Disquiet, Please!

by David Remnick

  Fortunately for me, Hilson’s Products has come out with a new, more chocolaty version of their Death by Chocolate ice-cream bar, with chocolate on the outside, then vanilla around mint surrounding a rich real-chocolate core. Even when the mere thought of food makes me ill, I can eat a box of those. Another discovery I’ve made is the factory trawler ships’ Weekly Seafood Specials, where they fly you offshore by helicopter and you choose your own netful of bunker or menhaden or whatever baitfish they’re hauling up that day. Doesn’t get any fresher than that! Also, I know some people at Archer Daniels Midland who give me access to the corn-syrup silos in Moline, where I can open the spigots and down as much as I feel like—none of this making it into McFlurrys or some such pap—just the real syrup, thick and undiluted and strong. You know what else is not bad? No. 2 heating oil. No. 6 oil is okay, too, but you have to cut the sulfur content of both with a good Australian Shiraz, and that runs up the tab. Sulfur can also be a problem with bituminous coal, which is priced right but involves digestive issues that make it less of a bargain. Anthracite, on the other hand, can be lower in sulfur, but it’s very hard on the teeth. Then finish it off with a jolt of pure power right from the grid; just—zap! If you like, I can give you the recipes.

  I’m still too thin, though. I have robust mini-potbellies behind each elbow, and my forearms are good and stout, but the wrists are looking a little spindly. And I don’t like the outside parts of my hands, the way they taper off. I can see the thinness there, waiting to strike. On my ankles, too; I’ve never been able to do anything with them. They could use another five or ten pounds apiece. I’ll have to get the opposite of liposuction done to them. (Who in the world, by the way, would deliberately have perfectly good fat removed and then thrown down the drain?) By now, you’re probably having some uncomplimentary thoughts about me. Well, I don’t care even a fig for you. Wait a minute—let me see that fig. I just want to look at it. Gimme that.

  2006

  JENNY ALLEN

  AWAKE

  I’M up. Are you up?

  I’m trying to go back to sleep. But I’m awake. Awake awake awake.

  That’s what Buddha said. Buddha said, “I am awake.” Buddha got that idea, that whole concept, from a middle-aged woman, I’m sure.

  Not that this sleepless business ends after a certain age. I think you have to die first.

  If you added up all the hours I’ve been awake in the middle of the night, it would come to years by now. Fifty may be the new forty, but, for the sleepless woman, fifty is the new eighty.

  Thank you, that’s a very good idea, but I already took a sleeping pill. I fell asleep right away—it’s bliss, that drugged drifting off—but now I’m awake again. That always happens! I fall asleep, boom, and then, four or five hours later, I wake up—like it’s my turn on watch, like I’ve just had a full night’s sleep. But if I act as if I’ve had a full night’s sleep, if I get up and do things, I will be pitiful tomorrow. I will confuse the TV remote with the cordless phone and try to answer it. I will not notice any of my typos—I will type “pubic school” this and “pubic school” that in e-mails to people whose public schools I am looking at for my daughter. I will say, “I saw store at the Shelly,” and then I will have to make one of those dumb Alzheimer’s jokes.

  I could take another sleeping pill, but I worry about that. I worry about liking sleeping pills too much. Sleeping pills always make me think of Judy Garland. Poor Judy.

  It’s funny about the name Judy, isn’t it? No one names anyone Judy anymore—do you ever see five-year-old Judys?—but half the women I know are named Judy. You would probably be safe, when meeting any woman over fifty, just to say, “Nice to meet you, Judy.” Most of the time you would be right.

  I am going to lie here and fall asleep counting all the Judys I know.

  Thirteen Judys. Including my husband’s ex-wife. Who’s very nice, by the way.

  I’m still awake.

  Some people who knew my husband before I knew him call me Judy. “Hi, Judy, how are you?” they say, and I never correct them. Who can blame them, when they know so many Judys? Although I do sort of hope that later they will realize they have called me by my husband’s ex-wife’s name and take note of what a nice person I must be not to have corrected them.

