Sleeping Beauty
Eve Marx
Word Count 742
This is probably an awful thing to say, but I call my daughter-in-law “Sleeping Beauty” behind her back. This is because so often when we’re with her, she is sound asleep. She works very hard, my daughter-in-law. She keeps very late hours because of her work and when she can, prefers to sleep in, so we rarely see her. I often wonder if she is sleeping to avoid us, the in-laws, and who could blame her? We have so many questions, we ask a lot. We try not to be imposing or impossible while at the same time fully aware that we are very likely imposing and impossible and it’s likely the very thought of us makes her extra-tired. She is very beautiful when she is asleep, and also quiet. I have sympathy for how difficult it must be for her, thrown into a family of poor sleepers and early risers.
My Uncle Charlie, my mother’s boyfriend for many years, was not a great sleeper; he was the original wandering Jew my mother called him because he could just not stay in bed. All night he roamed from couch to couch and we had at least six couches that he threw himself down on as he made his nocturnal journey through the house, a decrepit old beach monster with ten or twelve rooms. At one time the place was chopped up into apartments. It had been a boarding house. Three of the couches were spread around the wrap-around, glassed in porch that also served as Charlie’s home office. He had a dictaphone and an electric typewriter I practiced on for the day I prayed would come when he would invite me to help out at his real office. Meanwhile I kept a keen eye on Charlie’s habit of sleeping (or not sleeping) on sofas, concluding that the sharpest and finest minds were often insomniac. My mother, who I thought had a dim mind and even less of an imagination, slept like a baby in her lumpy bed where she couldn’t be asked to change the linens.
When I was twelve or so, at the edge of puberty, I longed to be a sleepwalker, largely based on some romantic ideas I had about somnambulism. I was already sneak-reading Freud out of Uncle Charlie’s library and associated sleepwalking with sexual desire. I hadn’t gotten around to his two-part collection of Havelock Ellis yet to read about the association between sleepwalking and depression as well as obsessive-compulsive disorders. A couple of times I pretended to be sleep-walking while of course being completely awake. My sort of stepbrother who was a few years younger thought this was a marvelous idea and copy-catted it from me with great success. Everyone enjoyed his faux-sleep walking performances during his father’s cocktail parties when we kids were supposed to be in bed, wandering through the party in his night clothes, stealing swigs from the guests’ abandoned highballs and martini glasses stickily collecting on coffee tables.
This entire winter I went to bed at 8 p.m. You could call it depression, but I attribute it to the living conditions. Where I live, it rains and rains. It’s dark and wet ten months out of the year and the truth is I prefer to read in bed. Books are more satisfying than tv, although in my younger sleepless years I spent many sleepless nights watching reruns of Criminal Minds. But that’s all in the past. Now I get into bed after eating an Indica-infused gummy and flossing my teeth and read for an hour, sometimes two hours, before my eyelids grow heavy and the dogs who share the bed are snoring to sleep my dreamless sleep. I’m old now and know I shall not remain asleep for very long. It’s a restless sleep I endure now. It’s not unusual to get up three or four times to use the bathroom. I am often awakened by cruelly painful leg cramps. When that happens I flick on the green-shaded lamp beside the bed and pick up whatever book I’m currently immersed in. The dogs burrow deeper under the covers to express their discontent. My husband doesn’t notice. Just like my Uncle Charlie he spends his nights drifting back and forth from our bed to the daybed that doubles as a sofa in the living room, reading, dozing, using AI like a dictaphone, fingers tapping on the keyboard of his laptop.
Eve is a journalist and author currently scraping out a tiny living crafting police reports for newspapers in New York and Oregon. She is the author of What’s Your Sexual IQ?, The Goddess Orgasm, 101 Things You Didn’t Know About Sex and other titles bearing some relation to her stint editing Penthouse Forum and other ribald publications. She makes her home in a rural seaside community near Portland, OR with her husband, R.J. Marx, a jazz saxophonist, and Lucy, their dog child.
