In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

by Ellen Gilchrist

  I will never be popular. But at least I can get elected cheerleader. I do Christina’s homework. I write her book reports. I carry messages to her secret boyfriend. He is a college boy named Dawson who plays the saxophone and is dying of cancer in an apartment behind his Jewish grandmother’s mansion. I carry their messages. I stand guard when she goes to visit him. I listen to her love stories. They lie down together on a bed with their clothes on and strange things happen. One thing they do is called dryfucking. I don’t really understand what it is but I feel funny and excited when she talks about it.

  Once I went with her to Dawson’s apartment, some rooms above a brick garage of the only mansion in Seymour, Indiana. There were phonograph albums and cartoons nailed to the walls. Dawson was very nice to me. He kept making me listen to something called Jazz at the Philharmonic. I pretended to like it. I pretended to like the worst part of all when someone named JoJo plays the drums for about fifteen minutes.

  I pass the grade school and turn onto Duncan Street where Christina has lived every day of her life. Next door to her house is a vacant lot. A bicycle I used to own is rusting in a corner of the lot. It has a flat tire but I have never bothered walking it to the service station to get it fixed. I have a new bicycle with shiny fenders. Christina’s mother always teases me about the old bike. “It must be nice to be rich,” she says, laughing.

  She thinks it is funny that no one makes me do anything about it. Christina has to do all kinds of things my mother would never dream of making me do. She has to help with the dishes and iron her own clothes and practice the piano for an hour every day and go horseback riding on Saturday.

  When I get to Christina’s house she is in the dining room with her mother looking at the fabrics they have spread out all over the dining room table. They have been to a sale and the dining room table is covered with bright plaid wools and gold and blue corduroy and a heavy quilted cotton with little flowers on a green background.

  “Here’s Margaret now,” her mother says, smiling at me, moving closer, her small, brisk body making me feel heavy and awkward and surprised. “Margaret, look at these bargains we got at Hazard’s. We’re going to make skirts and weskits. Look, we bought something for you. So you and Christina can have twin outfits.” She holds up the quilted fabric. “Isn’t it darling? Isn’t it the darlingest thing you’ve ever seen?”

  She is always so gay, so full of plans. I think of her getting into the Packard with my father the night they went off to Benton to the ballgame, the night my mother wouldn’t go. Christina’s father was out of town and I stood on the porch watching my father put her into his big car. My mother stood in the dark doorway not saying a word and later she went into the bedroom and locked the door. My mother has not been well lately. She is worn out. She has hot flashes. She takes hormones and writes long letters to Mississippi and is always mad at me.

  “Do you like it?” Christina’s mother says, holding the fabric against her body as if she were a model.

  “Oh, my,” I say, taking the material. “I love it. It’s darling. Is it really for me?”

  “Look,” Christina says, “the one with the green background is for you, to go with your red hair. We got the same print with a blue background for me. Won’t we look great together? You aren’t supposed to mix blue and green together but who cares. We can wear them to the Christmas Follies if we get them made in time.”

  “You’re going to make it for me?” I say.

  “Of course we are,” her mother says. “I’ll get started on it tomorrow morning. I can’t wait to see how cute you’ll look together. Besides I need to do something to pay your father back for all the help he’s been to us with our taxes. I’ll have to measure you first, though. Can I do it now?”

  “I can’t stay that long today,” I say quickly, not wanting her to know how big my waist is. It is twenty-six. I will never be a belle. “I’ll come back tomorrow and let you do it, if that’s O.K.”

  “Whenever you have time,” she says. “I can go on and start on Christina’s.”

  Christina walks me out into the yard. “She’s going to a horse show on Saturday,” she says. “Do you want to go with me to see Dawson?”

  “Sure,” I say.

  “I don’t know what I’d do without you,” Christina says. “I don’t know what I did before you moved here. Dawson says you’re darling. He thinks you’re smart as a whip. He wants you to come back over. He wants you to meet a friend of his from college.”

