In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

by Ellen Gilchrist

  “He said to come in first thing in the morning. He gets there at nine.”

  “Then I’ll go swimming until dinner,” she said.

  “Fine,” he said. “Did you bring a swimsuit?”

  “Oh, no,” she said. “I didn’t think about it.”

  “Well, here,” he said, handing her a hundred dollar bill. “Go find a gift shop and see if they don’t have one that will fit you. And buy a robe to go over it. You can’t go walking around a hotel in a swimsuit. I’ll take a nap while you’re gone. I’ll come down and find you later.”

  She went down to the ground floor and found the gift shop, a beautiful little glassed-in area that smelled of cool perfume and was presided over by an elegant woman with her hair up in a bun.

  Rhoda tried on five or six swimming suits and finally settled on a black one-piece maillot cut low in the back. She admired herself in the mirror. Two weeks of being too worried to eat had melted the baby fat from her hips and stomach, and she was pleased with the way her body looked.

  While she admired herself in the mirror the saleslady handed her a beach robe. It was a black-and-white geometric print that came down to the floor.

  “This is the latest thing in the Caribbean,” the saleslady said. “It’s the only one I have left. I sold one last week to a lady from New York.”

  “It’s darling,” Rhoda said, wrapping it around her, imagining what Ernest Hemingway would think if he could see her in this. “But it’s too long.”

  “How about a pair of Wedgies,” the saleslady said. “I’ve got some on sale.

  Rhoda added a pair of white canvas Wedgies to her new outfit, collected the clothes she had been wearing in a shopping bag, paid for her purchases, and went out to sit by the pool.

  The swimming team had arrived and was doing warm-up laps. A waiter came, and she ordered a Coke and sipped it while she watched the beautiful young bodies of the athletes. There was a blonde boy whose shoulders reminded her of her husband’s and she grew interested in him, wondering if he was a famous Olympic swimmer. He looked like he would be a lot of fun, not in a bad mood all the time like Malcolm. She kept looking at him until she caught his eye and he smiled at her. When he dove back into the pool she reached under the table and took off her wedding ring and slipped it into her pocketbook.

  When she woke up early the next morning her father was already up, dressed in a seersucker suit, talking on the phone to his mine foreman in Tennessee.

  “I can’t believe I’m going to be through with all this today,” she said, giving him a kiss on the forehead. “I love you for doing this for me, Daddy. I won’t ever forget it as long as I live.”

  “Well, let’s just don’t talk about it too much,” he said. “Here, look what’s in the paper. Those sapsuckers in Washington are crazy as loons. We haven’t been through with Korea four years and they’re fixing to drag us into this mess in Vietnam. Old Douglas MacArthur told them not to get into a land war in Asia, but nobody would listen to him.”

  “Let me see,” Rhoda said, taking the newspaper from him. She agreed with her father that the best way to handle foreign affairs was for the United States to divide up the world with Russia. “They can boss half and we’ll boss half,” he had been preaching for years. “Because that’s the way it’s going to end up anyway.”

  Rhoda’s father was in the habit of being early to his appointments, so at eight o’clock they descended in the elevator, got into a taxi, and were driven through the streets of Houston to a tall office building in the center of town. They went up to the fifth floor and into a waiting room that looked like any ordinary city doctor’s office. There was even a Currier and Ives print on the wall. Her father went in and talked to the doctor for a while, then he came to the door and asked her to join them. The doctor was a short, nervous man with thin light-colored hair and a strange smell about him. Rhoda thought he smelled like a test tube. He sat beside an old rolltop desk and asked her questions, half-listening to the answers.

  “I’m getting a divorce right away,” Rhoda babbled, “my husband forced me to make love to him and I’m not supposed to have any more babies because I’ve already had two cesarean sections in twelve months and I could have a legal abortion if I wanted to but I’m afraid to wait as long as it would take to get permission. I mean I’m only nineteen and what would happen to my babies if I died. Anyway, I want you to know I think you’re a real humanitarian for doing this for people. I can’t tell you what it meant to me to even find out your name. Do you remember Stella Mabry that came here last year? Well, anyway, I hope you’re going to do this for me because I think I’ll just go crazy if you don’t.”

