Sweet Dream Baby

by Sterling Watson

When my mom cried, I said, “I love you, Mom. You’re the most beautiful mom in the world.” That’s the truth, too.

  My dad puts on his hat. It makes him look like Superman. He’s tall and strong, and his jaw is blue after he shaves, and he walks like I want to walk when I’m a man. Like he knows where he’s going and nothing can stop him from getting there. “Come on, Trav, Buddy,” he says to me. “Time and tide wait for no man.”

  Two

  I hate the hospital. I usually wait in the car. Our car is a black, ’54 Chevy. Dad says we’re going to get a new Buick Roadmaster when he finishes clerking and gets to be a real lawyer. I don’t like our car because it’s old and doesn’t have a radio. It’s hot in the car, and there’s nothing to do.

  Dad visits Mom once a week, on Saturday afternoon. After he sees her, he always tells me she’s getting better and she’ll be home soon. Sometimes he smiles when he comes through the big double doors. He walks fast like I know he walked in his uniform when he was a Marine, and he stops in the sun and looks at the parking lot, trying to remember where I’m parked. He puts his hat on and smiles.

  Other times, he comes out and stops under the oak tree by the sidewalk, and I see him look at the far away. He takes a deep breath and lights a cigarette and rubs his eyes. He stands there smoking, raising his face to the light that falls through the tree branches. That’s when I know I have to be quiet. I can’t ask about Mom. I can’t ask when she’s coming home.

  Sometimes my dad talks to me about what he calls her case. He says things about hydrotherapy and insulin shock treatment. I don’t understand, and I don’t think he’s really talking to me. He’s talking to himself, and I’m listening in.

  One day, I came home from school and found Mom curled up under the kitchen sink. She was holding her knees under her chin and singing to herself, a song in Japanese. I don’t think I would have found her until Dad came home from work, except I went for a peanut butter and jelly sandwich and a glass of milk, and I heard the singing. I opened the cabinet door. I don’t know, it’s crazy, but I thought somebody put the radio under there.

  Mom didn’t open her eyes when I opened the door. She was lying there with the bottles of Lysol and the Ivory soap flakes all pushed back under the pipes. And she had her little shrine with her. It’s blue, and it’s made of the same stuff our dinner plates are made of, and it’s pretty. She had taken it from the bedroom and put it under the sink.

  The worst thing was how she didn’t look at me, and how she wouldn’t speak English. I didn’t know what to do. I thought of calling Mrs. Dietz from down the block. She’s the Avon lady. She comes up the street once every two weeks or so and tries to sell my mom some perfume or powder or lipstick. My mom usually makes coffee, and they talk. Mrs. Deitz’s husband was in the Pacific, too. He was a Seabee. He built the airfield on Saipan. He has dreams, too, she told my mom. And a collection of Japanese swords and pistols. I asked my mom to let me go see them, but she said no. She said, “That perfume is cheap stuff, Trav. But I’m nice to her. I’m stuck out here with no car and that Mrs. Pultney next door, and Bea Dietz is all I got for grown-up company. But don’t you ask her to see those swords. Those are kegashigoto, Travis. I don’t want you touching them.”

  I didn’t call Mrs. Dietz. I sat on the floor beside the sink and talked to my mom for two hours until my dad came home. She didn’t talk to me. She just kept singing in Japanese. I wanted to touch her face. I wanted to touch her eyes and say, “See me. I’m Travis.” I wanted to crawl in with her and lie there against her like I used to when I was a little kid.

  When Dad came home, he pulled her out, and she fought him. She scratched his face. If he hadn’t caught her hands, she would have hurt his eyes. He carried her to their bed and held her down and whispered to her until she pulled her knees up under her chin and started singing again. Then he called the doctor.

  I know about hospitals. I had the flu when I was a little kid, and I almost died. I got pneumonia, and it took me six weeks to get over it, and I lost a lot of weight, and I almost died. They put me in a ward with a lot of other kids, and some of them died, so I know what that’s like, and I know this is not a regular hospital. It’s on the outskirts of Omaha, and there’s a big fence around it. You come in through a gate, and a man writes down your license number. I asked Dad why he never lets me go in with him, and he said because it might upset Mom, but I know that isn’t true. I know it’s because of the people in there. I won’t say the word. I hate to even think the word, but at night I lie in bed, and I can’t stop it. It comes into my head. Crazy. My mom is crazy, and I wonder if I’m going to be crazy someday.

