House party

The last act of the musical play Peter wrote has just finished on the high school stage. We weave through a throng of teenagers out in the corridors; they loved the play, they’re raving about it. Our own kids (not Vixie and Luke, but an older girl and boy in their mid-to-late teens) had elected not to see it, but rather to stay down the hall in an activity area sort of like teen daycare. When we pick them up the other kids are still talking about the play; I hope their enthusiasm piques our own childrens’ interest in seeing it. They want to bring home a crowd of kids for a party. Peter and I say OK.

We have just moved into an enormous new house. It’s two or three stories high, perched in a field of dry grass near the edge of a bluff. Down the gentle slope between us and the road are two other buildings: another family’s home and, close to the road, the small gymnasium that came with our house.

It was night when the play ended, but now it’s afternoon. I’m alone in our oversized kitchen. It doesn’t get much light, and what there is gets absorbed quickly by the dark blue-green antique-finish walls. The stove is massive; the countertops are heavy slabs of blond wood. Right now I’m trying to figure out the wall switches. There are so many! They flip horizontally, and are grouped in pairs in different parts of the room. We haven’t been here long enough for me to know what they control. I walk around flipping toggles…sometimes a small light blinks on, sometimes a stove burner ignites, and there’s one I’m pretty sure is the garbage disposal.

And what about this dried-out grass outside in the dusty field? Can I water that much ground?

The kids’ party has started now. I sit at a table for four in one end of the kitchen with three teens, including a boy and a girl from out of state. These two have been traveling around the country together for a while, staying in hostels. The boy says they’re low on money and looks meaningfully at Peter’s wallet, which lies partially covered by paper napkins on the end of the table. I nod and say, “We could probably break a twenty.” He pulls out his own wallet and takes out three traveler’s checks still fastened together at their perforations. “I can’t cash traveler’s checks!” I exclaim. “Only a business can do that. I’ll bet they could do it at the counter.” (During the conversation our kitchen has become the inside of a McDonald’s, and the ordering counter is now on the other side of the wooden half-wall next to our table.) The boy leaves to try it. His girlfriend scowls at me; this is not what she had in mind.

Suddenly the party is in the back yard, with all the guests seated at a long row of tables. Peter and I are chatting with a man our age, who gestures at the house and asks, “How many bedrooms you got in that place? Six? Seven?” We answer, “Not that many extra, really; there are a couple, but not much bigger than an actual bed.” (I’m using two of them for my office. I have a mental image of Peter and myself moving my desk into a small light-green room next to an identical room on the left. The wall separating the two rooms comes and goes.)

The traveling girl is standing opposite me at the table now. She insults me loudly. I am indignant; I can’t believe she’s acting this way–she’s a guest in my home. I exhale a short breath and say, “Get out!” She retorts, “The way your house is decorated, it feels like a barn!” “Go! Now!” I shout. I think of Peter’s wallet on the kitchen table. Trotting into the kitchen, I see that it is gone. Have they ripped us off? “Peter!” I call, frantic. “Peter!” I look through the house for him, calling, panic building. Finally he responds from outside. I go out and ask tensely, “Do you have your wallet?” “Yes,” he replies. I’m greatly relieved–for a few minutes I’d been worried that the girl’s actions had been a diversion so her boyfriend could make off with the wallet, which had a fair amount of cash in it along with Peter’s credit cards and driver’s license.

Later that afternoon, after the party has ended, Peter comes to me and tells me that the landowner who sold us our house has sold the gym to someone else. I’m furious! Isn’t the gym ours? How could he do that without our permission? Peter tries to calm me down. Apparently the inclusion of the gym in our house sale was not all that cut and dried. I’m still mad.

We go down to see who’s bought it. The new family is out in the yard (from there I look up the rise and see the middle house and our house beyond that). They are all really nice. The wife and husband take us in for a look around; I’ve never been inside, even though I thought it was our property. We walk from room to room. I never knew there was anything in the building besides a gym, but it’s an entire house. Glancing through an open doorway I see the gym. It’s smaller than most, just a bit wider than the free-throw lane of a basketball court and about half the length I expected. And it’s cute! The lines on the polished hardwood floor are all painted red and are echoed in stripes across the walls; strawberries are stenciled in rows above these stripes. Daylight pours in from high windows. The young daughter of the new owners is in here playing a make-believe game with a friend. I feel much better now; it will be good to have these people as neighbors, and what would we have done with all this extra space anyway?

