The Bus of Dreams

by Mary Morris

  Alice’s two redheaded children, Sara and Teddy, grab me around the ankles as I walk in. Jim leans over to kiss me. He’s making breakfast. He’s got eggs scrambling in the electric frying pan and bacon in the microwave and muffins in the toaster oven and coffee in the coffee-maker and juice whirring around in the blender. He is the essence of efficiency as he moves quickly from one appliance to another. “How’s my little Pebble?” he asks. Pebble is an old nickname from my youth. When he began dating Alice during high school, I always went along. He called me the pebble in his shoe. Then just Pebble.

  Alice reaches her face up to kiss Jim hello. She’s only been gone half an hour, but they seem eager to kiss. Alice’s cheeks are rosy, and a droplet of mucus hangs from the tip of her nose. Jim kisses her. Then with his finger he wipes the drop away and on to his jeans. No one has ever with his own finger wiped nasal drip from my nose.

  If I think back, it is the first Christmas I’ve been single in ten years. It’s also the first Christmas I haven’t been miserable in ten years. So what is worse, I ask myself. I think maybe I should call that man in Colorado and tell him just forget it.

  We flock to the living room to open the gifts. At first there seems to be some system to the opening. Teddy and Sara sit near their presents like dogs being trained to wait for a biscuit. First they open their stocking stuffers one at a time and display whatever Santa gave them. Then they open all the packages that are not from Santa, and they give Alice the cards. Alice carefully records the name of the person who gave the gift so that thank-you notes can be written. Then the system falls apart and we tear open our presents.

  I’ve given Alice a lavender sweater and a pair of lavender socks. She quickly pulls the sweater on to show me it fits. She is radiant. I reach down to open what she’s bought me. “I don’t know,” she mumbles. “Maybe I should have gotten you something more practical.” But I’m already opening my gifts. The first is my stocking stuffer. It is a small booklet, about one inch by two, entitled What I Know About Men. It is a flip book of animation and I flip the pages, and they’re all blank.

  Alice and I fall over laughing. Then I open a present. It is a paperweight with a single drop inside that Alice said reminded her of me. And finally I get a large silver angel to stick on my wall. A guardian angel.

  After the gifts are exchanged, we begin to get ready for dinner. We examine the silver and check the glasses. Everything matches. In my apartment, I have three Irish coffee glasses, two brandy snifters, four wine glasses, but they’re all different. Nothing goes together.

  I look at Alice, polishing silver, raising a platter to see her face. Though this is hard for me to admit, Alice is perfect. Her house is perfect. It is decorated with angels and lights. And she knows all of this. Knows how to make a list for thank-you notes, knows how to set the table for twenty people with everything matching. How to test the silver with her reflection.

  When the table is set, Alice taps me on the arm. “Come on,” she says, “we’re going somewhere.” We get in the car and drive. After a few minutes I grow impatient and want to know where we’re going. Alice smiles. “I want a puppy. I want Jim to have a puppy.” I say all right, so we drive to Orphans of the Storm, the kennel not far from where we grew up. The kennel where we’d had all our dogs put to sleep.

  The kennel has the stench of dog droppings and Lysol. It smells of wet dog hair and slightly rancid meat. A man in a white coat takes us to the cages, where dogs yelp and jump and bang themselves into the wire. There are all kinds of dogs. I tell Alice to take a red one to go with her hair. The dogs howl and never take their eyes off us. They bark as if they’ve been waiting for us all along.

  There are beautiful dogs with mottled coats. There’s a Husky with yellow-green eyes. But Alice stops in front of the ugliest dog I’ve ever seen. He has a blue eye and a brown one and part of his ear has been bitten away. He is mangy and has big flat paws. He doesn’t bark or jump. He follows us with his calm, steady stare. He doesn’t seem to expect very much. Alice says she’ll take that one, because he’ll never find a home.

  Everyone likes Buick immediately. That’s the dog’s name. Somebody found him in an abandoned Buick. But Buick is not so sure how he feels about his new home. He sulks and wags his tail tentatively. To me he appears ungrateful, but Alice says he’ll come around.

  Just before dinner, I go upstairs to take a shower. The bathroom is through their bedroom, and Alice has neatly laid out my towels. I take my shower, but before going into the guest room where I’m to get dressed, I open Alice’s closet.

