The First Principles of Dreaming

by Beth Goobie

  Several years later, when she had gotten her first period, all she had said was “Mother, it happened.” Gerbils menstruated and so did she. What else was there to say? Her mother had given her a tiny gerbil-like smile, taken her to the linen closet, and pointed to a skyscraper-size box of sanitary napkins. “It will come once a month,” she had said primly. “Make sure you wrap the dirty ones in toilet paper before you throw them into the garbage, so your father doesn’t have to look at them.” For the past five years, Jez had been shrouding the incriminating evidence of her connection to gerbils and burying it at the bottom of a bathroom garbage pail. Now here was Dee’s mother, casually sipping a late-afternoon martini and assessing her daughter’s new debauchery-destined friend while she scanned her Bunny-fucked brain for ideas.

  “Jez,” murmured Mrs. Eccles, the purring undertow in her voice belying her startled Bunny eyes. “Short for?”

  “Jezebel,” said Dee, cutting in. “Did you know the first Jezebel was a queen that got tossed out a window by a creep named Jehu, and wild dogs licked up her blood?” Sprawled in her chair, she was fiddling with a sugar bowl shaped like a naked woman’s body—the lid a pair of breasts, the bowl a crotch and buttocks. “Check it out,” she said to Jez, lifting the lid and tipping the bowl so the sugar slid to one side, revealing an impossibly large cock inside the ceramic belly.

  “Jez,” repeated Mrs. Eccles, pulling Jez’s startled gaze back to her face. Even the ceramic cock was no competition for this woman’s voice. “Let me ask you a few questions.”

  Jez nodded, swallowing convulsively as she fought off various shades of red.

  “Have you had sex before?” asked Mrs. Eccles.

  “Yeah,” mumbled Jez. Then, thinking better of it, she straightened, folded both hands neatly on the tabletop, and added, “I mean, yes.”

  “Can you say yes without blushing?” purred Mrs. Eccles.

  “Uh, maybe,” said Jez, losing out to yet another wave of red. No two ways about it—this woman’s questions felt like a vaginal exam.

  Thoughtfully, Mrs. Eccles stroked her generous cleavage with long red fingernails. “Tell me, Jez,” she said. “Did you experience this sex before you met my daughter?”

  Dee’s body went into minor convulsions and she hissed something indecipherable.

  “Uh, before,” said Jez, glancing at Dee’s stony face. “Yeah, definitely before. More than once too.”

  “At summer camp,” Dee interjected heatedly. “Bible camp.”

  “I don’t need to know the details,” said her mother.

  “It was Christian sex though,” said Dee, her hard, bright eyes pinning her mother’s. “Does Christian sex count?”

  Suddenly, overwhelmingly, and without question, Jez wanted to go home. She wanted war that was restricted to her mother’s polite Biblical crusades. She wanted to devote herself to interminable celibacy and listen to Billy Graham for the rest of her life.

  “What counts, Jez,” Mrs. Eccles said coolly, swirling the contents of her martini, “is whether or not you enjoyed it.” Delicately, she sipped from her glass. “It’s just that you look so angelic, honey. You have to want this for yourself. I don’t want Dee pimping you.”

  “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” exploded Dee.

  “Just an expression, sweetie,” purred her mother. “I know how you can be when you get going.”

  “Yeah, everyone tells me we are so much alike,” muttered Dee, spinning the sugar bowl so violently, its contents scattered across the tabletop.

  “Would you like my help or not?” asked her mother, her tone ominous.

  “Um, yeah, actually,” said Dee, slumping downward until her hips rode the edge of her chair.

  “Fine,” said Mrs. Eccles, finishing her drink in one swallow. “Dee, dear, your prescription is with Dr. Blakely. I’d suggest we get another one from Dr. McCormack, and that you fill it at a drugstore across town. This is illegal, you understand? Jez, I need your word that you won’t tell any of your friends. Or your mother. Dee, I know I can count on you.”

  Dee sighed heavily. “You betcha,” she mumbled.

