The Hazards of Sleeping Alone (6 page)

She doesn't want to leave the house. Doesn't want to go out in the chilly night air, drive in the dark, eat something unfamiliar. But, more important than all the things she
doesn't
want to do, is the one thing she wants most in this world: to see her daughter happy. And, like every moment before this, Charlotte will choose her daughter's happiness over her own. Maybe that's what being a mother is all about.

Thai Heaven is in the same strip as Bed, Bath and Beyond, though Charlotte has never noticed it before. From the outside it's easy to miss, the front window obscured by a forbidding film of steam. But inside, the dining room is an explosion of the senses—deep reds and golds, tassels and sconces, brass emblems of elephants and gods. The place is nearly empty, it being 9:00
P.M.
on a Thursday in Millville. The only customers are couples. There is an intimacy about the place—its steaminess and smallness and spiciness—that makes Charlotte uncomfortable.

A pretty Asian woman appears at the front desk. Charlotte gives her the encouraging smile she reserves for people who don't speak English, and is embarrassed when the woman says, “Are you ready to order?” with a perfect American accent.

Emily looks at Charlotte.

“Nothing too hot,” she manages, before Emily begins rattling off questions and selections, fingers flying around the Vegetarian section. Charlotte doesn't mind eating vegetarian when she's with Emily. She's not hiding the fact that she eats meat, just doesn't see the point in forcing Emily to be around it. She watches her gesture to dishes with several intimidating little red spice leaves lined up next to them. One involves something ambiguously described as “brown sauce.”

Maybe she's better off not knowing. She takes a seat by the
door and occupies herself by dropping mints into her palm with a tiny silver spoon until Emily is done.

By the time they return to the condo, the bottom of the brown bag is damp with some unknown seeping sauce. Charlotte agrees to try a little of everything—what choice does she have?—and cringes as Emily piles her plate high, all of it drenched in sauces and spices, colors and flavors running together in an indefinable wet mess.

Charlotte holds her tongue and says, “It all looks delicious!” When she tries what looks like a relatively safe piece of celery, all she can taste is heat.

“So?”

“Good,” she manages, taking a gulp of water. “Very interesting.”

Emily laughs. “If you don't like it, you can say so.”

“It's not that—it's just hotter than I'm used to.”

Her water is gone before she's made it through the first three bites.

“So,” she says, grabbing the Brita pitcher and getting up to refill it. “Tell me all about your house. Is it all decorated?”

“Pretty much.”

“Pretty much? What do you need?” Charlotte turns on the tap water, sticks a finger in it, lets it run until it's cold. “I know there's always those odds and ends you don't think of before you're actually in the place … shower curtains, can openers, kitchen towels. Tomorrow we can take a ride to Bed, Bath and Beyond, and I'll buy you whatever you need.”

“But we don't need anything.”

“You must need
something.
And I just got a coupon in the mail. Twenty percent off any purchase over—fifteen dollars, I think.” She plucks a clean bowl from the dish rack and holds
it under the icemaker. At the churning sound, Emily looks up.

“Icemaker,” Charlotte explains. She was hoping to sound nonchalant, but even she can hear the note of excitement in her voice.

Charlotte carries the pitcher and bowl to the table. “It's just that sometimes the things you need for a new house don't occur to you until you see them in the store.” She drops two ice cubes in her glass. “Just the other week, I was out shopping when I saw this soap dish and realized I needed one. Remember how on Dunleavy Street, the soap dishes were built into the walls? Here, I had my soap just sitting on the sink, which was fine, but the soap dish looks so much nicer.” She takes a sip of water. How mundane her life must sound. “Besides, I want to buy you something. Something fun. You need a housewarming gift. It's your first house!”

“But there's really nothing we need.” Emily shrugs. “We just deal, you know? Walter built some shelves. Anthony has this great old trunk we're using as a coffee table. Mara made some tapestries and rugs. We're pretty self-sufficient.”

Charlotte looks down at her plate. She often feels, when talking to Emily, as if she's dodging tiny, invisible barbs. She doubts they are intentional; most likely, they are the product of her own insecurities. She and her daughter just live so differently, think so differently, that she could take virtually any comment Emily makes and twist it into a subtle criticism even if it wasn't meant that way.

