I’M LYING IN BED WITH Lucy, waiting for her to fall asleep. If I get up too soon, she’ll beg for one more book. I already read Tacky the Penguin and Blue’s Best Rainy Day. I’ll tell her no, and she’ll say please, stretching the eez out for several seconds to show me that she’s being extra polite and that her request is extra important, and I’ll say no, and in the course of this arousing tête-à-tête, she’ll wake herself up. It’s just easier if I stay until she’s out.
I’m spooning her small body, and my nose is on her head. She smells like heaven—an elixir of Johnson’s Baby Shampoo, Tom’s of Maine Strawberry toothpaste, and Nilla Wafers. I think I’ll cry the day all my kids stop using Johnson’s Baby Shampoo. Who will they smell like then?
She’s so warm, and her deepened breathing is hypnotic. I wish I could let myself drift off with her, but I have miles to go before I can sleep. This is the trick every night, to leave after she’s surrendered the fight to be up, but before I give in to the desire to close my eyes. When I’m convinced she’s fully unconscious, I slide out from under the covers, tiptoe around all the toys and crafts (land mines) strewn on the floor, and steal out of her darkened room like I’m James Bond.
Bob is eating a bowl of cereal on the couch.
“Sorry, babe, I couldn’t wait.”
No apologies necessary. I’m relieved. I love it when I don’t have to think about what we’re going to eat for dinner, and I love it even more when I don’t have to cook anything. Well, I should admit, I don’t exactly cook. I microwave. I heat up already prepared and cooked food. And the Takeout Taxi phone number is programmed into our speed dial. But cereal might just be my favorite dinner at home. It’s not that I don’t enjoy a sumptuous and elegant meal at Pisces or Mistral, but dinner at home on the couches with Bob isn’t about ambiance and fine dining. It’s about getting rid of the hunger pangs as quickly as possible and moving on.
We spend the next three hours in the living room on separate couches with our laptops on our laps. CNN is on the TV for background noise and the occasional interesting sound bite. I am mostly emailing our offices in China and India. Boston is twelve hours behind China and ten and a half hours behind India, so now is tomorrow morning for them. This still blows my mind. I’m a time traveler, doing business in real time on Thursday when it is still only Wednesday where I sit on my couch. Amazing.
Bob is clicking around the internet and networking for jobs. He’s at a promising information technology start-up, and the payoff is potentially huge if they get acquired or go public, but as with most fledgling companies in this economy, things aren’t looking so good. The recession is hitting them hard, and the skyrocketing growth trajectories Bob projected when he signed on three years ago feel like a distant, silly fantasy. At this point, they’re simply trying not to bleed to death. He just survived a second round of layoffs, but he isn’t planning on sticking around and holding his breath through a third. The problem is Bob is picky, and not many companies are hiring. I can tell by his pinched mouth and the vertical ravine between his furrowed brows that he isn’t finding anything.
The uncertainty of his job, both current and future, has been really weighing on him. When he starts sliding down What-If’s slippery slope to Doomsville—What if I lose my job tomorrow? What if I can’t find another? What if we can’t make the mortgage payments?—I try to brush them all off and make the load lighter for him. Don’t worry, honey, you’ll be fine. The kids will be fine. We’ll all be fine.
But the What-Ifs take up residence in my head, and in my head, I’m captain of the champion luge team, barreling at record speed to Doomsville. What if he does get laid off and can’t find another job? What if we have to sell the house in vermont? But then what if we can’t sell it in this depressed market? What if we can’t pay the student loans, the car payments, the heating bill? What if we can’t afford to stay in Welmont?
I close my eyes and see the word debt written in all caps and red ink. My chest tightens, and it feels like there’s no air in the room, and my laptop is suddenly unbearably hot on my legs, and I’m sweating. Stop thinking about it. Take your own advice. He’ll be fine. The kids will be fine. We’ll be fine. Deluded mantra.
