The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (32 page)

“Taureans are stubborn,” Anthony puts in, reaching behind him to fiddle with the stereo. “And Geminis are indecisive.”

“Put them together, and it'll be the perfect kid,” says Walter.

Anthony settles on some slow guitar and raises an eyebrow at Walter, who nods appreciatively, drumming the back of his spoon on the table. Charlotte takes advantage of the distraction to try a bite of tofurkey. The taste isn't too bad—it's even vaguely meatlike—but the texture is repulsive: a sudden softness not unlike warm, damp bread.

“So,” Anthony says, “Charlotte. Are you into astrology?”

“Me?” She takes a desperate gulp of water, trying to be discreet. “Not really,” she admits, swallowing, wondering again if she's offended him. Maybe astrology is common practice in Hawaii? Maybe it's considered sacred? She falls back on the animal excuse. “I just don't have much astrology experience, I guess.”

“It's fascinating stuff,” Anthony says. Charlotte wonders if “fascinating” is the official word of the alternative living arrangement. “I have a book you should borrow. I think you'd really dig it.”

“Yeah, Mom. You really might.”

Suddenly Walter is lunging across the table, both arms outstretched, headed for Charlotte. “Don't listen to them, Char-lotte!” he cries out, and a moment later his palms are clamped over her ears. The sounds of music and voices are dampened, and all Charlotte can hear is the pumping of her blood, all she can feel is the warmth of Walter's hands. Then she is released and the world returns—” Save yourself while you still can!”

Emily and Anthony roll their eyes. Clearly they've heard these opinions before.

Walter plops back in his chair. “Stars are for gazing,” he concludes, lifting a forkful of strawberry pretzel. “All a bunch of unsubstantiated, undocumented, unearthly crap.”

“Yeah, but that Adam and Eve thing,” Anthony smirks, flipping the cap off his Red Hook and onto the table, like a casino chip. “Apples, snakes, arks, walking on water. Man dying and rising up from the dead. All that's much more credible.”

Charlotte tenses, sensing a debate, but they all go on eating and smiling. It's hard to know when differences of opinion are potential arguments and when they are just conversation.

“Ignore the dissenters,” Anthony says, returning to Charlotte. “The study of astrology is totally fascinating. And valid. Take Emily—she's the quintessential Virgo.”

“Really?” Charlotte feels a little guilty for not siding with Walter, but wants to know. “What's the quintessential Virgo?”

“Self-assured. Overly sensitive. Overly critical.” He grins, knowing how apt a description it is, and takes a swig of beer. “Hungry for knowledge.”

“Really?” Charlotte says again. It's strange to hear her complicated daughter summarized so neatly. “That does sound like you, Em,” she says, before the warning look on Emily's face stops her from saying more.

But the boys are rabid for information. “So tell us what Emily was like as a kid,” says Walter. “Was she a troublemaker?”

“Any bedwetting?” from Anthony.

“First words?”

“Really embarrassing outfits? Haircuts? Imaginary friends?”

“Start from the beginning,” Walter says. “What was she like as a baby?”

It feels unusual for Charlotte to be in this position, the one telling the stories; usually, it's Emily who is revealing her.
“Well,” she says, knowing she must tread lightly. Emily's face is vague: not pouting, not smiling, but almost deliberately blank. She's looking at the wall slightly to the left of Charlotte, as if not wanting to admit she's listening. “She was born early. By almost three weeks.”

“Wow,” Walter says, “a preemie,” and squeezes Emily's knee. Charlotte can practically feel her daughter flinch.

“I guess she must have been eager to get going,” Charlotte says. The boys laugh and she smiles, warming to her analogy. “She couldn't wait to get out, I guess. We hadn't even decided on a name yet. Joe—” She pauses. “That's Emily's father.”

No one reacts. Of course they know who Joe is. God knows what they know.

“Yes, well. Joe always joked about naming her after himself. Jo. But the girl's name—with no
e.
”

Anthony winces. “That's so
Facts of Life.
”

“I thought he was kidding,” Charlotte says, “but sure enough, after she was born, he tried to do it.”

