by Lauren Fox
When she was little, four or five, Hannah used to crawl into my lap in the mornings, her hair sticking up in tufts, her little body warm from sleep. She would rest her head on my chest and whisper, “I stayed awake and played in my bed all night! I did not sleep one wink!”
“What do you mean?” I ask again.
“I haven’t been sleeping!” she says, the high, frantic voice of my little girl, and she starts to cry. Without warning the tears are just rolling down her cheeks, a flash flood. “I can’t sleep! I keep thinking it’s like…dying.” She takes a ragged breath and looks at me like she’s drowning, and I’m just standing here, balancing a teddy-bear pancake on a spatula like an idiot, like a clown, doing nothing to save her. “You fall asleep,” she says, “and where do you go? You’re gone. It’s like…it’s like you’re practicing to die!”
Well, okay. I have the urge to cut up this pancake and feed her. Actually I want to chew it up and drop it into her mouth like she’s a baby bird. “Sleep,” I say, as gently as I can, “is what every living creature needs.” At least, I think it is. Do ants sleep? Spiders? “It’s really…Honey, it’s the opposite of dying.”
She shakes her head, holds out her hands in front of her to stop me from hugging her. And I wasn’t even going to hug her! Because I knew she wouldn’t let me. And now I’m just hacking through the underbrush: Why wasn’t I going to hug her, anyway? Because I’m so accustomed to her rejections that I’ve given up? Should I have tried? Are those hands held up in defense just showing me that she needs me even more? My maternal instinct is buried underneath an unexcavated pile of clutter, along with the missing check I wrote for her field trip to the Art Museum and the bike key I lost last year.
“Sweetie,” I say. “You have to sleep.”
She gets up from the table with a clatter of dish and fork and a snort of disgust. “Oh, okay,” she says. Her hair brushes my arm as she breezes past me. “Okay, I’ll do that.”
A month or so after Josie died, we took Hannah to a psychologist, naturally. Dr. Melody van Kamp was a middle-aged woman whose practice advertised specialties in adolescence and grief counseling and, peripherally, pet therapy, about which I always wondered: With, or for? She met with Hannah alone a few times, and then with Chris and me.
“She’s doing really well,” Melody told us. The sun streamed into her cheery office, which smelled like Lysol and was decorated with pictures of dogs, cats, and, oddly, chickens. “She’s not hiding anything. Hannah is open about her feelings, and that’s marvelous. And she’s not defensive, either. A lot of children have their claws out at times like this.” Melody smiled encouragingly at Chris and me. We were perched on opposite ends of a long couch. Chris was studying his thumbnail, and I was trying to catch his eye, because it seemed that Melody van Kamp had confused Hannah with a different child. “Of course, you never know, with adolescents,” Melody continued. “Anything could come up for her at any time. They can seem fine for a long stretch and then go rabid with no warning!” She laughed and gazed out the window. “But that’s parenthood, right?”
Luckily, our insurance covered these sessions.
···
Hannah has gone back up to her room. The doorbell rings: he’s right on time. Even this is a new and jarring development, Chris a tentative visitor in what is still, technically, his own home.
“Come in, come in!” I yell, feeling generous. And because he still has a key, he does.
He walks through the house quietly. In the kitchen, he leans toward me for what I think, with surprise, is going to be an uncomfortable kiss, but which he intends to be an uncomfortable hug, so that, after some maneuvering, our shoulders collide, my forehead bumps into his cheek, and then Chris pats my back twice and quickly moves away.
“Awk!” Josie used whisper to me in weird social situations, an echo of what we sometimes write in the margins of students’ essays. Awk! Awk! The embarrassed cry of the flightless dodo.
“Hannah will be right down,” I say. “What are your plans?” Before last night, my plans for today were to clean the bathroom, buy some groceries, call my mother, and breathe. I think about Cal, and the amazement of my day opens up before me. With a swoop of my arm, I offer Chris a seat at the table, a pancake. He sits, unsure of what to make of me. I set a plate down in front of him.
