She soon wanted to fall asleep so she tried talking to her arms and legs, urging them to relax, but there is nothing more boring than talking to a body part, which is probably why the activity puts a person to sleep in the first place. After a horribly dull conversation with her toes, she gave up. There is a time for everything, or there should be, so Vicki declared night her time to mourn.
Her mourning began the next night. As she lay in bed at eleven forty-five, she envisioned herself and Rebecca finishing up their list of goals on the paper tablecloth at Till Midnight. Still awake at midnight, she analyzed age, and how so many things had gone unfinished in Rebecca’s life. At one o’clock, she resented heart attacks for sneaking in and robbing her friend and her grandmother of life, while they slept. She felt angry at death, the disgruntled gunman randomly opening fire.
No, death chose Rebecca, and it chose Grandma. They must have been carefully selected for some holy reason. What is it the very devout say? It must have been their time. And just as there is a time to be born and a time to die, Vicki decided there was a time to climb out of bed, and to forget about falling asleep.
At two o’clock, the irony of life haunted Vicki. Half of life is spent looking forward, counting down to holidays, vacations, and weekends, while the other half is spent pondering backward. But if she didn’t let herself reminisce, things she once loved would die. At three o’clock, she promised herself that from this day forward she would start living for the moment. At four o’clock, she cried for Rebecca’s family and their lost time together.
She tried counting sheep but instead turned to counting the number of antacid tablets she had given Rebecca. It must have amounted to a full bottle within a one-month span. She felt psychic as she watched each orange-glowing second tick by. I knew it would turn 4:46 at that exact second, I knew it! I knew it would turn 4:47 when it did!
After getting a tension headache, she covered the clock with a shirt. She envied others on the island for sleeping soundly. Why couldn’t she, too, fall asleep? Why wouldn’t she? She felt alone, lonesome in a world of sleeping people. She focused on her breathing, and then suddenly it changed. Perhaps it changed because she now thought about her every breath. She skipped a breath and her breaths sped up. She tried to slow them down again, and felt in need of an extra breath but couldn’t catch one. As the hours passed, Vicki was becoming preoccupied with her own breathing and her own death. She felt a lack of air, as she had in the car on the way home from the airport. She didn’t know why she couldn’t catch her breath, or why she was now hyperventilating.
She quietly got out of bed and, still wearing her nightgown, walked out the front door of the condominium. She walked the five minutes to Lighthouse Beach, at the east end of Periwinkle Way. She wanted to thank both the rising sun, for providing her its natural light, and the historical cylindrical steel lighthouse, for giving her a destination to walk toward. She liked having a destination just as much as she liked having something to look forward to on her calendar. Every spring, Vicki and her sister had gone to Sanibel to see Grandma, and they went to Lighthouse Beach to walk. Before each trip, they’d count down days. When the annual trip to Florida rolled around, they savored those days, and when it passed, they remembered them.
Just as one might crave chicken noodle soup when feeling down, she craved a walk on the beach. Something about walking a beach always made her feel as if she could forget what happened yesterday or what might happen tomorrow.
She sat down where the water met the talcum-powder sand and stared out at the Gulf of Mexico. She sat with the shells and felt sorry for them, cast ashore by storms, tides, and wave action. She loved the shells, the sand, and anything related to a beach. She could never live in a land-locked world.
Carefully scanning the sand around her to see if she might be sitting alongside a Chinese Alphabet, her grandmother’s favorite shell, she spotted a mound about two feet down. It looked like a sand castle. She got up and ran toward the mound with destruction in mind. She jumped and landed on the fortress and stomped it down to nothing more than silken sand. She felt good, yet wicked, and grateful that no one else walked the beach early on this particular morning to witness her anger-filled act. She picked up a Lightning Whelk that had decorated the top of the castle and tossed it as hard as she could into the water. She heard it land. She didn’t know what to do now that the castle was destroyed. She felt energy, fierce as a Calusa Indian. Her surging power fascinated her, but she knew these first inhabitants of the island wouldn’t waste their energy destroying a sand castle. Instead, they probably used it productively, for things like carving canoes and making masks for religious events.
