The Anatomy of Dreams

by Chloe Benjamin

  “You’re getting everything wet,” I said in protest.

  “Try to stop me,” said Hannah, and then she was tickling me as I yelped for leniency, both of us laughing so hard the bed shook. “Come on, Sylvie. You don’t want to spend your last semester of high school as some miserable blob of longing.”

  Over dinner, we plotted a self-betterment program. We took frigid runs before physics, dragging ourselves out of bed at six thirty, racing so fast downhill we were practically falling. We spent even more time in the workshop, using charcoal to draw our hands open, shut, twined together. Over spring break, we drove to her family’s farm in the Sacramento Valley. We sped down Route 101 with the radio turned all the way up, howling at the redwoods, sugar-high on Blizzards from the Petaluma Dairy Queen. Hannah’s sisters had all left home, so we had our pick of bedrooms in the farmhouse. During the day, we helped her mother, Ingrid, in the nut orchard. I preferred the almond trees: their hulls fuzzy and green as unripe peaches, their delicate ecology. They needed five years of pollination to bear fruit. It was our job to find and shuck the seeds, tapping each shell with a hammer until it split in two along the seams. At night, we spread out in the unused barn with our charcoals and worked in easy, simpatico silence.

  There, I felt peaceful—not ecstatic or despairing, as I had with Gabe, but fine. Even content. It’s the physical sensations I remember most: the sun close as a hand pressed to my neck, the relief of a crack in the almond’s stone shell. Each nut was a small adversary, a minute-long accomplishment. By the time we left Sacramento, I had almost convinced myself it was possible to let go of him. I could live on my own, I thought, or on a farm with Hannah; maybe I didn’t need the highs and lows that came with love. Maybe this quietude—these small, daily pleasures—could be enough.

  • • •

  That April, I got into UC-Berkeley, and I began to map the pillars and floorboards of my new life. I missed Gabe most in moments of camaraderie among us seniors—reading by the lake in early June, or crowding around someone’s computer, looking at photographs from a college visit. But I tried not to dwell on his absence, and with each month, it became a little bit easier to leave him behind.

  By the time graduation came around, I had almost done it. After the ceremony, everyone congregated on the lawn in front of Keller’s house, eating cheese cubes and drinking out of plastic cups—champagne for the adults and sparkling cider for us. I stood with my parents and Rodney at a center table, talking with Mr. Keller, when I felt something soft brush against my leg.

  I jiggled my foot, thinking it was the tablecloth. But then I felt it on my other leg, and when I reached down, I found a moving, velvety body, its muscles rippling against my calf.

  It was a small cat, tawny in color, with rust-colored flecks on its forehead and paws. But what I noticed most was the pressure of its head on my leg, a firmness, as though it wanted to push me into the table.

  I dropped my hand and straightened as if I’d touched something soiled. I must have knocked the table with my elbow on the way up, because Rodney’s glass began to quiver. Mr. Keller reached for it, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the cup toppled lightly into the grass, where the sparkling cider barely missed the cat’s tail.

  “Is that your cat?” I asked.

  “Indeed she is,” said Keller. “Lucy.”

  He had been talking to my mother, a cup of champagne in one hand. I could tell she wanted to continue the conversation and wished I hadn’t interrupted it, but I couldn’t pretend I was fine.

  “I had a dream about her,” I said.

  Keller’s face hardly moved.

  “You wouldn’t be the first. Lucy’s always lurking around the dining hall and the library. Come finals, everyone’s dreaming about cats.”

  There was a pause while my family looked at me. Then my father started to laugh, and Keller smiled briefly before turning back to my mother. But I still felt as though every nerve in my body had been lit with a match, and I couldn’t concentrate on the reception. The whole thing gave the end of my time at Mills an uneasy feeling. Soon, I began to avoid thinking about the school at all. It became easier and easier until the summer before my last year of college, when Gabe returned.

  4

  MADISON, WISCONSIN, 2004

  One Wednesday in late September, when the heat was just beginning to lift, I went to our neighbors’ house for the first time. I was standing at our kitchen sink, washing water glasses with the window open, when I heard someone call to me.

