by Dana Spiotta
7
That afternoon, Sam deep-cleaned every surface of the many-surfaced space, and in cleaning, she felt a deepening of her love, an intensification (if that was possible). The dark oak floorboards, mantel, and moldings glowed after she rubbed them with oil. She used a fingertip swathed in cotton to dust the notches carved into the beveled corners. The details emerging pleased her so much that she thought she might cry. What was wrong with her, feeling so happy about cleaning old wood? It was solid beneath her hands.
She looked up all the available paperwork about the house at the county historical association. She color-copied the ink-on-vellum blueprint templates, and she even read through the contracts the architect Ward had made with the artisans who worked on the house. Every voluptuous detail enchanted her. The stucco was to be of “Portland cement,” “hydrated lime,” and “clean, sharp sand,” with a liberal allowance of “cow’s or goat’s hair,” all thoroughly mixed. What a house, what a sturdy, well-made thing.
The peeling paint on the elaborate windows was a little daunting, no doubt full of lead (but it was “Brooklyn White Lead” mixed with French zinc and the “best raw linseed oil”). Why should she care, at fifty-three, about lead? Was she pregnant, did she have small children? She was invincible in her way—a few IQ points shaved off by toxic exposure meant nothing to her. Letting go of the lead fear elated her, made her buoyant, although she also knew that she might wake up at three a.m. imagining the lead dust she had kicked up in her lungs and in her blood making her ill. This was the problem of the Mid: the part of the night, the mid-night, that gave the lie to all the fearlessness.
That first night alone in the house, as the light faded, she heard things. But it didn’t exactly frighten her. So what if the world was filled with ghosts? Ghosts would be great; anything more than this life would be great. But maybe it wasn’t ghosts, maybe it was hungry junkies from the streets, the pale opioid zombies with the vacant eyes and the bad skin. They frightened her. And maybe some of the neighborhood denizens had seen her move in and probably figured her for an easy target. This house with its endless windows was fucking porous as hell.
Just stop, please, with these thoughts, these fears.
Also: why was she afraid of poor people?
And: what was she doing in this lonely place?
Sam reached for her phone, touched it until it came alive, and then texted Ally.
Hi, Ally-oop, I am in the new house. Pretty but lonely. (I mean the house, not me…ha.) Love you.
Her phone suggested an emoji in place of “Love you,” and Sam complied. Keep it light. Since Ally had stopped talking to her, Sam allowed herself one text a day, at nighttime. Ally ignored it, as Sam knew she would. But the phone showed that the message had been read, and Sam took her leaving read receipts on as an encouraging sign. Ally hadn’t blocked her, which she had feared. Sam must hold back, not send dozens of texts, or she would be too much and nothing would get through. Besides, wasn’t everyone more favorably disposed to their mother at night? Sam had texted each night even when they were still in the same house. The closed door of a teenager’s room may as well be another continent. So she sent a text before she went to bed. Ally read it and didn’t respond. It was still a connection, and maybe it would soften her over time. Sam couldn’t do nothing.
Sam wanted suddenly to call her own mother, but it was nine, and her mother was asleep. Sometimes she went to bed before eight, her elderly, weary mom.
Just, god, just don’t. Don’t think about Mom. And not right before bed.
Cognitive behavioral therapy involved redirection, recognizing and short-circuiting dangerous/self-defeating/habitual lines of thought. Or at least that was how Sam had understood it when she’d listened to a podcast and then read (skimmed) some self-helpy quickie articles on CBT for insomnia (CBTi). But it was so much work, so hard to do. She started a new toxic line of thought about how lame she was at implementing CBT or any other disciplined solution. Meditating. No screen time or eating or drinking for hours and hours before bed. The finest calibrations of mind and body, as if sleep were an elusive miracle to be conjured rather than an ordinary function of human daily life. What did it mean to lose your natural connection to sleeping? Thinking about it made it impossible, moved what should be autonomic to somatic. Sam should take sleeping pills like everyone else. Or just submit to the crap fitful tailspins and see what happens. At some point, sleep had to come.
