Machine Dreams

by Jayne Anne Phillips

  We girls took pains and were high style, but really, all the young women then dressed like matrons—silk shoulder pads in our dresses and those big hats. We got the shoulder pads from our mothers, and silk lingerie at rummage sales; you couldn’t buy silk during the war. The war influenced everything. We were the Class of ’43, and all the boys worried the fighting would stop before they could get overseas. Rummage and church sales were War Benefits; all the women’s clubs rolled bandages and collected tin. High school girls wrote to boys who’d graduated five and six years before, boys who’d driven their cars past them as they stood on the sidewalk playing hopscotch. Three letters a week to Europe on blue onionskin stationery; letters to boys who’d been our heros, and boys who hadn’t. We tacked Kodak snapshots on our walls—small black and white pictures the size of six postage stamps. A soldier in a graveyard and on the back: All these Germans are dead ones. You’ve seen your father’s war album—airstrips, everyone in khaki; how it was. Easy to tell good from evil.

  There was one boy I went with off and on through high school. He wanted to go to medical school instead of to war, and be a doctor like his father and two of his older brothers. The Harwins: they were a family of four brothers and one sister, grew up in one of the fine old turn-of-the-century houses, and were well-off. But Dr. Harwin had died when Tom was fourteen, and his mother died two years later, both of heart attacks. Tom was the youngest and Peggy, the sister, was in her twenties and taught phys. ed. at the college. One of the brothers—the oldest, I believe—was a sort of ne’er-do-well; he had a traveling job and then joined the navy. The other two were studying at Duke. They sent what they could, but the mother’s death took the last of the family money. Tom and Peggy had to sell the house his senior year, and the college bought it, just as they’d bought several of the other old homes. Shinner Black was Tom’s best friend and Shinner’s mother ran a rooming house, so Tom moved in for the summer. He didn’t really want to, but Peggy said he’d spend half his time there with Shinner anyway, and they couldn’t take a chance on losing the offer. Peggy was very practical and steady. She used to go along as chaperone when the high school kids went on picnics out by the river. Yes, we had chaperones, can you believe it? But Peggy was like one of us. I remember her lying on the rocks at Sago, wearing a black one-piece with a pleated bodice, and smoking cigarettes.…

  Sago was lush before mine drainage ruined it; the river so quiet, isolated. We went to Blue Hole—clear water circled with massive flat boulders, like a stone beach. We walked a long train trestle to reach it, a shaky old trestle high over the gorge, then down a trail by old tracks and over a wooded bank. Once we broke through the trees and a colony of butterflies, big yellow monarchs, were dipping their wings at clear puddles collected on the rocks. Forty or fifty of them, so silent. And the water was cool and clean then, twenty feet deep at Blue Hole. We swam and got lazy on beer, ate dinner, and went home. Peggy always took a wristwatch and hung it on a bush; we left at seven, before dusk. She’d tell us to wake up, children, and she yelled some hide-and-seek chant into the woods for the ones who’d gone off together. We walked back in a warm exhaustion, watching our feet on the trestle ties; trash, broken toys, trickle of stream in the weeds far down. Peggy said not to look—if you stared straight ahead you could be sure of every step and run to meet the train. She was a beautiful girl, fair, with honey-colored hair. She and Tom resembled each other; the other brothers were dark.