  “Are you sure you’re pregnant? he asked.”

  Oh, yes,” she said. “I’m sure. I’ve missed a period for three and a half weeks and I’ve already started throwing up. That’s why I’m so sure. Look, I just had two babies in thirteen months. I know when I’m pregnant. Look at the circles under my eyes. And I’ve been losing weight. I always lose weight at first. Then I blow up like a balloon.” Oh, God, she thought. Please let him believe me. Please make him do it.

  “And another thing,” she said. “I don’t care what people say about you. I think you are doing a great thing. There will be a time when everyone will know what a great service you’re performing. I don’t care what anyone says about what you’re doing…”

  “Honey,” her father said. “Just answer his questions.”

  “When was your last period,” the doctor said. He handed her a calendar and she picked out a date and pointed to it.

  Then he gave her two small white pills to swallow and a nurse came and got her and helped her undress and she climbed up on an operating table and everything became very still and dreamy and the nurse was holding her hand. “Be still,” the nurse said. “It won’t take long.”

  She saw the doctor between her parted legs with a mask tied around his face and an instrument in his hand and she thought for a moment he might be going to kill her, but the nurse squeezed her hand and she looked up at the ceiling and thought of nothing but the pattern of the tiles revolving around the light fixture.

  They began to pack her vagina with gauze. “Relax,” the nurse said. “It’s all over.”

  “I think you are wonderful,” she said in a drowsy voice. “I think you are a wonderful man. I don’t care what anyone says about you. I think you are doing a great service to mankind. Someday everyone will know what a good thing you’re doing for people.”

  When she woke up her father was with her and she walked in a dream out of the offices and into the elevator and down to the tiled foyer and out onto the beautiful streets of the city. The sun was brilliant and across the street from the office building was a little park with the sound of a million crickets rising and falling in the sycamore trees. And all the time a song was playing inside of her. “I don’t have to have a baby, I don’t have to have a baby, I don’t have to have a baby.”

  “Oh, God, oh, thank you so much,” she said, leaning against her father. “Oh, thank you, oh, thank you so much. Oh, thank you, thank you, thank you.”

  He took her to the hotel and put her into the cool bed and covered her with blankets and sat close beside her in a chair all afternoon and night while she slept. The room was dark and cool and peaceful, and whenever she woke up he was there beside her and nothing could harm her ever as long as he lived. No one could harm her or have power over her or make her do anything as long as he lived.

  All night he was there beside her, in his strength and goodness, as still and gentle as a woman.

  All night he was there, half-asleep in his chair. Once in the night she woke up hungry and room service brought a steak and some toast and milk and he fed it to her bite by bite. Then he gave her another one of the pills, put the glass of milk to her lips, and she drank deeply of the cold, lush liquid, then fell back into a dreamless sleep.

  The plane brought them to Nashville by noon the next day, and they got into the Packard and st
arted driving home.

  He had made a bed for her in the back seat with pillows for her head and his raincoat for a cover and she rode along that way, sleeping and reading her book. The wad of gauze in her vagina was beginning to bother her. It felt like a thick hand inside her body. The doctor had said she could remove it in twenty-four hours, but she was afraid to do it yet.

  Well, at least that’s over, she thought. At least I don’t have to have any more babies this year.

  All I have to do is have one more and they’ll give me a tubal ligation. Doctor Greer promised me that. On the third cesarean section you get to have your tubes cut. It’s a law. They have to do it. It would be worth having another baby for that. Oh, well, she thought. At least I don’t have to worry about it anymore for now. She opened her book.

