Sleepwalking in Daylight

“When was the last time you picked up Cammy or the boys from anything other than a random weekend soccer game? They’re your kids, too, Bob.”

He looks ahead and I find myself wondering how upset I’d be if he died. I’d be worried about the kids growing up without a father, but me? I don’t know that I’d feel much.

“I think it’s about the adoption,” I say. My stomach twisting up tells me this is not a good time to bring it up, but there’s never a good time to bring it up.

“Oh, my God, so we’re blaming everything that goes wrong on the adoption? Are we going to dredge this up for the rest of our lives? Jesus, let it go.”

“You want to know what I think? I think most of everything that’s gone wrong with her is because of how she found out about the adoption.”

“Oh, please …”

“You know exactly what I’m talking about. To tell a little girl the reason why she feels like she looks different from her brothers is because she’s not our ‘real’ child? Honestly? What the hell, Bob. How many years ago was that—ten years? No, eleven. For the last eleven years she’s been feeling like an outcast in her own family.”

“Stop. It’s not like that and you know it,” he says. I feel our speed increasing and we are uncharacteristically in sync with the other cars along Lake Shore Drive.

“Oh, yeah? What’s it like then? Huh? You’re saying you didn’t blurt it out? You’re forgetting that we had a plan … that we were going to talk to her together at an age-appropriate time like the books say? You just plunge in without me and say something without thinking it through and then you scratch your head in amazement like you’re surprised she remembers it word for word after all these years and then you sit here all smug and tell me it wasn’t like that? It was exactly like that, Bob. Exactly.”

Bob slows down and once again cars are swerving around us. A guy in a Prius gives Bob the bird and I wonder whether it’s because we’re the enemy now in our hateful gas-guzzling SUV or that Bob is driving under the speed limit or maybe just maybe he sees me spitting angry words at this man in my car, this man I no longer recognize, and he flips him off for me.

“Things have gotten so out of hand with her,” I say, backing off the adoption subject like I always do. “I don’t even know where to start. I put my finger on one leak and another one spouts.”

“I know,” he says. He’s lying. He doesn’t know. At least not when it comes to the kids, and frankly I’m sick of hearing how awful work is every single day. The boys crave time with him. Lately it’s taken me nagging him to get him to spend any kind of time with them. We ride the rest of the way in silence, which is fine by me.

I look at him and honestly? Honestly I am not in the least bit attracted to him. So that brings me back to my point:

Not one of my friends wants sex. Seriously. Not one. Well, not any of the ones with kids. I look around at other forty-something moms and they fall into two categories. One group has surrendered to the uniform of motherhood: sensible shoes, mom-jeans, sweatshirts, bulky full-length gray Michelin Man parkas in winter, shapeless old T-shirts in summer.

The second group is the pilates group. They’re hot. They wear jeans their daughters covet. They have defined biceps and flat tummys. Oh. And abs. Six-pack abs. Working out is a full-time job for them. It’s like there was a secret memo to do yoga, be in the best shape of their lives and shop in stores that carry tight T-shirts with plunging necklines, but the irony is there’s nowhere to go with it since no one’s having sex. I love a good crisply laundered white shirt, button-down like a man’s but formfitting. My jeans aren’t too tight but they aren’t baggy. My favorite shoes are a pair of old Gucci loafers I splurged on years ago when Bob got a great Christmas bonus. The best buy I’ve ever made: they’re well made so I’ve never had to have them resoled. The leather’s buttery and camel colored. They go with every pair of pants I own. Mostly though I wear skirts. I’ve never understood why more women don’t wear skirts. At school pickup not so long ago, Ann Slevick looked me up and down and said, “You’re always so put together,” and I thanked her but she didn’t smile. So the next day I made a point of wearing my jeans with the holes in them.

Sometimes at night when I’m changing into Gap boxers and an old Mount Rushmore T-shirt with holes and yellowed armpits, I inspect myself in our full-length mirror. I’ve got a decent hairstyle: that shoulder-length layered cut everyone seems to have. I haven’t overcolored it, so the brown looks natural, which is lucky. My ass isn’t so bad. Not for a forty-five-year-old. I’ve seen worse. It’s the front that bugs me. I hate my stomach. Lying down it feels flat if I don’t run my hands along my hips. It actually feels like it used to be before the boys. So all in all I suppose my body hasn’t started the middle-age decline yet, but it’s only because I’m tall and my limbs are long and there’s something deceiving in that. In old class pictures I would be the one standing on the side of the bleachers where all the kids were neatly sitting in rows. Our teacher stood on the other side. I cursed my height and wished I could stop shooting up like the Jolly Green Giant. It felt like a creepy magic trick, the way I grew taller and taller. It felt like Guinness World Records tall. My classmates looked like Lilliputians to me and I hunched over, folding into my chest to try to compensate. Like Cammy, I had knobby knees and clumsy bruises. With no spatial reasoning I found myself cutting the corner into another room, my whole right side hitting the door frame on the way in. I finally stopped growing at five feet nine inches and boys started reaching and then passing me and all was forgiven, but I still have to remind myself to sit up straight.

