Sleepwalking in Daylight

And:

“In a perfect world, we’d outlaw high heels and everyone would wear orthotics.”

He said that to the principal at Cammy’s school after a tense meeting in which the headmaster told us she was on probation again. The principal, Mr. Black, looks like the doctors used forceps when he was born. His pinched face matches his prim boarding-school Oliver Twist personality. I can’t stand him mainly because he seems not to be able to stand me. Or my family. Even before Cammy was in trouble, Mr. Black acted like we were a problem. Like we were high maintenance. When Cammy was in first grade we’d gone in to talk to him about moving her to another class with a more patient teacher and he started shaking his head halfway through our request and held up his hand. He said, “It’s a poor sportsman who blames the equipment.” I wanted to wring his neck. We tried talking to him about Cammy’s special needs and he waved us off like it was all bullshit. Bob said, “The kid’s in first grade … what could it matter?” And Mr. Black leaned across his desk and hissed, “Exactly.” Bob said, “No, I mean, what’s the big deal about her going into Miss Landis’s class. We hear she’s great with—” But before Bob could finish, Mr. Black stood and said, “We’ll see what we can do.” We were dismissed. Being new parents we actually thought he’d come through, but now that I know him I know he didn’t give us a second thought. Son of a bitch.

So, years later, Mr. Black was walking us to the front door on his way up to a class he needed to audit and I knew he was trying to mask the click of my shoes in the empty hallway when he halfheartedly asked Bob how work was going. He made me feel embarrassed to have such loud footsteps when they’re just footsteps, for Christ’s sake. Bob had us standing inside the front door for nearly five minutes talking about the latest in heel air cushioning until I saved the impatient principal by taking Bob’s arm and saying, “Honey, we’ve got to get going.” I purposely avoided what I knew would be grateful headmaster eyes because after all he’d just slammed my daughter and anyway he’d always been a son of a bitch. I guess, then, I was saving myself from having to hear Bob’s foot philosophy. Again.

“Jesus Christ, what’re we going to do?” I say on the way to the car. “I swear to God I honestly don’t know what else we can do. We’ve grounded her a million times. I’ve tried to get her to open up to me … she’s just always so angry. Why the hell is she so angry all the time?”

“Allen Edmonds shoes,” Bob says, reaching for the keys he’d given me to hold because he insists they make his gait uneven. Four keys. Like he’s running a marathon at the Olympics.

“The guy’s got good taste in footwear, I’ll give him that,” he says.

“Bob. Focus. What’re we going to do about Cammy?”

“He’s being way too harsh,” he says, starting the car and adjusting the rearview mirror even though he was the one who drove us there. “Probation? For ignoring a teacher?”

“I swear to God I can’t believe it. How’d we get to this? And Bob, she didn’t just ignore Mrs. Cummings. You know that death stare she gives. That Goth stare is crazy scary. I guarantee you she was clamping her jaw shut and doing that stare. I’d send her to the headmaster, too, if I were her teacher. When that look comes over her it’s like a cloud or something. And that’s not even the issue. She’s been cutting class. She’s smoking on school property. What the hell? I’ve never smelled smoke on her, have you?”

“I think it’s a little much to suspend someone for a death stare,” he says, looking to the right then the left before inching out of the school parking lot. “And kids cut class from time to time. Give her detention, for God’s sake, but suspension?”

Right and left again a second time. You’d think he was pulling onto the Daytona Speedway the way he looks for cars before moving. Like they’re going to whiz at him at triple-digit speeds and send him spinning into the boards.

“He’s not suspending her,” I say. “He’s putting her on probation. You’re fine on this side, by the way.”

“Suspension, probation, same thing. They both look bad on her school file.”

“Exactly my point,” I say. “It’s green, that’s why everyone’s honking.”

“Will you just let me drive?”

“All I’m saying is we’ve got to be a united front when we get home.” I turn in my seat to face him because I can’t bear to watch him drive. He’s terrible behind the wheel and the worst part is he has no idea. Completely clueless. Cars will slow down alongside him, the drivers’ faces gnarled in anger, mouthing swears, but he doesn’t see them.

“What’s the party line?” he asks.

“She’s grounded, for starters. No computer. No cell.”

“How’s she going to call if something gets canceled or she needs to be picked up from somewhere?” he asks.

“What good is taking away the computer if she still has her cell? All she does is text. We’ve got to take it if the grounding’s going to have any impact. Besides, what’s so wrong with her finding a pay phone if there’s an emergency or she needs a ride? I don’t know why you’re worried about that part of it anyway since I’m the one who does all the picking up.”