  Tom’s father died before I really knew him, but I’d seen his mother. She dressed her gray hair in a chignon and always wore gloves in the summer. I have a photograph that must have been taken the summer after the father died: Mrs. Harwin in the garden with her children, wearing a long black-lace dress, a gold brooch, three strands of pearls. The sons flank her, all in black suits, and Peggy is directly behind her mother, peering between black shoulders. Must have been an occasion, a wedding, the men wearing boutonnieres, morning coats, cravats. The wide trellis is behind them, and the shaggy trees. Tom is fifteen and pleased with himself, the kid brother dressed in his first tuxedo. Considering what happened, it’s a scary picture. Only Peggy is still living—all the rest died of heart. And Tom was the youngest; we were seventeen, had just graduated from high school. Now it seems to me he died as a child, before anything touched him. But that’s not really true. He’d already lived through the deaths of his parents, not easy at any age. He was one of the boys, popular, but he had such a presence, a gravity. Everyone respected his family and he grew into that same respect. Sure, he fooled around sometimes—once he and Shinner Black dressed in drag on Class Day. Bobby sox, sweaters over C-cup bras stuffed with apples, head scarves, and lipstick. Pretty Peasants, they called themselves, and played it up all during the ceremonies. Another time they somehow got a bull into the chemistry lab. It must have been difficult to lead that animal up three flights of steps; it was nearly impossible to lead him down.

  Tom was different because he was mannish and independent, but not afraid to be attentive the way a woman would be. He never forgot anything I told him, and he was proud of me. Sometimes when we were at a dance or out with the crowd, he’d nod in my direction and say, “Look at her. Isn’t she the prettiest thing you ever saw?” Probably sounds silly to you, but it wasn’t really about being pretty. He wanted everyone to know he loved me.

  I’d gotten a job at the telephone office that spring. “Number please” a few hundred times a day, plugging and unplugging the connections. The operators knew everything that went on in the town—if you weren’t rushed, you could listen in by leaving the key open. But you didn’t need to, there was plenty of information in who called whom and what they said to the operators. We could always count on Mr. Lee, who owned the dry goods store, to be tight drunk by noon and curse us out for answering too slowly or for getting him a busy signal. A lot of the girls knew which married men were seeing whom by the calls they made at odd hours. I never worried about all that and was glad to be getting a paycheck. I only minded our supervisor, a red-headed spinster named Lindstrom. She watched our work shifts to the minute and called us her chickens, as if the clicks and scratchings of the board were our sounds. She thought we were brainless, trying to take advantage. And I was so scrupulous, the perfect employee. Like a dumb kid, I was glad to work long shifts and have a lunch hour like a grown-up.

  Tom wasn’t working yet. He and Shinner Black had decided to paint houses for the summer and were looking to buy a cheap truck. But they were in no hurry, and it was around then that Tom started getting sick. He would walk me home every night from the telephone office, and we’d have to stop twice on the way up the hill for him to rest. He had chest pains and shortness of breath. After a few days he went to Doc Jonas at my insistence and was told he had gas on his stomach, to take some antacid pills and exercise. But he couldn’t; he had no stamina. He’d played sports all his life and suddenly he couldn’t run up the hill. I think he knew all along, though he may not have thought it actually possible—at seventeen. The last week, he stayed in bed most of the time. I would go by after work and make supper for him in Mrs. Black’s kitchen. One night he lay in bed sweating and would barely talk to me. I went home crying to Mother that he was going to lie over there and die if nothing was done. So she called Mrs. Black and told her to phone Tom’s brother Nate in Chapel Hill. Nate, who was a fifth-year med student, recognized the symptoms right away, and drove all night to get to Tom by morning. He examined him and hired an ambulance, made arrangements for surgery down south. Tom said he would only go if I went with him, and Nate agreed. Mother had my bag packed and they were to pick me up from work.… Tom got out of bed to comb his hair and dropped dead by the bathroom sink. That quickly. I put the call through from Black’s house, recognized Nate’s voice, and kept the key pressed down. He was calling Peggy, told her to come at once, that they were all too late, and why hadn’t she known Tom was so sick? Then he hung up and called the undertaker. I put that call through too, then left the board and went into the ba
throom. I sat there dry-eyed and stared at the brooms and mops propped against the wall.

  Outside, the other girls were talking. One of them was sobbing and Lindstrom was saying there was no one to take over, I would have to finish the shift. I went back out. None of them looked at me and I finished: thirty-five minutes. I started walking home and Mother had someone meet me at the bottom of the hill, in a car. Who was it? Oh yes, Shinner. He’d been there when it happened and had seen Tom lying on the floor, then had gone to my mother in a panic. She sent him after me but he stopped the car at the hill and waited; he couldn’t be the one to tell me. We went home and sat on my bed and wept for hours. He said Tom lay there in his pants and no shirt or shoes, on his side, his feet reaching into the hallway. His face just empty, like you wouldn’t believe anything could look.

