Other People's Noise

II.

Me: walking in the stuff tonight with a friend a block or so from where my car is parked to the local pub. I’d brushed the car halfway clear, regretting a little the transparent maw of windshield I’d opened when she found me, engine running, ice running, and said let’s go get a drink. My shoes are heeled, thin. The cuffs of my pants are wet and my feet are soaked, but the snow is beautiful. We walk arm in arm and step together to avoid slipping. I am near giddy; I am not yet going home, and I am with her. Our shoes sink through the slush and I talk to her, tell her I haven't been able to sleep for the last month. I am too wakeful, too intent on deciphering the sounds that wake me. A crash, then nothing for an hour while I walk around and check the windows and watch the ceiling when it creaks. In the driveway light, his waxed blue Caddy leaks its clean oil and stains the concrete path by the backdoor, rainbow, rainbow. Then a din in my living room, several voices. Shouting, escalating, scooting furniture, 2:32 a.m. on my bedroom clock set to go off at five, and I am in a state of alarm. A state of predicting all possible outcomes and of anticipating the worst. Waking is not the difference between sleep and consciousness, but is like hearing the spring meltdown running through the gutters and knowing it will soon be time for another time. It springs in violence. It weathers your winter coat which you carry in one arm one surprising warm afternoon—the sky clears, yawns, breaks into color—but it is not done wintering yet. Someone falls, that much is clear, and I call the police. How do you sleep these days, I ask my friend. She says the baby wakes her at eight in the morning after she’s been up all night, working. I sleep when he sleeps, she says. If I can.