*****

Theater of Depp and swinging to the beer mug

Afternoon, in a broad U-shaped corridor being used as a theater. Peter, Luke, Vixie and I are seated in the left arm of the U watching a Johnny Depp play. As the action builds toward intermission, Depp’s character (a minor one–he’s still only in his mid-teens) disappears from the stage. Suddenly the stage lights go off. An emergency situation has been created, and the red “Exit” signs in the corridor start to flash. In this place, the words “Follow the guide” are cut into the silver metal below the word “Exit”, but they glow in white. “What’s going on?” someone asks as the audience gets to its feet and shuffles toward the right side of the U (where the doors are hidden from our view). “I get it!” I exclaim. “Johnny Depp’s character is leading the audience out the doors. He’s the guide, he’s supposed to be saving us!” I simply know this; I can’t see him from where we are. The audience is part of the play.

I’m driving the family home now…or in another country (there was a travel agent back there somewhere, typing on his computer to get us a good airfare). The landscape is of gently rolling golden hills. The road runs through a hollow, its two lanes divided by a wide swath of the same golden grass that covers the hills. Just ahead of us both lanes are submerged in hubcap-deep water. This is apparently normal; the other drivers calmly splash through. The turnoff to my house is also underwater where it cuts across the oncoming traffic, so I turn the wheel and steer past my neighbor Paul N.’s gate.

He and his wife Barbara are standing near the fence, peering at something further back on their property. I stop and get out of the car to see what they’re looking at. I am registering at the same time that Barbara has come back after leaving Paul for a time; after forty years of marriage, he had temporarily fallen for another woman (true).

Across a partially cleared space (nothing can grow beneath the tall, scattered pine trees) is a shack or playhouse of weathered wood. Next to it is a rickety wooden stand with a white enamel bowl perched on its top. It is this bowl they’re looking at. “I left some things in that bowl, and now I can’t get them,” Paul tells me in his British accent. He sounds slightly inebriated.

In his right hand he holds one rope of a swing that is anchored to a high branch in a tree between the fence and the shack. Someone needs to use the swing to get to the bowl, and it’s clear that both Paul and Barbara feel a little too frail to do it. I climb aboard.

Paul gives me a push and I arc wide to the left; the swing has been ingeniously located so that even if it swings in a circle, it misses all the trees. When I reach the shack I jump down–still holding one of the ropes–and look inside the enamel bowl. It contains a white enamel coffee cup (which I know is for holding Paul’s beer), a small tea strainer that has lost its chain, and one other small object (a porcelain saucer?). I guess Paul wants these things so he can have a drink. I gather them up, thinking that Vixie would like to ride on this swing

and so

here she is.

*****

This way be spiders

I’ve borrowed the (real)white transport van of my (former) convention services company. I’ve driven it home and am trying to wedge it between the two family cars already parked in our two-car garage. It won’t fit into the four-foot gap; in trying to avoid hitting our (real) white sedan I almost scrape the right side of our (real) new burgundy minivan. Finally I give up and get out of the van, leaving its rear end sticking out of the garage. (I have to turn it in tomorrow–Tuesday– because it’s Luke’s next-to-last day of school. After I drive it to work Peter will have to pick me up at the office. I could walk home, but it would take a long time; it’s pretty far.)

Passing through the garage on my way into the house I notice a strand of spider web stretched across the left front side of the sedan. Two black spiders, each an inch and a half wide, are perched on it. More webbing has been spun across the car’s grille; it gets thicker as it spreads. Several more of the black spiders are here.

Now I’m inside the house, trying to clear away the webs that are suspended between the couch and the kitchen counter. The spiders do not budge during this process, but I know that if I just throw them into the kitchen trash along with the webbing that they’ll crawl out and start all over again.

Suddenly a man is helping me. We wind the webs on white cardboard shirt inserts. After a while he says, “I think you’d better use some spray.” He’s right; there are far too many webs and spiders for us to make much headway by hand. I get a can of bug spray and start on the kitchen. I tell the man, “This is where it started,” but as we work backwards toward the door out to the garage I think that this was where I remember seeing the webs for the first time. I say, “No, wait, it was HERE that they started.” This happens again when we enter the garage, and yet again when we get to the sedan.

