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Authors: Cammie McGovern
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names of old teachers, of classmates I hardly knew, details about what the popular girls said as they lined up the apples slices and cottage cheese they ate for lunch.
I remembered everything except for the episodes I forgot completely.
Eventually I told him the truth about my parasomnia episodes, though I framed it as a thing of the distant past. “I used to be quite a sleepwalker,” I said.
“ Really? What was that like?”
“Usually I’d wake up and be in my sister’s room, trying to take her things.”
“You’d steal in your sleep! I love it!”
“She’d yell at me and that would be that.”
He laughed and clapped like an audience waiting for an encore. This was how we’d portrayed ourselves to each other, as smart and flawed people, perpetual outsiders trying to fit in. “Eventually it got a little creepier than that,” I admitted. “Food started disappearing in the middle of the night and I wouldn’t remember anything, but I’d know that I’d eaten it.”
His smile faded a fraction into concern. “What kind of food?”
“Bulky things. Half a loaf of bread. A stack of crackers. In the morning I’d wake up covered in crumbs.” I wanted to strike the right note, get him to laugh again.
He didn’t. “Wow. Did your parents know?”
“Not really. They thought we had a terrible problem with mice.” This was initially true. Then they assumed my father was to blame. “I’m pretty sure it stopped when I was in high school, but about halfway through college it started again.” I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this when I’d never told anyone before. “I was living in a suite with five other girls. We had a mini-fridge. I remember moving in and seeing all that food and thinking, I wonder if this is going to be a problem? ”
I tried to make it a funny story, though I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t know the other girls well. I was coming off the loneliest year of my life. Geoffrey’s smile said it was fine, he was ready to laugh, so I kept going: “Sure enough, the first week a package of hot dogs disappeared in the middle of the night. There was a wrapper in the garbage and no sign that any of them had been cooked. Another morning I woke up and discovered I’d eaten a stick of butter.”
I tried to blame the boys’ suite across the hall. We talked about putting an alarm on the fridge. But I had enough evidence—greasy smudges on my sheets, vile stomachaches all day—to know that I was the culprit we were trying to catch, and that if it came out, it would be no laughing matter. It was unheard of and disturbing, a window to the possibility that I didn’t just grow up in the disturbing presence of my father’s unhappiness but contained the possibility for it somewhere inside of me.
I kept going because Geoffrey was laughing hard by then. “I had developed a thing for greasy raw meat, apparently. It was like I had the opposite of anorexia. I begged the school doctor for prescription sleeping pills and that seemed to do the trick. I’m the only person who’s ever lost five pounds in a month by staying in bed.”
Now I study the book that I’ve just pulled down from Trish’s shelf. As if it were not disturbing enough that Geoffrey was pretending to have read this as a teenager, I remember him inscribing a copy of his favorite Ken Kesey book to me with the exact same closing: Friends Always (I hope) . I was thrilled with the sentiment, the vulnerability I read into the parenthetical add-on.
I try to imagine what this means. I don’t remember ever seeing Geoffrey and Trish together or hearing him mention her. I tell myself, If he was writing about a teenage girl, it wasn’t preposterous for him to befriend one. I dig through Trish’s desk drawers crammed with notes and old school papers to see if I can find any more evidence of his presence in her life. At the bottom of the deepest one, I find a dog-eared blue spiral notebook with DIARY KEEP OUT! PRIVATE! written
I remembered everything except for the episodes I forgot completely.
Eventually I told him the truth about my parasomnia episodes, though I framed it as a thing of the distant past. “I used to be quite a sleepwalker,” I said.
“ Really? What was that like?”
“Usually I’d wake up and be in my sister’s room, trying to take her things.”
“You’d steal in your sleep! I love it!”
“She’d yell at me and that would be that.”
He laughed and clapped like an audience waiting for an encore. This was how we’d portrayed ourselves to each other, as smart and flawed people, perpetual outsiders trying to fit in. “Eventually it got a little creepier than that,” I admitted. “Food started disappearing in the middle of the night and I wouldn’t remember anything, but I’d know that I’d eaten it.”
His smile faded a fraction into concern. “What kind of food?”
“Bulky things. Half a loaf of bread. A stack of crackers. In the morning I’d wake up covered in crumbs.” I wanted to strike the right note, get him to laugh again.
He didn’t. “Wow. Did your parents know?”
“Not really. They thought we had a terrible problem with mice.” This was initially true. Then they assumed my father was to blame. “I’m pretty sure it stopped when I was in high school, but about halfway through college it started again.” I wasn’t sure why I was telling him this when I’d never told anyone before. “I was living in a suite with five other girls. We had a mini-fridge. I remember moving in and seeing all that food and thinking, I wonder if this is going to be a problem? ”
I tried to make it a funny story, though I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t know the other girls well. I was coming off the loneliest year of my life. Geoffrey’s smile said it was fine, he was ready to laugh, so I kept going: “Sure enough, the first week a package of hot dogs disappeared in the middle of the night. There was a wrapper in the garbage and no sign that any of them had been cooked. Another morning I woke up and discovered I’d eaten a stick of butter.”
I tried to blame the boys’ suite across the hall. We talked about putting an alarm on the fridge. But I had enough evidence—greasy smudges on my sheets, vile stomachaches all day—to know that I was the culprit we were trying to catch, and that if it came out, it would be no laughing matter. It was unheard of and disturbing, a window to the possibility that I didn’t just grow up in the disturbing presence of my father’s unhappiness but contained the possibility for it somewhere inside of me.
I kept going because Geoffrey was laughing hard by then. “I had developed a thing for greasy raw meat, apparently. It was like I had the opposite of anorexia. I begged the school doctor for prescription sleeping pills and that seemed to do the trick. I’m the only person who’s ever lost five pounds in a month by staying in bed.”
Now I study the book that I’ve just pulled down from Trish’s shelf. As if it were not disturbing enough that Geoffrey was pretending to have read this as a teenager, I remember him inscribing a copy of his favorite Ken Kesey book to me with the exact same closing: Friends Always (I hope) . I was thrilled with the sentiment, the vulnerability I read into the parenthetical add-on.
I try to imagine what this means. I don’t remember ever seeing Geoffrey and Trish together or hearing him mention her. I tell myself, If he was writing about a teenage girl, it wasn’t preposterous for him to befriend one. I dig through Trish’s desk drawers crammed with notes and old school papers to see if I can find any more evidence of his presence in her life. At the bottom of the deepest one, I find a dog-eared blue spiral notebook with DIARY KEEP OUT! PRIVATE! written
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