Dreamsleeves

by Coleen Murtagh Paratore

  My Peely-Stick Shop is a circle of birch trees — tall, thin white trunks with black patches — like the Dalmatian dog version of trees. There’s a huge old pine tree beside them with thick green boughs that have spread over the tops of the birches to make a roof, thick enough to keep the rain out most days, with just a few spots to let sun drops in.

  The Peely-Stick Shop is mine, just mine. Intruders would have to hike through overgrown masses of pricker-bushes to get here unless they knew about the secret path I cleared with a weed-whacker and gardening gloves and lots of sweaty hard work. I had blisters on my hands and cuts up and down my legs and prickers stuck to my socks and sneaker laces, but it was worth it.

  I think if there’s someplace you really need to go, you have to make your own path, because nobody else is going to do it for you.

  I call the birch trees “peely-sticks” because they are skinny as sticks and their bark peels off in patches. Mom told me the Native American Indians used to etch words and pictures on the birch peels to tell stories and pass along messages.

  I can’t imagine how you’d fit a whole story on a peely-stick page, but I etch happy words like Smile and Sing and I hang them inside my shop. I use thumb-tacks so I don’t hurt the trees. So far they haven’t complained.

  I call this place my “shop” because I make presents here — birthday and holiday gifts for my family. Little stick dolls for Callie; wildflower bouquets for Nana and Mom that I tie with ribbons and hang from a rope clothesline to dry; and paperweights — smooth rocks that I clean off and paint messages on. Mom uses the “Believe” paperweight I gave her for her birthday to keep her GANE papers in order when she writes. Dad keeps his “Best Dad” rock on his desk. I’d never give him a present like that anymore.

  When I first discovered this circle of birches about five years ago, I thought somebody must have planted these trees to grow up so perfectly to make this round house with the pine roof that smelled so beautiful.

  When year after year no one else came to claim it, I figured God built it for me. God knew just what Aislinn O’Neill needed and sent it as a present just for me.

  A place where I could be A.

  I wish everybody in the world could have a peely-stick shop sort of place. It doesn’t have to be fancy, big or small, indoors or outdoors, it doesn’t matter. It just has to be a place you can call your own — a place where you can dream.

  When I leave for college to be a teacher, I’m going to pass on my Peely-Stick Shop to Callie. She will love it. And then maybe someday, she’ll pass it on to Dool or Eddie or the new baby on the way.

  After college I will marry a handsome boy like Mike Mancinello and we’ll be so happy together like Maria and Leo Carroll. We’ll have breakfast each morning, jelly donuts and tea, and he’ll kiss me good-bye and go to work and I’ll head off to teach my class. Fifth grade, I think, or maybe fourth.

  Dreamsleeves.

  Maybe the most important dreams we have are connected to our particular gifts, the talents we are born with that we are somehow meant to share. I’m pretty sure that that my gift is teaching. I want to do for other people what my fifth-grade teacher, Miss McMahon, did for me — to create a class space that feels safe and encouraging, to take the time to really pay attention to my students and help them discover their talents — to inspire them and believe in them and help them stand “up, up with people.”

  Twisting the top off the jar of bubbles I always keep in my shop, I dip the wand in and blow a huge bubble skyward, smiling as the sun paints it red, yellow, blue.

  Thank you, God, for my Peely-Stick Shop. You can’t put a dream on your sleeve to come true if you don’t know what your dream is, right? And I might never have discovered what my particular talent is if I didn’t have a place of my own, quiet enough to close my eyes and listen, really listen so I could hear my dream and pull it up … up, up out of my heart.

  She … trembled to think of

  that mysterious thing in the soul,

  which seems to acknowledge no human jurisdiction,

  but in spite of the individual’s own innocent self,

  will still dream …

  — HERMAN MELVILLE

  Third time for Tommy Doyle,” my father says to no one in particular as I come out into the kitchen Monday morning. He has the newspaper open on the table. When he looks up, I see that his eyes are wet with tears.

  I walk to the table to look. It’s an obituary notice. The wake is tomorrow at Clinton Funeral Home. That’s where my uncle Mark’s wake was. “I’m sorry, Dad.”

