Sleepwalking by Meg Wolitzer Page B

York State Council on the Arts, she had thanked them in her speech. Helen and Ray had sat in the front row of the auditorium, bewildered and proud. Helen’s pumps had felt tight and all wrong. She had been wearing sandals for years now on the beach and loafers in the classroom.
    Sometimes crazy thoughts went through Helen’s head. Maybe Lucy was put on this earth for some divine purpose. Maybe she and Ray were not Lucy’s true parents, maybe they were just the facilitators of her birth—she the mortar and hethe pestle, as it were, grinding up and preparing the ingredients of this spectacular creation.
    After Lucy killed herself, Helen found that she often thought about Lucy’s conception for some reason, trying to remember it in minute detail. She didn’t know why she had latched on to this, but she could not stop thinking about it. Lucy was conceived while Helen and Ray were spending a weekend in Southampton. His Aunt Mary had died and left Ray’s family her summer house. “You kids might as well use it,” Ray’s father said. “You’re young, enjoy it.”
    They drove out to the beach every Friday and stayed until very late Sunday night. They almost couldn’t bear to go back to Brooklyn. “This is where we really belong,” Ray said, and he was right. Later, when Southampton College opened, they both got faculty positions, and Helen made the move from the city to the beach with ease.
    But it was those early days, when the house was theirs only during the weekend, that Helen remembered most clearly. One Saturday in 1954, as Ray was about to leave the house and spend the day exploring the area, Helen stopped him in the hallway. “Wait,” she said shyly. “Would you like to go back to bed for a little while?”
    Ray stopped and put down the bag lunch she had packed him: a sandwich without the crusts, cut into neat triangles, a nectarine carefully checked for scars and soft spots, and a thermos of coffee, black as pitch. They did not go into the bedroom but made love right on the warped wooden floor of the hallway. The salt air had made the whole house buckle.
    Ray smiled over and then under her, smiled as she moved her hips to his. Just as in formal dancing, here she would never take the lead. She would never initiate a rhythm; she always left it up to him. This control seemed to frighten Ray, but somehow this fear must have been arousing. He placed his hands on her bottom, and pulled her up to him frantically. It was an action that might be taken by a person waking up to a house full of fire—a survival action, pulling a lover or child smack against his body as they wove their way through a thicket of flames.
    Helen had wanted very much to conceive. They had been trying for months, and after they made love that morning, she lay flat on her back on the floor, her hands on her stomach. “Oh,” she said suddenly.
    “What is it?” Ray asked in a worried voice.
    “I just felt something,” she told him. “Inside me, moving around. Like the beginnings of a baby, I think.”
    He laughed at her. “That’s ridiculous.”
    “No,” she insisted, “I think this time it really worked. I actually
feel
pregnant.” An image flitted through her mind: a microscopic fetus, its proportions minnowlike, almost all head and eyes, sucking its thumb somewhere deep inside of her. Ray laid his head down on his wife’s stomach, listening closely for signs of life.
    —
    A re you ever happy?” Helen had asked her daugher once, when Lucy was eighteen.
    “What do
you
think?” Lucy answered. Helen never brought the subject up again.
    Lucy’s poetry matured early—long, graceful poems that were accepted by small literary magazines. She went off to Barnard, but she did not get much out of it, and she dropped out after three semesters. “The education’s too narrow,” she said. Helen did not know what that meant. She only knew that Lucy was a rarity, and that she needed to be left alone. Sometimes, though, she had to be