Wayward

by Dana Spiotta

  That first Mid waking that first night on Highland Street, in her new old empty house, she sat in the living room and peered out the half-opened window. She could see the lights of the city sparkle and the old parklike cemetery glowing with streetlamps. No one around. She reached into her purse and pulled out a pack of cigarettes. “Who,” she said, “bought these?” And she laughed. She smoked, looked out at the city, and decided she wouldn’t try to go back to sleep. At four o’clock she made coffee (a single-serve pour-over), opened her laptop, and scanned the New York Times’ front page, then the Washington Post’s. She clicked over to the Post-Standard’s site, Syracuse.com. The first four articles were sports coverage; then various arrests and mug shots. She read the police blotter. The streets near her house on Highland, in the Northside, came up frequently. (Petit larceny; criminal mischief, third degree; assault, second degree; burglary, second degree; criminal contempt, first degree; criminal mischief, second degree. Rape, first degree, two counts. The website even had a database searchable by name, crime, or location. In the suburbs, the blotter was mostly DWIs, but the city didn’t have time for that.)

  At six, when sunlight had barely begun to pinken the sky, she brushed her teeth, got dressed, and went for a walk past the cemetery park, down the hill, past the crumbling AME church and under the damp, black concrete overpass, and into downtown and the blocks lined with grand old city buildings.

  Later that morning, MH showed up at the house with an aloe plant. A medicinal, of course. Sam fondled the slick leaves. Maybe useful but also pretty. They drank very strong coffee from her French press. Sam’s third cup of the day. “I have been up since three,” she said, and it half-sounded like a brag.

  “Night wakings are features of midlife, not to be squandered.”

  Sam laughed when MH said this, but MH was serious.

  “You wake for a reason. It is time for a special kind of thinking, middle-of-the-night thinking. Don’t fight it. Wake for your night office, your nocturna. Get out of bed, fall to your knees, attend the moment.”

  Sam shrugged. “Whatever. It will still be my sad, addled brain drowning in the same material. My stagnant yet churning pools.” MH wore a shiny metal ring on her index finger that looked like the business end of a lug wrench or a bolt nut.

  “No, let go of that expectation. Recast this problem as a gift. You are a desert mother. You don’t need sleep. You have things that need the contemplation that can only happen alone on your knees at three a.m.” She spread her hands emphatically, and she caught Sam staring at the ring again. MH touched it. “It’s a wearable. Made of titanium.”

  “Aren’t all rings ‘wearable’?” But Sam was just messing with MH. She knew from lurking around MH’s n=1 Hag Hacks group (another sub of the Hardcore Hags, Harridans, and Harpies group) that “wearables” referred to smart tracking devices. MH was a biohack obsessive, and she was into all the gym-bro self-tracking and quantification, from food to sleep to activity.

  “So it counts steps?” Sam said.

  MH snorted. “No. It’s a Scandinavian device. Tiny sensors inside the ring track heart rate variability, beats per minute, sleep stages, body temperature, respiratory rate. Which are uploaded and analyzed via an app.” She waved her phone at Sam by way of illustration. An accounting of MH’s sleep appeared, with graphs and analysis of every micrometric involved.

  “It’s like you’re stalking yourself,” Sam said. “Does it send you push notifications when you aren’t breathing correctly? Mis-respirating? Contra-haling?”

  “Actually, it does.”

  “What do you do with all that…”

  “Data?”

  “Yeah.”

  MH shrugged. “Optimize.”

  “Potentiate?”

  “The promise of total control, even when you sleep.”

  “But you just told me not to resist the sleep disturbances.”

  “We all have our own contradictions. It is embodied in us, we are built for it. For example, stress is bad, but then if it is pulsed in the right dose, it creates a hormetic, adaptive cellular response. It makes you stronger. It takes a huge effort to control your physiology. Once you have dialed in all the variables, calibrated your potential optimization, only one avenue remains.”

  “What? Acceptance?”

  “No. Beyond mere acceptance. Bold surrender. Defiant gratitude. Perverse celebration.”