A young woman (a DJ?) reclines backwards on the hood of the car, her feet braced on the cement floor. She’s wearing a T-shirt and shorts. The man tells her she’d better move off the hood or the spiders will climb onto her. She stands up, but then in no time is back to leaning on the car. I warn her this time and she straightens again, but again she immediately lies back across the hood. I wonder why she’s doing this.

In the background as we work, Steely Dan’s “My Old School” plays on the car radio.

Weddings and sentient fish

I’m observing (and sometimes being) a woman staying at a friend’s vacation cabin in a small town. She leaves to take a bike ride in the dusk. When she returns, three other women friends of her friend are sitting on the treated railroad ties that serve as edging for the gravel path. They say hello, and nicely ask how long she’s staying. She thinks they should get a turn in the cabin, too, so she says, “I think I’m moving to another place tonight.” These women will all be bridesmaids in the cabin-owning friend’s wedding the following evening.

She goes inside and the phone rings. (Now it becomes mostly me.) It’s our bride-to-be friend, asking me to arrange for the band; she’s heard of a great guitar duo out of L.A. Can I get them? “I’ll give them a call,” I reply. She materializes on the gravel path to give me the money to pay them, wearing a Jackie Kennedy-style pastel pink suit and pillbox hat. She hands me a $410 dollar bill, which I fold and put in my pocket. Then she’s gone and I think that with only 24 hours’ advance booking, the duo’s airfare is going to be much higher than usual. I pull the bill back out to look at it and am relieved to see that two more of them are attached to it end-to-end, accordion-style.

I need to go downtown to make the arrangements. Another member of the wedding party, a man, drives me there in a convertible; we stop in front of a store that is more like a display. There is no front wall; the entire shop consists of a mock kitchen counter with a built-in Tokero range. (That’s the name printed on the wall above it, anyway.) I’m a bit disappointed. “This is all there is?” I ask of no one in particular. But there IS something else–in my hand I’m now holding a white object about the size of a playing card, half an inch thick, that has a tiny lens in the center front. I’m pretty sure it’s a camera, but can find no shutter release button, no zoom toggle, no controls of any kind; only a bit of small print on the top where all these would normally be.

The wedding preparations are taking place at the spacious home of a member of the bride’s family. The bride herself is trying on her gown in the loft of an outbuilding, bridesmaids fluttering around her; I can see them from below, through the ladder hole. These peek-a-boo views would make great pictures, I think–but the photographer hasn’t arrived. I try to use the little white camera I brought from the shop. All I can do is point the lens and press the little letters on the top. No click tells me I’ve taken a shot, so I have no idea if it’s working or not.

Two Lotus-style sportscars, one red and one silver, materialize in the circular driveway. Friends and family members gasp. Four of the younger bridesmaids want to go for a ride; two of them jump into the front seat of each car and take off. When they get into town two of the groomsmen are standing on the curb. They gape at the cars–and then they see who’s driving. The girls in the red car pull over and say they can come along if they want. DO they! Gingerly, the two climb into the back seat; the fit is tight and there’s a sunroof to contend with. As the first one scoots in from the curb side the driver warns, “Watch the hard edge” (meaning that his leg could jam into the tortoiseshell plastic console between the two front seats). The second man follows and the driver repeats, “Watch the hard edge.”

They zoom off down a California-feeling street. The silver car follows. The steering is so effortless and the car so powerful that they have no idea how fast they’re going until they notice that the buildings flanking the road have changed to thatched-roof white stucco. They’ve driven all the way to Mexico!

Back at the scene of the wedding preparations, I’ve started to notice something strange. I’m standing indoors beside an Olympic-sized swimming pool that extends underneath a glass wall so that the larger part of it is outside. A few large koi had been swimming here a minute ago, but they have just disappeared. My attention is drawn to two Plexiglas tubes two feet in diameter and fifteen feet apart, running parallel to each other down the length of the pool a foot beneath the surface. In one of the tubes a steady stream of particularly pretty tropical goldfish swims; in the other tube the goldfish are flatter and rounder–more like tangs, their orange fading to a peach shimmer in two vertical stripes. In both tubes the fish on top are swimming toward the inside end of the pool and the ones on the bottom are swimming back outside–it’s almost like they’re delivering something, but I can’t see anything but fish. I don’t know what’s going on, but I know the fish are sentient.

