Talk Before Sleep

  “It sounds to me,” Sarah says, “as if you’re the one trying to run things, L.D. I only did what Ruth asked me to.”

  “You made her ask you!”

  “Please,” Ruth says.

  Helen stands up, grabs the pan of brownies off the counter, slams them down in front of L.D., hands her a knife. “Here,” she says. “Cut these. Make them all even so we won’t fight.”

  L.D. hesitates, then takes the knife, cuts down the center of the pan and looks up. “Who knows higher math?” she asks. “Where do I cut to make them all come out even?”

  “The last time I ate really a lot of brownies, I’d taken LSD,” Helen says. “It was in the Rocky Mountains, in Colorado, in 1969. I thought the brownies were alive, but I ate them anyway.”

  “I loved acid,” Sarah says. “I could speak different languages on it. I don’t mean Italian, I mean dog. I mean wind.”

  We are all of us stunned, and we stare at her.

  “You never took acid,” L.D. says, finally.

  Sarah smiles, a lovely thing, brushes an invisible crumb off her lap. “It was on the back of a stamp. The first time I took it, I spent all my time looking into the center of a flower. I kept saying over and over, ‘It’s all right here.”

  L.D. grunts. “You were one of those hippies in dresses that cost three hundred dollars.”

  “Skirts,” Sarah says. “And gauzy tops, with tassels and all those shiny things on them—sequins, rhinestones.”

  “Fine, three-hundred-dollar skirts and tops,” L.D. says.

  “Is it that you’re attracted to me?” Sarah asks suddenly. “Is that it?”

  L.D. lets air out of one side of her face. “Sorry.”

  “What’s your girlfriend like?” Sarah asks.

  “She’s real little and blond and pretty,” Helen says.

  “And sexy,” Ruth adds.

  Sarah nods thoughtfully. “L.D., do you think if you’re a woman you have to be a lesbian to be truly political?”

  L.D. looks up sharply.

  “I mean it,” Sarah says. “This is a real question. I’ve thought that. I’ve often thought that.”

  L.D. pushes back from the table and crosses her legs man-style, booted ankle up on one knee. “Door’s open,” she says. “Come on in.”

  “I’m being serious,” Sarah says.

  Silence.

  “If there’s a heaven,” Ruth says, “do you think you have to come there as you died? I mean, all beat up and stuff?”

  That night, when we are alone, Ruth asks me to make oatmeal. “Don’t use water, use milk. And put in a whole lot of brown sugar and butter. And some raisins.”

  When I carry the bowl into her bedroom, she sighs. “Put it on a tray, with one of those cut-lace placemats. Put the spoon on a napkin. There’s a bud vase in the cupboard.”

  I carry the bowl out to the kitchen, prepare the tray in the way she asked me to, add a small glass of orange juice. I feel as though my hurt feelings are standing behind me, tapping me hard on the shoulder. When I set the tray beside her, I say, “You’re so picky. You’re kind of a bitch.”

  “I know. I always was. I’m spoiled.” She inspects the tray, then looks up at me. “Go ahead and eat it.”

  “This is for you!”

  “I know. But I can’t … I think I’m hungry, but then I just can’t eat. You eat it. Just let me watch, do you mind?”

  I pick up the tray, look at it. I realize that I would never prepare such a thing for myself, but that I should. It’s a good thing to occasionally lie back and wiggle your toes at the pleasure you’ve created for yourself. “You really want me to eat this?” I ask Ruth.

  “Is it too weird? Is it sexual or something? Is it weird?”

  Actually, I’m not sure. But I say, “No, it’s okay. But don’t start criticizing my manners or anything like that.”

  “I won’t.”

  “No … you know, smiles, or anything.”

  “I won’t!”

  I eat the oatmeal and when I’m finished, she asks, “Isn’t it good?”

  I show her the empty bowl, scraped clean.

  “On cold mornings in Montana,” Ruth says, “my mother always made me that. And she’d wrap a scarf all around my head till only my eyes stuck out. I had red boots, with fur on the top. I walked to school, and it hurt, when I got there, getting defrosted. I’d gotten used to the cold.”

