Talk Before Sleep

  Andrew answers on the first ring. “Is Ruth there?” I say, and then, into the questioning silence, “This is her friend, Ann.”

  “Oh,” he says, guardedly friendly. “Of course. Hello, Ann. No, she’s not here yet. I was just getting ready to go to the airport. She’s actually going to be a little late.”

  Late? I think. Late? What’s the matter with that goddamn airline? She’ll be too tired!

  “Well,” I say. “If you could have her call me when she gets there, all right?”

  “I’ll tell her.”

  “Also, she wanted me to tell you … she likes her bed by the window.”

  “Yes, I’ve put it there. She’s always liked her bed by the window.”

  “Well, I just wanted to make sure.”

  “That’s fine.”

  “She hasn’t been eating much.”

  “Is that right?”

  “No, she doesn’t have much of an appetite.”

  “I see.”

  “She might like some french fries, though. And of course she really likes ice cream.”

  He shifts the phone, I can hear the noise of it. And the impatience. Then he says, “Ann, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate what you and all your friends have done for Ruth. I want you to know I’ll take very good care of her. We’ve always been very close.”

  Huh! I want to say. You’re not so close! She used to be very mean to you, I happen to know. When you were little and sleeping in the bunk below her, she told you that ghosts were in the room and she made whoooo noises until you cried. She told you the story of the Crucifixion and embellished all the gory details until you cried about that, too. She pretended to turn into another person so you’d say things about her and then she beat you up for what you said. What an idiot you were, Andrew! And now you object to Ruth’s language. You flinch every time she swears, get a white ring around your lips, yes, she told me that.

  “I know you’re close,” I say.

  “I’ll have her call you.”

  “Thank you.”

  I go into the bathroom, look at myself. In the mirror, I see Ruth holding her spoon over her cereal that morning. Her hand was shaking, a fine tremor, and I was thinking, brain involvement, oh, Jesus, it’s her brain, she’s getting worse, please don’t let her have a seizure on the way to the airport. I put my hand on the mirror, drag it down the surface, note with a sense of terrible satisfaction the dirty tracks I leave behind.

  By ten o’clock, she still hasn’t called me. And I don’t call her. I’ll wait until tomorrow, I think. I sit at the kitchen table in my pajamas eating the eggplant sub Joe brought me and thinking about a time before Ruth got sick when we talked about how we wanted to die. “I think I want a massive heart attack,” I said. “Sudden death. But no matter what gets me, I want the last thing in the world I feel to be peace.”

  “Not me,” she’d said. “The last thing I want to feel is … dazzled.”

  “That’s a pretty tall order,” I’d said, and she’d said, “Yes. But it’s what I want.”

  How will she get that now, I wonder. How?

  When I climb into bed beside him, Joe turns on his side and reaches out toward me. I think, if he tries to get laid I will kill him with a butcher knife. And then I start to cry because he is only Joe, touching my hair, pushing it back from my face because he knows I love it when he does that, and that is all, it is whitely innocent.

  “Who knows why people make the decisions they do?” he says softly. “Especially when they’re dying. Maybe this was just something she couldn’t explain. Maybe it had nothing to do with you.

  Maybe it didn’t, I think. The pull of family is formidable, I know. I haven’t yet let myself feel how grateful I am to be back in my own bed, but I know it’s coming. And I know I’d better get ready. Because feeling good will feel awful.

  I got my hair cut,” I tell Ruth, a couple of days later.

  “Really? What’s it look like?”

  “It looks like hell,” I say. “I told him an inch and he heard ‘Shave it.’”

  “Beauty seclusion again?”

  “Are you kidding? I put on a scarf to go to the bathroom.”

  The inevitable pause. “So,” I say. “How are you?”

