by Lee Smith
But as Melanie turns to go back in the store she catches sight of Bobby of Bobby’s Sport coming to work. He wears a navy-blue running suit and bounces along on his brand-new athletic shoes like an advertisement for himself, which in a way he is. Melanie stands half turned in the door to watch him go by, and then to her surprise he gives her a big flashy grin. “Morning,” he says. Bobby’s teeth are so even and white, he must have had braces as a child.
“I saw that,” says her best friend, Grace, who has been married to the same man for a million years so she is fascinated by this kind of thing.
“What? Nothing happened,” says Melanie, but Grace says, “Huh!”
“Girls, girls, let’s settle down now.” Mr. Rolette claps his hands. They are getting ready for a back-to-school sale. Deborah Green at the cash register looks up from her book and glares at him. Deborah is an intellectual, working her way through school. Mr. Rolette sets the two black girls, LaWanda and Renée, to unloading sheets and scatter rugs for the back-to-school bin by the cash register, while Grace tidies up the bath area and Melanie waits on customers. She’s good at it. Over the years she has gotten so she can match up a woman with a sheet in five minutes flat, it’s like a sixth sense or something. In fact she’s so good at it that she doesn’t have to think much, she can go on dreaming although it’s hard to say exactly what she’s dreaming about, nothing special, it’s still raining outside, all the people who come in Linens N’ Things are dripping wet. That’s the only bad thing about working at the mall, you miss so much weather. All you know is basically if it’s raining or not raining, from the skylight which is frosted glass. Bobby of Bobby’s Sport has a deep cleft chin which Melanie likes in a man.
At lunchtime she and Grace go to The Magic Pan. They always eat lunch together even though Grace is so persnickety. For instance she will say, There is too much cheese in this blue-cheese dressing, or, This Coke is flat. You can’t satisfy Grace, which is probably one reason she is Melanie’s best friend, opposites attract, and Melanie’s easily pleased. Also they have worked together every day for the past nine years.
“Do you think Bobby is cute?” Melanie asks.
“Well, yes, I do think he is sort of cute,” Grace says, “but he looks like he might be real bouncy, I think you ought to look for somebody older and more stable,” says Grace. You can trust her to find some fault. Grace is married to her own high school sweetheart, Gene, a tall skinny man with big black glasses who is always worrying about things, he’d be the last man in the world that Melanie would be interested in, whether he was stable or not.
Grace fixes Melanie with her watery blue-eyed stare. “I think if I was you I’d try to look at all my options,” she says, “and not just fall into something else.”
Melanie opens her mouth and then shuts it. Grace means the best in the world of course, she just does not have a lot of personal tact, so what. Still, Melanie feels real down as they walk back to Linens N’ Things together. Just the other day her sister said, “Melanie, you need to get a grip on things.” Melanie knows her mother and her sister talk about her on the phone. They pass Shoe Town, Revco, The Casual Male, The Christmas Shoppe. Melanie thinks she would die if she worked in there and had to listen to Christmas carols all day long. They pass Deborah Green, sitting on the bench by the little fountain, reading a book. She doesn’t look up. This reminds Melanie again of Drew, who was always reading.
“You go ahead,” she says to Grace. “I’ll catch up with you in a minute, I want to buy something to read.”
Grace looks funny. “Huh!” she says.
But Melanie ducks into News and Notions anyway, it’s not much bigger than a closet stuck in between The Christmas Shoppe and Marine Discount.
The very first book she picks up is a paperback named How to Interpret Your Dreams, by dream expert Margery Cooper Boyd. She went straight to it, it must be fate. “I’ll take it,” she says, and pays the old man behind the counter, who always stares at her bosom, and she buys a USA Today also, to find out what’s going on in the world, but as soon as she reads the first page of How to Interpret Your Dreams she’s hooked. It’s like Margery Cooper Boyd wrote this book especially for her.
