Praying for Sleep

ignore it but the image refused to disappear.
    Oh, what’s that on your head, Mama? What’re you wearing there?
    Mama . . .
    Take off that hat, Mama. I don’t like it one bit.
    Fifteen years ago Michael Hrubek had been a boy both very muscular and very fat, with waddling feet and a long trunk of a neck. One day, playing in the tall grass field behind an old willow tree, he heard: “Michael! Miiiichael!” His mother walked onto the back porch of the family’s trim suburban home in Westbury, Pennsylvania. “Michael, please come here.” She wore a broad-brimmed red hat, beneath which her beautiful hair danced like yellow fire in the wind. Even from the distance he could see the dots of her red nails like raw cigarette burns. Her eyes were dark, obscured by the brim of the hat and by the amazing little masks that she dabbed on her eyes from the tubes of mask carrier on her makeup table. She did this, he suspected, to hide from him.
    “Honey . . . Come here, I need you.” Slowly he stood and walked to her. “I just got home. I didn’t have time to stop. I want you to go by the grocery store. I need some things.”
    “Oh, no,” the boy said tragically.
    She knew he didn’t want to, his mother said. But Mr. and Mrs. Klevan or the Abernathys or the Potters would be here at any minute and she needed milk and coffee. Or something. She needed it.
    “No, I can’t.”
    Yes, yes, he could. He was her little soldier. He was brave, wasn’t he?
    He whined, “I don’t know about this. There are reasons why I can’t do it.”
    “And mind the change. People shortchange you.”
    “They won’t let me cross the street,” Michael retorted. “I don’t know where it is!”
    “Don’t worry, honey, I’ll give you the instructions,” she said soothingly. “I’ll write it down.”
    “I can’t.”
    “Do it for me. Please. Do it quickly.”
    “I don’t know!”
    “You’re twelve years old. You can do it.” Her composure was steadfast.
    “No, no, no . . .”
    “All you have to do”—her mouth curved into a smile—“is go by the store and get what I need. My brave little soldier boy can do that, can’t he?”
    But the Klevans or the Milfords or the Pilchers arrived the next minute and his mother didn’t get a chance to write down the directions for him. She sent him on his way. Michael, frightened to the point of nausea, a five-dollar bill clutched in a death grip, started out on a journey to the nearby store.
    An hour passed and his mother, stewing with mounting concern and anger, received a phone call from the market. Michael had wandered into the store ten minutes before and had caused an incident.
    “Your son,” the beleaguered manager said, “wants the store.”
    “He wants the store ?” she asked, bewildered.
    “He said you told him to buy the store. I’m near to calling the police. He touched one of our checkers. Her, you know, chest. She’s in a state.”
    “Oh, for the love of Christ.”
    She sped to the market.
    Michael, shaking with panic, stood in the checkout line. Confronted with the apparent impossibility of doing what he’d been told to do— Go buy the store —his conscious thought dissolved and he’d belligerently grabbed the checker’s fat arm and thrust the cash into her blouse pocket as she stood, hands at her side, sobbing.
    “Take it!” he screamed at her, over and over. “Take the money!”
    His mother collected him and when they returned home, she led him straight into the bathroom.
    “I’m scared.”
    “Are you, darling? My little soldier boy’s scared? Of what, I wonder.”
    “Where was I? I don’t remember nothing.”
    “ ‘Anything.’ ‘I don’t remember anything.’ Now get out of those filthy clothes.” They were stained with sawdust and dirt; Michael had belly-flopped to the floor, seeking cover, when his mother, eyes blazing beneath her stylish hat, charged through the pneumatic door of the supermarket. “Then I want you to come out and tell my guests you’re sorry for what you did. After that you’ll go to bed for the day.”
    “Go to bed?”
    “Bed,” she snapped.
    Okay, he said. Okay, sure.
    Was he being punished or comforted? He didn’t know. Michael pondered this for a few minutes then sat on the toilet, faced with a new dilemma. His mother had dumped his clothes down the laundry chute. Did she want him to apologize naked? He gazed about the room for something he might wear.
    Five minutes later Michael opened the door and stepped