She texted Laci and MH on their group chat and told them she was spending her first night in the new house. She had surprised herself by keeping them in the loop: I left my husband, I bought a house, I moved into the house. But always after the fact, because she didn’t want help or company or advice. She just wanted to declare herself, remind herself of what she was doing.
Laci wrote back in seconds.
Good 4 u! Housewarming??
Instead of answering, she texted her a photo of a candle glowing on a ledge built into the oak wainscoting.
She was tired. She should get in her bed.
It was then that she discovered that she didn’t have sheets for her bed or a pillow. How could she have forgotten that? She brushed her teeth and then lay upon the bare mattress. As soon as she did, she lost her sleepiness. Sam tried to push into sleep, fully clothed on the bed, and of course it didn’t work that way, pushing it. She let herself go; she returned to lead poisoning, but then moved back to the avoidance/unavoidance of catastrophic mother-loaded fears (what if her mother died in her sleep tonight, what if Sam never got to see her again, what if Sam had called the doctor she heard on that podcast and talked her mother into his protocol, something about push-pulse, she should remember to read about the Wurburg or Warburg effect), then Ally (just the song “Once upon a Dream,” as sung by Ally at age twelve, in the delicate soprano of prepubescence, how Ally used to beg to sing for Sam in the car, But if I know you, I know what you’ll do, you’ll love me at once, the way you did once, Ally pausing, Sam glancing at her in the rearview mirror upon a dream, a smile and then Ally waited for Sam to say “Wonderful,” which she always did because it was a wonder, the girl, the voice, in the back of her car). And then back to the neighborhood, the zombie junkies and Sam’s disgraceful fear of the poor people who had seen her move in. Then disgust at her own monstrousness, now exaggerated and abstracted: her lack of compassion, her need for safety. Why does she get to have safety? What has she done to deserve that. But everyone should be safe—the desire for safety is just human, maybe she was too hard on herself. (Reprimanding herself, arguing with herself. These are the deeps found in her wretched, exhausting wakefulness.) The fears are not discarded by sheer will; the fears are myriad and persistent. It was only human. She was human. Fall asleep.
And, somehow, this time, she did. Until she woke later, in the Mid. Somehow the Mid always seemed to be precisely 3:00, very seldom 3:10 or 2:55. Uncannily on the dot of 3:00. This was worse than the sleepless slow period at the beginning of the night (“latency insomnia” it was called), because Mid-waking was disorienting, a shock to Sam. Her eyes would open into the deep black of the room, and her body would wake up. Tired yet fully awake. Lying next to sleeping Matt, she would feel a tremendous isolation at these moments, a dread and then a kind of vacuum.
During most Mids, the vacuum would not last, it would again fill with all the worried things, worse things than nothing. Sometimes a wave of heat would have woken her, something from inside, an endocrine-stoked furnace, and she would throw off her portion of the blanket and let the night air cool her body. Other times there was no discernible reason for the wake-up, and she would press her eyes shut, pull her portion of the blanket tight, and try to go back to sleep. Either way, she knew pretty quickly if a prompt return to sleep was lost to her. She might be awake for an hour, or more. On really rough nights, maybe even for the duration. Then she would take her phone off the nightstand, shield it with the covers away from Matt,
and press it awake. The light, of course, would leak into the room anyway, that cold, bluish, painful light. You shouldn’t look at a screen, but it was her clock, wasn’t it? She needed to know the time, to orient herself against the night. Who had resistance and discipline at three a.m.? It was a vulnerable state. She wasn’t stupid, wasn’t totally reckless, though. She didn’t let herself, for example, scroll through the president’s Twitter feed. But she had the impulse, which she had to will away, fight. That was the typical Mid.