  “I’ll see you tomorrow then,” I say. “I’ll come by in the morning. And thanks a lot about the skirt. That’s really nice of your mother.”

  I walk off down Duncan Street for a few blocks, then change my mind about going home. I decide to walk out toward the railroad tracks and get some exercise to make myself smaller before I get measured.

  It will be light for another hour. I think about going by Janet Ingram’s house to see what she is doing. Janet lives on the edge of town in a house that is very different from the ones Christina and I live in. There are stained red carpets on the floors and over the mantel is a collection of china bulls her father wins at carnivals. I know I am not supposed to go there although my mother has never actually told me so.

  Janet’s father sleeps in the daytime and works at night in a factory. Once I was there in the afternoon and he was just getting up, walking around the house in a sleeveless T-shirt. I walk along, thinking about the way Janet’s house smells, warm and close and foreign, as though the air were full of germs.

  I try not to think about Christina’s mother. If I think of her I remember how she leans over my father’s chair handing him things when they have dinner at our house. I think of him putting her into his car. Then I think of the beautiful quilted material. I think of Christina and me walking into the junior high together, wearing our matching outfits.

  I am walking along a new street where houses are under construction. Two men are still hammering on the high beams of one. They are standing on the slanting half-finished roof. I am afraid they will fall while I am watching them and I turn my face away. It is terrible for people to have dangerous jobs like that. I’m glad my father doesn’t have a dangerous job. People who are poor have to have jobs like that. Perhaps it doesn’t matter as much what happens to them.

  Janet comes to the door. Her father is in the living room putting on his shoes. “I can’t ask you to stay,” she says. “My dad’s getting ready to leave for work and I have to help with dinner.”

  “That’s all right,” I say. “I was just walking around. I just came by to see what you were doing.”

  I am staring at Janet’s breasts, which are even larger than mine. I wonder if it is true that Janet lets boys touch her breasts.

  I begin walking home. Dark is falling faster than I expected. The days grow shorter. It is almost Thanksgiving.

  A group of children playing in a yard begins following me. One of them recognizes me from school. He picks up a dirt clod and throws it at me. It hits my coat. I don’t know what to do. No one has ever thrown anything at me before. I look up. Another dirt clod hits me on the shoulder. I begin to run, trying to figure out what is going on. I run through the darkening streets as fast as I can. Streetlights flicker and come on. Here and there a yellow porch light shines brightly. I run and run, afraid of falling down, afraid of every shadow, afraid to look up, afraid of the trees, afraid of the moon.

  Now it is full dark. How did it get dark so quickly? I fear the dark. I never sleep without a light in my room. If I wake in the night in the dark I am terrified and jump out of bed and run down to my parents’ room and tremble between them until morning.

  The night is so still I can hear the branches of the trees reaching out their arms for me. A huge moon has appeared in the eastern sky. I run past the construction site. The exposed beams stand out against the dark blue sky. I think if I looked inside I would find the bodies of the carpenters broken and bleeding on the floor.

  I run past an alley where I f
ound an automatic card shuffler in a trashcan once when my grandmother was visiting us. When I brought it home she flew into hysterics and bathed me with lye soap, lecturing me about diseases I could catch from strangers.

  Now I am on my own street. I run past the Dustins’ house. I run into my house and down the hall and turn around and around and run into the kitchen and find my father sitting at the table with my brother. They are laughing and cutting fat green olives into generous pieces.

  I throw myself upon him screaming, “Look what they did to me! Look what they did to me! Look what they did!”

  He takes me into the bedroom and sits on the bed with me. He holds me in his arms. My face is against his shirt. I burrow into the strength of his body. Once I look up and there are tears running down his cheeks.

  My mother is touching my hair. “It’s from living like this,” she says. “This insane life in this hick Yankee town. I don’t know who she’s with half the time. God knows who she plays with. God knows what she’s doing.”

  “What do you want me to do?” he says. “Go home and starve in Waycross? Run a hardware store the rest of my life?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “I don’t know what I want you to do.”