  “Tommy Doyle was a good one,” Dad says. “Say a prayer for him, A.” He blows his nose on a white handkerchief and sticks it back in his pocket. “Let me tell you something, A, there’s three times you get your name in the paper — when you’re born, when you’re married, and when you die. But there’s only one time they’ll stop traffic for you.”

  “When’s that, Dad?”

  “When you die.”

  My mind flashes back to my uncle Mark’s funeral, how we drove in a rented black Cadillac behind the hearse carrying his coffin and how we went straight through red lights at all of the intersections, halting traffic all the way to St. Mary’s Cemetery. Nana’s friends from the Women’s Guild sent covered dishes for a luncheon at Nana’s afterward. Maria Carroll brought down a tray of lasagna and three dozen sugar cookies. I miss my uncle Mark. He loved me.

  “I’m sorry, Dad.” I reach out to touch his shoulder.

  He refolds the paper, sniffs, and stands. “Gotta go, monkey,” he says, nodding at the clock. “Time is money and I’m broke.”

  At the door he turns back around. “How about we go to Hoffman’s tonight? We haven’t been there in ages.”

  Hoffman’s Playland. My dad and I love the fast rides, the faster the better, the roller coaster and the Scrambler. We go every summer. Just us two. I wish I could go there with Mike.

  “Sure, Dad.” I try to sound happy. “That’d be great.”

  “All right then,” he says. “Get that laundry done today, will you?”

  I take my class on a field trip walk up behind the outhouse, near the swing set. I teach them the names of the flowers, just like my mom taught me — white Queen Anne’s lace, blue cornflowers, yellow buttercups, purple thistles — it’s a good way to teach Dooley and Eddie their colors, too. I point out wild strawberries almost ready to pick and some other round, shiny red berries. “Don’t ever, ever touch these. They are poisonous.”

  Back in our classroom, we do art, coloring pictures of the flowers we saw. I tape their pictures up so they dangle down from the hubcaps. “You are Picassos and Michelangelos,” I say, “Monets and Degases.”

  Beck and Callie giggle at the sounds of these foreign names. Eddie peels the wrapper from a purple crayon. “No, Eddie,” Dooley says, taking it away from him.

  When I walk down to the mailbox that afternoon, Eddie in my arms and Dooley nearly tripping me when he bends to retrieve one of his Matchbox race cars, there is something spectacular in the mailbox.

  A letter for me?

  No. Something better.

  An invitation!

  Sue-Ellen Dandridge is having a thirteenth birthday party. Oh, why does it have to be her? A pool party at her parent’s club, the Valleyview Country Club, on Saturday, July 24, from two until five P.M. “Hot Dogs and Hamburgers will be served. And cake and ice cream, of course! Wear a suit and bring a towel. RSVP by July 18 to Mrs. Rodney Dandridge III at ASH-4745.”

  My heart is pounding. Oh, how I’d love to go to a pool party. But Snoop-Melon? Ugh … Why does it have to be that girl? Not that my father will let me go anyway. Eddie tries to pull the invitation from my hand.

  “No!” I shout too loudly. His lips pucker, about to cry.

  “Sorry, E,” I say, kissing his fat cheek. “It’s mine.”

  The telephone’s ringing upstairs.

  “Go, go, go,” Dooley shouts, and sends his favorite red Matchbox car zooming down the sloped conc
rete walkway that runs along the side of our house.

  “Come on, Dooley,” I say, reaching for his hand. “The phone.”

  “Wait,” he says, watching his car race away, his face all lit up excited.

  The little red car grows smaller and smaller as it races down the hill then vaults off the top step of the staircase that leads to the sidewalk and road below and is gone. The phone keeps ringing. D pulls my hand. “Come on, A. Let’s get it!”

  “No, D, the phone.” It might be Mike or Maizey. “I’ll get your car later. Come on!” I take his hand and yank him along, him crying and protesting.

  I rush up the steps, across the porch, and into the house, plunk Eddie into his crib, and then pick up the receiver. D and E are both crying now.

  “A! It’s me.”

  Maizey. Finally. Maybe she’s coming over.

  “Guess what?” she says.

