Sundown, Yellow Moon

by Larry Watson

  But however false my memory tries to play some facts, it situates precisely in time and place—Christmas Day 1964, my bedroom—what Marie said after she rose from my bed and unself-consciously dressed in front of me. The little tale she told had probably been thrust to the forefront of her consciousness by the nearness of the Stoddard home, just across the street and down the block. Had she opened the curtains and looked out, she could have seen it from my window.

  “Did you know,” she asked me, “that Gene didn’t call your father immediately after discovering his father’s body?”

  “Yeah. He tried to phone Marcia first. And then when he couldn’t reach her—”

  Clasping her brassiere, Marie shook her head. “There was a little time between those calls. Did you know that? What he did before he called your dad?”

  “I don’t believe I do.”

  She adjusted her breasts within the brassiere’s cups. “First, Gene got two pans from the cupboard, one he filled with hot water and laundry detergent and the other with hot water and Pine-Sol.”

  When Marie pulled her sweater over her head, static electricity again gave her hair a will of its own, and the strands stuck out in a way that reminded me of the graduation night party when she tried to coax Gene down from the roof of his car, and the bonfire backlit her and gave her hair that same look of coppery filament. Once again she lifted her skirt, this time to pull on her panties and shimmy her girdle into place. “Mr. Stoddard had . . . When he died he . . . wet and soiled himself, and Gene wanted to clean up his father and the garage before anyone else came on the scene.”

  She adjusted her nylons, smoothed down her skirt, and stepped into her shoes. “He did a decent job on the garage floor, and the tires his father had stood on Gene just threw into the backyard. He couldn’t clean his father’s trousers, though, and for a minute Gene considered taking them off and finding a clean pair of pants. But in the end he just couldn’t make himself do it. He couldn’t undress his dad.”

  Marie put on her coat, gold wool and double-breasted, and buttoned it to her throat. The heat our bodies had made had cooled. She pulled her collar as high as it would go. I reached for the T-shirt she had pulled off me. Christmas services were over. Marie had her own family dinner to attend.

  “You’re right,” I said. “Gene never told me that story.”

  “Why would he?” she asked on her way out the door. “He wasn’t trying to seduce you.”

  In addition to the Hemingway collection, Marie also gave me a Rooster tie and a copy of The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, the album with the cover of Dylan and Suze Rotolo arm-in-arm in the middle of a slushy New York street. I have that album still, like the Hemingway, although I no longer own a turntable to play the record on. I hadn’t asked for the album, the book, or the tie, but Marie was well enough attuned to my tastes and desires that it would have been reasonable for me to expect any of those gifts.

  And while I didn’t expect the little anecdote she told about Gene, in a way it too was a gift. Here, she might have said, I know this is something you’ll like. And in giving it to me perhaps she was trying to get rid of it—Here, I don’t want this and I know you do. I present it to you, confident that you’ll never lose it and that one day you’ll find a use for it.

  Yes. How well she knew me and my desires. And perhaps since she could not face a life with a man who would never stop hungering for exactly what she wished to divest herself of, she had to choose a life apart from his. I’ve often wondered—did Marie Ryan ever tell the man she eventually married anything about Raymond and Alma Stoddard? About their son, Gene? About both the boys who once lived on Keogh Street? It would not surprise me to learn that she didn’t. Nor would I blame her.

  Since Marie W. remembered the past with such clarity, she wondered why its appearance in her dreams was so muddled and confused. Even by the surrealistic standard of dreams, hers seemed to operate on the far edge of unreason, especially in matters of chronology.

  For example, no matter how many decades had passed since she’d lived under her parents’ roof, her dreams never played themselves out in the home she currently lived in—nor in any house or apartment she had once called home—but in the Bismarck, North Dakota, dwelling she grew up in. No matter how old her four sons were, they were almost always infants or, at most, grade-schoolers in her dreams. Her parents, of whom she never dreamed when they were alive, once deceased appeared to her regularly. They were alive and in the fullness of health in those dreams, yet they commented often on the inconveniences of being dead.

  Marie’s own age fluctuated in her dreams but within a narrow range. She was always an adult, no matter the age of her parents or children, but she couldn’t find any means, not her appearance, not external events, that enabled her to locate her age precisely.

  But the greatest confusion came from three males, a boyfriend from high school, a boyfriend who followed the first and with whom she had a relationship that began in high school and went into her college years, and her husband. These three were as different as could be. The first was a brash, opportunistic, unpredictable boy. The second was sensitive but shy, brooding and often remote. And her husband was a confident, ebullient, unshakably cheerful man. Yet these three freely changed identities in her dreams. She might be driving somewhere with her husband and their children only to find, upon arrival, that it was her first boyfriend who lifted her son out of the backseat, and her second boyfriend who held open the door to the house they were visiting. The oddity wasn’t, however, that all three males were present. There was only one man but with an identity that wasn’t fixed. One would suddenly become another, and with no discernible transition, and no matter how strange these shifts were to her waking mind, within the dream they were unremarkable.