  Sometimes I have bad dreams that I’m looking for Mom and can’t find her. Sometimes I wake up, and I see the green dial of dad’s watch at my bedroom door, and he says, “Trav, buddy, you’ve been entertaining the bogeyman again. Wake up and get rid of him.” And I ask him if I can come to his room, and he says, “No, Buddy. You’re too big for that now. You’ve got to tough it out.”

  We drive through the gate, and the man writes down our number. For once, Dad finds a parking place under a shady tree, but I know I’m not staying in the car. Dad didn’t tell me, I just know. We get out, and he puts his hands on my shoulders. “Listen, Buddy,” he says. “You’re gonna see some strange things in there. I want you be polite no matter what and don’t stare at people. If anybody speaks to you, just answer politely if you think you can, and if you can’t, just smile and don’t say anything at all. I’ll take care of you.”

  We start walking toward the big double doors, and I think of all the times I’ve sat in the hot car with nothing to do but stare at those doors and wait for my dad, and now here I am going in, and I’m scared. It’s like it was when Jimmy Pultney shot the arrow. My knees are all of a sudden gone, and I feel like I’m going to be crawling soon. I try to take my dad’s hand, but he won’t let me. We walk a few steps, then he rests his hand on my shoulder. Then he takes it away. “Buck up, old Buck,” I hear him say.

  The nurse at the desk looks up and says, “Good morning, Mr. Hollister.” There’s a picture of President Eisenhower on the wall behind her. She sees me and comes around the desk. There’s a spool on her belt with big heavy keys on it, and when she leans down, I see she’s got a mustache. But her eyes are nice, and she says, “I bet you’re Travis. Your momma talks about you all the time.” She stands up and looks at my dad. “You’re a lucky boy to have such nice parents.”

  I don’t like her telling me that. I know it already, and it’s none of her business. She opens her desk drawer and takes out a red lollipop. She bends down, and her breath smells like cigarettes. I look at my dad, and he nods, and I take the candy. I say, “Thank you, ma’am,” like Dad taught me. None of my friends at school have to say ma’am and sir, but Dad says we’re southerners and we say it. He says my friends are all Yankees and don’t know anything about manners.

  I’m standing there with the candy in my hand and feeling too hollow inside to put it in my mouth, and the nurse says to my dad, “She’s in the day room. I thought the boy would like it better in there.” I know the way her voice is. I’ve heard it before. It’s how adults send messages kids don’t get. Only sometimes you get them.

  There’s a door to my right, and from beyond it, I hear somebody moan. It’s a long, sad sound, and it falls into my hollow stomach and lies there hurting. It makes my hands go sweaty. The nurse pulls a key from the spool on her belt and unlocks the door beyond the desk. It’s like the time I got paddled at school for throwing the chalk up into the ceiling fan. I had to walk down the hall and knock on the assistant principal’s door and go in, and there was a witness waiting, Mrs. Tarleton, the third grade teacher, and she’s pretty, and I didn’t want her to see me cry. I stood outside that door for a long time and couldn’t knock until Mr. Beard, the assistant principal, the guy who does all the paddling, opened the door and said, “Travis, are you going to stand out there all d
ay?”

  It’s just like that now. I don’t want to go through that door. Not even to see my mom, and I haven’t seen her in a long time. Not even if Dad wants me to see her. But I do. I walk through with my dad, and I hear the key snap back on the nurse’s spool, and the door locks behind us, and it smells like pee and Lysol inside.

  My mother is pretty and looks like all the ladies in the magazines and at church and at the PTA. She’s not tall, but she’s slender, and she wears high heels that make her legs pretty and make her taller, and stockings with seams down the back that she keeps straight. She wears dresses that have flowers on them, and she wears lots of slips that make the dresses stand out from her legs and sizzle when she walks. She wears Chanel perfume, and I’ve watched her get dressed after her bath. She puts a dot of perfume on each wrist and then rubs them together and touches the sides of her neck with her wrists. Then she takes the glass top of the perfume bottle, shaped like a teardrop, and opens her robe and touches it to her chest, down low in the middle, and my neck gets thick then, and I love my mother, and now I see her sitting on a metal chair at a table at the far end of a big room, and her hair isn’t curled, it’s pulled back straight, and she doesn’t have on her red lipstick, and she’s wearing a green cotton dress with no belt, and she’s holding her hands together tight on the table.

