For her cell phone’s ringtone, Tiff was using the screams of a woman being knifed in an Italian horror movie. In the middle of the night of Thanksgiving Day, Tiff’s friend Nat, knowing of the chronic insomnia that had plagued Tiff since the age of seven, tried calling Tiff repeatedly, setting off the screams again and again. But Tiff had forgotten her phone in the living room and was upstairs in her bed, watching, with earphones deafening her to the rest of the world, another Italian horror movie on her laptop. The screams woke Ivy, and though she knew they were unlikely real, they were nonetheless unsettling.
Ivy went downstairs in her ex-lover’s pajamas. She’d been wearing Prof. Chester’s flannel pajamas, pajamas she’d bought him for Christmas in Paris, for so many years that they’d faded from a sky blue to a near-white. In an ugly scene, as he’d packed to leave her five years before, she had unpacked everything he’d put in the suitcase.
“Stop being an infant,” he said. Prof. Chester grabbed her by the arm, lifted her away from his clothes, and shoved her against the wall, where she tumbled and fell against an end table, rapping her funny bone hard and breaking a lamp. Ivy sat there, sobbing.
“Where am I supposed to go?” she cried. They’d been subleasing the apartment from another professor, also on sabbatical. He would be returning in a week.
“Go home to your family,” he told her. He needed nothing at all from her—not forgiveness, not respect. She’s been my wife for twenty-five years, he’d told Ivy when he’d announced he was going back to Mrs. Chester. That’s important to me. “You have a child,” he told Ivy. “You know, that was one of the things that first attracted me to you. A young single mother, taking a night class, improving her life. It was touching. When I suggested you coming to France with me, quite frankly, I was surprised that you said you would. And kind of disappointed, in a way. So things, for us, started falling apart from the very beginning. You weren’t who I thought you were if it was so easy for you to leave your little girl.”
The screams of the phone had stopped by the time Ivy reached the kitchen at the bottom of the stairs. She cocked her head, perked her ears, listening to the house. Her watch, left on the kitchen counter, ticktocked louder than she realized it ever did when it was on her wrist. A rack rattled in the fridge as the motor ran, causing wine bottles to jingle. She reached in to stop the jingling, then decided to empty the almost-empty bottle of chardonnay. Earlier she’d thrown away the chipped wineglasses, but now she pulled one from the trash, rinsed it off, and poured herself the last glass of wine.
Ivy took a needle and thread from a kitchen drawer to repair a button of the pajamas. She’d also kept two of her professor’s shirts and a necktie, all of which she still wore. Perverse, she realized, but Prof. Chester, villain though he was, was the great lost love of her life. She didn’t want it to be that way—it wasn’t a romantic notion she’d concocted. It just was. She’d contemplated, now that she was back from France, signing up for another of his courses. She fantasized sitting in the first row on the first day of class, stunning in a long white winter coat, doused in the French perfume he used to buy her. Prof. Chester, she’d say, raising her hand, why, in your scholarship, do you so aggressively refute the lesbian interpretations of Myrtle Kingsley Fitch’s The Ladies of the Katydids? Is it because of Mrs. Chester’s history of lesbian affairs throughout your marriage, including one with one of your colleagues at this very university? Is it because of your own feelings of inadequacy in keeping your wife satisfied that you fear careful analysis of gender roles?
After Prof. Chester had left her in Paris, returning to his wife, Ivy had answered an ad in the newspaper—a woman seeking a roommate. So Ivy kept her money in savings and lived for five years in a small bedroom, afraid to return to Nebraska for the very reason she’d left in the first place—she was a terrible mother for Tiffany. She worried she’d be even worse if she returned so heartbroken. She had thought Prof. Chester would take care of her forever. He would’ve taken them in, and he would’ve helped her provide for her daughter. She’d been so enraptured by that portrait of the rest of her life that her life was not easily reimagined. She stayed in France because she thought that might win Prof. Chester back. Within a year, as a woman of Paris, he’d want her again, she reasoned.
Ivy heard the horror-movie screaming again and followed it to the living room, where the cell phone sat on a sofa cushion. She answered it.
“Is Tiff there?” the girl on the phone said.
“Of course not,” Ivy said. “She’s in bed.” She then said, “Do you realize what time it is?” only because it was something that every parent eventually said.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” the girl said. “This is Tiff’s friend Nat. Usually she’s up. Because of her insomnia.”
“Tiff doesn’t have insomnia,” Ivy said.
“Oh,” Nat said. “Okay. But she does, kind of. She’s had it since she was little. We talk in the middle of the night all the time. I have insomnia too, ever since my parents split up.”
“I can’t imagine,” Ivy said.
“Well, I’m very sorry I bothered you,” Nat said. “I’ll just text her. She can read it in the morning, I guess, but she’ll really, really, really want to know about it.”
“Happy Thanksgiving, Nat,” Ivy said. Ivy closed the phone and sat on the sofa in the dark, finishing her wine. In a few minutes, the phone chimed and lit up with its text message. Ivy flipped open the phone and dialed, with one thumb, Prof. Chester’s house. Stop calling here, Mrs. Chester had told Ivy once, years before, but it had sounded less like a demand than a plea. He won’t talk to you. And I won’t let him change our number because we’ve had the same number for our whole marriage. We are not changing this number.
The phone rang, but Ivy hung up. Leaving an unfamiliar phone number on their caller ID, in the middle of the night: it satisfied Ivy.
Ivy went back upstairs and opened Tiff’s door. Tiff looked startled and pulled the plugs from her ears and slapped shut her laptop. “I couldn’t sleep,” Tiff said.
“Apparently you never sleep,” Ivy said. “Nat says you’re an insomniac.”
“Well, yeah, but we all are,” Tiff said. “Nobody I know sleeps at night.”
“You left your phone downstairs, and it’s been … screaming.” She held it out to Tiff.
“Oh,” Tiff said, laughing a little. “Sorry.” She threw aside her quilt, scooted over, and patted the bed. “Get in with me.”
Ivy crawled in next to Tiff and pulled up the blanket. They lay in the dark, staring up at the ceiling, where the stuck-on stars glowed green from the moonlight.
Ivy had received a B— in the lit class she’d taken with Prof. Chester (And that was me being pretty generous, to be honest, he’d told Ivy as they’d taken a bath together).
Tiff read Nat’s text. “I have to call Doc, Mom,” she said. “Pronto.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Ivy said. “Do you know what time it is?”
“Do we have a CB radio?” Tiff asked. “Do we even know what that is?”