  Of course the reason for this shape-shifting, this identity swapping, was within Marie, yet she had no idea what curl or twist in her brain or psyche might be causing it. Any explanation she came up with seemed pedestrian and inadequate. Yes, these were three males to whom she had professed love. Yes, she’d had sexual relations (but not intercourse) with all three. Nothing in those facts, however, explained the phenomenon. She didn’t pine after former boyfriends or even possess much curiosity about them. She didn’t feel she had made a mistake in severing her relationships with them. She loved her husband and lived a contented life with him. She had a forceful, well-defined personality—others said it of her, and she felt its truth as well—and she had never sublimated her own identity to any male, not to her father, her husband, her sons, or to an old boyfriend. In the end, no amount of self-analysis brought her an answer or decreased the frequency of the dreams.

  Then Marie received notice of her high school’s twentieth reunion, to be held in Bismarck in mid-August. Both those boyfriends of her youth graduated in the same class as Marie, so though it was by no means a certainty, it was possible that if Marie and her husband attended the reunion, the three men who exchanged identities within her dreams might be in the same room at the same time. She’d had no interest in attending her ten-year reunion, but now it seemed to her that this social ritual had the potential of correcting the confusion of her dream life.

  As soon as her husband came home from the Minneapolis clinic where he had his pediatric practice, she presented the letter of invitation to him. “What do you think?” Marie asked.

  “Feel like driving to Bismarck in August?”

  He laughed, but something in her demeanor must have told him she was serious. “Why not? Will I get to meet your old boyfriends?”

  Marie had told him nothing of her dreams, and though his question, both eerie and prescient, jolted her, she tried not to show it. Instead, she attempted to match his jaunty tone. “Get to? I’ll insist on it.”

  He rubbed his hands together in gleeful imitation of a scheming silent movie villain. “At last—I’ll find out if you always made that little mewing sound when the back of your neck is kissed, or if that’s only for my benefit.”

&n
bsp; She took the invitation from his hand. “That’s just for you, baby. Just for you.”

  In truth, Marie came into the marriage with little in the way of sexual history, especially compared to her husband’s, but what she had, or hadn’t, done before they met was of no consequence to him. Had Marie told him about her dreams, she was sure he would find them only amusing. He was not a jealous man, nor was he given to angst or introspection, and until the dreams began, Marie had always felt her spirit was a match for his.

  The first of the reunion weekend’s events was a mixer at the Sheraton hotel. Marie and her husband were staying at a Holiday Inn on the city’s opposite end, and once they settled their sons in their adjoining room and reminded them they were limited to a single Spectravision movie, the couple set out for the evening.

  In the parking lot, Marie’s husband tossed her the car keys. “You drive,” he said. “It’s your town.” And then he launched into a falsetto rendition of the J. D. Souther song. “It used to be his town, it used to be her town. . . .”

  Her town . . . yes. A town whose streets and avenues were once as familiar to Marie as the halls and rooms of her own home, yet that night she had trouble finding the hotel. Over the years, the city’s hotels had changed hands; what was once a Sheraton was now a Radisson, and the new Sheraton was on a street that had been changed to a one-way. Eventually, Marie had to park two blocks away because she couldn’t figure out how to negotiate her way to the hotel’s block.

  As they walked toward the Sheraton, a solitary man kept pace with them on the opposite side of the street. He was wearing a white shirt, dark slacks, and cowboy boots, and though Marie didn’t recognize him, she assumed he was on his way to the reunion too. Why couldn’t he be one of her former boyfriends? Twenty years was more than enough time for bodies to shrink and expand, for hair to grow out or fall out, for features to flesh out or seam in ways that would make people look nothing like their yearbook portraits. Why did Marie believe she would know either of those boyfriends on sight? Did she think that the intimacies of love were a kind of imprinting, rendering her able to identify them by instinct? Or was she counting on them to recognize her and then announce themselves? For that matter, what process had her mind followed to make those boys appear as men in her dreams? Did her unconscious have a talent, Marie wondered, like a police sketch artist, to produce accurately aged portraits of someone she knew two decades before?

  Once again, her husband seemed to know her thoughts. “Now, those old boyfriends,” he said, “any chance there might be some residual bad feelings? Should I be ready to defend your honor or fight for the right to take you home?” He bobbed and feinted and threw phantom jabs into the night air.

  Marie laughed in spite of herself. If nothing else, this little display of his demonstrated how different he was—with his buoyant spirit and his always-ready willingness to take himself and everyone else lightly—from her previous too-serious boyfriends, and she wondered again how it was possible that they could be confused or conflated, even in a dream. She felt a sudden rush of love for this man she’d married, and she stepped inside his boxer’s stance, raised up on her tiptoes, and kissed him on the long, clean line of his freshly shaven jaw.

  He dropped his hands, running them languorously down her back. When he reached her buttocks, he squeezed and pulled her tightly to him. “Or should I”—he assumed his comic British accent—“find other ways to demonstrate my rights of conjugal primacy?”

  “You’re doing a pretty good job of that right now.”

