Growing up, Lizzie loved going upstairs to bed. She greeted sleep with relief. Mendel and Lydia insisted that her door be open all the time, except when she was sleeping, so bedtime was her only time for privacy. Those relatively few nights when she couldn’t fall asleep, because she was worried about school, or something Andrea said, or her stomach ached or her head pounded with pain, she’d get up quietly and take two aspirins (for the headache) and then read until her eyes felt too heavy to keep open and then she’d sleep.
She’d decided to take two classes that summer, Political Geography and Transformational Grammar. The geography class met at seven a.m. on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Lizzie figured that because there would be so few students in attendance (because who in their right mind would want to study geography at such an ungodly hour?) she’d be forced to focus her mind on something besides Jack in order to get a decent grade. The grammar course met at a much more conventional time, but since Lizzie had only the foggiest notion of what transformational grammar was, and suspected that just a handful of other undergrads might actually understand it, and even fewer find the subject interesting enough to spend their summer hours (usually the most beautiful time in Ann Arbor) studying, the class would be small enough, and the subject difficult enough, that she’d have to pay close attention to what was going on. She was correct on all counts. For a brief six hours a week she had a respite from her obsessive thinking about where Jack was, what Jack was doing, and why he hadn’t written her.
After a week, and then another week, had passed without hearing from Jack, Lizzie began to yearn for sleep. She’d walk home from class or the library as slowly as she could, in order to give the letter from Jack, because surely this day there would be one, more time to arrive at her apartment. If only there’d be a letter there, waiting for her. It could be as prosaic and dull and short and unforthcoming as “See you in August.” Please, Lizzie prayed to Jack, please write me.
She and Marla never got much mail. It was easy to riffle through the credit-card offers, the ads, and the requests from various charities and immediately see there was nothing from Jack. But Lizzie was unable to go through the envelopes only once. She’d compulsively examine them again, and then a third time, giving each envelope a shake just in case another was stuck to it. Then she’d begin the wait for another chance to hear from him. She hated Sundays, when no mail came. Lizzie wondered whether it would be better or worse to have lived in England during the nineteenth century, when mail was delivered twice or three times a day, and still there’d be nothing from Jack. Would that have increased or decreased her sadness? She didn’t know. She did know how much more miserable she felt every day.
When she finally crawled into bed at night, she couldn’t fall asleep. She wanted to sleep. She thought that sleep would not only “knit up the raveled sleeve of care” (see, she had paid attention once in a while in her Shakespeare class) but also speed up time until the mail came again. Every day she finished working at the library around four and walked home to the apartment she and Marla and James had rented for the summer, only to find there was no letter from Jack. Then, in desperation, she’d begin counting down the minutes, carelessly doing her homework until she felt it was late enough to go to sleep as though she were a normal college student and not some quivering Jell-O-y mass of misery. Most evenings she was alone. Marla was in the art building looking at slides. James was at the library studying.
She couldn’t eat. Her stomach had a hollow anticipatory feeling that led her to believe (rightly, it turned out) that eating anything would lead to a disastrous outcome. The lack of sleep made her even more vulnerable to tears. She wasted hours at the end of the day walking around the three rooms of the apartment, hugging herself, repeating “Don’t cry, don’t cry, don’t cry” until the words lost their meaning and became merely sounds. She lost a lot of weight very quickly and avoided looking at herself in any mirror she encountered. Whenever she did fleetingly glimpse her reflection, she didn’t immediately recognize herself. One night when James and Marla were home for dinner and Lizzie was pushing food around her plate, James told her that she was way too thin.
“You’re making yourself sick. Eat something, Lizzie, please,” Marla begged.
But she couldn’t eat.
And she couldn’t fall asleep. Though her desire for oblivion, even temporary oblivion, was strong, sleep would not come, declining to accommodate her yearning for its appearance.
Oh, she tried all the usual measures. First, a cup of warm milk, to which—because she was now an adult—she added a good measure of brandy, purchased specially for this purpose, but later in the summer used it the way it was intended: straight. She didn’t sip it either. She ate saltines, sometimes with peanut butter, if her stomach felt up to it. She took long bubble baths.
James told her that he’d heard that a good technique for falling asleep was to take each worry you had and dump it into a trash container, one by one, until all your worries were disposed of and you were asleep. She tried it one night, taking her many-claused worry that Jack didn’t love her, had never loved her, would never come back, would never be seen by her again, maybe he was dead and nobody thought to tell her, maybe he’d never taken their relationship seriously, maybe she was just like the girl in his high school who nobody would date, maybe the Great Game had ruined any chance she had at being with Jack, maybe he was gone forever. She ceremoniously emptied all those fears into a large silver trash can. But they refused to stay there, jumping up like magic beans and relodging themselves in her mind. She reported to James that, regretfully, it hadn’t worked.
She played “A . . . My Name Is Alice” but made it harder for herself by adding an adjective to whatever the carload was and the car had to be filled with people, not things, so instead of organic oranges and boring books, she had carloads of dastardly Danes, eager electricians, cowardly criminologists, and nasty neurosurgeons. Q, Z, and X were always difficult, but her years of reading made them easier to do. “Q my name is Queenie / And my husband’s name is Quentin / And we come from Queens / With a carload of questionable quislings.”
That sort of thing. She was bothered a little by the use of Queenie and Queens, so substituted Quebec for the location, which made her feel a bit triumphant but didn’t help with falling asleep. Perhaps this game had never been a particularly good sleep magnet. There was too much concentration involved. Maybe she needed something easier.
She recited all the Housman poems she knew but had to stop when she got to “Stars, I Have Seen Them Fall” because it took her thoughts back to the last night with Jack, which was disastrous. When that happened she’d get up and smoke some of James’s ample supply of pot, but at the beginning of the summer it did ruinous things to her, it made her paranoid, made her heart beat erratically. Her eyes, already red from crying, became even redder.