“Have you guys heard about all these sexless marriages?” I ask my book club. We’ve been together for about five years now. It started with me and Lynn and Ginny from down the street. Ginny’s sweet. Maybe too sweet, but still. She’s thirty, fifteen years younger than me. She and her husband, Don, live in a bright green house everyone calls the Traffic Light. She’s the one I call when I need another set of hands for something around the house. Like hanging the drapes I sewed. She’s always home. While I never set out to, every once in a while I end up talking to her about life and I’m reminded why I like her so much. I think we bonded when she left her job as an investment consultant at a downtown banking firm about four, five years ago. Around that time on a summer night in white wicker chairs on my front porch we talked about what we really wanted out of life. I said I wasn’t sure but I knew it hadn’t happened yet. I remember this: she seemed startled. When she said, “But you have children,” I realized why. I used to think the same way. That life would make sense once we had children. Ginny mentioned she and Don had been trying to have a baby. She talked about finding something else in her life. Something with purpose. Something she could feel proud of. I told her what I wish someone had told me. I told her not to be in such a hurry to have children. I told her sometimes it’s not all it’s cracked up to be. She nodded and sipped her wine. There wasn’t a hint, even a twinge of judgment from her. I knew this was something she’d share with Don in bed that night. “She doesn’t really love her children,” she’d marvel. “I never would’ve guessed it.”

Most people I know think the sun rises and sets on their children. They orbit around them like planets. So it was a big deal to feel open enough with someone other than Lynn about something so personal. I told Lynn we needed to let her into our friendship. She balked at first but after a little while, months maybe, she admitted Ginny’s pretty great.

So book club started with the three of us. Then Ginny asked if she could bring a friend she works out with, Leanne, who is kind of a pain in the ass but I don’t mind her. She’s funny but she doesn’t seem like she has a whole lot of depth. Or intelligence. I’ve always suspected Leanne cracks the bindings on her books to make it look like she’s not only read them, she’s studied them. She might even dog-ear them then flatten out the folded triangles on random pages. Teresa Wdowiak came in along the way—I can’t remember who brought her. Then Sally Flanders cornered Lynn when Lynn was weeding some years ago and asked if our book club was accepting new members and if so could she be one of them. What choice did we have? There’s no stopping Sally Flanders.

There are eight of us here tonight, which is uncommon. Typically it’s four or five but we’re reading The Kite Runner this month and everyone wants to weigh in. Last month someone recommended A Hundred Years of Solitude, but no one got past the first fifty pages so we canceled. Actually that’s not true. Kerry Kendricks read it and fought the cancellation, but she’s a show-off and no one wanted to sit there and listen to her lecturing us about South American literature.

We’re in Sally Flanders’s living room. I hate being in Sally Flanders’s living room. It’s like walking into Pier One through a curtain of the smell of potpourri and scented candles. I’m pretty sure I see a Glade plug-in across Sally’s living room, next to a grandfather clock that’s got an irregular tick. Sally favors floral design and needlepoint animal pillows. She tells us where to sit—that’s weird enough as it is—based on what pillows are there. She calls them her “cute critters.” Tonight I’ve got “Lucky Lassie” wedged between my lower back and the spires on the back of this, the most uncomfortable chair in the world. Lynn is rolling her eyes at something Leanne’s saying about the snickerdoodles she brought—she always wants a medal for her cooking, saying stuff like, Oh, it’s so easy, and then rattles on about how much trouble she went to for all of us. Special ingredients blah blah blah. Her cooking’s not even very good and Lynn usually finds a way to point that out. Tonight she eats one tiny bite of the cookie and leaves the rest on her empty plate, which she puts on the coffee table where Leanne’s sure to see it. I don’t know why Lynn lets Leanne get to her.

“I just read this article in MORE magazine or something—maybe it was O—that said forty-year-old women are just getting started,” I say. “It said something like we’re secure with our bodies and vocal about our needs. I can’t remember the exact wording but that was the gist.”

The laughter interrupts me.