  “You want lemonade?”

  I looked up. It was the woman next door, hanging out of a second-story window that faced our house and the train tracks. She leaned from the waist, so that her upper body tilted out of the frame, her hair streaking the sky.

  “Sorry?”

  “I said would you like lemonade. I saw you looking at my porch. Sometimes I sit there with a drink but I’m in today, it’s too goddamn hot. So I thought I’d invite you.”

  I had planned to go to the office to enter the data from last night’s session. Our participant had wriggled out of his leg straps and walked down the hall to the building’s emergency exit. When Keller brought him back to the lab, he had no recollection that he’d been there before; eventually, he became so agitated that Gabe had to sedate him. We woke him several hours later.

  We hadn’t lost control like this since patient 222, a woman named Anne March. She was the first person I worked with, and she left our study abruptly, though I tried not to conflate these two facts. I still wondered if we’d helped her at all; sometimes I thought we’d actually made things worse. Every so often, I forgot about her, but then, like a fussy, chronic injury—a pulled muscle or a bad ankle—she made herself known again. But I didn’t want to spend the day thinking about Anne, and I was too curious about the woman next door to turn down an opportunity to meet her.

  “Okay!” I shouted back. “Thank you!”

  I put my last glass upside down on a towel and crossed the driveway that separated our houses, the screen door hissing shut behind me.

  The woman had left her front door ajar. She stood by the refrigerator, her large feet turned out. She wore a ruffled white dress, and up close, her legs looked even more like a calf’s—shins longer than thighs, with hyperextended knobs for knees. When I stepped into the kitchen, she came to greet me, a glass pitcher in one hand. The liquid inside was bright yellow, topped with little pieces of cucumber and strawberry and torn mint.

  “I’m Janna,” she said. She pronounced the J like a Y—Yanna.

  “Sylvie.”

  I held out my hand. Her fingers were long and thin, cool from the refrigerator.

  “Sylvie. That’s fascinating. Do you like it?”

  The barbell above her eye raised along with her eyebrow. Her irises were the iridescent gray-blue of abalone shells.

  “Like it?” I asked. “I guess so.”

  “I do,” she said. “Very much.”

  She walked to a large standing cabinet, painted yellow and peeling, and took out two ceramic cups. The kitchen’s layout was identical to ours, but the two rooms looked nothing alike. Here, a mix of pots and pans hung from multicolored pegs, and the kitchen table—wooden and water-ringed, one bad leg wrapped in duct tape—had a matryoshka-doll centerpiece. The nesting dolls reminded me of my paintings: the bright figures resting inside each other like secrets, increasing in detail as they decreased in size.

  “Janna’s not a name you hear often,” I said. “Are you from the States?”

  “Nope. Finland. But the name itself is Hebrew. Mother started out Lutheran, but Daddy’s a Jew and she converted. His family’s from Israel, but he met Mother in Helsinki, where he was born. There are a little more than a thousand Jews in Finland, you know, and that’s where most of them live.”

  “I didn’t know. Are you practicing?”

  “Ah, no.” She shook he
r head, and the strands of red and black rustled together. “I left a lot of things behind. But I appreciate it, the ritual. Ritual and ceremony and songs and bitter herbs. And the sweet things, too. Charoset is sweet. You’ve had it?”

  She set down the cups, one blue and one green, and poured the lemonade hastily. Drops splattered the table.

  “I haven’t,” I said.

  “Are you religious?”

  She put the mug of lemonade at my place and sat down across from me, waiting for me to drink. But I was trying to keep up with the conversation: like a wild bird, it kept jumping unexpectedly, then resettling on delicate claws.

  “No,” I said. “Neither were my parents—my mom is a microbiologist, and my dad’s an ancient historian. He studies ancient history, I mean—the Sumerians. He himself is very modern.”

  Janna smiled, distant. “Funny,” she said.

  “Anyway, I suppose that’s where I get it, the atheism. I’m in academia, too.”