I decide to watch TV for a minute to take my mind off of Doomsville. Anderson Cooper is reporting about a San Diego mother who accidentally left her two-year-old toddler in the backseat of her locked car for eight hours while she worked at her job. When the mother returned to her car at the end of the day, her toddler was dead from heat exhaustion. Officials are deciding whether or not to press charges.
What was I thinking? CNN is the capital of Doomsville. My eyes fill with tears thinking about this woman and her dead child. I imagine the two-year-old, helpless to escape the car seat’s five-point harness, terror and fevered desperation giving way to organ failure. How will that mother ever forgive herself ? I think of my mother.
“Bob, can you change the channel?”
He flips to a local news station. One of the anchors is listing today’s news from bad to worse—banks begging for bail-outs, soaring unemployment rates, the stock market in free fall. Doomsville, U.S.A.
I get up and go to the kitchen to look for some chocolate and a big glass of wine.
We both surrender the day at eleven. Before the sun rises in Boston, consultants in the various European offices will be sipping their first espressos of the day, adding their emails to my inbox with their morning’s questions, concerns, and reports. And, at about the same time, Linus will wake up. Groundhog Day all over again.
It used to take me a long time to fall asleep, anywhere from twenty minutes to a full hour. I used to have to read something totally unrelated to my day, like a novel, to distract and calm my racing thoughts. And Bob’s snoring used to drive me crazy. It’s truly nothing short of miraculous that he can sleep through all his own growling and whistling. He says he’s protecting our cave from predators. While I appreciate his idea about the origin of the man snore, I believe that we as a species have evolved past the need for it. Like the dead-bolted front door, to begin with. But his Fred Flintstone snore will not be phased out by modern technology. There have been many nights when I wanted to suffocate him with my pillow and take my chances with the lions, tigers, and bears.
But no more. Since about the time that Lucy was born, I’m asleep within five minutes of my head hitting the pillow. If I try to read, I don’t get past the page I start on. I can’t remember the last time I finished a novel. And if I happen to surface into a light sleep during the night and notice Bob’s snoring, I roll over and sink unperturbed back into slumber.
The negative side to this is its impact on our sex life. I’m embarrassed to admit this, but I can’t remember the last time we had sex. I like sex with Bob, and I still want to have sex with Bob, but I don’t seem to like and want it enough to stay awake long enough to make it happen. I know we’re both busy and tired at the end of the day, but I’m not too busy and tired to read to Lucy, email China, and go through the piles of bills. Yet every night, I draw the line at sex. And so does Bob.
I remember when we used to have sex early in the evening, before we were too tired, sometimes even before going out (when we used to go out). Now, when we do manage to fit it in, it’s always just before bed, always in bed, a pre-sleep activity like brushing teeth or flossing, although never with that kind of regularity.
When I was single, I remember reading in Vogue or Cosmopolitan or one of those magazines I only read at the hairdresser’s that married couples with advanced degrees report having sex the least of all married couples. Only ten to twelve times a year. That’s once a month. That will NEVER be me, I thought. Of course, I was twenty-something, single, without children, far less educated than I am now, and getting laid at least two to three times a week. I used to read the surveys in those magazines and think they were entertaining but pure fiction. Now I hang on every brilliant word.
I hope Bob doesn’t doubt whether I’m still attracted to him. Ironically
, if anything, I’m more attracted to him now than when we were dating and having sex all the time. Watching him feed Linus a bottle, kiss Lucy’s boo-boo, teach Charlie over and over again how to tie his shoes, moments when I see him utterly unself-conscious and absorbed in loving them, I feel like I could burst with how much I adore him.
I regret the nights when I’m so tired that I fall asleep before telling him that I love him. And I’m irrationally angry with him on the nights that he falls asleep before he tells me. If we’re too unmotivated to eat a grown-up dinner, too preoccupied with emails and job hunting to snuggle on the couch and watch a movie, and too tuckered out to consider three minutes of sex, then we can at least say we love each other before we pass out.