  “I absolutely promise,” Jez added fervently. Now that the ordeal was over, she felt like leaping to her feet, hand over heart, and reciting the Pioneer Girls Club creed, or displaying her Red Cross volunteer badge—anything to prove to Dee’s mother that she could be responsible.

  Mrs. Eccles’s brief smile cooled to ice. “No sex for a month,” she said sternly. “It takes a while to kick in. You’ll just have to fend them off until then.”

  “Thanks, Mom,” said Dee, her expression clearing as she picked up the almost empty sugar bowl and licked the cock clean of sugar. In a parallel motion, Mrs. Eccles ran a quick tongue around the sunlit rim of her empty martini glass. Then, without looking at each other, mother and daughter gave identical slide-through smiles—the split-second kind that come and go like a prowler at a bedroom window.

  “Come on,” said Dee, slapping Jez’s knee. “I’ll show you my knife marks downstairs before I drive you home.”

  Getting to her feet, Jez glanced one last time at Mrs. Eccles, but the woman, her back turned, was setting her martini glass into the dishwasher, the conversation and its subject matter apparently dismissed.

  Five

  At every corner, Louisie anchored our Eleusis home in the spirit world. My initial glimpse into this realm came not through my mother, but in the ghostly mirrors the former owner had left hanging on the second floor. As I first ran through those empty rooms, mysterious portals seemed to open in walls and closet doors, allowing what appeared to be my twin to repeatedly step toward me—a hazy welcoming figure edged in dust and blurred light. Words could not describe this resurrection of my heart. A grave had opened, releasing the other half of my life, albeit one that remained separate and beyond, the antique glass yet another membrane dividing the split atom of self.

  Immediately following Louisie’s death, I had been placed in the care of our minister’s wife so my father could focus on funeral arrangements and my mother’s collapse. The minister’s wife was an austere, italics-hissing woman who considered it unseemly for children to interact with corpses and refused to take me to the funeral home to view the body. Although I had no clear idea as to a funeral home’s function, I learned through intensive blank-faced eavesdropping that my twin had been laid out at McAllistair’s Funeral Home, a building I had seen often enough from the local Dairy Queen directly across the street.

  All roads lead to the Dairy Queen when you are seven; blindfolded, I could have found my way to it from any direction. And so it was entirely predictable that, midway through what was supposed to have been my second afternoon nap at the manse, I was instead to be found tearing along Dover Avenue toward the familiar ice cream cone sign, then crossing the street and lugging open the front door to McAllistair’s Funeral Home. Inside the lobby’s dense, carpeted silence, voices could be heard from an adjoining office, discussing “the little girl’s viewing,” which further eavesdropping revealed was scheduled to take place shortly in Room Two. Several doors opened directly off the lobby, and Room Two was easily located, along with its small white coffin and bouquets of lilies. Dragging over a nearby stacking chair, I climbed onto the seat, leaned into the open coffin, and hissed, “Ha! Just joking, huh? Didn’t fool me, but you sure got everyone else praying for you.”

  Bright-cheeked and red-lipped, Louisie lay demurely, both hands folded over her chest. Her hair had been curled and tied with a bow, she wore our best matching Sunday dress, and the lower half of her body was covered with a white satin sheet. Despite the dull chemical smell that emanated from her skin, she could have been merely asleep, with me awake beside her and listening to her breathe, as had so often been the case. From birth, Louisie had possessed the knack of falling quickly and deeply asleep, and many had been the night that I had laid my head on her chest and ridden the cadence of
her breathing steadily into dreams. So that afternoon, without thinking, I followed my longing into the coffin and laid half on, half beside her body, as I twisted a lock of her hair around my finger.

  “Louisie,” I whispered hesitantly. “What’s it like in Heaven? Do angels sing boring old hymns all the time? Do they ever fart or burp?”

  When I touched her cheek, it was as cool as the varnished surface of our bedroom dresser. What gave me pause, however, was not the blush that smudged my fingertip, but my twin’s lack of response to my blasphemy—the complete absence of scorn or prediction of eternal hellfire blasting from her ruby lips. A kind of knowing descended upon me then, a cold animal shifting in my bowels, and I began the slow rotation toward fear.