“Got a problem?” the book says. “Sleep on it. If you know how, you can literally dream up a solution during the night. The dreaming mind’s ability to find creative and logical solutions for unresolved problems has delighted and intrigued man for as long as he has been in this world. Without the ability to dream, it’s doubtful that man would have survived as long as he has. It is safe to say that he certainly would not have attained dominance.” Melanie sits down on the bench in front of Belk’s. “History is filled with examples of how dreams have helped men and nations to solve problems. Perhaps the best known examples are Biblical—Pharaoh’s dream of the lean and fat cows or Jacob’s dream of the sheaves and stars. In more modern times, there are Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Mozart, and others who have had dreams.” Melanie blinks, she doesn’t know who all these people are, she can’t remember anything about the pharaoh either. Then she reads a lot of these dreams and what they turned out to mean, and it is very interesting. Some dreams have changed the course of history. She doesn’t care if she’s late or not, she doesn’t care if Mr. Rolette gets mad or not. Once you are able to accept your dreams as private messages from your subconscious, you open yourself up to a whole new world of self-understanding. You can get what you want!
“Listen to your dreams,” writes Margery Cooper Boyd. This certainly ought to come easy to Melanie, who lives in a dream world anyway, everybody has always said so. In fact Mr. Rolette says it later that day, “Melanie, pay attention, you live in a dream world,” when she marks the towels down wrong. The interpretation of dreams is done through symbols, everything you dream means something else. Melanie can’t wait to start learning what they mean. Her dreams are full of symbols, sometimes at night she dreams so much she wakes up all worn out.
“Isn’t it something?” she asks Sean later when they’re eating dinner, tacos, something quick, she was too excited to cook much. Sean says, “Isn’t what something, Mama?” in his normal bored voice, and she says, “Everything in your dreams means something else.”
Sean smiles at her, the long slow smile which is the only characteristic he seems to have gotten from his daddy thank God, who was nevertheless attractive. “Mama,” he says, “almost everything means something else.”
Melanie just looks at him. “Well!” she says. Sean’s hair is bleached and long on top, he has a rattail in back, his ears have been pierced so many times they look like Swiss cheese. Sean plays guitar, he looks like somebody who just knocked over a convenience store. But Sean is basically real smart and only a few people, mainly his teachers, know this. He’d drop dead before he’d let his friends catch him studying.
“What do you mean?” he asks, and so Melanie shows him the alphabetical listing, which is very complete, going from Abandonment, Accounts, Actor or Actress, Adultery, and Airplane all the way to Tomato, Tooth, Vault, Washing, Yellow, Youth, and Zoo. “Washing!” Sean says. “Who ever dreamed of washing?”
“Well, if they did, I’m sure it means guilt,” sniffs Melanie, because it has occurred to her Sean might be making fun of her again.
“‘Snow,’” Sean reads out loud. “‘Snow is a symbol of purity. It can also symbolize sex. To dream of tracking through untouched snow expresses a desire for sexual intercourse.’”
“Give me that!” says Melanie, grabbing her book.
“So which is it, Mama?” asks Sean. “Sex or purity? How do you know?”
“You just have to trust your heart,” Melanie says, “and go with your instincts that’s all, that’s what Margery Cooper Boyd says.”
“Well, then it must be true.”
He’s teasing her all right, he’s always teasing her, still they do hav
e a wonderful relationship, considering, but sometimes it seems like it’s gotten all turned around, like Sean’s the grown-up here and she’s the child.
“Listen, Mama,” he says suddenly. “You remember Mr. Joyner?”
“Who?”
“Mr. Joyner, you know, my history teacher from last year. You met him at the end of school when you came over to see the concert.”
“No, I don’t believe I do,” says Melanie, who can’t recall even hearing the name before, of course she was busy last spring, what with Stan and the guys from WHIT.
“Well, now he’s gotten a divorce, and he came up to me in the hall and asked me what my mother was doing these days.”
Melanie just stares at him. A high school history teacher is not really her idea of a good time. “How old is he?” she asks.
“About forty-five.” Sean lights a cigarette, he’s been smoking since he was twelve, she can’t do a thing with him really. “He’s real nice, Mama, sort of an ex-hippie.”