  “I remember that, too,” I said. “Your fingers would feel fat around the pencil.”

  “Yes.” She sighs, closes her eyes. “I suppose it’s gross to say so, but I actually had a very happy childhood.”

  “Did you?”

  “Yes. So this cancer, it didn’t come from that.”

  “Oh, who knows where it comes from? It just comes.”

  “I really hope so,” she says. “I’m so tired of digging around in my head, trying to figure out all I did wrong.”

  I have trouble going to sleep that night. I can feel the mild ache of fatigue in my body, but my mind is overly alert, as though it is waiting for evil to creep up on it. I change positions, turn the pillow over, then over again. And then I close my eyes and ask my brain to show me something that will make me feel comfortable and safe. I envision a gigantic nest, lodged into the high branches of a tree. Light filters in gently through the leaves; the sun is setting; a veiled moon waits off to one side of the sky. There is a thick white quilt in the nest, and a pillow. I climb in, put my head on the pillow, wrap the quilt around me. It smells like air and sunshine. I am high up and comfortable, but I need something else to feel safe. I look up at the edge of the nest and sitting there, looking down at me, are Joe and Meggie. I can’t make out their features, but I know who it is from the outline of their bodies. Meggie is swinging her legs, and I see the shoelace from one of her sneakers hanging down and following the loopy pattern of her movements. The light is a rich golden color; it seems to push as strongly as a hand at their backs but they stay steady, they stay sitting there and watching over me; suddenly, thick bands of light from the last of the day’s sun spread like peacock feathers all around them. They could be the center of the universe. I open my eyes, say I understand, and then close them again to sleep.

  The next morning, Ruth asks me to draw her a bath. Then, after I help her in, she points to the floor. “Sit there, will you?”

  She holds her washrag up, lets water run from it, watches it. “Sometimes water sort of twists,” she says. “Did you ever notice that?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why does it do that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There are rules about all those things.”

  “I suppose. I don’t want to know them, though. I’d rather believe in magic.”

  “Me, too. That’s one thing I always liked about you Ann, you don’t know a lot of things. Especially about current events. You’re really a moron about that stuff. And I never knew who the goddamn secretary of anything was, so it was a comfort to be around you.”

  “Thank you very much.”

  She raises a leg, looks at it critically. “It feels like I need a shave.”

  “I’ll do it for you.”

  “Will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Have you ever shaved anyone before?”

  “Sure. I’ve prepped people for surgery. I’ve shaved lots of things. The men get real nervous when you get near their peckers. But I’m good. Lean back. Relax.”

  I soap one leg, then slowly pull the razor up along it. Ruth laughs a little. “Does it tickle?” I ask.

  “Yes. But I was also thinking how stupid this is. Who started it, anyway?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s such a strong thing, though,” she says. “I mean, I’m lying around dying and I feel hair on my legs and I need to shave them. And I’m not even … involved.”

  “I could call Joel. You could lie on your bed with your legs hanging out and he could come admire them.”

  She closes her e
yes. “Yes. That would be quite nice.”

  We are quiet then, listening to the scraping sound of the razor, the lapping of the water, the occasional drip out of the faucet. In the apartment next door, we hear a door slam loudly. “Nancy’s going to work.” Ruth sighs. “Every morning, she slams that door like that, as if she’s really pissed off.”

  “Is she?”

  “I don’t know. I never did talk to her very much. The first time I met her, I saw that she used hp pencil.”

  “Ah. No wonder.”

  “No, I mean, it was way outside her natural hp line, you know, she’d drawn in what she wanted. Dial-a-Mouth. I didn’t feel I could relate to her. Her lips looked like those cartoon animals that wear lipstick, the hippos with the pleated skirts. She was … yeah, she was like a cartoon woman.”

  “Did she draw in eyebrows, too?”

  “No,” Ruth says, “but you could tell that was coming. She’ll be the kind to draw those big fat greasy kind of eyebrows, the ones shaped like fried shrimp. I don’t know, we just never had much to say to each other.”