  Are all my Judy friends up, like me? Judy in Brooklyn, are you up? Judy on Amsterdam Avenue, Judy in Lincoln Towers, Judy in Morningside Heights, Judy on Riverside Drive? I’m here in bed imagining that I can see all of you—I probably could see a few of you from my window if you waved at me. I feel like the teacher on Romper Room when I was little. She used to hold a big magnifying glass the size of a tennis racquet in front of her face, so that it was between her and you, and she would say, “I see Nina, and Becky, and Scott, and Glenn, and Judy …”

  I see them. I see all my Judys, and I see Martha and Angeline and Eden, and Ellie and Goldie and Jackie and Wendy, and everyone in my book group. I see them lying there in their nighties, their faces shiny with night cream. Some of us lie alone, some of us lie next to another person, who is, enragingly, sleeping like a log. How can these people next to us sleep so profoundly? They snore, they shake their restless-leg-syndrome legs all over their side of the bed, they mutter protests from their dreams—“I didn’t say Elmira!” and “It’s not yours!” They’re making a regular racket, and yet they sleep on.

  Sleepless friends, I am thinking about you. Ginny, did you decide what to do about day camp for your grandchildren this summer? Martha, what are you reading to help you fall back asleep? Will you call me tomorrow and tell me about it? Mimi, are you up thinking about who you haven’t had lunch with lately? You’re eighty-seven years old. That’s a hundred and thirty-nine in wakeful-woman years. Congratulations for hanging in there.

  Sometimes I fall asleep to the television. And a strange thing happens: No matter what I have fallen asleep watching, when I wake up in the middle of the night Girls Gone Wild is on. I never turn the channel to Girls Gone Wild, I promise. It’s just on. My goodness, those girls must sleep well, when they finally do sleep. I have to change the channel right away when I see Girls Gone Wild, because I always think about the girls’ mothers, and that upsets me. I worry about their mothers, up in the middle of the night, waking up to Girls Gone Wild: “That one looks just like Melanie—oh, my God.”

  Look. Law & Order is on. I’ve seen this episode, of course. Do they run the same ones over and over, or is it that I have seen every one there is? What a scary thought. Fortunately, I never remember what happens after the opening scene, when they find the dead person, so I can watch them all over again.

  That was a good one. Although one day maybe there will be a teenager on the show who isn’t a psycho killer.

  I’m still awake.

  Friends, are you all still up? It seems inefficient somehow for all of us to be awake separately; wouldn’t it be great if we could pool all our individual little tributaries of wakeful energy into one mighty Mississippi, and then harness it, like a WPA project, like the Hoover Dam? We could power something. We could light up Manhattan. We could light up Manhattan and have a huge party for all the women who are awake.

  I should read. Reading is too hard for the dead of night. Reading has too many words in it. Including words I might not know. If I read a word I don’t know, I will feel compelled to scrawl it on whatever piece of paper is on my bedside table and then hope that I’ll be able to read my writing tomorrow, and will remember to look up the word in the dictionary. If I am too lazy to write down the word, I will have to make a decision about whether to dog-ear the page—bad reader citizenship!—and I don’t want the burden of that choice now, in the middle of the night.

  Also, I know that even if I do look a word up tomorrow I won’t remember the definition next week. I keep looking up the same words over and over. “Fungible.” “Heliotrope.” How many times am I supposed to look up “heliotrope”? I used to remember the definitions, but I haven’t for years. I still know a lot of words
, though. “Cleave” is a funny word, because it means to sunder, and, strangely, it also means to stick to. “Ouster” is a funny word. “Ouster” means the act of getting rid of someone, but it also means the person who does the getting rid of. Who should be the ousterer. “Timorous” means timid, but why not just say “timid”?

  Timmy was the name of the boy in Lassie, the television show. The theme music for the show was melancholy, shockingly so. It made you yearn, it made you homesick, even as you watched it in your own home.