  “Hey, Louisie,” I hissed, pushing that fear desperately aside. “Did you know the minister’s wife picks her nose when she’s on the phone? She’s always blabbing on this big red phone they got in the kitchen, and the whole time, she’s pulling another goober out of her nose. She always checks to see how big it is too, before she rubs it on the wall.”

  No disgust twisted my twin’s face in response to this information, no petals of breath floated from her mouth. Fighting the terror that now fish-hooked my gut, I burrowed into her hair and hung on. “Hey, Louisie,” I whimpered. “Don’t you think you’re tired of Heaven yet? Maybe just a little? Don’t you think God’s got enough souls up there already to keep Him company? I only got one twin, you know, and that’s you. And yesterday I heard the minister’s wife say Mommy took a fit over you dying, and I ain’t seen her for two days because I got to stay with the nose-pickin’ minister’s wife, and you took it all away, Louisie. You took it all away.”

  At this point, someone entered the room and turned on a vacuum cleaner. Startled, I sat up, causing a young woman in a McAllistair’s Funeral Home uniform to shriek loudly and flee through the open doorway. With similar haste I executed my escape, making it back to the manse before the minister’s wife came to wake me from my nap. In the half hour that I had been gone, my absence had not been noted, and no one ever learned of those desperate whimpering minutes spent clutching my dead twin in her coffin. The following day, I was allowed to attend the funeral and watch as she was lowered into the ground, part of me still trapped inside the casket, arms wrapped tightly around her silent form and begging for a resurrection.

  So, one year later, Louisie’s rising into my mirrored reflection was an answer to my prayers. For weeks after we moved into the house on Quance Crescent, I stood before those mirrors, fingering the flowers and horned beasts carved into their frames and whispering into the glass. For the first time since my twin’s death, I had someone to talk to, and each time my parents called me away from my reflection, I felt myself grow numb and distant as if I were losing something—something that was internal and at the same time entirely other.

  Neither of my parents noticed my sudden obsession with mirrors, my mother still staggering under a monumental burden of grief and my father forced to divide his attention between his own sorrow, keeping my mother functional, and fitting in at his new workplace. As a result, when, several months into our attendance at the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle, my mother received a revelation concerning the abomination of vanity, my father did not think twice about taking down every mirror in the house and storing them behind several steamer trunks in the basement. This presented somewhat of an inconvenience with regards to my ongoing dialogue with Louisie, but nothing insurmountable; I simply took my quest underground. Day after day, I descended the steep basement stairs into the furnace room, where the mirrors had been leaned against the back wall and covered with a tarp. Crawling under the tarp, I then spent hours seated cross-legged in a musty between-worlds kind of place, holding a flashlight dimmed by a pillowcase and whispering to my shadowy-faced twin. To further encourage her cooperation, I would hold up one of several flannel-backed Billy Graham paper dolls that I had rescued from the trash before the move to Eleusis; its presence never failed to bring Louisie’s high-pitched voice to mind, full of remonstrations concerning Jesus and the rules of Heaven, thereby allowing me to take on my accustomed role as her opposite, an identity familiar and defined.

  For weeks, I descended into this underworld while my parents went on above me, distant muffled voices and the reassuring creak of floorboards. Then one afternoon, I discovered the tarp tossed carelessly across the steamer trunks, and nothing but bare wall where the mirrors had been stored. Immediately, I understood that the mirrors had been thrown out with the trash; just as quickly, I realized they could not be retrieved, the garbage trucks having already completed their weekly rumbling journey along the crescent. Panic was a moth over a candle, its wings on fire. The mirrors had been my link to Louisie, and I was certain she lived inside them. If they were gone, she was too, taking with her some ephemeral hoping part of myself…but there was no point whatsoever in pleading my case with two fully committed Waiting for the Rapture parents.

  “The mirrors loved me,” I was reduced to wailing. “The mirrors saw me. I’m all gone away again. I’m all gone away.”