She bent down to pick up a stick. Before long, she tossed it down, then fell to her knees on the damp ground, praying for Rebecca. After her torrent of words was spent, she rested her head and stared at the stick.
Without thinking, she took it and began scribbling in the sand. She wrote what she could remember of Rebecca’s goals. She scribbled with so much intensity and enthusiasm that she was probably acting like the kid who built the castle she had just destroyed. The stick broke in two, but she continued, and now she no longer kneeled. Instead, her scribbles grew larger and larger along the shore, enough so that someone in a plane overhead might be able to read them. Suddenly, without warning, the water gently rolled further up the beach than before and made its way over the markings. As quickly as the water came, it also went, carrying Rebecca’s goals and dreams with it into the Gulf of Mexico.
She felt sorry that nothing survived forever. The island Indians were eventually wiped out, not by an incoming tide, but by invaders with firearms and foreign diseases, things they couldn’t compete with. She had stomped on the sand castle, and now her markings were washed away as well. Maybe it was a good thing. Something about the sacred goals being tossed in a trash can back at the café didn’t settle well with Vicki. Despite the fact that her scribbles in the sand would never be seen again, Vicki’s soul felt refreshed because now Rebecca’s dreams were blended into nature.
As she glanced down at the sand, she noticed piles of different types of miniature shells, known to the islanders as “coffee grounds,” and decided she could use a good, strong coffee drink herself, so she left.
When she arrived back at the condo, she decided it was too early for coffee, so she settled down in the recliner chair in the living room, attempting to fall asleep for a few minutes at least, but the hyperventilating returned. Why couldn’t she breathe? Several times she dozed off, and it felt good and natural. Once there was a thud on her window, and she assumed it was a bird hitting the glass. She dozed again.
No! Wake up! an inner voice cried out. Do not fall asleep! You might die! The inner voice, her mind, tortured her exhausted body. This attack of hair-pulling insomnia returned night after dragging night.
CHAPTER FOUR
VICKI WISHED GOD HAD never created night. But nights of sitting up alone in the living room recliner attempting to catch her breath did pass, and day arrived to greet her rudely. Sure, day rescued her from night, but having had no sleep, day felt like unusual punishment.
During the days that followed, she took shelter under her dark sunglasses, which barely hid her red, bloodshot eyes and the bags that drooped as low as her cheekbones. No one fully understood the extent of her insomnia, or what to make of it, but she knew she needed one good night of sleep in order to survive—physically and mentally. She did her time and now wanted to declare this time of mourning over, complete. She wanted to enter a new time, perhaps a time for dancing, or one of the other joyful times that fall under the category of “everything.”
Naps on the raft in the sunlit pool hardly competed with a dream-spent night in bed. She wanted badly to become a member of the rapid-eye movement, but she couldn’t get in and didn’t know why. She granted herself permission to enter sleep, but it stood miles away, a fortress up on a mountain, hidden behind brick walls and moats filled with dark water and knights prancin
g around on horses. She wanted more than anything to enter the kingdom of sleep but didn’t have the strength to break down the walls, swim through the dark water and kill the men in armor guarding its doors. She could hardly catch her own breath and had no idea where it had gone. Despite her feelings of sleep deprivation, she rejoiced with more gladness than ever when the days that the Lord hath made kept coming. But nights came too, part of the package. She couldn’t have day without night, she knew that, but still resented night — a punishment, solitary detention or abyss — that kept creeping up.
“When you have your shortness of breath tonight, just breathe into the bag.” Her mother placed a brown paper lunch bag next to the recliner, her newfound bed. “Try relaxing your thoughts when it happens.”
“But it’s not my thoughts. It’s kind of strange that my thoughts would do this to me. I know I’m not crazy!”
In truth, she knew her thoughts of death made their way through her mind like objects on a factory conveyor belt. She couldn’t bring herself to yank the bad thoughts off, and just let them go by.
“It has nothing to do with being crazy,” added her father as he turned the television off. “Have you been drinking caffeine past three o’clock?”