  He squeezed harder, and she pivoted away from his embrace. “Before we go in there,” she said, “maybe we should set up signals. You know, if we need to be rescued from someone boring, or if the whole evening is just too excruciating.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “How about an erection? If you see that I’ve got a hard-on, you’ll know that means we’ve got to get back to the hotel right away.”

  “I was thinking more along the lines of a tug on the earlobe.”

  “A page from the Carol Burnett playbook. Okay. I like mine better, but the earlobe tug will work, too.” He pushed open the door of the hotel. “Let us go among them.”

  The mixer was being held in a large banquet room, and Marie hesitated before its open doors. The room was dark but for candles on tables, and the flickering light gave everyone inside a spectral presence as they moved in and out of the wavering shadows. Marie had no more than glanced inside when her heart instantly misgave her, and she was ready to give up on the entire enterprise. But what could she say? Minneapolis was 450 miles away, their night’s accommodation had already been paid for, and her husband was standing expectantly by her side.

  A plump scowling woman who must have been from Marie’s class but whom Marie did not recognize sat at a long table just outside the doors. With obvious consternation, she said, “They haven’t provided me with any of the registration materials, so just write your name on one of these labels and stick it somewhere on yourself.”

  Marie’s husband, for whom any unsmiling countenance was a challenge, said, “Any place visible, you mean.”

  She looked at him blankly.

  “Because I could stick it on my chest,” he said. “Under my shirt.” He reached inside the gap between his buttons and tapped his fingers in imitation of a beating heart. He bestowed upon her the irresistible smile that he swore he never practiced.

  Grudgingly returning his smile, she said, “Someplace visible.”

  He pretended to slap the label onto his forehead, and the plump woman allowed her grin its full release. She asked him the question she never asked Marie. “Do I know you?”

  He pointed to his wife. “She’s a senior. I already graduated.”

  As they walked away from the registration table with their names pasted onto their clothes over their hearts, Marie asked, “Must you charm everyone?”

  The question’s petulance surprised Marie—it had leaped from her before she could stop it—but her husband seemed notto take offense. “I must! I will not cease from my labors until every man, woman, and child is charmed!”

  At the bar, Marie ordered a white wine and her husband asked for a light beer, and while they stood with the sweating containers in their hands, two couples approached them. Marie wasn’t sure how it happened, but almost immediately after the introductions were made an invisible partition descended on the group. The men drifted off, talking, as near as Marie could tell, about the brown suits Ronald Reagan wore, and Marie was left in the company of two women she only vaguely remembered from high school but who now pretended as though they had all been closer than they really were.

  Neither of the women had aged well. Rhonda Veach, now Rhonda Schneeberg, had been a raucous, overweight tag-along in high school, and while she was still heavy, she apparently believed her pounds now worked to her advantage. She had squeezed herself into a tight, low-cut dress that revealed an embarrassing abundance of cleavage. Janice Schmidt, née Kalsow, with whom Marie had been closer in elementary school than in later years, was also wearing a low-cut dress, but she was so thin and darkly tanned that the skin of her neck and chest looked, even in the poor light, like paper that had been crumpled and then smoothed out.

  While they were catching up—an activity that largely consisted of an enumeration of children’s names and ages—another woman joined them. Peggy Pilquist and Marie had been good friends, and their embrace was spontaneous and genuine. Peggy looked disturbingly similar to the way she’d looked in high school—pretty in a wide-eyed, well-scrubbed way. Her blond hair was still carefully waved around her face just as it was in her graduation portrait.

  The group’s talk soon became a recitation of notorious high school incidents—the cow smuggled into the gymnasium, the bowling ball rolled down the stairs, the principal’s car pelted with eggs—that challenged no one’s memory. When they began to speculate about certain individuals—the boy arrested for stealing tires, the girl pregnant at prom, the algebra teacher and t
he phys ed instructor found out in an affair—Marie felt herself tested. But her memories seemed to coincide with everyone else’s. The conversation gave her no reason to believe that the confused identities in her dreams had anything to do with a general disorientation about the past. Perhaps if Marie could separate Peggy from the others, Marie could ask her if she ever dreamed about old boyfriends or if the present and the past ever exchanged themselves in dreams.

  And just at that moment an old boyfriend stealthily approached. For a good portion of high school Janice Schmidt had dated Randy Oslund, and that was exactly who now loomed behind her. Randy’s index finger in front of his wide grin warned Marie and Peggy not to give away his presence.

  Randy was over six feet tall, and even thinner than he’d been in high school. He had close-set eyes and fine blond hair that looked windblown even indoors, and when he raised his arms over Janice Schmidt, he looked like a predatory bird. His white shirt and dark trousers gave him away as the man Marie had seen earlier walking toward the hotel.

  Janice must have sensed he was there, because she whirled about. When she saw who it was, she shrieked, and instantly they fell into each other’s arms.

  No, not a bird. A vampire, for Randy Oslund pronounced, in his Transylvanian accent, “I haff come for you, my darling.”

  Their embrace went on so long that Marie imagined they were giving their bodies a chance to remember the sensations of the past. Even when they broke their clinch, they still kept their arms around each other.