23
I’m standing at the door to my father’s consultation room. There’s a tremendous sense of urgency; someone is ill or injured, maybe me. I’m clutching a book to my chest to stem the rising pain there. Yes, I’m the one who’s ill and my father’s door is locked. I make a fist with my free hand to bang on the door, and then I jiggle the knob and call out to him. I can hear muffled voices and music coming from inside—it sounds like a cocktail lounge—but he doesn’t answer. I run around a street corner and try another door and it swings open much too easily, as if it’s fallen off its hinges. The room it leads to is completely white. I can’t see anything except that whiteness, like the brilliant glare in an operating room. The book is gone; I must have dropped it in the street. “Daddy!” I cry, and then I wake up.
The next day, at Andrea Stern’s, I tried to make meaningful associations with the images in the dream. Even before I got there, it came to me that the book I’d held to my breast represented my mother—her poetry, the pain in her own breast, her wish to calm the feeling in mine. Didn’t I still carry her everywhere, and wasn’t she lost?
I wondered if the whiteness of the room stood for purity, virginity, for something bridal, or maybe it was a kind of void, like the blank pages of another book, the one I hadn’t written. I told myself that my father didn’t come to the door because he couldn’t, because he was senile and confined to a wheelchair. Except he was in his office in the dream, completely restored to his old vigor from the sound of things, and I was a child again.
Dr. Stern stayed on the sidelines, offering encouragement and affirmation as I stumbled toward interpretation, but not pressing me into making connections. I felt so restive, the way I did when I was in labor, with a desire to pace or to just push the damned thing out. At the hospital, they’d made me wait until the baby began to descend, getting ready to present itself to the world. Suzy, especially, took her sweet time. Now I was the one stalling, unwilling or unready to let go. “This is like having a baby,” I groaned, and Dr. Stern said, “Yes, it’s hard work.”
“But maybe it’s only false labor,” I told her, just as I kept telling the doctor in the delivery room, when I wasn’t screaming. There was no backing out then, but before my hour in Dr. Stern’s office was up, I had veered away from the subject, and the most vivid details of the dream began to recede and fade.
I went to Violet’s studio later that day for coffee and a second opinion, and, as I had anticipated, she was far more directive and confrontational. “You women with kids are always looking for analogies to childbirth in everything,” she said. “In your writing and your painting, even in reading your own dreams—it’s such a cliché.”
I glanced at the canvas on her easel; there was certainly nothing life-giving there. “Well, they’re all hard work,” I said, a dull echoing of Andrea Stern.
“Yes, but you have to be more creative in your thinking,” Violet said, “and more radical.”
“So what do you think it means?”
“No, what do
you
think? And get your mind out of the stirrups for a minute.”
“I think I’m going nuts,” I said. “My marriage, my life, is wrecked, and all I can dream about are my parents. It’s as if I’m arrested at about the age of ten.”
“Ten,” Violet said thoughtfully. “What happened then?”
“You were there, too. You tell me.”
“It’s your dream, Alice. It’s your life.” She wasn’t that directive, after all. And hadn’t Jeannette Joie said something similar about the nagging feeling in my chest?
“That was the year I went to Dr. Pinch,” I told Violet. “His name inspired me, you know. I used to pinch myself, hard, while I was in his office, so I wouldn’t blink.”
Violet laughed. “Did it work?” she asked.
“Of course not.”
“What else?”
“Wait a minute,” I said. “Wait.”
“What?”
“My birthday.”
“What about it?”
“I don’t know. I can see the whole date printed out somewhere, on a calendar or something.” Violet’s birthday was only two weeks later, and we always had back-to-back celebrations. “Did we do anything special at our parties that year?”
“I can’t separate them from one another anymore. Was it the year of that manic clown, or was it when you had the magician with the balloons? Poor Allie, you were so afraid of those balloons.”
“I still am, a little. That awful rubbery squeak when he knotted our party favors. Cute little dachshunds for the girls, airplanes for the boys.”
“Sexist bastard,” Violet said mildly. “We should have reported him to NOW.”
“Actually,” I said, “I preferred the dachshunds. They
were
pretty cute. Yet I was never prepared for when they popped—the bang and that sudden deflation.”
