Whenever a thunderstorm came to our little patch of earth, my mother gathered up her little ones. We would run upstairs to the sleeping porch at the back of the second floor to watch the sky. Every time we saw lightning tear across the sky, she’d say, Okay, start counting. Here it comes! Several seconds later, the thunder would clap, and so would we — Kevin, Brian and me, cheering the jagged white streak as it lit the sky. Hurray, Mom yelled, laughing in the face of the storm.
Little did I know that such bravado was born of terrors she withstood from a young age — some of them in broad daylight but mostly in the darkness. My mother carried a gene for nightmares and sleepwalking that she passed down to three of her seven children. As a small child, she got out of bed in the dark and roamed the house until she found a safe spot, usually in the back of a closet. Gram knew to search the closets if little Midge was not in bed in the morning. She would find her curled up with her pillow and blanket asleep behind a rack of dresses or a curtain of winter coats.
My nocturnal peregrinations began when I was ten. I got up suddenly from my bed and walked to the kitchen. I don’t remember what was going through my mind, but I know I was frightened. I got three eggs from the refrigerator and put them on the kitchen table. Then I walked over to the wall phone by the back door. I dialed our next door neighbors, Reverend and Mrs. McKenzie. Seized by a brief moment of doubt, I hung up the phone after two rings. Thank God there was no caller ID back then.
I took the three eggs back to my bedroom and set them on my dresser. One of them rolled off and smashed on the floor. Still asleep, I walked into my parents’ room and woke my mother. I just broke an egg on my floor, Mom. That’s okay, Katie, just go back to sleep. You just had a bad dream. No, Mom, really. There’s a broken egg on the floor. Okay, she said, night, night, turning her back to me. I gave up and went back to bed.
My brother Joe was the first of my mother’s children to present the sleepwalking gene. I remember him talking in his sleep and running around the third floor. Brian also had a tendency to jump out of bed and yell incomprehensible strings of words. Kevin remembers waking to Brian bursting into his room in a state of great agitation. It’s under the bed! he yelled. It’s under the bed! Kevin said, Brian will tell you I punched him when he wouldn’t wake up, but it’s not true. With no prodding from me, Brian later told me the same story, ending with And then he cold-cocked me. When I told Brian that Kevin gave me a different ending for that story, Brian began a series of deep belly laughs. It was impossible not to laugh with him. I don’t know. He seems to remember that punch. But he thought there was something under the bed, too.
Speaking of punches, my father once appeared at the breakfast table with a remarkable shiner. The night before my mother had sat bolt upright in bed, mid-dream. Someone was trying to hurt her babies. When my father tried to calm her, she punched him in the eye. He seemed pretty amused to have been punched by his lovely, 110-pound wife and pleased to have chosen a life partner who would defend his children with such ferocity. I’m sure he smiled every time he told someone in the office how he got that black eye
Recently, John and I drove across the Shenandoah to visit Joe and Lane in Charlottesville. The night before we left, I sat up in bed at 1 a.m. and said to John, Shhhhh. There’s someone in the house. Long used to these conversations, he said, Uh, okay. I had distinctly heard a man say hello from another part of the house. I sat there, my heart racing, and pushed 911 on my phone. I’ll wait until I hear him again, I thought…just in case this is…a dream. A dream? Could I be dreaming? Should I lie back down and be murdered in my sleep? It might be easier than confronting the monster in the other room. Before long I was fast asleep.
When we got to Charlottesville, I asked Joe if he still had nightmares. Lane rolled her eyes. Last night he thought there was something at the end of the bed, she said. He woke me up to warn me. I told him he was dreaming and went back to sleep. Joe recalled waking up in the middle of the night with a very similar dream when he was a little boy. Snakes were under the covers by his feet. He yelled, and my mother came running.
It’s okay, Joe, she said. They’re gone now. She was way too savvy about these things to say the snakes weren’t there. They’re going to come back, Joe said. Mom went into the bathroom and got some bath towels. She wrapped them tightly around the end of his bed and said, There. They won’t be able to get in there now. That seemed to satisfy Joe.
In college I shared an apartment in Silver Spring with a girl who was getting her master’s in voice at the University of Maryland. She got up at 4 a.m. to work in a bakery before class. Invariably, the sound of the front door closing would start my brain whirring with some imagined threat. About the time my roommate had driven down the street, I’d be out the door and on the sidewalk with the door locked behind me. Fortunately, I had a neighbor who got up at that ungodly hour. Each time, she let me in and gave me tea and orange juice until the super woke up.
One summer when I was in college, everyone was back at Jocelyn Street: Joe from Louisiana, Maureen from Seattle. Brian, Kevin and I were there as well. With all the adults and their offspring, the house was full to overflowing. After a dinner of grilled hamburgers and Gram’s potato salad, we sat on the patio under the mimosa tree and talked into the night. When the mosquitoes got too bad, we retreated into the house and eventually went to bed.
Maureen and I slept on the sleeping porch. Joe and Lane were in one bedroom with a door to the sleeping porch, and Brian was in the other. At the time, this big, old house had no air conditioning. The windows and the doors to the porch were open to what little breeze a Washington summer might bring (we could only hope).
In the morning we got up, one by one, and made our way to the kitchen, drawn by the smell of bacon. Mom stood by the stove frying a henhouse worth of eggs. We were laughing and talking when Maureen appeared. She looked, as my mother would say, like something the cat dragged in. How did you sleep, Moe? Mom asked. Maureen moaned, First Joe yelled and jumped out of bed. Then, Brian stomped across his room, mumbling to himself. As soon as I fell back to sleep, Kate started talking about something that made no sense at all. I’m exhausted! The three of us looked at each other. Really? Do you remember that? Nope. Neither do I. I don’t remember that at all.
Life of Reillys 