Red Plaid Shirt

by Diane Schoemperlen

  To see a refrigerator in your dreams warns that your selfishness will injure someone trying to gain an honest livelihood. To place food in one brings the dreamer into disfavour.

  22

  I thought I was coming down with something, so I lay on the couch all afternoon, aching and feverish.

  I dreamed that my friend Bonnie was running a home for retarded deformed children.

  I dreamed that I went to see a lady who had advertised for someone to walk her two white sheepdogs.

  I dreamed that you went to Texas and shaved off your beard for the first time in fourteen years.

  I dreamed that my mother was finally teaching me how to iron a shirt properly.

  Just before I woke up, I dreamed about Janet, who is married to your friend Roger now. She was always wearing blue jeans, bow-legged, flat-chested, a real tomboy, always playing in mixed softball tournaments. They had such a good relationship that she could stay out all night drinking with the girls and Roger didn’t mind. In the dream I am at the ballpark with hundreds of other fans waiting for the game to start. I am alone and searching for someone to sit with. Janet is the only person I know. As I make my way toward her, she says to someone else, “I’ve gotta go to my feminist class. Bye now.” I am carrying my new puppy in my arms and suddenly baseballs are being thrown at us. I am running away, shoulders hunched to protect the puppy, who has turned into a rabbit. The baseballs bounce off my back like ping-pong balls.

  23

  I have been, among other things, giving Ben his bath before bed, watching a made-for-TV movie about a compulsive gambler (female), pushing Ben’s stroller up a steep street in the heat and feeling profoundly sorry for myself, when a certain sneaky word has come to me without warning: Chimera.

  It is one of those words which, for years, I’ve had to look up every time I come across it because I keep thinking it has something to do with water or light, shimmering.

  chimera n. 1. (Gk Myth.) A fire-breathing monster with the head of a lion, the body of a goat, and the tail of a serpent. 2. An impossible or foolish fancy. (Gk khimaira, chimera, “she-goat”).

  The image which invariably follows is of a gorilla straddling a silver airplane wing, beating its hairy chest and roaring in at the innocent bug-eyed passengers. The airplane is flying low at night through fraying cloud cover and the eyes of this gorilla are red.

  This doesn’t shake me up nearly as much as it used to and I am able now to wonder maturely how this gorilla got into my head in the first place. Was it a movie or a dream? Who can I ask?

  To dream of a gorilla portends a painful misunderstanding, unless the animal was very docile or definitely friendly, in which case the dream forecasts an unusual new friend.

  This is like thinking of that November night in the Hazelwood Hotel, you and I drinking draft beer because we were broke, and some guy came in and said there was a dog frozen dead out front, said it was Bonnie’s dog, Blitz. The entire bar emptied and outside we found that someone had let Blitz off her chain and put in her place a dead Doberman, frozen, its throat slit. So then we all got talking about that crazy guy in town for a month or two last summer, the one who always carried an empty pizza box under his arm and who chased his Doberman down Main Street with an axe that one time when the dog wouldn’t mind.

  So then it was last call and you and me and our friend Mike bought a case of off-sales and went over to his place for a sauna. I think of the three of us running naked in the backyard, rolling around in the snow like puppies, having heard that’s how they do it in Finland. And in my drunkenness, Mike with his bulging eyes and acne-ravaged skin was starting to look pretty good to me. And I was ranting on about Remembrance Day, which has just passed, and how I was so proud of my father for what he had done in the war, fairly weeping with the intensity of my unexamined admiration, and Mike said, “I don’t believe in war,” and tried to talk me out of it, but I said, “I don’t either but still …” and would not be swayed. So then Mike went and called his mother long-distance in Ontario at three in the morning and told her how much he loved her.

  You said, “It’s time to go home, I’m seeing triple and I might call my mother too, she’s been dead for years,” and when you tried to stand up, you knocked over the lamp, spilling kerosene all over our clothes, and I was screaming, “How stupid can one person be!”

  The next morning we soaked our clothes for a while in the bathtub, then gave up and threw them away.

