How the Dead Dream

by Lydia Millet

  When he got home his mother sat red-eyed in a lawn chair on the balcony, Terry in another chair beside her, an ashtray balanced on his mother’s chair arm. He felt a pang of need— Beth should be here, she would be better at this than he was.

  Of course after one evening they were not at that point. It would be far from appropriate.

  He knelt in front of his mother and took her hand. “Are you OK?”

  She nodded slowly, vaguely. Her face was clean of makeup.

  “Do you need to talk about it?” She shook her head.

  “I’ll get us something to eat.”

  “She broke things,” said Terry, catching up to him in the kitchen.

  “She broke things?”

  “She threw the dishes down on the floor. See? No plates,” and he opened the cabinet door above his head to display its emptiness. “She threw out all her shoes. And the—what— vacuum cleaner.”

  “She was just, what was she? Angry? Crying?”

  “I gave her a tranquilizer. I have them for the airplanes? And so she is better.”

  When they brought the food out his mother decided she wanted to be inside, but she also wanted to smoke. T. opened the windows and the three of them sat at the table. His mother stared down at her soup with a lit cigarette in her hand; Terry slathered butter onto a piece of bread.

  “You shouldn’t be able to do that,” said his mother finally, in a voice so soft he could barely hear it.

  “Do what?” he asked.

  “Get a divorce without telling the other person.” He watched her long ash fall onto the table.

  “I was thinking,” he said softly. “When you were staying here before you went traveling, you were going to Mass at St. Anne’s, right?”

  His mother nodded.

  “Maybe we should go in together tomorrow. You can talk to the priest.”

  “I hardly know him.”

  “Then let’s call home. Let’s call Father Stevens. OK? He’ll be able to help with this.”

  “I didn’t tell him I was leaving,” mused his mother. “But I did send a postcard. From Cabo.”

  “Let’s call him.”

  He left his hand on her shoulder. In the morning, he was telling himself, she would talk to her old parish priest, kindly and soft-spoken. She trusted him implicitly.

  He would marvel later at how a mind could slip into otherness without you even noticing it. Slip away right beside you, motionless.

  After dinner Terry turned on the television in the living room, where he settled down with a beer to watch a game, pretending intense concentration. Angela said weakly that she was going to wash her hair, which T. seized upon as evidence

  of a restored normalcy. He said his own goodnights to both of them and retired to his room with the portable telephone, relieved.

  While she ran her bath in the room next to his he called Beth and spoke to her, told her in low tones about the crisis. She was sympathetic and sounded sincerely worried; she offered to help but he did not want to give an impression of neediness. After he hung up he lay in bed letting his mind roam to business, legs splayed on the bed, one hand idly scratching the hair on his groin; while his mother picked up and inspected Terry’s orange vial of tranquilizers he patted the bed and watched his dog jump up to curl at his feet. He closed his eyes and considered the wind farms of Palm Springs, the cost of the turbines, the megawattage that powered Coachella Valley. His own development would be powered thus one day, if he could swing it; and he was considering a contract with the wind-farm company when his mother removed her woven sandals and dark blue skirt.

  As she stepped into the bath and opened a bottle of baby shampoo, he was already falling asleep. For a while they floated side by side like that, only a thin wall between them—she with her hair lathered, a towel rolled beneath her neck to soften the bathtub edge, he in an undershirt and boxer shorts on the bare sheets, the blankets pushed down hastily to the foot of the bed. As he fell asleep he was seeing the turbines that stretched along the San Gorgonio Pass, rows and rows of long, white windmill blades that whirred against the sky.

  He had once spotted dinosaurs off the freeway there, a brontosaurus and a tyrannosaurus rex, their massive heads held high.

  Stumbling out his bedroom door to the bathroom in the middle of the night he peed staring at the china shepherdess: and as he turned from the toilet to the sink to wash up he saw his mother.

  He dropped to his knees and despite the shock of her nudity grabbed her out of the water and tried to breathe into her mouth and pump on her chest. He called out in panic between breaths, called out to Terry downstairs; and Terry was behind him fast. They kneeled over her together and did what they thought they were supposed to do, did what they could again and again until the ambulance pulled up wailing outside and the attendants were rushing up the stairs and bending down around him. He welcomed them as he had welcomed no one before; with gratitude he relinquished her to them, a towel thrown across her stomach.

  The paramedics took her over and made him stand up, urged him back from her a few steps so that they could work. He stood useless and spare in the corner, breathing hard, his T-shirt soaked in soap-smelling water, his underwear dripping down his bare legs.

  When one of them said she had a pulse the strength went out of him and he sat down hard on the toilet seat.

  Later he learned it had been a stroke caused by an overdose of Terry’s tranquilizers. Later, sitting beside her bed and barely seeing her face for the tubes and the paleness of the skin, he would recall that—after all this panic, all this dread and this commotion—she had never seemed to notice his father much at all, around the house, back in the olden days. His father’s absence, he realized, meant more to her than his presence ever had.

