Margaret Comes Home

I am envious of people who have the ability to fall asleep quickly. My husband Paul is one of them. Often, in the early hours of the morning, I lie awake and listen. Paul mutters and groans in his sleep while I stare up at the bedroom ceiling, willing my brain into submission. He is an affectionate sleeper, cuddling up to me and trapping me in his arms until the heat of his body makes me sweat through my nightshirt. When I can’t bear it anymore I extricate myself from his arms to sleep on the couch.

On Sunday Paul is up early to spend the day with Meemaw. Meemaw is what we call his mother, despite the fact that the term usually refers to a grandmother, and Meemaw has no grandchildren. Paul’s only sibling, Cass, died in a car crash in her late twenties. She was a fickle woman, never content to stay in one place or one relationship for long. I only knew Cass for a year before she died, but I could see that she was Meemaw’s favorite. I myself never wanted kids, never really liked them– they’re too needy, too smelly, and too honest. Paul was ambivalent about the child issue, and easily swayed by my distaste. Perhaps, if he had ended up with someone else, Meemaw would have had grandchildren.

Maybe a woman of a certain age cannot avoid becoming a Meemaw, regardless of whether she really is one. Each year I get closer to becoming one myself. The age accumulates on my skin as I drink my morning coffee and watch my evening TV. This knowledge doesn’t evoke the same panic in me that it used to.

Meemaw’s days revolve around the clubhouse, the community center in her gated retirement community where the seniors go for luncheons, bingo, water aerobics, and other activities of that variety. Today, however, Paul has gotten Meemaw tickets to see a play at the local theater. Meemaw is sharp and still pretty agile, but her eyes are shot, and she’s not allowed to drive, so Paul is picking her up in our old Honda van with the sliding door and seats that smell like fruit left in the sun. Our neighbor’s kid spilled a juice box on the backseat once and no amount of deep cleanings could get rid of that fruity smell.

I sleep until noon and could keep sleeping but as it ticks towards one I force myself out of bed.

“Time to get up,” I say to myself. “Time to be a real person.”

My body doesn’t listen at first– my bed is too comfortable– but eventually my brain wins over and I throw the covers back and place my feet on the cold hardwood floor. The pain of this sudden exposure to wakefulness is acute but only lasts for a moment, like the sharp jab of a needle which the doctor promises will barely hurt. Of course, even as a child I knew that the doctor was lying, and somehow this made it hurt even more.

The day is slow, the way I like it. I make a pot of coffee and nuke it throughout the day, nursing the half-warm mugs while I watch episodes of Beyond Belief: Fact or Fiction. “Welcome to the world of strange truth, a world where the real and the unreal blur into one,” says a tanned, white-haired James Brolin. The first story is about a woman whose boss is so cruel and egotistical that she makes a voodoo doll of him. I lose interest and turn it off before the end of the episode, so I never find out if it’s fact or fiction.

***

Around 7 pm, the Honda pulls back into the driveway. From the window I watch Paul get out of the car in his navy cable-knit sweater. I was so half-asleep this morning when he left that I didn’t notice he’d worn my favorite sweater of his, the one he bought during the first year we were dating. I feel a surge of warmth towards him. Then I see him go around to open the passenger side door, and a smaller figure steps out of the van– slowly, not quite sure of her footing.

“She said she was feeling feverish,” Paul whispers to me when Meemwaw goes to use the restroom. “Sorry I didn’t give you any warning– we were already in the car and I didn’t want to text.”

“It’s fine,” I say, though I’m already imagining her making a permanent home in our guest room and filling it with all her things, and somehow outliving us so that when we die of old age she’s still there– would she keep sleeping in the guest room or would she move into the main bedroom after we died?

“How was the play?” I ask, partly to distract myself from this distressing line of thought.

“Good,” he says. “Well, long.”

****

Meemaw is tired from the outing and goes to sleep in the guest room around nine. Paul and I watch a couple of episodes of some crime drama we’ve already seen, and Paul falls asleep during the second episode. I turn the volume all the way down on the TV so it’s barely audible, and read along with the subtitles. I finish the episode, and start another one.

Around eleven I hear footsteps and the vague sound of things being moved. I slip out of bed and into the hall, my own footsteps silenced by the fluffy Christmas socks I dug out the closet– goodbye, cold hardwood floors in the morning. I follow the sounds into the kitchen and find Meemaw at the counter with her back to me, her thin nightgown bunched up around her ankles. She is talking to herself and moving her hands in strange motions. She looks like she is trying to butter a piece of toast, but there’s nothing there.

“Silly badger” she mutters. “Need to pick up the dry cleaning.”

For some reason, my first thought is this: I don’t want to be the one to break it to Paul that his mother is becoming senile.

I approach her slowly, not wanting to startle her.

“Meemaw,” I say. She doesn’t turn around. “Margaret.”

She turns. Her eyes are glassy and unfocused. I’m relieved to see immediately that she is only sleepwalking– I saw the same look on Paul’s face once when I found him eating shredded cheese out of the bag in his sleep, the open refrigerator casting his face in its cold blue shadow.

“Let me help you back to bed,” I say.

Meemaw mutters something unintelligible which I take as an assent and I reach out my hand to hold her bare arm. Her skin is papery and warmer than I was expecting. As I lead her back into the guest room with the floral curtains that Meemaw picked out herself when we bought the house ten years ago, I think about the plans that Paul and I had for our life in this house– the friends who would visit us, the dinners we’d host. Our social life was never that vibrant, but our life here has become even more quiet recently, so gradually that I didn’t notice it was happening.

Meemaw leans her weight on me– all 95 pounds. I help her into bed.

“Goodnight, Margaret,” I say.

“Goodnight, Margaret,” she echoes back.

In the bathroom adjacent to the guest room I splash water on my face and look at myself in the harsh light. Something compels me to run a bath. I pour in some Epsom Salts and lower myself slowly into the water. I like it hot, almost scalding. The bath is big enough that I can float in it– I release my limbs and let myself rise. The water engulfs my ears and the whole house seems to hum.

I am floating as sleepiness starts to overcome me, and for a moment I am Meemaw watching the shifting chlorine reflections on the pool ceiling at water aerobics class; I am my child-who-never-was in the warm liquid of my womb; I am teaching my child to swim, his pudgy legs kicking as I place a hand under his stomach and guide him across the water.

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Hannah Ratner is a Boston-based writer. Her work is published in Pithead Chapel, The Smart Set, Meniscus, Fiction on the Web, and elsewhere. In her spare time, she likes to hang out with her cats, read, and indoor rock climb.