Prerequisites for Sleep

by Jennifer L. Stone

  “It suits you,” Judith said.

  “This particular gown is part of a special promotion,” the salesclerk said. “Reduced because of the arrival of new stock.”

  Today that special promotion was hanging on the back of her bedroom door.

  They met the rest of the girls at the beauty salon at eleven, Anita’s friends Ingrid and Wendy, and Kevin’s cousin Michelle.

  Ingrid greeted them with exaggerated hugs and kisses that made Anita feel like a plush toy that had been returned after an unplanned absence. “You do realize,” Ingrid teased, “that by this time tomorrow you will no longer be a single entity but part of a pair.”

  Wendy laughed. “Like shoes.”

  “Or salt and pepper shakers,” said Michelle.

  “I don’t know if I should be jealous or relieved,” said Ingrid.

  By the time they left the salon, the sky was clear, the sidewalks nothing but strips of glare. Anita wondered whether or not this had any bearing on her luck, now that both the sun and the rain had made an appearance on her wedding day.

  “Just in time for photos,” Judith said. Leave it to Judith to say the right thing.

  Judith excelled at saying the right thing. After the funeral, she and Anita had returned to the house, which was empty for the first time in days. Someone had tidied up, depriving them of the much-needed busywork. Anita flopped down on the sofa, no longer feeling like the preteen who, just the previous week, had gone to a sleepover with her friends. She had returned the following morning to find a police car waiting in the driveway. Anita resented the loss of her childhood almost as much as she resented her absent mother and father and the stoned kid who ran the red light. Judith came in and sat down next to her. “I always wanted to learn how to play one of those things,” she said, pointing to the Nintendo system on the shelf below the TV. “How ’bout we order a pizza and you can teach me?”

  That night they slowly allowed themselves to laugh and yell at the characters that jumped across the television screen, and then to slip into a realm where silliness prevailed. Afterwards they slept, waking late the following day with a new understanding of the roles they had inherited in each other’s lives, knowing that anything either one of them did from now on would affect the other.

  Judith gave her away. That was something that Anita had insisted on and Kevin agreed. It was only right. They walked down the aisle arm in arm amidst harp music and the rustle of satin and silk, neither one shaking or teary-eyed, no mention of what Anita’s mother or father might have felt. There was no need to; they had stopped dwelling on the past years before.

  “Kevin’s uncle Gerald would be glad to walk you down the aisle,” his mother had suggested, along with several other options, all male, as dictated by tradition. His mother was not one for altering institutions. But she was also not one for fighting small battles, so in the end she agreed.

  Mrs. Sinclair liked Anita and thought of her as hard-working and smart, not some spoiled bimbo who couldn’t see past her next visit to the spa. Although she had always been well-off, the older woman had learned the same lessons that Anita had at an early age; that nothing was to be taken for granted, and that important things can disappear, the way her brother had disappeared into the river; and afterwards, the way her mother had disappeared into the bottle. Of all the girls that Kevin had been involved with, Anita had the most substance. The least she could do for the girl was give her a beautiful wedding. And a beautiful wedding dress, for that matter; no one needed to know of the arrangement made between her and the owner of the boutique.

  “I think I’m switching to autopilot,” Kevin whispered in her ear partway through the receiving line.

  Anita smiled. She could think of nothing better than sitting down and putting her feet up. “Tell me again why we didn’t elope,” she whispered back, while waiting for his grandfather to close the gap in the stream of people. Kevin laughed and bent to kiss her enthusiastically on the mouth. The room burst into a round of applause.

  “Okay, break it up,” said Kevin’s grandfather, leaning forward to peck Anita on the cheek.

  Next in line was Richard. His face, like a statue with stone eyes and a rigid jaw, moved towards her. “Will you be going by Mrs. Sinclair now, or do you intend to keep your own name?” His question surprised her.

  At dinner, Judith made a speech that was both happy and sad. She talked about their life together and about new beginnings, the one they undertook fourteen years earlier and the one that Anita and Kevin were now embarking on. “I believe that Anita can manage anything that comes her way, including you, Kevin,” she quipped, a statement that was followed by laughter, along with whoops and whistles from Kevin’s friends.

  The rest of the day went off without a hitch. Everyone would remember it as a lovely event. Mrs. Sinclair had taken their wishes and transformed them into a choreographed work of art. Anita tried to imagine how Kevin’s mother would use those skills on the many committees and boards that she was a member of.

  She was curled up in the king-size bed next to Kevin. He had slipped quickly into sleep after they had made love. To her, sleep didn’t arrive as easily so she slid out from under the covers and pulled on the complimentary terry robe. The hotel room was on the top floor, overlooking the harbour. A fog rolled above the water, looking pinkish-yellow from city lights that never allow darkness to settle or stars to shine. Standing in the window, Anita continued to revisit the day in her thoughts. For her this was a nightly habit, rehashing the events of her life in twenty-four-hour segments, one of her prerequisites for sleep.

  Richard had come to the wedding. Richard, who got through university the way she did, on part-time jobs and student loans, barely making ends meet as he worked his way towards being a heart specialist. She knew he would be excellent; he had already filled a hole in hers.

