Girlish

by Lara Lillibridge

  Girl raced back to bed before Stepmother turned meaner. She pulled the covers up and promised herself, when I have kids I will never forget what it is like to be scared in the dark. Stepmother slammed their bedroom door shut and dropped the lock back into place.

  Alone in her bedroom, the open closet door made a dark mouth against the wall. All of Girl’s bad dreams lived in the closet, and if she couldn’t get it closed, she knew they would come out as soon as she fell asleep—they always did, just like if she fell asleep with the light on she knew that she’d wake with a headache. Girl threw her weight against the closet door, but it was stuck on a stuffed animal or a Barbie dress, or maybe a paperback book. It wouldn’t close, and she couldn’t bear to be uncovered and vulnerable so close to the closet for very long. She dived back into bed and hugged Scooby-Doo, who was two feet tall and filled with tiny Styrofoam balls so he was hard, not soft, but he was still her favorite and Girl slept every night with her head on his muzzle, which was forever smooshed into a very undog-like shape. Girl had her parents’ old bed and their old, light-blue-and-white comforter, not that Girl could see it in the dark. But Mother used to sleep under it, so it kept some comfort trapped deep in the cotton batting. Girl grabbed her stuffed weasel that had been loved from white to gray, its hard plastic nose tucked up by her face so Girl could find that extra-soft fur behind the ear and rub it on her cheek. She clenched the tail between her knees. Mother bought her plenty of stuffed animals but it was always the ones from Father that became Girl’s favorites. She closed her eyes tight-tight-tight until she saw stars behind her scrunched-up lids. In the dark of her bedroom Girl created an even darker dark inside her tightly closed eyes, lit with retina bursts that looked like jellyfish. Girl filled the void with scrolling lyrics, like the prologue in Star Wars. Words from “America the Beautiful,” or “My Country Tis of Thee”—her fear-crazed brain could only think of the stupid songs they learned in school. Girl never sang in her head any of the songs her mother sang, only empty repetitive ones that held no meaning. An empty structure to hold the fear at bay. “Oh beautiful, for spacious skies …” The tune was easy to remember. The lyrics dismissed Mother as easily as she had abandoned Girl to the night. Girl’s hands finger-spelled the first letter of each word with both hands at the same time, concentrating as hard as she could. Gradually her fingers relaxed, then her shoulders, and finally she slept.

  notes from the fourth wall

  this is a story about mothers and children who are very bad at sleeping

  2008

  “The closest I ever came to losing it was at bedtime,” my mother said. “This was after I divorced your father, before I met Pat. Matt would not go to sleep and I spanked him, and I felt like I could have spanked him forever. So I stopped myself and took you both over to Aunt Kiki’s house and went off on my own for a few hours. The next day I signed up for counseling. I didn’t want to be a person who could even imagine abusing her kids.”

  I left my husband when my youngest was four months old, a few months before my eldest’s third birthday. I worked two jobs. I nursed my baby and tried to get my toddler to eat and we slept all three of us in my double bed. My big boy could only sleep wrapped around my body, one arm underneath my shoulders, the other across my torso, his little hand buried underneath my side. “Don’t burrow!” I’d admonish, but when I was the one holding him, I always tucked my fingers under his back in exactly the same way. We were burrowers, we couldn’t help it. My baby wasn’t a burrower. He would crawl to the end of the bed (which was pushed up against the wall both for safety and because the room was only ten feet square) and sleep far away from us. If he was feeling needy, he’d come sleep on my pillow, his stomach draped across the top of my head.

  2015

  Every night that I don’t take melatonin I have nightmares. Maybe it works, or maybe it’s just a placebo. If I skip my pill, I wake up gasping, my heart thrashing against my ribs like a trapped bird. I should be too old for this shit. I generally can’t remember the dream, just the feel of it. Fear is heavy, like breathing in steam or smoke. I look at my left breast—I can see it pulse above my pounding heart. Little rabbit jerks. Breathe, Lara.

  “You always say you never slept when you were a child,” my mother told me in what she considered affectionate teasing. “You would insist that you didn’t close your eyes all night.” Her look is slightly vengeful, like she’s been waiting for years to show me what a silly child I was. “I’d go into your room at night and you were always asleep, but you’d never believe me when I told you so.”

