Red Plaid Shirt Page 12

  Either you were ignoring my mood or you were just getting used to me.

  Your best dreams, your pork-induced visions, were all about work: the backhoe, the Cat, the scraper, the grader, you were operating all of them at once: knocking down trees, digging up boulders and whole mountainsides, grading steep slopes perfectly within an inch of your life so help me, loading twenty trucks a shift, unloading them all again at the other end, waking me up with your twitching as the dump truck bucked beneath you, box up, shrugging out the last of its load.

  To dream of machinery foretells undertaking a project which will give great anxiety, but will finally result in good for you. If the machinery is idle or derelict, it indicates approaching family or employment problems.

  I handed you your lunch and cursed you out for taking my last cigarette.

  All you said was, “I’m so tired. I’ve been working all night.” I said nothing and glared at your hands, nicotine-stained and speckled with scabs and fresh scrapes which you liked to enumerate each evening over supper. Particularly purple and ugly were the two flat knuckles on your left hand, squashed one afternoon between a boulder and the tailgate, a story you loved to tell repeatedly in the bar, wrapping it up with, “Well, I guess that’s what they mean by ‘Caught between a rock and a hard place,’ eh?”, not mentioning how you threw up at the sound of your own bones grinding.

  You were gabbing on about how in the dream you nearly rolled the truck and then the other guy just missed you with the bucket of the backhoe, until I said, gritting my teeth and spacing my words, “Can’t you just be quiet for once?”

  I always told you I hated to talk in the morning because, after sleeping for the last eight hours, I had nothing to talk about but my dreams and who wants to hear all that crap?

  People change.

  7

  My best talking time was after we went to bed. We weren’t having sex much anymore by then, so maybe my babbling was just a way of filling in the time. One night I remember we were talking about Italians, their industriousness, how they would come over from the old country with nothing and build up successful companies in concrete or construction. Then I told you about all the Italian women I’d worked with that one summer at the bank in Atwater. This covered lasagna (Angelina), Italian weddings (Loretta), arranged marriages (Teresa), and how some Italian women get so fat and sloppy after the first baby (Rosina) and how some Italian men fancy themselves such Romeos and like to let their chest hair show (Rosina’s husband, Guido). Then I discovered you had lint in your belly button, which put me in mind of that girl I knew at the Atwater United Church who had no belly button and how we used to serve at church teas together.

  And you said, “Sleep, sleep, woman, I’m begging you to let me sleep.”

  That night all of my dreams were accompanied by organ music.

  Pleasant organ music heard in a dream is an omen of satisfying sexual prowess. To hear doleful singing with organ accompaniment denotes you are approaching a tiresome task and probable loss of friends or status. To see an organ in church warns of despairing separation of family members and death, perhaps, for some of them.

  8

  I dreamed I was trying to steal another woman’s baby from a furniture store. Then my mother offered me $3,000 and a fancy orange sports car if only I would leave you and go live with her in a mobile home in Florida. She said, “If he really loved you, he’d marry you.” We were in Sonja’s kitchen, eating cabbage rolls and borscht, and the car was parked right across the street, running.

  9

  The reasons for our leaving each other are not especially clear. I wish you had left me for another woman. Such triangular situations are so common, so understandable. By way of compulsive comparison—myself to her, my hair to hers, my hips to hers, my cooking, my cleanliness, my clothes, my big eyes to hers — the pain would become so much more accessible, acceptable.

  I wish you had left me for another woman or I wish I had left you for another man because then either or both of us could dream of revenge.

  To dream of taking revenge is a sign of a weak and uncharitable nature, which will bring you trouble and loss of friends. Such a dream is a reminder that you must give consideration if you expect to get it.