  I don’t think this was a dream but it should have been. That time I called you to check, you said you didn’t remember any of it. Sometimes you’re no help at all.

  What I really want to know is: how did we get home without our clothes on?

  24

  I got my hair cut. That night I dreamed of going back to the beauty parlour, wanting to show the nice lady how good the new style looks. My mother is with me. This lady has light red hair, long red fingernails, and freckles all over her hands, what my mother called “age spots.” She is talking on the phone and smoking when we go into the shop. All the chairs and dryers have been removed—all that remains is the reception desk and this French Provincial telephone.

  The hairdresser recognizes me immediately, puts her hand over the mouthpiece, and asks, “Did you ever figure out how John died?”

  What on earth is she talking about? Then I remember that while she cut my hair we talked about “Another World,” her favourite soap opera.

  I say, excitedly, “No, no, I didn’t, but here’s my mother.” She is standing near the glass door in a red pantsuit. “She’s been watching “Another World” since before I was born, she’ll know.” I turn to my mother and ask her how John died. She’s looking right at me but can’t hear me. I am yelling but still she can’t hear me.

  When my mother was here for Christmas three weeks before she died, I was always angry because she couldn’t hear the doorbell or the telephone and the TV was turned up too loud. She might get a hearing aid, she said, someday.

  When my mother went into the hospital the first time, she got my father to tape “Another World” on the vcr every day so she could catch up on the action when she got home. This last time, when the doctors were still trying to figure out how to tell her she was dying, she told my father not to bother. He told me this when he came to visit Ben and me, he told me this was how he knew that she knew. “Remember how mad she used to get when they put the ball game on instead of her show?” he asked.

  Remember how when the U.S. bombed Libya and I called home to say I was watching the news all day and I was scared and she said, “Well, if you don’t like it, change the channel.” And the next morning I went down to the A&P and bought a case each of baby formula and cat food, praying, Please God, let Ben live to be old.

  If you were here with me now, would I tell you all this in the morning over breakfast, fresh-ground coffee and brown toast, soft-boiled eggs?

  You were always trying to figure out how to get the eggs just right at the high altitude of Hazelwood. “It’s perfect, it’s perfect!” you’d say before you tasted it and then you’d say, sadly, “No, no, thirty seconds more, just thirty seconds more, and it would have been perfect.”

  Until finally one winter morning you were satisfied, so I got out the Polaroid and snapped a shot of it: The Perfect Six-Minute Egg. We kept this picture on our bulletin board for years. I study it now: egg in the egg cup, a half-eaten piece of toast on the Blue River plate on the wicker placemat on the blue tabletop, a coffee mug with a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream beside it, also dental floss, dirty ashtray, and a pink pepper shaker which is one my mother gave me when I first left home, called carnival glass, which used to come in boxes of detergent.

  25

  The dreams I hate the most are those in which every person, place, and thing keeps changing into some other person, place, or thing and then back again. Even the ground seems to shift and bubble beneath my dreamy feet and occasionally it disappears altogether.26

  You become my father watchin
g the ball game and drinking frosty beer, he becomes my mother melting, she becomes Ben eating ice cream with his fingers.

  27

  The coffee cup in my left hand becomes a piano and the cigarette in my right a spatula.

  28

  The front step of my father’s house becomes a conveyor belt and then the house itself a restaurant.

  29

  Ben becomes a kitten even as I hold him in my arms which are turning into saxophones.

  30

  Waking, I open my eyes and cannot imagine for a minute where in the world you or I might be.

  31

  I used to dream that Ben was crying in the night. I would wake up, get out of bed, go to the kitchen, take the bottle out of the fridge, heat it to exactly the right temperature by instinct, and when I got to his room, there he was fast sleep. He’d never moved, never cried, never made a single sound.

  32

  Sometimes now I am pregnant in my dreams, but the pregnancy is never what the dream is about, is merely the condition I happen to be in as I board buses, go to parties, make pizza, or fly.