  They asked me to plan the funeral and we buried him with his parents. All of that is a blur. I’ve almost no memory of it. A few days later Peggy and I went down to North Carolina for a month, to visit Nate and his wife and their new baby. In pictures from that time, I look like somebody’s grandmother, my face puffy, my hair tied in a kerchief. And Peggy is so blond and bright, too bright, her hair perfectly curled, light blue eyes straining above a set smile. She looks perpetually surprised, but scared and insincere, like a play actor. She felt guilty because she’d insisted they sell the house; Tom was off with his friends all the time and there she was with the cleaning and the upkeep and her teaching job as well. But the fact was he’d had to move out and she hadn’t, since the college turned the place into a girls’ dorm and Peggy stayed on, in her own room, as house mother. She and Tom had argued and three weeks later he was dead—she hadn’t even known he was sick. She thought I blamed her but wouldn’t say so. I did blame her some, but with such a resignation there was no anger. It was all muddled. I kept thinking Tom and I might have broken up anyway when he went off to college, and said so, but they all denied that, as though his honor were at stake. We talked about him endlessly. Finally I sickened of the whole thing and told myself it was his business, his death. We all seemed to have so little to do with it, and no right to such feelings. I suppose I was stunned. All the days were like some repetitive dream—sometime next week I would wake up and be in the real world.

  Mother said, “You’re young. Your life’s not over.” A girlfriend of mine moved in with us and Mother gave us the whole top floor of the house. We moved the Victrola upstairs, played records loud, and practiced dance steps. “Fascination” is a song I remember from that time: I might have gone on my way empty-hearted; every jukebox had two or three versions. I wore anklets and heels and did the furniture in gaudy colors. Took one of Mother’s beautiful antique vanities, painted it pink and black, and hung a starched white ruffle around the legs. Wow, I said, isn’t it pretty; Mother said yes, it certainly was. Anything I did was fine with her. My girlfriend and I had jobs as checkers at the grocery, and clothes, and dates—I never went out with the same boy three times. I forced myself to be happy and flip. Really, I was mad at all of them, and mad at Tom for leaving me. There in town with all the same people and sidewalks and buildings, it was as though he still existed but wouldn’t come near me. Like he was watching me all the time, disappointed and sad-faced. What had I done wrong? Nate and Peggy had made copies of all their snapshots of Tom, then given me the originals and the negatives. Envelopes of those stiff dark negatives, squares that rattled when I shuffled them. I kept them in my high school scrapbook. Sometimes I took them all out and held them to the light one by one. We all glowed up like angels. The smiles and unsuspecting gestures made more sense, full of a secret everyone ignored, but what was it?

  So the time went on quietly. I worked, took classes at the college. Life wasn’t like it is now. Look at you—born here and think you have to get to California, go so far, do so much so fast. Crazy situations, strange people—all this I hear about drugs. We had the Depression and then the war; we didn’t have to go looking for something to happen. And the things that happened were so big; no one could question or see an end to them. People died in the war and they died at home, of real causes, not what they brought on themselves. Living with that was enough.

  Late in ’44 I enrolled in the Cadet Nurses’ Program in Washington, a special accelerated course subsidized by the army. My mother’s trouble, the cancer, had started the spring before—but she wasn’t ill except when she had the treatments, and she so wanted me to have the training, some security. So I went. I lived in a dorm at American University. The food was terrible and we all smoked cigarettes to cut our appetites. Washington was exciting in wartime, choked with soldiers and service people. And I loved the classes. But I only stayed four months; Mother got worse. My brother was in the service, my sister was divorced and had a child to support—there was no one to help but me. At that time we still thought she’d recover, but I didn’t want her to be alone. I was twenty years old, almost an adult, and felt I should earn the money to support us, the money to get her whatever treatment she needed. And that’s what I was doing two years later, just barely, when I met your father.