“Too old,” Melanie says flatly, because no matter what anybody says, she’s not over the hill yet. She can get somebody sports-minded and cute if she can harness her subconscious long enough to do it, but Sean stares at her through the smoke. “Maybe you could just talk to him sometime, Mama,” he says, and she says, “Maybe so.”
That night Melanie dreams that she is in a supermarket where a lot of men are for sale and Margery Cooper Boyd is working the cash register. She says to Melanie in a Northern voice, “Take your pick, half-price today only, all sales are final.” So in the morning Melanie dresses very carefully for work, the yellow dress with the black patent belt, the black patent shoes, she knows this dream is prophetic.
And sure enough, when he comes bouncing past Linens N’ Things that morning, Bobby gives her a big wink. His intentions are perfectly clear.
“I saw that,” says Grace, right behind her, and Melanie just can’t resist, she tells Grace that actually she caused that wink herself, by harnessing her subconscious. Grace asks if this is some kind of new diet or what, and Melanie says, “No, silly, don’t you remember my dream book? I’ve learned to interpret my dreams,” but Grace turns up her nose and says Melanie ought to get a grip on herself, she ought to go to a doctor, it might be PMS. Grace’s big blue eyes are watering the way they do when she thinks she’s on to something. Melanie looks at her carefully. “Why, Grace!” she says suddenly, “I believe you’re jealous!” As soon as she says it, she knows it’s true. It’s been true probably for years, only she never realized it before because she wasn’t listening to her heart, she wasn’t going with her instincts. Right now Grace is especially jealous because Melanie can interpret dreams, but not too jealous to hang around later while Renée tells Melanie what she dreamed last night. It was all in color, which proves Renée is very intelligent, according to Mrs. Boyd.
Renée says she dreamed she was supposed to go out to dinner with her boyfriend so she got all dressed up. She wore a red dress. In this dream she did her hair and then painted her nails and then her toenails, it seemed to take forever the way things sometimes do in dreams, and she was so hungry, she kept looking at the clock. Seven o’clock, eight o’clock, nine o’clock and still he didn’t come, she was starving, she’d done her nails about seven times. Then finally at ten o’clock she realized that she’d been stood up and so she went to the refrigerator and got a frozen pepperoni pizza and put it in the oven to cook for dinner.
“Then what?” asked Melanie.
“What do you mean, ‘what’?” says Renée. “That’s it, honey. That’s the end of the dream.” It’s not much of a dream, and Renée knows it. “I don’t care if you like it or not,” she says, all huffy. “It’s my dream anyway.”
“No, no, it’s fine, Renée, I just need to concentrate on my interpretation, that’s all.” Melanie is getting nervous now because Grace and Deborah Green and Mrs. Small, the bookkeeper, have all gathered around to listen.
“Look up ‘Dinner,’” says Grace, “or maybe ‘Pizza,’” but there’s no listing for either one.
“Oh, honestly!” Deborah Green acts like she knows it all. “The meaning is perfectly obvious. Renée is afraid her relationship’s nearly over. She’s afraid he’s losing interest or something.”
“Roy?” snorts Renée. “Roy is doing anything but losing interest.”
“Maybe that’s just what you think,” Deborah says, which starts a big commotion that allows Melanie some time to consult Mrs. Boyd and think about Renée’s dream. The interpretation, when it comes to her, is very serious. So she doesn’t tell Renée until lunchtime, when she can catch her alone at Orange Julius.
“Renée, I’m afraid I have some bad news for you.” Melanie is very formal. “I believe you’re pregnant.”
“No way I’m pregnant,” Renée says, but her pretty eyes go wider, darker.
“You better find out,” Melanie tells her, “because my book says that if a woman dreams of putting something in an oven, it means she is expressing a fear that she is pregnant or that she will become pregnant, or a desire to do so.”
“Lord,” Renée says. “I’ve got a tipped uterus, anyway.”
“Well I’d find out if I was you,” Melanie says. “It might be your subconscious trying to tell you something.” Then Melanie’s just standing there drinking her Orange Julius when Bobby comes by in a white terry-cloth jogging suit and introduces himself. He asks about business in the mall and whether she likes it here, and whether she runs.
“Runs?” Melanie says.
