Some people opt for a glass of milk. My method of nudging myself back toward sleep is to get a little physical activity. I don’t mean I whip on my running shoes and take a jaunt through greater Minneapolis. Usually all it takes to calm down my central nervous system enough to accept sleep is a little yoga and some upside-down pacing. Yes, I’ve found that my particular skill, coveted by all kids and most adults—walking on my hands—can be soporific when used at the right time.
Once when she was about seven, Flan had woken up from a nightmare and was not responding to any of my or Jerry’s efforts to console her. Finally, out of desperation (she wailed when she was scared), Jerry had suggested that we try to amuse her.
“Why don’t you walk on your hands?”
“Are you nuts?” I’d asked, but, willing to try anything, I flipped forward onto my hands and began walking around her small bedroom, greeting everything I saw at my upside-down eye level.
“Hello, dolls,” I’d said, passing Flan’s dollhouse. “Hello, Lincoln Logs. Hello, fuzzy bunny slippers.”
The wailing hadn’t stopped but definitely ebbed.
“Do you see Mommy, Flan?” Jerry had asked. “Isn’t Mommy funny?”
“Hello, game of jacks, hello, Heidi book.”
By the time I had taken my topsy-turvy inventory of what was on Flan’s floor, my daughter was soothed to the point of laughing, and Joe, who had been awakened by all the hubbub, was standing in the doorway, requesting that I do his room next.
That night I’d gone back to bed and fallen asleep so fast and thoroughly that the next time I couldn’t sleep, I stole downstairs and did a room-by-room tour on my hands. Even if it didn’t make me sleepy, I thought, it would entertain me, but I’d slept soundly again afterward and had been using the technique ever since.
The living room was filled with a soft gray light as I hoisted myself up onto my hands and began walking around the couch and toward the archway that separated the living room from the dining room. Not to brag, but I’m a pretty skilled hand-walker; I can turn tight corners and go up stairs (not too many, though; more than five scared me). I always felt a sense of accomplishment when I navigated through a particular angle or narrow space.
“Geez, Mom!”
Startled, I scrambled to my feet.
“You scared me!”
“Sorry, Gil,” I said, rubbing my temples. My head always pounded if I got up too quickly. “What time is it? Did you just get home?”
Gil looked at his watch. “Twelve-forty, and yes, I did.”
The youngest and the only one still at home, Gil enjoyed a much looser curfew than his siblings had, yet rarely abused it.
“Are you hungry?”
Gil smiled. “If you made me something, I’d eat it.”
At the kitchen table, enjoying the macaroni and cheese I warmed up for him, Gil, familiar with my alternative-to-sleeping-pills method, asked, “So why couldn’t you sleep?”
“Well, I was with the Angry Housewives tonight and drank a lot of coffee.” I helped myself to a forkful of the macaroni and cheese. “And Faith told us all about her trip to New Orleans and . . . and a lot of secret stuff.”
Gil perked up. “What kind of secret stuff?”
“Oh, about finding out that Beau was gay and—”
“She just found out that Beau was gay? Mom, that wasn’t exactly a secret.”
“Well, it was to her.” I proceeded to tell him the story Faith told us and was able, for once, to shock my seventeen-year-old son.
“Wow,” he said, shaking his head. “Poor Mrs. Owens. Trying to keep all that a secret all that time.”
“Well, not only that, but creating a whole different reality: making her father a doctor and all that. My God.”
Gil laughed.
“What?”
“You sound so offended. Like those stories she made up were a personal assault.”
“They were in a way, I guess. I mean, don’t you feel betrayed when somebody lies to you?”
“Depends on the lie, I guess. I don’t think Mrs. Owens said anything to hurt you personally, Ma. She was just trying to protect herself—and trying to protect you from the person she thought you couldn’t handle.”
I sat for a moment considering this. “I . . . I just don’t like people keeping things from me, no matter what their motive is. I don’t like to be lied to.”
Gil got up and, opening the refrigerator door, took the milk carton and proceeded to down its contents.