I lie in bed alone and wait for Bob. I want to tell him that I love him, that even if he loses his job tomorrow, I’ll still love him. That wherever What-If takes us, we’ll be okay because we love each other. But he takes too long in the bathroom, and I fall asleep before I get a chance to tell him, worried for some reason that he doesn’t know.
CHAPTER 5
On the way to the laundry room, I notice a door I’ve never seen before behind the exercise equipment. I stop and stare. How can this be?
“Bob, where’d this door come from?” I holler.
He doesn’t answer.
I grab the knob that I swear never existed before now and pause. My mother’s voice says, SARAH, MIND YOUR OWN BUSINESS.
I twist the knob to the right.
A menacing Alfred Hitchcock movie voice says, DON’T.
I have to know.
I push the door open. I’m standing in the threshold of a room I’ve never been in before, and in the far corner, a lion is drinking water from a stainless steel lobster pot. The room is bigger than our kitchen, but that’s the only detail about it that I can take in because I’m transfixed by the lion—his muscular hind legs, his lively tail, his intolerable stench. I cover my nose and mouth with my shirt to keep from retching.
Moving was not a good idea. The lion looks over his shoulder, sees me, turns to face me square on, and roars. His stinky breath is hot and damp on my face. I don’t dare to wipe it. Drool drips from his mouth, accumulating into a sizable puddle on the floor. Our eyes are locked. I’m trying not to blink. I’m trying not to breathe.
Bob strolls in carrying a bundle the size of Linus wrapped in white deli paper. He walks past me, untapes the package, and dumps a slab of bloody, raw, red meat onto the floor next to the lion. The lion forgets about me and pounces on it.
“Bob, WHAT is going on?”
“I’m feeding the lion dinner.”
“Where did he come from?”
“What do you mean? He’s ours. He came with the house.”
I let out an uncertain laugh, thinking this must be the punch line to one of Bob’s weird jokes, but stop when he doesn’t join in.
Now that the lion is busy devouring something other than me, I look around the room. The walls are paneled, the concrete floor is covered in pine shavings, and the beamed ceiling is two stories high. A framed picture of me and Bob hangs on the wall. I notice another door in the wall opposite the lion. This one is small, about half the height of a regular door.
I have to know.
I tiptoe past the lion, open the door, and crawl inside. The door slams shut behind me, leaving me in total darkness. I can see nothing but assume that my eyes will adjust over time, like they do at the movies. I sit cross-legged against the door, blink, and wait, excited about what I’ll see.
I’m not scared.
T H U R S D A Y
Bob and I are standing in Charlie’s empty classroom, on time, hands in our coat pockets, waiting for Ms. Gavin. Every bone in my body doesn’t want to be here. However long this meeting lasts, I’ll probably be late for work and can already foresee chasing the rest of the day and never catching it. I feel as if I’m coming down with a miserable cold, and I forgot to down a shot of DayQuil before we rushed out the door. And I really don’t want to hear whatever it is Ms. Gavin is going to tell us.
I don’t trust this Ms. Gavin. Who is she, anyway? Maybe she’s a terrible teacher. I remember from Open House Night that she’s young, in her twenties. Inexperienced. Maybe she’s overwhelmed with her job and has been scheduling a meeting like this with the parents of every kid in her class. Maybe she has a thing against kids who challenge her. God knows Charlie can be challenging. Maybe she doesn’t like boys. I had a teacher like that once. Mrs. Knight only called on the girls, only gave the girls smiley faces on their papers, and was always sending one of the boys out into the hall or to the principal’s office. Never one of the girls.
Maybe this Ms. Gavin is the problem.
I look around the room for evidence to support my well-reasoned suspicion. Instead of the individual desks with attached chairs that I remember from my elementary school days, this room has four low, round tables with five chairs arranged around each, like little dining tables. Ideal for socializing, I’d say, not for learning. But my nice long list of things that the inept and unqualified Ms. Gavin is doing wrong ends with that single, lame observation.
