotte's swollen windows and fill her empty house with sound and life. Charlotte murmured “mmm,” “yes,” laying slivers of cake on Emily's plate, the raspberry threads like ruby tiaras, as Emily spoke at passionate length about the death of Kurt Cobain.

Charlotte steps out of her slippers and onto the hardwood floor. Hardwood is “in,” according to her realtor; people are just dying for hardwood. Charlotte thinks it's too creaky. Too cold. She thinks of her bedroom in the house on Dunleavy Street, the flat moss-green rug whose wrinkles and bald spots she had memorized. She never wanted to leave that house, but with Emily finishing Wesleyan, she could no longer justify staying. As irrational as Charlotte can be at 2:47 in the morning, she also possesses a keen sense of practicality. It didn't matter that the
house was paid for, that her parents' life insurance had taken care of the mortgage years ago. The house was simply too big for her to stay in alone.

Charlotte sets her water on the nightstand, switches the Dream Machine to “ocean waves.” It sounds vaguely tidal, in that the staticky sound kind of undulates. She climbs into bed, stares at the ceiling. This machine isn't helping. It's covering up the extra noise—“ambient sound,” according to the side of the box—but she finds she's only more anxious because of the noise she
isn't
hearing. What if someone is breaking in and the ocean is so loud she doesn't hear it? What if the sounds of footsteps are swallowed up in the static tide? She tries to conjure up the many tips she's read for falling asleep. One suggested counting backwards from 100, which only made her progressively more anxious. Another said that simply breathing deeply would slow your heart, decelerate your pulse. In other words:
force
you to relax.

Charlotte shifts, but slightly. She's read that it is important to keep the body as still as possible when trying to fall asleep. She tries to concentrate on the ocean, on letting the waves carry her away. Instead, she's straining to hear the elusive “ambient sounds” under all that static. It occurs to her that the Dream Machine was probably manufactured by the same people who break into houses in the first place.
Perfect for concealing the sounds of lock-picking, tiptoeing, breaking glass
… This is what the real advertisement must say, the one that circulates privately to all the criminals. Probably on the Internet.

Charlotte turns the Dream Machine off (feeling guilty, but telling herself she'll use it once Emily gets here) and climbs back into bed. She tries to be brisk, assured, yanking the sheets to her chin, smoothing them with her palms.
You're being absurd—it's a condo! In New Jersey!
She pictures the world outside: tidy mailboxes,
arc of parked cars, glowing lampposts. In the morning, she'll chastise herself.
Look at where you live. It's perfectly safe! Tonight, remember this scene. PICTURE THIS LAMPPOST.

Charlotte pulls her knees to her chest. Was she this fearful when she was married? She's sure she wasn't. She didn't need to be. She hadn't been alone. It is the particular quality of aloneness—its detachment, its vulnerability—that sets the mind whirling and gives the imagination free reign. With Joe, she was never really frightened, just nervous. “Fussy,” he called it, back when he found it endearing. She bit her cuticles. She double-and triple-checked their bank statements. She was very, very careful about cooking chicken and washing fruit.

It was when she became a mother that Charlotte's nerves intensified. Every night, before bed, she would check to make sure Emily was still breathing. It wasn't so unusual when she was a baby—awful things happened to babies in the middle of the night, she'd read it in parenting magazines, seen it on
60 Minutes
—but it continued even when Emily was four, five, six years old. It was as routine as making sure the oven was off, the coffeemaker unplugged, the front door chained and bolted, twice.

She would wait until Joe was absorbed in grading papers, then creep into Emily's room and kneel beside her bed. Emily slept on her back with lips slightly parted. Her long brown hair splayed unevenly across the pillow, holding the shape of that day's braids or plastic barrettes. Charlotte would lower her head until it was level with Emily's chest, eyeing the Holly Hobbie comforter, confirming its slight rise and fall. Sometimes, to make doubly sure, she would lean over Emily's face and turn her head, ear hovering just above her mouth, and feel her breathe.

Since graduating, Emily has been teaching in an “alternative learning environment” in Lee, New Hampshire. A middle school, essentially, except with no discipline. No attendance requirements. No report cards. No grades at all.

“But how do you assess their progress?” Charlotte had asked, after Emily got the job.

“The students assess their own progress.”

“But wouldn't they all give themselves As?”

“There are no As.”

“There are no As?”

“They don't use letter grades.”

“What do they use then?”

“The Watt School doesn't represent a child's progress with a number or a symbol,” Emily recited, as if from a promotional brochure. “There are other ways of measuring progress. Like increased self-confidence. Ability to think critically. To perform creative problem-solving tasks. To articulate one's own growth.”

Charlotte had no idea what she was talking about, but didn't press the issue. Emily had always thrown herself into projects and crusades and causes, most of which Charlotte didn't agree with or even understand. When she was five, Emily came home from kindergarten and announced she was no longer eating hamburgers. She'd learned about the food groups that day and realized her dinners bore a direct relationship to the cows she saw grazing off Route 9. (She would soon make the connections between lamb/veal, pig/pork chop, and the suddenly obvious chicken/chicken fingers.) From then on, whenever Joe grilled hot dogs, Emily would heap her plate with macaroni salad and let out dying oinks.

Charlotte found the strength of her daughter's convictions enviable. Even admirable. They were also, she secretly believed,
a product of her youth. As Emily got older, Charlotte suspected the reality of day-to-day living would dampen her enthusiasm a little, make her more practical, less volatile. More realistic. But until then, Charlotte certainly wasn't going to be the one to do it.

Besides, she was sure Joe had no objections to the alternative learning environment. He was probably okay with it. In favor. Having an ex-husband so “with it” only accentuated how very much Charlotte was “without it.” Toward the end of their marriage, when Emily was five and six, Joe managed to absorb all the latest fads and trends in a seemingly unconscious way. Emily would mention a cartoon, or sneaker, or video game, and Joe would know exactly what she meant. Charlotte was clueless. (She once pronounced M. C. Hammer “McHammer,” thinking it was an Irish rock band.) Now, in such situations, rather than draw attention to how unhip she was, Charlotte had learned to keep her doubts to herself.

Which is why she hadn't pressed the issue of the school with no report cards. Just like she hadn't let on her true feelings about Emily's tongue ring, or belly ring, or women's studies major, or aimless cross-country road trip between her junior and senior years of college. But in June, when Emily called about her new living plans—what Charlotte has since termed the “alternative living arrangement”—she found it impossible to remain her quietly supportive self.

“Walter and I have decided to live together.”

It was like a scene from a bad made-for-TV movie: the pivotal moment where the rebellious daughter, chin held high, announces to her conservative parents a decision she knows they won't agree with. Usually the declaration is followed by the parents threatening, the daughter shrieking, possibly the lines,
“Not while you're living under my roof!” or “I'm eighteen! You don't own me anymore!” and some slamming doors, stone-faced sidekick boyfriends, Harleys gunning ominously in the distance.

In her version, however, Charlotte was cleaning the bathroom. Her forehead was sweaty, the portable phone clutched between her chin and shoulder. Emily was speaking to her from Hartford, where she was living temporarily, subletting an apartment and working at a day camp for inner-city youth. Charlotte hadn't been crazy about the camp plan (Emily was a Wesleyan graduate, after all) and felt a little hurt that Emily hadn't come home to spend her last few months on Dunleavy Street. But as soon as she lamented any detail of Emily's summer plans, she reminded herself of the only one that truly mattered: She wasn't spending August in Seattle.