  “I’ve done research, Mom. I was a frequent night waker, and in children, they often don’t realize they slept, because they are awake so much.”

  “I didn’t know that,” she said, with a look that told me she was appeasing, not conceding. “All I know is that it was so funny, how you said you never slept, but I always saw you asleep, your bed covered in stuffed animals.”

  “I always thought you’d sleep better if you got rid of half of those stuffed animals,” my stepmother said. I changed the subject.

  Do most people wake as frequently as I do? I woke so often as a child; I really did believe that I didn’t sleep. All I knew was that I was always staring at the ceiling. My light fixture was a fluted square with flowers etched into the glass. The plaster ceiling had brush-stroke swirls I knew like my own fingerprints. I always left my door open and the hall light on, so I could still see, but when my parents came to bed, they shut the light off, and the room was only dimly lit by the streetlights outside. I fell asleep staring at the ceiling and woke staring at the ceiling, so it didn’t feel like time had passed.

  Now I know when I wake. I fall asleep on my right side, my body wrapped like a backpack against my lover, my hand tucked under his chest. My stomach fits perfectly in the small of his back. I tuck my left arm up under the pillow, and I wake when it goes numb. Then I flip over to my left side and reach my arm back to rest on his hip. He wakes up and turns over and encircles me with his arm. Later, we move to our backs, and our arms drift across the bed to hold each other’s hands. All night we wake and flop and grasp and touch and sink back into down pillows. When he is out of town, I still wake, my eyes hunting the clock instead of his body. Knowing the time grounds me, returns me to my present self, pulls me back from the dream world that feels more real than this one.

  Whether he is home or away, every night I tune the television to a documentary or podcast before I close my eyes. I cannot sleep in silence. I need sounds to drown out my thoughts: the lists of things I need to do, the essays I don’t know how to finish. Quiet makes my brain louder. If I forget my melatonin, I wake in the early morning darkness with a sharp inhale, the fear clawing at my ribs, the burn in my chest, terror in my lungs. It feels like a craving, but for what, I don’t know.

  2009

  When my youngest was eleven months old, I got him to sleep regularly in a crib, and instead of nursing from my body, he drank soy formula from a bottle. My breasts could not keep up with shared parenting. I put an extra “baba” in his crib, so when he woke up, he could find it on his own and go back to sleep. The baby was the best sleeper of the three of us. Once he was down, I carried my three-year-old down to the living room and put on my Pure Eighties Dance Mix CD. I swayed to the opening stanzas of “Video Killed the Radio Star,” holding my big boy to my chest. This was how I got him to sleep every night since he was an infant. I did aerobics—lunges, knee lifts, and side-steps as the song changed to “Hungry Like the Wolf.” My son and I both had a need for mother-love, we had touch-hunger, empty holes inside our chests. As I danced, I held his head gently against my breast. The CD player spun into track three, and my son’s arms went limp, his head lolling as I swayed. I carried him back upstairs and laid him in his bed. Only then was the night my own.

  2015

  Most of the time I remember only fragments of my dreams, just one or two images, maybe the thread of plot, but I awake swollen with the emotion of it. I wake wi
th the taste of sadness, or love. Sometimes I dream the same dream over and over all night, always waking at the same place. I often wake myself with the word I spent my whole dream trying to enunciate, but instead of help it sounds like hnnnnuh. I will carry a bad dream for a day, sometimes two, unable to leave that murky world that exists on the other side of awake. My boyfriend thinks it is unfair that I tend to blame him for actions he performed only in my dreams. I tell him my dream is a microcosm of my thoughts and unresolved feelings, therefore I can blame him. I think I must be a very hard person to live with.