Somehow Sam had imagined that she would sleep better once she was in her new house. But that very first night, she burst awake with the odd certainty, not driven by a clock or darkness, that it was not morning. She started a little, made a sound into the dark, a gasp, as she realized where she was. The room took strange shape around her. But then, like a switch turning on, she realized that she was alone, and she didn’t have to concern herself with Matt. Waking him, disturbing him. She was surprised to discover what it felt like, this not needing to do anything. She could go back to sleep or not; or she could just sit here looking into the dark. She could get up, turn on all the lights. She could cook dinner, if she wanted, watch a movie, make noise, not have to explain to anyone that nothing was wrong, while also meaning everything was wrong. How much of this night-waking problem had related to him, to them, to the pair of them in the bed?
She sat up. The multipaned windows glowed for a moment, illuminated. Car passing.
And, for that matter, what a ridiculous thing, the daily arrangements of a marriage: sleeping in the same bed side by side, when even children learn to sleep alone. Throughout her early years, Ally would try to make a nighttime end run into their bed, and Sam would be torn, wanting Ally to come into her arms, but wanting, just as much, to sleep. She knew that allowing Ally in would mean a restless night of limbs crossing, blanket pulling, and constant waking. And that it would, as the experts said, make for a bad habit. Fuck all of that—why didn’t she just enjoy Ally in her bed with no equivocation? It wouldn’t have been forever. Why had she wasted so much time, expended so much energy on this endless, fruitless, pointless questioning of her parental inclinations? Time that could have been spent clutching the little body to her, comforting her daughter while she could still be comforted, before she grew up and they both become, well, uncomfortable?
One night, during Ally’s sleep-wandering years, Sam went through the usual bedtime routine. After the bath and the teeth brushing, she always read to Ally. Several whole books when she was really small, and then portions of chapter books later. Ally could usually get two chapters out of Sam, and by the end her eyelids would be nearly closed, her breathing slow and steady, her pink-ribbon lips slightly parted. But this time, when the second chapter was done, Sam looked over at her and Ally stared back at Sam, awake, not drifting at all. Sam went to turn out the light. Ally sniffed, her mouth a hard, narrow frown.
“What is it?”
“It isn’t fair,” she said, a tearful jagged blurt.
“What?”
“Grown-ups are never scared, but they don’t have to sleep alone. Children are scared, and they have to sleep alone,” she said, exasperated, the injustice of it becoming more and more outrageous to her as she spoke the words. Sam smiled, which was the wrong thing to do. She shouldn’t condescend to her daughter, really. Sam corrected her face.
“It’s true, it does seem silly,” Sam said. “I never thought of it that way before.”
Ally nodded, accepting this concession.
“But grown-ups do get scared, everyone does.” Sam always made the mistake of thinking of Ally as a person she could be totally frank with. Be the way she was with everyone, always hedging everything, always admitting weaknesses and doubt. But Ally didn’t need to hear about adult doubt. She wasn’t Sam’s confessor. She wasn’t an adult. Ally needed security, sleep, constancy. Sam should have smoothed her brow and soothed her the way Lily had when Sam was small. When Sam got spooked as a child, she would run downstairs to where her parents were watching TV. Her mother would hold her hand and walk her back to bed. Then her mother would rub her back as she lay there. Stroke her cheek. Her mother would let Sam state her fears (I dreamed you were gone and I was all alone in the house). Lily would tell her, “Don’t worry. I will never leave you. I will always take care of you.” This may have been a lie, but it was exactly right. Such glorious certainty and assurance. Sam, in those moments, felt a profound security and deep peace. Remembering her mother’s hand on her face, her mother’s voice, all these years later, brought that peace back, made Sam feel calmer. In your whole life, only in young childhood, and only if you were very fortunate, could you get a measure of innocence—a time free of knowing what will come, of what must come. Those moments, that simple engagement of only what was wonderful about being alive, that love, really, would be at the center of you forever; deep inside, you would have this tender core that believed everything would be okay.
Sam should have done that with Ally. Told her they would be together forever. But Ally would have seen through it. She was always too smart to be lied to or brushed into calm. Sam would have betrayed her own lack of confidence, it would have been in her face somewhere, and Ally, smart Ally, would have noticed it. Ally was such a force, is such a force. So particularly herself. Even when she’d been scared of sleeping alone, Ally had marshaled logic and made her case. It wasn’t about her fear; it was about the inequity of sleeping arrangements. And the frustration of not having a say in these crucial matters.
