The Hazards of Sleeping Alone Read Online Free PDF

fruit salad, vacuum, clean the bathtub. Last time Emily came to visit, she was fanatical about her bath taking. She talked at length about the bath’s “healing properties,” the various salts and soaps, oils and beads, how necessary they were to one’s “spiritual well-being.” (Charlotte herself never takes baths, too preoccupied by how easy it would be for someone to break in while she was in there.) Last week, she went to the Millville Mall and picked up some lavender bubbles and a “bath glove.” She’d never heard of one, but the saleswoman told her it was very popular. She called it “restorative” and “revitalizing.” The very ambiguity was its selling point; if it was unfamiliar to Charlotte, chances were Emily owned five.
    Now, Charlotte digs her nails into her palms. No point in getting upset, she reasons. Nothing she can do about her checklist from in here. She decides to try being mindful—in part because mindfulness is supposed to be particularly effective in traffic, in part because she knows Emily will be quizzing her on it later. In August, Emily sent her a book called
The Miracle of Mindfulness.
It was her personal copy and had her excited reactions spilling into the margins, asterisks and exclamation points and comments like YES! or WALTER. Charlotte had picked loyallythrough a chapter or two, more interested in Emily’s notes than the book itself. She tried to grasp the concept of meditation, but just didn’t get it. To sit alone with her thoughts?
Her
thoughts? She could think of nothing less relaxing.
    â€œIt isn’t really about
thinking,
Mom,” Emily had explained over the phone. It was the week Emily moved into the alternative living arrangement, and she was talking to Charlotte while she unpacked. “It’s kind of the opposite. Like being really inside your body, not your mind.”
    She paused, and Charlotte heard a zipping sound.
    â€œIt’s being engaged in what you’re doing while you’re doing it,” Emily said. “Like, if you’re stuck in traffic, instead of spazzing, just stop and
be
in the traffic. When you’re doing laundry, really
experience
the moment of doing laundry. Do the best laundry you’ve ever done.”
    How in the world Emily came across these things Charlotte had no idea. It wasn’t just her youth. Charlotte had been young once and hadn’t found herself exposed to radical approaches to grading report cards and doing laundry. She had lived as she lived, known what she knew. But with Emily, new ideas seemed to just land in her lap. Charlotte might have chalked it up to a liberal arts education if her daughter hadn’t always been this way. When she was nine, and Charlotte took her on a day trip to Philadelphia, Emily grabbed at every crumpled piece of paper strangers thrust at her on the street. Greenpeace literature. Concert flyers. Psychic hotlines. Anti-Bush propaganda. “Thank you,” she smiled, stuffing all of it in her Hello Kitty backpack. Once, when Emily was in eighth grade, Charlotte had come home to find her sitting on the back porch after school, snacking on trail mix with two ambassadors from the Church of Latter-day Saints.
    It was wonderful that Emily was so engaged in things—so
interested.
But most of the time, Charlotte found her daughter’s ideas exhausting. She preferred the concrete world. Coupons to snip. Bathtubs to scrub.
Jeopardy!
every night at seven. Lean Cuisines to microwave for three to five minutes. She couldn’t admit this to Emily, but she had no interest in adopting a new philosophy, a new religion. She didn’t want to make her life more complicated, not at this stage. Besides, having opinions invited differences of opinion, which invited conflict. Charlotte believed more strongly in avoiding conflict than she did in any stance or slogan. It might sound lame, or weak, or passive, but she didn’t