Walter tosses an artichoke heart in his mouth like popcorn. “Were you conscious?”

“Just barely. That was his plan, I think.”

The boys laugh again, at her or with her or both she doesn't know, nor really care. She thinks of the son she's always imagined raising, the boy with the messy bedroom and untied shoelaces and voracious appetite. Anthony and Walter could be his older, slightly healthier counterparts. She suspects they are humoring her a little, doting on her a bit too kindly, but with boys it all seems so affectionate somehow. Maybe it comes from the natural distance sons put between themselves and their mothers, the intense way they guard their private lives, their awareness of all that would worry their mothers if only they
knew. Sons feel guilty about their mothers not knowing, yet love them even more for not knowing, which translates into an apologetic kind of sweetness. With daughters, the relationship is more open, so the teasing is more literal, more personal, and can sting a little.

“So how did you decide on Emily?” Walter uncaps a beer.

“Well,” Charlotte says, “as it turned out, we ended up staying in the hospital a few extra days. They wouldn't let Joe stay overnight—they had some kind of policy—but before he left he bought me some things. A book, a box of butter creams, and flowers. Daisies, I think.”

Was it daisies? She hasn't thought of that gift in years.

“It might have been daisies,” she qualifies, just in case. “I know he bought it all in the drugstore by the hospital. It came in a plastic bag like you get at drugstores. But Joe had this yellow necktie in his pocket. He'd been wearing it when he got the call at school—he was in the middle of teaching and wasn't expecting it, it was still so early—and he was so surprised he ran out of the classroom and left everything behind. His grade book, students' papers, everything.” That he'd done this hadn't surprised her, but it had bothered her a little. She'd imagined his students tearing through his notes, erasing their grades and penciling in new ones. Now, though, the gesture has a certain charm, a spontaneity she finds, for maybe the first time, appealing.

“Anyway,” Charlotte says. She's drifted far off track. “This yellow necktie, it had been stuffed in his pocket for two days.”

Walter gives her a nod of encouragement.

“And when he walked in with my present, it had this huge silly bow on it.” She can still picture that yellow necktie ribbon, limp and grinning. She can see Joe loping into the room with it,
all loose limbs and kisses. He'd set the flowers on her bedside table, fed her chocolates from his fingertips.

“So where did the name come in?” asks Anthony. His expression is kindly, tolerant. Charlotte recognizes it as the look on the faces of younger generations when they indulge older generations in their stories, stories that promise to be dramatic and romantic but come across as mild, disjointed, rambling.

“Yes,” she says, chastising herself for taking so long. “The name. It came from the book Joe bought—
Wuthering Heights.
”

“Emily Brontë.”

She nods. “I never read it myself. It was Joe's idea.”

Something flickers then across Emily's face. Not just disappointment, but something deeper: a lack of surprise. Of course she didn't read it, Emily is thinking, and Charlotte wishes suddenly, desperately, that she had. She can hear how she must sound to them, deferring to Joe, as she always has:
Joe
chose the book,
Joe
chose the name,
Joe
bears all the responsibility and takes all the credit. Joe, she is sure, has read
Wuthering Heights.

“I was so tired,” she explains, for the sake of her story and herself. “Exhausted. And then, with the baby at home, practically all I had time to read was the
TV Guide
—”

Anthony smiles. He forgives her. Charlotte doesn't dare look at Emily. She fixates on her food instead, the strawberry gelatin looking obscenely bright—
American,
she thinks—in the center of her plate.

“But wait,” Walter says, sounding concerned. “Why did you have to stay in the hospital so long?”

Charlotte looks up, thankful for the change of subject. “Well, at first, because Emily was underweight.”

“But that's not surprising, right?” he asks quickly. “Since she was early?”

“That's true. But when she was two days old, she got jaundice—”

Walter's hand moves back to Emily's knee. Her tongue ring clicks.

“—so they had to put her in a special kind of crib, like an incubator, except it shines a special kind of light.”

“Was she really yellow?” asks Anthony.

“For a day or two. Then she was, well, you know. White.”

“How about the delivery?” Walter wants to know. “Was it an easy delivery?”

“Wal—” Emily blurts, then expels a frustrated sigh.