  After a while my mother undresses me and puts me in bed in her soft flowered nightgown. She brings me a hot toddy and feeds it to me with a spoon. The hot liquor runs down my throat and soothes me. My mother promises to stay with me till I sleep. She turns off the lamp. She sits touching my arm with her soft hands. And the terror draws in its white arms and is still, watching me with cold eyes from the mirror on my father’s dresser.

  Indignities

  Last night my mother took off her clothes in front of twenty-six invited guests in the King’s Room at Antoine’s. She took off her Calvin Klein evening jacket and her beige silk wrap-around blouse and her custom-made brassiere and walked around the table letting everyone look at the place where her breasts used to be.

  She had had them removed without saying a word to anyone. I’m surprised she told my father. I’m surprised she invited him to the party. He never would have noticed. He hasn’t touched her in years except to hand her a check or a paper to sign.

  After mother took off her blouse the party really warmed up. Everyone stayed until the restaurant closed. Teddy Lanier put the make on a waiter. Alice Lemle sang “A Foggy Day in London Town.” A poet called Cherokee stood up on an antique chair, tore open her dress, and drew the sign for infinity on her chest with a borrowed Flair pen. Amalie DuBois sat down by the baked Alaska and began eating the meringue with her fingers.

  Everyone followed us home. Someone opened the bar and Clarence Josephy sat down at the baby grand and began improvising. He always makes himself at home. There was a terrible period in my childhood when I thought he was going to be my father. I started going to mass with a little girl from Sacred Heart to pray he wouldn’t move in and have breakfast with us every day. I even bought a crucifix. I had worked up to forty-six Hail Marys a day by the time my father came home from Australia and the crisis passed.

  As soon as everyone was settled with a drink mother went upstairs to change and I followed her. “Well, Mother,” I said, “this takes the cake. You could have given me some warning. I thought I was coming home for a birthday party.”

  “I’m leaving it all to you, Melissa,” she said. “Take my advice. Sell everything and fly to Paris.”

  I threw myself down on the bed with my hands over my ears, but she went tirelessly and relentlessly on. “This is your chance to rise above the categories,” she said. “God knows I’ve done my best to teach you the relativity of it all.” She sighed and shook her head, stepping into a long white dressing gown. I had always been a disappointment to her, that’s for certain. No illicit drugs, no unwanted pregnancies, no lesbian affairs, no irate phone calls from teachers, never a moment’s doubt that I was living up to my potential.

  Melissa was born old, my mother always tells everyone, born with her fingers crossed.

  “Why do you think you’re dying, Mother?” I said. “Just tell me that, will you? Lots of women get breast cancer. It doesn’t mean you’re going to die.”

  “It means I’m going to die,” she said. “And I’ll tell you one thing. I am never setting foot inside that hospital again. I’ve never run across such a humorless unimaginative group in my life. And the food! Really, it’s unforgivable.”

  “Mother,” I said, trying to put my arms around her.

  “Now, Melissa,” she said, “let’s save the melodrama for the bourgeoisie. I have a book for you to read.” She always has a book for me to read. She has a book about everything. She reads the first chapter and the table of contents and the last three paragraphs and if she likes the theory she says APPROVED and goes on to the next book.

  If she really likes the theory she writes the author and the publisher and buys twenty copies and gives them away to friends. She has ruined a lot of books for me that way. What real book could live up to one of mother’s glowing and inaccurate descriptions?

  It must be interesting to be her daughter, people say to me.

  I don’t know, I tell them. I’ve never tried it. I use her for a librarian.

  The book she pressed upon me now was Life after Life by Raymonad A. Moody, Jr., M.D. It was full of first-person accounts by men and women who were snatched from the jaws of death and came back to tell of their ecstatic experiences on the brink of nonbeing. The stories are remarkably similar. It seems the soul lifts off from the body like a sort of transparent angel and floats around the corpse. Then the person sees someone he is dying to talk to standing at the end of a tunnel swinging a lantern and waiting for him.