Art projects line the walls. At the front of the room, printed-out photos of kids are taped onto two giant poster boards titled “Stellar Spellers” and “Math Olympic Champions.” Charlie’s picture is on neither. Five vibrantly colored, stuffed, kid-sized armchairs sit in a corner labeled “The Book Nook” next to a shelving unit packed with books. At the back of the room, there are two tables: one with a hamster in a cage and the other with fish in a tank.
Everything looks organized, cheery, and fun. I’d say Ms. Gavin loves her job. And she’s good at it. I really don’t want to be here.
I’m just about to ask Bob if he wants to make a break for it, when she appears.
“Thanks for coming. Please have a seat.”
Bob and I sit in the kiddie chairs, inches from the floor. Ms. Gavin sits high in her grown-up teacher’s chair behind her desk. We are munchkins, and she is the great and powerful Wizard of Oz.
“So, Charlie’s report card must be concerning to you both. Can I start by asking if you were surprised by his grades?”
“Shocked,” says Bob.
“Well, they’re about the same as last year,” I say.
Wait, whose side am I on?
“Yeah, but last year was about the adjustment,” says Bob.
Ms. Gavin nods, but not because she’s agreeing with him.
“Have you noticed if he has a hard time completing the homework assignments?” asks Ms. Gavin.
Abby starts the process with him in the afternoon, and Bob and I continue with him often past his bedtime. It’s supposed to take only twenty to thirty minutes. He struggles, agonizes, stalls, complains, cries, and hates. Worse than broccoli hates. We threaten, bribe, implore, explain, and sometimes just do it for him. Yup, I’d call it a hard time.
In his defense, I know I didn’t have homework at his age. I don’t think kids, with the exception of a few precocious girls, are ready for the responsibility of homework at the age of seven. I think the schools are putting too much academic pressure on our little kids. That said, we’re talking one page of “greater than or less than,” or spelling words like man, can, ran. it’s not rocket science.
“He does,” I say.
“It’s brutal,” says Bob.
“What are you seeing here?” I dare to ask.
“He’s struggling. He can’t complete any of the class assignments on time, he interrupts me and the other children, and he daydreams a lot. I catch him staring out the window at least six times before lunch every day.”
“Where is his seat?” I ask.
“There.”
She points to the chair closest to her desk, which also happens to be right by the window. Well, who wouldn’t get lost in thought when you’ve got a view? And maybe he’s sitting next to someone who’s distracting him. A troublemaker. A pretty girl. Maybe I gave Ms. Gavin too much credit.
“Can you try moving his seat to the other side of the room?” I ask, sure I’ve solved the whole problem.
“That’s where he started the year. I need him right in front of me if I want any chance of holding his attention.”
She waits to see if I have other bright ideas. I have none.
“He has a hard time following directions that have more than two steps. Like if I tell the class to go to their cubbies, get their math folders, get a ruler from the back table, and bring it back to their desks, Charlie will go to his cubby and bring back his snack, or he’ll bring back nothing and just roam the room. Are you seeing anything like this at home?”
“No,” says Bob.
“What? That’s Charlie,” I say.
He looks at me like he can’t imagine what I could be talking about. Is he paying attention? I wonder what Bob would get on his report card.
“Charlie, go get dressed and put on shoes. Charlie, put on your pajamas, put your clothes in the hamper, and brush your teeth. We might as well be speaking Greek.”
“Yeah, but he just doesn’t want to do those things. It’s not that he can’t. All kids try to get out of doing what they’re told,” says Bob.
I sneeze and excuse myself. My congested sinuses are killing me.
“He also doesn’t participate well in activities that require taking turns. The other kids tend to shy away from playing games with him because he won’t follow the rules. He’s impulsive.”
Now my heart is breaking.
“Is he the only one doing these kinds of things?” Bob asks, convinced that he’s not.
“Yes.”
Bob glances around at the eighteen empty little chairs and sighs into his hands.
“So what are you saying?” I ask.
“I’m saying Charlie is unable to focus on all aspects of the school day.”
“What does that mean?” asks Bob.
“It means that Charlie is unable to focus on all aspects of the school day.”