Sleepwalking in Daylight. Elizabeth Flock
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My ass isn’t so bad. Not for a forty-five-year-old. I’ve seen worse. It’s the front that bugs me. I hate my stomach. Lying down it feels flat if I don’t run my hands along my hips. It actually feels like it used to be before the boys. So all in all I suppose my body hasn’t started the middle-age decline yet, but it’s only because I’m tall and my limbs are long and there’s something deceiving in that. In old class pictures I would be the one standing on the side of the bleachers where all the kids were neatly sitting in rows. Our teacher stood on the other side. I cursed my height and wished I could stop shooting up like the Jolly Green Giant. It felt like a creepy magic trick, the way I grew taller and taller. It felt like Guinness World Records tall. My classmates looked like Lilliputians to me and I hunched over, folding into my chest to try to compensate. Like Cammy, I had knobby knees and clumsy bruises. With no spatial reasoning I found myself cutting the corner into another room, my whole right side hitting the door frame on the way in. I finally stopped growing at five feet nine inches and boys started reaching and then passing me and all was forgiven, but I still have to remind myself to sit up straight.
“Have you guys heard about all these sexless marriages?” I ask my book club. We’ve been together for about five years now. It started with me and Lynn and Ginny from down the street. Ginny’s sweet. Maybe too sweet, but still. She’s thirty, fifteen years younger than me. She and her husband, Don, live in a bright green house everyone calls the Traffic Light. She’s the one I call when I need another set of hands for something around the house. Like hanging the drapes I sewed. She’s always home. While I never set out to, every once in a while I end up talking to her about life and I’m reminded why I like her so much. I think we bonded when she left her job as an investment consultant at a downtown banking firm about four, five years ago. Around that time on a summer night in white wicker chairs on my front porch we talked about what we really wanted out of life. I said I wasn’t sure but I knew it hadn’t happened yet. I remember this: she seemed startled. When she said, “But you have children,” I realized why. I used to think the same way. That life would make sense once we had children. Ginny mentioned she and Don had been trying to have a baby. She talked about finding something else in her life. Something with purpose. Something she could feel proud of. I told her what I wish someone had told me. I told her not to be in such a hurry to have children. I told her sometimes it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. She nodded and sipped her wine. There wasn’t a hint, even a twinge of judgment from her. I knew this was something she’d share with Don in bed that night. “She doesn’t really love her children,” she’d marvel. “I never would’ve guessed it.”
Most people I know think the sun rises and sets on their children. They orbit around them like planets. So it was a big deal to feel open enough with someone other than Lynn about something so personal. I told Lynn we needed to let her into our friendship. She balked at first but after a little while, months maybe, she admitted Ginny’s pretty great.
So book club started with the three of us. Then Ginny asked if she could bring a friend she works out with, Leanne, who is kind of a pain in the ass but I don’t mind her. She’s funny but she doesn’t seem like she has a whole lot of depth. Or intelligence. I’ve always suspected Leanne cracks the bindings on her books to make it look like she’s not only read them, she’s studied them. She might even dog-ear them then flatten out the folded triangles on random pages. Teresa Wdowiak came in along the way—I can’t remember who brought her. Then Sally Flanders cornered Lynn when Lynn was weeding some years ago and asked if our book club was accepting new members and if so could she be one of them. What choice did we have? There’s no stopping Sally Flanders.
There are eight of us here tonight, which is uncommon. Typically it’s four or five but we’re reading The Kite Runner this month and everyone wants to weigh in. Last month someone recommended A Hundred Years of Solitude, but no one got past the first fifty pages so we canceled. Actually that’s not true. Kerry Kendricks read it and fought the cancellation, but she’s a show-off and no one wanted to sit there and listen to her lecturing us about South American literature.
We’re in Sally Flanders’s living room. I hate being in Sally Flanders’s living room. It’s like walking into Pier One through a curtain of the smell of potpourri and scented candles. I’m pretty sure I see a Glade plug-in across Sally’s living room, next to a grandfather clock that’s got an irregular tick. Sally favors floral design and needlepoint animal pillows. She tells us where to sit—that’s weird enough as it is—based on what pillows are there. She calls them her “cute critters.” Tonight I’ve got “Lucky Lassie” wedged between my lower back and the spires on the back of this, the most uncomfortable chair in the world. Lynn is rolling her eyes at something Leanne’s saying about the snickerdoodles she brought—she always wants a medal for her cooking, saying stuff like, Oh, it’s so easy, and then rattles on about how much trouble she went to for all of us. Special ingredients blah blah blah. Her cooking’s not even very good and Lynn usually finds a way to point that out. Tonight she eats one tiny bite of the cookie and leaves the rest on her empty plate, which she puts on the coffee table where Leanne’s sure to see it. I don’t know why Lynn lets Leanne get to her.
“I just read this article in MORE magazine or something—maybe it was O—that said forty-year-old women are just getting started,” I say. “It said something like we’re secure with our bodies and vocal about our needs. I can’t remember the exact wording but that was the gist.”
The laughter interrupts me.
“What?” I look around at them. “I’m being totally serious. Don’t you worry about this?”
“No, she’s right,” Lynn says. “There was something on the Today show about it yesterday. They showed one couple who had sex on their honeymoon and that was it. Guess how long they’ve been married? Just guess. You won’t, so I’ll tell you. Twelve years. Twelve years and no sex. I don’t know how she pulled it off, but I’ll have what she’s having.”
More laughs.
“What’s all the fuss about anyway?” asks Ginny. “We still have sex.”
“You’re in your thirties!” Lynn says. “Of course you’re still having sex. Wait’ll you turn forty.”
Paula, who complains anytime the conversation becomes social, mutters “off topic” in a tsking tone, hoping it will steer us back to book talk, but it rarely does. She usually sits there with her arms crossed and her lips tight. Tonight, though, she weighs in: “I’m so tired all the time.”
Everyone stops and looks at her. It’s an unspoken assumption that Paula’s asexual. She’s got a Dorothy Hamill haircut and what a doctor would definitely term morbid obesity. I’ve never seen her with anyone but her three-legged English bulldog, Freddy. I think Paula is about fifty pounds away from being housebound. She’s all business but I kind of like her for that. In the blackout a few summers ago she organized a candle drive so the elderly neighbors would be okay. She puts together a neighborhood newsletter on her computer. Birth announcements, who’s moving in or out. Want ads you can e-mail to her. A ten-speed for sale. Babysitters needed. Does anyone know a good plumber? That sort of thing. She’s the kind of person neighborhoods don’t realize they need. She’s the one who goes to the monthly Neighborhood Watch meetings and writes up safety information we already have. Lock your doors. Keep your front light on all night to discourage burglars. I respect Paula. In an emergency I like knowing she’s at arm’s length in her house with gray vinyl siding she hoses off every spring.
“I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Ginny looks at me and rolls her eyes. “You’re always so together, you know? Like you’ve got it all figured out. Plus, you and Bob are like the golden couple. I bet you have sex, like, every other day.”
I open my mouth to say, “Are you crazy? You can’t be serious!” but Lynn interrupts.
“As far as Michael knows, I have my period every day of the month,” she says. The laughter bounces off the cuddly critters or whatever they are, mixing with advice for what to say to get off the sex hook and then a juicy story about a sex-addict husband of someone we all know