  “What do you study?” asked Janna. But she was examining the fingers on her left hand, her knuckles bent; eyeing something, she brought the fourth finger to her teeth and tore at the jagged skin around the nail bed.

  “Oh, it’s complicated.”

  I could tell this upset her. Her face and neck flushed, and I became more conscious of the blue veins beneath her skin. Is it terrible to say I was delighted? It was a small moment of leverage—my foot wedged in a cranny of rock, my body muscled above hers.

  “I’m not sure I can say much about it, honestly,” I said.

  Gabe and I could talk about our work within limits—Keller asked us to be vague, and we were to never share information about individual patients—but we had never done it. Both of us feared we would be seen as quacks—or worse, interrogated, doubted, and criticized. It was safer to keep the truth between us.

  “I see,” said Janna. She took a gulp of lemonade and looked out the window to the street, as if waiting for someone to join us.

  “What do you do?” I asked. “Sometimes I see you coming back in the evening.”

  As soon as I said it, I reddened. I didn’t want Janna to know I’d been observing her as closely as I had. But if she was surprised, she didn’t say so.

  “I’m paid to garden. Landscaper is the term, I suppose, but I prefer gardener. I work for one couple at the moment who’ve got a big plot of land, several acres. It’s like a bunch of needy babies crying out for me. That’s what Thomas says: I’m raising my children.”

  “Thomas,” I said. “Is that the man who lives here?”

  Janna nodded. She put her spidery fingers on either side of the mug and began to rotate it.

  “My husband,” she said. “He’s in academia, like you—the English department. He’s a Romanticist, studying for his PhD.”

  I wasn’t sure whether he was studying the Romantics or if she meant to imply that university work was a romantic gesture in itself, a comment that had to be directed in part at me. Then and even months later, it was difficult for me to gauge Janna’s slyness, to sift it out of what was sincere.

  “And you?” she asked. “I’ve seen someone else coming out of your house. Is he your husband? The short man?”

  “My boyfriend.”

  I was irritated by then. I finished off my lemonade, ready to make an excuse about work. But Janna leaned forward in her chair and began to tell me about her courtship with Thomas—how they met in college when he was studying poetry and she was in botany; back then, she said, she thought she might be a field researcher. Something delicate in the bright sheen of her eyes, her quick, pale hands, stopped me from resenting her.

  The tattoo on her arm was a plant, black and white, with slanted flowers and sharp leaves. It traveled from her palm to her elbow. Her skin seemed too thin to withstand such inkiness. But most disturbing was the piercing on the back of her neck, which I only saw when she turned: two balls spaced an inch or so apart without a bar. I couldn’t tell how they’d been inserted, and that was what unnerved me. Keller had shaken my notions of privacy, and though I was now tied to his work, it made me fiercely protective of my core. There was something about the piercing in Janna’s neck that seemed invasive, even if she had chosen it. That was what struck me: her allowance of invasion, her desire for it.

  • • •

  As it turned out, Gabe spoke to Thomas the next day. He told me that night while we did our exercises. In Fort Bragg, we had begun to feel the physical toll of our lifestyle, in which we were either sleeping or observing the sleep of others. Our lower backs ached; our knees popped. Because our work schedule was so irregular, it didn’t make sense to join a gym, so Gabe suggested we use DVDs. We rented stacks of them from the library, our tote bags clattering on the walk home. Today, we were using 8 Minute Abs with 8 Minute Buns.

  “I went over to the neighbors’ house yesterday,” I said. “The woman invited me—Janna.”

  Gabe grunted. When we finished our sit-ups, we sat up and took a sip of water.

  “Funny,” he said. “I met the guy this morning. At the Laundromat.”

  We started bicycle crunches.

  “You didn’t mention that,” I said.

  “It was a little strange, to be honest. He sat down next to me by the dryers. I thought he recognized me, but he didn’t say anything. He took out all these books. And then”—we stood for lunges—“when I was leaving, he asked if I would wait for him, so we could walk back together.”

  “So you talked then?”