  33

  When Ben was three weeks old and I could almost sit down normally again, I had an erotic dream about Dr. Long, the one who delivered him, the handsome one who interrupted his Sunday afternoon golf game three times to come to me in the delivery room and listen to me hollering, “Do something, do something, can’t you do something? What kind of doctor are you anyway? I don’t want to do this anymore, I want to go home now.” The one who said, “Wow, look at that, the blood squirted right across the room!” The one who handed Ben to me softly and said, “He’s perfect like a flower,” even though when the nurse said, “Look, look, it’s a boy!” I wailed, “I don’t want to look!” because after eleven hours on that table and everything going wrong—monitors, oxygen, Demerol, forceps—I thought he was going to have a big purple birthmark all over his face.

  In the dream, Dr. Long was caressing me in his surgical greens, spreading me open gently on that table and burying his face in my milk-filled breasts. I awoke embarrassed and disgusted with myself.

  Sometime later, in a confessional fit, I told this dream to Bonnie, who is my best friend and so I can tell her anything, disgusting or not, and she will still like me. Dr. Long had delivered her baby too. And she laughed and said, yes, yes, she’d dreamed of making love to him too. We snickered and compared details.

  Sometime later still, here in this city, I was having lunch and white wine spritzers with two other women I hardly knew. I was making fun of my former self by telling them this dream and they marvelled and said, yes, yes, they’d had it too about their obstetricians and never told a single soul till now. One of these women had had four children, grown now, all delivered by the same fat, fatherly man who had also taken out her tonsils when she was six. She had dreamed of making love to him in the laundry room. We were so relieved, the three of us, to find ourselves feeling normal for a change that we laughed and laughed, hugged each other round the table, and sat there drinking all afternoon.

  34

  I have not slept with a man in over ten months. Every night for a week I dream of sex. I have perfunctory sex with everyone but you, including Roger who married Janet, Mike who had the sauna, David Coleman who was in my Grade Ten Health class, and the man in front of me in the checkout line at the A&P on Wednesday, buying Kraft Dinner, Oreo ice cream, and a comb. I have elaborate and extended dream sex with the man next door who borrows my frying pan and lifts weights in his front yard in his small red shorts. When I see him in the bank the next day, I blush furiously and fidget. But he does not seem to recognize me from either the street or the dream.

  35

  There are whole days when nothing goes through my mind but you. Then I lie down and dream all night of shopping with my mother, buying a bag of potatoes and a pair of blue high heels. What does this say about me? I wonder, I worry. Am I missing something serious in my psychological makeup? Am I missing the point? What’s wrong with me anyway?

  36

  The night you left I dreamed about washing the kitchen floor.

  In a Dark Season (1988)

  You know what it’s like: how when you are seeing a certain kind of man, the kind who is reliable, patient, and sensitive, the kind who is willing to do absolutely anything for you, the kind who is Nice and Boring, how you feel compelled to keep asking him over for lunch, over for dinner on Sunday, over to have coffee, a drink, a game of Scrabble, over to hook up your new stereo, over to help you wallpaper your three-year-old son’s bedroom, how you have to keep driving by the bookstore where he works just to check up, not on him, but on your feelings for him: do you love him, do you think you will love him eventually, do you even like him? You do not trust your feelings for him to stick. Why does he love you so much? You knew damn well when you met him—you knew within the first ten minutes — that he would never hurt you. And now you have to keep reminding or convincing yourself that you will never hurt him either. The sheer weight of his goodness makes you want to either slap him or weep.

  Sitting at your kitchen table, Nice-and-Boring assures you that the flowers he keeps sending come with no strings attached. You already know this. So why is it so hard to look at them there on the table beside your coffee cups, the newspaper, the books you are reading, your son’s red and white Texaco truck, and Winnie the Pooh? Why is it so hard to see them simply for what they are: pretty, fine-scented, pink? Why is it so hard to see them without something like slug trails streaming down off the blossoms and circling your wrists like thin bracelets? Why did you cringe when you saw that poor delivery man bearing them so proudly up the driveway in a Valentine’s Day snowstorm, up to his knees? You admire them extensively now in front of Nice-and-Boring who inquires intelligently about the books you are reading. You get up and make more coffee.