When I was in middle school and would come home upset about something, a fight with a friend or a bad grade, Helene used to say to me, “The worst has already happened to us.” It was mortifying, of course, but it was also a perversely comforting sentiment. “The loss of our family,” she would say, “is in our bones.” You could make serious hay with that one. She still trots it out occasionally. I want to explain it to Chris now, although I’m certain he wouldn’t understand. I have a date, I would tell him, with an older gentleman. And here is a pancake in the shape of a bunny!
“Life goes on,” Helene sometimes says, “but only if you’re lucky.”
“We need to do a few errands.” Chris’s knife makes a hideous screech against his plate. “Take Mrs. Reinhoffer to the vet.” Mrs. Beverly Jean Reinhoffer is our cat, of whom Chris has full custody. I never liked her and was glad to see her go. Over the last few months, the absence of Mrs. Reinhoffer has, at times, been my sole consolation. She used to jump onto my lap and dig her claws into my thighs if I tried to move her. Also, she had the habit of finding me, wherever I was in the house, and throwing up. “And I want to pick up that part for the dishwasher. I can try to fix it when I drop Hannah off on Tuesday.”
“Thank you,” I say.
“I know we were just at the vet,” Chris says, “but Mrs. Reinhoffer needs shots.”
“Okay.” Does Chris think I care how many times Mrs. Reinhoffer sees the vet? I really don’t care about that cat. “Oh, listen, by the way.” I slide another pancake onto his plate and pull out a chair for myself. “Hannah has not been sleeping well. She says she’s scared to close her eyes. She thinks it’s like dying.” Morning sunlight plays across the kitchen table between us, reflects in Hannah’s abandoned glass of orange juice. I feel, for a brief moment, proud of this intimate knowledge that I possess about our daughter, something private and delicate and mine. In this endless, silent jockeying for position that neither of us would admit to, I am, for one shiny, ugly moment, on top.
And then Chris looks at me in complete confusion. “I know,” he says. He sits up a little bit straighter in his chair. “I know. This has been going on for weeks. Maybe a month. How…” His eyebrows are about to skyrocket off of his forehead. “Iz, how did you not know this?”
I look down at my monkey slippers. They sneer back at me. Stupid human. “She just told me.”
“We’ve been listening to a relaxation CD I got from the library. I bought her some lavender oil for her pillow. I was going to talk to you about signing her up for a yoga class at the rec center.”
“Okay, that’s great,” I say. “Good. Lavender oil. Excellent.”
“I don’t…” He looks out the window and waits a few seconds. The sleeves of the shirt that I bought for him are pushed up on his arms. The hair that I used to run my hands through needs a trim. “This is kind of a big thing you’ve missed, Iz. Our daughter is terrified to sleep.”
“Yes,” I say, fidgeting in my chair, the proximity of our bodies still reflecting the harmony of five minutes ago, not the defensive anger that’s boiling up now.
Hannah has turned on the music again upstairs. It’s a different melody, but a similar bass line thuds down to us, deep and intrusive, the soundtrack to a low-grade panic attack.
“I know that now,” I say. “Is this really the time to rub my face in it? When Hannah needs our help?” I see that I am still holding the spatula. “Good for you, that she’s confiding in you. Maybe next time she shares such a big thing with you, you could let me in on it.”
“Jesus,” Chris says, his voice soft and maddeningly calm. “Uh, I think—”
“What?” Is he asking me to make him more p
ancakes?
“Your pancakes are burning,” Chris says, gesturing toward the stove with the slightest tip of his chin.
And, yes. They are.
···
Chris and I met just after I moved back to Milwaukee, fifteen years ago. I was living with my mother and working part-time as a receptionist at the Fraser Feldman Medical Group, where Helene was the office manager. I got the job through sheer nepotism and hung on to it the same way.
