The Best American Essays 2013 (6 page)

It took a while for the house to change, from the light of day and then of the household lights turned on late in the evening, from the general clatter of things to be done, hung up, finished with, to a stranger place in which people and the work that dictated their lives fell away, their uses for everything around them fell away, all the furniture retreated into itself without wanting or needing any attention from you.

You might think this was liberation. At first, perhaps it was. The freedom. The strangeness. But as my failure to fall asleep prolonged itself and as it finally took hold altogether until it changed into the dawn, I became more and more disturbed. I started saying rhymes, then real poetry, first to make myself go under but then hardly of my own volition. But the activity seemed to mock me. I was mocking myself, as the words turned into absurdity, into the silliest random speech.

I was not myself.

I had been hearing that said of people now and then, all my life, without thinking what it could mean.

So who do you think you are, then?

I’d been hearing that too, without attaching to it any real menace, just taking it as a sort of routine jeering.

Think again.

By this time it wasn’t sleep I was after. I knew mere sleep wasn’t likely. Maybe not even desirable. Something was taking hold of me, and it was my business, my hope, to fight it off. I had the sense to do that, but only barely, as it seemed. It was trying to tell me to do things, not exactly for any reason but just to see if such acts were possible. It was informing me that motives were not necessary.

It was only necessary to give in. How strange. Not out of revenge, or even cruelty, but just because you had thought of something.

And I did think of it. The more I chased the thought away, the more it came back. No vengeance, no hatred—as I’ve said, no reason, except that something like an utterly cold deep thought that was hardly an urging, more of a contemplation, could take possession of me. I must not even think of it, but I did think of it.

The thought was there and hanging on to my mind. The thought that I could strangle my little sister, who was asleep in the bunk below me and whom I loved more than anybody in the world.

I might do it not for any jealousy, viciousness, or anger but because of madness, which could be lying right beside me there in the night. Not a savage madness either, but something that could be almost teasing. A lazy, teasing, half-sluggish suggestion that seemed to have been waiting a long time.

It might be saying, Why not? Why not try the worst?

The worst. Here in the most familiar place, the room where we had lain for all of our lives and thought ourselves most safe. I might do it for no reason I or anybody could understand, except that I could not help it.

The thing to do was to get up, to get myself out of that room and out of the house. I went down the rungs of the ladder and never cast a single look at my sister where she slept. Then quietly down the stairs, nobody stirring, into the kitchen, where everything was so familiar to me that I could make my way without a light. The kitchen door was not really locked—I am not even sure that we possessed a key. A chair was pushed under the doorknob, so that anybody trying to get in would make a great clatter. A slow, careful removal of the chair could be managed without making any noise at all.

After the first night I was able to make my moves without a break, so as to be outside within a couple of smooth seconds.

There. At first everything was black, because I would have lain wakeful for a long time, and the moon had already gone down. I kept on staying in bed as long as I thought I could for several nights, as if it was a defeat to have to give up trying to sleep, but after some time I got out of bed as a regular habit, as soon as the house seemed to be dreaming. And the moon of course had its own habits, so sometimes I stepped into a pool of silver.

Of course there were no streetlights—we were too far from town.

Everything was larger. The trees around the house were always called by their names—the beech tree, the elm tree, the oak tree, the maples always spoken of in the plural and not differentiated, because they clung together. The white lilac tree and the purple lilac tree never referred to as bushes because they had grown too big. The front and back and side lawns were easy to negotiate because mowed by myself with the idea of giving us some townlike respectability. My mother had once had that idea too. She had planted a semicircular lawn past the lilac trees, and edged to it with spirea bushes and delphinium plants. That was all gone now.

The east side of our house and the west side looked on two different worlds, or so it seemed to me. The east side was the town side, even though you could not see any town. Not more than two miles away there were houses in rows, with streetlights and running water, and though, as I have said, you could not see any of that, I am really not sure that you couldn’t get a faint glow if you stared long enough. To the west, the long curve of the river and the fields and the trees and the sunsets had nothing to interrupt them ever.

Back and forth I walked, first close to the house and then venturing here and there as I got to rely on my eyesight and could count on not bumping into the pump handle or the platform that supported the clothesline. The birds began to stir, and then to sing—as if each of them had thought of it separately, up there in the trees. They woke far earlier than I would have thought possible. But soon, soon after those earliest starting songs, there got to be a little whitening to the sky. And suddenly I was overwhelmed with sleepiness. I went back into the house, where there was suddenly darkness everywhere, and I very properly, carefully, silently, set the tilted chair under its knob and went upstairs without a sound, managing doors and steps with the caution necessary although I seemed already half asleep. I fell into my pillow. And I woke late—late in our house being around nine o’clock.

I would remember everything then, but it was so absurd—the bad part of it indeed was so absurd—that I could hardly bother about it. My brother and sister had gone off to school—being still in public school, they were not getting time off for good exam performances, as I was. When they got home in the afternoon, my sister was somebody who could never have passed through such a danger. It was absurd. We swung together in the hammock, one of us at either end.

It was in that hammock that I spent much of the days, and that may have been the simple reason for my not getting to sleep at night. And since I did not speak of my night difficulties, nobody came up with the simple information that I’d be better to get more action during the daytime.

My troubles returned with the night, of course. The demons grabbed hold of me again. And in fact it got worse. I knew enough to get up and out of my bunk without any pretending that things would get better and I would go to sleep if I just tried hard enough. I made my way as carefully out of the house as I had done before. I became able to find my way around more easily; even the inside of those rooms became more visible to me and yet more strange. I could make out the tongue-and-groove kitchen ceiling put in when the house was built maybe a hundred years ago, and the northern window frame partly chewed away by a dog that had been shut in the house one night long before I was born. I remembered what I had completely forgotten—that I used to have a sandbox there, placed where my mother could watch me out the north window. A great bunch of golden glow was flowering in its place now; you could hardly see out of that window at all.