  Sam legit tried to embrace the wakings, if not celebrate them. The very next night, she woke in the Mid. She got up from bed and kneeled on the bare floor. It felt mildly ostentatious, foolish, performative. Plus it hurt her knees. She sat cross-legged on the floor. This also hurt. How can a body in middle age become so determined to acquire excess fat and yet that padding offered no protection from the hard surfaces of the world? She put her pillow on the floor and lowered herself to her knees again. Her mind wheeled and whirled. Maudlin, self-pitying, reductive, hysterical—hardly the stuff of a desert mother.

  “Keep trying. It’s a practice,” MH said the next day when Sam explained how it went.

  “Yeah, okay,” Sam said. It was better than trying to sleep and failing. MH was all about the gift of middle life, of menopause, of “super-exaltation,” as Eliza Farnham called it in the 1860s, a secret joy, freedom from childbirth and housework and, presumably, the demands of men. MH, however, took hormone replacement therapy. Which didn’t mean she was trying to stave off anything, she explained. (And not that natural/bio horseshit either: real pharmaceutical-grade hormones. Progesterone, estradiol, and testosterone. “T,” she said, was “dick in a bottle. The man within.”) She also manipulated her body with time-restricted eating, with exercise, with sleep training (including lucid dreaming, dream fasts, staged rapid eye movement waking), and with lab-tested and third-party-verified supplements. Yet MH firmly believed in the gift of menopause.

  “Historically, only for women of a certain class, of course,” MH said.

  After MH left, Sam enacted her own “n=1” biohack. Drink a ton of coffee and don’t sleep. Then do her weight routine at the gym. She ran to the Downtown Y feeling virtuous, invincible. Sam wondered what testosterone, a jolt of it, would feel like in her body. Would she finally be able to do a pull-up? Would she get tattoos and want to wear motorcycle boots? (But she already wanted to wear motorcycle boots. Would testosterone make her feel entitled rather than pretentious if she wore them?) Would a hormone change what she did, how she thought? Wouldn’t that change who she was? What if what she thought of as her “self” was a matter of endocrinology? As mutable as the house you lived in or the clothes you wore?

  8

  A week after Sam moved to Highland, MH invited her and Laci to the Smiley Face, the sad chain stand-up joint at Destiny mall. Sam’s move into the city seemed to signal some new trust, a closer embrace, even some potential at intimacy, with Laci and MH. Sam was no longer a suburban tourist. But the Smiley Face was not the setting for the sort of rad hangout Sam had imagined.

  MH had recently taken to going to open mics, to comedy clubs in particular, to test herself in the “real” world.

  “I hate comedy clubs, hate the people who attend them,” MH told her as they found a banquette table in the half-empty club. “And a chain comedy club in Central New York? It ain’t the Groundlings, you know. This is some middle-America shit right here.” Sam looked around at the other customers. They did look like frat boys approaching forty. They had that bloated, doughy look that men get in their thirties if they keep drinking beer the way they did in their twenties.

  “So why do you come here?” Sam asked.

  “I come to stand up,” MH said. “Not funny stand up. I come to make them look at me, to make them see me, even if they boo me. And I come because I am scared of it, and I want to do what frightens me.”

  “It’s her method. Her philosophy, really,” Laci said. “It’s why she started the Hardcore
Hags.”

  “Who says I started it? It’s a secret group,” MH said.

  Laci smiled. “Yeah, it is.”

  MH turned to Sam. “When I turned fifty, I was divorced, my son was grown up, and I realized I still had decades to go. It was the oddest thing—just as the culture began to lose interest in me, just as the world decided I was irrelevant, I began to feel more myself than ever. Louder, smarter, stronger. It felt truly adolescent, like I wanted to take drugs and drive fast and shave my head.”

  MH ran her hand through the bristles on her head. “I didn’t want to be quiet and supportive. I didn’t want to be dignified, and I didn’t want to take care of anyone for a while. I wanted to be a little selfish, a little eccentric.”

