But, alas, not for you. You swim through a nocturnal world of slow-wave non-REM stage-three sleep—a clinical term that is just metrical enough to sound like bad poetry—and experience an abrupt pseudo-awakening with your heartbeat a frenetic paradiddle in your chest. And your prefrontal cortex, which is dormant because you are asleep, can’t help you. It can’t rein in your hands as they reach down below your waist. Or, when that’s not enough, as they reach for whoever’s beside you. Or, when there is no one beside you, as you set out to find someone.
We see a Berlin Wall between sleeping and wakefulness, between the conscious and the unconscious mind. But that’s wrong. Think a spectrum. Imagine a line.
And then imagine your limp surrender when you cross that line—the tremors, the unbidden release, the subsequent shame when you wake. And then imagine that you cross that line one time too many.
CHAPTER EIGHT
IT WAS A revelation as a twenty-one-year-old to push a grocery cart. I realized that despite having been in supermarkets easily hundreds of times in my life, I had never before taken a metal cart and guided it up and down the aisles. I had sat in them, of course. I had walked beside my mother or father as one or the other had pushed one, eventually with Paige in the seat. And I had shopped for myself at the grocery in Amherst and I had picked up things for my family right here over the years, but I had always used a plastic basket. Or I had balanced the cat food, the apples, and the heavy cream in my arms like a circus clown. And now I decided that I rather liked pushing the cart. I knew the pleasure would wear thin if this really were a weekly chore, but there was still an element of unreality to it—a sense that I was playacting. Twice when I was alone in one of the long, well-lit aisles, I had given the cart a little shove with the toe of my sneaker and watched it roll half a dozen yards ahead of me. I might have done it a third time, but my second push had sent it swerving like a bowling-alley gutter ball into a section of boxed cereals, and the impact had caused some of the cartons on the very top shelf to fall to the floor. Still, this task—grocery shopping—had exhumed some latent childhood happiness. There were the Saturday mornings before Paige was born, when my parents together would do weekly errands and I would wander these aisles with either my mother or father or both, and pick out the items that I wanted to bring with me to preschool or daycare, or I wanted packed in my lunch for school. How many of those very early memories were real and how many were manufactured from conversations with my parents or photos of me and my preschool pals at snack time I would never know. But the recollections from second grade? Precise. Same with the Uncrustable lunch phase. The peanut-butter-and-banana-sandwich phase (still one of my favorite sandwiches when I came home from college and craved comfort food). And, yes, the curried egg salad phase. (I was, apparently, a fourth-grade gourmand.)
But what did it matter if those first memories were, in fact, fabricated? It mattered not at all. The images in my mind were all as pleasant and reassuring as the supermarket recollections that I was confident were real: all those times after Paige had arrived when it would be only my father and me, because my mother would be home with my baby sister. Two aisles away from where I was standing right now, poised behind the back of the cart, was the bakery section, where my father and I had picked out the cake mixes and the icings and the sprinkles and the candles for my tenth birthday party cupcakes. (I smiled almost reverentially at the memory, and how I had wanted cupcakes instead of a cake, and how each one had to be decorated a little bit differently—and how my father had obliged. Paige was still an infant, and my father had done most of the heavy lifting at that birthday party. It was a sleepover on a Friday night. The next day, Saturday, after my friends had gone home, my father had taken me to Boston and brought me to a place called Club Conjure, the shabby second floor of a comedy club where magicians performed on the weekend. I was awed. By the time I was twenty-one, I had performed there twice myself, once with Rowland the Rogue in the audience. He brought me flowers.) “Lianna?”
I awoke from the daydream and saw Marilyn Bryce was beside me. Marilyn was a friend of my mother’s who tended to drive my father a little crazy. She was a painter in one of the hills beyond the village of Bartlett. Sometimes both of my parents joked about what my father called Marilyn’s “peace, love, and tie-dye” vibe—which was shorthand for the fact that her paintings all looked like album covers from 1967 and there was always the chance when you dropped by her studio that you would be offered some pretty serious weed—but her canvases went for thousands of dollars in galleries in Vermont and two and three times that in Massachusetts and Manhattan. It seemed as if her husband, Justin, was rarely in Bartlett: he was either at one of his bistros in Middlebury or Burlington, or visiting other restaurants that he thought might have something to teach him. Their son, Paul, was three years younger than me, and the sort of kid who smoked dope with his mom and had all the drive of a well-fed house cat. He was, I presumed, a freshman in college, and it embarrassed me now that I had no idea where.