The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (30 page)

“What do you think?”

There are many things about this house that would distress Charlotte. It's tangled. It's disorganized. It feels not particularly clean. And yet, there is something in the details and the disarray that makes her heart ache.

“It feels like a home,” she says.

Emily smiles. “It does, doesn't it?”

Suddenly Charlotte hears footsteps thundering down the stairs. She looks up, expecting Walter, but finds herself facing an Asian boy with long silky hair.

“Ant!” Emily says.

The boy stops short. “Em!”

“Hey man, I want you to meet my mom.”

The boy turns to Charlotte. “Hey, Em's mom!”

His ensemble is bizarre: thick rag socks with summer sandals and a bulky sweater with baggy shorts. He's dressed half in one season, half in another.

“Mom, Anthony,” Emily says. “Anthony, Charlotte.”

She steels herself for a possible hug, but Anthony just pumps her hand enthusiastically. He has an exotic look: olive skin, jet-black hair, dark eyes that shine like wet glass. Charlotte had assumed Emily meant his family was vacationing in Hawaii, but seeing his complexion, wonders now if they live there. Maybe that's why he's wearing shorts in November. His island disposition.

“So,” he says, sweeping his hair away from his face with one hand. “You'll be joining us for the feast of the new millennium?”

Charlotte feels herself deflate.

“She's the guest of honor,” Emily says.

“Ah.” Anthony smiles. “Brave woman.”

Emily punches his arm. “You can joke now, but you'll see. I'm multitasking in there.”

“But it's all under wraps!” Walter's voice bellows from the top of the staircase, followed by a flurry of footfalls. “I don't know what the hell's going on in there,” he says, emerging at the bottom. “But I got a bad feeling. I'm thinking it's all so healthy she doesn't want to admit what's in it. Good thing we're cooking too.”

“Definitely.” Anthony nods solemnly.

Emily rolls her eyes at Charlotte. “They're cooking
one
dish each,” she explains. “That was the deal.”

This too strikes Charlotte as oddly old-fashioned, but she keeps her mouth shut.

“Yeah, one
awesome
dish.” Walter leaps from the bottom step to the floor. “That it for the car, Charlotte?”

“Actually, I brought some food too—”

Simultaneously, Walter and Anthony burst out in a laugh and slap five.

“Mom!” Emily wails. “I'm totally capable of making this—”

“Oh, no, I didn't think—”

“Charlotte's a great cook,” Walter confides to Anthony.

Based on what? Charlotte wonders. A piece of toast? A cup of coffee he brewed himself?

“Good deal.” Anthony nods. “So we got backup. Just in case.”

“Maybe there's even meat in it,” Walter says, rubbing his hands together. “Maybe we'll actually have
turkey
on Thanks
giving.
”

“Quit it!” Emily says, swatting at them both. But she is laughing. Under other circumstances she might have taken offense, but today it seems like nothing can bring her down. “You're going to eat your words, boys. Along with some fabulous soy products. Come on, Mom. Let's go see your room.”

“Nice to meet you!” Anthony calls up the stairs behind her. Charlotte gives him a quick smile before turning to follow Emily. The staircase takes a moment to adjust to: a steep, hazardous spiral lit by one dim bulb.

“Aren't these steps wild?” Emily is burbling from up ahead. “It's like a funhouse or something.”

Charlotte trails her hands along the walls, watching Emily's bare heels to keep steady. When she emerges, Emily is heading down the hall. “La toilette,” she quips. Charlotte doesn't have time for more than a glance before she's facing a doorway strung with sparkling, floor-to-ceiling, turquoise beads. “And this,” Emily says, “is our room.”

Intellectually, of course, Charlotte knew Emily and Walter shared a bedroom. Still, the physical reality of it takes a moment to sink in. Her first impression, stepping through the beaded doorway, is that the room is vastly out of proportion, like one of the wrong turns in
Alice in Wonderland.
Everything is much too close to the floor. The bed is no more than a flat, frameless mattress disguised under tiny pillows and bright blankets. Above it hangs some kind of purple-and-pink batiked sheet. A rickety-looking drying rack is propped by the window, crammed with wool socks, T-shirts, underwear. It occurs to Charlotte they probably don't have an electric dryer; as further proof, a pair of jeans and Walter's striped running pants are draped over the closet door. Lining the baseboard is a knee-length bookcase constructed of bricks and boards, sagging under the weight of a dense and random library.
Franny and Zooey. The Red Tent. The Women's Health Encyclopedia. 100 Love Poems by Pablo Neruda. Evening. Rule of the Bone.
Planks of raw wood lean against the wall beside it, probably the beginning or end of one of Walter's projects. The only thing standing at normal height is the loveliest: a dresser made of what looks like cherry wood with long, silky grains.