  Even furniture could be an object of nostalgia … in recalling her life with his father, as she lay there in the soft

  bathwater, he imagined her dulled by the weight but then, as if recalling an old armchair with fraying arms, stricken by homesickness. He imagined the life she had led, her weekly route to the grocery store where she had shopped throughout his childhood. He saw her holding the steering wheel and turning right and then left and then right again, watching the wipers shunt back and forth in the rain. She had grown up, as he had, and found the same thing: the warmth of other bodies dissipated as you pulled further and further away, and in the space between people the air became cool.

  On the small television in her hospital room, which was on all the time, families sat in a row of chairs and argued. Women hurled recriminations at their stolid husbands and sons and then, meeting with indifference, broke down in a torrent of weeping. A Kleenex box on her nightstand was printed with brown flowers.

  He had requested a private room but there was a waiting list, so she shared with another prone woman who was always snoring. During the first week of the coma he took Beth once to visit her, which should have been too intimate for an early date but felt natural. In fact Beth reminded him, standing over his mother’s bed with a compassionate expression, of a nurse—not the nurses who actually worked in the hospital but an ideal nurse, capable, courteous, modest. He wondered how she came to have this capacity for appropriateness wherever she went.

  But mostly he went alone, not wishing to overwhelm her. They sent in orderlies to bathe the patients, and on the day his mother came out of her coma the orderly had secured her hair to the sides of her head with a pair of pink barrettes. He went to the bathroom in her room, wondering idly why there were plastic butterflies affixed to his mother’s

  temples, and when he came out her eyes were open. She blinked several times.

  “Mother?” he asked, and fumbled to press the call button. “Can you hear me?”

  Her face still did not move and he picked up one of her hands, pressed it gently.

  “It’s me,” he said, “T. You’re in the hospital.”

  Finally her mouth worked dryly and he put down her hand. He ran to the bathroom and filled a paper cup w
ith water.

  “Here,” he said. “Here, drink this.”

  He spilled the water over her chin and down the sides of her face, trying to tip it into her mouth.

  “Can you talk? Do you know me?”

  “Tell me your name,” said a nurse, cutting in beside him. “Angela,” said his mother.

  “And can you tell me what year it is?” “1990,” said his mother.

  “OK,” said the nurse. “Just lay back there, honey.”

  “I died,” rasped his mother, after a long pause. “I died.” He leaned in and clasped her wrist.

  “You almost died,” he said. “You had a stroke. But here you are.”

  “Thirsty,” she whispered, and he poured more water into her mouth. He could hear her gulping, and the nurse raised the head of the bed so that his mother sat up.

  “You don’t need to talk,” said the nurse. “Just relax. You’re doing great.”

  “I died and went to another place,” whispered his mother, straining to lift her head off the pillow. “But it was nothing like what I expected, T. It was nothing like it.”

  “You can tell us all about that later,” said the nurse. “OK? Right now we need you to just lay back and relax.”

  “You believe me, don’t you,” whispered his mother, reaching for his face. “You believe me.”

  “Of course I do,” he whispered back.

  “I was surprised. I thought it would be heaven, T. But it was bad, very bad,” said his mother, and moved her feet suddenly beneath the sheet. “It was the International House of Pancakes.”

  “I’m surprised too,” said T.

  “I thought it would be more expensive than that.”

  He studied her face to see if he could detect humor but there was nothing, only a vague and yet urgent concern.

  “We’re just glad to have you here with us,” he said, and leaned down to kiss her cheek.

  “I don’t want to go back there again,” she said, and closed her eyes. “I must have done something wrong, T. Something very wrong to go there.”

  “I’m going to get the doctor now,” said the nurse. “And you best be letting her get some rest. Visiting hour’s almost done anyways.”

  “Sure,” he said.

  Before he left he reached over and removed the barrettes.

  He found her a small apartment, on the first floor of a yellowbrick building a block away from him. She would convalesce there and T. could check in on her easily. It was pleasant and airy, modest and clean; the windows of the large living room gave onto a common garden whose grass was a deep green, with white plastic lawn chairs and a kidney-shaped pool. The doors were wide enough for a wheelchair and the inside smelled of lemon.

  He and Beth furnished the apartment on the day his mother was to be released, drinking coffee and watching as men from a furniture rental company rolled in the chairs and

  sofas on dollies. They brought over her few belongings from T.’s apartment and Beth put daisies in the window.

  “Oh T.? I think we forgot something,” she called from his bathroom when they were getting ready to leave for the hospital. She came out holding the Bo Peep figurine.

  He was struck by the sight of this—how the statuette, which he had previously viewed as ridiculous, did not appear so the way she held it, how the fluidity of her gestures seemed to steady and ground its frivolity. In her hand it was almost acceptable.

  “No,” he said softly. “I don’t think so.”

  “Are you sure? It doesn’t remind me of you,” she said, and put it down on a shelf as they walked together through his front hall, keeping pace, both their key chains jangling.

  “She bought it for me,” he said, and pulled the door closed behind them. “She believed in guest soap.”

  •

  He never found out whether the overdose had been an accident. Angela was changed, shifted sideways from her previous self; it was not quite that she was absent, merely that she seemed dislocated. The patterns of her speech had altered and frequently her sentences wasted into nothing; but then some days she seemed to rise from the fog, sharp-tongued and beady-eyed, and would lecture her son on his selfishness or his lack of religion.