“Use a glass!” I said, which had to be up there on the top ten list of things most said by a mother.
“What you fail to realize,” he said, reaching into the cupboard for a glass, “is that most people haven’t had the kind of life you have, Ma. You had a stable home, were raised by parents who loved you, found a husband who loved you, and had children”—he lowered his voice in a tease—“who worship you. So why do you need to make anything up? You’ve got the perfect life.”
He filled his glass with milk and returned the carton to the refrigerator. I stared at him.
“How’d you get so smart?”
Gil tapped his forehead with his finger. “I’m taking psychology this year, remember?”
“Oh, yeah. And what kind of grade did you get last semester?”
My son, who has a grades-are-a-pointless-reward-system-that-encourages-rote-learning philosophy (one he actually wrote a paper on), smiled. “A C-minus,” he said.
Because I still believe we have to have some kind of system by which to measure a student’s progress, and most of all because I’m his mom, I smiled back and said, “Imagine how you could analyze me if you got an A.”
PART FOUR
The Nineties
June 1991
HOST: MERIT
BOOK: Handling Sin by Michael Malone
REASON CHOSEN: “Someone at the piano bar recommended it—she said she had laughed herself into convulsions.”
The day after Audrey suggested Merit might not be going through menopause at all, Merit bought a kit and holed up in the bathroom long enough to read a copy of Woman’s Day from cover to cover. Finally she was able to give in to the call of nature, peeing a steady stream and at the last moment aiming onto the strip of paper she held under her.
When the results confirmed Audrey’s suspicion, shock, like a big bully, pushed her back onto the toilet.
This can’t be happening, she thought. I’m forty-three years old.
Frank’s bewilderment was bigger than Merit’s.
“But I was told long ago I had an extremely low sperm count.”
“I thought you said you were sterile!” said Merit.
“And I thought ‘extremely low sperm count’ and ‘sterile’ were sort of interchangeable.” A moment passed before a big, gold-glinted smile cracked though the bewilderment on his face.
“Aw, gee, Miss Mayes,” he said finally, when his muscles tired from smiling, “I’m as tickled as a human being has a right to be. In fact, I’m surprised I’m still sitting here—I feel light enough to be floating up among the stars.” He took Merit’s hands and kissed them. “Now, of course I have some questions I must ask you. Number one: are you as thrilled as I am?”
Merit had to smile; he was practically bouncing with excitement.
“Number two,” he continued, “do you believe in miracles? And number three: will you marry me?”
Frank’s enthusiasm was catching. Merit’s children were the joy of her life, and to have a baby with the man she had found true love with would certainly be a gift. Yet she found herself saying, “You don’t have to marry me, you know.”
Glee surged through Frank’s body, making him writhe as if he were electrically charged. Finally, to ground it, he slapped his knee. “Oh, that’s very noble of you, Merit. It’s not as if we haven’t been talking about it.”
It was true, they had been.
“All right, then,” said Merit, suddenly shy. “In answer to your questions: I don’t know, yes, and the
sooner the better!”
They hugged then, Merit catching a nail on the fibers of Frank’s leisure suit jacket, and when they finally let each other go, Frank asked, “Did you keep it?”
“Keep what?”
“The strip thing. The tester.” He shook his head, trying to come up with the right word. “The test thing that told you you were with child.”
“Oh, that strip thing,” said Merit. “Well, no, I didn’t . . . but it still should be in the bathroom wastebasket.”
“Let’s get it now,” said Frank, pulling her off the couch. “We’ve got to frame it or gild it or something.”
MERIT FELT SHEEPISH as she gathered her girls around the dining room table. If ever there was a case of “do as I say, not as I do,” this was it.
After much beating around the bush, she finally smashed the bush to smithereens.
“You’re what?” said Reni, while her younger sisters engaged in a contest to see whose jaw could drop further.
“You heard me,” whispered Merit, drawing dashes in the tablecloth with her thumbnail, color blooming on her face.
