Little Nightmares, Little Dreams

by Rachel Simon

  What do you mean? he says.

  Like — I don’t know. Like something we’re not.

  He peers at me. Do you really think this? he asks.

  Yeah, I say. Sure.

  But sitting here, watching his hair wave in the draft from the window, I realize they are just words I am saying, words he wants to hear. They sound right, but what do I care about this. What really matters is permanent warmth. Everything else is nothing.

  People flock to the second show, some inside the gallery with glasses perched on their noses, others outside with placards raised high. On my legs, sponges cluster in colonies; they seem to be streaming down my body, toward my extended foot. Amoebas take refuge on this foot. A few are incomplete, their other halves having been chased off my toes into oblivion.

  Most of the people focus on me.

  Through the windows I can see handwritten signs. SLASH THE FUNDS: STOP THE PEEP SHOW, says one. Wait a minute, I want to say, isn’t a lot of art about naked women? Then another sign comes into view: IN HERE ALL WOMEN ARE OBJECTS. But I am not all women, and I am not an object. Besides, who are they to tell me what to do with my body? On the opposite side of the building are more signs. One reads, A WOMAN’S BODY IS HER CASTLE. I prefer that, though in a way it is as offensive as the others. I am only one woman. My body does not stand for anything. It is mine. That is all. It is mine — and it is his.

  I think, as I stand, about him, about us, about how he does not know I am lying to him. I think about those first lies, and the ones that followed; how quickly they slid from my lips, as easy as a kiss. But he’s never doubted what I’ve said. He needs me too much.

  And then I think about the morning after a gallery had decided against taking the action pictures he’d painted of me. He had pinned all his hopes on getting in there, and the next day when I came by, he was still in bed. I thought you wanted to work today, I’d said. I can’t do it anymore, he’d replied, and he rolled over and faced the wall.

  I sat by his pillow for a minute. After a while I said, Let’s do something different today.

  It’ll all be the same. It’ll never change.

  Maybe not, but we can still have fun. Look, why don’t you try painting something new.

  Like what.

  Like, and I’d looked out his window to the junkyard, like hubcaps or bottles or car roofs.

  He didn’t say anything.

  Or an animal. Paint some animal. A dog. Me.

  It’s been done, he said.

  Then do it new. Do it your way.

  I don’t know what that is anymore.

  Come on, I’ll help you figure it out. I’d taken hold of his arm and pulled until he sat up.

  And you know that Works in Progress show at the university that you wanted to enter? With such good money in it? Enter me.

  He shook his head and laughed. That’s a long shot.

  Maybe, I said. Maybe not.

  We have three weeks to go. Every morning, we read the newspaper to each other. He reads me the news. I read him the editorials. I am getting better at understanding what they’re about, and asking him to define the words he uses: Machiavellian, seditious, parasitic. I will not look them up in front of him, but when I ask him questions, he seems to feel so good. And sometimes, just to show he’s had an effect on me, I use the words later, if they seem to apply to the paintings. Like these fish and the seaweed — that’s symbiotic, right?

  He starts, stares at my leg. I guess so, he says. You know, I think you’re smarter than you give yourself credit for.

  I tell him to keep painting.

  Every few days, there are letters to the editor about the show at the university, and inevitably, they focus on me. There are so many arguments, I can’t keep track of them all. “Now you see what happens when we fund any Joe Quasi-Artist off the street. Money should not be squandered on immorality,” one letter says. Another, anonymous, is so short, I almost miss it. In its entirety it reads: “And they wonder why they get raped?”

  I know it is not hopeless if I work things right. I did it once before, when I lived in that other city.

  A boy, that first one in the alley, became my brother. His father moved in with my mother and brought him along. That first night, we eyed each other across the living room, waited till we heard the springs creak in my mother’s bed, then stole into my room. Below us the boys were getting high in the alley. We closed the window. I’d never felt a sheet beneath me when I did it. It made me feel like an angel.