“What do you think?” Emily asks.

“That dresser is beautiful.”

“Isn't it?” She runs her hand across the top edge, the only surface that isn't crowded with the accumulation of the everyday:
deodorants and hairbands and loose change and crumpled cash machine receipts and piles of tangled silver jewelry—hers? his? both?—a hammer and box of nails.

“I had no idea Walter was so talented,” Charlotte says.

“Come on.” Emily steps to the doorway, shoving the beads aside like a shank of hair. “Let's get you set up. And by the way, if you're wondering about these”—she gives the beads a shake—“the room had no door when we moved in. Walter was going to try to fit one, but we thought this was cooler anyway. Not totally private, but it has a nice flow, don't you think?” Not waiting for an answer, she points to the right. “That's Anthony's hellhole.”

Charlotte glances into a small room that looks like a cyclone hit it.

“Yes, he's a pig,” she confirms, heading to the end of the hallway. “And this is your room. Otherwise known as Mara's.”

“So Mara and Anthony don't—”

“Room together? No, they do. But they were sort of just friends when we moved in, now they're more than friends—I don't know. It's still ambiguous. It's like, they love each other, they're just trying to figure out what that means. Basically, they sleep in here and store stuff in there. We call Ant's room their walk-in closet.”

In other words, Charlotte thinks, she's sleeping in the sex room.

“Don't worry, I put on clean sheets,” Emily says, reading her mind. She turns to the door, draped with yet another aggressively multicolored sheet. “Mara makes these.”

“Oh?”

“Yeah, she's great with fabrics. Listen, I need to go check on the food. And the boys are being suspiciously quiet. So just
make yourself at home—wash up, rest, whatever, then come on down.” She brushes her lips against Charlotte's cheek and smiles. “I'm glad you're here,” she says, then skips off down the stairs.

Charlotte faces the door to Mara's. At least the room
has
a door. She nudges it open and, for a few seconds, thinks she's stumbled upon some kind of crazy tent. The entire room is swathed in sheets, rugs, pillowcases, wall hangings in an explosion of colors. The ceiling slants sharply in the middle, tapestries drooping to almost eye level. At first glance it looks chaotic, but as Charlotte ventures deeper inside, she realizes this may actually be the most organized spot in the house. On top of the dresser stands an orderly wooden earring ladder, each earring lined up next to its partner, butterfly backings intact. A moat of vials and bottles—sunscreens, hand lotions, flavored lip balms—surrounds the base, and two framed pictures oversee the tidy, scented village. In one, a tiny dark-haired figure stands on top of a snowy mountain—Charlotte vaguely remembers Emily once saying something about a roommate and Mount Kilimanjaro—could that be Anthony, that speck on top of the world? In the other, Anthony is hugging a young woman who must be Mara. She has a sweet face, fine blond hair, twin stripes of sunburn on her cheeks. The two of them are tangled in a canoe, laughing, wearing orange life preservers that engulf their chins.

It's a strange feeling, wandering the bedroom of someone Charlotte doesn't know. And yet, oddly endearing. There's something innocent, almost childlike, about Mara's belongings. In the far corner stands an old-fashioned school desk covered with more photos. Charlotte picks up one of a middle-aged couple, probably her parents, standing in front of a lake with arms around each other's waists. Both are wearing sunglasses and
crewneck sweaters. The man has a fanny pack strapped around his middle, the woman a graying bob that's fluttering in the wind. Charlotte takes comfort in their ordinariness, then remembers what Emily said about Mara's family being “completely fucking nuts” and, gently, sets the picture back down.