  “It’s up to you,” he had said to her, “but I think you should go. Why stay home all alone when you can go to a party and enjoy yourself?”

  So she decided to go, taking transit to the closest intersection, then walking the rest of the way. The music could be heard all the way down the street, mostly bass, turned up and throbbing like a heart. It started to rain and she was without an umbrella, so she ran. A little later, when she was standing in a crowd, chatting and sipping a rum and Coke, she felt two hands rest on her shoulders and heard a voice from behind. “Even soggy, you’re a sight for sore eyes.”

  That night with Kevin was a fluke. Who would have thought they would run into each other at a party that Richard couldn’t attend because he had to work? She and Kevin had been together several years earlier, the summer she was eighteen. No commitments; there were universities to attend and careers to secure. Kevin was heading off to an Ivy League college in the States to study business, while Anita had been accepted into the chemistry programs of three top local universities and had picked the one closest to home. Sex was something that had happened between them. It happened again, aided by memories and alcohol.

  There was the baby to think about. She had been on antibiotics at the time, for an ear infection. A warning came with her birth control pills. She had read it only once in her teens when she first started taking the oral contraceptives. She considered an abortion, discussed the option with her doctor. He told her she needed to make a decision quickly, but she let the deadline pass. It wasn’t that she was religious or that she thought it was wrong. Some days it seemed perfectly right; other days, not right for her.

  The child could belong to either of them; both had similar features. Kevin was so excited when she told him. “We’ll get married,” he said. “I hope it’s a girl.”

  Anita had weighed her options and made her decision. It was a decision she would consider every time she handed over her baby to the nanny that Kevin’s mother offered to procure, and when she returned to university to get her master’s debt-free. Later she would consider it again wh
en her daughter walked down the aisle as flower girl at Judith’s wedding and upon seeing a photo announcing that Richard had become Head of Cardiology at St. Michael’s Hospital. She would consider it every night for the rest of her life. This was something she knew for a fact while standing in the window watching the shoreline become obscure.

  Thomas and the Woman

  Thomas woke up on a Tuesday morning to find a woman in his house. She was standing at the counter in his narrow kitchen with a spatula in her hand, flipping pancakes in his electric frying pan. He nearly bumped into her, not being fully awake and, of course, not expecting a person, let alone a woman, to be blocking his path to the coffee maker. He couldn’t entirely recall the previous evening to provide an explanation for her presence. His memory offered only vague glimpses of a barbeque with a horseshoe pit and chests of beer on ice. She gestured towards his table, squished against the wall at the far end, where there was a place set with a fork and knife, a mug of coffee and a glass of orange juice. Easing around her, he sat in his chair, picked up the glass of juice, and downed it in two gulps while she placed a plate in front of him stacked with several pancakes that appeared to have had thin wedges of apples pressed into them before they were flipped. He ate the way hungry men do, concentrating solely on the food and the travels of the fork from the plate to his lips. Afterwards, eyeing the woman over the rim of his coffee mug, he decided that it was good. It being the food and the preparation of the food and the woman standing in his kitchen.

  She liked to do things. Clean windows. Make curtains. Hang pictures. She had two large photos of lilies, one with yellow flowers, one with orange, nicely matted and framed, and decided that one of these should hang in the front hall, on a particular wall that faced the entrance and was about four feet wide. She picked the yellow one, lilies the colour of sunshine, and centred the frame horizontally on the wall, placing it at eye level and holding it there with a hook and picture wire. Three little taps with a hammer, that was all it took. Then she stood back and looked, tilting her head, first to the left and then to the right, trying to decide if it worked. For three days, every time she walked past the yellow lilies, she stopped and looked. On the fourth day, she took them down and hung the orange lilies up in their place. The orange was crisper and more vivid, but again she hesitated every time she happened by. After two more days, she turned the picture from landscape to portrait, causing the three large blooms to form a triangle the shape of a female’s pubic area. The largest flower, positioned on the bottom, was angled in a way that was both daring and inviting. Then she stood back, palms together in front of her with her fingertips resting on her chin, and nodded her head with approval because now she was sure that the photo called out for attention.

  There was property, several acres, that went with Thomas’s house. She decided to put in gardens, starting small at first, with a few plots of vegetables and some flowers and shrubs around the building’s foundation. Slowly they grew, not just the flowers and vegetables but the actual size of the planted fields, until almost every square foot produced something. Something to harvest.

  And harvest she did. She set up a market at the side of the road next to the house, and sold tomatoes, broccoli, lettuce, asparagus, kohlrabi, carrots, and beans. And bouquets of lilies and gladioli and mixtures of coneflowers and black-eyed Susans. In October, her pumpkins were much in demand. Come November and December, her preserves and wreaths and sprigs of holly became seasonal favourites.

  When Thomas went to work, his co-workers would often approach him at the water cooler or the urinal to deliver compliments. “Her vegetables are some good,” a co-worker would say, “had some with my supper last night and they were some good.” Or someone else would say, “Took a drive out your way the other day, Thomas. It was our anniversary, and I had to pick up a bouquet of her flowers for my wife. They are considered second to none, ya know.” Thomas would wipe his mouth with the back of his hand or fumble with his fly front before nodding and smiling with agreement. He enjoyed this attention and upon returning to his desk would sit idle for several minutes, basking in the success of the woman’s harvests.