  10

  I went to a dinner party at the home of another writer. We had a chicken, tender and meaty enough to have been a turkey, which she’d bought from the Hutterites. The other guests were writers too and one or two filmmakers. They talked about people I didn’t know, movies I hadn’t seen, books I hadn’t read. I couldn’t blame them: they all knew each other, I was new in town and not about to admit that no, I wasn’t especially fond of Henry James and hadn’t got around to reading Chekhov yet. Over dessert (fresh strawberries in heavy cream), they began to trade their dreams around the table like a deck of cards. They had earnest, intelligent dreams, intricate like lace or the way a prism in the window will cast colours on the backs of your hands.

  “I was sitting with a group of Cossacks drinking black tea from a silver samovar. Then one of them turned into Dostoyevsky and we were debating crime and punishment until he wanted to know about Australian Rules Football and what does this word ‘nuclear’ mean? The windows were white with frost and a wolf howled.”

  “Oh, I’ve had that one too!”

  “I was preparing Boeuf Bourguignon, sipping a good Chablis. Gurdjieff was coming for dinner. Afterwards we would play croquet and the sunset would be perfect.”

  “Marvellous!”

  “I was having my first haircut, a child of two. Vidal Sassoon was the barber and I was reading to him from Sartre’s Being and Nothingness.”

  “Wonderful!”

  “I was a peacock, preening.”

  “Oh oh, we all know what that means!”

  I felt inadequate and pushed the strawberries around in my bowl the way Ben does when he doesn’t want to eat. But there was no escaping them.

  So I told my recurring dream, the one where I am in bed, sweating and scared, trying to call out for my father but the sound won’t come out. Everything in this dream is detailed and true; it has recast itself into every bedroom I have ever lived in. Finally, after years of this, I woke myself up one night screaming, “Dad! Dad!” and you held me and I never had the dream again.

  This was so obvious as to seem shallow.

  11

  The puppy, I assume, dreams about cats and other dogs, raw steak maybe on a good night. She twitches and whimpers, thumps her stubby tail on the floor.

  The cat, I assume, dreams about birds, mice, and other cats, a nice fresh can of tuna. She sighs.

  What does Ben dream about? I like to think that he is dreaming about running, flying, cuddling, sailboats, ice cream with sprinkles, Big Bird, and lambs. I do not like to think he is dreaming about the time when he, at two months, cried all night and I whispered, hysterical at four in the morning, “Shut your fucking mouth, you little bastard!” and then laid my wet cheek against his monkey face and rocked him and watched till the streetlights went out, smelling his perfect skin.

  He is too young, he will not dream about you. Oh, he may dream about your photographs, your guitar, your bald head, as I sometimes do.

  To see a bald-headed man in a dream warns to guard against being cheated by someone you trust. For a young woman to dream of a bald-headed man means she must use her intelligence against listening to her next marriage offer. Bald-headed babies signify a happy home, a loving companion, and obedient children.

  He is too young, he will not remember his grandmother either. For the rest of his life, he will suspect that all of the strangers in his dreams are either her or you.

  12

  Often I dream that I am dreaming. But still, such knowledge does not keep me from the fear.

  13

  When I dream about you now, you are always wearing that red shirt.

  14

  Two months after my mother died, my father came here to visit Ben and me. The night before he was scheduled to a
rrive, I dreamed that when he did, my mother was with him, wearing her pink shortie nightie and a scarf. In the dream, I thought very clearly, Well, of course, I should have known this would happen.

  I went to pick him up at the airport, the little old-fashioned kind where the passengers still have to walk down the steps and across the tarmac in the dark windy night. I stood behind the chain-link fence and watched for him, my tall father, thinking he would be wearing that stupid hat he always wears when he has to do something official like go to the doctor or fly. But there he was, coming at me bare-headed — and alone, of course.

  An East Indian family got off the plane behind him. The man, in jeans and a plaid shirt, held a sleeping child against each shoulder. The woman behind took tiny steps in her purple sari, cuddling a wide-awake fat baby whose soother fell out of its mouth and rolled across the parking lot as she passed me. I was feeling too cruel or isolated to point this out to her and the taxi they got into backed right over it.

