by Amy Benson
I have another picture that might help to explain. It’s a picture of me taken by the sparkling-eyed boy with my parents’ camera. I’ve always liked the picture, probably because it’s anomalous: I’m fifteen or sixteen, wearing my sister’s clothes, and I look pretty and grown up, like a girl someone’s going to marry. I was neither of those things, though, and I hadn’t yet agreed to go out with him. I’m looking at him over my left shoulder, something unmistakable in my eyes—the knowledge of being loved. I wasn’t sure what made me lovable to him; I was just grateful that, no matter how I tested him, he stuck around, always willing to show me his heart. This was a boy I could count on.
These stories are about permanence and temporality—two equally strong poles of human yearning. Death is tragic, we feel. The death of love, also tragic. Another birthday, a sinking helium balloon, the slow distortions of memory, tragedies all. Most of us need to think these things won’t happen to us, so we make choices that might root us to our selves: we get religion, or get married, buy a house, have a kid. But our acquisitions only tell us how mortal we are, glued to one spot, embodying one self until we die.
But, on the other hand, if we have chosen nothing—rather, if we have chosen to hover always in a state of possibility, never committing to a place, a person, a job, an argument, an idea, how do we know who we are? What can we point to in order to account for ourselves? We will have left not even the slightest impression on the loose soil of the earth or the skins of the people on it. I will never experience what it’s like to decide early on to stay and eventually die in the same place I was born, the deep knowing that might have been mine.
I admit I am terrified by sameness. The thought of not periodically changing my life is like an unpacked steamer trunk on my chest. But before the sparkling-eyed boy married, I had a wholly unfair expectation that he would be my permanence. That wherever I went, whatever choices I made or refused to make, he had chosen me permanently and kept some part of me safe and constant. I wanted to have every possible thing and to lose nothing in the process. Honestly, don’t we all?
I miss him still. But he has become a soapstone in my pocket, shaped less like himself than the heart of my hand, wearing to the grip of my fingers, grooved with the lines of my palm.
A Primer on Rootlessness
When you leave the place you will only later call home, you become, rather suddenly, though you might not know it for quite some time,
like a fish without scales, the naked diamonds of its puckered skin flashing their ascent from the bottom to the air-choked top,
like a flock of birds with pebble-filled bones—though the stones themselves may be quite lovely, the birds will plummet toward the ground as if they had suddenly fallen in love with it. Once there, they will embrace it, wings wide and necks crooked in touchingly naive surprise,
like an eye leaking water, its strangely beautiful circles of color buckling. One crack, two cracks, and it is a flap of spent cells, no longer an eye,
like a moth flying more and more erratically, aiming for the obscene head of a flower and hitting the stem instead, an oval of its wing dust ground into the finger pad of a human,
…
like two hands of fingers, nails extracted—they carry a sense of bereavement times ten and they cannot catch fine and shrinking things,
like a tiny country that can find itself on no map or atlas. It wonders, was it a dream? Those years of living and naming and fighting and crying. And the tales we tell of our headdresses and the ways we sing ourselves to sleep.
like a river damned, swelling like a goiter, watching its sickly abdomen trail out the other side, raging under the pressure of itself upon itself, wishing for a pin a tooth an awl a tiny hole an eyelash crack,
like a fish, scaled.
But the news is not all bad. Though you cannot rescale yourself, though you cannot go home, you may never know yourself better than when you are about to float, white on a dark streak of lake, breathing like a beast.
The Way It Goes When We Close Our Eyes
I have dreams about you. This is what I will tell the sparkling-eyed boy.
I instruct my students in Introduction to Literature: think of the last truly beautiful or frightening or shockingly real dream you had. If I’m lucky, their faces take on expression. Did you try to tell someone about it? How did that feel, the telling? I am trying to demonstrate something about the fear of solipsism in the work of Li Po or Wordsworth, or in Hamlet. It’s frustrating, the students say, willing to talk about their own lives but not the lives in the books. Their friend, girlfriend, mother, didn’t understand, couldn’t really see what they had seen in their dreams, not really. But, I ask, have you ever stopped trying to tell? I ask, but don’t ask, Aren’t you spurred by the lonely echo in your chest?
I would say to him: I dream that everything I need to know could come from your mouth.
The dreams started a few years after his marriage—when I was twenty-three, twenty-four. I refuse to own them; they came to me like a haint. Once every few months for the first years I had these dreams, I would go to bed, filled with the forgettable detritus of the day, and he would seep into my sleep and trigger the same encounter over and over. Life would become ridiculously simple for however long it takes us to dream up the beginnings, middles, and ends of our sleeping stories.
The one I remember best, the one that told me I had a genuine pattern of dreams on my hands, begins on my family’s dirt road. A group of people is gathered, but the sparkling-eyed boy and I are, essentially, alone with each other. The convergence of sky, tree, and water in this very spot implies that we’d be blind if we weren’t looking at each other, as if this background and foreground couldn’t exist separately. As if, in other words, we have been apart far too long.
“Hi,” I say.
“Hi,” he says.
In my dreams we are not brilliant or even believable conversationalists.