  After he leaves, you get out your camera and take a picture of the bouquet, the cute card propped up in front. You stick it in your photo album beside all those shots of your son ripping open his presents Christmas morning, of your son with a bowl of turkey and mashed potatoes on his head, of your son sleeping sweetly.

  Fifty times a day you are thinking: I will just pick up that phone, I will just call him, I will just pick up that phone and call him and I will say yes. You are creeping toward surrender.

  But then you have a tuna sandwich and some salad for lunch, you wash up the dishes, do three loads of laundry, clean out the kitchen cupboards, go and get your son from daycare, make tacos for supper, read him a story about a princess or a duck, and then you make the mistake of thinking about the other one, the Brooding one who has come back to you in a dark season. You have not seen hide nor hair of Dark-and-Brooding in six months. You have been seeing Nice-and-Boring for three. You thought you had it all figured out. You thought you were over Dark-and-Brooding but now here he is again, sitting down at your kitchen table, saying, I’ve missed you, I’ve changed, you know you can trust me.

  What you do know, within these first ten minutes, is that you are willing to do absolutely anything for him. You also know that you are going to give him another chance and he is going to hurt you again. He doesn’t even ask who the nice flowers are from. It is quite possible that he doesn’t even see them. You have put the cute card face down under the vase. You get up to make more coffee.

  You are sitting at the kitchen table with your best friend. Your son is in bed, calling out goodnights for half an hour and then he sleeps. You and Best Friend are intelligent, well-educated women. You share a passionate interest in books, writing, language, all things literary. But all you ever talk about is men. The same men, Best Friend points out. She has been having similar problems.

  You tell her how when Nice-and-Boring comes over, he always sits to your left at the table. Dark-and-Brooding always sits to your right. You try to find meaning in the seating arrangement. In a dark season, everything seems significant. You tell her how one night Nice-and-Boring inadvertently sits to your right
because there is a Fisher-Price Piano on the other chair and how you feel a flicker of new possibilities. But you are still watching out the window behind him, trying to recognize the tail lights of the cars which pass down your dark street.

  Best Friend always sits directly across from you at the table. She fondles your new books and plays with your son’s Texaco truck, making engine noises in her throat. She babysits for free when you go to a poetry reading with Nice-and-Boring, also when Dark-and-Brooding takes you to see Return of the Living Dead. You entertain Best Friend with your black fantasy of both men showing up in your kitchen at the same time. Nice-and-Boring knows about Dark-and-Brooding but Dark-and-Brooding doesn’t know about Nice-and-Boring. You want to hurt them both or you want them to hurt each other. You ask Best Friend if you are a vicious person. She says, No.

  You get up to make more coffee. You realize you are spending a fortune on coffee beans these days. You try to imagine what it would be like to meet someone new.

  Dark-and-Brooding bears a distinct resemblance to your son’s father, who is someone you hope never to see again in your entire life. When you tell Dark-and-Brooding all about it, he says, He sounds just like me.

  You can see what he means. You know you are not as concerned about this as you should be.

  Your son adores Nice-and-Boring and has taken to calling him Daddy. When Dark-and-Brooding comes over, all your charming son will do is sit on your lap and whine. You put him to bed early.

  You (and Best Friend, bless her) can see things in Dark-and-Brooding which other people, including your son, cannot see. You can see the things in him that he’s been hoping his whole life someone would see. These are also the things he has spent his whole life trying to keep anyone from seeing. You keep thinking fondly of that one half-hour that one Saturday afternoon when he was exactly the way you knew he could be, exactly the way you wanted him to be: he was talking about something you said to him six months ago, how he knew you were right, how he knew he had lost you, how much it hurt. This is the first you have heard of his pain. Your heart goes out to him. He is saying how you are the only person he can really talk to, you are the only one who really understands. You are wishing you could remember what it was you said to him six months ago, just in case you have to say it again.