Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer

would watch my father’s face, his lips moving slightly as he read the print of a huge marine biology text, and I could see that he was doing all he could just to
be
, and that nobody can really do any better. Until there is no longer the possibility of sadness,of isolation, there can be no gravity. We all float by, rootless, taking clumsy astronaut steps and calling it progress.
    “My mother came to me in the hospital, clutching her red pocketbook and looking so out of place, so lost. She came and stood at the foot of my bed, just watching me. Someone cried across the big room; this was an adult cry, unlike the sounds of children I used to hear at night during that summer so long ago. A nurse whispered to my mother that I was stabilized, and this seemed so ironic that I smiled. I didn’t think I would ever be really stabilized. I had been given a sedative, and could feel its dull glaze start to move evenly over me. My mouth was loose and dry. I had nothing to say to my mother, and I hoped she would leave soon, go back to the beach, the only place she seemed to fit. Everything is grainy there, like the texture of a blown-up photograph. The ground is broken up into an uneven surface, like a page of Braille. Everywhere you walk there are tiny surprises—shell chips with their color bleached away, ridged Coca-Cola caps, the empty husks of men-of-war. Somehow my mother and father feel at home there.
    “We used to dig for China. My whole family would burrow in the sand until we reached the depth where it became dark and wet, not like sand at all, and we could not dig any farther. That was my favorite part—the core of the beach—all of the graininess gone. Your fingers touch clay, touch a new, smooth plane. I imagined an underground world, a country where the inhabitants knew the beauty of the darkness, and weren’t afraid of it.
    “‘Is this China?’ I would ask my parents. ‘Have we reached China yet?’
    “‘Almost,’ they would answer. ‘Almost.’”
    —
    H elen’s skin had many acids in it, and every time she wore a silver or gold chain, she wound up with a fine black band of tarnish on her neck. According to her husband, this was a sure indication of royalty in the blood. She had always viewed it in a different way. When she observed herself in the wavy-glassed mirror above the sink, the band appeared more as a dissecting line, etched in a perfect semicircle directly above her collarbone. Cut on dotted line.
    She thought abstractly of supermarket coupons. Lately she had been collecting these fragments of paper, shredding them from glossy magazines whenever she found them, even in the doctor’s waiting room while the receptionist’s hawk eye was focused elsewhere. It was not the redemption of these money savers that intrigued her, but the actual collection itself. She hoarded them, the way her husband, Ray, collected bivalve mollusk shells. Feverishly, as though on a scavenger hunt. It filled the hours; it was better than nothing. “Just so I don’t have to think,” Helen had said to a friend once. “That’s all I ask for.”
    It was winter in Southampton, and the ocean was choppy and looked darker than ever. Helen was stewing tomatoes and onions in the kitchen while Ray read an oceanography journal.
    “Do you want to drive into East Hampton to a movie tonight?” he asked. “They’re showing
Kramer vs. Kramer
.”
    “I don’t care,” she said. “Whatever you want. You know that none of that matters to me.”
    Ray sighed and closed the magazine. He placed his handsflat on the kitchen table. “There’s nothing I can do to make you feel any better, is there?” he asked.
    She did not answer him.
    “Maybe you should go back to see Len Deering. He would put you on those antidepressants again if you asked. They seemed to help you last time.”
    “They just masked things,” Helen said, “and they made me fat. I couldn’t fit into any of my clothes, and I just sat and cried all day. Remember?