  How did I meet him? I met him at a VFW dance. Veterans of Foreign Wars had fixed up an old house down near Main Street. There was a bar and jukebox and no furniture in the parlor so couples could dance on the hardwood floor. He was there with Marthella Barnett—she was wearing a purple sweater with cheap pink glass buttons down the front—and he left her and asked me to dance. I don’t remember who I was with; I was dating Bink Crane and Jimmie Darnell at the time. I was always going out with older fellas, but not as old as Mitch Hampson, and I was a little scared of him. What year was it? 1947. And he was thirty-eight, a man about town since the war was over. He was so much older that even though he’d gone to high school in town I’d never heard of him, and no one I knew had heard of him, except he was related to the Bonds who owned the hospital. He was wearing a nice suit and drove his own car, and asked me to lunch. I said no; I didn’t have enough time, my lunch hour was too short.

  But we must have had lunch, because we certainly started going out. I remember him then as very patient, a perfect gentleman, none of the cussing and bad temper he was full of later. Of course it’s not hard to be a gentleman for a three-week courtship. Three weeks, and we were married! Drove to Oakland, Maryland, with a wedding party of eight people. I wore a white suit I’d bought on sale and altered, and a white broad-brimmed hat I’d done in pale blue net and sprays of silk honeysuckle. What little fool would marry a man after three weeks? I should have had my head examined. But it seemed the right thing at the time. Mother said from her bed, “What’s your hurry?”

  She and I had been through a lot those years she was sick. Mitch and I were married in June and she died in December. He really was good to her. Every evening he went down to the drugstore to get the paper, and he’d go into her room before he left, sit and talk to her about the weather or the news, ask if she wanted anything.

  She was bedfast about the time I started seeing him, and I guess I felt the ground going under me. We were alone in that big house, living mostly on my salary. I did office work for Maintenance at the State Road Commission; I balanced the payroll, answered phones.… I kept a telephone on her bed so she could call me if she got in trouble. The cancer had gone clear through her and her body just didn’t work. She was so afraid she’d offend people. She’d drag herself to the bathroom every day and wash herself out with a syringe. I kept a big bowl of gauze pads on the table right next to her, gauze cut to measure from long strips I bought at the hospital. She kept herself clean with them all day, and every night I washed them along with her sheets.

  Sometimes I wonder how things would have turned out if she’d never gotten sick. I didn’t want her to die thinking I was alone. It seemed the least I could do for her, but really I suppose I was scared for myself. I had no idea what I would do without her.

  I’ll never forget the day she found it. One of those first warm days in early April, and a woman had come fr
om Winfield to measure the couch for slipcovers. She’d spread material samples a yard wide, five yards long, all around the living room—a bright blue and a pale blue, a green floral, a beautiful off-white cream they called “oyster.” I was standing in the dining room doorway looking in at the colors. Mother came out of the bathroom and said she was spotting. She was fifty-one then, just past menopause. She said she would call Dr. Jonas just to be safe. The seamstress had opened a window and there was a smell of mown grass from across the street.… We chose the cream; it really was lovely, textured with raised threads and very rich. A little more expensive, but Mother said the material would make the room seem lighter, summer and winter—and later we could have the chairs done in a print, maybe the floral.

  Those slipcovers were the last thing but necessities we bought for three years, and the last housewares I bought until she was gone and the house was sold and I was buying for my own house. You never see the everyday the way you might.

  She did call Dr. Jonas that very day and made an appointment. He diagnosed it and said there was no problem at all, not to worry, they could cure her with radium at Baltimore. So she went to Kelly Clinic by train. They told her it was a spot the size of a pinpoint on the mouth of the uterus. She went every three months, always by herself—we couldn’t afford anything else. Sometimes they wouldn’t find a trace in her whole body. The disease seemed to come and go like a shade. For a long time she had no pain, she would just get terribly tired.