Image borrowed from YahooThe Fox and the Hare
I had a recurring dream for years. I’m wearing a tuxedo, and I step onto an elevator and fall perfectly in love with a beautiful woman I’ve never met before. As soon as we lock eyes, it’s like we’ve known each other forever. We decide we want to get married, and we have to do it before the elevator reaches its destination because we’re each going to different floors, which means we’ll be separated. The problem is that she doesn’t have a dress. Luckily, her father is a Nobel-Prize-winning chemist who’s developed this chemical that he can add to cloth to make it totally malleable. It’s untested, but she happens to have some with her. She pours it on her clothes, and they change so that she’s suddenly wearing a wedding dress. It’s white, full of lacy ruffles. There happens to be a preacher on the elevator, and he begins the ceremony. He looks just like my father. Someone who looks like Ms. Sandee’s there, as a witness. I’ve never been happier. It’s a perfect moment, she and I; I can feel her arm in mine. But then it’s gone. I look at her, and she’s nothing but a dress, still holding its shape from the ruffles, but empty. I stick my head in, but there’s a sea of ruffles and I have to sort of swim down through them. We’re almost to one of our floors, and I’m swimming, and I see her, way down ahead of me. She’s shrinking away from me. Someone she yells to me that my touch has made her have a reaction to the chemical; it made her shrink. I’m afraid that someone will step on her (everyone in the elevator is wearing heavy boots, even the preacher/Dad and Ms. Sandee) but I can’t reach her as she shrinks. We are the fox and the hare; the faster I move through the cloth, the faster she shrinks. I make a herculean effort and dive completely into the dress, committing totally to this insane chase, and I almost reach her. But then the bell dings. Everyone else in the elevator grumbles, so I have to tear the cloth apart to escape it. She’s gone, shrunk so small I can’t find her. I know she’ll be trampled, but what can I do? It’s my floor. I look around. Ms. Sandee checks her watch. Dad/the preacher shrugs. I step off the elevator and wake feeling a dull ache in my chest and a sense of loss like there’s a black hole in my brain.
I could never go back to sleep after that dream, even if it was 2 or 3 o’clock in the morning. Sometimes, I would clean my room or do some chore. After school started, I would do my homework for the next day. The important thing was that I had to stay busy because if I didn’t, I would start thinking about that shrinking woman. The thing was, she looked exactly like Betsy.
* * *
When I saw Betsy in the tub, I ran over to her and tried to lift her out of the bloody water. I thought she might be drowning. She was pale and cool: not cold, yet. Her head lolled onto my shoulder, and I thought she was trying to hug me or something, though her arms didn’t move. I sort of propped her up and looked at her face, but her eyes were closed. I tried shaking her. She was naked and strange. I was ashamed of seeing her like that, but I sat back and sort of stared at her for a long time. I didn’t know what to do.
That’s how her husband found me. I heard noises downstairs and he was suddenly opening the bathroom door. I stood to shake his hand, because that was the polite thing to do. He looked at me, at the tub, and Betsy, and ran out. I heard him yelling, but I couldn’t understand what he was saying. I couldn’t understand what anyone said to me for a couple days after that. But when I tried to open the bathroom door to ask, he’d propped something against it, and I couldn’t open it. He thought that I’d killed her, I found out later, and was keeping me from escaping.
The cops came a little while later. One of them came in with his gun drawn. I just looked at it. If he’d shot me, I’m not sure I’d have noticed. He looked around, then disappeared, then came back and started asking me questions, but I couldn’t understand anything he said. He took me downstairs where Betsy’s husband was with some more cops. Betsy’s husband started yelling and pointing, and they took him in a different room. I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t remember his name. The cops kept trying to talk to me, but it didn’t make any sense; it was just noise. Finally, one of them frisked me and took my wallet. I didn’t really mind. A little while later, dad showed up and took me home.
* * *
I don’t really remember much about my mom, but I like to think she was a singer. My dad told me once that she was always humming and singing songs. She was a school teacher, and some of the older teachers still remember her. Sometimes, one of them will get this look in her eye and tell me something about her, like that I look like her or move like her. My choral teacher, Mrs. Schomberg, said that I inherited mom’s voice. So when I think of mom, I like to think of her singing. On that ride home with dad—and I don’t know if this was a real memory or something I wished was real—I could hear her voice. She was in the kitchen, making donuts. She used to bake on Sundays. I hadn’t thought about it in a long time, but just then, in dad’s truck, him, panicked and silent, me, staring out the window, I could smell the dough frying, the sugar caramelizing. And I could hear her singing that song, “O-o-h Child,” by the Five Stairsteps. She always liked Motown. I kind of started singing along with it, with my head halfway out the window like a dog. Dad didn’t say anything, just drove. It was okay, because I wouldn’t have understood him anyway.
C.L. Bledsoe
Posted over on Troubadour 21
No comments:
Post a Comment