  We hung out every night. The other boys didn’t like it. You’re ours, they’d say. We’ll take you back soon enough, soon as he bags you. Don’t worry, he’d tell me. You’re my woman. I’ll take care of you.

  And he did. He was strong, with a body so big that when he stood in a doorway, he could block almost all the light; when he lay over me, and came down low on his elbows, he would cover me completely — he became my ceiling and sky. Other boys never dared go after me with him around. He walked by my side always, his arm around my shoulders.

  Then one of his old girlfriends called him up and said she was going to have his baby. But I haven’t seen you for months, he said. Sorry, she said, four more weeks and I’m popping. You want to see it, you come by.

  I got to go, he told me, packing. I can’t do nothing.

  Think you’ll stay with her? I asked, throwing some things in a shoulder bag, thinking stupidly that maybe I could go along.

  Till the kid’s born, he said. After that, I don’t know.

  Next morning I told my mother I was walking him to the bus.

  He’s a good kid, his father said. My mother put her arm around her man. What did she know. I hiked my bag up higher on my shoulder and cursed this old girlfriend. If only I could have gotten pregnant first. But then I’d have to share him.

  The other boys ground broken glass under their sneakers as they watched my brother and me walk down the block. They said nothing. He held my hand.

  At the end of the street I turned and looked at them. They shot kisses up the sidewalk at me. My brother jerked my hand. I turned my back on them. All the way to the bus, I could feel them staring. They would be waiting for me to return. They would gun me down on the street with their eyes.

  The sixth show is packed. Around me, canvases are filling up, marble is smoothing down into figures. Dinosaurs are dying across my body. The protesters are still outside. They will argue their case before the finance committee tomorrow, but we are planning that Homo sapiens will cover me next week.

  The show is almost over, and I am looking forward to going home, when a large man with skin the color of gray stone comes in. I am twisting at the waist, my arms reaching toward the ceiling so the pterodactyls appear to be flying. The man heads right for my side. He winds through the crowd, brushing people out of his way like weeds. They sway back, unaware, it seems, of his touch. There is something familiar about him, not his face but the way he moves, the way his eyes are lit. He reminds me of the boys.

  I am standing there, posing as though I am trying to climb into Heaven, when this man walks up. His head is even with mine, despite the pedestal. I glance away and find my artist. He is talking to someone. He is in the middle of saying something and he freezes, his hands caught spread and speaking, and he turns his head toward me. I peer back at the man. My eyes are looking right into his. He is staring at me.

  And then he grabs me and jerks me down from the pedestal and presses me into him and clamps his mouth onto mine. I try to scream, but my voice cannot get out. His breath tastes of onions and beer, the wool of his coat scratches my skin like a brick wall, I try to push away but he’s too strong, I can’t wriggle out of his grip. All around, I hear the cries of people, the artists — my artist — the security guards, the stomping of feet. Clear the way! Doors are slammed shut. His tongue twists into me. I can feel his rough hands kneading into my waist, kneading the paint right off my skin.

  All right, buddy, they shout. Dozens of fingers squeeze between us and
try to pry him off me. The skin of one hand is covered with bumps — the raised paint of my artist. He is here. He’ll do something. He will —

  But the stone man won’t let go. I’m squirming, I’m kicking, the hands are like crowbars, I’m wrenching my head this way and that, there are bodies all around me, men everywhere: Let her go! they yell.

  I open my eyes. He is looking right at me. His eyes are as gray as the stone of his skin. The lines in them run wild, like someone carved up the whites with a razor.

  And then I feel air on my skin, he is breaking away from me; they’ve got him now. His mouth drops off mine, but his eyes are locked onto me, and as the police wrest him away, he leans toward me and rasps: Baby, baby, you are a gift from God.

  Once he is off me, he holds out his hands, and the police slap on the cuffs. I cough and gasp for air. He grins at me until they turn him around and lead him out.

  It is then that I see the gallery has been cleared. Outside, voices are shouting so many things I cannot hear any of them. Security guards linger at the door.

  You all right? my artist says, and he lays his hand on my back. I lower my head, cover my eyes with my fingers, breathe. I thought you were going to get him off me, I say. I thought you were going to take care of me.