  “You know,” she says, “I was thinking today about how I used to get so pissed off just because my laundry hamper was full. Now it takes so little to make me happy. This is good to finally learn, you know what I mean? It’s not so bad, Ann, honest. It’s kind of interesting. I sort of feel like I’m only going home, like I’m being called in first, like when we were kids. Of course we always hated to go, right?—everybody else got to stay out, there was still some light, but then when you got in, you were sort of glad to be there. I think I’ll be glad to be there. I just don’t want to be in pain, so I’ve got lots of stuff around in case I need it.”

  I look out the window. “Do you look the same?”

  “I don’t know. I don’t look in the mirror anymore. It’s getting pretty messy, Ann. You’re not missing a thing.”

  “Yes, I am.”

  “Do you look the same?” she asks.

  “Yeah, except for my marine haircut. And I’ve gained even more weight. I guess I don’t look the same.”

  I can hear her smile. Then she asks, “Did you see the full moon last night?”

  “Yes! So big!”

  “Yes.”

  And then we don’t talk for a while. I think we are both savoring the fact that there is still something we can see at the same time. Ruth once said that the best parameters of her mental health were her skin and her awareness of what phase the moon was in.

  “Ann?” she says. “I’m kind of whipped, okay?”

  That’s how she always ends the conversations.

  I read a good book,” I tell her. “Want me to send it?”

  “I don’t think so.” She sounds so tired today.

  “I made this new recipe last night,” I say. “You use a whole bunch of mustard on chicken. It sounds terrible, but it’s really good.”

  “Have you seen Helen?” she asks. “L.D.?”

  “No. But I will.”

  “Promise me, okay?”

  “I promise.”

  Our conversations are silly—about nothing, really, less and less consequential. But they are comforting to both of us, I know. They remind me of what we talk about before we go to sleep, any of us, the lazy, low-voiced assurances we offer each other: Did you turn out the lights? Put the chain locks on? Is the cat in? Are the kids covered? Always, we’re just checking to see that we’re safe. I’ve always thought that was the funniest thing, given the vastness of the dark we lie down in.

  After two more days, she can’t come to the phone anymore. Talking takes too much energy, too much breath. I talk to Andrew instead. I make brief, awkward inquiries, and he offers brief, awkward responses. Helen says she hates him, he won’t tell her anything, but there is nothing to say. “Should we go there?” we all ask each other, in our different combinations. I don’t know, I don’t know, we all say. And we wait. I make brownies, look up from the mixer, burst into tears, wipe my face with my apron, and finish. “Hello?” I say, too anxiously, every time the phone rings.

  Would you please buy her a bouquet for me?” I ask Andrew. “I’ll send you a check. But I want you to go pick it out yourself to make sure the flowers are good. She’ll have a fit if they’re not good flowers.”

  “To tell you the truth,” he says. “She’s not really too interested in anything now.”

  “All purples and pinks and whites,” I say. “No carnations. A really big one. Plenty of freesia, so it smells good.”

  “Ann, you’d really be wasting your money.”

  “She always likes to have fresh flowers. She needs them.”

  “All right. When the nurse comes today, I’ll go get her some. How much do you want me to spend?”

  “What does the nurse come for?” I ask.

  “Oh, just … She bathes her, helps wi
th medication, with the oxygen.”

  “She’s using oxygen?”

  “Yes, it’s been pretty hard for her to breathe. Especially at night, for some reason.”

  I remember her doctor saying, “It will most likely be respiratory, Ruth. A lot of people like to go into the hospital at that point because the feeling of not being able to breathe … well. Anyway, at the hospital we can give you enough medication to make you comfortable.”

  Ruth said, “You mean you can kill me that way, instead,” and her doctor said, well yes, that was one way to look at it.

  She looked at me then, popped her bubble gum, raised her eyebrows up and down. And when we got in my car outside, she said, “‘A lot of people like to go to the hospital.’ Did you hear that?”

  “Yeah. I thought that was a pretty poor choice of words myself.”

  “Well, I guess so,” she said. “You know how I felt, hearing him say that?”