  First I find bags of clothing, complete with labels: “Transitional spring and fall, except for corduroy” and “Jim’s summer suits.” And then inside the closet the blouses, the skirts, the suits and pants, all in their proper place. I move on to shoes. Each pair of shoes is in a box and each box has a label. Green sling-backs from Field’s, suede pumps with purple flowers from Saks, Yves St. Laurent black sandals with red buckles from Paris, Maud Frizon purple shoes with spike heels. There were Docksiders and Tretorns, tennis shoes, and running shoes. Shoes from the L. L. Bean catalogue. Waders and black boots with walking heels. Frye boots, Bandolino gangster moll shoes with open toes in beige, black alligator sandals from Pappagallo, purchased near the Spanish Steps.

  I move on to the drawers. I open a drawer filled with Jim’s underwear, and on his socks, on each pair of his socks, is his name, carefully sewn. I open the drawer of the night table with the Sunbeam electric blanket dial and find spermicide, an applicator, a diaphragm case, all in a little box. I close the drawer quickly when I hear footsteps enter the room.

  Jim comes in and sees me standing in my towel, his closets and drawers opened. “You lost?”

  “I was looking for a robe.”

  “Oh.” He flings one at me, which I awkwardly slip on over my towel. “You staying for the weekend?”

  I shake my head. “I’ve got a lot of work to do.”

  Jim sits down at the edge of the bed. “You’re never going to meet a guy, working so hard.” Actually I don’t work very hard, but I’m always on call. I work for a man who makes commercials. I’m the one who makes soap bubble, beer foam. I’ve been flown to Los Angeles to squeeze a tube of toothpaste.

  “I’ve got a date tomorrow night.” I blush in defense of myself. “To go ice-skating.” Jim nods. “With an accountant.” Jim smiles.

  “Anything serious?” I shake my head. “Well, I hope it will be soon.” He sighs wistfully as he walks toward the door. “Nothing like it when it is.”

  For dinner Alice has a turkey and a goose and two kinds of stuffing. She has sweet potatoes and cranberry sauce and creamed spinach and three pies and I don’t know what else. Just before the guests arrive, Jim begins to carve. He puts a fork firmly into the turkey’s back and brings the knife gently to the side. He brings the knife back and forth again while Alice holds out a platter. He carves smoothly and well and puts the meat carefully onto the platter that Alice is holding. They have worked up this act. I watch as he brings the knife back and I can picture him in the act of love, moving with an even, steady motion.

  Once when we were in college and I visited Alice, we all slept in the same room and I watched them making love. They thought I was asleep and Jim kept saying to Alice, over and over, “Is this all right? Do you like this?” And Alice said, “Shush, I’ll die if you wake Jennie.” But I’d been awake the entire time and I’d watched the way their bodies moved, with Alice’s beautiful red hair flowing off the bed.

  The next night I go out with the accountant. We go to an outdoor skating rink and drink Irish coffees. During an Irish coffee, he says he knows if he’s going to fall in love with a girl after talking to her for fifteen seconds. Since he and I have been talking for a few hours already, it doesn’t seem that I’m a likely candidate. He takes me home, rolls a joint, and we make love foolishly. After he leaves, I think about Alice. How she has it all.

  A few days later I go to a department store and buy she
ets. My mother bought some sheets for me when I graduated from college, and I’ve been sleeping in them ever since. Suddenly I can’t stand the lack of texture. The way they feel all polished like smooth stones.

  I’ve never bought sheets before. Not for myself. I’ve bought other things since I graduated from college. Crosscountry skis and dresses for parties and trips to the south. But sheets and dishes and nightgowns, those things I bought for other people. For people who were going to be married. But suddenly I have to go and make those purchases.

  The department store confuses me at first, so I go directly to the linens section. There’s a white sale and I watch the women as they pick up the packages and squeeze them, as if they’re buying cantaloupe. A salesgirl, seeing me bewildered, comes up and offers to help. She’s young, with very white teeth and blond hair that looks dyed. I tell her I want sheets for regular occasions, and sheets for special occasions. She gives me a knowing smile.