  2009

  My big boy didn’t even have a bed at his father’s, so he thought this idea of sleeping in his own room at my house was exasperating and ridiculous, not that he used those words. I was trying to stop dancing him to sleep every night, so I laid down in bed next to him, curling my five feet seven frame to fit in the four-foot-long toddler bed. It was a good thing I didn’t weigh much. He rested his head on my shoulder, his arm across my body, fingers tucked in underneath my side. His light-brown hair smelled like boy-child, like his very own person, like mine. I hated when he came home smelling like Daddy’s house, or when his hair kept the musty smell of church, or the powdery smell of Grandma Kathy. To help him fall asleep, I told him a story I crafted off the top of my head about a pet guinea pig—our agreed-upon reward for when he finally slept in his own room all night long. I made up grand adventures for the pig and the boy until my son fell asleep. The pig went to playgrounds, got pulled around in a little red wagon. The pig went to nursery school. Half the time I fell asleep beside my son in that tiny bed, exhausted from his constant night waking. But it was not always this ideal. Some nights consisted of stories and songs and creeping downstairs only to hear him cry, “Mama!” as soon as my foot hit the bottom step. Many nights were filled with his tears and my begging him to please, just this once, couldn’t he go to sleep?

  How do you tell an unbearable story? If I don’t write it down, maybe he will forget the time he wouldn’t go to sleep and I was screaming and he was crying and it was eleven at night and I swatted his bottom through his pajamas once, twice, before I left him sobbing alone in bed, retreating to the porch and dragging the sharp biting smoke of a cigarette deep into my lungs. I needed the smoke to burn me, I needed the ten-minute break to return to who I meant to be. I went back upstairs and held my little boy and told him I was sorry and that he was good and it wasn’t his fault and I held him and rocked him until he fell asleep. He was four years old and this was wrong and I knew better. I knew better because I remembered what it was like to be small and scared in the dark. I never hit him again, and when I ask him about it now, he doesn’t remember it happening. That isn’t enough to absolve me.

  2015

  “Mama, I can’t sleep,” my oldest child, now ten years old, says.

  “Honey, I can’t make you sleep. This is something you have to figure out on your own,” I answer. “I’m not a good sleeper, either. I used to sing songs in my head. You are going to have to find something that works for you.”

  “Well, if I can’t sleep, can I read?”

  “As long as you don’t wake up your brother and stay in bed, you can read as long as you want.”

  Should I have sleep-trained him as a baby, like some of my friends did with their infants, forcing him to cry alone in a crib until he learned to soothe himself? I didn’t have the heart for it. Had all of my bedtime ministrations left him permanently sleep-scarred? Slowly, I have backed away at bedtime. This is the first year I no longer sing lullabies, though I still read a chapter of Diary of a Wimpy Kid to my seven-year-old every night. I’ve outsourced bedtime to the iPod, and let them play talking books on repeat. Now, unless they are sick, once the boys fall asleep, they stay asleep until morning. It’s been years since a nightmare has sent them racing for my bedroom door. If one does have a bad dream, he walks across the bedroom to his brother’s bed and lies down beside him and falls back asleep. Maybe I should encourage them to wake me up instead, I don’t know. I don’t know the first thing about sleep.

  brother and girl against the world

  Brother was always a head taller and a grade ahead, but otherwise he and Girl were as identical as opposite-sex siblings could be: straight brown hair, brown eyes, gawky knees and skinny backs, long stork-like limbs and round stomachs that stuck out like children from Ethiopia on TV commercials. They both had double-jointed thumbs. Like the two-headed dog Orthos in Greek mythology, they were often treated as a conjoined set—Brother-n-Girl, one word, one identity. They played together, bathed together, sometimes even peed at the same time when they had been toddlers, sitting back-to-back on the toilet seat if Mother was in a hurry, Brother’s hot stream splashing Girl’s bottom.

  Brother and Girl were made of the same genetic flotsam. Mother was a separate person from Girl. Father was even further removed. Brother was made of the same DNA and dirt as she was.

  He was the only other person who had the same life as Girl. Mother and Stepmother had never been to Father’s house in Alaska. They had never smelled the odor of jet fuel inside of Father’s plane or felt his condo’s rough carpet itch their bare legs as they sat on the floor watching TV, because Father had no couch. Mother and Stepmother didn’t know how the sun glinted off the water in Alaska’s Prince William Sound where Girl and Brother sailed every summer. Father didn’t know the color of the dirt in the backyard of Mother and Stepmother’s house that got lodged under the children’s fingernails and no one made them clean. Father hadn’t seen the view from Girl’s bedroom window and had never run his fingers over the 1945 inscription in the basement wall behind the water heater.

