Excerpt from Sleeping Alone by Ru Freeman, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Indeed, everything Rene had done thus far had been either a statement of past regret or a mysterious wager made in the name of a better future. One in which she, through dint of desire and purchase, if not nature, would acquire the ability to breathe, project, and gain flexibility in her voice to rival that which had unfairly come to life along with her husband at his birth, through no effort of his. Yet musical comedy, folk, and Italian art song classes, endless stints as the inglorious second soprano at various community events, and even the expensive theory teacher who had introduced her to the concept of oratorio and cajoled her into joining the Presbyterian church choir had failed to achieve anything more than frustration. One spring, when Sylvia was just five and Dickens seven, Rene had spent a whole month dragging them to Verdi Square every morning at 6:00 to gaze for a full fifteen minutes, timed by her gold wristwatch, at the statue of Giuseppe Verdi and each of the other four characters whom Sylvia grew to know only in later years as Falstaff, Leonora, Aida, and Otello but at the time had assumed, since she and Dickens were forced to attend this ritual, were Verdi's adult children. It had been during a long period when her parents were not speaking to each other and Sylvia had feared, additionally, that her mother was praying that her husband and children would be turned into stone.

In the scheme of things, therefore, Sylvia felt that being asked to sleep for a month on the floor of the living room between the orange fold-out couch that their parents made up each night and the reflective Steinway grand that was her mother's tool of trade, while her father made a life-sized magic box out of their room was entirely within reason. She entertained herself by imagining that they were on a stage, a feeling enhanced by the deep purple drapes that her mother had hung from ceiling to floor; drapes that had never been drawn but simply stood, like rippled pillars on either side of the orange couch. The drapes, hanging thus in Apt. 19G on 909 West Seventy-Ninth Street, which address, Sylvia felt, had a likable cadence to it, convinced her that it was not beyond the realm of possibility that she might wake from a dream to find herself in midperformance in a theater made luminous by adoring fans. The vision helped her fall asleep.

Excerpt from "The Wake," from Sleeping Alone. Copyright © 2022 by Ru Freeman. Used with the permission of Graywolf Press, Minneapolis, Minnesota.