sharp or uneasy. He ate whatever she put in front of him, even though Sophie knew that later on in bed he would turn from his back to his side and sigh in a way that let her know he was worrying about his weight. If asked, he would say nothing bad about her mother. “I like going over there,” he’d say. “It’s a nice place.” And just like that, she was left to stay awake in the bed, where the corners of the mattress rose up slightly, where the equatorial bar bruised her back and shoulders.
That’s where she’s going this afternoon: to see her mother and then buy a new bed. She told Joe that she was going to the drugstore. This struck her as an acceptable lie. She didn’t want to get into a discussion with him about the bed, and whether it should be replaced, and what implications that would have for their relationship and the future of the planet. She just wanted to sleep. Joe seems to be sleeping more than ever. For more than a week he has been slack, like a clothesline strung indifferently between two buildings. The preoccupation with his weight is only part of it. He has been listless. He has started to drink too much again. He has complained that he does not know what he wants from life, that he cannot imagine going forward while he is in the grip of this inertia. “But inertia is what makes you go forward,” she says. They were both right, but she was more right.
The radio is playing Billie Holiday, a song called “You Go to My Head.” Sophie knows the song, knows it well. Here, credit is due not her mother but her father. He plays the trumpet, sometimes professionally, and when she was a baby he had been obsessed with American singers. A truck goes by with a picture of a ghost on the side, which reminds her of a line in the song: “Though I’m certain that this heart of mine hasn’t a ghost of a chance in this crazy romance, you go to my head.” She and Joe do not listen to music together very often. Mostly it’s in the car. A radio is never on as they are going to bed or waking up. When she was friends with Peter, they used to listen to music all the time. Peter was obsessed with Smokey Robinson. “These songs tell you who to love,” he used to say. “Whoever you think of while you are listening to these songs, well, that is who you love.” When Peter explained this theory, Sophie saw how brightly hope was burning in his eyes. She could not endorse that hope. Instead, she fell silent and stayed that way.
At the time that Peter had asked Sophie to date him and Sophie had refused, she had told Peter she was sorry, and while it was a lie, it was also a prediction, because that time did eventually come. She thought of him often and was sorry when she did. Now in the car, as she drives to her mother’s house, she wonders where Peter is. He lingers like a haunting refrain. The song ends. Next is another Billie Holiday song, “They Can’t Take That Away from Me.” Sophie sings along. “The memory of all that, no, no, they can’t take that away from me.” She imagines her mother’s voice next. This is becoming quite a play. “Oh, but they can take that away,” she hears her mother say. “Can and will. So be careful.” Her mother loves Joe. He is often the first thing she asks about. “It is so important to pick the right man to marry,” she tells Sophie. When her mother speaks of Joe, she rarely has any irony in her tone.
Her mother picked the wrong man to marry. He had run around, had a child with another woman, and eventually left. And it wasn’t as though there was no proof of his error: his daughter by the second wife lived in America now, although everyone said she was crazy. These were some very real consequences, her mother said, and every chance she got, she told Sophie not to repeat her mistake. Sometimes she even made her voice quaver when she said it, so she sounded like a ghost. “Dooooo not doooo what I have donnnnne,” she said. Again, the pain processed in such a way that it did not become poisonous. The memory of her mother’s ghost voice makes Sophie smile, although she feels a soft thud in her heart at the thought that perhaps the crime has already been committed. The last days have been criminal at many points. She was not able to look at Joe directly during dinner. She was angry at him in the truck. She disparaged him silently while he weighed himself. This is not the way it should be. Joe is kind. Joe will never leave. Joe will eventually fix the car. In “My Man,” Billie Holiday’s lover beat her up and ran around and still couldn’t weaken her devotion. That’s not Joe, not at all.
