The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (4 page)

The next morning, driving to the Super Fresh, Charlotte is humming. The sun is shining. She is right on schedule. Emily is on her way. She reviews her mental Emily checklist: lettuce, tomatoes, bell peppers (red, green), grapes, Boca Burgers, soy milk. She assumes Emily won't be here for lunch; New Hampshire is a good six hours away. Still, it's possible she could arrive by midafternoon. It would mean leaving New Hampshire by dawn, probably—but who knows. Maybe they're early risers. They're nature types, after all. A happy vegetarian family living in the wilds of New Hampshire.

Charlotte gives her head a shake, airing out the cynicism. She wants to be home by noon regardless, in case Emily calls from the road. She might be running late, or lost. The condo is only about fifteen minutes from the house on Dunleavy Street, but still, Emily's never been there. Charlotte doesn't have an answering
machine (a point Emily argued with her about regularly) but maintains she doesn't need one. “Anyone who really needs to reach me will call me back,” is her defense. She won't admit the real reason: she doesn't want to record an outgoing message because she hates the sound of her voice on tape.

She is humming the
Today Show
theme—pitch perfect, she thinks—when, two blocks from the Super Fresh, traffic stops. Charlotte cranes to see around the massive back of an SUV and glimpses a long line of taillights. R
OADWORK
A
HEAD,
says the sign propped tiredly in the breakdown lane. The car behind her lets out a long honk. Charlotte's fingers tighten on the wheel. She feels her temples start to pound, her careful itinerary unspool. She can hear the phone ringing inside her empty condo as she sits here, hour upon hour, in a clot of giant, overheating SUVs. She imagines herself standing on the hood of her Toyota, shouting: “My daughter is coming! I must be let through!” at which point the traffic will part and a squad car will arrive, siren wailing, to escort her to the Super Fresh like a pregnant woman in labor.

The car behind her honks again. Charlotte glances into the rearview mirror. It's a woman in a tailored blouse, talking agitatedly on her cell phone. A businesswoman, Charlotte thinks, and feels a pinch of guilt for what Emily calls her “life of leisure.” Charlotte has never worked full-time. When she was married, Joe worked, and she stayed home with Emily. Then when Emily was starting third grade, a year after Joe left, Charlotte's mother died—two years after her father, neatly bracketing Joe's departure—leaving behind not only life insurance but a surprisingly large savings account. She'd never known her parents had that kind of money; they'd always scrimped and saved like they were on the brink of ruin. At the time it had seemed like a sign: work
wasn't financially necessary, so she should stay at home and be with Emily. But deep down, as Charlotte grieved for her parents, sifted through their house, packed up her father's books she'd never read but couldn't bear to give away, guilt gnawed at her insides. Because she knew it was her parents' deaths, and their lifetime of frugality, that freed her to do what she really wanted: stay home, take care of her child, and avoid the world.

She stares hard at the bumper sticker in front of her:
PROUD PARENT OF AN HONORS STUDENT AT MHS!
Mentally, she recites all the things she still has to do before Emily's arrival: make egg salad, make fruit salad, vacuum, clean the bathtub. Last time Emily came to visit, she was fanatical about her bath taking. She talked at length about the bath's “healing properties,” the various salts and soaps, oils and beads, how necessary they were to one's “spiritual well-being.” (Charlotte herself never takes baths, too preoccupied by how easy it would be for someone to break in while she was in there.) Last week, she went to the Millville Mall and picked up some lavender bubbles and a “bath glove.” She'd never heard of one, but the saleswoman told her it was very popular. She called it “restorative” and “revitalizing.” The very ambiguity was its selling point; if it was unfamiliar to Charlotte, chances were Emily owned five.

Now, Charlotte digs her nails into her palms. No point in getting upset, she reasons. Nothing she can do about her checklist from in here. She decides to try being mindful—in part because mindfulness is supposed to be particularly effective in traffic, in part because she knows Emily will be quizzing her on it later. In August, Emily sent her a book called
The Miracle of Mindfulness.
It was her personal copy and had her excited reactions spilling into the margins, asterisks and exclamation points and comments like
YES!
or
WALTER.
Charlotte had picked loyally
through a chapter or two, more interested in Emily's notes than the book itself. She tried to grasp the concept of meditation, but just didn't get it. To sit alone with her thoughts?
Her
thoughts? She could think of nothing less relaxing.