  When me and Dad come close, I can see in her eyes she wants to stand up and come to me. She wants to hug me and run away with me, but she knows she can’t. Her eyes tell me she knows and she’s sorry.

  Me and Dad take the two chairs across from her, and he reaches into his pocket and gives my mom a small paper bag. She opens it and takes out some sticks of incense. She smiles and says, “Thank you, Lloyd,” and my dad looks at her, and his eyes go big and soft, and I don’t know what’s happening. Then I know. He’s going to cry. My dad, Marine 2nd Lieutenant Lloyd T. Hollister. I can’t look at this.

  It’s like when I walk past my parents’ bedroom on Sunday afternoon after church, and the radio is playing softly, and there’s a cigarette burning in the ashtray by the bed, and my mom is lying with her head on my dad’s chest, and it’s what I don’t know about them, what they have only for themselves, and I put my eyes down and go by fast, out to the backyard, all the way out to the place where our yard meets the wheat field, and I stand there and stare at the dead farmer’s silo a mile away.

  My dad takes out his handkerchief, and I look away, and I see there are other people in the room. Crazy people.

  A man with no hair and sores on his face sits at a table to my right staring down at a checker board with no pieces on it. He lifts his hand to his face but doesn’t touch it. His eyes never leave the board. Behind my mom, there’s a couch and two women sit on it. One of them rocks back and forth and hums to herself. I recognize the tune. It’s Peggy Lee. It’s “Fever.” My dad likes that song. When it comes on the radio, he stops and listens. He closes his eyes and taps his fingers on his thigh.

  The other woman on the couch is slowly pulling the yarn out of a green sweater she’s been knitting. She sees me looking at her, so I smile. She says, “Don’t you look at me, you filthy little boy. Don’t you dare look at me.” She gives me the finger.

  I’ve done something wrong. I try to remember what Dad told me out in the parking lot. Don’t talk. Be polite. I’ll take care of you. But Dad is taking care of himself. He’s drying his eyes, and he’s looking at Mom, and she’s looking at me. “Don’t mind her, Travis,” my mom says. “She doesn’t know what she’s saying. She knows you’re not a filthy little boy.” I just nod. I don’t know what I’m allowed to do, to say. I want to go around the table and hug my mother. I know she wants me to, but something’s keeping us from it. It’s like someone is watching, and we have to sit here like this, like we’re sitting in a church pew, my hands in my lap, my dad putting his handkerchief back in his pocket.

  My parents talk for a while about the house, my dad’s job, bills that have to be paid, the weather, about me and how I did in school. It’s summer now and school’s out, but when I was going, I wasn’t doing so hot. Not after my mom went to the hospital. They talk like I’m not here, and all the time I look at my mom and think how pretty she is, even without the lipstick and the dress with the slips that sizzle and the stockings with straight seams. How she looks just like the ladies in the magazines and at church and at the PTA except she’s Japanese, and her skin is dark, and her eyes are turned up at the edges.

  After a while, my dad says it’s time to go, and I look at him like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. How can it be time to go when we haven’t done anything? I haven’t hugged my mom. She hasn’t kissed my eyes like she does before I go to sleep at night. She hasn’t told me when she’s coming home.

  We stand up, and I want to cry or punch something or throw the mean lady’s knitting on the sore-faced man’s checker board and say, “Why don’t you two filthy people play a game of sweater checkers?” I look at my mom and let my eyes ask her. Please. She knows what I’m saying. Her eyes are sad, and she shrugs. Her eyes say, “I can’t.” She looks around at the green walls, and I know now they have eyes and they’re watching her, and she has to do what they want or she’ll never get out of here. She whispers, “I love you, Travis,” and she reaches into her pocket and takes out a wallet and hands it to me. She smiles and says, “I made it for you. I hope you like it. It’s for your birthday.”