Joe would be surprised to learn that Sophie knows nearly every song Billie Holiday ever recorded. She knows “Riffin’ the Scotch” and “With Thee I Swing” and “Spreadin’ Rhythm Around” and “That’s Life I Guess.” Joe thinks that she does not know very much about music because she is young. He takes a squinty view of both her facts and her opinions. The night before, in the truck, there was a song that he loved and she didn’t. “I don’t know it or care to know it,” she said. He sniffed and said, “You always have a bone to pick musically.” Sophie was offended. She marked off the distance from Joe in her mind. But now, as she drives, she decides that she loves the sound of what Joe said. She feels like she has been recognized as the virtuoso of some rare instrument. That is what angels should play instead of harps: a bone. She likes the image so much that it relieves the pain of the insult almost entirely.
She drives by the exit she would take if she were going to her office. She has a job that requires her to sit at a desk and decide the fates of others. She would rather sit in her mother’s house, eat some food, have a drink, and talk about her own fate. Her mother never forgets to ask. “And what will happen next?” she likes to say to Sophie. From another mother to another daughter, this could be an overbearing question. But Sophie’s mother does not have an answer in mind. “Sometimes the second step is distant from the first,” she likes to say, waving her hand. What will happen next? It is worth thinking about.
The exit to her office sets her thinking about work. The day before had been the Friday before a Monday that will contain her biggest meeting in months. The Monday meeting was the main reason she could not sleep, even after sex. Her firm is fighting an injunction that would halt construction on a large office park in a subdivision called Potter Grove. The advocates who have filed the injunction are arguing that the construction would most likely pollute a nearby aquifer. The lawyers in her office are trying to get a judge to lift the injunction by arguing that one of the other attorneys is out of jurisdiction, and tracing that attorney’s history has fallen to Sophie and her staff of paralegals. Every detail has to be in place. When, that morning, Joe had started complaining that he did not feel motivated in his own life, that he felt as though he were stalling, she had given him a hug when what she really wanted to do was to push him against the wall. While she hugged him, she noticed that it was harder than ever to reach all the way around him. Maybe he had gained weight. She marked off the distance from him. What would happen next?
Suddenly she remembers the dream she had the night before, when she was stretched out alongside Joe, wondering if she would ever sleep again, backtracking over the sex that had just concluded. At some point, she had answered most of her questions or decided that they could not be answered, and she had remembered that there was at least a little pleasure in it for her. She had squeezed her hand between her legs and then relaxed into sleep, where she had dreamed about Peter. He was a judge, and he was presiding over her life. He was deciding which man deserved her, and what music she should listen to, and whether she needed to work fourteen-hour days, and whether she should have a child. He made his opinions known in writing, behind elaborate wax seals. She was angry at first, and then relieved. Why not put your future in the hands of someone you trust? Toward the end of the dream, issues of jurisdiction returned, but they were blurry.
She is tired in the car. She has been tired all morning. She has never been more tired. While she was making coffee, she had almost put her hand in the machine. Joe does not know she is tired. How would he? The rattling noise, which is usually annoying, is putting her to sleep. In the car she has another kind of dream. It lasts only a second, and then she is back awake, worried that she has missed the turnoff for her mother’s house. The radio isn’t playing Billie Holiday anymore. It’s playing Smokey Robinson. The song is called “Swept for You Baby,” and though she does not remember ever hearing it before, she finds herself singing along. She makes a mental note to tell Peter, and then another mental note that she does not tell Peter anything anymore. It is nothing she can tell Joe. Maybe she will tell her mother. The rattling noise is putting her to sleep again. The sun is in her eyes. Her back itches and she resolves to scratch it the next time the car comes to rest at a stop sign or a red light.
The next time the car comes to rest, it is not at a stop sign or a red light. What are some of the other choices? It is overturned. Sophie is out on the road under the hood. Inertia has brought her there. Broken glass is spread around like rhythm. A bone comes through her arm. An artery in her thigh is laid open for all the world to see. “Look at my blood!” she wants to say. It is healthy blood, and it is running out. Time is running out with it. She is growing lighter than air. She has a sudden urge to weigh herself.
THE GOVINDAN ANANTHANARAYANAN ACADEMY FOR MORAL AND ETHICAL PRACTICE AND THE TREATMENT OF SADNESS RESULTING FROM THE MISAPPLICATION OF THE ABOVE
(Australindia, 1921)
