A Wake in One Zone

by Richard Grayson

SLEEPYHEAD--I WENT OUT FOR A WALK WITH YOUR GRANDFATHER, the note on the hotel-room dresser said. She smiled dreamily and remembered something pleasant. The traveler's alarm clock, that small green triangle, said it was 3:40. She had gone to sleep with a headache after lunch; Robert had been doing needlepoint on the other bed. The hotel room had two beds, one single and one double. Now Robert was gone.

She saw him naked the first time the night before, as she was about to begin her nightly entry in her diary: February 13, 1974. He was changing out of his briefs into another pair. All boys wore the same white briefs with the same red-and-black stripe on the waistband that looked purple from far away. Johnny wore them, and so did Chris, and so did her little brother. The light was so low the night before, only the weak amber of the dresser lamp. Without her glasses it wasn't all that clear. But Robert had looked so beautiful, so vulnerable, naked like that, it had almost made her cry.

She was still a virgin. Johnny and she had been only kids, and he got impatient but tolerated it. At least he had until he left her for Sally. ("Why do you like Sally?" she asked him later, foolishly. "I don't really know," Johnny said, "but I guess mostly because she can be a bitch." Implying that she was not, and that she could never be.) So she and Johnny made do, and they both managed their not insignificant satisfactions. There were fine moments with Johnny.

Chris was a virgin, too, and never touched her. She was about to tell him how she wanted him to pounce on her sometimes, but gently. Soon she met Robert, and Chris was in the past.

Robert went further, and tried other things, for he had had experience. But he never persisted against her resistance, the hand gently taken off the place where she did not want it to be. Even the night before, when they shared the double bed, he did not do anything she did not want him to do. And what they did was good.

When Johnny said goodbye for good, he told her she was an anachronism. That hurt. But she had been reading Jude the Obscure at the time, and she liked Sue Bridehead, and so it did not hurt all that much. She and Robert almost broke up over it twice, but each time he said he still wanted to be with her even if she wouldn't. The Sisters had been right about that, and Robert wasn't even a Catholic boy. Lately Robert had been trying to appeal to her sense of logic, telling her how ridiculous it was to do everything else and not that and still call yourself a virgin. She didn't argue with him. She couldn't. But she knew what she felt--it wasn't conscience, it wasn't morality, it wasn't fear of commitment or pain. It had to do with her being she, a sense of herself and what she was and the things she knew she could not do. But mostly it had to do with her world being all pastel: lilac and lemon yellow and wispy essence of smoke.

Robert's world was white mice in mazes, and unfinished meals with half-eaten platters, and those serrated edges where the logical met the absurd. Their worlds were co-terminous only at a few points, but those were enough for both of them--at least they had been so far. Johnny's world had been black light and blue smoke and plucky seagulls taken flight in a storm. But then his world changed, and she did not belong. Chris's world she remembered only vaguely: it was knee socks and sassafras tea and lived-in upholstery.

Was it all because she was still not awake? Was it stage one or stage four that she was in? She would have to get Robert to explain it again, and he would grow impatient, but then be glad that she cared. It seemed like stage one to her: the mental drifting, the shallow breathing, the occasional jerk upwards.

SLEEPYHEAD--I WENT OUT FOR A WALK WITH MY GRANDFATHER. Yes, that was it. Robert's grandfather. Both of her grandfathers were dead, both before she was born. Robert still had two grandfathers, one short and one tall. She wondered which grandfather it was. She murmured something. But she had a grandmother, and Robert did not.

She thought of herself as three people and a moment passed, the traveler's clock ticking, and she thought: What a strange and pleasant idea. And she closed her eyes again. Her glasses were on the dresser and she was glad to be free of them. They were causing red indentations on either side of her nose, indentations which did not fit in with her freckles.

She opened her eyes, focused on Robert's navy blue sweater, the crew-neck lying on the floor by the bed. She stared at the blue, closed her eyes, opened them to the ceiling, and saw a patch of orange. The opposite of blue. As Robert was Johnny's opposite, as she was Sally's, as God was--whose?

More sleep, she felt. It was necessary after the night before, and the headache was there still, a bit, not yet gone. But still she fought it. She looked at the note again.

SLEEPYHEAD--I'VE GONE OUT FOR A WALK WITH MY GRANDFATHER. It was in the perfect tense now. She had not noticed it before. Of course Robert would write in the perfect tense, just as Johnny would have used the pluperfect, just as Chris would have used .... She didn't know any more what tense Chris would have used. Probably, she thought, the simple present: I WALK WITH MY GRANDFATHER. But Chris had no grandparents--the Germans saw to that.

"Cleft in twain." That was the phrase that stuck stone in her head. Could one be cleft in train? In transit? Sic gloria transit? "Oh, sic, sic, sic," she mumbled, admonishing herself for the play. Her hand, under the pillow, was asleep, all darning needles and rolling pins. The hand was still red and swollen, and not a part of her anymore. And though it frightened her to be like that, she didn't budge. A move was more than she could make. Always, it seemed.

She thought of New Jersey. They came up to the hotel through No Jersey. No, New Jersey. Robert and she had stopped at a Howard Johnson's, and they had laughed over frozen baked beans on a stick, and the hostess with the orange-and-blue face smiled at them, but severely, as if to admonish with guilt. How she wished she could be a bitch! But she did not have the things that Sally had, and she could not afford to be anything but nice. At the moment she was nice and tired. Good and tired. Extraordinarily tired. Horribly tired, fantastically tired, terrifically tried. But she was not sick and tired. At least she was too young for that.

This time, when she looked, it said: SLEEPYHEAD--I'VE GONE OUT FOR A TALK WITH HER GRANDFATHER. She squinted. There was a pain somewhere. So that was it. Outside the window it was snowing, thick globs of white that looked so heavy, so massive. Robert had gone out to speak with someone else's grandfather. Probably in the lobby or the snack bar, or maybe in the sauna. But "a talk"--that meant it was something more than casual. Apparently a discussion of some significance. The thought entered, and then she knew, and silently she cursed herself for not thinking of it long before.

Sally's grandfather. Yes, that was it. The violinist, that old man with the thick white eyebrows. Robert was going to see Sally's grandfather to ask for Sally's hand. She chuckled involuntarily at the joke, but then, cranky, she began to cry. She cried like a colicky infant. Robert was leaving her for Sally, just as Johnny had done the year before. The same thing was happening all over again. An aria da capo. An old wound, long thought to have been healed, burst open anew. Blood everywhere, and she had forgotten to buy her tampons. She moaned with the ache from the growing pains. The pain was bad. Like a prayer, she repeated the name of the state, first New Jersey, then Jersey alone: Jersey, Jersey, Jersey, Jersey, Jersey, Jersey, Jersey, Jersey ... until the word sounded foolish and foreign and absurd, and she felt feverish and obsessed and in hell.

But she reached for her glasses, and she looked at the note: SLEEPYHEAD--I WENT OUT FOR A WALK WITH YOUR GRANDFATHER. She had been right the first time. Robert would be back. She turned over the pillow. The headache was gone. She could smile.

The Author

Richard Grayson is the author of several books of short stories, including The Silicon Valley Diet, I Survived Caracas Traffic, and Lincoln's Doctor's Dog. He has worked as a college professor, an attorney, a computer programming teacher, a newspaper columnist, and a messenger for The Village Voice.