Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (32 page)

He was also bewildered to find that his instincts as a voyeur were actually stronger than his instincts as a proper son. Though he knew he would suffer his mother's erotic memories each night, he would not abandon the bed for what he thought to be the dreamless floor. Had he slept there he would have encountered at least one of his father's dreams from the occasional nights that his father had slept on the floor. He would have disproven his easy theory that dead persons' dreams don't transfer to the living. His mother's dreams were simply stronger than his father's, so her dreams dominated the bed. Fred could, for example, have discovered his father's real feelings for his Aunt Blanche on the floor. But we are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries. We are top-of-the-water adventurers, who limit our opinions of the icebergs to what we can see.

Fred was learning something about dreams, but there was more that he was missing. Why, for instance, did he usually dream
historical
dreams? — that is, dreams which are really memories, or exaggerated memories of real events in our past, or secondhand dreams. There are other kinds of dreams — dreams of things that haven't happened. Fred did not know much about those. He didn't even consider that the dreams he was having
could
be his own — that they were simply as close to him as he dared to approach.

He returned to his divorced home, no longer intrepid. He was a man who'd glimpsed in himself a wound of terminal vulnerability. There are many unintentionally cruel talents that the world, indiscriminately, hands out to us. Whether we can use these gifts we never asked for is not the world's concern.

Other People's Dreams (1976)

AUTHOR'S NOTES

Here is another short story that spent a number of years in my bottommost drawer; every few months, I would take it out and revise it — then I would put it away again. After six years of this abuse, the story — what was left of it — was anthologized in a collection called
Last Night's Stranger: One Night Stands & Other Staples of Modern Life
, edited by Pat Rotter (A & W Publishers, New York, 1982). Other People's Dreams” ended up in good company — also in that collection were stories by Raymond Carver, Hilma Wolitzer, Richard Ford, Gail Godwin, Richard Selzer, Don Hendrie, Jr., John L'Heureux, David Huddle, Joyce Carol Oates and Robert Coover — but the story, for such a
little
thing, drove me crazy.

I went through a series of first sentences, all of which eventually became the end lines of paragraphs deeper in the story. These false beginnings were all statements of one sort or another. “Sleeping alone is different from sleeping with someone else” was the
first
first sentence. It was replaced, for a short while, by “It's frequently true that we have offered to us much of the insecurity of sleeping with strangers, and little of the pleasure.” (These statements were so self-evident that they seemed more tolerable when buried in the story.) Another was “We are not known for our ability to follow through on our unearned discoveries.” (For a while, “Unearned Discoveries” was the title of the story.) And my last effort to begin the story became, after six years, the end of the story instead. “There are many unintentionally cruel talents that the world, indiscriminately, hands out to us. Whether we can use these gifts we never asked for is not the world's concern.” (These sentences had earlier been
cut
from “The Pension Grillparzer,” where they were companions to the line about the death of the man who could only walk on his hands, which I kept: “The world has many unintentionally cruel mechanisms that are not designed for people who walk on their hands.”)

And I see now that my “terminal” theme, which extended throughout the writing of
The World According to Garp
, is repeated here. “He was a man who'd glimpsed in himself a wound of terminal vulnerability.” It's funny how this jumps out at me now — it didn't then. In addition to terminal patients and terminal cases, and even terminal
trees
, here's a poor guy whose vulnerability is terminal, too. (I don't know where all of this doomsaying came from.)

M
inna Barrett, 55, looks precisely as old as she is, and her figure suggests nothing of what she might have looked like “in her time.” One would only assume that always she looked this way, slightly oblong, gently rounded, not puritanical but almost asexual. A pleasant old maid since grammar school, neat and silent; a not overly stern face, a not overly harsh mouth, but a total composure, which now, at 55, reflects the history of her many indifferences and the conservative going of her own way.

Minna has her own room in a dormitory of Fairchild Junior College for Young Women, where she is the matron of the dormitory's small dining hall, in charge of the small kitchen crew, responsible for the appropriate dress of the girls at mealtime. Minna's room has a private entrance and a private bath, is shaded in the mornings by the elms of the campus, and is several blocks from Boston Common — not too far for her to walk on a nice day. This room is remarkably uncluttered, remarkable because it's a very small room, which shows very little of the nine years she has lived there. Not that there is, or should be, a great deal to show; it is only as permanent a residence as any other place Minna has lived since she left home. This room has a television and Minna stays up at night, watching the movies. She never watches the regular programs; she reads until the news at 11:00. She likes biographies, prefers these to autobiographies, because someone's account of his own life embarrasses her in a way she doesn't understand. She is partial to the biographies of women, although she does read Ian Fleming. Once at a party for the alumnae and trustees of the school, a lady in a soft lavender suit, who wanted, she said, to meet
all
of the school's personnel, found out about Minna's interest in biographies. The lavender lady recommended a book by Gertrude Stein, which Minna bought and never finished. It wasn't anything Minna would have called a biography, but she wasn't offended by it. She just felt that nothing ever happened.

So Minna reads until 11:00, then watches the news and a movie. The kitchen crew comes early in the morning, but Minna doesn't have to be in the dining hall until the girls come in. After breakfast she takes a cup of coffee to her own room, then maybe naps until lunch. Her afternoons, too, are quiet. Some of the girls in the dormitory will visit her at 11:00, to watch the evening news — there is an entrance to Minna's room from the dormitory corridor. The girls probably come to see the television more than they come to see Minna, although they are very considerate of her and Minna is amused at the varying stages of their undress at this hour. Once they were interested in how long Minna's hair would be if she let it down. She obliged them, unwinding, unfurling the long gray hair — somewhat stiff, but falling to her hips. The girls were impressed with how thick and healthy it was; one of the girls, with hair almost that long, suggested to Minna that she wear it in a braid. The next evening the girls brought a deep orange ribbon and they braided Minna's hair. Minna was meekly pleased, but she said that she never could wear it that way. She still might be tempted, the girls were so impressed, but it is too much to think of changing her hair from the tightly wrapped bun it has been all these years.

