Read Online Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Meg Wolitzer
Tags: Fiction, Contemporary Women
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“Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!” long into the night. In the background, like an accompaniment, there was the soft squeak of nurses’ rubber heels on the aqua tiled floor, the clicking on of lights, the rush of tap water in a dented tin basin. It was all these noises, moving skyward like the smoke from many small fires and fusing together, that lullabied her nightly.
At the private psychiatric hospital where Lucy Ascher stayed one summer of her childhood, the grounds were tended as carefully as any historical tourist attraction—like the kind ofmansion third graders are taken to on class trips, she wrote in her notebook. It was like the kind of place that rents out tiny tape recorders and earplugs so that you can wander around and hear a deep voice tell you about how Mrs. Roosevelt picked out the hummingbird wallpaper pattern herself, the kind of place where a curator leaves the train sets and chipped porcelain dolls of the President’s children scattered randomly about the nursery as though the children had just abandoned their toys when called to the table for lunch. While her classmates, Lucy wrote, would be impressed by the high, lumpy beds and the heads of moose and deer that seemed to poke through the walls, she would be looking at Mrs. Roosevelt’s wallpaper and realizing how yellow it had turned over the decades, like milk gone sour. “I would focus on decay rather than history,” Lucy explained.
The hospital had a sweeping half-moon drive crunchy with gravel, and it was set far back from the road, “nestled in pine,” as the catalogue read. Her parents sent away for hospital brochures as if they were looking into summer camps, and in the end this famous place was picked, right in the heart of the Berkshires. Her parents would go to Tanglewood in the evenings of their visits, stretching out side by side, defeated, on her father’s old army blanket.
She had lost her ability to speak; it was as simple as that. Ten years later she went out with a man named Richard whose mother had had a stroke and would say, whenever her telephone rang, “Would somebody please answer the steeple?” “Telephone” was lost somewhere in the collapsed portion of her thinking—lost forever, a mitten, a shoe. Lost, butinexplicably replaced, and that was the difference between them. Lucy could not replace her words. “There was a seashell pressed indefinitely to my ear, and the sea-static terrified me. I was twelve years old, and one morning my mother found me curled in my room, late for school, trembling. ‘Lucy,’ she said, drying her hands on a dishtowel, ‘are you sick, sweetie?’ But I could not answer her; the rushing was too loud. I opened my mouth like a pathetic, newly hatched bird—opened and closed it, opened and closed it, gasping for air, gasping for words.”
There should have been a drowning—one of her parents going under during a family boat outing. Maybe that would have been a reasonable excuse for the silence that was knitted so closely around her. There should have been a death of some kind, or at the very least a trauma. Perhaps her parents got angry and hit her sometimes, the young male psychologist suggested, leaning forward in his chair, springs straining. But she was clean—no suggestive purple bruises, no burn marks rippling up on her arms or the backs of her legs. There was no obvious explanation; her family life was intact. Her parents were very married. Her father sometimes stood behind her mother in the kitchen, placing his broad hands over her hips while she prepared dinner. “Ray,” she would hiss, “stop it,” but as she lifted the lid of a tureen of soup Lucy could still glimpse the quick light of her smile behind the rising steam.
Someone had led her out into the sun and placed an old
Richie Rich
comic book on her lap. She was sitting there by herself, her thoughts going nowhere, encircling her like a stupid dog in yipping pursuit of its tail, when she first met Levin. He walked slowly
At the private psychiatric hospital where Lucy Ascher stayed one summer of her childhood, the grounds were tended as carefully as any historical tourist attraction—like the kind ofmansion third graders are taken to on class trips, she wrote in her notebook. It was like the kind of place that rents out tiny tape recorders and earplugs so that you can wander around and hear a deep voice tell you about how Mrs. Roosevelt picked out the hummingbird wallpaper pattern herself, the kind of place where a curator leaves the train sets and chipped porcelain dolls of the President’s children scattered randomly about the nursery as though the children had just abandoned their toys when called to the table for lunch. While her classmates, Lucy wrote, would be impressed by the high, lumpy beds and the heads of moose and deer that seemed to poke through the walls, she would be looking at Mrs. Roosevelt’s wallpaper and realizing how yellow it had turned over the decades, like milk gone sour. “I would focus on decay rather than history,” Lucy explained.
The hospital had a sweeping half-moon drive crunchy with gravel, and it was set far back from the road, “nestled in pine,” as the catalogue read. Her parents sent away for hospital brochures as if they were looking into summer camps, and in the end this famous place was picked, right in the heart of the Berkshires. Her parents would go to Tanglewood in the evenings of their visits, stretching out side by side, defeated, on her father’s old army blanket.
She had lost her ability to speak; it was as simple as that. Ten years later she went out with a man named Richard whose mother had had a stroke and would say, whenever her telephone rang, “Would somebody please answer the steeple?” “Telephone” was lost somewhere in the collapsed portion of her thinking—lost forever, a mitten, a shoe. Lost, butinexplicably replaced, and that was the difference between them. Lucy could not replace her words. “There was a seashell pressed indefinitely to my ear, and the sea-static terrified me. I was twelve years old, and one morning my mother found me curled in my room, late for school, trembling. ‘Lucy,’ she said, drying her hands on a dishtowel, ‘are you sick, sweetie?’ But I could not answer her; the rushing was too loud. I opened my mouth like a pathetic, newly hatched bird—opened and closed it, opened and closed it, gasping for air, gasping for words.”
There should have been a drowning—one of her parents going under during a family boat outing. Maybe that would have been a reasonable excuse for the silence that was knitted so closely around her. There should have been a death of some kind, or at the very least a trauma. Perhaps her parents got angry and hit her sometimes, the young male psychologist suggested, leaning forward in his chair, springs straining. But she was clean—no suggestive purple bruises, no burn marks rippling up on her arms or the backs of her legs. There was no obvious explanation; her family life was intact. Her parents were very married. Her father sometimes stood behind her mother in the kitchen, placing his broad hands over her hips while she prepared dinner. “Ray,” she would hiss, “stop it,” but as she lifted the lid of a tureen of soup Lucy could still glimpse the quick light of her smile behind the rising steam.
Someone had led her out into the sun and placed an old
Richie Rich
comic book on her lap. She was sitting there by herself, her thoughts going nowhere, encircling her like a stupid dog in yipping pursuit of its tail, when she first met Levin. He walked slowly
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