  He was a big guy. Strong. Think I broke some fingers.

  He holds up his right hand, his painting hand. The three long fingers are swollen, bent sideways and backward, and covered with blood. Looks like this counts us out for the finish, he says.

  I am changing the dressing on his fingers. The seventh show is tonight, but we will not be there; we had to withdraw. The finance committee, seeing no reason to pursue, canceled the hearing. It will be several weeks before my artist can paint again. I’d tried to relax in what would have been our last week together, but instead I worried about my future with him. So I have been cooking his meals. I have been scrubbing the paint off his bathtub.

  You know, you don’t need to stay here, he says when I finish wrapping the bandage.

  But I want to. I want to keep you up and busy.

  I can’t be busy if I can’t work.

  Sure you can. Let’s go somewhere. Let’s do something.

  What.

  Anything to get out of your studio. It’s still light out; how about if we go sit on your front steps and watch the sun set over the junkyard?

  He brings a jug of wine. I sip some water. Trolleys and cars pass by, men in overalls stroll home from work. A fine mist has settled onto the street; there are no colors in the sky.

  I know I cannot wait any longer.

  I take his hurt hand and press it between my two. He does not resist. His skin is rough and hard, as coarse as the bandage that surrounds his fingers. Do you like me? I ask him, placing his hand beneath my skirt, squeezing it between my thighs.

  He turns to me and smiles. Yes, he says, and he outlines my cheekbones with a finger from his other hand. You’ve been what I needed. I’ll always like you.

  Will you stay with me? I ask.

  I feel his hand go limp. I’m not the person you want, he says. I can’t even take care of myself.

  But we’re a team. Look at the publicity we got.

  Nothing lasts long in the art world. Something new will come up, and people will forget about us.

  I want to make us last, I say.

  He smiles quietly into the distance.

  And then he bends over and kisses me, for the first time, on my lips. Our mouths are closed, our lips puckered like little hearts. This is what I’d wanted for so long, this is what I’d worked for. But as he pulls away, I realize: there was no passion in his kiss. Nothing I’ve done has worked; he did not touch me as a lover. I cannot believe it. I swallow to stop shaking inside.

  You are not like a father, I say, stroking his face.

  You are too much like a daughter, he replies, removing my hand.

  He folds my arms in my lap and turns. I follow his gaze, but there is nothing I want to see.

  I could sit here until I found a man walking by who appealed to me. Then I could stop him with a toss of my hair. Or I could leave right now, go downtown, find a man on a corner licking his lips, sweating, burning to guide my fingers toward his belt. I could do whatever I want, but as I sit on these steps watching possibilities stroll by, I decide to stay here, just one more night. Tomorrow I’ll say goodbye and walk to a store, and there I’ll put on a little eye shadow, a little lipstick and blush. I’ll check myself in a mirror. I’ll decide how I’m going to look.

  I peer down at my legs. Below the stockings, I spy the outline of the paintings, frozen in motion. Then I look harder, and I realize that I am seeing nothing but the chilly rising of my own veins. The paint has washed away. All that is left is me.

  The Long Sadness of No

  When my mother turned seventeen, she fell in love with a man who had multiple sclerosis. For dates, she and Peter rode buses, looping through one town after another in the slanting sunlight of each afternoon. They sat close, the sides of their bodies touching, their hair weaving into the wool of each other’s sweaters. He whispered funny stories about other passengers; she giggled. They rode until night fell, and on that final run they would slouch down and kiss, stopping only when my mother noticed that they had passed Peter’s stop. Then he reached for his cane, and shuffled off the bus, and poked through the brown leaves shriveling on the sidewalks. She inched along, holding on to steady him. The few blocks to his house often took an hour. Afterward, she ran home, keeping in the street, as far as she could get from shadows and strangers.