No one else notices any of this until a little girl comes to stand beside me and watch. The khaki-clad female aquarium keeper walks by the outdoor end of the pool with some equipment slung over one shoulder. We can only see her from the waist up, because the pool now seems to be part of an exhibit in a public aquarium and is elevated above sidewalk level. “She hasn’t noticed yet,” I tell the little girl (meaning the calculated behavior of the fish). “Watch what happens when she does!” Sure enough, at that instant the woman glances at the pool–and does a massive double-take. The little girl and I laugh.

Now we’re back in the living room of the house, which T’s into the dining room. Female relatives of the bride (and now of mine, too) are going through family photo albums; they first photograph, then remove and destroy anything that might be sensitive for other family members before they arrive. All this is done amongst great giggling. As I sit on the floor flipping through one album–the old kind with black pages and stick-on photo mounting corners–I come across some black and white photos of my dad as a young man. Stuck onto the page beside it is what I understand is a small, empty foil package of his favorite cookies. I get the camera so I can photograph this stuff; I’m going to get rid of it before Mom sees it. (They divorced when I was twelve.)

A few people are with me outside in the garden now. It is partly open, partly cloistered; gravel paths wind around flowerbeds both at ground level and in stone-walled circles three and four feet high. Out of the corner of my eye I see–elves? fairies?–dash past the far side of one of the raised circular beds. These weren’t in the first version of this movie, the edited-for-television one that daughter Vixie and I saw together recently. I decide this must be the feature-length film. Vixie will want to see these creatures. As she comes out of one of the doors under the cloister roof, two lines of the earthtone-clad, three-foot-tall fairies form up near her. Vixie joins me and we watch as they prepare for some kind of human/fairy interaction ceremony. It is all very joyful.

*****

Insurance and conveyor belts

Nighttime in our (not) house. Kids Luke and Vixie along with husband Peter and I are trying to agree on a video to watch out of the selection stacked in a cubbyhole recessed into the top of our coffee table. Finally we settle on a ballet. We watch it in the bright glare of two lamps that flank the couch.

And then

Our friend John C. from Little Rock is working in a small family (not HIS family) business. It has vaguely to do with insurance or something similar; there is no manufactured product involved. His walnut-paneled office is on the second floor of the house-sized brick company headquarters building. I go to visit him, and we chat.

Now, after having moved away from Little Rock for a while, he has moved back and resumed his job. He thinks I’d like a job with this company and has arranged for me to meet the extended family; they’re having a company meeting today in a (cafeteria? conference center?). We have to cross a very narrow channel (about twenty feet wide) on a passenger ferry. The water is fast and rough. I’ve lived here such a long time; why is it I’ve only crossed this channel once before? The ferry is nowhere in sight. We wait with other passengers, confident that it will show up.

Inside the conference center, the family members and employees mill around talking in a room filled with rectangular tables and chairs. John introduces me to a few people. They are mostly older men in gray business suits. Everyone is glad to see John again; they like him a lot, so they are amiable with me. They all find chairs as lunch is served. There is no chair for me, no food tray…an attractive woman my age with short, dark hair (who is in charge of one branch of the company) makes apologetic noises about my not being included in the meal. One young man ebulliently states, “She can only come on board in partnership with another person already here, and we don’t have any open people now. That’s the way we always hire–with one other person.” Everyone else nods silently. John is a little embarrassed at having put me in this situation. He hasn’t seen these folks since he moved away and didn’t know there were no openings right now. I’m OK with this. I can tell from the pale, boiled chickens on the plates (and the other bland food everyone is eating at this catered meal) that this company is a little too conservative for me.

I’m walking down the outside staircase on my way home when a few of the men, who have finished early, come out the door of the banquet room. A man in his late sixties passes me on the stairs, eating a piece of bread and butter with sugar sprinkled on top. One of the younger men jeers, “Sugar on your bread? That’s a kid’s snack!” The man next to me replies, “I don’t care.” I nudge him and tell him confidentially, “I’ve been eating sugared bread ever since I can remember.” He smiles.

The company meeting is far behind me now (both in space and time) as I walk. I’m approaching a long cinderblock wall painted pastel yellow on one side. Against that side is a slow-moving conveyor belt, piled randomly with stacks of boxes; other stacks sit here and there on the floor. A metal track with three red rubber hand grips dangling from it is mounted six feet above the belt. Two ten-year-old boys, one black and one white, jump from the end of the belt nearest me, grasping the handles and gliding along the track as far as they can. When they drop off, some people working near the far end of the belt laugh and call, “Can’t you make it any farther than that?” I watch as they try it a couple more times, going further with each attempt. After each boy’s final ride he shouts, “I can!” Then I climb up onto the end of the belt table, grab the hand grips and push off, raising my feet up to avoid the stacked boxes as I cruise past.