“It isn't really about
thinking,
Mom,” Emily had explained over the phone. It was the week Emily moved into the alternative living arrangement, and she was talking to Charlotte while she unpacked. “It's kind of the opposite. Like being really inside your body, not your mind.”

She paused, and Charlotte heard a zipping sound.

“It's being engaged in what you're doing while you're doing it,” Emily said. “Like, if you're stuck in traffic, instead of spazzing, just stop and
be
in the traffic. When you're doing laundry, really
experience
the moment of doing laundry. Do the best laundry you've ever done.”

How in the world Emily came across these things Charlotte had no idea. It wasn't just her youth. Charlotte had been young once and hadn't found herself exposed to radical approaches to grading report cards and doing laundry. She had lived as she lived, known what she knew. But with Emily, new ideas seemed to just land in her lap. Charlotte might have chalked it up to a liberal arts education if her daughter hadn't always been this way. When she was nine, and Charlotte took her on a day trip to Philadelphia, Emily grabbed at every crumpled piece of paper strangers thrust at her on the street. Greenpeace literature. Concert flyers. Psychic hotlines. Anti-Bush propaganda. “Thank you,” she smiled, stuffing all of it in her Hello Kitty backpack. Once, when Emily was in eighth grade, Charlotte had come home to find her sitting on the back porch after school, snacking on trail mix with two ambassadors from the Church of Latter-day Saints.

It was wonderful that Emily was so engaged in things—so
interested.
But most of the time, Charlotte found her daughter's ideas exhausting. She preferred the concrete world. Coupons to snip. Bathtubs to scrub.
Jeopardy!
every night at seven. Lean Cuisines to microwave for three to five minutes. She couldn't admit this to Emily, but she had no interest in adopting a new philosophy, a new religion. She didn't want to make her life more complicated, not at this stage. Besides, having opinions invited differences of opinion, which invited conflict. Charlotte believed more strongly in avoiding conflict than she did in any stance or slogan. It might sound lame, or weak, or passive, but she didn't feel a need to be a highly opinionated person. Some people just weren't cut out for it.

On the phone, explaining mindfulness, Emily's voice had alternated between loud and muffled. Charlotte had pictured the portable pinned under her daughter's chin, resting in the bony hollow of her collarbone. She hadn't seen Emily's new home and naturally was imagining the worst. Brown tap water. Moldy tub tiles. Weeds growing through the floorboards. Roommates in bare feet or bath towels or worse.

“Hang on a sec,” Emily said, and Charlotte wondered what she was doing. Talking to one of her new family members? Talking to Walter? Kissing Walter? Unzipping Walter's—She blinked away the thought.

“Sorry. Back.”

Charlotte heard the clicking sound that she recognized as Emily's tongue ring swatting against her teeth. It was a habit that usually signaled something was making her agitated. Charlotte wondered if it was their conversation, or something else.

“What was I saying?”

“I was doing the best laundry I'd ever done.”

“Right.” Emily paused, exhaled a long breath. For a second, Charlotte was convinced she detected Walter's breath on the line too. Maybe he was on a different extension, listening to their conversation. Worse, maybe his face was huddled next to Emily's, nibbling her ear above the phone.

“Basically,” Emily said, “mindfulness comes down to living in the moment.”

“Right.”

“No matter what you're doing. Even if it's the most boring, mindless thing in the world. Don't you think that makes so much sense?”

“Oh, yes,” Charlotte answered automatically. At the moment, her main concern was not sounding foolish, especially not with Walter possibly listening. Maybe, if she acted as though she had a firm handle on this mindfulness business, they could move on to something else.

“The whole practice really boils down to
awareness,
“ Emily went on.

Charlotte felt the beginnings of a headache, each temple a pulsing dot of pain.

“Being aware of your breath. Being aware of your body.”