  “How?”

  “Look,” she said, and when I did, she slowly pulled her wig up off her head, saying, “Eeeeeyikes!”

  “Put some baby orchids in that bouquet, too,” I tell Andrew now.

  “All right. And you wanted to spend …”

  “I’m sending you a check for a hundred dollars.”

  “That’s way too much!”

  “Find a way to spend it,” I tell him. “Use long stems.”

  Michael comes home, goes to stay with his dad.

  Ruth’s request. It must be getting very close.

  “Is she scared?” I ask Andrew.

  “I don’t think so,” he says.

  “You haven’t asked her?”

  “No.”

  “Well, Jesus, Andrew, go ask her, and then come back to the phone and tell me what she said.”

  He puts the phone down, and I hear him saying my name and then some other things. Then he comes back to the phone. “She wrote no. Then she wrote that she loves you.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and hang up.

  She “wrote.” What else will be taken from her before she leaves?

  I go to the grocery store. I go to the post office. I fold the towels, stack them in the linen closet. I sit on the edge of the bathtub and weep, and then I clean it with Soft Scrub.

  Tell her that I will always talk to her. Remind her.”

  “She’s pretty much sleeping all the time now, Ann.”

  Tell her when she’s sleeping.

  I open the mail. I roll the socks up, put them away. I read articles in magazines. I watch Seinfeld and Nightline with Joe. I’ve begun taking antacids for the regular grabbing pain in my stomach.

  I have lunch with Helen, and she tells me about the time she and Ruth had to dissect a fetal pig together in biology class. “We got in trouble that day because the teacher heard us talking about butt-fucking. We couldn’t help it. We’d just heard about it, and we couldn’t believe it. We had to talk about it. But then we got kicked out of class and Ruth was really pissed because she’d wanted to cut the pig’s heart out that day and send it to her boyfriend, Chuckie Lokenwitz.”

  “What’d she want to do that for?”

  Helen shrugs. “It was Valentine’s Day.”

  We laugh, and for a moment it’s like when we were all at her house. But then it is just the two of us again, without her, and it’s different. I am reminded of public television specials that demonstrate the importance of everything needing to be on the right spot on the right chain, or things turn out to be something else, something wrong.

  Joe and I are going out to dinner so I am making Meg Kraft macaroni and cheese even though I worry about the yellow dye. He called from work a while ago, suggested I try to get a last-minute sitter, that he’d call back in a few minutes to see if I could. If so, he’ll go to the restaurant right from work, meet me there. When the phone rings, I pick it up and say, “Good news!”

  “… Hello?” I hear a voice say.

  “Andrew?”

  “Yes.”

  He never calls me. I know why he’s calling now. I start crying and some part of me held in permanent abeyance says, well, would you look at that. Look how fast those tears come. As if they’re always on the ready. Which of course they are.

  “What time?” I ask Andrew.

  He sighs. “Three thirty-seven this morning.”

  “Thank you,” I say, and hang up. Then I pick up the receiver again, get halfway through dialing before I realize who I am calling: Ruth, to tell her she died.

  I tear a piece of paper from the newspaper lying on the kitchen table, write down the date and 3:37 A.M., put it in my apron pocket. Then I push a dishtowel up to my mouth. The sounds I make remind me of those I heard coming from myself when I was in labor.

  Meggie comes down from her room, silently crosses the kitchen and puts her arms around me. I spread my hand flat and hard against her back to feel the movement of air into, then out of her; then back into her again. I subtract nine years from forty-four.

  That night, at my request, Joe takes Meggie to a movie. I walk around the house, touching things: a book, the smooth surface of the kitchen counter, Meggie’s bear that smells like her. Then I get into the bathtub, he back with a wet washrag over my face, and let go. It is a howling, really, a self-indulgent letting go of some part of my awful pain. And then, I sense her presence. I sit up, pull the washrag off my face, frightened and exhilarated. She will appear, see-through, say something so wise and healing I can easily go on. But she does not appear. I only hear her voice inside my head. “Knock it off,” she says. And I do.