  She looked around the room. “And once I hit sixty? Rather than mellowing, it intensified. I felt wildly unleashed. There is something about not pleasing people that interests me. About provoking people. About failing to meet expectations. It might be the abasement in it, I admit that. There’s something revelatory and liberating about being an object of contempt.”

  MH looked back at Sam and held her gaze for a few seconds longer than Sam felt comfortable with, so Sam nodded and looked at something on the table. MH’s blue, heavy-lidded eyes were set off by the glittering silver of her gray hair. Sam snuck a glance at her eyes again, when MH wasn’t looking back at her—the blue was so deep, it almost looked fake, like contacts. But that seemed unlikely.

  “I like being grotesque,” MH said.

  But MH wasn’t grotesque, so, like with so many MH comments, Sam didn’t know how to take it.

  It occurred to Sam that they were the oldest people in the room. Really? The doughy men and their wives, the doughy men with other doughy men, and even a few college-age girls at one table. Yep, the oldest by ten years or so. And all three of them with short hair and no makeup. They stood out already.

  Sam ordered a glass of wine: a sugary, thick, revolting Malbec. She sipped and grimaced.

  “What?”

  “I think they added sugar to this wine,” Sam said. Laci and MH laughed.

  “ ‘Wine,’ ” Laci said, making air quotes with her fingers.

  “You don’t come to places like this and eat the food or order wine. It all comes out of a giant vacuum-packed Sysco bag of chicken breasts, including the wine,” MH said.

  MH and Laci were drinking whiskey on the rocks. Laci ordered Sam a Maker’s Mark, and then they were being quieted for the show. A local comedian warmed them up with jokes that amounted to “kids today, amirite?”

  MH was the third to go on. Each person had five minutes.

  MH spoke in a low voice. Always a bit too confident, and declarative, she now read as charismatic. Sam could see her clearly, and there was a shiny appeal to her onstage: broad but muscular, short-haired, makeup free, yet glamorous in her way. Her jeans were cut narrowly and cuffed; she wore expensive motorcycle boots that folded back at the ankle. She didn’t look like the itinerant (the “Half Hobo”) that she apparently was. MH began her set with the story of getting her first period at twelve. “The dictionary defines a period as ‘a flow of blood and other material from the lining of the uterus, lasting for several days and occurring in sexually mature women who are not pregnant at intervals of about one lunar month until the onset of menopause.’ Let’s follow that line.” She then described her abortion at age eighteen, her pregnancy, her miscarriage, and her birth experience, until she finally detailed her perimenopause and menopause. People sort of laughed in discomfort, but there were no jokes in there, not one. There was, however, a kind of arc, or at least an intensification to her set as she moved through time. MH then described her aging physical changes in clinical detail, the experience of discovering her postmenstrual body.

  “If you accept this new body, you have a period of freedom from fertility before you really begin to decline. It is an adjustment: your waist thickens and your jawline softens. Your ass becomes both lumpy and flat. You chafe against the world. Yes. Everything—everything—becomes drier and rougher. And worn down—like sprung, stretched-out elastic on a pair of granny panties.”

  Her set had a clarifying effect on the room. People got up and left. Others conversed and ignored the stage. One guy—alone, naturally—stared at MH with a look of concentrated disgust. There was always going to be one guy who could meet the moment, bite on MH’s provocations. MH sat back down and looked over the room with a huge grin, apparently not just unfazed but energized.

  “You should try it, Sam,” MH said. “Open-mic night is the last Wednesday of every month. Don’t overthink it—just get up and talk.” Maybe she would. Could she stand to be groaned at, unliked, misunderstood?

  After, Sam paid their bill while MH and Laci studied their phones, scrolled their feeds, tapped their responses. This despite their mutual pledge to move themselves off social media. Only Sam stuck to that goal. They swiped and clicked. Sam took out her phone, pressed it awake, and sent Ally a long text, but only one:

  Hi, honey! How did the YAD conference go? I am sure you won a citation. You would never believe it, but I am at the Smiley Face, the comedy club at the mall. Awful but also pretty interesting. Love you!