  “Well, I guess not. A woman with incipient shrimp eyebrows!”

  Ruth stops smiling, and her face turns earnest. She pulls her leg away, sits up. “Do you think I’ve been awfully small in my life, always sort of hypercritical?”

  I don’t answer for a while, and she says, “You do, don’t you?”

  “Well, some,” I say. “But mostly I think you just tell the truth more than most people, that’s all.”

  “Well, that’s not bad.”

  “No.”

  “I have to tell you something,” she says, and I feel myself brace for anything. But all she says is, “I’m in a good mood.”

  I let the soap slide into the water, rinse my hand in a slow circle. “Yeah?”

  “Well, isn’t that sort of crazy? I mean, I woke up today, and I felt really, really happy.”

  “Well, that’s good. That’s good.” I don’t understand it, but surely it must be good.

  “And I have to tell you something else, Ann.”

  “What?”

  She draws in a breath, takes one of my hands in both of hers. “I want to be buried here, but I want to go to Andrew’s to die.”

  I pull her hand away, sit back on my heels. “What for? What do you mean?”

  “Now, don’t get crazy.”

  “Is this because we had that weird fight in the kitchen last night?” I ask. “That’s why, isn’t it? That was just some tension, Ruth. I mean, these are extraordinary circumstances. There’s going to be some tension. Or do you think this is too much to ask us? It’s not. We’re fine here. I’m fine here. I’ll stay with you.”

  “No. It’s just … because he’s my brother. He was there when I was born, Ann.”

  I say nothing. I feel a tightening in my chest that is a terrible fear.

  “Can’t you understand this at all?”

  I nod, then shake my head. “No!”

  “Well, you will. Michael can fly down there with me. Can you take us to the airport?”

  “When?”

  “I think we’d better plan on a few days from now.”

  You can’t go, I want to say. We just made a whole lot of the Jell-O you like. We haven’t watched the movies we rented. And beyond that: You are ours. You belong with us.

  I don’t say anything. I shave her other leg. I help her put on perfumed talc. She sits in a chair in an apricot-colored nightie and I change her sheets. And then we make some phone calls.

  That afternoon, while Ruth naps, I stand at the window and review things that might have made her come to this decision. Did she feel my vision last night, understand how much I need my family, and start to feel guilty again about taking me away from them? Or maybe it was the time Helen and I thought she was sleeping, and talked about our fears for her. Td said I hoped that the end wasn’t respiratory, that I didn’t want her to feel she was suffocating. Helen said but that was better than her brain going, wasn’t it? And then we said nothing. I think we felt ashamed of ourselves. Was she awake then? I remember Helen finally saying, “I just feel like I’m dodging malignancies. All around me … you know? Like, if I open the window, one will slip in and get me. I just keep wondering when it will be my turn.”

  I hear a knock at the door. It’s L.D., loaded down with daisies. “She likes these,” she says, and starts for the kitchen.

  I follow her, and as I watch her fill a large pitcher with water I tell her Ruth wants to go to Andrew’s.

  She looks sharply at me. “For a visit.”

  “No, L.D.”

  She looks away, finishes filling the pitcher with water, shoves the flowers in it, then slams them on the kitchen table. She sits down, staring at them, then looks up at me. “Will you stop your fucking sighing? You’re driving me crazy! I never heard anyone sigh so much in my life!”

  I open my mouth, then stop. I had no idea. “Well, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize—”

  “You sigh when you’re making dinner. You sigh when you’re looking at magazines. You sigh when you’re just fucking sitting there doing nothing!”

  I take a small step forward, then another, then lean down to put my arms around her. “We didn’t do anything wrong,” I say. “She just wants to go to her brother’s house. It’s not our fault.”

  Her arms come up out of her lap and she holds on to me fiercely. “It is. It’s my fault. I won’t let her die. And she knows it. So she’s going somewhere where she can.”

  “I don’t think that’s it, L.D.”

  “Where is she?”

  “Taking a nap.”