“What? It's important, Em. It's probably a good indicator of how yours will go.”

Charlotte pauses. Emily's face looks hard, and Charlotte realizes then that her daughter's annoyance isn't about the story. The impulse rises in Charlotte to warn Walter, tell him to stop crowding her, stop protecting her, that she's seen this look on Emily's face before.

“I wouldn't call it easy,” Charlotte says, carefully. “It was long, about thirty-six hours. And my blood pressure was dropping on and off.”

A look of genuine pain crosses Walter's face, and Charlotte summons what she hopes is a big, reassuring smile. “Don't worry,” she says. “Emily's tougher than I am.” She looks back to her daughter, but she is looking only at Walter, at his strong hand resting on her leg.

When Walter asks her to come out to the barn, Charlotte is finishing up the dishes. She'd insisted on doing them, and Emily hadn't fought her on it, retreating to the living room with a library book and a pair of furry bootlike slippers, curling up
before the fire Walter had started in the wood stove. Anthony had gone upstairs to pack.

“I want to show you something,” Walter whispers, beckoning Charlotte to the door. “Hey, Em!” he calls. “We're going to the barn. Gonna show your mom my stuff.”

The evening sky has settled into a sleepy purplish black. The stars are beginning to pop, white, clear, unfiltered by artificial patio light. The stars look cold, the same raw cold that's pinching Charlotte's earlobes and nose. She hugs her sweater around her as she and Walter pick their way across the yard, comfortably silent. Past the vegetable garden, defunct for the winter. Past the pair of striped beach chairs. On the ground between the chairs, Charlotte notices a Chock Full O'Nuts coffee can filled with crushed cigarettes. She tenses instinctively, thinking of the smoke and the baby.

“Ant,” Walter says.

“Hm?”

“Ant's the smoker. Mara, too, when she's in a mood.” He nods at the ground. “In case you were wondering.”

God bless him. Charlotte might actually love this boy. They walk on, feet shushing through the fallen leaves. Anthony was leaving the next morning, and throughout the evening Charlotte had increasingly found herself wishing he weren't.

“I guess he must be leaving early,” she says. “That must be a long drive, to D.C.”

“About eight hours, I think.”

“It's such a pretty city,” Charlotte says. She's drawing on a single day trip she and Emily took in 1990. “All those monuments,” she adds, as if to prove she's been there.

“Impressive,” agrees Walter. They've fallen into step now, wading through the leaf piles, Charlotte following the broad
outline of his back against the sky. “I don't envy the guy, though.”

“Oh?”

“He's got it rough down there. Mara's people are so old-school it's—”

Completely fucking nuts,
Charlotte thinks.

Walter pauses. “Basically, they're not happy Ant's not white.” He looks at her and raises his eyebrows, anticipating her incredulity. “They want her to end up with some frat kid with a corporate job and a good bloodline.”

Charlotte flashes to the picture of the man and woman framed in Mara's bedroom. They had looked so kind, so wholesome. Then she winces, remembering her own initial impressions of Walter—her quick conclusions, knee-jerk reactions—and is thankful to the darkness for concealing the shame on her face.

As they near the barn, it gets a few degrees darker, the eaves blocking out the moonlight. “Watch your step,” Walter says, pushing the door open. Inside it's pitch-black, windowless, smelling of raw wood and earth. It's cold too, like the inner sanctum of a church, pumped full of a cool air that seems otherworldly, without a source. She hears Walter fumbling by the wall, then a flashlight pierces the darkness. She follows the beam with her eyes as it alights on something in the corner: round, dark, chest-high.

“It's for Em,” Walter says, “for the baby.” The circle of light widens as they approach it, and after a moment, Charlotte realizes it's a cradle. Walter stops about a foot before it and caresses the wood with his flashlight. Charlotte can see the intricacy of detail: scalloped edges of the horizontal bars, detailed etching on the front and back panels, curves of the vertical rungs like lapping waves.

“I'll cushion the bottom,” he says, maybe misinterpreting Charlotte's silence for concern, but it is just the opposite: she is awestruck.

“No, I—I think it's beautiful.”