The Sleepwalker(57)
Melissa Toms of Scotland would emerge from her bed, her husband asleep beside her, and meet college boys from the nearby university. The Tomses lived at the edge of the campus. At first she met them at the hall in which the students resided. But then, for reasons no one can quite recall, the boys started coming to her house, where they would be waiting for her in her front yard. She would have sex with three and four of them at a time there, though always on her terms. She hardly spoke. It only stopped when her husband found the condoms scattered in the wood chips along the front walkway. To this day, she insists she has no recollection. Two of the college boys have admitted they were quite sure when they were having sex with Melissa—or as one said, “she was having sex with me”—that she was sound asleep.
In January 2009, Timothy Brueggeman of northern Wisconsin walked in his sleep from his house into the nearby woods in only his underwear and froze to death.
James Currens, seventy-seven, once walked in his sleep into a pond full of alligators in Palm Harbor, Florida. He survived because he had been sleepwalking with his cane, which he would use that particular night to keep the animals at bay.
I collected stories like these like stamps. I hoarded them the way some people amass matchbooks, postcards, or old coins.
In them I saw deviance and strangeness, but also the raw power of the id. I saw its absolute independence.
And, of course, I saw…me. And I knew I was not alone.
CHAPTER TWELVE
I CLUNG TO my memories of Annalee Ahlberg that autumn and tried to focus on the mother I knew. It was impossible to ignore the thrum of words and the sexual werewolf they conjured—parasomnia, sexsomnia, sleepwalking, sleep sex—but our home was a museum to the singular woman she was. Even the footlocker with the magic tricks I had outgrown but was unable to bring myself to resell could resurrect her for me in my mind.
When I was ten and Paige was still a baby, my father had a conference at Columbia University, and my mother joined him and brought her girls to Manhattan. (And, in hindsight, we always were her girls: not their girls and not his girls.) While he was uptown at the university, she took me to my favorite store for magic tricks on Broadway and Twelfth Street. It was near the Strand Bookstore, where we would also spend hours on that trip, and a restaurant that specialized in chocolate. (I had honed my appreciation for decadent chocolate desserts long before my mother would die and I would meet Gavin Rikert.) The store was on the second floor of the building, and on that particular visit we took the elevator, rather than the stairs as we had in the past, because Paige was against my mother’s chest in a robin’s-egg blue Snugli.
Like Lindsay McCurdy—a.k.a. Rowland the Rogue—the gentleman behind the counter was from another era, but otherwise he was nothing like the dapper and rather elegant old magician I would meet when I was in college. This fellow was crusty and brusque. He had a paunch reined in ever so slightly by suspenders, unruly topiaries growing from his ears, and a thick shock of salt-and-pepper hair it seemed he hadn’t washed or combed in a very long time. I saw men like him in magic stores or in how-to videocassettes about magic all the time. His hands were awash in tea-colored sunspots, but I loved watching him use them to demonstrate tricks for us. They were smooth and fast. And like a lot of the magicians of his generation, he tolerated a girl like me—but just barely. My mother and I were the only customers in the store that morning.
He was showing us a trick called the magic pan, a silver skillet perhaps four inches deep with a silver lid. You show the audience it’s empty, cover it, and then whisk off the lid to reveal an overflowing mound of sponge balls, flowers, or silks. I liked it, but I worried that if I couldn’t produce something more solid—something not easily compressed in the hidden panel—the trick would lack dazzle. I was imagining hard candy: a great big, colorful pile of hard candy. Then I would toss it to my classmates or the really little kids who, back then, were my audience. My mother and I were discussing this possibility with the salesman, and my mother was asking him if he could disclose the size of the compartment. It was right about then that Paige awoke and started to fuss. My mother gently lifted her from the carrier, unbuttoned her own blouse, and pulled the lone chair in the small showroom up to that counter. And then she sat down and began to nurse my baby sister. Instantly, Paige settled down.
I never thought twice about my mother nursing in public in Vermont in 1989. I might not have thought about it in Manhattan that day. But the old magician said to my mother, “If you’d like, you can do that in the storeroom.” His eyes were on the corner of the floor behind us. It was as if my mother’s breast, even shielded by a rapacious infant’s mouth, was the sun.
My mother smiled at him, momentarily surprised by his discomfort. Soon, however, she was relishing it. “Oh, we’re fine,” she said. “You were about to show us the panel. The secret panel. I’m guessing it’s in the tray, and when you lift the lid, you release it—and then it becomes hidden in the top. True?”
He glanced down at the trick. He eyed me. He was going to gaze everywhere but at my mother. “Look, you really need to do that elsewhere,” he said finally, speaking straight into the glass display case. “What if another customer comes in here?”
My mother shook her head. “They won’t care,” she told him, losing none of her equanimity. “I think you might. But most men your age have seen breasts, and I know every woman has. Now, one of my daughters is hungry and one is interested in buying some magic tricks. I think between the two of us, we can make them both very happy. Why don’t you pay attention to Lianna here, and I’ll pay attention to this little one. That way, everyone will get what they want.”