  Brother was companion and adversary, playmate and competitor. By the time the children entered grade school they fought viciously every day over TV channels, toys, who got the front seat of the car, who looked at the other the wrong way. Brother could hit harder, but Girl grabbed onto his upper arm and dug her fingernails in as deep as they could go. He hit her over and over with his free fist, but she hung on until he called for Mother. Girl couldn’t outhit him, but she could outlast him.

  Brother was cross-eyed and started wearing glasses when he was three, whereas Girl didn’t wear glasses until she was ten. He wouldn’t play Star Wars with her, even though Girl had a Jawa and Princess Leia and promised not to touch his precious AT-AT or Tauntaun. He made her watch G.I. Joe on Saturdays instead of Strawberry Shortcake. There was no taking turns; there was only who got to the TV dial first, and his arms were longer. The rule was, if the children woke Mother up the television went off, so Girl had to give in even though she didn’t want to. Still, though, they walked to and from school together every day, traded books back and forth, and occasionally had to wear each other’s socks.

  The children thought they were poorer than everyone else at school. They weren’t, really, but their parents scrimped and saved for summer vacations and future college expenses. Their parents didn’t lavish the children with Jordache jeans, like their classmates wore. The children’s Toughskins jeans and shirtsleeves were never long enough for their gangly limbs, and their clothes weren’t cool by a long shot—which their classmates were quick to point out with colorful word choices and scornful glances. Brother and Girl despised each other as much as everyone else at school despised them, hating the mirror of uncool they reflected back at each other.

  “Why couldn’t I have been an only child?” Girl asked Mother on an almost-daily basis.

  “Because if I only had one child, I would have only had Brother. He’s oldest. That’s how it works.”

  “That’s not fair!” she protested, even though she was old enough to understand basic biology and timing. Girl occasionally prayed that Brother would get hit by a car, though she knew this was evil and wrong.

  The turning point came when Girl was in fourth grade. It was her birthday, and she wore her favorite pink dress to school. She loved pink, and her sailor dress was dotted pink-on-pink cotton, and even though it didn�
�t have lace or ruffles, Girl felt pretty in it. That day she wore her pink dress with her pink sneakers and the corsage her father had sent. She didn’t understand the purpose of the pin-on flowers. It wasn’t nearly as good as the new Barbie dolls she had been coveting, but at least he remembered her birthday this year. Normally he sent a box in the mail a week or so late, but the flowers had come on time, and she liked being the only one wearing a corsage to school, as if she were someone special.

  Girl and Brother walked home from class together, the strange, old-lady flowers still pinned to Girl’s dress. Rogers Middle School was a mile and a half from their house—they missed the cutoff for busing by three blocks. Girl and Brother always met up in the halls filled with slamming lockers, swinging backpacks, and yelling voices. Even when they were in the middle of a fight, they would never leave the other behind to walk home alone.

  Brother seemed kind of nervous when Girl met him in the hall. He didn’t confide in his sister about his problems, but she could tell he was eager to get out of there as quickly as possible. “Let’s go,” he said, banging closed his gray locker door that still smelled like back-to-school paint. They went out the side door into the sunshine. It was the first week of school, what they called autumn but was still technically summer. Their house was a mile or so from Lake Ontario and the warm wind had just a kiss of September coolness at the edge of it. They walked on cracked sidewalks in and out of shadows cast by maple and oak trees. Brother and Girl cut through the Catholic school parking lot and through the break in the fence behind the plaza. Lots of kids took the same path in sets of twos and threes and fives, leaving a few feet between each cluster.

  When Girl and Brother reached the big, empty parking lot behind the shopping plaza, most of the other kids had turned off toward their own houses—there weren’t that many kids who walked as far as Girl and Brother, and she envied those who had parents willing or able to pick their kids up after school. Girl hated this section of the long trek home. It was ugly and gray and the sun was hot with no trees to give them shade. There were a few scraggly weeds that managed to push their way up through the cracks in the broken concrete and old rusted lampposts to break up the view of the back of the stores. As they got near the shipping doors for Irondequoit Plaza, a kid on a white bike pulled ahead of the siblings and stopped suddenly, cutting them off and almost knocking Girl down.