  Like notes in a bottle. It had been almost a month, which was getting serious, wasn’t it. She instantly regretted the length, the exclamation points, the markers of her neediness.

  9

  Spring progressed, but Syracuse was still damp and cold. After a week of daily rain, it was finally clear. Sun streamed in everywhere throughout her elaborately fenestrated home (Sam felt a marvelous drunken awe, gazing at all the types of windows, her house a festival of inflected light). She spent the day waxing the red oak floors upstairs, then fell asleep at three p.m. She woke from a startling noise at five p.m. Or she woke, but had no memory of what the noise was, just a feeling of having heard something. She ran to her window. A car had pulled up to the corner. The bass from the music boomed out. Was that what woke her? She washed her face, brushed her teeth, and decided to explore her new neighborhood on foot. She discovered a small bodega as well as a butcher, a liquor store, an old Italian bakery, a dollar store, a Rite Aid, and a noodle shop. Sam could smell the steamy salt broth as the door to the shop swung open. She was, she realized, very hungry. In all the excitement of the house, she hadn’t consumed anything but coffee and water for twenty-four hours. Actually, more like thirty hours.

  Roaming the neighborhood, she bought some groceries for the week, and she also bought some items for a feast tonight: a wedge of powdery tiramisu, a bottle of red wine, a triangle of aged provolone, and a large container of beef pho. She marveled that everything she needed was within walking distance. It started to rain again. She hurried to get back to the house, to get out of the damp, to sit in solitude in her little kitchen alcove and eat the warm soup. Then she could make a fire, have a glass of wine and the cake. She imagined taking a bite, devouring it slowly and completely. The pleasure would be deep and totally satisfying. Deprivation and indulgence—was the deprivation really a kind of decadence, a way to underline the intensity of surrendering to indulgence? Maybe she was going to be one of those menopausal women who developed an eating disorder, binge-purge or anorexia. The whacked-out hormones and the fixation on food—it was a thing at fourteen and a thing at fifty. But really, who cared? (Who cared if she had some dysfunction, some disorder, and who cared what caused it. She didn’t.) What she did care for was the sight of her house in the dusk glow, waiting for her. And the coming simple pleasure and satisfaction of her plan. She crossed in front of the dormer windows and turned toward the doorway. She’d forgotten to leave her entry porch light on.

  A figure was sitting in front of the door.

  Sam stopped, tried to see who it was. Rain clouds made it dark. She tightened her grip on her packages and took a step closer. “Hello?” she said. Her heartbeat ticked up, her eyes focused. It was a wo
man, about her age. Under a blanket, crouched on the brick entryway, with her head against the door. She had a watch cap pulled over her ears, but Sam could see her face.

  “Excuse me,” Sam said. The woman woke, startled, and jumped to her feet, but she was still partly asleep, so she almost fell. The woman steadied herself against the doorjamb, looked toward Sam with blinking eyes.

  “I live here,” Sam said, moving her chin toward the door. The woman looked at her, nodded. Rain started to fall harder, and Sam leaned under the eave, closer to the woman. Her eyes were enormous, with dark circles. Her skin had red marks, blemishes. She was thin. She smelled like old vegetables and wet wool.

  “I thought nobody lived here,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  “I just moved in. It’s okay,” Sam said.

  The woman looked at the rain. “I’m gonna go,” she said, but she didn’t move. She looked at Sam.

  “Are you okay?” Stupid question. The woman started gathering her stuff, tucking the blanket into her belt and over her head, preparing for the rain.

  Sam put down her bags. She reached for her wallet in her jacket. She thought she would give the woman twenty dollars, but then she just took all her cash out, a handful of twenties, and held it out to her. The woman, astonished, took the money. She didn’t look at it and shoved it into a pocket under her sweatshirt. “God bless you,” she said. And then she started crying. Even in the dark Sam could see her crying. And hear her. Sam didn’t know what to do.