She pushed the lever on the chair and shot upward. She didn’t want to recline. “No. I’m down to half a cup in the morning. No more.” In truth, she knew that if anyone asked her blood type, she’d have to reply, “hazelnut coffee.”
“I was thinking that it’s asthma,” she said. “Or who knows, my scoliosis might be constricting my lung cavity. I haven’t had my scoliosis checked in years.”
“Are you worried about anything?” Her mother turned off the lights in the living room.
“Wait, keep that small light on, please. No, I’m not worried about a thing. Just falling asleep, that’s all.” She sat in the recliner, ready to confront another night as a coward, as if death might come like a thief in the night.
“Why don’t you have a gin and tonic with us?” asked her mother. “We can sit out on the porch and talk.”
“I’d love to, but I’m exhausted,” she said. Secretly, she believed her own hypochondriac thoughts. It might be mitral valve prolapse, or some irregularity with my heart, or angina, or an undetected aneurysm ready to burst.
“Try to get some sleep tonight. If it doesn’t go away, we’ll get you checked.”
As they left the room, her mind began to tick along with the clock. So did her fingers, tapping the arm of the cold vinyl recliner. An hour later she could hear the distant snoring of her father, like the growls of a dragon from within the fortress of the world of sleep. She tried focusing on the present moment and the remote control in her hand. She felt frustrated with the new digital manner in which she had to flip through over a hundred different stations. This must be why Grandma had never watched television. Perhaps she would specialize her future psychology practice on patients who couldn’t adapt to modern technology.
She clicked the remote, and then got stuck on a channel of static. The stubborn device wouldn’t work as she desperately pointed and clicked, over and over again. She tried to enjoy the flickering static show in the dark living room, like fireworks on a smaller scale. The stststststtststststst sound got to her, and she knew she’d have to quietly exit the vinyl, walk over to the television and turn it off.
Hours passed. She started to slip into sleep, the existence she longed for, but then someone kept tossing her out. No, wake up, do not lose control or you might slip into the dungeon of death by mistake. Do not fall asleep! She manned the graveyard shift, while the rest of the world slept. The living room in the condo looked ready for battle. A gaudy copper helmet posed on top of the TV, a medieval sword hung on the wall over it, and two black-and-gold shields were nailed next to it. Touched by sun, the decorations weren’t bad, but at night, in the dark living room, they were eerie. She watched the walls, decorated by her grandparents who had traveled the world after retirement collecting cheap souvenirs. Nothing moved but a spider on a cross-country journey from the corner above the television to the corner above her recliner.
Day arrived and night followed, over and over again. Who said it was all very good? She disagreed with the Creator on this one.
Sitting at the kitchen table in her pajamas, she stared at the cereal boxes erected like buildings that formed a city around her bowl of milk. She could feel her hair, tangled by her night of tossing and turning, and she traced the skin on her face for pillow crevices. They remained, along with the head rush that should have disappeared a minute after first standing. She chose Life, Quaker Oats’ Life. She chose it because she liked its name. Perhaps eating it might make her live forever. She read the nutrition facts on the side panel and the ingredients below. She placed her health in the hands of whole oat flour (with oat bran), sugar, corn flour, whole-wheat flour, rice flour, high-starch oat flour, salt, calcium carbonate, sodium phosphate (a phosphorus source and dough conditioner), reduced iron, and many more ingredients. Yes, this combination created the cereal she now ate, the cereal called Life.
Her lazy adrenal glands screamed out to her, so she poured herself a cup of coffee, added milk, then squeezed in chocolate syrup and stirred it all together.
“You know, Dad, I’ve never had a summer unemployment problem before. I always worked for you in the shop or in my internships in Chicago.”
“I wish I had a job to offer you this summer, honey. I don’t anymore.”
“I know. I try not to look back, but this time last year, I’d be ringing the silver bell, alerting the town that the ice cream had arrived; that the season had started.”
Her father set his paper down and stared out the window at a palm tree. “I’d be outside in front, painting a fresh coat of pink on those wooden benches.”