“I
am
aware of my body,” Charlotte snapped, a touch more defensive than she meant to be. Emily's tongue ring clicked, twice.

Well, it was true: she
was
aware of her body. She was meticulous about her doctor's appointments. She had regular mammograms and dentist's cleanings. She knew all there was to know about what had killed her parents: her father's cancer (stomach, liver, and finally brain, phases of hope and hopelessness strung out over seven years like some kind of extravagantly awful tease) and her mother's sudden heart attack two years later. She was
aware of the risk factors, vigilant about the symptoms. She'd memorized the cycle of her seasonal allergies, her stubborn patches of dry skin, the right eyelid that twitched when she was tired. “I'm in perfect health,” she said. “Just ask Dr. Weiss.”

Emily laughed the
Oh, Mom!
laugh. “Not that kind of aware,” she said.

Charlotte felt tired. She wondered if it was possible that the human body existed on a sensory plane that other people experienced but of which she was biologically deprived, and therefore couldn't understand—like a blind person who couldn't begin to conceive of sight.

Focusing on the bumper sticker in front of her, Charlotte tries hard to be mindful. She listens to her breath: yes, there it is. She hears it. She tries to be
aware
of her breathing—is that the same thing as listening to it?—and notes it going in and out, in and out. She knows this can't be what Emily was talking about, that “being aware of your breath” implies something much deeper, more internal, involving the whole body. But when Charlotte tries to be aware of her whole body, she succeeds only in being aware of her whole belly. It seems to be getting softer lately, rounder, the kind of belly women trap under jeans with elastic waistbands, gardeners and grandmothers, proof that they have paid their maternal dues.

That night at 8:00
P.M.,
precisely the hour Charlotte had decided she would call someone—the Jersey police or the highway patrol or, least appealingly, the roommates in New Hampshire—she hears Emily's car. Charlotte knows the rattle of it by heart, an old barn-red station wagon Emily inherited from Joe when she first got her license. Charlotte rushes to the foyer and presses her face to the cloudy glass blocks framing the doorway,
like a child in a toy store window. She watches Emily's thin silhouette open up the trunk, hoist out a bag. Hears the dull bang of the trunk as she shuts it. Sees her pause, chin lifted, surveying the row of condos for the right address.

Charlotte yanks open the front door and starts waving. “Em! Here!” She pushes open the screen door, and cold air wraps around her, snaking under her sweater sleeves and up the legs of her tan capri pants. “Over here, honey!”

Emily lifts a hand and starts walking across the lawn. Charlotte feels a rush of love just looking at her daughter's familiar shape: the thin shoulders, bowed head, pointy chin. Emily has always been tiny, but what might otherwise come across as fragile is challenged by the utter confidence of her stride. Emily has walked with this same assurance—a near defiance—ever since she was two years old and took her first fearless lunges toward a neighbor's kiddie pool.

Emily arrives at the porch step with an emphatic clomp. “Hi, Mommy.”

“Hi, sweetheart.”

Emily gives her a kiss on the cheek. As she steps inside, Charlotte takes a quick inventory of her daughter: hair, clothes, accessories. It wouldn't be unusual to discover something new, something that's been pierced or altered since the last time she saw her. But today, nothing radical. Nothing permanent, anyway. Emily is wearing rust-colored corduroys, a white T-shirt, brown hiking boots. A wide pink silk bandanna, like something women wore in the 1920s, is swathed around her head and knotted at the nape of her neck, the tail of the scarf tangled in her long, messy brown hair. Her eyes look tired. Sunken. Well, naturally. She must be exhausted from the drive.

“How was your drive?” Charlotte asks. “Any problems? Any traffic? Did you get lost? I was expecting you a while ago—”

“I got a late start.”

There is a pause, a silence that feels tentative, unfamiliar. For a long minute Emily gazes around the house, and Charlotte just watches her, a nervous smile pasted to her face. Then Emily shrugs off her duffel and starts rooting around inside it. “Here,” she says, and holds out a plastic bag full of what look like green flower petals.

“What's this?”

“Arugula. From our garden.”

“Your garden?” Charlotte takes the bag. “You grew these yourself?”

“Me and Walter.”