The east wall of the kitchen had no windows in it, but it had a door opening on a stoop where we stood to hang out the heavy wet washing and haul it in when it was dry and smelling fresh and triumphant, from white sheets to dark heavy overalls.

At that stoop I sometimes halted in my night walks. I never sat down, but it eased me to look toward town, maybe just to inhale the sanity of it. All the people getting up before long, having their shops to go to, their doors to unlock and window arrangements to see to, their busyness.

One night—I can’t say whether it was the twentieth or the twelfth or only the eighth or the ninth that I had got up and walked—I got a sense, too late for me to change my pace, that there was somebody around the corner. There was somebody waiting there and I could do nothing but walk right on. I would be caught if I turned back.

Who was it? Nobody but my father. He too was looking toward town and that improbably faint light. He was dressed in his day clothes—dark work pants, the next thing to overalls but not quite, and dark shirt and boots. He was smoking a cigarette. A roll-your-own, of course. Maybe the cigarette smoke had alerted me to another presence, though it’s possible that in those days the smell of tobacco smoke was everywhere, inside and out.

He said good morning, in what might have seemed a natural way except that there was nothing natural about it. We weren’t accustomed to giving such greetings in our family. There was nothing hostile about this—it was just thought unnecessary, I suppose, to give a greeting to somebody you would be seeing off and on all day long.

I said good morning back. And it must have really been getting toward morning or my father would not have been dressed for a day’s work in that way. The sky may have been whitening but hidden still between the heavy trees. The birds singing too. I had taken to staying away from my bunk till later and later, even though I didn’t get comfort from doing that as I had at first. The possibilities that had once inhabited only the bedroom, the bunk beds, were taking up the corners everywhere.

Now that I come to think of it, why wasn’t my father in his overalls? He was dressed as if he had to go into town for something, first thing in the morning.

I could not continue walking, the whole rhythm of it had been broken.

“Having trouble sleeping?” he said.

My impulse was to say no, but then I thought of the difficulties of explaining that I was just walking around, so I said yes.

He said that was often the case on summer nights.

“You go to bed tired out and then just as you think you’re falling asleep you’re wide awake. Isn’t that the way?”

I said yes.

I knew now that he had not heard me getting up and walking around on just this one night. The person whose livestock was on the premises, whose earnings such as they were lay all close by, who kept a handgun in his desk drawer, was certainly going to stir at the slightest creeping on the stairs and the easiest turning of a knob.

I am not sure what conversation he meant to follow then, as regards my being awake. He had declared such wakefulness to be a nuisance. Was that to be all? I certainly did not intend to tell him more. If he had given the slightest intimation that he knew there was more, if he’d even hinted that he had come here intending to hear it, I don’t think he’d have got anything out of me at all. I had to break the silence out of my own will, saying that I could not sleep. I had to get out of bed and walk.

Why was that?

I had dreams.

I don’t know if he asked me, were those bad dreams?

We could take that for granted, I think.

He let me wait to go on, he didn’t ask anything. I meant to back off but I kept talking. The truth was told with only the slightest modification.

When I spoke of my little sister, I said that I was afraid I would hurt her. I believed that he would know what I meant. Kill. Not hurt. Kill, and for no reason. None at all. A possession.

There was no satisfaction, really, once I had got that out. I had to say it then. Kill her.

Now I could not unsay it, I could not go back to the person I had been before.

My father had heard it. He had heard that I thought myself capable—for no reason, capable—of strangling my little sister in her sleep. He said, “Well.”

Then he said not to worry. He said, “People have those kinds of thoughts sometimes.”

He said this quite seriously but without any sort of alarm or jumpy surprise. People have these kinds of thoughts or fears if you like, but there’s no real worry about it, no more than a dream. Probably to do with the ether.

He did not say, specifically, that I was in no danger of doing any such thing. He seemed more to be taking it for granted that such a thing could not happen. An effect of the ether, he said. No more sense than a dream. It could not happen, in the way that a meteor could not hit our house (of course it could, but the likelihood of it doing so put it in the category of couldn’t).

He did not blame me, though, for thinking of it.

There were other things he could have said. He could have questioned me further about my attitude to my little sister or my dissatisfactions with my life in general. If this were happening today, he might have made an appointment for me to see a psychiatrist. (I think that is what I might have done, a generation and an income further on.)

The fact is that what he did worked as well. It set me down, but without either mockery or alarm, in the world we were living in.

If you live long enough as a parent, you discover that you have made mistakes you didn’t bother to know about as well as the ones you do know about, all too well. You are somewhat humbled at heart, sometimes disgusted with yourself. I don’t think my father felt anything like this. I do know that if I had ever taxed him, he might have said something about liking or lumping it. The encounters I had as a child with his belt or the razor strop. (Why do I say encounters? It’s to show I’m not a howling sissy anymore, I can make light.) Those strappings, then, would have stayed in his mind, if they stayed at all, as no more than quite adequate curbing of a mouthy child’s imagining that she could rule the roost.

“You thought you were too smart” was what he might have given as his reason, and indeed one heard that often in those times. Not always referring to myself. But a number of times, it did.

However, on that breaking morning he gave me just what I needed to hear and what I was to forget about, soon enough.

I have thought that he was maybe in his better work clothes because he had a morning appointment to go to the bank, and to learn there, not to his surprise, that there was no extension to his loan, he had worked as hard as he could but the market was not going to turn around and he had to find a new way of supporting us and paying off what we owed at the same time. Or he may have found out that there was a name for my mother’s shakiness and that it was not going to stop. Or that he was in love with an impossible woman.