“Why did you leave me?” he asks. “You went to college and I didn’t hear from you anymore. You left and you never came back.”
“I know,” I say. “I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t think I could have a life up here. I thought there were other things I had to do. I guess I wanted to forget what I was so I could become someone different for a while.”
“Yes,” he says, as if he didn’t even have to ask. “I’ve missed you,” he says. His face is sad but certain, as if the end of this conversation is already determined and the words we choose must be said but can’t alter the outcome. (My favorite kind of speech, the kind I can’t fumble.) We have, both of us, been rehearsing with the same script for a long time.
I want to rush to the end. I say: “How could you have gotten married? And so soon! You were only twenty-one.”
He says: “I’m sorry. I guess I panicked—I thought you’d never come back, and, maybe, up here, no one would ever marry me.”
I nod at our mutual accusations, our mutual apologies, as if to say: Yes. We have been foolish. We have done what we needed to do. (This paradox goes unacknowledged.) But now we’ll set things right.
“I’ll have to find work up here,” I say.
“I’ll have to have a talk with my wife,” he says.
We wander down to a secluded bend in the road. At this point in the summer, the grass at the side of the road is nearly taller than we are, and the smell of fresh mint is drifting up from the ditches. We step toward each other, the lengths of our bodies almost touching, conscious that someone might see us. This close, our pores open to each other and we breathe deeply, sending each other to our lungs, then on to every somal cell. For no reason at all he smells like lambs, cedar, and sunshine. Then we kiss, a kiss slower and deeper than any I’ve had. It’s almost as if we are merely breathing into each other. Everything will be different from now on.
I dream we are so normal. Neither of us melts into a griffin or becomes the other’s mother.
Of course, I wake up then; after all, what could possibly happen next? I
am not an unhappy person, really. Melancholic, I’ll allow, but not truly unhappy. However, I do wake every morning, my head buzzing with plans as to how I can avoid disappointing myself any further than I already have. On less cheerful days, I wake with the certain knowledge that today I will not be able to avoid disappointing even people I don’t know. But on the mornings after these dreams, I wake deeply unconscious of my life, of the patterns of my brain, and of my true opinion of myself. I am alive only to love, only to the peace of being enveloped. It’s like—yes, like what we pretend to remember of the womb. Only it lasts a mere ten seconds or so. I wake fully and then I am again incomplete, as if I had been a conjoined twin, sharing a heart with my brother and now I am forced to limp along with two ventricles only, the blood never making it to my extremities. But (as only an addict would say), pale as I am, tepid as is my pulse, the ten seconds are worth it.
I dream in sunlight, great sheets of yellow, as if we could reach out our tongues and taste it and it would shrink from us like cotton candy.
Isn’t it sometimes difficult to remember that dreams are not fortunes, and that fortunes, even those in the backs of scented magazines or folded into cookies, are not gifts of foresight? The sparkling-eyed-boy dreams were so shockingly sweet and necessary that for a while I refused to interpret them lest they stop coming. I wanted them to be visitations, predictions, psychic phenomena, and if I dissected them I would find them merely inanimate, in severed pieces.
I dream we are like water when it meets other water.
Here is another example, a later variation on the sparkling-eyed-boy dream: We are again on my family’s property in the Upper Peninsula, only this time we’re in my grandmother’s cabin and we are wrapped up together in a tarp on the floor. We’re not in any danger, but there is some suggestion of having been wrapped in the tarp by, say, a burglar or as a practical joke. If someone finds us like this, we have the excuse, at any rate, that, though we are exactly where we would like to be, we have not acted of our own volition to get there. We are having our usual dialogue about the choices we’ve made, but this is a very quiet dream and our low murmurs are indecipherable even to me, the dreamer. Sometimes he is on top, sometimes I am, but we don’t do anything; we don’t do it. Our aspect is more like a loving couple after sex. On our first meeting in years, we can easily acquire a post-sex, defenseless melting without any of the acrobatics. (What I want—or at least what my subconscious wants—from the sparkling-eyed boy is not, apparently, sex.) Somehow, come morning, which we’ve watched break over the bay, we are freed from the tarp. In a dream leap, we are suddenly in the back seat of a car, being driven out of my family’s property. The looks that we silently share assure us both that it’s not over, it will never be over between us. Strangely, I think I am also the driver, catching these looks in the rearview mirror and comprehending what they mean, experiencing both the pleasure of secret love and the pleasure of discovering the secret.
Why does it afterward feel as if my brain has given me an unexpected gift and snatched it back again? The gift is almost always the same: the ability to talk after so long, to explain ourselves to each other; the unspeakable relief that we still love each other; the threat of discovery; and at the most a few kisses. No matter the configurations of my life—friends, boyfriends, graduate programs, jobs—he comes again.
I may be dreaming about an ability to break the stranglehold of the past, to escape the consequences of my choices. As I sleep, I am allowed to have fragmented my world and then find it whole again. I am, to push the metaphors, allowed to unring a bell. The sound waves, fat and satisfying, roll back to me as if I had called their names and they loved me.