  Hummingbirds were attracted to her bee balm and monarchs to her milkweed. Other birds also found things to their liking, and soon, species considered rare for the area were stopping by while in migration. Bird-watchers and naturalists would pull over in their vehicles to scan the area from their car windows with binoculars in hand. The woman noticed this and, knowing that she had plenty of room to do so, created paths that curved their way through the various plantings to enable the enthusiasts better access. She edged them with stones and filled them with pea gravel, the tines of her rake making a musical sound as she spread the tiny pebbles that were delicate shades of pink, grey, blue, and taupe. She set up benches and enclosures the size of small bus shelters in case of rain, then added birdbaths and feeders and little hand-painted signs to identify plants and indicate points that might be of interest.

  When people came to visit, they told their friends, who told more friends, and before long, there were lineups of vehicles on the shoulder of the highway. The municipality, recognizing that these people purchased gas and ate at local establishments, widened the shoulders, but they had a tendency to erode every winter so they built a parking lot on county land across the road. They placed two billboards advertising the property at each end of their jurisdiction and included it in all their tourist literature.

  “Your property has become a destination, Thomas,” one of his co-workers said one day while handing him an article snipped from a magazine. “Look at this. People are coming from all over the country to see it. Who would have thought?” Thomas glanced at the article and smiled, then pinned it up on the bulletin board next to his cubicle so everyone could see and comment on it. A large photo showed his house and the market and the acres that stretched out behind. An inset showed the author, no one he recognized, pointing and holding up a guidebook. The bulletin board became crowded with such articles. Sometimes co-workers would give them to him personally while making complimentary comments about the feature. Other times he would arrive at work to find another one added to the collection, the bright white of new paper catching his eye. When they told him his property was on the national news, Thomas was a little disappointed, as he always went to bed before the news, and he had nothing tangible to pin up on the bulletin board.

  One day a man arrived. He walked the property in awe, delighted with every twist and turn of the path. “This…” he said, hesitating because he couldn’t find the right words, “I could spend every day here. Do you mind if I help?” So the next morning he arrived, dressed in light clothes and a straw hat to cover the bald spot on his head, his body pale from the lack of sun. For days, he followed the woman around the property, watching her movements until he felt sure of what to do. Then he began on his own to weed and hoe and water and compost, not harvesting until verifying with the woman that her crop was ready. They worked acres apart and side by side, sometimes in silence, other times engaged in enthusiastic conversation. Soon, he looked like her, his arms and legs a maple-syrup brown, his muscles taut and shiny with sweat. But it was the expression on his face that had changed the most.

  Soon others came, men and women who arrived every morning to stay for the day. Together they dug a small well and installed water features to erase the ever-increasing noise of traffic. They created evergreen hedges that encircled the property and hosted songbirds in both summer and winter. Thomas would arrive home from work just as these people were leaving. He would hear their bantering as he walked from the car to his front door. The man who had come first was always the last to leave. He would wave and smile at Thomas, and Thomas would smile and nod his head because his hands were full, carrying the newspaper and his keys and his briefcase and the lunchbox that the woman packed fresh for him every morning. Thomas liked the idea of these people enjoying the property, and the fact that they were helping to make it into
a destination. But what he liked more were the meals that the woman would make for the two of them, the fruit and vegetables of the season prepared and served in their prime. Sometimes raw, sometimes cooked, they were nature’s bounty at its best. He considered himself fortunate to be the recipient of such fine food.

  It was on a Saturday morning that Thomas woke up to discover the woman gone. He searched the house, but found only her slippers under a stool in the kitchen and her bathrobe hanging on the back of the door. He continued to look for her outdoors, where he wandered the curved paths and planted rows of the property until he was overwhelmed. Never before had he fully explored the garden or understood the enormity of the accomplishment as a whole. Previously he might have considered a single tomato or a serving of beets to admire their healthy perfection and, while eating, savour their flavour. But this was different, something that was much greater than the sum of its parts. For hours he roamed the property, sometimes stopping to sit on a bench or observe a goldfinch busy at a feeder. He watched other birds, ones that he didn’t recognize, eat red currants from a bush. And saw butterflies land on the flat surfaces of large petals and remain quiet and still for indeterminable lengths of time. He listened to the trickling of water running in streams that he hadn’t known existed. At one juncture, he could smell peaches so strongly that his mouth watered. Around another bend, a scent of lavender that took him back to his childhood and his mother’s dresser drawers. He wanted to share these revelations with the woman but found he had no words in his vocabulary to describe his feelings. He had never been a man who made speeches. Or a poet. Or a reader. He tried to remember if and when he had experienced similar emotions in the past, thinking that maybe, if she returned, he could explain with comparisons. Surely she must know already, but still he wanted to tell her how moving it all was. If, he thought, if she returned, suddenly aware that the word “if” was highly unreliable. His eyes watered and his breath caught in his throat as he choked back a sob.