“What the?”

“When was the last time you picked up Cammy or the boys from anything other than a random weekend soccer game? They’re your kids, too, Bob.”

He looks ahead and I find myself wondering how upset I’d be if he died. I’d be worried about the kids growing up without a father, but me? I don’t know that I’d feel much.

“I think it’s about the adoption,” I say. My stomach twisting up tells me this is not a good time to bring it up, but there’s never a good time to bring it up.

“Oh, my God, so we’re blaming everything that goes wrong on the adoption? Are we going to dredge this up for the rest of our lives? Jesus, let it go.”

“You want to know what I think? I think most of everything that’s gone wrong with her is because of how she found out about the adoption.”

“Oh, please …”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. To tell a little girl the reason why she feels like she looks different from her brothers is because she’s not our ‘real’ child? Honestly? What the hell, Bob. How many years ago was that—ten years? No, eleven. For the last eleven years she’s been feeling like an outcast in her own family.”

“Stop. It’s not like that and you know it,” he says. I feel our speed increasing and we are uncharacteristically in sync with the other cars along Lake Shore Drive.

“Oh, yeah? What’s it like then? Huh? You’re saying you didn’t blurt it out? You’re forgetting that we had a plan … that we were going to talk to her together at an age-appropriate time like the books say? You just plunge in without me and say something without thinking it through and then you scratch your head in amazement like you’re surprised she remembers it word for word after all these years and then you sit here all smug and tell me it wasn’t like that? It was exactly like that, Bob. Exactly.”

Bob slows down and once again cars are swerving around us. A guy in a Prius gives Bob the bird and I wonder whether it’s because we’re the enemy now in our hateful gas-guzzling SUV or that Bob is driving under the speed limit or maybe just maybe he sees me spitting angry words at this man in my car, this man I no longer recognize, and he flips him off for me.

“Things have gotten so out of hand with her,” I say, backing off the adoption subject like I always do. “I don’t even know where to start. I put my finger on one leak and another one spouts.”

“I know,” he says. He’s lying. He doesn’t know. At least not when it comes to the kids, and frankly I’m sick of hearing how awful work is every single day. The boys crave time with him. Lately it’s taken me nagging him to get him to spend any kind of time with them. We ride the rest of the way in silence, which is fine by me.

I look at him and honestly? Honestly I am not in the least bit attracted to him. So that brings me back to my point:

Not one of my friends wants sex. Seriously. Not one. Well, not any of the ones with kids. I look around at other forty-something moms and they fall into two categories. One group has surrendered to the uniform of motherhood: sensible shoes, mom-jeans, sweatshirts, bulky full-length gray Michelin Man parkas in winter, shapeless old T-shirts in summer.

The second group is the pilates group. They’re hot. They wear jeans their daughters covet. They have defined biceps and flat tummys. Oh. And abs. Six-pack abs. Working out is a full-time job for them. It’s like there was a secret memo to do yoga, be in the best shape of their lives and shop in stores that carry tight T-shirts with plunging necklines, but the irony is there’s nowhere to go with it since no one’s having sex. I love a good crisply laundered white shirt, button-down like a man’s but formfitting. My jeans aren’t too tight but they aren’t baggy. My favorite shoes are a pair of old Gucci loafers I splurged on years ago when Bob got a great Christmas bonus. The best buy I’ve ever made: they’re well made so I’ve never had to have them resoled. The leather’s buttery and camel colored. They go with every pair of pants I own. Mostly though I wear skirts. I’ve never understood why more women don’t wear skirts. At school pickup not so long ago, Ann Slevick looked me up and down and said, “You’re always so put together,” and I thanked her but she didn’t smile. So the next day I made a point of wearing my jeans with the holes in them.

Sometimes at night when I’m changing into Gap boxers and an old Mount Rushmore T-shirt with holes and yellowed armpits, I inspect myself in our full-length mirror. I’ve got a decent hairstyle: that shoulder-length layered cut everyone seems to have. I haven’t overcolored it, so the brown looks natural, which is lucky. 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 very well, according to Kerry Kendricks, who, when Lynn asked her if she still has sex, says:

“Who has the time?” Kerry Kendricks is on every committee at school and not once have I heard her called by just her first name.

Ginny: “Let me ask you something.” She looks at me. “Do you all think it’s the women or the men? Do women want sex and the men don’t or is it the other way around?”