After the girls leave, after the movie, Minna sits in her bed, thinking of her retirement. The farm where she grew up, in South Byfield, comes back to her mind. If she thinks of it with a certain nostalgia she is not aware of this; she thinks only how much more restful her work at the school is, how much easier than on the farm. Her younger brother lives there now, and in a few years she'll return, to live with her brother's family, taking her tidy nest egg with her, and relinquishing herself and her savings to the care of her brother. It was only last Christmas, when she was visiting his family, that they asked her when she would come to stay for good. By the time she feels it is right for her to come, in another year or so, not
all
of her brother's children will be grown-up, and there will be things for her to do. Certainly no one would think of Minna as an imposition.

She thinks of South Byfield, what past and what future — after the news, after the movie — and she feels, now, no resentment toward this present time. She has no memories of a painful loss or separation, or failure. There were friends in South Byfield, whom she simply saw married or who just remained there after she quietly moved the 30 miles to Boston; her mother and father died, almost shyly, but there is nothing that she misses with particular pain. She doesn't think of herself as very anxious to retire, although she does look ahead to being a part of her brother's healthy family. She wouldn't say that she has a lot of friends in Boston, but friends for Minna always have been the pleasant and familiar people connected with the regular episodes of her life; they never have been emotional dependents. Now, for example, there is Flynn, the cook, who is Irish with a large family in South Boston, who complains to Minna of Boston housing, Boston traffic, Boston corruption, Boston this-and-that. Minna knows little of this but she listens attentively to him; in his swearing Flynn reminds her of her father. Minna doesn't swear herself, but she doesn't find Flynn's swearing unpleasant. He has a way of coaxing things that makes her feel as if his swearing really
works.
The daily battles with the coffee urn are invariably won by Flynn, who after long and dark curses, heavy jostles and violent threats of dismantling the whole thing, emerges the victor; for Minna, Flynn's animated obscenities seem constructive, the way her father would shout the tractor into starting, during the winter months. Minna thinks Flynn is nice.

Also, there is Mrs. Elwood, a widow, with deeper lines on her face than Minna has — lines which move like rubber bands when Mrs. Elwood talks, as if her chin were hinged to these lines. Mrs. Elwood is the housemother of the dormitory, and she speaks with a British accent; it is well known that Mrs. Elwood is a Bostonian, but she spent one summer in England, after her graduation from college. Apparently, she had a whale of a time there. Minna tells Mrs. Elwood whenever there's a movie with Alec Guinness on the late show, and Mrs. Elwood comes, discreetly after the news, after her girls have gone back to their rooms. It often takes a good half of the movie for Mrs. Elwood to remember if she's seen this one before.

“I must have seen them all, Minna,” Mrs. Elwood says.

“I always miss the ones at Christmastime,” Minna replies. “At my brother's we usually play cards or have folks in.”

“Oh, Minna,” Mrs. Elwood says, “you really should go out more.”

And, too, there is Angelo Gianni. Angelo is pale and slight, a bewildered-looking man, or boy, gray eyes that are merely a deeper shade of the color of his face, and there is nothing about him, outside of his name, to suggest that he's Italian. If his name were Cuthbert, or Cadwallader, there would be nothing in his appearance to suggest that. If he were a Devereaux or a Hunt-Jones you would see nothing of that in his awkward, embarrassed body — anticipating, with awe, the most minor crisis, and reacting dumbstruck every time. Angelo could be 20 or 30; he lives in the basement of the dormitory, next to his janitor's closet. Angelo empties ashtrays, washes dishes, sets and cleans tables, sweeps, does things like that wherever he is needed, and does other, more complicated things when he is asked, and when the problem has been thoroughly explained to him, more than once. He is exceptionally gentle, and he behaves toward Minna with a curious combination of the deepest respect — at times, calling her “Miss Minna” — and the odd, shy, flirtatious gestures of true affection. Minna likes Angelo, she is tender and cheerful with him as she is with her brother's children, and she is aware of even
worrying
about him. Angelo, she feels, stands on precarious ground, and at every moment of his simple, delicate life — unguarded, she thinks — he is prone to the cruelest of injuries. The injuries go unnamed, yet Minna can picture a hoard of sufferings lying in wait for Angelo, who lives fragilely, artlessly, in his isolated world of kindness and faith. Minna seeks to protect Angelo, seeks to instruct him, although these sufferings she envisions for him are quite nebulous to her; she can think of no great injury she has received, no great threatening and destructive force which ever has loomed over her. Yet, for Angelo she fears this, and she tells him her instructive stories, inevitably ending in a proverb (one of those proverbs she cuts from the daily newspaper and sticks with a small piece of Scotch tape to the thick, black pages of her photograph album, which contains only two photographs — one brownish print of her parents, stonily posed, and one color shot of her brother's children). Minna's stories are her own, stripped of any prelude, stripped of time and place, even names of characters, and certainly stripped of any emotional involvement of her own that might have existed at the time, might linger still —
might
, if Minna ever remembered anything in that way, or if anything could affect her, personally, in that way. The proverbs range from “A little knowledge is a dangerous thing!” to a whole assembly of mottoes urging compromise. The danger of trusting
too
much, of believing
too
much. Angelo nods to her advice; a frequent, awesome seriousness seems to fix his eyes, suspend his mouth, until Minna is bothered so much by Angelo's painful concentration that she tells him, as a footnote, not to take anything that
anyone
says too seriously. This only further puzzles Angelo, and seeing what effect she has had, Minna changes the subject to something lighter.