“You know, jog,” says Bobby. “I just got in a new shipment of ladies’ running clothes today.”
“Oh yes, yes I do,” says Melanie, who doesn’t but plans to now.
“Well, I’d better get back to business,” Bobby says. “Nice to meet you, see you around.”
That night Melanie tells Sean that she is not a bit interested in meeting his ex–history teacher. She goes to bed early and dreams that she and Bobby are on a vacation in a tropical wonderland someplace like Hawaii, that they go swimming in the warm blue ocean and then they take a walk through a grove of orange trees and Bobby reaches up and picks some oranges which they eat and then they go dancing and so many men keep cutting in that Bobby gets jealous and makes her leave, but then her alarm goes off before she gets to the good part. It’s a big rush to get Sean some breakfast and put on her makeup and concentrate on this dream, plus they are out of coffee. Melanie skims the book, Sean gets picked up by some of his friends in a hearse. Basically, water means sex and oranges mean breasts, so it’s pretty clear what is going to happen next. Melanie wears her turquoise slacks and her turquoise and white sweater with the diamond pattern, just in case she sees him.
So she’s late to work, but once she gets there it’s very exciting because Renée runs in all happy and tells everybody that it’s true, she is pregnant, she took the early pregnancy test last night, and that’s not all either, her and Roy are engaged! Renée is glowing she’s so happy, and Melanie is so happy for her.
But now it seems like everybody has a dream to tell her, suddenly she’s famous in Linens N’ Things. In fact Mr. Rolette speaks real sharp to her about it, which oddly enough reminds Melanie of another dream she had last night, it just pops back into her head all of a sudden, a dream that Mr. Rolette’s house, the two-story colonial on Cedar Street where Mr. and Mrs. Rolette host the Christmas party every year, suddenly disappeared while she and Grace were walking up the driveway to it, carrying a covered dish. When Melanie tells Mr. Rolette this dream, he gets very mad at her and almost shouts, “Melanie, I think you ought to do this on your own time, it’s very disruptive.” Mr. Rolette has been nervous lately.
On Wednesday, everybody knows why. Mr. Rolette isn’t there, but he has called Mrs. Small and said he will not be coming in for a while due to psychological factors. Mrs. Rolette has left him. When he got home last night, he found the note. An
d Mrs. Small, after she gathers them all together and tells them this, stares hard at Melanie. “Now how did you know?” she asks, and everybody else looks at Melanie too like there’s something wrong with her, except Grace who has the morning off. Melanie spends the morning worrying whether she ought to go with her instincts so much or not, and whether Bobby is ever going to ask her out or if she ought to just go ahead and bite the bull by the horns and go up to Bobby’s Sport right now and give him the opportunity.
Then Grace comes in and tells Melanie she needs to talk to her privately, so they go to the ladies’ and lock the door. Grace has circles under her eyes. She has not looked too good lately. She’s had this dream, she says, over and over again, and Melanie says, “Then it’s probably significant.” Grace smokes a Merit cigarette while she tells it. In the dream, Grace and Gene are in their living room and Gene is sitting at his desk paying the bills—“You know how worried he gets over money,” Grace says, and Melanie nods—but after a little while his pen runs out of ink and he gets mad and throws it down on the floor. Then Grace brings him another pen and it happens again, several times. Then she wakes up.
Melanie flips through her book, past Owl, Park, and Peach. She pauses before she reads Pen out loud to Grace.
“Well, what does it say?” Grace is impatient, trying to see over Melanie’s shoulder, but the light is bad in the ladies’.
“‘Pens are phallic symbols representing the male organ,’” Melanie reads. “‘If a man dreams of having a pen that has run out of ink, he may be expressing fears of impotency or that he is sterile.’”
“Well, I didn’t know it was a dirty dream!” Grace says.
Melanie laughs. “Oh, Grace, it’s not, it’s all in your subconscious anyway, it says the same thing about guns and nails and pencils and cucumbers.”
“Cucumbers?” Grace is furious. “I don’t have to listen to this kind of dirty stuff,” she says, leaving, pushing Melanie aside.