The doctors (that’s what she called them, reverently: the doctors) loved Helene. She was the smiling face of their practice, efficient and organized and compliant in an old-fashioned, may I bring you some coffee? kind of way. I was less efficient and more bored and incompetent, still trying to get over the shock of adulthood. (My favorite thing to do was to say, when people asked me to validate their parking, “You’re excellent at parking!”) But Helene loved having me with her. She introduced me to everyone—patients, consultants, drug reps, valets—with outsize, wildly misplaced pride. This is my daughter, Isabel. My darling daughter! She would pack us identical lunches or treat me to a bagel and soup at the café on the first floor of the building; she’d schedule our breaks together, because she was the office manager, and scheduling breaks was her job. Although I complained about it to Mark—It’s too much! She made me wear her sweater today! I was doing some filing and she complimented me on my alphabetizing skills!—I actually loved working with my mother, basking in her judgment-free love, gossiping about coworkers, stealing gum and M&M’s from her purse. Still, I worked on my résumé during downtime and was counting the days until I could find a teaching job.
Chris limped in on a sunny Monday morning, the first appointment of the day. (Well, there were no windows in the office, so for all I knew the morning sun had given way to dense fog or a tornado or a dust storm; the Fraser Feldman Medical Group was a climate-controlled pod in the heart of a downtown high-rise.) He had a huge brace on his knee, his wrist was wrapped in an Ace bandage, and a large white piece of cotton gauze was taped over his right eyebrow. He was tall and sexy in a wounded way, my favorite kind. He propped himself up on my desk with one elbow and exhaled, smiled at me, and then winced.
“Wow. What the hell happened to you?” I said.
He laughed, then winced again. “It really hurts to smile.”
“Oh. Psychiatry and Mental Health are down the hall.”
He looked at me, baffled. “No, I…I have an appointment with Dr. Feldman. He’s taking out my stitches.”
“Sorry,” I said. “I was just kidding. Because you said, you know, that it hurts to smile, so I…” I was always doing this, cracking dumb, inscrutable jokes in the presence of handsome men. It was as if I were programmed to alienate, as if somewhere deep down I wanted to be single forever.
“Ha,” the handsome man said, shifting his weight. “My appointment is at nine. Christopher Moore.”
I nodded. The office was empty. My mother was in the back, and the doctors hadn’t arrived yet. “Please have a seat,” I said. But Christopher Moore didn’t move.
“I was playing basketball,” he said. “I went for a layup and took an elbow right above the eye. I went down like a bag of bricks.” I could tell he wanted me to be impressed.
“That’s impressive,” I said. I thought sports were stupid, but I managed not to say that. What I did say, after an awkward silence, was “We’re having a special this week, if you happen to also have syphilis. Two for one.” Then my face got so hot I could feel it turning red: a boiled tomato, a roasted pepper, a steamed, dying lobster.
“Noooo,” Chris said, scrunching up the unbandaged side of his face in confusion. “I’m good. Thanks.” Then he walked away slowly toward the rows of empty chairs.
Forty-five minutes later, as I was replaying the whole exchange for the three-hundredth time, Chris hobbled out of Dr. Feldman’s office and stood in front of me. He cleared his throat. “My syphilis is cured!” he announced. A woman in the waiting area visibly flinched and stared at us. “Would you like to go out with me?”
···
“Daddy!” Hannah whirls into the kitchen, carrying her pillow, throws it at Chris. “Mama made teddy-bear pancakes. Do you want some? She could make you some!” Let’s be a family!
Chris pulls her into a hug and kisses her on her head, and the ease of affection between them feels like shards of glass in my chest. “She already gave me some. They were good. But we have to go, Banana. Mrs. Reinhoffer is in the car, and she’s probably mad as heck by now.”
“Heck!” Hannah says. “Do you mean hell?” She grabs her backpack and Clucky. “What’s she doing in the car?”
“We need to stop at the vet,” Chris says, and I notice he’s not meeting anyone’s eyes now. “Mrs. R is due for her shots.”
“Oh, goody! Annabelle! I love her!”
I slide the burned pancakes into the sink, run the hot pan under cold water just to hear the hiss. “Who’s Annabelle?”
“Dr. Lundy. Our vet!” Hannah says. “She’s so great. We love her. She’s going to let me help with some of the animals, she said. Like when they come in for shots, they need someone to just pet them and keep them calm? She said I could come in and do that sometime. Right, Daddy?”
“Yep.” Chris himself looks like he could use some sedation right now. “We’ve got to go now, Hanners.” He looks at me over her head. “I’ll be back Tuesday after school. With the part for the dishwasher. Okay? Bye.”