  I had two dreams about planes while my father was here. In the first, a small red and white plane had crashed in my backyard, sending up fireworks instead of flames, and we were only surprised, not hurt or frightened. In the second, I was driving my father back out to the airport to go home but it ended up that Ben and I boarded and he stayed behind, waving. I knew it was all a mistake but there could be no turning back now.

  I told my father this one at breakfast as he held Ben on his lap and fed him toast with strawberry jam, but I never told him about the fireworks.

  15

  During my father’s visit, I had one of those dreams where you keep coming almost awake but you don’t want to, so, miraculously, you are able to swim back down and pick up where you left off.

  In the dream, you and my father are in the kitchen, talking about fishing. Your father, you are telling him, tied his own flies. I am making hamburgers and salad, bringing you both another beer. My dead mother, I discover, has been laid out in my new queen-size bed. I try to walk into the bedroom but see her folded hands and think I am going to throw up. I back away, then force myself forward again and then again, gagging. I never do get into the room before I wake up.

  There was something in this dream about lettuce, about peeling away all those pale green leaves. Or was there? Maybe I just made it up, searching for a symbol, trying to get surreal.

  16

  Four months after my mother died, Ben and I went back to Atwater to visit my father. Each day he said, “Maybe we should go out to the cemetery this afternoon,” until finally one day we went. I took pictures of her headstone with the lilies in the rain, something which did not strike me as an odd thing to do until after I got the prints back and could not think where to put them.

  When we got back to my father’s house, Ben fell asleep and I lay down too, on my parents’ bed. There was thunder and lightning all afternoon. I am still afraid of storms, not the lightning so much, which is swift and can kill you instantly, but the thunder, which is unpredictable and makes you hold your breath waiting for it.

  In the long dream we are driving in from the country, my mother, father, me, in a taxicab at night. I am obsessively worrying that I will have to drive in the dark, will wreck the car and kill us all. But no. It turns out that the cab driver will take us all the way to wherever we are going.

  We stop at a supper club on the highway, eat steak, treat the cab driver too because he’s such a nice guy. He holds my hand on the way back to the car. Then we are just travelling for a long time.

  When daylight comes, I am alone in the seedy downtown section of a strange city. I walk along many slummy streets, looking for a bookstore. I even climb over a chicken-wire fence. I pass a little old lady in a green dress who says, “It’s hard to get around these days,” so I help her over the fence.

  I go below street level into a narrow room and find it filled with colourfully dressed people and bikers. I meet a young blonde man wearing an Indian shirt, the embroidered kind with mirrors.

  He says, “My name is Chris. I’ve fried my brain. I used to be a Hare Krishna and they killed my brain. Look into my eyes, they are dead, empty, insane.”

  We make love and I say, “No, your eyes are beautiful, neither dead, empty, nor insane.”

  A short blonde woman with a shirt just like his, dirty little hands and feet, comes over and watches us. She is his girlfriend, Kathy. She leaves.

  Making love again, he says, “I’m dead, I can’t feel anything.”

  I say, “I’ll make you feel it.”

  He is on top, I climax, he doesn’t, but says, “Still, you made me feel something, more than Kathy can.”

  We make love once more, I’m on top, I come twice, calling his name. He comes too and cries on me, with love and relief.

  Back on the street, I’m waiting for a bus at a huge, complex intersection where eight streets converge. Behind me is a Safeway store, an A&P, and an IT&T. My watch reads 10:17 a.m. I am being blown around in the hot wind and, hanging onto a parking meter, I tell the man beside me that I wish I had a pen so I could write down the street names to find this place again.

  But I’ve lost my purse and I panic, until I look in the pockets of the green army parka I’ve acquired. There I find my wallet, cigarettes, address book, and two library books: Disturbances in the Field by Lynne Sharon Schwartz and Technique in Fiction.

  The bus comes and I am riding to my parents’ house, thinking of how mad they’re going to be that I stayed out all night. So I decide to let my mother help me choose a dress for the dance tomorrow night. This is bound to make her happy again.