Everyone’s talking at once so it doesn’t matter that I don’t answer. I don’t tell them that neither of us wants sex. Only Lynn knows I haven’t stopped trying with Bob because I think it could still save us from being total strangers to one another. I haven’t stopped trying for sex even though I don’t want it any more than Bob does.

The next morning after the kids are off to school Lynn pulls up a kitchen chair and shakes a packet of Sweet’n Low into the tea I put in front of her.

“Before I forget, will you sponsor me for the breast cancer run?” I slide the form to her. “I know, I know. I swear this is the last time I’ll hit you up this year.”

“Breast cancer, Go Green, Save the Whales …” She sighs, fitting her name into the allotted space. “Sheesh, is there anything you don’t raise money for? Here you go.”

“Thanks, and for the record it was a Greenpeace fund-raiser not Save the Whales and it was about ten years ago.” I laugh. “Thanks for this. I really do appreciate it.”

“You should’ve taken it to book club last night,” she says. “I would’ve loved to have seen how much Paula gave, since she loves breasts more than anyone, I bet.”

“I don’t think she’s a lesbian,” I say. “You heard her.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Lynn says.

“So how about what Ginny said?” I settle across the table from her and just to make it seem like I’m bringing it up casually, I brush nonexistent crumbs off the table.

“What, you mean how they still have tons of sex?”

“Yeah, that,” then I pretend to remember something else Ginny said, “Oh, and then there was that comment about me … what was it?”

Lynn narrows her eyes at me. “You actually think I’m buying your little show? You really want to talk about Ginny’s sex life?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I barely finish the sentence without laughing. “Okay, okay. You’re right, you’re right.”

This is the best part about Lynn. She’s pretty much always right. The worst part about Lynn is that she knows it.

“You know why everyone thinks you’re so together? Because you act like you’re so together,” Lynn says. She’s blowing on her tea, waiting for it to cool.

“Everyone really thinks I’m so together?”

“Yup.”

“I’m not so together.”

“I know that and you know that but I’m telling you, people think you’re so together.”

“Wow.”

“Yup—” she takes a sip “—little do they know. Shoot! There’s the recycling truck and I forgot to put the bins out. Got to go.”

“Don’t forget dinner tomorrow!” I call out to her. At a school fund-raiser/silent auction last spring, I bid on dinner for two at a new sushi place downtown thinking it’d be a good date-night thing to do with Bob. SushiMax is the hardest reservation to get according to Chicago Magazine. I forgot all about it until they called to reconfirm, and of course Bob found some excuse to get out of it until I came out and asked if it was just that he didn’t want to go and he shrugged and said, “You know how I feel about sushi,” so I asked Lynn and told Bob he had kid duty.

I have been acting. Of course. I haven’t thought of it as acting but that’s exactly what I’ve been doing. But doesn’t everyone put on a good face? Is anybody my age really happy? I’ve stretched my mouth into a smile for so long it’s become natural. And sometimes it is natural … with the kids, especially when they were smaller. With Lynn. I know there are other times, too, I just can’t think of them off the top of my head. Oh. After yoga, when I make it to Imogen’s class. That’s another genuine smile. On the rare nights just Bob and I have dinner, it’s so silent I restrain myself from upending the kitchen table just to jolt us out of this stupor.

Bob once said, “The only constant in our marriage is the edge of the cliff we’re hanging on to, killing time until we tire ourselves out and give in to our inevitable collapse.”

It was fairly early in our marriage. We were reading in bed. We’d been married probably three years by then. I think it was during the fertility nightmare, but that’s a whole other story. I remember it was summer and all the windows were open because the air conditioner didn’t work. When we’d moved in, Bob had said, priority number one was central air, but the months ticked by and two, three years later there we were with a broken window unit and air so humid I was sweating just lying there.

“Listen to this,” he said. I put my book down to wipe my palms on the white sheet while he read a sentence aloud.

“‘The only constant in our marriage …’” He recited more while I was staring up at the ceiling thinking a ceiling fan might not be such a bad idea after all.

“Are you listening?” he asked. Then he read it again and that time I heard it.

I turned on to my side and flattened the pillow so I could see him, his expression. I remember wondering if he was simply impressed with the writing—sometimes he read passages aloud to anyone within earshot just to marvel at the sentence structure. Or was it something else? He’d put the book down and was staring into the room so I only had his profile. Then, almost to himself, he said:

“So I guess things could be worse.”

I waited for a laugh but there had been no sarcasm in his tone. It was as if he was comforted knowing at least we were doing better than the couple hanging on to the cliff, if only a little bit better. That’s the way he said it. Like he hadn’t realized anything could be worse than what we were living through.