Ally, by age seven, had reached the pinnacle of a phase in which she sharply decried and enumerated the differences in how children were treated versus adults. She noted all the differentials in power and agency, and she found her own lack of freedom a chronic source of irritation. One day Sam was called in by Ally’s Waldorf teacher, who, with slight-but-deliberate frown, showed Sam a drawing Ally had made at school. The teacher, usually a bright, felted, fairy type, seemed to want Sam to find it disturbing, but it made Sam laugh so hard that she had to cover her mouth. Magic Marker on butcher paper, the title at the top said, “Things I will do when I am a Grownup.” Beneath it were several drawn objects: a knife, some pill capsules, matches and fire, a car, a toothy open mouth. Under each drawing, captions: “Knifs. Pills. Fier. Driving. Gum.” Funny, precocious, tough girl.
At some point, gradually and then definitively, came the extinction of Ally’s middle-of-the-night visits to their bed. Only a few scant years of peaceful sleep followed. Soon Sam’s body—at first occasionally and then in a nearly nightly fugue of climacteric hormonal fluctuations—would begin to wake her during her deepest sleep.
Then, the same as now, her thoughts would turn, and return, to Ally. Always there was a thing she needed to work out regarding Ally. One thing you discover in motherhood that you never understood from being a daughter and loving your mother—the mother end of things went deeper. After you gave birth, no sleep ever again would take you far from your child. The particular sound of Ally’s cries, the pitch and tenor, was keyed to unlock Sam’s sleep. Sam used to think this was a baby thing, that she had to wake to hear her child’s cries. But sometimes in the middle of the night, years after the night crying had ceased, she would imagine she heard Ally cry out for her, or heard Ally simply cry out, which was also always for Sam. It was a muscle that remained ready. Sam remembered jumping up and going to her, and how it gave Sam a wonderful sense of purpose even as she felt a terrible fatigue. What you don’t get from having a mother versus being a mother is how consuming it was, how profoundly one-sided. The child’s job was to need her mother less and less, a progression toward independence. But the mother’s job was to always help, always be there when needed, and never, ever stop worrying. Was that true? She knew that her mother still worried about her, even when her own body was failing her, even when she was—
But she shouldn’t think of her mother’s body now.
Ally.
What could she do? Every night she would continue to text Ally. Just one text. The unanswered dailiness of her texts was devotional, humble, a sign of her unconditional love. Probably Ally just found her pathetic and that’s why she didn’t block her.
The Mid was the time when all her gestures felt unbearably sad and futile. And when heat suffocated her. Sam pulled at the neck of her T-shirt, pulled it down and away from her chest. Her body knew what was coming. Her heartbeat picked up speed. And then the hot. A sudden interior flame had bloomed in her. Her heart beat so fast she could hear it in her ears.
She went to the built-in window seat, cranked the handle of the casement window, and with some splintering of dust and paint, the window opened and cool air rushed in. Bright, sharp night air, bracing. Even by the open window, she was hot. She looked at her phone. No texts. Of course she would still have trouble sleeping in the new house. Tonight it was the blast of heat, not merely the worries, that tormented her. Body-driven. The erosion of sleep was a gradual but escalating consequence of physical symptoms. There was nothing wrong with her; Sam simply woke because she had what she supposed was a “hot flash.” But it didn’t feel flashy, just hot. Her doctor had explained that the night wakings were a natural and common aspect of her menopausal journey. Oh well, if it’s natural, then no problem, right? Natural or not, she knew she was doomed. No matter how she looked at it, she knew that tonight her fight against wakefulness would lead not back to sleep but, instead, to rumination. (That was the right word, like a ruminant’s stomachs going over and over the same material, a dreamful distortion darkening it further each time. It would move from the specific, like Ally’s face when Sam told her she was leaving, into more sweeping things, like the president, wars, the environment, her own nascent cancers, her whole ruined life.)