  Her time in the coma had persuaded her into an angle of devotion more stringent and bizarre than her old way of worship. She had always assumed that when she died the Blessed Mother would shelter her; instead she had been

  relegated to a dingy House of Pancakes, and the shock was considerable. Whether her banishment had been to hell, purgatory, or as she first implied a disappointing version of heaven remained unclear to him. But she seemed to be certain of what the experience signified; she had found herself in a place of disillusionment where fluorescents had threatened to bring on a migraine and the other patrons, fat, pasty-faced, and dressed in loud prints, had studied her resentfully. None of them were Catholics.

  It had been a stern warning, and one she would heed— for the House of Pancakes outcome could be averted, she told T., by renewed attention to matters of the spirit. She had fallen away from attention to faith in recent months, she said, with her self-absorption and her self-pity. Of course the divorce itself, being a violation of doctrine, might also have brought on her punishment despite the fact that she had not had a hand in it personally: it was no coincidence that she ended up in the Pancake House the very day she was notified of the legal severing of her conjugal bond. Starting now she would devote more of her time to charity, attend church daily and curb her language.

  But her concern that he might end up in an IHOP was greater than her worry for herself. Her admonitions to him were constant, and on her sharper days he sometimes caught himself wishing she would return to dimness. If an elderly lady with a walker was preparing to cross the road a half a block away, she would wave wildly with both arms to stun her into halting her progress; then grab T. firmly, pinching, to hustle him over to the woman’s side so he could support her for the brief traverse. And as he and his current ward made their way through the crosswalk she would often leap around wildly beside them, fending off cars with a fierce and mobile series of facial expressions despite the fact that all of them

  were already at a standstill. Recipients of her largesse were not always grateful for the interruption but she ignored this; and several times, hands flapping on T.’s back to hurry him along, she pressed him into the service of perfectly hale and hearty men in their early forties.

  She also urged him toward charitable contributions— here five thousand dollars for a local chapter of Mothers Against Drunk Driving, there five hundred for the Roman Catholic Anti-Defamation League of Newfoundland. When

  T. resisted her tithing demands she would finger-wag and remind him of the flicker of long tubes over his head, the blue-white light, and the laminated menus with close-up pictures of heavy foods.

  Behind the wheel of her car she carefully avoided not only the various Los Angeles locations of the International House of Pancakes but all breakfast-oriented restaurants that were national chains. And if she was struck as she drove with the sight of a Denny’s or Waffle House, unexpected, she closed her eyes tightly until it was past.

  •

  He rarely saw the men he knew from college days. But early that spring there was a call from a fraternity brother reporting that Ian Van Heysen, Jr. had relocated to the Hollywood Hills and was hosting a housewarming gala. The new home had a pool with a view of the city, a whirlpool and sauna and steam room; it had previously been owned by a B-list actress with famously bee-stung lips. This, and not the independent features of the property, was what had attracted Van Heysen and inspired him to cajole from his father a purchase price in the mid-seven figures.

  “You gotta come, man,” said the fraternity brother, now a pharmaceutical rep. “You being right there in the city and shit. I mean guys are flying in from Singapore for this thing. And you’d give it that real old-time flavor, you know? I mean shit, we haven’t seen you since eighty-fucking-six. It’s gonna be a hell of a s
hindig.”

  “I’ll do my best,” said T.

  He took Beth with him and they headed up the front path through the garden, which was crowded with exotic plants. Near the front porch they found two men holding beer cans, ties loosened.

  “Ron, how are you,” said T., and they clapped each other on the back. “This is Beth.”

  “Pleased to meetcha,” said Ron. “Wow. You got a keeper there, T. She a model or something? Whoo-hoo!”

  “See you later,” said T., and they left him standing with the other man, who leaned over a birdbath and retched.

  “My,” said Beth.

  “Ron was never one of our very brightest stars.” “Reassuring.”

  Inside the house was palatial, with a spiral staircase and a massive window giving a view out over the light-dotted hills in the dark. Caterers moved among the crowds, and in the corner of the main room a tubby man in late-model Elvis sang karaoke.

  “T. holy fucking shit! My man!”

  Down the stairs came Van Heysen, red hair mussed, his round and florid face shining.

  “Ian,” said T.

  “My man! I can’t believe it!”

  He found himself clasped to Ian’s chest, and when he was released a blast of whiskey breath almost floored him.

  “What the hell you been doing? I hear something like real estate?”

  “Something like. This is Beth,” said T., and Ian looked her up and down.

  “Hot,” he said, and stuck out his hand. “Nice to meet you too.”

  “So are you like Asian or black or something?”

  “You grill everyone about their ethnic background, Ian?” “Hey. If she wasn’t so foxy I wouldn’t give a shit. So step on up to my garden of earthly delights. We got coke, we got

  weed, we got speed, we got X.”

  “No, thanks,” said T. “You remember who you’re talking to, right, Ian? Straight as a pin.”

  “Does a Pope shit in the woods? Is a bear Catholic?” “What can I say.”