  “What?” I say, panting and sweating, trying to catch my breath.

  “Sue-Ellen’s parents are inviting our whole class to a boy-girl birthday party, at their country club, which is absolutely beautiful, let me tell you. Isn’t that something?”

  “Yes,” I say. “I just got my invitation.” B and C are giggling in the living room, still side by side on the couch, watching the TV show I turned on for them before I went down to get the mail.

  “Don’t worry,” Maizey says. “We’ll make up something.”

  The “we” makes me feel good. Maizey means we will have to think up a story so that my dad will let me go to the party. If he hears that boys are invited, he won’t let me go. My heart is pounding. Maybe Mike will be there. I have to go! But I don’t have a decent bathing suit. And what if my father got suspicious and followed me to the party? He started checking up on me like that last year after one of his drinking buddies said, “You’re gonna have to lock that one up, Roe. She’s gonna be a looker like her mother.”

  That stupid, drunk old jerk. Why did he have to make my life even harder than it was by saying that? I looked in the bathroom mirror and studied my face that night. I didn’t see what he was talking about. I looked the same as I always do.

  Last year the Keating twins up on Stowe Avenue invited me and Maizey to a double date matinee at Proctors. The Keating twins have been our friends since kindergarten, we all wait at the same bus stop together, so it didn’t even seem like a real boy-girl date or anything. Maizey’s father was going to drive the four of us and pick us up right after the movie. My mom said I could go, but “just don’t tell your father.”

  Even though Jackie Keating had really bad breath and he didn’t even try to hold my hand, it was an okay first not-real-date, I guess. But as I ate buttery popcorn and sipped cola, I couldn’t focus on the movie I was so nervous … what if my father found out?

  Sure enough, when the four of us walked out into the sunshine from the dark theater, waiting for Mr. Hogan’s car, eating the stash of candy Mrs. Keating sent for us to eat, my heart froze when I saw my father’s car pull up.

  He leaned across the front seat and yelled out the window. “Get in!”

  My whole body turned red with shame and my legs wobbled with fear as I walked to the car. Tires squealed as we pulled away. He drove fast and yelled, but he didn’t hit me, probably because it was a Sunday. “You’re grounded,” he shouted when we got home, which was a meaningless punishment because I can never go anywhere anyway. Then late that night he banged on my door with a broom in his hand. “Get out there and sweep the dining room.”

  But what if … just maybe … I can go to the pool party. Imagine spending all that time, three whole hours, with Mike.

  Dooley is still crying about his red car.

  “Okay, okay. I’ll go get it. Stay here.”

  I head down past the mailbox, following the path the little red Matchbox took. It’s not on the front steps, not on the sidewalk. I look out on the road, cars whizzing past.

  I see something red way over against the far curb, but it’s tiny as a measle. It could be anything, really. And there is absolutely no way to investigate except to cross four lanes of traffic, which is definitely not going to happen.

  When I come back empty-handed, Dooley cries even harder. “But that’s my best one!” he says. He runs to the couch in the living room and looks out the window, down toward the road, his forehead pushing against the thin screen.

  “Don’t do that, D!” I say. “You’ll fall out and kill yourself.”

  “Please, A, please,” he cries. “I see it. There it is!”

  I kneel next to him and put my arm around him. I stare down but I don’t see even the measle anymore. “I’m sorry, Dool, but it’s gone. You’ve got lots of others.”

  “No!” he says. “Please, A, go find it.”

  “Your blue car’s really sharp, buddy. And the black Corvette. I love that one.”

  “But the red’s my favorite,” he screams. “It’s just like Daddy’s.” He runs to his bunk and cries as if he’s lost his very best friend.

  After lunch, grilled cheese with cut-up green grapes on top, I read B and C three Curious George books on the couch and send them to their beds for “quiet time.” I put D down for a nap. He turns away so I can’t kiss his cheek.

  “I’m sorry, Dool. I’ll get you a new red one for your birthday.”

  “But I want that one, A, that one.” He kicks the wall. “It’s my best one.”

  “I know, honey, I’m sorry.”