  “Vanity, vanity. All is abomination” was my mother’s response, but she must have sensed Louisie’s second departure on some level, for it was soon after the mirrors’ banishment that photographs of my twin began appearing all over the house. The supply of these pictures was extensive—before Louisie’s death, our mother had been an avid photographer, and an entire living room bookcase was crammed with her photo albums. Now, feverish and distraught, she piled these previously beloved albums onto the kitchen table and ransacked them. Scissors in hand, she rifled through images of her lost daughter, lifting snapshot after snapshot out of its four corner pockets and cutting Louisie free. If the picture contained other figures, they were unceremoniously lopped off, their black and white Kodak remains scattering across the tabletop, and I watched in growing horror as my mother’s pink-handled scissors edged me out of birthday parties and pillow forts, the shared grins of my first seven years.

  Having reduced each photograph to Louisie’s solo image, my mother would get to her feet and walk slowly through the house, eyes half-closed and humming until inspiration struck, then abruptly whirl and tape the picture fragment of my twin onto a wall, door frame, or running board. Soon into this process, she began to add wings to the tiny Louisie figures, and spent hours cutting insect and angel wings out of magazines or creating them from colored construction paper. Significantly, these winged figures initially appeared in the positions the antique mirrors had originally hung, but they spread quickly throughout the house, and I returned daily from school to find new versions of my twin hovering in diapers, bathing suit, or Sunday best on the wall above my bed, on the side of the fridge, even next to electrical outlets.

  Gradually, the house filled with these flitting, flying images. Wherever I went, they rose from floorboards, manifested inside opened cupboard doors, and circled overhead light fixtures. At first I was delighted, exulting in the discovery of another Louisie angel taped to the front of the de-mirrored medicine cabinet or gazing out from the center of the telephone’s rotary dial. In spite of the disappearance of the antique mirrors, my twin had found her way back to me, and was stepping out of every angle of wall, ceiling, and floor. Transfixed by this merge of internal and external worlds, I shifted naturally into a state of nonstop communion, and poured myself in an unguarded river toward the legion of Louisie angels that drifted about the house.

  As time passed, however, and the number of angels increased, I grew disoriented, unsure if I was walking floor or ceiling. Home had become a veritable house of mirrors, splintered into a multitude of tiny-winged reflections, each a near-replica of my own face and body. To make matters worse, I was not allowed to contribute to the Louisie collage. If I drew a picture of my twin and taped it to the fridge, it was summarily removed and placed on my bed. And if, by accident or design, I happened to shift one of the Louisie angels, sev
eral stinging slaps were applied to my hand with the wooden spoon. Furthermore, nothing was explained, the meaning of my mother’s actions left to reverberate like invisible electric wires in my head. As a result, my confusion grew daily. Whose soul was it, in the end, that had been entrapped in winged points of light all over the house—Louisie’s or mine? And where was I supposed to locate myself—within the wave field of angels that vibrated soundlessly in the house walls, or in my numb, increasingly hopeless child’s flesh?

  After their initial appearance, the Louisie angels were not acknowledged by my parents, and, over time, decreasingly by myself. We seemed simply to live our physical lives within the dream of their ethereal wings, oblivious to the part of our consciousness that had escaped us to fly at greater and greater heights. Not once did we discuss what it was that actually hovered about us, what sort of otherworldly awareness might have been drawn to such displaced yearning. Silent yet keening, a high-frequency anguish vibrated like invisible string art between the angels and our bodies. Each Kodak cherub was a tiny nerve prick of pain, sent out and away. Gradually, as we continued with our anesthetized lives, the Louisie figures began to curl at the edges; then, as the tape holding them in place loosened, their long, silent fall began. Gently, they spiraled downward; catching them midair, we pulled them from our hair and stared numbly. Unvoiced was the knowledge that the angels held something that belonged to us—something we needed to recover but could not. Without sadness, without even seeming to notice, my mother swept the withered forms into the garbage, but their high, white current of grief remained trapped in the house walls, each angel’s previous location like a gate that had been fixed into position, waiting for the Divine Sister’s night prowling to call it open to the other side.