The last leg of my trip home is along the top of a long eight-foot-high fence rail. It’s about the width of a shoe box and painted off-white. It tilts downhill at times, following the terrain, angling sharply to avoid obstacles like bright blue-painted apartment complexes. I’m almost back to the ferry now.

*****

four dreams in one

In a bedroom at my high school friend Debbie’s house, Debbie and her boyfriend are making out on one twin bed and Bob C. (an old boyfriend of mine from slightly after my friendship with Debbie ended) and I are making out on the other. We are all eighteen or so. We are doing this according to the house rules, but they are not rules set down by Debbie’s parents; we don’t know where they came from–nor do we question them. One rule states that at some point we have to change partners for a while. This happens without me or Debbie’s boyfriend really noticing it. The next thing I’m aware of is sitting propped up on the bed in a long spaghetti-strap white cotton nightgown. Bob looks at me hungrily as he gets his white tailored shirt off as fast as he can; I know he likes the way one gown strap falls off my shoulder. “At last, it’s my turn!” he says, diving onto the bed.

After a little more (and heavier) necking, I see Bob’s watch in the light of my dorm room bureau mirror. It’s one A.M. “I promised Mom I’d get home by now,” I tell the other three. Debbie is having a party soon and I’ve been asking her the date all evening, but she hasn’t been sure. We’re standing in her living room now, and she says, “(Name?) is importing dressers, and I’m thinking of buying one before the party.” In my mind’s eye I can see an antique white chest of drawers with gilded crevices, frail-looking palm trees painted on its flat surfaces. “Where will you put it?” I ask, looking around at the already-full living room. Debbie waves her arms around vaguely, finally pointing through a set of French doors to the adjoining family room. “In there.” “Do you have a date for the party yet?” I ask. “Next Friday,” she replies.

And now

I’m sitting at a table opposite a very cute and precocious three-year-old boy and his father. A Christmas tree stands behind them and to their left against a wall. The little boy unwraps a gift. It’s a small painted wooden toy. He turns it over in his hands, admiring it. His father says, “We’ll put that on the tree.” The little boy agrees, “OK.” I’m impressed by his ability to postpone playing with the toy. This would not happen at our house.

And now

I’m trying to leave a house at night, but someone has turned into a big orange tabby cat and I have to take it with me in the car. I put it into the back seat of my (Karman Ghia?) but the bright dome light reveals that the passenger door is open; the cat quickly slips out and runs back to the house. I close the passenger door and go to get the cat again.

In the front hallway I see that the cat has camouflaged itself as a cardboard standup poster. Hot pink rings surround a black circle, in the center of which is printed a pair of neon-green eyeglasses. It’s the eyeglasses that give it away. The cat’s owner, a middle-aged woman, helps me catch it.

And now

Husband Peter and I are in an open-topped elevator car that glides up an incline at an angle rather than going straight up or down. The interior of the car is like a restaurant booth surrounded by a low metal wall. The shaft we move through is pale yellow and well lit, broken from time to time by dark doorways that lead off into shopping arcades. Our elevator operator is a balding Leslie Nielsen, and he sits opposite Peter on the mustard-colored vinyl seat. Is the tabby with us? A bird that belongs to us is; sometimes it’s in a cage, but it has just flown over Nielsen and pooped on his head. Another bird, coming from somewhere else, does the same. We smile apologetically as Nielsen raises his hand to his head, coming away with a smear of white on his fingertips.

*****

Floating upstream

A fast-moving but not too deep stream about fifteen feet across runs parallel to a calm, deep, medium-sized river. Our family is camping there with our friends Curt and Theresa and their kids Emily and Ben, who are the same ages as our Vixie and Luke. Right now I’m the only adult in the area; I haven’t seen my husband Peter, Curt or Theresa yet and don’t know where they are. This is not worrisome. The kids and I decide to float up (yes, up) the stream in inner tubes tomorrow morning.