“You mean you and Mr. Paradise had sex?” asked Jewel. After a moment of silence, everyone burst out laughing.
“Mr. Paradise and I love each other very much,” she said, trying to bring some decorum into the discussion, “and we’ve talked of getting married, and in answer to your question”—a picture flashed in her head of Mr. Paradise and her in the dressing room at Claudio’s piano bar, a room that was used more for undressing than dressing—“well, yes, I guess we did.”
This caused another wave of laughter from the girls, and when it had ebbed, the girls had a store of questions and comments.
“So are you gonna marry him, Mom?”
“When’s the baby due?”
“Did you think about having an abortion?”
“What am I supposed to tell my friends?”
“I don’t know one person whose mom is having a baby.”
“Weren’t you using birth control?”
“I won’t be the youngest anymore! In fact, I’ll be—wow—fourteen years older than her . . . or him.”
“What do you think you’re going to have?”
“How are you feeling, Mom?”
It was the last question that brought Merit to tears.
“I feel all sorts of things,” she said, her voice catching. “Scared, surprised, a little embarrassed . . . but most of all, excited.”
“If you marry Mr. Paradise,” said Melody, “he’ll be our stepdad, won’t he?”
Merit nodded.
“Then I’m excited too,” she said, and her sisters nodded their assent.
THE NIGHT BEFORE their wedding at the downtown courthouse (the important thing for them was the marriage, not the ceremony), Merit drove over to Frank’s house (he had sold it and all its furniture to a young couple recently emigrated from Ukraine who would be moving in at the end of the week).
“I’ve got something to show you,” she said, clutching a shoebox to her chest.
“What is it, honey?” he asked, curious and a little frightened.
Merit didn’t say anything until she was seated on a plaid recliner in the small, narrow living room. Mr. Paradise sat across from her on the plaid davenport, his hands clasped around his knees. He didn’t like that his bride-to-be looked so serious the night before their wedding, and found himself tensing his wiry body until he felt his bones might spring out of their sockets.
“Frank,” began Merit, “I’m going to show you something I’ve never shown anyone.” She lifted the cover. “Promise me you won’t think I’m a mental case.”
Frank’s mind reeled, unable to understand even a smidgin of what Merit was talking about.
Slowly and deliberately, as if she were displaying pre-Columbian artifacts to a group of archaeologists, Merit took each item out of the box and set it on the pine coffee table that along with the plaid furniture had been sold as a set.
Frank’s mind continued its uncomprehending spiral. Why wouldn’t his beloved be able to throw away scraps of paper, crumpled tissues, a half-eaten baby biscuit, and a Q-tip that looked used, for heaven’s sake?
Merit stared at the coffee table, her expression serious bordering on angry, but when she looked up at Frank she laughed.
“Oh, my gosh, Mr. Paradise—you should see your face! You have no idea what this is, do you?”
Pulling down his jaw, Frank scratched his sideburns.
“No, I can’t say as I do.”
Merit scrambled off the recliner and rushed to Frank’s side, telling him the whole story of how she had put these things in her hair as a protest against her ex-husband’s cruelty.
“And that helped you?” asked Frank when she was finished.
Merit nodded solemnly. “I think it kept me sane. Knowing this”—she unfurled a slip of paper that read Dr. Eric Iverson is a quack—“or this”—she held up a tissue—“having this stuff in my hair was my secret way of dishonoring Eric, of sticking out my tongue or giving him the finger all day long. And he had no idea.”
“My brave Merit,” said Frank, and he held her lovely face in his hands and kissed her.
After the courthouse ceremony and a bridal luncheon at Dayton’s Oak Room, Reni drove her sisters back to school (Melody didn’t want to miss choir and Jewel had a biology test), and the new Mr. and Mrs. Paradise walked hand in hand to the library, where Frank sat on his old vinyl chair and watched Merit through the glass as she played “Ode to Joy” and “The Man I Love” and “Maybe This Time.”
At one point, Merit looked up to see Mr. Paradise wearing a peaceful smile on his face and sitting ramrod straight (the same posture he always had while listening to her play), and she thought, That man is the father of my baby and my new husband. The thought was as soothing as a psalm.