  “You are not that kind of soldier and I am not that kind of girl,” Renata was saying to Colonel Cantrell. “But sometime give me something lasting that I can wear and be happy each time I wear it.”

  “I see,” the Colonel said, “And I will.”

  “You learn fast about things you do not know,” the girl said. “And you make lovely quick decisions. I would like you to have the emeralds and you could keep them in your pocket like a lucky piece, and feel them if you were lonely.”

  Rhoda fell asleep, dreaming she was leaning across a table staring into Ernest Hemingway’s eyes as he lit her cigarette.

  When they got to the edge of town he woke her. “How are you feeling, Honey,” he said. “Do you feel all right?”

  “Sure,” she said. “I feel great, really I do.”

  “I want to go by the house on Manley Island if you feel like it,” he said. “Everyone’s out there.”

  It’s the Fourth of July, she thought. I had forgotten all about it. Every year her father’s large Scotch family gathered for the fourth on a little peninsula that jutted out into the Tennessee River a few miles from town.

  “Will Jamie be there?” she asked. Jamie was everyone’s favorite. He was going to be a doctor like his father.

  “I think so. Do you feel like going by there?”

  “Of course I do,” she said. “Stop and let me get into the front seat with you.”

  They drove up into a yard full of automobiles. The old summer house was full of cousins and aunts and uncles, all carrying drinks and plates of fried chicken and all talking at the same time.

  Rhoda got out of the car feeling strange and foreign and important, as if she were a visitor from another world, arriving among her kinfolk carrying an enormous secret that they could not imagine, not even in their dreams.

  She began to feel terribly elated, moving among her cousins, hugging and kissing them.

  Then her Uncle James came and found her. He was an eye surgeon. Her father had paid his tuition to medical school when there was barely enough money to feed Rhoda and her brothers.

  “Let’s go for a walk and see if any of Cammie’s goats are still loose in the woods,” he said, taking hold of her arm.

  “I’m fine,” she said. “I’m perfectly all right, Uncle James.”

  “Well, just come walk with me and tell me about it,” he said. They walked down the little path that led away from the house to the wild gardens and orchards at the back of the property. He had his hand on her arm. Rhoda loved his hands, which were always unbelievably clean and smelled wonderful when they came near you.

  “Tell me about it,” he said.

  “There isn’t anything to tell,” she said. “They put me up on an examining table and first they gave me some pills and they made me sleepy and they said it might hurt a little but it didn’t hurt and I slept a long time afterwards. Well, first we went down in an elevator and then we went back to the hotel and I slept until this morning. I can’t believe that was only yesterday.”

  “Have you been bleeding?”

  “Not a lot. Do you think I need some penicillin? He was a real doctor, Uncle James. There were diplomas on the wall and a picture of his family. What about the penicillin? Should I take it just in case?”

  “No, I think you’re going to be fine. I’m going to stay around for a week just in case.”

  “I’m glad you came. I wanted to see Jamie. He’s my favorite cousin. He’s getting to be so handsome. I’ll bet the girls are crazy about him.”

  “Tell me this,” he said. “Did the doctor do any tests to see if you were pregnant?”

  “I know I was pregnant,” she said. “I was throwing up every morning. Besides, I’ve been pregnant for two years. I guess I know when I’m pregnant by now.”

  “You didn’t have tests made?”

  “How could I? I would have had to tell somebody. Then they might have stopped me.”

  “I doubt if you were really pregnant,” he said. “I told your father I think it’s highly unlikely that you were really pregnant.”

  “I know I was pregnant.”

  “Rhoda, listen to me. You don’t have any way of knowing that. The only way you can be sure is to have the tests and it would be doing your father a big favor if you told him you weren’t sure of it. I think you imagined you were pregnant because you dread it so much.”

  Rhoda looked at his sweet impassive face trying to figure out what he wanted from her, but the face kept all its secrets.

  Well, it doesn’t matter to me whether I was or not, ‘ she said. “All I care about is that it’s over. Are you sure I don’t need any penicillin? I don’t want to get blood poisoning.”