And now it’s tomorrow morning. Emily starts first, while Vixie and I are working with something in the camp. Out of the corner of my eye I see Emily enter the water. “Let’s go over and watch how the stream is running,” I say to Vixie. I want to see if the ripples break over Emily’s face as she floats upstream against them. I’m a little worried that if they do she’ll get upset and start to cry. When we get to the bank, however, it’s Ben who’s on the inner tube. He has only drifted upstream about forty feet when his progress is halted by a four-foot rise in the riverbed. If the stream were any lower this would be a small waterfall. As it is, the water flows smoothly over the ledge and continues downstream. This wasn’t here yesterday; the water level must have dropped overnight. What will we do now? I peer over the earthen dike that separates the stream from the river. We could float on the river instead–but even though it moves much more slowly than the stream, it’s so…deep.

Ben clambers out of his stalled tube and is suddenly standing on the ledge. He dives. I rush toward him–the water is too shallow for diving here; I can see the rocks on the bottom–but by the time I reach him he’s already in. He has bumped his head on a good-sized rock, but not too hard. I’m so relieved! I scold him on behalf of his parents.

Now Vixie and Emily are walking across the parking lot of a small grocery store. I see them from a sidewalk that runs down a dirt embankment past the store, so I’m ahead of and slightly below them. Vixie wears a pink knit belly shirt with new pink hip huggers. I think this is a good look for her, and am proud she’s put it together.

Inside the store now. I’ve given Ben free rein with the shopping cart, and he zooms around the corner of one aisle with the basket crammed full. Curt, Theresa and Peter are with me at this point, and we grin as he approaches us with his load of marshmallows, bread, cookies and three different bottles of wine. I laugh and ask him, “Can we compromise a little, here?” I grab one of the bottles of wine–a two-liter red that he’s jammed upside down into the cart–and walk toward the wine aisle to return it to the shelf. As I go, I glance at the price sticker. $52.65! Well (I think to myself), at least Ben has good taste!

*****

The parrot-and oh, I pretend to be the Second Coming

I’m having a conversation with an intelligent (and very sweet) talking parrot–the big blue kind with a goldenrod breast. He’s so smart that he’s about to be taken for testing. This is not what he wants; he just wants to live his life.

We’re in an alcove at one end of a shopping mall. I go out into the mall proper, and with the help of a friend I decorate the high ceiling of that section of the building with rows of silky Mardi Gras hanging banners, streamers and beads–everything purple, green and gold. (It takes us about three seconds.) I’ve done this for the parrot, to make him think he’s going on an adventure with pirates. He gasps in awe when I carry him out to see it.

And now

the parrot is gone and I’m goofing around in that same space with the friend who helped me decorate it. My friend’s friend works behind a counter in this part of the mall. In front of her I’m pretending to be the Second Coming–or at least that I’ll be inhabited by God on Friday the twenty-third.

My friend’s friend believes me wholeheartedly, especially when I start quoting remembered snatches of Scripture and listing the names of as many of the books of the Bible as I can from old, old memory. (Good thing I’d read that reference to the book of Kings somewhere recently. I’d pretty much forgotten about First and Second Kings.) Gail M (son Luke’s teacher from this year) comes in. By the way she looks at me, smiling quizzically, I can tell she’s wondering about all this.

Next I’m floating up among the banners. Strands of tiny white lights have been scalloped along their tops and edges now, and I gently touch one, and then another…

*****

Uh-oh, the old nudity archtype

Fragment: I’m in a clothing store. I’ve arrived on my bike(?) and am wearing nothing but bike shorts. This had seemed OK when I was riding, but now that I’m in the store I am becoming increasingly uncomfortable with my exposed torso. I look for a sleeveless shirt to buy among the many that are folded and stacked on dimly-lit shelves in alcoves around the shop’s perimeter. Unfortunately, most of the blouses are sheer–for example, a medium-brown silky one with an embossed pattern of flowers is a little too transparent between flowers for me to feel good about wearing it without a bra.

A friend appears. She has just tried on a chiffon tunic with a matching long skirt. It is really attractive on her–white with big red poppies. I find a similar one on a rack (in pale yellow) and try it on.

*****

Doctors who are lawyers who are mystery writers

I park my car at a wooded intersection very far from where I need to be (dentist’s office? surgeon’s?) and start walking. Now I’m sitting in the waiting room. The receptionist calls me in, shows me to a dressing room. I undress and put on one of their robes. Two dentists(?) are on duty, but they’re busy; one says to the receptionist, “Dr. ___ is available at home, you can call him in.” She picks up the phone. Suddenly I don’t know why I’m here–I don’t need any work done. I leave the office and start walking back to my car, still wearing the office’s robe.