  I take the wallet and look at it. It’s too early for this. My birthday’s in two days. I’m going to be twelve, and I’m going to have a cake, and I’m going to be at home with Mom and Dad, and there’s going to be a lot of presents. The wallet has a picture of Roy Rogers riding Trigger on it. My mom says, “I put that picture on there with an electric wand. I hope it’s not too young for you. You’re getting to be such a big boy.”

  She looks at Dad. He looks hard at the far away and says, “Miko, it’s not too young for him. He loves Roy Rogers.”

  I still like Roy, but I’m more interested in creatures now. I saw Creature from the Black Lagoon at the Rialto downtown last week, and I liked it a lot. I’d like to swim in a river in South America and find this guy with webbed hands and feet and fight him and drag him up on the bank and put him in a big tank and take him home and keep him in my room. He’d be my creature, and I’d show him to all my friends.

  My mom looks at me very carefully now, and I put away the wallet, and I say, “Thanks, Mom. I love my wallet. I really do.”

  She says, “I want you to be a good boy with Grandpa and Grandma Hollister. Will you do that for Momma?”

  I say, “Sure.” I want her to hug me. I want us to run away. I’d protect her. I’d take care of her. I’d never say she couldn’t have her household god.

  My dad puts his hand on my shoulder. We all walk to the door and Dad pushes a button, and we hear the nurse’s key in the lock. My mom gets down on her knees in front of me, and she looks into my eyes.

  My dad says, “Kiss your mom good-bye, Travis, Buddy.” He has his old voice back. I can’t see his eyes, but I know they aren’t big and soft anymore. I know he didn’t like me seeing them that way. I wait for Mom to kiss me.

  But she waits for me. It’s because we’re here. She smiles. I lean toward her, and she smells good, the old way, and I try to kiss her cheek but she stops me. She kisses me on the mouth. It’s sweet and slow and soft, and I’m crying like I told myself I’d never do again, and she says, “You’re going to love that ride on the airplane, Travis, my good boy. You’re going to fly on the wind like the spirits of my ancestors,” and then Dad lifts me by the arms, and the door opens, and he pulls me through it, and I don’t see much more until we’re in the car again.

  Three

  I wake up when the stewardess shakes me. Her name is Wendy, and she smells good like my mom, but she doesn’t look like the ladies at church and PTA. She looks like the lady the Creature kidnapped in the Black Lagoon. She’s the mo
st beautiful lady I’ve ever seen that isn’t in a magazine or on TV or in the movies. She’s my friend. When the plane took off, she let me sit beside her and buckled my seat belt. I was so surprised when we left the ground, I said, “It feels like my stomach’s going into my butt,” and Wendy giggled and put her finger across her mouth. She gave me a Coke in a paper cup and a Baby Ruth. After I ate the candy and we hit a storm and the plane started to bounce around, I wasn’t feeling so hot. Wendy gave me a pill that made my stomach feel better and made me sleepy. She gave it to me with a paper cup full of water, and she leaned down and I smelled her, and she kissed me on the cheek and then rubbed off the lipstick and said, “You’ll probably sleep the rest of the way, but don’t worry, Gorgeous, I’ll wake you up before we land.”

  I looked at her, and I know I was smiling. I was already feeling warm and my stomach wasn’t flopping anymore. I said, “Gorgeous? What does that mean?”

  I know what it means, but I wanted her to tell me. She laughed. “It means you’re gonna be a heartbreaker some day, Kid. Now go to sleep and dream about the Sugar Plum Fairy.”

  I said, “I’m too old for that.” I yawned.

  She said, “Then dream you’re Mickey Mantle.”

  Now Wendy shakes me and says, “Did you hit a home run, Gorgeous?” and I remember Mickey Mantle, and I’m going to be a heartbreaker, and that must be good because Wendy smiled when she said it. She leans down and says, “That pill really swacked you. Why don’t you look out the window? That’ll wake you up. We’re approaching Panama City.”

  Wendy has freckles on her nose and red hair pulled back in a bun, and she’s wearing a garrison cap. My dad has one. He says the Marines call it a pisscutter. She’s wearing a brown skirt that’s tight and a white blouse with a brown bow tie and an Eisenhower jacket. She’s got a pair of silver wings, and I want her to give them to me, but I know I can’t ask.