  (Rhoda was growing tired of the conversation. It isn’t any of his business what I do, she thought, even if he is a doctor.)

  She left him then and walked back to the house, glancing down every now and then at her flat stomach, running her hand across it, wondering if Jamie would like to take the boat up to Guntersville Dam to go through the locks.

  Her mother had arrived from town with the maid and her babies and she went in and hugged them and played with them for a minute, then she went into the bathroom and gingerly removed the wad of bloody gauze and put in a tampon.

  She washed her legs and rubbed hand lotion on them and then she put on the new black bathing suit. It fit better than ever.

  “I’m beautiful,” she thought, running her hands over her body. “I’m skinny and I’m beautiful and no one is ever going to cut me open. I’m skinny and I’m beautiful and no one can make me do anything.”

  She began to laugh. She raised her hand to her lips and great peals of clear abandoned laughter poured out between her fingers, filling the tiny room, laughing back at the wild excited face in the bright mirror.

  Generous Pieces

  I am poking around the house looking for change to spend at the Sweet Shoppe. It is afternoon, November. The light coming through the windows of my parents’ room is flat and gray and casts thick shadows on the rug my father brought home from China after the war.

  I am going through the pockets of his gabardine topcoat. The pockets are deep and cool. The rubbers are in the right-hand pocket. I pull them out, look at them for a moment, then stick my hand back in the pocket and leave it there. I stand like that for a long time, halfway into the closet with my hand deep in the pocket, listening to the blood run through my body, to the sound of my own breathing.

  I smell the cold safety of his suits and shirts. I stare down at the comforting order of his shoes and boots. I hold one of the little packets between my fingers, feeling the hard rim, the soft yielding center. It gives way, like the hide of a mouse.

  Behind me is the walnut bed in which he was born far away in Georgia. Beside it, the old-fashioned dresser with a silver tray onto which he empties his pockets in the evenings. While he dreams the tray holds his daytime life, his plumb bob, his pocketknife, his pens and pencils, his onyx Kappa Sigma ring, his loose change, his money clip.

  How do I know what the rubbers are? How do I know with such absolute certainty that they are connected with Christina Carver’s mother and the pall that has fallen over our house on Calvin Boulevard?


  I stand in the closet door for a long time. I want to take out the little package and inspect it more closely, but I cannot bring myself to withdraw it from the pocket, as if to pull it out into the light would make it real. After a while I become afraid my mother will come home and find me in her room so I take my hand from the pocket and leave.

  I wander into the kitchen and make a sugar sandwich and talk for a while to the elderly German housekeeper. She is a kindly woman with a thick accent who smiles all the time. She has a small grandson who is deaf, and occasionally she brings him to work and talks with him in the language deaf people make with their hands. I feel sorry for her because of the deaf child and try to remember to pick up my clothes so she won’t have to bend over to reach them. When I am good about this she bakes me gingerbread men with buttons and smiles made out of raisins.

  I leave the house and begin walking aimlessly across the small Indiana town. Usually I go by Christina’s after school. We are best friends. We spend the night together on weekends. We stand by each other in lines. I work hard to make Christina my friend. I need her for an ally as we have only lived in this town six months and she is the most popular girl in the class.

  We have lived in five towns in three years. Every time we move my father makes more money. Every place we live we have a nicer house. This time we are not going to move anymore he promises. This time we are going to stay put.

  I want to stay put. When the junior-high cheerleader elections are held in the spring the girls will try out in pairs. If I try out with Christina I know I will win.

  My mother was a cheerleader at the University of Georgia. Her senior year in college she was voted Most Popular Girl. There is a full-page photograph of her in the 1929 University of Georgia yearbook. She is wearing a handmade lace dress the color of snow, the color of marble. Her face is small and sweet and full of sadness. Underneath her feet in black letters it says, Most Popular Girl.