She perches on the edge of the bed. To her right, the square of window could be a New England postcard: smoky blue sky, plush treeline bursting with color, old-fashioned red barn with a rake propped against the door. In the middle of the yard, two rainbow-striped beach chairs are angled toward each other, as if in conversation. So far, Charlotte thinks, the house is not at all what she expected. It isn't the physical details she finds surprising so much as the overall atmosphere of the place. She'd expected Emily's life here to feel younger, sillier, more like a college dorm, a group of kids playing grown-up. But there's a solidity about the place—the heavy wood furnishings, spicy cooking smells, handmade blankets, messy affectionate clutter—that feels legitimate. Lived in. The way houses should.

Charlotte suddenly realizes how exhausted she is. She could fall asleep right now, but forces herself to venture into the hallway. The bathroom, she discovers, is no bigger than a large closet, tiled in headachy black and white threaded with long thin cracks. Strewn on the sink ledge are three frayed toothbrushes and a misshapen brown lump that seems to have hardened permanently onto the porcelain. It resembles soap, but feels grainy, mealy. Charlotte shudders. Must be homemade. She splashes her face with cold water, skims two fingertips lightly over the soap cake, then dries her face on one of the mint green towels stacked on the hamper. Emily's old towel set from college. Charlotte can still make out
EMILY WARREN
in faded black marker along the edge.

She catches a whiff of something strange. She presses her face to the towel: detergent. Sniffs the soap, but though it looks repulsive, it smells only vaguely waxy. Then she turns and spots a box tucked in the corner next to an old claw-footed bathtub, filled with what looks like gray sand. She stares for a moment, then realizes: a litter box. Charlotte had no idea there was a cat in the house, and the realization (both the cat and the box) is mildly disconcerting. A young Hawaiian man is staying for dinner, a dirty cat is somewhere in their midst—what other surprises are in store?

Returning to the sink, Charlotte checks her reflection in the mirror on the medicine cabinet but is too distracted by the mirror itself to register what she looks like. The glass is marred with flecks of spit, toothpaste, God knows what else. The door is hanging slightly ajar. If she craned her neck at the right angle, she could probably see inside the cabinet without having to move it at all. She pauses, listens, and hearing nothing, leans her head against the tile and arches her eyebrows. She spies mint dental floss. Tom's All-Natural Toothpaste. Himalayan Herb Toner. Squinting, she tries to decipher the curly script on a jar the size and shape of her Noxzema: “Butter Dress.” Butter Dress? She reaches out to nudge the door, just slightly—what if she needed toothpaste? if she'd forgotten to pack it?—until the full label is exposed: “Shea Butter Hair Dressing for Men.” On the front is a drawing of a man with an Afro. It must be Walter's. Some kind of African-American hair pomade. Impulsively, Charlotte reaches into the cabinet, grabs it, unscrews the cap. True to its name, the stuff looks like congealed Blue Bonnet.

Now that she's so far in anyway, Charlotte can't stop herself from going further. She nudges the door a little more, and her eyes sweep over the clogged shelves, the numerous tiny bottles of
essential oil: lavender, lemongrass, tea tree, jasmine, myrrh. Myrrh? She rewinds. Myrrh it is. Rubbing alcohol. Witch hazel. Band-Aids. Bug spray. A bottle of “Love Butter.” Probably another hair product, she guesses, leaning closer to read the fine print.
Increase your sexual pleasure with …

Charlotte pulls back, banging the back of her head on the cabinet door, her cheeks filling with heat. She's half expecting someone to leap out and yell: “A-
ha!
' She was accused of being a snoop once before. It was just after Emily's tenth birthday; she'd received her first diary from Charlotte's aunt Polly. The diary was old-fashioned—red leather with gilt-edged pages, oddly Bible-looking—and came with directions for safeguarding it from “snooping older brothers.” It advised placing a strand of hair on the cover; if the hair disappeared, you knew the diary had been read. Emily had devoted herself to this experiment, despite the fact that she had no brothers, older or otherwise. Joe had moved out by then, so her only potential snoop was Charlotte. One day after school, Emily came racing into the kitchen, pointed a finger at Charlotte and yelled: “A-
ha!
' The hair was gone. Charlotte had sat Emily down at the kitchen table and explained the many ways it might have blown off: the rotating fan, a breeze from the window, even Charlotte's hip swishing by. But Emily looked so crestfallen that Charlotte actually began to feel badly for ruining the experiment. She told Emily maybe she'd snooped after all, and just forgot.