This is a portion of a lighter chapter that introduces the sleeping issues both my mom and I have. The way the memoir is now, this is Chapter 6, When Blue Eyes Are Closed.
In fourth grade I learned I should never talk to my mom while she was asleep. But earlier in my life, I learned that I get both blue eyes and sleep issues from my mom. In first grade, I had the first misadventure in my slumber, and although I was asleep when it happened, I know the story well because my mom told it over and over again at family gatherings, to every new friend I brought home and one that my mom said she couldn’t wait to tell my first boyfriend.
Back when we were living in the Blue House on 115, my mom and Jasmine’s mom, Barb, were smoking, drinking coffee and putting paste on the backs of the many panels of large wallpaper. These pieces would all fit together and make a beautiful mountain scene mural for mom and Tony’s bedroom. When the work was complete, Mom and Tony could lie in bed inside the house, but feel like they were outside in the wilderness. Mom and Barb would carefully take one piece at a time into the bedroom to hang it, making sure the ends met and that there were no bubbles. As they were working, I appeared in the doorway of my bedroom, and walked to the living room.
“I talked to you, but you weren’t answering,” my mom said. “So, I thought you were just going to get a drink of water or something.”
I continued past them into the kitchen and headed straight to the refrigerator. My arms weren’t extended like sleepwalkers in the movies do it, though. (I asked.)
“It was never like you to get a midnight snack, so Barb and I peeked in to see what you were doing. You opened the refrigerator door, bent down, opened the crisper drawer, turned around, pulled down your panties, pulled up your nightgown, squatted and peed,” my mom built up the conclusion like the crescendo I learned about in Mr. Capone’s music class.
“I peed? In the fridge?” I pictured the cigarettes falling out of my mom and Barb’s mouths as they opened them wide with shock.
“Yes. You peed. In the crisper drawer. Pulled your panties up. Pushed in the drawer. Shut the fridge door. Went right back to bed,” my mom said, making animated hand motions like all Italians do when they tell stories. My eyes followed the lit cherry on her cigarette like a cat does with a laser pen.
My mom laughed so hard whenever she told the story that tears poured out of her blue eyes. Sometimes she’d laugh so hard, she had to stop and start the story over. Sometimes people asked her if she could breathe because she was gasping for the next word.
My mom attributes this sleepwalking episode to starting the first grade and using public restrooms on a frequent basis for the first time. In kindergarten, we had our own private bathroom in our classroom. But in first grade, we used the regular school bathrooms. Mom said I must have been processing the change in my subconscious: opening the fridge door was like opening the door to the girl’s room and opening the crisper drawer was like opening the stall door. She also said that I did it again the very next night, only I opened that cabinet under the sink, squatted down and peed on the tile floor and went right back to bed. I had other strange sleepwalking incidents I never told my mom or any of my friends about, like the one time at Girl Scout camp when I woke up in the middle of the night sitting on the stoop of my cabin, with my pants wet sitting in a puddle of my own pee.
But the incident in fourth grade wasn’t funny. At least not at first. With Gary gone, it was just my mom and me in the Lincoln Log House and we had a hard time waking each other up in the mornings. If my mom got up first, she had trouble waking me up and vice-versa. She even taught me how to hit snooze if I wanted to sleep longer, which is the exact way I learned my nine times tables so well. The previous year in third grade, Miss Decker was impressed with my multiplication skills because most of the class was stumped with the nines. But I had them memorized. For instance, if my alarm went off at 7:00, but I really had to be ready to get up at 7:30, I could hit the snooze button three times– 27 extra minutes. Most of the time though, I’d get up for school on my own and onto Bus #37 before my mom even woke up. One morning, I wanted to ask Mom if I could go to Jasmine’s house after school. You usually needed a permission slip to ride another bus, but I went to Jasmine’s house so much that her bus driver knew me, and always let me on anyway. My bus driver, Roy, was nice but Jasmine’s was even cooler. At the request of all the kids, May would speed up to hit all the bumps on Long Pond Road so we’d fly up into the air.
I went into my my mom’s room to tell her my plans, but of course she was still sleeping. She was a big, yellow, unconscious bundle. She was laying on her back, with her legs crossed up in the air. This was a position you may be in if you were laying in the grass reading a book, star-gazing or even watching television, but my mom slept this way. Her brown hair was a mess. Her mouth was wide open. She was snoring loudly.
“Mom.” I shook her. “Moooom.” I shook her again.
“Huh?” She snorted, put her legs down and curled into the fetal position, now facing the other side of the room.
I walked around to the other side of the bed.
“Are you awake?”
“Yeah.” Her right eye flickered, opened a little.
“Okay, good. Can I go to Jasmine’s after school?”
“The lollipops.”
“What lollipops?”
“The lollipops are in Mrs. Metzgar’s mailbox.”
“Mom? What lollipops?”
Mrs. Metzgar is Eric Metzgar’s mom. They were in the Parent Teacher Organization together. She must be processing a PTO meeting in her head, I thought. I shook her again.
“Mom! Get! Up!” I roared impatiently.
“Whaaaat?” she yelled loudly. Her eyes popped open. She stared right at me. She looked a little scary, like a horror movie monster.
“God, Mom! It’s about time. Can I go to Jasmine’s after school?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Thanks. Bye,” I said as I jolted out the door to catch the bus.
On my way to school, I told Stacey who shared a seat with me about my mom’s lollipop dream. I couldn’t wait to tell Eric that my mom was dreaming about his mom. That afternoon, Jasmine and I were sitting at the wooden kitchen table eating fish sticks and French fries and corn on our usual plastic plates, which Jasmine’s mom, Barb had set out– one pink, one yellow, one blue and one sea green. Jasmine, her sister Jade and I always battled it out for the sea green plate. None of us were pink kind of girls, no one ever wanted blue because part of it was melted and no one ever wanted yellow either because it was the color of pee. The phone rang and Barb answered.
“Hello. (pause) Oh, hi Lori. (pause) Donner? Yeah, Donner is right here. Do you want to talk to her?”
Barb was originally from Staten Island and some words that ended in “a” she pronounced “er” instead. So, sometimes I became one of Santa’s reindeer when she said my name.
“What?!” I heard Barb exclaim. “I didn’t know that. Hold on.” She put the phone on the counter. “Donner!”
Jasmine and I shrugged at each other. Barb seemed alarmed as she called me over to the phone. I slid out of the bench of the picnic-style table and went to the phone. Since the phone had a long, curly cord, I walked back to the table as I put the phone to my ear. I wanted to eat my last fish stick.
“Hi Mom,” I said as I dipped the fish stick in a blob of ketchup and bit in.
“Donna! Why are you at Jasmine’s? Did you know I was outside to get you off the school bus and the school bus flew right past our house? Did you know I was looking for you up Route 115 and that I called the school to see if you missed the bus?!”
“But mom, I…..”
“I thought you were kidnapped!” she interrupted. “Or, or that you ran away. You had me worried.” I could hear her blowing smoke, a big puff.
“Ma. I did ask you,” I said, frustrated. “I asked you this morning while you were sleeping. I thought you were awake because your eyes opened.”
“What?” she asked, baffled.
I told her about her dream. I knew she knew I was telling the truth when she exploded into her usual tear-filled laughter. My mom made a new rule: never ask her anything while she was in bed unless she had a lit cigarette in her mouth or a cup of coffee in her hand so I would know she was officially awake and not off somewhere in dreamland putting sugary goods inside people’s mailboxes.
As Jasmine and I watched Duck Tales later that night, I realized my mom and I were even. She had an embarrassing sleep story to tell about me to my first boyfriend. Now, I also had a good one to tell her next man.