“Yeah, don’t you just hate that deflation.”
“Women like you,” I said, “are always looking for sexual metaphors.”
“Well, when you can’t get the real thing . . .” Her voice trailed off, and the smile she tried on was feeble. Then she told me that she’d broken up with her married doctor a few weeks before, after she’d seen him walking past Framework one afternoon with his wife and child.
“But you knew that they were part of the deal,” I said.
“Yes, of course.” Violet said. “And I could handle them in theory, just not in the flesh.”
Flesh,
I thought, the word evoking nakedness, in a sexual sense, and in the sense of being exposed and undefended. And I knew that my own fleshy presence in the world would keep Violet and Ev from ever getting together, easing a fear I hadn’t even let myself acknowledge before this.
Then I thought of Michael, and of the startling possibility of Violet and Michael—that’s what comes from free association—but she was too old for him, really, just as I had been, and she probably wasn’t even his type or the right temperament. Part of my resistance to the idea, I knew, came from an old, subliminal rivalry between Violet and me, the darker side of our devotion. For an only child, I seemed to have an endless supply of would-be siblings.
“I’m sorry,” I told Violet.
She shrugged. “I’ll live,” she said. “Now back to you. Where were we? You were ten, right?”
But the fused odors of turpentine and linseed oil in the studio, which I’d always thought of with pleasure as Violet’s particular fragrance, had begun to seem suffocating. “Let’s not do this right now,” I said. “We’re not getting anywhere, and it’s creepily like Donna and Ricky trying to solve one of their little mysteries. Besides, I really have to go.” I realized that I’d just given one reason too many, that fatal move of bad liars. I looked at my watch, as if to back up my sudden restlessness with a hint at having actual plans.
The only place I needed to go, though, was home. And once I got there, I wasn’t sure of what to do with myself. It was that transitional time of day you might mark with cocktails and music when you lived with someone else, putting up a cheerful unified front against the onset of darkness. I didn’t feel like drinking alone, but I put a CD on the stereo, the soundtrack from
Sleepless in Seattle,
with all those gorgeous, sentimental old ballads.
When Jimmy Durante’s raspy, vital voice crackled through the speakers, singing “As Time Goes By,” I closed my eyes and began to slow-dance with an invisible partner around the living room. After a couple of turns, I bumped into the sofa, and I opened my eyes and sat down, overwhelmed by feelings I couldn’t exactly name. I remembered dancing with Ev, of course—swaying in place, really—and, long ago, watching my bathrobed parents glide across the floor together to the music of Les Brown or Char-lie Spivak. Like the embracing dancers suspended inside my mother’s perfume bottle. Was any of that, or maybe all of it, the source of the music in my dream? The whole thing was becoming curiouser and curiouser. And then I saw myself, barefoot, perched on my father’s black leather slippers, being whirled around the room, too, with my head flung back, until I was dizzy with delight and vertigo.
I shut off the stereo and went into the bedroom, where I took out my mother’s folder. I lay across the bed and opened it, reaching for the letter from the
New Yorker
editor in its separate pocket. There was the date— November 18, 1963—my tenth birthday, on the envelope’s postmark, not on an old calendar, as I’d suggested earlier to Violet. This was surely just a coincidence, but it seemed weighted with some significance I didn’t understand.
Later, when I was in bed again, absently watching the news on television, it occurred to me that the whiteness in my dream was a presence more than a void or an absence. But I couldn’t elaborate on that impression, and I fell asleep soon after that, still thinking about the dream, and hoping for and dreading a rerun, or even a sequel.
The next morning I realized that I hadn’t dreamed at all, at least not that I could remember. It was as if my head had been erased, leaving only chalky traces of what had been written there. I had a date to meet Suzy near Bloomingdale’s for lunch, and to go shopping with her afterward for bedding. Unlike Suzy, I’ve never liked shopping very much. It’s always seemed to be as much of a time-killing social ritual as a simple convention of free enterprise. But now I had plenty of time to kill; it made me contemplate how many hours of most couples’ lives are expended on ordinary domestic matters, like cooking meals and eating them, making love or plans or conversation.