  I buy bags full of purple and white flowered sheets. I buy beige sheets with lace sidings, a purple and white comforter cover, and four down pillows. I spend more money on my sheets than I’ve ever spent on anything. Then I go home and make my bed. I put on the new and toss out the old. It is a Saturday night, so I go down the street and buy a newspaper. Then, even though it is early in the evening, I crawl into my bed. I can hear all kinds of sounds outside. Drunk people wandering home from parties, people having fights. Car doors opening, slamming shut. I open the paper and begin to read. The new sheets feel different from the old ones. They are crisp and they scratch a little as I try to sleep.

  I call Alice on her birthday and say I want to come out and see her. She says there isn’t going to be much of a party this year, just a few old friends are stopping by, but I can come if I want. She sounds distracted, and I can hear Sara crying. When I get to her house, it’s quiet and doesn’t feel as though she’s going to have a party. The house isn’t decorated with balloons and paper streamers, and I can’t find any chicken salad in the icebox. Buick lies lethargically in a corner, ignoring us all.

  Alice sits at the kitchen table for a few moments, sipping coffee. Then she asks me if I want to come down to the basement and help her with the laundry. I find it a little odd that Alice is doing the laundry on her birthday, when she’s having a few friends over, but I don’t see any reason not to help her.

  We go downstairs; the basement is damp and cold. She has a washer and dryer and there are piles of laundry on the floor. There seems to be a ton of laundry. I’ve never seen so much clothing. There are sheets and towels and socks and gym clothes all mixed together. Colors lie with whites. And to one side there are more baskets of clothes. There are so many shirts and socks. They look as if they belong to a man. Alice picks up a handful. “These are Jim’s,” she says to me. I nod. I tell her I know. Plaid shirts and green pants. Sweats and a man’s undershirt. She picks up a handful and stuffs them into my face. “Smell them,” she says.

  “What?” I step back in surprise.

  “Go on,” she says, “smell them.”

  I smell them. They smell like a man’s body. Like a man’s sweat. And they smell like something else, but I can’t figure it out. “They smell dirty,” I say.

  But Alice shakes her head. “Don’t you smell anything else?” This time she separates some underwear from the rest of his clothes. She takes some underpants and shirts and stuffs these in my face. I breathe in deeply.

  “They smell nice,” I say dumbly.

  “Perfume,” Alice says. “French perfume, I think.”

  I nod, sniffing Jim’s underpants, which she holds up to my nose. “Smells good.”

  She stuffs them into the washing machine. “I don’t wear perfume.” She puts in a plaid shirt with his underwear. “I’m allergic to it. My skin breaks out in hives.” Alice takes a very large amount of soap and dumps it into the washing machine. “If I just put a tiny dot on my skin, I get a big blotch.”

  “Oh,” I say. And then add, “I never knew that.”

  “That’s why Mom never gives me perfume. When we were little and Mom would dab some on me, I’d break out. I think I react to the stuff that comes from whales. Maybe they don’t get it from whales anymore. But I haven’t tried it. I’m probably not allergic to the synthetic thing they use. Anyway, the cause doesn’t matter. What matters is I don’t use perfume. I never have.”

  She bangs the door of the washer shut and begins removing things from the dryer. She takes out shirts and socks and puts them on top of the large folding table. She folds them and puts them in a basket. “When you live in a house for as long as I’ve lived in this, you get to know the way it smells,” Alice tells me. “I know when things are burning. I know when the cats piss on the rug.” I help her fold.

  “I washed everything,” she goes on. “I must’ve washed everything in his closet a dozen times. I wanted to get rid of the smell and I wanted them to be clean before I packed them. I’ve packed most of them. This is all that’s left.”

  Alice begins to match some of his socks. “I even know who she is. She designs the little appliances. You know, the miniature electric fan; that was her brainstorm.”

  During her birthday party, Alice runs up and down the stairs with Jim’s fresh laundry. Alice is normal with Jim. She hangs on his arm. Kisses him on the cheek. He keeps his arm tightly around her. And then after the party, when the guests are leaving, Jim goes to take his elderly aunt home. While he is gone, Alice and I put all of Jim’s things into several suitcases. “Alice,” I say, “are you sure about this? I mean, shouldn’t you think it out?”

