Talk Before Sleep Read Free

martini?”
    “I’ll mix, okay?” she said. “No one can make them like I do.”
    I leaned against the kitchen counter, watching her while she made our drinks. She had a flask in her purse, a lovely silver thing filled with gin. “Where’d you get that?” I asked.
    “A Christmas present from my husband,” she said. She nodded in the general direction of the living room. She wasn’t wearing a wedding ring. “It was an attempt to bring us closer. See, we can now, at a moment’s notice, get drunk together. Isn’t that romantic?”
    We sat at the kitchen table and got through the what-brings-you-here material. And then it was on tomovies. She asked if I’d seen
Sophie’s Choice
and I said no and she said I should, it was terrific, ripped your heart out and flung it onto the floor. “I’ll go with you and see it again,’” she said. “You should see it with a woman.”
    My husband came into the kitchen, looked at me sitting there with Ruth. I gave him a slight raise of eyebrow, a tiny defensive shrug. He sat down and introduced himself, then had the good sense to leave.
    “All right, how long have
you
been married?” she asked, sighing, and I knew we had a lot to talk about. I could forgive her good looks. She was capable of a scary kind of honesty I was ready for, although until that moment, I hadn’t realized how much I’d been needing to meet someone I might be able to say everything to.

S he is sleeping. I do make sure, of course. I watch for the rise and fall of the sheet over her. You must stop your own breathing to do this. Otherwise, you count your own movements as that of the person you’re watching. You also must never check for a person’s pulse using your thumb, or you’ll feel your own heartbeat. Actually, I plan on doing that if I’m the one who’s here when Ruth dies. I plan on giving her my heartbeat before I let her go.
    I move off the bed slowly, tiptoe into the living room. I call home, the machine answers, and I say I’m staying over tonight, that I’ll call back again later. Then I go into the kitchen, open the refrigerator, look for something to eat. There is a collection of things here,different efforts by her friends: a pan of spinach lasagna, fruit salad in a flowered bowl, banana bread wrapped in Saran Wrap and ribbon, wild strawberry Jell-?, half a baked ham. In the freezer is a container of homemade ice cream. Ruth’s boss, Sarah, brought that. She said, “I was ready to put it in a container and all of a sudden I thought, wait—how big? If I put it in something small, will Ruth think I think she’s going to die sooner?”
    “I know,” I said. “It’s very confusing. This is all very confusing.”
    I break off a piece of the banana bread, sit at the little kitchen table to eat it, look out the window. There’s a balcony off the kitchen with a turquoise Adirondack chair on it, many years old and sun-bleached to a pleasant pastel color. It faces the voluptuous rise of hills in the distance and looks to me to be alive and seeing. I hear a noise behind me; Ruth is coming slowly into the kitchen.
    “Want some banana bread?” I ask.
    She waves it away. “No. I hate banana bread. It’s too suspicious-looking. I always thought the cooked banana looked like insect legs.” I look at the piece of bread I’ve been eating. She’s right. I put it down.
    Ruth opens the refrigerator, scans the contents, closes the door without taking anything. “I don’t recognize my own refrigerator anymore,” she sighs. “All this sick-person stuff. Where are some lamb chops or something? Where’s the fancy lettuce?” She is wearing her unlaced sneakers as slippers, a striped shirt over her nightgown. She hates slippers, lately, as she hates robes and bed jackets or bed trays and glasses left at her bedside. “If my brain goes and I can’t do anything and theybring those fucking bedpans into my house, shoot me,” she told me.
    She sits down at the table, subtly out of breath.