  “Not much. He mentioned the weather—asked did I think it was humid. I said I did. He was sort of looking around like this.”

  Gabe dropped his shoulders so his neck was long and his chin lifted, like a prairie dog. He turned his head from side to side, as if searching for someone in a crowd.

  “Well, the woman wasn’t any less awkward,” I said, though it occurred to me that awkward was the wrong word. It was more that she made me feel uneasy—as if she didn’t understand how to do small talk or wasn’t playing by the rules.

  “The weirdest part,” said Gabe, squatting, “was that when we got here, he suggested the four of us get together for dinner. He said his wife had thought of it.”

  “Really? I didn’t think she liked me very much.”

  “Why not?”

  The tape ended. Gabe turned off the TV, and we flopped to the floor, our stomachs rising and falling in unison.

  “It was just a feeling I had.”

  But the more I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure I was right. The next morning, I slipped a note under their door inviting them to eat with us that night, and despite what Gabe had told me, I was still surprised when they accepted.

  • • •

  Kraft macaroni, tomato soup, cream of mushroom casserole: these were all things that my mother had made when I was growing up and that seemed painfully unsuitable now. Gabe cooked more often than I did, in part because he enjoyed it but mostly because I had not inherited certain womanly qualities from my mother, who did not have them to give me. I had never known how to bake scones or how to bounce an infant to keep it from crying. When Gabe approached me in college, I was becoming acutely aware of the differences between me and other girls, and the idea of Keller’s work—so divorced from typical gendered life, divorced even from typical human life—felt like a blessedly alternate universe.

  Now, for the first time in years, I felt real social anxiety. I wanted to prove I could play hostess. So I told Gabe I would cook and found a recipe for skewered chicken, the breasts slippery as silk in my hands. I set the table with my grandmother’s red tablecloth and a small vase, which Gabe filled with daisies he picked along the train tracks.

  Janna had called to say they’d be by at seven thirty. But it was eight when our doorbell rang, and the chicken had almost gone cold. Gabe and I had dressed up—he wore a button-up shirt with his jeans, and I ha
d on a knee-length navy skirt—but Janna and Thomas looked like exotic birds in our entryway. She wore a short, canary-yellow dress, he a three-piece herringbone suit that looked much too hot for the late summer weather.

  “I’m Janna,” she said, turning toward Gabe. “And this is Thomas.”

  After I began to call him Thom, I found it odd she never did. I still remember the way she introduced him that day, as if it was her duty to preserve something old-fashioned and noble in him.

  “Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas. He shook my hand, his grip boyishly enthusiastic; he nodded his head at the same time, the fuzzy strawberry-blond hair flapping up and down on his forehead. He wore a bow tie at his neck, and that, combined with his freckles and glasses, made him look like a character in a newspaper comic. But behind the glasses, his eyes were a deeply concentrated brown. They anchored his energy, like a mooring dropped in busy water.

  “For you,” said Janna, holding out a porcelain dish, fuchsia, with plastic wrap on top. “Blueberry soup, for dessert—something my mother used to make. Mustikkakeitto, in Finnish.”

  The words had a staccato beauty. In her high, lilting voice, they sounded sharp and delicate as glass shards.

  “Thank you,” I said, taking the bowl. The liquid inside was a deep magenta stain. Gabe reached for Janna’s hand.

  “Gabe,” he said. His smile broke open as easily as it did with Keller’s patients, and he held Janna’s hand in a firm grip, then Thomas’s.

  “Quite nice of you to have us over,” said Thomas, flattening the front of his vest with his palms and looking around at our walls, which were bare. “It occurred to us too late that we should have hosted you. But here we are, and we brought Janna’s soup. Though now I wish we had something better—a housewarming plant or something, yeah? Bit bare in here, unless that’s how you like it?”

  “Don’t be rude,” said Janna. “Thomas says the first thing that comes to his mind, and usually the first thing isn’t the best. They’ve just moved in, they haven’t got time to get the place decorated. It was that way for us, too, in the beginning—everything packed away in boxes and boxes.”