Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer

Author:Meg Wolitzer
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Group US
Published: 2014-03-25T04:00:00+00:00

chapter eight

True or false: A mollusk is an invertebrate animal with a soft, unsegmented body that is usually contained in a calcareous shell.

Oh, true.

He had come home from giving a quiz to a large, vacant-looking group of freshmen that afternoon, and she had been there, sitting at the kitchen table. Helen looked up at him pointedly, as though to transmit the message: I’ll explain later. Ray sat down in the chair across from Claire and studied her. She blinked a few times and tapped her fingers in a rhythmless pattern on the tabletop. He wondered if it was remotely possible that he made her nervous. Ray was fairly sure that he had never made anyone nervous before in his life.

He listened patiently as Helen explained that they would be trying out Claire as a live-in maid for a while. Things needed to be done around the house, she said, and she herself did not have the energy to do them. It would be nice to have a little spring cleaning done, to have the place in order once again, didn’t he think? Ray nodded in agreement, and thought that the three of them certainly made a motley crew. They looked like people sitting in the waiting room of a pain clinic, each person’s pain manifesting itself in a different way, but the message being driven home all the same.

Helen showed it in her constant distractedness. You could sustain a conversation with her for only a limited time. Despair had enclosed her completely over the past few years. She was distracted in everything she did. Sometimes she forgot to shut off the flame under boiling soups, under macaroni, filling the kitchen with rich, rolling smoke and blackening the bottoms of pots. He wondered what had held them together since Lucy’s death. Maybe it would have been easier if they had separated and lived alone, or if each had lived with someone new, someone hopeful and life-giving.

Ray often wondered what kept people together as couples, as lovers. Was it the sharing of so many burdens—growing old, unpaid mortgages, concern over a child’s fever? Or was it simply the endless slapping together of bellies in the night, the routine of practiced lovemaking? He knew he was not the best of lovers. “There is too much of you,” Helen had said to him once. “I can’t even put my arms all the way around you.” She had laughed while saying it, but occasionally he wondered if she saw him as only a floating hunk of driftwood that took up three quarters of their king-sized bed. Such a big, strong brute, and he couldn’t manage to set things right again. He tried over and over to console her, but the attempts were always awkward and forced and useless. Even a Saint Bernard, as dumb and as big, a flask of brandy strapped to its neck, had better instincts.

There was something to be said for self-preservation, though. Ray had to keep himself from real depression however best he could.

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