As often as not lately, I ate directly from take-out cartons, sometimes standing at the kitchen counter, and I didn’t usually even go out to pick stuff up anymore; I had it delivered from one or another of the million ethnic places in the neighborhood: a noodle dish or something with chicken or tofu—they all tasted pretty much the same after a while—topped by an unpeelable complimentary orange or a packet of fortune cookies.
Your
honesty will be its own reward.
Yeah.
The winds of opportunity sew the seeds
of success.
Oh, the mysterious East Side!
So many people are on their own in the city. That’s why those bicyclists with plastic bags hanging from their handlebars are always crisscrossing the streets in the paths of taxis and pedestrians. I felt exposed in my aloneness every time the doorman announced over the intercom that I had a food delivery, and by the obviously modest size of my order. Dinner for one. I could swear that my skin was starting to smell like soy sauce, and every few days I threw out another refrigerated carton of petrified rice, a congealed version of what’s thrown at the newly married for luck.
At a bistro on Third Avenue, Suzy observed that I looked a little drawn, before she launched into a kind of joyous operetta about George and herself while she slid the red Bakelite bracelet up and down her arm. Somehow she also managed to finish everything on her plate. Then we went off to Bloomingdale’s.
There was a white sale in progress, and as soon as I saw the sign at the head of the escalator, I was reminded of my dream. I thought of telling Suzy about it, but I was afraid its hidden meaning might turn out be too intimate to share with her. Maybe Violet’s sexual metaphors were as common as rice, and maybe Freud was mistaken when he maintained, as Violet once informed me, that not all dream material was necessarily sexual. It was imperative not to lose my real place in my children’s lives by trying to become their friend.
While I was thinking all of that, Suzy worked her way determinedly along the sales racks, riffling through packaged sheets and pillowcases as if she were looking for something she’d misplaced. Even from a few feet behind her, I could hear her murmured exclamations about the superiority of one shade of parchment white over another, or about thread counts that seemed to reach into infinity.
When Ev and I first lived together, in Iowa City, our bed linens were a colorful assortment from our hastily merged households. His dark percales were permanently scented by a floral fabric softener, yet a stray sock or two often clung to them with static tenacity. I’d usually wake up with a rash on my cheeks, which might have come from the marathon kissing we did, or an allergy to the fabric softener. Or maybe we had a dangerously low thread count. But the only thing that mattered then was how recklessly we threw ourselves down onto those scruffy, mismatched sheets for love or sleep. They could have been clouds or cacti for all we noticed.
“So, what do you think, Mom?” Suzy asked. “Manila or alabaster? Lauren or Charisma?”
I grabbed her arm. “Listen,” I demanded. “You’re still happy, aren’t you?”
Suzy looked nervously around us. “Of course I am!” she exclaimed. “What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you been listening to me?”
I glanced around then, too, releasing her arm. I was embarrassing my children, one by one, in public places. “Of course I have,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure, that’s all. Lauren. Manila.”
The following Wednesday I told Dr. Stern that I hadn’t had the dream again. “I’m worn out from thinking about it,” I said. “And yet I feel remiss, as if I haven’t completed an important homework assignment.” Afterward, I started to walk home through Central Park again, despite my lingering lassitude, and the fact that I wasn’t dressed for the sudden, unseasonable chill. Leaves blew around my feet, and the birds near the reservoir pecked disconsolately or huddled together in their inflated feathers.
This walk was the starting point of the resolution I’d made that morning to be more active and hopeful. I had been lying around the apartment too much—brooding about everything, sleeping in sudden, uneasy little installments, and not getting enough exercise. I planned to begin eating healthier foods, too, and maybe even join a gym. On the main floor of Bloomingdale’s the other day, Suzy had urged me to have a makeover, or at least buy a new lipstick, and I’d reluctantly agreed. But when the beauty consultant approached, wearing a white lab coat and a dazzling professional smile, I had a moment of panic and headed for the doors.
The park wasn’t crowded this time, maybe because of the unsettled weather. There were several empty benches along the water, and I sat down on one of them to rest for a few minutes. I must have fallen asleep instantly, my brand-new talent, and I woke to something stinging my face. I couldn’t have been out very long; I was much too guarded to take a real nap in the middle of the park. But I seemed to have slept into winter.