When I told Joel about the holes, he waved my fear away. “Your brain isn’t full of holes,” he said. “You’re just overtired.”
“Forget the holes,” I said. “It’s like…” I sat down on the edge of our bed, my face in my hands, peering through my fingers as if through the bars of a prison cell. I took a deep breath. “It’s like… imagine your brain is a mansion, a huge mansion with many wings and floors and a thousand rooms at least.”
“Okay.”
“But you don’t have enough money to pay the electric bill anymore, so you close off one floor. Big deal, you think at first. Who needs a thousand rooms, nine hundred is plenty. But eventually, you have to close off another floor, then another, then the whole wing. You cover all the furniture and art with white sheets. You lock the doors. Then you close another wing. Eventually, all that’s left is the attic. You get squeezed into this tiny place in a corner of the attic with only a candle. You know the rest of the mansion is there, but you can’t get to it.”
Joel stared.
“That’s what it feels like not to sleep.”
“Maybe you should ask for sleeping pills,” he said finally.
“I can’t take pills! It’ll get into the milk.”
“You don’t need to shout,” he said, gripping my shoulders. “I hear you.” He released me to pace back and forth. “There must be something.” He tapped his forehead as if the solution would tumble out. “Wait here.” He grabbed his keys and left, slamming the door. Of course, the baby woke up. Twenty minutes later, when he came back, she was still screaming and my nerves were stripped raw and throbbing.
He took her and thrust a bag at me. “From the health food store. I bought every natural sleep aid they had. I’ll take care of her while you take a nap.”
I dumped the contents on the kitchen table: valerian root, melatonin, magnesium, Sleepytime tea, and even a CD of soothing sounds. In bed, I took three of everything, drank the tea, and played the CD. I closed my eyes and waited. The sounds were soothing: waves rolling in, water trickling over stones—or was that a toilet that had just been flushed? The room grew foggy. My brain settled a little, bumping up against sleep. I was adjacent to sleep, I told Joel later, skirting a neighborhood I couldn’t enter.
“Really? I peeked in—”
“I was like one of those orphans with empty bellies in a Dickens novel, out in the cold, watching the children of the rich as they dine on roast beef—”
“Maybe that was a just a dream—”
“A hungry orphan peering through a window that is slowly fogging over with her last breaths. Or, no, the little match girl.”
“You’ll just have to try again tonight. It takes a while for this stuff to build up in your system.” He looked so disappointed. I felt as if I’d let him down, as if my inability to sleep was hurting him.
“Sure,” I said. “Never, never, never give up.”
“That’s my girl.” He kissed my forehead and handed me the baby. “I’ll make dinner tonight.”
Something else started to bother me. Why was I only remembering male authors? I couldn’t think of a single line written by a woman, but I’d mainly studied female writers in college. It was because men had been in power since forever, I told myself, banishing women to scrape the soup kettle and chamber pot as they pranced around in velvet knickerbockers, signing declarations and penning manifestos, hogging the limelight, those shits.
“Listen,” I told the baby, “I’m only going to read female authors to you. You need to know what you’re up against.” I pulled Beloved from the shelf, cracked the spine, cleared my throat. “124 was spiteful. Full of a baby’s venom.” A baby’s venom! Yes, I thought, exactly! Only a woman would write that. Only a woman would know that some babies are poisonous.
She began to cry, so I shut the book and picked her up. “Some babies are full of venom,” I cooed. “Yes, they are!”
Sometimes I cried, too. But I am so lucky, I would remind myself as the tears splattered onto her head, poor thing.
I would never be alone with myself ever again. Now that she existed, she would always be there: if not front and center, then at the edges, hovering, and even if she moved away to some distant country, she would be in my head, needing things I couldn’t give.
Was it like that for my mother, too? Did my existence make it hard for her to be herself? Or to even breathe? The next time she called, I tried to ask her, but I only managed to ramble on about the mansion.
There was a silence on her end, and then: “Are you okay? Sweetheart? Should I come again in a few weeks? I might be able to take some time off next month.”
“No, of course not, I’m fine. I’m being silly again, that’s all.” But I wanted my mother so badly. I wanted to crawl right back into her.