  She nods. “I’ll wait.”

  Of course Helen and Sarah claim responsibility as well. We all of us feel like the one who stood up in the boat at the wrong time. The four of us are talking about it in low voices while we eat dinner that night. We made fried chicken, mashed potatoes, buttered green beans and corn, apple pie. This is what we do. We accept, like a backrub, the relief of calories. Helen is saying that maybe Ruth feels bad that she’s taking so long to die, like women and orgasms, she’s saying. Suddenly, Sarah holds up a hand, stops chewing. I hear it now, too, Ruth, moaning. We move together into her room. Her light is on, and she is sitting at the side of her bed. She looks up, her face full of pain. “My back,” she says.

  I rummage through the pills at the side of her bed.

  “I did,” she says. “It didn’t help.”

  I stand still, thinking, I am a nurse. I should know what to do. What should I do? Nothing comes to me except a knocking sense of panic. For the first time, I think this is just too much for me, she needs to be in the hospital.

  Then L.D. pushes through us, picks Ruth up and carries her to the rocking chair in the corner of the bedroom. “Give me a blanket,” she says, and I hand her the quilt from the bed. She tucks it tightly around Ruth, then rocks her slowly, staring intently into her face. “Think of whiteness,” she says. “Think of stillness.” Then, her voice lowering and softening and slowing, “Think of how the dust rises up from the horses’ hooves. Do you know how the cactus flowers? Think of that, Ruth, think of it opening, slowly, so slowly.” Ruth moans, a sound like “Ahhh.” If you didn’t know, you’d think it was something altogether different.

  This is what I keep thinking, sitting in the living room with Helen and Sarah. Pretend this is something else. I am waiting for Ruth to finish getting her hair permed. Then we will go and look at shoes: dangerous high heels. Jeweled sandals that we will try with our socks on because both of us hate our toes. Sarah sits motionless, her hands folded on her lap. Helen holds the dishcloth, folds it and unfolds it, folds it again. We look at each other from time to time. We can hear L.D., the low murmur of her comfort over Ruth’s moans, and then finally it is only L.D. we hear.

  “Did she die?” Helen asks. “Oh, Jesus, did she die?”

  The air around me holds me down. I swallow against the strength of something that is telling me not to move anything, not even to breath
e.

  Then we hear L.D. close Ruth’s door, and come into the living room. “She’s sleeping.”

  She sits down beside Sarah, puts her arm around her, and for the first time I see Sarah weep. “I don’t know what’s so surprising about this,” she says. “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen.”

  The day before she is to leave, Ruth sits at her kitchen table trying to eat breakfast. She is feeling better, but taking her morphine pills regularly to head off what might happen again. This makes her pleasantly spacey, blurred at the edges. She is putting a few Cheerios at a time into a bowl of milk, then spooning them up and eating them. “This way they stay crisp,” she says. “You should really try it, Ann.” Someone left a newspaper from yesterday on the table and she pulls it over to her, starts leafing through it. I know what she’s looking for: both of us always read our horoscopes, take them seriously. She comes to the obituaries and stops, gasps.

  “What?” I say.

  She points to a name. I can’t quite see it upside down, so I come around to her side of the table, look down over her shoulder. “Ruth Thomas,” it says.

  “What is this?” I say, furious, pulling the paper away from her. “Who did this?”

  “It’s not me,” Ruth says.

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not me! It’s another woman with the same name.” She pulls the paper back, spreads it on the table, and together we read about the other Ruth Thomas. She was out on a hike, climbing up a mountain. She fell. She was thirty-eight, a stockbroker.

  “Jesus,” Ruth says.

  I sit down, say nothing. I am thinking, for some reason, of the suits in the other Ruth’s closet, hanging there.

  “Isn’t that weird?” Ruth asks.

  “It really is.”

  “Do you think it’s a sign or something?”

  “Oh, Ruth. Of what?”

  She looks at me. “You’re tired.”

  “Yes, I suppose.”

  “You don’t want me to go.”

  “No.”

  “I just don’t think I can explain it anymore.”