“I’d be slicing strawberries for the guests’ breakfast,” added her mother, “and Ann would be sneaking testers here and there when I wasn’t looking.”
“And old Granny would be sitting in the window on the pink radiator,” added her father.
“I feel horrible. I planned on making enough money this summer to at least reimburse you for my own airline ticket to Spain.” Vicki sipped her chocolate coffee and burned the tip of her tongue, which ruined the experience of drinking the rest of her cup of coffee. “Is there a yellow highlighter anywhere? I’ve got to search the classifieds.”
“You might not need to,” her father said.
“What do you mean?”
“We got a phone call this morning. There are some legal matters Mom and I need to attend to concerning the sale of the businesses. We’re leaving for Michigan in two days. We’d love for you to come with us; spend the summer there.” He took a sip of his black coffee. “You could at least live back in Holland near your friends, and wait tables with them. That way you’d have some spending money for Spain.”
“No, I can’t go back to Michigan. I can’t, not now.” She poured herself more coffee, this time without adding chocolate. She felt as if she had done nothing to pursue her goal of finding a summer job. She felt like a crab walking sideways.
“We had no idea this would come up. We don’t want to leave you here alone. You need to be around people, especially after the loss of Rebecca. It might be good for you to return.”
“I can’t return. I won’t. In fact, I vow right now to find a job within two days. Maybe I needed a deadline to work against, and now I’ve got one. Two days.”
She gulped the muddy drink as if injecting herself with some ancient formula. With each gulp she could feel her creativity awakening, her ambitions screaming out, and her confidence building. “Someone will hire me, I know it. Just put me in front of an interviewer, and I will get the job.”
“Whoa, Nellie. What kind of job do you think you will look for?” He often spoke as he would speak to his horses back in Michigan. His favorite horse was named Kid. He loved them all.
“When I drink coffee, I can do anything!” She laughed and poured
herself the last inch from the pot. “This liquid bean stuff turns me into a wonder woman of some sort. Coffee inspires me. Don’t worry. I’ll go out and interview today, and I’ll come home with a job!”
“Hey, hold the reins! Before you go, good luck, and we know you’ll do great. Don’t you forget that, you hear? Mom and I say it all the time - anyone who hires you is going to be the luckiest employer alive.”
“Oh, Dad, I wish I could still work for you.”
“Get out of here. Hit the pasture!” he said.
“Okay, but I’ve been meaning to ask you both something. Just before she died, Grandma told me she had discovered a recipe for instant gratification. She was going to send it to me. Do you know what she might have been talking about?”
“No. I have no idea.”
“I wish I knew.”
In one full day, she attended a brief seminar at Edison Mall on how to become a purified-water saleswoman, interviewed with Lee County to become a toll collector on the bridge linking Sanibel Island and the City of Palms, and phoned the Thomas A. Edison and Henry Ford Museums in Fort Myers, begging to get hired for anything. When the man there asked her why she wanted a job at the museums, she had desperately replied, “Because I’m sick of fearing death.” She knew it made no sense to a complete stranger, but the man, once his surprise had passed, told her that when Thomas Edison was in a coma and close to death he awoke for a moment, looked up, and said, “It is very beautiful over there.” The man didn’t offer her the job, but at least he gave her a glimpse of hope.
By noon, the coffee high wore off, but she kept going. She filled out an application to be a manager of forty Spanish-speaking maids at a four-star resort. But after she and the person doing the hiring had a conversation together in Spanish, Vicki knew she’d never be called back. She left and attempted to apply for the Fort Myers Beach trolley driver position. They told her she needed a special license to drive a trolley. A woman interviewed her for a cash register position at a boutique where Grandma used to send friends and family to shop for books on shelling, for shells they couldn’t find on the shore, and for souvenirs. She wanted the job, but then a senior with a case of serious “Sanibel stoop” interviewed for the position immediately after her, and Vicki knew the woman’s charm alone would win her the job. Looking as if she had spent years stooping for shells didn’t hurt her chances either. In sum, no one offered her a job. She felt defeated, overqualified and under-qualified, and completely unmarketable.
Sanibel Scribbles Page 5