A few hours later, twenty minutes before Cal is supposed to arrive, I pull my robe tight and sit down with a piece of paper and a pen. I can’t do this. I realized it this morning as the front door slammed behind Hannah and Chris, and the smell of burned pancakes lingered in the air. I can’t. And so, dear Cal,
I have a cold
I have a cold sore
I have a tapeworm
I have a twelve-year-old
I have issues
I’m old
I’m sad
I have a little lower back pain
I’m not looking for a relationship right now
I’m looking for a relationship right now
I need to focus on me
I need to focus on cake
I’m a shell of a human being
I’m so self-absorbed that I managed to overlook my daughter’s debilitating insomnia
I think my (ex?)-husband might be dating a veterinarian named Annabelle
This will never work, because you’re too old and I’m too asshole
The Holocaust
I set my pen down and examine the list, cock my head to blur my vision just a little, let the letters skid and slide and transform into their component blue lines and dots and squiggles before my eyes: mysterious, unintelligible.
And then, with my remaining seventeen minutes, I go upstairs, brush my teeth, and get dressed. I even put on a little makeup.
···
“My mother is eighty-nine,” Cal says in the car on the way to the nursing home—the assisted-living facility, as he scrupulously calls it.
“Eighty-nine is the new seventy-four,” I say, meaning it.
“For some people.” Cal taps his horn at the car in front of us, whose driver is lolling at a green light, texting. “But she’s…she’s eighty-nine. Anyway, thank you again. This will only take a few minutes, and you really should feel free to wait in the car. This is awkward, and there’s no reason for you to—”
I cut him off by putting my hand on his knee. “Cal, it’s fine. I’m happy to come in with you.” He smiles and pats my hand, then moves his back to the steering wheel. “I’ve always wanted to meet your mother,” I say.
“I know. I’m sorry I’ve kept you two apart for so long.”
When Cal walked in the door fifteen minutes ago, I could tell something was wrong. I’d come downstairs and was eagerly waiting for him in the living room, even as my own emotions left me with a feeling of psychic whiplash. But I had exorcised my demons, at least for the day, left them impo
tent on a scrap of paper in the kitchen, and now I was just looking forward to seeing Cal. I even briefly considered seducing him. I had a hunch it would be easy, although I had never actually seduced anyone before.
I invited him in. I thought for a second that he’d been here last night, but then I remembered we’d said goodbye outside. We walked into the living room. There were things I hadn’t noticed just a few minutes ago: a bowl of soggy cereal on the side table next to the couch, a pair of Hannah’s socks in a ball next to the TV. The afternoon sunlight cast a theatrical beam on a tumbleweed-sized clump of dust in the corner. “My house needs a little attention,” I said. “Don’t look at anything too closely.” Including me.
“Okay,” he said. He sat down on the edge of my favorite chair and stared at his feet, sighed softly, then looked up at me with big, sad, regret-filled eyes.
Shit, I thought. So soon. Such a quick turnaround from this morning. I sympathized, though, even as I felt stung; after all, I’d composed that list. What would his excuse be? I don’t want a woman who’s sixteen years younger than I am; I want one who’s thirty years younger? I’m not looking for anyone quite so still-married? Well, I wasn’t going to let him be the one to end this…whatever it was…first. I’d salvage a scrap of dignity from the wreckage.
“Um, Cal,” I said, a little shakily. “I’m so sorry, but I’m not really up for—”
“Isabel.” He cut me off. “I spoke with my mother this morning.” He paused and glanced around the room as if he were just realizing where he was. “She’s elderly. Obviously.” He smiled, or possibly winced. “We speak every morning. Today she seemed…well, she wasn’t herself. She seemed a bit disoriented, or maybe just unusually sad. I tried to convince myself that she was fine and that you and I could still spend the day together. But I’m afraid I do need to go check on her.”
My system flooded with a relief-shame cocktail. I took a breath, delighted that I wasn’t being rejected, then quickly adjusted my face into a sympathetic frown. “It’s okay,” I said. “Of course! Some other time!”