  Sitting in my mother’s chair, rocking E to sleep, I think about how much I hate Sue-Ellen for saying I smelled like pee in fourth grade, but how nice it would be to go to a pool party. I close my eyes and picture myself at a fancy country club like I’ve seen on TV, climbing to the top of the diving board, sashaying across it like a model, arching into a perfect dive, slipping into the water smooth as satin, with not so much as a splash.

  When I surface, Mike Mancinello is leaning over the edge of the pool, looking down at me, smiling, with those gorgeous brown eyes. “Need a lift, A?” he says.

  I hold out my hand, pretty pink manicured nails and all. “Sure, thanks,” I say, flipping my wet hair back off my shoulder, all casual, and he pulls me out of the pool.

  Mike offers me his towel and I dry off and we go to get cheeseburgers and all the other girls are watching us, jealous because he is the cutest boy ever. And then Snoop-Melon trips in the pool and drowns — no, sorry, God, erase that — she just slips in the pool and gulps in too much chlorine and it makes her throw up and snort bubbles out of her nose. I walk over to her, all make-believe concerned, hand in hand with Mike, and then I lean down and I sniff, sniff, sniff around her face.

  “Oh my gosh, everybody,” I shout, “she smells like puke!”

  Nothing happens unless first a dream.

  — CARL SANDBURG

  I decide to test out my Dreamsleeves idea with a small but important wish. I take one of the Hello labels from my father’s desk. Last year my dad won “most humorous” speech at one of his meetings. People say my dad is such a funny guy. There’s a picture of him on the wall. He looks maybe seventeen. He’s lying on his back on the roof of a car, his arms making a pillow behind his neck, gazing up at the sky. It’s summer, just before dark. My dad is smiling. He looks happy.

  In my room I cut the HELLO MY NAME IS part off the label. I print New Bathing Suit on the white space, peel off the backing, and stick my dream on my T-shirt sleeve, up top, facing out.

  When my mother gets home from work, she slumps down on a kitchen chair. Her ankles are swollen and her face is flushed and sweaty from the heat.

  “Get me a Tab and some chips, will you, A?” she says.

  “Sure, Mom.”

  She takes a long drink of soda and eats some potato chips. I get the portable fan from the living room and plug it in so it faces her.

  “Thanks, honey,” she says, “you’re so thoughtful.”

  She closes her eyes and I stand there in front of her watching the breeze blow wisps of damp brown hair f
rom her face.

  Finally, after a while, she opens her eyes. She sees the dream on my sleeve. “What’s that?” she says.

  “I need a new bathing suit, Mom. Last year’s is way too small for me.”

  “Okay. We can go pick out a pattern at Woolworth’s Saturday.”

  I sigh, no. That’s not what I had in mind.

  My mother makes a lot of our clothes on her Singer sewing machine in the dining room. When I was younger it was fun going to Woolworth’s with her and picking out patterns for a sundress or a Halloween costume. But I’m a teenager now! I don’t want some babyish bathing suit with strawberries and a big poofy ruffle across the chest like last year. I would die of mortification wearing a bathing suit like that to Sue-Ellen’s country club party. I’m sure Sue-Ellen orders her clothes from Sears.

  Mom and I turn our heads at the sound of footsteps on the porch. The knob turns, the kitchen door opens. Dad’s home. He’s dressed in a light blue jacket, white shirt, striped tie, and gray pants. My dad always dresses like a million bucks. His fake Coppertone tan is looking a bit orange, and he’s got a potbelly and is losing hair on the top of his head, but he’s still handsome.

  As he moves past me I smell his Old Spice Cologne and the cinnamon Dentyne gum he’s always chewing. Dad walks straight to the cupboard and takes out a glass. He opens the freezer, crack-twists some ice cubes out of the tray. They tinkle as they slide into the glass. He opens a liquor bottle, almost empty although he just opened it new on Saturday night. He fills his glass nearly to the top, and then splashes in some ginger ale.

  My mother watches all of this without a comment. She used to tell him to be careful, not to drink so much because of his stomach ulcer — his doctor warned him it was getting bad — but that just made my father angry and end up drinking more, so she doesn’t nag him about it anymore. She eats another potato chip. She keeps the peace.