  Alice looks at me with a strange smile. “Don’t you think I already have?” She takes a tag and puts it on one of the suitcases. We lug them out into the driveway and place them right where Jim would run over them when he comes into the drive. The tag says, “Don’t bother coming in.” After we do that, we start to make dinner. We use all of Jim’s appliances, every single one.

  While we are making dinner, Jim pulls into the driveway. The car screeches to a halt; the door slams. We go to the window and see Jim, staring at his luggage. Alice turns away, but I watch him hurling the suitcases into the car.

  That night I sleep in the back bedroom with Sara. I am tired, but for some reason I wake in the middle of the night. It is a bright moonlit night and the moonlight makes the snow a very silvery blue. In the snow, I see Alice, walking Buick. She has him on a very long lead and she is walking him across the snow. I think how beautiful it is, to see Alice walking Buick in the moonlight in the snow.

  But then I think how it’s rather late to be walking a dog. And the dog doesn’t seem to want to be walked at all. In fact, I can see the mark of his whole body in the snow, where he’s being dragged. Buick is a fairly large dog and it’s not easy to drag him, so Alice must really be much stronger than she looks.

  I watch for a few moments from the window to see where she’s dragging him. She drags him to a tree that grows close to the ground in the backyard. I see her get to the tree and toss the lead over a branch. She tugs on the rope and Buick rises, struggling and making a kind of yelping noise, off the ground, those big, flat paws clawing at the air.

  I run downstairs and pull on a pair of galoshes. In my nightgown, the cold slapping my skin, I run out across the snow, shouting at Alice. I don’t know what I’m saying, but I feel the impact of my body as it hits hers, like a football player in a fierce tackle. We sail into the snow, and Buick goes yelping off across the yard. We are both in nightgowns, the snow goes right to our skin. Our nightgowns lift up, and in the cold snow our bodies come together. Alice rolls on top of me and tries to smash my head into the snow. I turn her over and hold her down.

  Alice shouts at me how he’s a mean, nasty dog and she’ll just have to give him back to the kennel. She says how they’ll just put him to sleep. I press my arms on her wrists, my knees into her legs. I feel the warmth of her thighs against my thighs in the snow. It is a strange feeling, for we are both hot and cold at the sa
me time. “I hate you,” I tell her. “I always have.”

  After I say it, I let her go. I get up and shake the snow off me. She shakes the snow off herself. We stand there together, shivering. For a moment we stare at each other. “I didn’t mean that,” I say. “I just always thought you had it all.” And then she grabs me. I think she is going to strangle me too and I struggle to get away, but instead she presses me to her and sobs. I hold Alice, broken, cold as winter, whiskey-breathed, with snot drops frozen to her nostrils. I lift up the hem of my nightgown and bring it to her face.

  I take her upstairs and we put on dry nightgowns. I crawl into bed and wrap my arms around her. The dog curls foolishly on the floor, his memory obliterated. The moon shines a path into the room, and outside I see the snow. It is that midwestern winter I know so well. Pristine, all just right, the moonlight, the crackling noises, the snow crashing from the trees and sounding like the footsteps of small animals traveling across the roof. From the bed I see icicles hanging from the roof. I want to break one off and suck on it, but Alice is falling asleep in my arms.

  The Typewriter

  ON THE NIGHT TRAIN to Venice, Bill and Clara had a compartment to themselves. They locked the door and pulled down the shades. They opened a bottle of wine and ate ham and cheese sandwiches. Clara lay with her head in Bill’s lap, reading out loud from the guidebook, while Bill ran his fingers through her hair as if he were sifting sand. They were tired from the three days they’d spent in Paris, so when the porter came in to make up their berths, Bill yawned and put the typewriter on the overhead rack. He slipped it in his jacket, wrapping the sleeves around the body of the typewriter. “I don’t want somebody coming in here in the night and stealing it.”

  It surprised Clara that for a little while she had forgotten about the typewriter. Perhaps, she thought, she’d forget about it altogether. They brushed their teeth in the tiny sink in their compartment. Then Bill kissed her good night and climbed into the upper berth. For a few moments Clara lay on her back in the lower berth, listening to the rhythmic clacking of the wheels, to the sound of the train whizzing across France.