  “But who are you in such a hurry to see, Mother,” I said, “all of your friends are downstairs and you never liked your own parents.”

  “Perhaps Leonardo will be there. Perhaps Blake is waiting for me. Or Margaret Mead or Virginia Woolf.”

  “How old will you be in heaven, Mother?” I ask, being drawn into the fantasy.

  “Oh, thirty-four I think. Attractive, yet intelligent enough to be interesting. What color was my hair at that age? The only thing I regret about all this is that I never had time to grow out my gray hair. I kept putting it off. Vanity, vanity.”

  “Mother, let’s stop this.”

  “Right. Not another word.” She sprayed herself with Shalimar and giving me a pat on the cheek went downstairs to her guests, leaving me alone in her room.

  Her room is half of the second floor of a Queen Anne house designed by Thomas Sully in 1890.

  There is a round bed on a dais with dozens of small soft pillows piled against a marble headboard. There is a quilt made by her great-grandmother’s slaves and linen sheets the colors of the sky at evening.

  Everything else in the room is white, white velvet, white satin, white silk, white marble, white painted wood.

  There is a dressing table six feet long covered with every product ever manufactured by Charles of the Ritz.

  There is a huge desk littered with papers and books, her unpublished poems, her short stories, her journals, her unfinished novels.

  “Mother,” I called, following her into the hall, “what about the novels. Who will finish the novels?”

  “We’ll give them to somebody who needs them,” she called back. “Some poor person who doesn’t have any.”

  I went downstairs to find her reclining on a love seat with her admirers sitting at her feet drinking brandy and helping plan the funeral.

  I was surprised at how traditional her plans have become. Gone was the flag-shaped tombstone saying IT SEEMED LIKE A GOOD IDEA AT THE TIME. Gone the videotape machine in the mausoleum.

  “Some readings from García Márquez,” she was saying. “Lionel can do them in Spanish. Spanish always sounds so religious, don’t you agree?”

  “How long do you think it will be,” Bartlett said.

  “Not more than six months surely,” mother said. “February.”

>   “I like a winter funeral myself,” Eric said. “Especially in this climate.”

  The weather was perfect for the funeral. “Don’t you know she arranged this,” everyone kept saying. As we were entering the chapel a storm blew up quite suddenly. Rain beat on the walls and lightning flashed through the stained-glass windows.

  Then, just as we were carrying the coffin outside, the sun broke from the clouds. “That was going too far,” everyone agreed.

  Later, a wind blew up from the east and continued to blow while we shoveled dirt on the coffin. “Really!” everyone muttered.

  “Melissa,” she had said to me, “swear you will never let strangers lower my box.” So, while the gravediggers sat politely nearby wondering if we belonged to some new kind of cult, we cranked the coffin down and picked up the shovels.

  Clarence turned on the tape player and we shoveled to Mahler for a while, then to Clementi, then Bach.

  “I remember the night she chartered a plane and flew to California for the earthquake,” Lionel said, pulling a feather out of his hat and dropping it in the hole. He was wearing a velvet suit and an enormous green hat with feathers. He looked like a prehistoric bird.

  “Remember the year she learned to scuba dive,” Selma said, weeping all over her white tuxedo and dropping an onyx ring on top of the feather. “She didn’t even know how to swim.”

  “I remember the week she played with me,” I said. “I was four years old. She called and had a piano crate delivered and we turned it into a house and painted murals all over the walls. The title of our mural was Welsh Fertility Rites with Sheepdogs Rampant.”

  The wind kept on blowing and I kept on shoveling, staring down at all that was left of my childhood, now busily growing out yards and yards of two-toned hair.

  Perils of the Nile

  Revenge

  It was the summer of the Broad Jump Pit.

  The Broad Jump Pit, how shall I describe it! It was a bright orange rectangle in the middle of a green pasture. It was three feet deep, filled with river sand and sawdust. A real cinder track led up to it, ending where tall poles for pole-vaulting rose forever in the still Delta air.