  I’m still awake. Only now everything is sort of blending together. It’s the time of night when I think I may finally be losing my mind for good. The theme song from Lassie is blending into the Brownie song, the one about “I’ve something in my pocket, it belongs across my face,” about a Great Big Brownie Smile. Where’s my older daughter’s Girl Scout sash? Why didn’t the younger one ever do Girl Scouts? What’s in that pot-roast recipe besides a cinnamon stick and horseradish and a can of cranberry sauce? What was my old ZIP Code when I lived on Third Avenue? Why didn’t I submit that expense report worth a thousand dollars nine years ago?

  Instead of going crazy, maybe I will just lie here and regret things. Let’s see … Can’t I blame the really big mistakes on others? Didn’t they fail me, didn’t they provoke me, didn’t they drive me to it? Didn’t they just really strain my patience?

  No, face it, you have some things to regret. Now you have to sit with it, as Buddha would say—or, in your case, lie with it. Not exactly the path to Slumberland.

  Here’s the question: Have you done the love thing? The unconditional-love thing? Have you done it with your children? And with the person lying next to you, the one with the jitterbugging legs?

  Oh, look. The city sky is turning from purplish black to … brown. It’s going to be daylight soon. Dawn! How are you, Dawn? How’s my girl? As long as you’re up, I might as well get up, too. We can keep each other company.

  REAL IMITATIONS

  JAMES THURBER

  A VISIT FROM SAINT NICHOLAS

  [IN THE ERNEST HEMINGWAY MANNER]

  IT was the night before Christmas.

  The house was very quiet. No creatures were stirring in the house. There weren’t even any mice stirring. The stockings had been hung carefully by the chimney. The children hoped that Saint Nicholas would come and fill them.

  The children were in their beds. Their beds were in the room next to ours. Mamma and I were in our beds. Mamma wore a kerchief. I had my cap on. I could hear the children moving. We didn’t move. We wanted the children to think we were asleep.

  “Father,” the children said.

  There was no answer. He’s there, all right, they thought.

  “Father,” they said, and banged on their beds.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “We have visions of sugarplums,” the children said.

  “Go to sleep,” said mamma.

  “We can’t sleep,” said the children. They stopped talking, but I could hear them moving. They made sounds.

  “Can you sleep?” asked the children.

  “No,” I said.

  “You ought to sleep.”

  “I know. I ought to sleep.”

  “Can we have some sugarplums?”

  “You can’t have any sugarplums,” said mamma.

  “We just asked you.”

  There was a long silence. I could hear the children moving again.

  “Is Saint Nicholas asleep?” asked the children.

  “No,” mamma said. “Be quiet.”

  “What the hell would he be asleep tonight for?” I asked.

  “He might be,” the children said.

  “He isn’t,” I said.

  “Let’s try to sleep,” said mamma.

  The house became quiet once more. I could hear the rustling noises the children made when they moved in their beds.

  Out on the lawn a clatter arose. I got out of bed and went to the window. I opened the shutters; then I threw up the sash. The moon shone on the snow. The moon gave the lustre of mid-day to objects in the snow. There was a miniature sleigh in the snow, and eight tiny reindeer. A little man was driving them. He was lively and quick. He whistled and shouted at the reindeer and called them by their names. Their names were Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder, and Blitzen.

  He told them to dash away to the top of the porch, and then he told them to dash away to the top of the wall. They did. The sleigh was full of toys.

  “Who is it?” mamma asked.

  “Some guy,” I said. “A little guy.”

  I pulled my head in out of the window and listened. I heard the reindeer on the roof. I could hear their hoofs pawing and prancing on the roof. “Shut the window,” said mamma. I stood still and listened.

  “What do you hear?”

  “Reindeer,” I said. I shut the window and walked about. It was cold. Mamma sat up in the bed and looked at me.

  “How would they get on the roof?” mamma asked.

  “They fly.”

  “Get into bed. You’ll catch cold.”

  Mamma lay down in bed. I didn’t get into bed. I kept walking around.

  “What do you mean, they fly?” asked mamma.

  “Just fly is all.”

  Mamma turned away toward the wall. She didn’t say anything.