  If my mother was awake during the afternoon naps we took together before I was old enough for school, I would ask her about Peter. She told me about the stars he notched into his cane after their trips, about the melted-chocolate sound of his voice. She never refused to answer my questions. And I asked so many. Sometimes, when she and I were riding in the car, or cooking dinner, and there was a lull in our conversation, I would pick up where we’d left off the day or the week before. On occasion, her stories about him made her voice crack, and she would turn and hug me. I always squeezed hard when I hugged back.

  Once, when the whole family was at the shore, and my father was hauling the beach chairs back to the car, and my mother was holding the baby, and the rest of us were grumbling about the hot sand, I ran up to her and asked why she hadn’t married Peter. She did not say, “I fell out of love with him.” Nor did she say, “He fell out of love with me.”

  She said, “Because then I’d have to do everything by myself. Like carry those beach chairs and your sister at the same time.”

  I tried to protest but I didn’t know what to say. It simply made too much sense.

  Later, after the divorce, when my brothers and sisters and I pleaded with my mother to explain why she ever married my father in the first place, she told us, “I was so depressed after I broke up with Peter that I couldn’t see straight. I used to walk in front of cars.… Then someone introduced me to your father…”

  Now she is almost sixty, and has gone through two more marriages and countless other men. Sometimes she goes to singles dances. Inevitably she ends up in the ladies room, weeping behind a stall door so she doesn’t have to face anyone, not even herself in the mirror. She calls me from a nearby pay phone, where she twists the segmented cord around her fingers like a spiral of rings, occasionally pulling so hard she breaks the connection and has to call back. I come and drive her home. She begs me to spend the night on her sofa. I cannot say no.

  Last night I had a dream about Peter. In it, I find him in an institution, sitting in a wheelchair. I come up to him and tell him who my mother is. His eyes widen as he takes me in — I have my mother’s body, I have her skin and her lips. His face grows flushed, and in that melted-chocolate voice I’ve imagined so many times, he asks, “Can I see her? Can I see her?” I run to a phone across the room, call and tell her that I have found him. “It’s a miracle,” I say. “He is waiting for you to drive over.�
� “After all these years?” she says. “I can’t. I feel too guilty.” She hangs up. I stare at the wall while I gather the courage to explain this, and then I turn around, but even across the room he has heard everything; already he is crumpled and sobbing in his wheelchair. When I wake up, I am crying too, and my body is stiff with the paralysis that comes from sleeping in the wrong position.

  I will not tell my mother about my dream. It would only be cruel. Life is hard enough without your children tugging at your sleeve, bringing up things that cannot be changed.

  Grandma Death

  I found the first one on my way to work. It was in the bathroom at the bus terminal.

  I’d just come out of the toilet and was slinging my purse over my shoulder when I happened to notice, under the stall door right in front of me, a dark hand with blue-gray nails and fingers curled in like a claw. I looked harder and could make out the arm behind it, soaking up a puddle of water. I bent down and peeked inside the stall. That was when I saw the head, resting against the base of the john. The legs must’ve been back there somewhere, but I sure wasn’t about to look for them.

  I ran to the sinks, didn’t see anyone, so I went out to the ticket booth and told the man behind the counter. I wanted to stay for the big scene — ambulance, doctor, body bag — but I had to get to work. George, my boss, says I’m lucky to have a job at Shop-Rite, they usually don’t hire old women like me because we work too slow and suffer from arthritis and eye trouble. I myself don’t work too slow, and all he can say about me is I’m stout and short. But my friends from high school, those that’re still alive, are half blind and humpbacked and move like molasses. They would’ve had a stroke just walking into the bathroom at the bus station, let alone finding someone on the floor. So I know what he means.

  Next morning I saw it in the Daily News: Drug Death in Philadelphia Bus Station. I’ve read the paper every day of my life, but this was the first time I saw my own name in it. I cut the article out and at work taped it to my cash register. Freddie the stock boy said I was brave, especially for an old lady. I said, Bravery had nothing to do with it, and stop calling me an old lady. He said, Sorry, and just before closing he took the shoppers’ music off the loudspeakers and rapped a little song about it. Lazy kid. Should be working, not wasting his time.