THE WIVES, a recent Bookreporter.com Bets On selection, is a captivating memoir that tells the story of Simone Gorrindo’s experience of joining a community of army wives after leaving her New York City job. Simone has fond memories of her mother reading her bedtime stories each evening. In fact, she loved this part of the day so much that, at the age of six, she came up with an ingenious way of extending the time they spent together right before calling it a night. Simone’s daughter, who is now seven, has adopted this same strategy, and Simone wouldn’t have it any other way.
Every lifelong reader has a gateway, an experience --- often a childhood ritual --- that imprints on her a love of reading. Mine was my evening bedtime story with my mother. Each night, despite her exhaustion after a long day at the flower shop where she worked, she read to me, still smelling of roses and gardenias. I loved snuggling against her in my little twin bed and wished we could stay like that forever.
Around the time I was six, I devised a way to make this happen: I began to read to her instead. This was my clever trick, how I managed to hold her hostage until she fell asleep next to me. She fought sleep valiantly and was sometimes still awake by the end of the book. But if this happened, I’d insist on another. “My teacher says I need to practice reading aloud,” I’d tell her. How could she say no to that?
Mostly, the stories themselves haven’t stayed with me. What has stayed with me: the glow of the lamp next to us, her fresh-cut floral scent, the sense, as we read, that all in the world had found its rightful place. As long as I kept reading, my mother would be next to me, warding off the darkness of night, the forward march of time. And that sensation of rightness, of airtight security and warmth, would stay with me, too. Reading to my mother was my childhood superpower, the way I learned to freeze time.
In the years since, I have returned to that sensation through books I cradled on long bus rides, under my desk at school, and during nights of insomnia. I’ve always known that books are an escape for me, worlds that feel sometimes far more real than my everyday. But it wasn’t until I had a daughter of my own that I fully understood what I seek each time I crack open a book. I am looking not just for the story in its pages but for the origins of my own story --- for the comfort of my mother sleeping next to me, for the confirmation that I indeed froze time all those years ago.
And, it turns out, I did: Every evening that I put my daughter to bed, I return to those nights with my mother. Now seven, my daughter has taken over the mantle of reading aloud. I didn’t suggest this to her, but she seems to have inherited my rather limited bedtime-resisting repertoire. As she reads, I am as exhausted as my mother used to be. And more often than not, I fall asleep under the stars that glow on her ceiling, lulled by her little voice that is low and soft like mine, filled with the sense that everything is right in the world, if only for a moment.
