Sleepwalking in Daylight. Elizabeth Flock

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