  It was the kind of dream that you think takes hours, the kind of dream that makes perfect sense when you first wake up and then proceeds to mystify you all day long.

  17

  I have never dreamed about the lilies.

  To dream of a lily denotes coming chastisement through illness and death. For a young woman to dream of admiring or gathering lilies denotes much suffering coupled with joy. If she sees them withering, the sadness is nearer than she suspects. To dream of breathing the fragrance of lilies denotes that sorrow will purify and enhance your mental qualities.

  18

  From my mother’s closet, I chose a green linen suit and a white blouse and put them in a brown paper bag. I did not know beforehand that I would also have to give them her underwear: a slip, bra and panties, pantyhose. Shoes, they said, were optional. I didn’t put them in because I couldn’t bear to think of anyone putting them on her feet. My father at the last minute put in the emerald earrings and pendant he’d given her for Christmas three weeks earlier.

  As we shuffled past the coffin, he moaned and held his arms out, leaning forward as if to kiss her. I pulled him back and led him away because I was afraid.

  After the service, everyone went to Sonja’s for sandwiches and dainties, dark rum and beer. Sonja gave me a huge pot of spaghetti sauce which I served with salad for supper that night to the relatives gathered in my father’s house. You called long-distance with your sympathy.

  That night I slept in the bed of my childhood and my feet kept bumping the borrowed crib where Ben slept at the end. He sighed and said, “Sorry.” I counted the books on the shelves like sheep.

  That night I dreamed of your lips, which I was always fond of.

  Sweet lips in a dream signify a successful sex life and happiness in love. Thick, overly sensual, or ugly lips forecast failure in love but success in business. Sore or swollen lips denote deprivation and unhealthy desires.

  At breakfast, my father said, “I had a kooky dream last night. I dreamed that your mother had left me and they said she was living with some guy on Market Street. But I said, ‘No, she’s dead, it can’t be true, she can’t be over there with him.'”

  I kept on scrambling farm-fresh eggs for Ben.

  19

  The only childhood dream I can still remember is the one about the giant camel. I am in the school basement, wearing my black patent-leather shoes and my new tartan
skirt with the gold pin. I am hiding in the bathroom, where all the toilets are short and the concrete blocks are painted pink. The camel is upstairs in the kindergarten room. His hooves come through the ceiling like shovels. I am washing my hands and there is hair on the soap.

  There is never any doubt that the camel will get me.

  To dream of a camel means you will have to work hard to overcome your obstacles. If the camel bore a burden, unexpected wealth, possibly in the form of an inheritance, will come your way. If you rode the camel, your future is bright indeed.

  20

  I often dream about Lake Street in the east end of Atwater. In this dream nothing happens and I’m not in it. In this dream it is always five o’clock in the morning and raining. Cars with their headlights on pass each other all up and down the wet street, swishing and splashing to a halt, idling and waiting for the light to change. The tavern has its windows bricked up. The Chinese grocery and the pawnshop are bankrupt, vacant, the apartments upstairs condemned by the health department. Winos lounge and sleep or die in the doorways of warehouses filled with washers, dryers, fridges, stoves, dishwashers, and stereos. Bats cling and swoop. The rain stops, the sun comes up hot, and the sidewalks steam.

  There is in this dream a persistent and clammy sense of danger which does not materialize and is never explained.

  21

  I dreamed about buying a refrigerator in the chocolate-brown colour no longer popular among major appliance purchasers (so the salesman informs me while eating a peanut butter and banana sandwich) but I just have to have the brown anyway. Then I call Annie Churchill, who I graduated from high school with and haven’t seen since, although I seem to know that she is married to a dentist now and happy about it. I tell them what I’ve just bought, how much I love it, how much I’ve changed. “You’re getting so domestic in your old age,” he says or she says.

  After a grainy digression that has to do with a party and changing my clothes, there is a slow-motion section about an enormous mound of cocaine being kneaded into a pound of raw hamburger and stashed in the fridge door behind the eggs because the cops are coming, I can hear the sirens.