Rest
The cat licks then nibbles his paw alternately, for so long, she wonders if he might be suffering from an injury of night carousing. Then he stops and she wonders what to do with her worry. She thinks, This might be the darkest room in the house. This room with its off-kilter mattress that belongs, full time, to her daughter’s best friend. Part time and temporarily, she thinks, it will belong to her. She will guard against squatters and feline neglect while her friend takes her daughters to visit her childhood home in Brazil.
She thinks about the idea that a place could belong to a person and grows cold. There are so many belongings she has lost. What if it’s the other way around? If people belong to a place? What if all those places are suffering her loss? Yes. That’s better. She will trade for feeling like an object, a thing lost to places, for the warmth she recaptures by casting the places as victims rather than herself.
Unaccustomed as she is to the prospect of waking in the night to needy cats, she sleeps so shallowly that daylight arrives and hands her a headache. It’s like having infants, she thinks, noticing the morning sensation of dismay and panic that comes from having missed one’s chance at purchasing a functional day. She thinks about this: To eat, to drink coffee, to walk and find people who can provide the means to those things. But she lies in bed instead, staring blankly at the Beauty Berry bush outside the window. People, would be too much.
She chose this role out of self-preservation. Her mother, who benefits from chances to escape her downtown apartment for streets that welcome a walk, is available to do this duty. She asked her mother to wait. To let her start. After her blowup that the husband suffered this week, they both agreed a little time alone was called for. So, doing too much this morning, any unnecessary act, would really waste the opportunity. The object of the game is to do only the necessary and the desired. To whatever degree the means to quench desire are available, of course.
She went back to sleep as soon as her body allowed and slept as long as it would. Which got her an hour or two more of brittle rest. Enough to stave off misery and leave her with just discomfort. How lacking in zeal she is after an inadequate sleep! Or is it that when she stops providing for everyone else’s needs and desires she is left turning awkwardly to herself. Oh, you’re still here. In day to day life, her necessaries get taken care of, mainly, but in a way that’s like picking up a passenger while barely slowing the car. This morning, really noticing them, draws to her attention how annoyed she is to need anything.
Breakfast is a mango she stole from the house in a sneaky act of rebellion, it being her children’s favorite fruit and purchased out of love, for them. She eats it with a whiff of pleasure and much relief that there is no cooking, no walking or driving, no talking required to get herself fed. She somewhat resents the search for a utensil drawer and the special cutting technique required to reach the fruit. Then, back to bed. Rest is the only sensation she is aware checks the box of “desire” in any faint way.
Near the middle of the day, she finds herself feeling satisfied to some degree. The cadence of her freedom begins to whet her whistle somehow, though she’s barely budged from the bed, but to visit the bathroom and read a book review that intrigued her. She remembered how, when she reads fiction she admires, some door gets unlocked in her and she finds a writing voice again. Of late her writing voice has felt like a vague memory. A dream she imagined. A folly, like a phase doing paint by numbers or latch hook rugs.
Her husband, her children, her dog with their sweet, warm, lovely, blessed bodies are like hungry parasites that have no awareness of anything but their hunger. They are willing to give her the gift of freedom but then there is a knock at the door and a wide-eyed girl, who knows the way to her best friend’s house, is supplicating because the emails went out about her Fall placement for ballet and she just couldn’t wait. The mother is hugging her daughter then, her soft cheeks so sweet to kiss and reassuring her that yes, I’ll check for you. She feels an energy, a joy then. They read the email. Celebrate and discuss how the new class will change their family schedule. A brief interruption. Then the girl says, slumping her shoulders a little and sighing, “I guess I’ll have to walk home now.” As if the mother would get in the car to drive her the one block home. The mother is disgusted. Instantly on the edge of enraged. Her goodwill feels as if it was wrested from her under false pretenses. She is angry that there is, no where in her daughter, an awareness of her need to be uninterrupted. “That’s just lazy,” the mother says, instantly regretting her choice of words.
The girl leaves and with her goes the satisfaction the mother had earlier achieved. The recovery of some right relationship with herself she had begun to taste. She realizes she must start over and wearily, she does. But she wonders what it will take. And if she will achieve it.
She returns to bed, nothing else fitting the category of necessary or desirous. She thinks how much this feels like being sick. Like she must stay in bed until she can imagine herself doing anything else. She realizes why women avoid this. Time alone. The realization that she wants nothing leaves her glum. She decides that at 48 years of age, with children reaching the age of independence, she has learned this: to outrun glum is futile. Also this: to sit in it will eventually take her somewhere new. Her trust in that phenomenon is like her trust in gravity. It just is.
Outside the window, the ten-foot-tall Beauty Berry bush hums with bee life. She thinks about the husband, the father, the man who planted it. How he chose to offer those bees that plant. How it sustains them. How he has, since the divorce, gone to find himself in Hawaii while his teenage daughters fly back and forth to see him. How he won’t be the bush. How he can trust that his girls will buzz around his wife for as long as they need, drinking her nectar. She wonders if the bush feels weary.
She remembers a dog she saw once in Mexico, puppies yelping under the porch, placed there for shelter from the hot sun. The mother dog (out of respect she avoids thinking of what else we call female dogs, and now human women) was swaying to walk, her teats hanging long. She was the weariest beast the woman had ever met. The woman wonders where she is now. If she remembers those pups. If she has ever recovered her joy.
The woman’s stomach begins to suggest that food is necessary. She finds a small bit of desire alongside its suggestion. She swings her pajamaed legs over the side of the bed now. Wanders toward the kitchen. She begins to poke around in bags she brought and scans to see what the fridge might need to dispense with. It’s unclear. But she wants something now. She thinks, to belong to myself. She doesn’t know what that means. So she lets herself know only that much. As she pokes around for options in the kitchen, she realizes she wants to see about something here. She might even feel some energy to leave the house for it. She wants to see if she could find something. She imagines it as a feeling before it has taken shape. Before she has found an answer to the question of what it is. She thinks there might be some small way, out there somewhere, for her. A way that she needs. But that she also wants. The best way she can describe it is this: It is a way that she might find, that it’s not too late to find, a way that would take her back to herself. A way that if she follows it, could find her wanting things again. And she can tell that if she keeps looking for it, something important might happen. She thinks that if she just waits, like she’s been waiting, and moves, like she’s been moving, she just might find it. And that way would take her to a place where she could learn. Suddenly she feels that it isn’t hopeless. That she could learn! And she wants to learn. She might even start practicing with lunch. Here goes. First problem to solve: How to marry her needs with her desire.