Perhaps I am dreaming of a less complex world. The dreams allow me to exercise a taste for reversals—videotapes running backwards, systems becoming simpler, entropy undone. There is his self and my self and we know just what to say to each other, just what we will do from now on.
Maybe I’m just trying to experience that moment I will never experience—knowing his present mind, letting him know mine. We could help each other understand the past; I know we could. We could be kind to each other, tell each other that in a disappointing world, we nevertheless would be wrong to doubt the endurance of love.
Some people say that a good way to understand dreams is to think of every person in them as you, or at least as some part of you. If this is true, I can understand the repeated variations on this dream as the reunion of two parts of myself: my present self, none too pleased with itself, meets up with my younger self, braver and more unified. We find out we have been sad without each other, that we have loved each other all along. Thus, I can feel, for a moment, some peace, some wholeness.
How terrifying, though, if even our subconscious can’t imagine other people besides the self, if we are as isolated in our dream life as we are in our waking one. More than anything, I need to think of these dreams as love stories, a fulfillment of both our wishes. The sparkling-eyed boy started appearing to me again, wholly unbidden, until I agreed to notice him, honor our losses—whatever they might have been—and mend them. That’s really him, pressing my hand between both of his. Not me, him—freckled, intent, more serious than usual. Really. I never would have started writing this if I thought my brain could not fully imagine him, if every dream had been just me, multiplied.
I dream lately that you won’t speak to me. My shoes are all wrong. And then I am cast, like a Copenhagen statue, gray and forever.
But have you ever stopped trying to tell someone about your dreams? make them understand you? I ask my students. Aren’t you terrified by the solitude in your body cavity?
I have dreams about you. I have decided that this is what I will tell him if I press a note into his hand this summer when no one is looking and the note asks him to meet me at noon the next day or the day after that at the roadside park along the shore of Lake Huron and he comes and we look at one another and don’t know what to say. We will shuffle and blush and I will know that I shouldn’t have asked him and he shouldn’t have come. Nevertheless, I will say, I have dreams about you and I wake up deeply satisfied. So what are we going to do about that?
The Art of Letter Writing or, “Hey! It’s been a long time!”
I remember standing on the gravel road in my green plaid bathing suit, my hair dripping dark spots in the dust, holding a note in my hand. The sparkling-eyed boy had just pressed this worried lump into my fourteen-year-old palm and gunned away on his four-wheeler. A handwritten letter is usually a triumph for a young girl: here, finally, an unambiguous gesture. But I felt the weight of obligation folded into a hard knot under my fingers and the gravel boring into the bare soles of my feet. In the palm of my hand were sentences like When you danced with me last night at the Community Center, why were you not really dancing with me? Why don’t you like me back? I’ve waited for you to like me for a long time.
Years later I write a letter to the sparkling-eyed boy:
“. . . I’ll bet you’re surprised to hear from me! I can’t believe it’s been seven years! Can you? So much has happened. . . . I hear that you got married a few years ago. Congratulations!!”
Would that I could wrap the exclamation points around my throat until I agreed to tell the truth about just one thing. Would it do, though, to turn all my secrets inside out so the thick skin is on the inside and the wet insides infect?
No, it would not. So I make it easy on him, writing a letter he will have no problem showing to his wife. I avoid even one “I remember,” even one claim on the vast stretches of time over which she can cast no shadow. Still, I feel greediness churn up the back of my throat. I have no right to even the smallest scrap of him, and yet here is my carefully fingered horde.
I am convinced—if he loved me first, he loved me best. I spent only summers in his corner of the Upper Peninsula, but wasn’t he waiting for me every June with a grin, his dimples integral flecks in my summer landscape? Weren’t we always working side by side in the stuff o
f the earth—the strawberry patch, the gravel pit, the hay fields? Wasn’t he strong enough to be always holding up his tenderest, most possessive heart in his rough hands, only to have me slap it down—“not now, not like that”?
I have proof: on my fourteenth birthday, he gave me a glowing wooden bowl he’d made with his own hands. A perfectly fitted lid opened with a slight popping sound to a picture of himself lying in the bottom, an unevenly cut school picture with sleepy eyes, hair cut straight across his forehead, one deviant tuft arching up, and two dimples boring straight through his cheeks to something good, unsure, and longing in the center of his brain. “Love, ——” was scratched on the back. Oh, didn’t I blush and squirm? Honestly, I was a silly girl, the silliest, courting the approval of scornful boys, arrogant strangers, grownups, and anyone else who couldn’t possibly matter. I didn’t want to have to see the sparkling-eyed boy so always by my side. Yet there he was, planted in front of me, cowlick and all, demanding that I notice something real, like the work of his hands on the body of a tree, or the hands themselves, connected as they were to the rest of him.
But I had just become a weak adolescent and wasn’t ready to give up the small powers adolescence affords: trying to level what I could, to build what I couldn’t. I took the bowl home with me, though, at the end of the summer and set it on the dresser in my bedroom, a scrap of tree to comfort my separation from forest and lake. In a few moments of clarity now and then, I thought of how happy I would be if that bowl could make my heart glow like its own piney grain.
