Speaker 1
Sasha had always been pretty, a blessing and a curse, janet thought, but never said out loud. Now, sasha was a lawyer. His wasnt a passion, which she said wasn't the point. What she wanted was a purpose. Privately, janet had hoped that sasha might be swept up in a cause. She'd seen a movie about a small town lawyer battling an evil power plant. But something in her had proved not sweepable. Janet followed the tenagor down an aisle full of plastic devices and plastic packages. A middle aged man standing in front of the display of remotes lifted one of them and pointed it straight at the girl's chest. Closing one eye as if taking careful aim, she stopped in her tracks. The man laughed the game is at eight, he said, lowering his weapon. I need this by eight. The girl composed herself. Of course, she said, there were lots of interesting things to do with tha law degree saucer. Did not want an interesting life, but first she wanted a stable life. She used this word stability so often that janet couldn't help wondering what it really meant. Had her own life been too precarious? Her husband had never had a career exactly, but he'd almost always had a job. She had never gone back to work after having kids, but hardly any of the women she knew had. Things might have been shaky now and then, but she was pretty sure they had never come close to collapse after her honeymoon. Sasha had started a job at a big firm in new york. The office was full of men an expensive uits and women armored with tight smiles and mean reputations. They all wore a light touch of make up under their eyes. You weren't expected to sleep much, but you were expected to look like you did. Once the man had selected a remote he hurried away without thanking the girl and without looking at janet. She had heard women age complained about this never turning heads, never getting even a sideways glance. But for janet, it had come as a relief. Men who locked eyes had only ever locked her in. She wanted to tell these women to rejoice. The keys are yours. Come and go as you please. In the end, janet picked anew remote that looked nothing like the old one, because novelty was hard to come by. She headed toward the cash registers, then paused and turned back to face the girl. Maybe it's true that the customer is always right, janet said, but out there, she gestured toward the automatic doors where a young woman was struggling to push a cart with a faulty wheel. Out there, you get to be the customer. Janet always woke up between three and four a m. The predictability of this insulted her. Were her problems really so routine? Many of her friends had sleep troubles of their own, which they liked to discuss. I can relate, they said nanother. But janet didn't want to relate. When she thought of them in the night, all those old women tossing and turning, worrying, waiting, keeping watch, pretending there was something that needed watching. She had a simple, terrible thought, i hate my life. Eventually she'd fall back asleep, and when she woke up in the morning, the thought was absurd. Of course, she liked her life. She always had. The room was flooded with light. The blanket had fallen on to the floor. The sheets were tangled as if two people had slept in the bed. As a child, sasha had been a bad sleeper. Couldn't fall asleep, or couldn't stay asleep, called out janet, or slipped into bed beside her. Above all, she had needed to unburden her dreams. Every morning she had recited them, not as a dramatic performance, but as a kind of confession. When she was finished, she had always seemed relieved. It was the same with any secret, her own or some one else's. She couldn't bear to be its sole cust dian, which might have been another way of saying that she couldn't bear to be alone.