“Yes, well, I guess you are.” Charlotte forces her fork into a spongy broccoli head. “I'm still so impressed by you, growing that arugula.” She pops the broccoli in her mouth, and her tongue goes up in flames.

Emily, she notices, has barely touched her dinner. She feels a flicker of panic as she adds up tonight's strange behavior: her moodiness, her thinness, and now, her untouched plate. Could she have some kind of eating disorder? Charlotte doubts it—Emily has never worried about food, except to make sure it's organic—but then again, these eating problems are so rampant these days. Linda Hill's daughter, Rachel, was just diagnosed (was that the right word, diagnosed?) with anorexia. She'd gone to live at a clinic in Philadelphia. Linda told the book group that Rachel had been hiding rocks in her pockets, trying to trick her doctors into thinking she weighed more than she did.

“You know,” Charlotte ventures, careful to keep her eyes away from Emily's food, “Rachel Hill has anorexia.”

“No kidding,” Emily says. “Rachel Hill hasn't eaten a meal since fifth grade.”

Charlotte looks up. “Fifth grade?”

“She always threw her lunches away in the cafeteria.”

“Fifth grade?” Charlotte repeats. “How in the world would a fifth-grader even know to
do
a thing like that?”

“Easy.” Emily twines her legs onto her chair lotus style. “Girls in this generation grow up much faster. It's a biological fact: puberty now starts earlier than it used to. So being in fifth grade is the same as being, I don't know, thirteen.”

Charlotte puts down her fork.

“If you ask me,” Emily continues, picking up a chopstick, “schools need to stop showing filmstrips in health class. Do they really think kids watch them and worry about overdosing on drugs or starving themselves to death? Wrong.” She jabs the chopstick in the air for emphasis. “They watch them and get ideas. They leave class psyched to try out bulimia or take some Ex.”

Charlotte stares at her daughter. Her daughter, who is so startlingly, endearingly, terrifyingly honest. Charlotte reminds herself, as she has many times before: I'd rather have an honest child than an evasive one.

“Well,” Charlotte says, picking up her fork, “Rachel's at a clinic in Philadelphia.” She struggles to keep her voice even. “Inpatient.”

“That's great. Good for her.”

“Apparently she's been putting rocks in her pockets.” She can't help but feel a hint of pride, relaying this tidbit of inside information. “To trick the doctors into thinking she's heavier than she is.”

“Yeah, I've heard that.”

Naturally. Nothing she could reveal would surprise Emily. She reaches for her water. At this rate, she'll be up all night.

“One of my students was in a clinic last year,” Emily says, absently poking the chopstick at the palm of her hand. “Her parents forced her to go when she started growing fur.”

Charlotte almost chokes. “Fur!”

“It's the primal survival instinct kicking in. If the body gets too thin, it gets cold because there's not enough fat to keep it warm. It starts growing fur to protect itself.”

Charlotte is speechless. Emily sounds more animated than she has all night.

“It's amazing, isn't it? At the end of the day, humans are all just animals, you know?” She shakes her head in fascination. Not a morbid fascination, but a genuine awe for the natural workings of the world. “It's really incredible, if you think about it.”

Well, Charlotte thinks, at least she's not being so listless. She'd rather Emily be acting animated and fascinated, fur and all.

With renewed energy Emily turns to the shelf under the window, where Charlotte keeps miscellaneous piles. Two packs of moving announcements she bought six weeks ago and hasn't been able to bring herself to open. The Book Group snack schedule. A pink soap shaped like a hippo that she saw in the mall, thought was cute, then never used, realizing she didn't want to watch it disintegrate bit by bit each day. On the bottom is her dust-filmed laptop. It's Emily's old computer, the one she used in high school and gave to Charlotte when she left for college and Joe bought her one that was “cutting-edge.” Emily had encouraged Charlotte to use it as a journal, but she was so confounded by the technology that the few times she tried to use it, she only got frustrated. It froze on her two years ago, and she hadn't opened it since.

Charlotte braces herself for a comment on the unused computer, the unsent moving announcements, but Emily reaches instead for a book with a bright logo stamped on its cover. “What's this?”