Along the way I find myself in a daycare center. Toddlers and preschoolers ride little electric cars across the shiny dark-gray linoleum floor, around and around the circle formed by the large central pillar/core of the white room. I’m watching from a gap in the core beside a closet. One of the toddlers abandons his charcoal-gray car, leaving it sideways across the right half of the circuit. A little girl comes around the far corner and is heading straight for it. I’m afraid she’ll get a bump, so I dash over and scoop her out of her car. She cries a little–out of surprise and disappointment at being taken out of the car, not out of pain–but calms down when the attendants appear.

Everyone is acting like I’m a big hero. I’m back in the doctor’s office now, but this time the on-call doctors (as well as the one they’d brought from home) are very jovial with me–also, they seem to have turned into lawyers in white lab coats.

One of them, a sandy-haired man (whose age fluctuates from my age to younger to older without warning) especially wants to help me out. When he hears my accent–which is a little thicker than usual–he asks where I’m from. I tell him Oklahoma. He looks surprised and asks, “What brought you all the way out here?” “Acting,” I reply. “But I didn’t do that for very long. This is a tough market.”

Suddenly we’re at his family’s home. I’m beginning to think his interest in me is maybe a tad unsavory (after all, I’m still wearing a robe; my clothes are back in my car). But I meet his wife, and she doesn’t seem worried at all. His kids–a girl about my daughter Vixie’s age, a boy a couple of years older–are visible out by the (barn? workshop?). And the colleague who had been called away from his home is here, a man with dark hair and hornrimmed glasses, still wearing his lab coat. “So what are you doing now?” the sandy-haired doctor/lawyer asks. “Trying to get a book published,” I tell him. “Oh, really? Let me take you to New York. I’m working on a book too, and I have a publisher I can introduce you to. Let’s go!”

Now we’re in his convertible, driving along the highway to New York City. “Which publisher is it?” I ask. “Well, they used to be Triton, but they went through a couple of mergers, so now they’re Trident.” “Trident Press? I’ve heard of them,” I reply, impressed. “What’s your book about?” “It’s about…” –he swerves the car back and forth on the empty road–”You’re a secret operative in a foreign country, their spies have just spotted you, and–” “WHOOM!” yells the colleague called from home, who has appeared on a knoll behind and on the opposite side of the road from the car as he mimes the pulling of an imaginary grenade pin and throws it at us. “Oh, it’s a spy novel,” I say (thinking, “how trite.”). But it doesn’t matter; this guy knows a big publisher. I hope that a publisher who handles spy novels will also be interested in what I’m doing–dreamscripting is a pretty different genre.

And now we’re back at his house. He offers me a choice of brand-new outfits his wife has recently bought. They are identical cotton knit wraparound minidresses, except that one has horizontal stripes in red and slate blue and the other is pastel pink with gray. At first I think I want the pink, but when I try the red one on it looks really good–and besides, the red has leggings to match. I ask his wife, “Are you sure this is all right? YOU weren’ t the one in that little car.” She smiles, winks and says, “Confidentially, this is a (Big Name Designer). I’m going right out and buy a replacement exactly like this one.”

Outside near the barn, I’m getting the feeling that these two white-coated lawyers (both of whom are standing beside me) think I’m not very well off. This is confirmed when one of them makes a joke about how hard it is to get food stamps. My husband Peter appears at this point, not seeming very happy to see me standing with two men while wearing a robe and carrying a roll of clothing under my arm. Do I explain his occupation to the lawyers, and that he makes us a very good living? Will this change my standing in their eyes–meaning they won’t work so hard to introduce me to the publisher? Before I can decide, the blond (formerly Sandy-Hair) says, “I want to give you one last present.” He walks over to a workbench along the outer wall of the barn/workshop and picks up a rectangular woodmarking pencil. He hands it to me. “Here you go,” he says. “Now we’ve got to get you back to your car.” While he walks back to the house to get his keys, I spot an elaborate pencil sharpener on the workbench. I pick it up. It’s metallic blue with clear plastic slots both round and rectangular; I see that it can be used to sharpen the pencil I’ve just been given. Some of the round holes have silver and black levers attached that can custom-fit them to any size pencil. Briefly I contemplate stealing it; but this family’s done so much for me already. When their son comes up to me, I say, “Your dad gave me this pencil, and I’d like to use this to sharpen it.” I know I can just use a knife when it gets dull in the future.

*****