“What?” I look around at them. “I’m being totally serious. Don’t you worry about this?”

“No, she’s right,” Lynn says. “There was something on the Today show about it yesterday. They showed one couple who had sex on their honeymoon and that was it. Guess how long they’ve been married? Just guess. You won’t, so I’ll tell you. Twelve years. Twelve years and no sex. I don’t know how she pulled it off, but I’ll have what she’s having.”

More laughs.

“What’s all the fuss about anyway?” asks Ginny. “We still have sex.”

“You’re in your thirties!” Lynn says. “Of course you’re still having sex. Wait’ll you turn forty.”

Paula, who complains anytime the conversation becomes social, mutters “off topic” in a tsking tone, hoping it will steer us back to book talk, but it rarely does. She usually sits there with her arms crossed and her lips tight. Tonight, though, she weighs in: “I’m so tired all the time.”

Everyone stops and looks at her. It’s an unspoken assumption that Paula’s asexual. She’s got a Dorothy Hamill haircut and what a doctor would definitely term morbid obesity. I’ve never seen her with anyone but her three-legged English bulldog, Freddy. I think Paula is about fifty pounds away from being housebound. She’s all business but I kind of like her for that. In the blackout a few summers ago she organized a candle drive so the elderly neighbors would be okay. She puts together a neighborhood newsletter on her computer. Birth announcements, who’s moving in or out. Want ads you can e-mail to her. A ten-speed for sale. Babysitters needed. Does anyone know a good plumber? That sort of thing. She’s the kind of person neighborhoods don’t realize they need. She’s the one who goes to the monthly Neighborhood Watch meetings and writes up safety information we already have. Lock your doors. Keep your front light on all night to discourage burglars. I respect Paula. In an emergency I like knowing she’s at arm’s length in her house with gray vinyl siding she hoses off every spring.

“I don’t know what you’re worried about.” Ginny looks at me and rolls her eyes. “You’re always so together, you know? Like you’ve got it all figured out. Plus, you and Bob are like the golden couple. I bet you have sex, like, every other day.”

I open my mouth to say, “Are you crazy? You can’t be serious!” but Lynn interrupts.

“As far as Michael knows, I have my period every day of the month,” she says. The laughter bounces off the cuddly critters or whatever they are, mixing with advice for what to say to get off the sex hook and then a juicy story about a sex-addict husband of someone we all know very well, according to Kerry Kendricks, who, when Lynn asked her if she still has sex, says:

“Who has the time?” Kerry Kendricks is on every committee at school and not once have I heard her called by just her first name.

Ginny: “Let me ask you something.” She looks at me. “Do you all think it’s the women or the men? Do women want sex and the men don’t or is it the other way around?”

Everyone’s talking at once so it doesn’t matter that I don’t answer. I don’t tell them that neither of us wants sex. Only Lynn knows I haven’t stopped trying with Bob because I think it could still save us from being total strangers to one another. I haven’t stopped trying for sex even though I don’t want it any more than Bob does.

The next morning after the kids are off to school Lynn pulls up a kitchen chair and shakes a packet of Sweet’n Low into the tea I put in front of her.

“Before I forget, will you sponsor me for the breast cancer run?” I slide the form to her. “I know, I know. I swear this is the last time I’ll hit you up this year.”

“Breast cancer, Go Green, Save the Whales …” She sighs, fitting her name into the allotted space. “Sheesh, is there anything you don’t raise money for? Here you go.”

“Thanks, and for the record it was a Greenpeace fund-raiser not Save the Whales and it was about ten years ago.” I laugh. “Thanks for this. I really do appreciate it.”

“You should’ve taken it to book club last night,” she says. “I would’ve loved to have seen how much Paula gave, since she loves breasts more than anyone, I bet.”

“I don’t think she’s a lesbian,” I say. “You heard her.”

“Don’t be so sure,” Lynn says.

“So how about what Ginny said?” I settle across the table from her and just to make it seem like I’m bringing it up casually, I brush nonexistent crumbs off the table.

“What, you mean how they still have tons of sex?”

“Yeah, that,” then I pretend to remember something else Ginny said, “Oh, and then there was that comment about me … what was it?”

Lynn narrows her eyes at me. “You actually think I’m buying your little show? You really want to talk about Ginny’s sex life?”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” I barely finish the sentence without laughing. “Okay, okay. You’re right, you’re right.”

This is the best part about Lynn. She’s pretty much always right. The worst part about Lynn is that she knows it.

“You know why everyone thinks you’re so together? Because you act like you’re so together,” Lynn says. She’s blowing on her tea, waiting for it to cool.