“I didn't choose it,” Charlotte says quickly. She knows Emily's opinions on corporate book clubs. “It's for my group.”

“You still do the group?”

“The second Saturday of every month.”

Emily looks up. “Isn't that this Saturday?”

“Well, yes, but I'm not going, obviously. Not with you here. I'm still reading the book, though, for, you know. Pleasure.”

Emily scans the inside flap.

“So,” Charlotte says. She knows she has to ask sooner or later, and the brink of a book discussion seems as good a time as any. “How are things with Walter?”

Emily lets the book fall shut. “Fine.”

Charlotte pauses, a forkful of brown rice halfway to her
mouth. It's the first time she's ever heard Emily mention Walter with anything short of unbridled enthusiasm. “Honey?” She puts the fork down. “Did something happen?”

“No.”

“Then what is it?”

“It's nothing.” Emily tosses the book back on the shelf. “I don't want to talk about it.”

“So it's something.”

“Mom,” Emily warns. “I'm serious.”

Charlotte watches as Emily pokes at her food with a chopstick. She knows if her daughter doesn't want to talk, there will be no convincing her otherwise.

“Okay.” Charlotte nods. “Fair enough.”

Emily doesn't look up. Watching her, Charlotte realizes that this entire evening—Emily's moodiness, her quietness, her lack of appetite—now makes sense. Emily doesn't have an eating disorder. She isn't upset about the condo. She's having problems with Walter. Charlotte doesn't know why she didn't suspect this in the first place. In retrospect, it's obvious—inevitable. Living together was such a big step, an
adult
step, they were bound to have trouble. They couldn't have known how hard it would be, no matter how in love they were. Besides, it only makes sense that Emily's fascination with Walter would fade eventually. She's always lived from cause to cause, passion to passion, phase to phase. When one hobby loses its novelty, she throws herself into the next, and the next, and there's nothing like utility bills and dirty socks and caking toothpaste tubes to speed up the process.

As sorry as she is, Charlotte can't help but feel relieved. She doesn't know what she would have done if Emily didn't like to come visit. And although she'd never admit it, she feels the tiniest bit validated. She's known all along Walter and Emily weren't
right for each other. In fact, she's always known exactly what kind of man Emily will settle down with. He'll be her opposite: proper, reserved, conservative. The man who provides the sense and steadiness to counter her impulsiveness, contest her radical ideas, soften her stubborn will.

Emily, of course, would hate that Charlotte presumed to know this, so she's never told her. She doesn't need to. She is secure in her prediction. She knows that one day—maybe at Emily's wedding reception, as Charlotte raises a glass of wine, wearing a pale blue dress with mother-of-pearl trim—she will say:
Even back when my daughter was young and impulsive, even when she got that pierce in her tongue
(laughs),
I always knew she would settle down with a man like …

“So what about you?”

Charlotte blinks, refocuses. “What about me what?”

“Do you have a man in your life? A
beau?
“ She leans on the word just enough to undermine it.

“Emily.” Charlotte reddens. “Don't be ridiculous. Have you seen a parade of men lining up at my door in the past fifteen years?”

“And? That doesn't mean it can't happen. Maybe now's the perfect time. You have a new place. You have time on your hands. You're only forty-seven. There have to be some eligible bachelors in The Heights.”

On the surface, her words sound supportive, but Charlotte can hear the hint of a challenge underneath. Emily is prying into her mother's personal life in exchange for Charlotte prying into hers.

“Don't be silly.”

“Why is that silly? It's the exact
opposite
of silly. It's what people do.”

Charlotte stabs at her plate. “I have plenty of things to do.”

Emily pauses. Charlotte knows well what her daughter thinks about the “things she does.” She's never watered down her opinions on Charlotte's lack of career (“It's not about
needing
to have one, Mom, it's about
wanting
to”) or the eight college credits Charlotte needs to graduate (“But wouldn't it feel satisfying?”) or the fact that she's never had a “real” job. Which isn't exactly true. Before she was married, Charlotte did part-time clerical work at LaSalle University, where her father taught philosophy. And for two years after Joe moved out, she was an office aide at Emily's school. The pay was low, but with alimony and child support it was enough; plus, it allowed her to be home after school with Emily.