That night Claudio threw them a reception at the piano bar, and the Angry Housewives showed up in mismatched bridesmaids’ dresses (although they all did share an overabundance of flounces and ruffles) Slip had scrounged up at Goodwill.
In the hotel room they had booked for their weekend honeymoon, Merit changed into the sheer black negligee the Angry Housewives had given her and arranged herself like a pinup girl on the bed. But pinup-girl positions aren’t necessarily comfortable ones, and she rearranged herself again, wondering what was taking her groom so long. Finally she decided to investigate.
Frank was in front of the mirror, fiddling with his hair.
“Don’t worry about your hair, handsome,” she said, standing behind him and putting her arms around his waist, “I’m just going to mess it up in bed anyhow.”
He smiled sheepishly, and immediately Merit knew something was up.
“What’s going on?” She scrutinized him in the mirror, noticing that one hand was closed in a fist. “What have you got in your hand?”
“Nothing,” he said unconvincingly, and then, noticing what she was wearing, he said with much greater conviction, “My God, Merit, you look beautiful.”
“Don’t change the subject. Now come on, Frank, open up.”
Reluctantly Frank relaxed his hand, displaying a small tuft of hair with a candy heart attached to it.
“What is that?” said Merit.
Frank’s laugh was tinged with embarrassment. “Well, it was supposed to be my secret way of honoring you, of saying that I’m the luckiest guy in the world.”
Merit gingerly lifted the hairy heart off his palm and read, “ ‘Be mine.’ ”
“I glued it to my hair,” he said as he bent his head to show her. “There’s another one in there, but it’s a bear to get out.”
Frank’s great oiled pompadour was as capable of subterfuge as her French roll had been. Pushing a section of it aside, Merit saw another candy heart hidden inside it.
“You didn’t glue this to your scalp, did you?” she asked as she began to pry it out.
“No, I didn’t glue it to my scalp. I’m not a sadist.”
&nbs
p; Merit twisted the candy heart.
“Ow!”
Several hairs clung to this heart too, but she held it between her fingers, inspecting it as if it were the Hope Diamond.
“ ‘I luv you,’ ” she read as a lump grew in her throat.
“I do,” he said, and his hands slid over and up the sheer fabric of her negligee until they found skin.
AS MUCH AS MERIT’S GIRLS JOKED about their mother’s condition to each other, the girls were thrilled that their mother had found someone like Mr. Paradise with whom to fall in love and have a baby. It made them believe in happy endings.
They rarely saw their own father, who was remarried to a very tan, very blond jewelry sales rep in Boca Raton. The favorite part of their visits was the part when they boarded the plane back to Minneapolis.
“I don’t even feel like he’s my dad,” Melody had said on their last flight home, to which Reni replied, “I don’t think he feels like our dad either.”
But Frank Paradise, as soon as he met the girls, had asked them more questions than their father had asked in a lifetime. He took such an interest in what they did and thought that when Merit asked them what they thought of him, Jewel said, “He’s like a teacher who thinks you’re the smartest kid he’s ever taught.”
They had hunkered around the coffee table playing Monopoly or Risk, Parcheesi or Scrabble; they had taken walks along the creek and Minnehaha Falls; they had, one rainy Saturday afternoon, watched an Abbott and Costello festival on TV, ordering pizza and entertaining themselves with endless versions of “Who’s on First?”
High school friends of Melody’s and Jewel’s were always surprised to hear what the girls had done the night or weekend before, that the sisters had willingly, happily spent time with their mother and her new husband.
“You couldn’t pay me to go to a movie with my family,” said Chloe, Jewel’s best friend. “I don’t care if it had Tom Cruise and Matt Dillon in it.”
Reni came home from school as often as she could; fortunately, Carleton College was less than an hour away. She loved school, but she loved her family and missed not only her mother and sisters but Mr. Paradise, with whom she liked to talk about astronomy, a shared interest.