Sleeping Alone by Ru Freeman

Author:Ru Freeman [Freeman, Ru]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022-05-15T00:00:00+00:00

I am on my own and I stay at the new hotel, using American Express like I had never known the feel of coins and colored money. I do not stop at All Hallows, but I genuflect, haphazardly it may seem to others, in the general direction of the factory.

The house has become smaller, the street has broadened. All the fashionable apartments and still, still standing, the shrunken house where I had, with the grace of God, chanced upon Madailein. I put my suitcase down.

I stare at the door that I have pictured every day of my life. I ran my palm over this wooden door when I touched my wife. I built it into my own house and I held it open for my first grandchild. It stayed shut in my dreams. And now, on this crowded street where I am anonymous and enormously exposed, they are reabsorbed into its solid strength. Everything that came after my few months behind this door goes back into the place outside it. The angle from which I have viewed them: my wife, my work, my children. Between the two there are three planks of wood.

The cuff of my long-sleeved shirt has disappeared into my suit jacket. I tug it out and rearrange myself. People push past me, looking better and more purposeful than I had ever been. Even the iron knocker seems to blame me for it, for Madailein, alone in all that time. And me, too, now a widower, my children all grown, and nothing more to work toward or look back upon but this lost moment, this startling, brief imprint of life. I wonder if she wears orange still. Or perhaps she has aged into burgundy, distancing herself gracefully, outwardly, from the desires of her youth.

“Don!” she says, somewhere over my head, leaning out of the drawing room windows. I wave. She blows me a kiss. “Come on up, Don! The door is open!” I catch a flash of bright color as she ducks back inside.

No longer dressed in orange, but not exactly retiring in emerald green either.

Strange, now, to see how beautiful little Dedre has grown, how fully she takes up the space that her sisters once filled. The hair cut short and decidedly wavy, the high heels, the voice. Odd how such a woman withers in her mother’s company, a second fiddle no matter how hard she tries. She is subdued, restrained, and only the subtlest inflections to her remarks indicate what lies within. A star turn, and it is not her. It is her older, less attractive, less stylish alter ego: Mummy.

“I went to the convent, but I was sent there for different reasons than the rest of them. She sent me because she wanted to get rid of me,” Dedre says, her arm around Madailein, but her eyes sharp, airing her youngest-daughter grievance.

“I can see why!” I say, and we all laugh, creating our good old time, our fond memory. We all want to believe it. We all know it is not true.

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