  I went out into the room where the chimney was. The little man came down the chimney and stepped into the room. He was dressed all in fur. His clothes were covered with ashes and soot from the chimney. On his back was a pack like a peddler’s pack. There were toys in it. His cheeks and nose were red and he had dimples. His eyes twinkled. His mouth was little, like a bow, and his beard was very white. Between his teeth was a stumpy pipe. The smoke from the pipe encircled his head in a wreath. He laughed and his belly shook. It shook like a bowl of red jelly. I laughed. He winked his eye, then he gave a twist to his head. He didn’t say anything.

  He turned to the chimney and filled the stockings and turned away from the chimney. Laying his finger aside his nose, he gave a nod. Then he went up the chimney. I went to the chimney and looked up. I saw him get into his sleigh. He whistled at his team and the team flew away. The team flew as lightly as thistledown. The driver called out, “Merry Christmas and good night.” I went back to bed.

  “What was it?” asked mamma. “Saint Nicholas?” She smiled.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  She sighed and turned in the bed.

  “I saw him,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  “I did see him.”

  “Sure you saw him.” She turned farther toward the wall.

  “Father,” said the children.

  “There you go,” mamma said. “You and your flying reindeer.”

  “Go to sleep,” I said.

  “Can we see Saint Nicholas when he comes?” the children asked.

  “You got to be asleep,” I said. “You got to be asleep when he comes. You can’t see him unless you’re unconscious.”

  “Father knows,” mamma said.

  I pulled the covers over my mouth. It was warm under the covers. As I went to sleep I wondered if mamma was right.

  1927

  PETER DE VRIES

  INTRUDER IN THE DUSK

  (WHAT CAN COME OF TRYING TO READ WILLIAM FAULKNER WHILE MINDING A CHILD, OR VICE VERSA)

  THE cold Brussels sprout rolled off the page of the book I was reading and lay inert and defunctive in my lap. Turning my head with a leisure at least three-fourths impotent rage, I saw him standing there holding the toy with which he had catapulted the vegetable, or rather the reverse, the toy first then the fat insolent fist clutching it and then above that the bland defiant face beneath the shock of black hair like tangible gas. It, the toy, was one of those cardboard funnels with a trigger near the point for firing a small celluloid ball. Letting the cold Brussels sprout lie there in my lap for him to absorb or anyhow apprehend rebuke from, I took a pull at a Scotch highball I had had in my hand
and then set it down on the end table beside me.

  “So instead of losing the shooter which would have been a mercy you had to lose the ball,” I said, fixing with a stern eye what I had fathered out of all sentient and biding dust; remembering with that retroactive memory by which we count chimes seconds and even minutes after they have struck (recapitulate, even, the very grinding of the bowels of the clock before and during and after) the cunning furtive click, clicks rather, which perception should have told me then already were not the trigger plied but the icebox opened. “Even a boy of five going on six should have more respect for his father if not for food,” I said, now picking the cold Brussels sprout out of my lap and setting it—not dropping it, setting it—in an ashtray; thinking how across the wax bland treachery of the kitchen linoleum were now in all likelihood distributed the remnants of string beans and cold potatoes and maybe even tapioca. “You’re no son of mine.”

  I took up the thread of the book again or tried to: the weft of legitimate kinship that was intricate enough without the obbligato of that dark other: the sixteenths and thirty-seconds and even sixty-fourths of dishonoring cousinships brewed out of the violable blood by the ineffaceable errant lusts. Then I heard another click; a faint metallic rejoinder that this time was neither the trigger nor the icebox but the front door opened and then shut. Through the window I saw him picking his way over the season’s soiled and sun-frayed vestiges of snow like shreds of rotted lace, the cheap upended toy cone in one hand and a child’s cardboard suitcase in the other, toward the road.

  I dropped the book and went out after him who had forgotten not only that I was in shirtsleeves but that my braces hung down over my flanks in twin festoons. “Where are you going?” I called, my voice expostulant and forlorn on the warm numb air. Then I caught it: caught it in the succinct outrage of the suitcase and the prim churning rear and marching heels as well: I had said he was no son of mine, and so he was leaving a house not only where he was not wanted but where he did not even belong.