Lungs Full of Noise

The White Wings of Moths

31 The White Wings of Moths Bea lies in her daughter’s bed, in the narrow rut of the mattress, where the small hips of a stomach-sleeping child wore grooves between the springs. It is an upper–bunk bed. As a child, her daughter liked being scrunched tight to the ceiling, boxed in by pillows, an old drapery-like comforter pinning her down. Bea is giving this method of sleep a try. Menopause has made sleep a difficult thing, a hidden room in a hidden house in a hidden town. She is in her sixth year of symptoms and has come upon a bad time. Her body burns and tingles. And there’s quaking inside her limbs. The bones in her spine have turned to ice. Her ovaries too. She feels them heavy and cold like stones nestled against her womb. She knows hormones would 3 2 T h e W h i t e W i n g s o f M o t h s make it all go away but she doesn’t dare. Her mother died from a stroke. Bea takes drugs to sleep. They make her hands heavy but awaken her ears. She has tried ear plugs, but the beats and burps of her body make more noise than clocks and cars and dogs. She has tried sleeping like her husband with a pillow between her legs. She has tried sleeping like her son in a perpetual roll that twists and tangles the sheets. She has tried sleeping as her mother did, hands folded over her chest. She tries to occupy sleep from a different body in every bed. Every night, she sweats through every bed in the house. The sheets have taken on a sepia tinge. All the beds in the house are empty. Her daughter is in Cambodia fixing cleft palate children. Her mother is in a coffin on a pale pillow deep deep underground. Her son is in Pittsburgh with a wife who knits Bea a pom-pom hat every year for Christmas and sends typed recipes for vegan soups. Bea uses the recipe cards to clean the crack between the cutting block and the stove. Since her husband transferred to his new job at the jail in Danamora, she hasn’t cooked more than grilled cheese and hard-boiled eggs. Sometimes when she can’t sleep, she sits in the breakfast nook with the window behind her open and blowing against her neck. She listens to radio jazz, soaks her feet in a basin of water, and peels hard-boiled eggs. She likes the way her fingernails slide under the shell and sink into the white of the flesh. Other times, when she’s given up on sleep, she walks the streets and collects caterpillars from the trees. At first, she collected them in an old Care Bear thermos. Her daughter did this in grade school, leaving the square sip straw up so they could breathe. A green Good Luck Care Bear is printed on the thermos, though two paws have worn off from the abrasion of thumbs. Now she takes the thermos along for water and drops the caterpillars into a bucket, the handle looped over her elbow like a basket of bread. She walks the streets between three and five in the morning. She wears shorts and a sports bra. The flab of fat hanging over her caesarian scar would horrify her children, but there is no one around. At first, Bea expected to come across other women with sleepless bodies. She imagined they would congregate in the cold night air and share stories, and this would soothe the electricity under her skin. But out in the night in the dark, she is completely alone. T h e W h i t e W i n g s o f M o t h s 33 She takes slow shuffling steps to keep the heat at a simmer. She hits her heels against the pavement trying to shake out the ants crawling between her toes. When she gets too hot, she presses her forehead to the cold metal pole of a stop sign. When the metal warms, she moves on. She goes to the places where caterpillars assemble. To the bark of the Grayson’s willow. And the leaves of Mrs. Chin’s pear tree. The rose bushes against the library fence. Also the nest in the Okolsky’s alder. There, the branches are so thick with bodies...