  Meggie wants to come to the funeral and she wants to wear black. She has a black skirt and black leotards and a black sweatshirt and that is what she wears, though with her school’s name turned to the inside. She sits in a church pew beside Joe. Two rows behind them I see Joel Fratto, his hands folded in his lap. His face is remarkably impassive; only his hands speak.

  I sit in the front row with Helen, L.D., and Sarah. Sarah wears a beautiful green dress, Helen a forties special that Ruth loved: a brown print dress with huge buttons, a matching veiled hat. I wear a red miniskirt, which is what she told me to do. L.D. is wearing a black, ill-fitting suit belonging to her mother, who apparently is just about the same impressive size. She is wearing nylons that smash the hairs on her legs into a pattern you might find on a sofa, and she has on low black patent-leather heels. Heels! We don’t any of us know what to say and anyway, L.D.’s face told us not to try. We all read something we’ve written about Ruth, and though I have an awareness of people standing and saying things, myself included, I don’t know what they are. I can’t stop crying and finally I stop trying to. Tears seem beside the point, something like my hair color. I can’t retain what anyone is saying to me, but everyone keeps talking. I feel as though I’m in a field of bees.

  After the church service, the four of us drive in Sarah’s car to the nearby cemetery. There they are, the same two trees Ruth showed Michael and me, the stream that now you can hear running. Helen pulls me aside, wipes at my face. “Stop crying,” she says tenderly, and then starts herself.

  “I wish she’d have let us see her,” Helen says.

  “I know.”

  “I guess she thought we shouldn’t see her looking so bad.”

  “Do you think that was Ruth who decided that?” I ask. “Or Andrew? Doesn’t seem like Ruth. Seems like if it was Ruth worrying about looking bad, she’d have the funeral guy put a mask on her.”

  “I know. Nixon or something.”

  “Maybe we should ask Andrew to let us see her before they lower it in.”

  “L.D. already asked. He told her no.”

  “Really!” I say, with some admiration.

  Someone turns around to hush us up, there is a little speech being given by the minister. And then people begin walking away. Wait, I think. Is this it? Is this all? I’m not ready to leave her. I see Joe and Meggie put flowers on the casket and walk away. There are so many flowers. She would have loved it. Eventually, I am
the only one left. But then I hear the sounds of someone quietly weeping. I walk around to the other side of the casket and see L.D. sitting on the ground, her face shoved into her hands, her legs splayed out before her. “L.D.?” I say softly.

  She looks up. “I never even told her my name. I wanted her to keep on wanting to know, to have some questions that needed answering, so she’d stay alive.” She is not wearing a coat, and she starts shivering violently. ‘As if that would keep her alive! I never told her what my name is, and she really wanted to know.”

  “Well … What is it?” I ask. “Tell me.”

  She looks up at me with her huge, tortured face. “It’s Lolly fucking Dawn,” she says. “Okay?”

  “Yes,” I say. “Okay.” I squat down, put my arms around her. She is so cold. Her hands, holding on to each other, are reddened and chapped already. “We have to go, L.D.,” I say. “She’s not here.”

  I like to think that she looked out the window one last time the night she died, and saw with a new understanding the placement of the stars. I like to think something incomprehensibly vast and complex moved into her soul at that moment, and that it, not pathology, was what took her breath away.

  EPILOGUE

  I go bowling with L.D. and Sarah and Helen every other Wednesday night. We had shirts made up: Big Balls Bowling League on the back, our names in script over our pockets in the front. Once we got kicked out for L.D. starting a fight with the people who were bowling next to us and took exception to the fact that my gutter balls were crossing over into their lane. The other times, it’s just normal fun: beer, potato chips, good talking, a lot of hard laughter. Sometimes my stomach hurts the next day from it.