In the Land of Dreamy Dreams

by Ellen Gilchrist

  Late one afternoon Baby Gwen and I were sitting on the porch swing talking to Fielding. It was one of those days in August when you can smell autumn in the air, a feeling of change coming over the world. I had won at bridge that afternoon. I had made seven hearts doubled and redoubled with Fielding looking over my shoulder, and I was filled with a sense of power.

  “Let’s all go swimming tomorrow,” I said. “They’ll be closing the pool soon and I need to practice my strokes.”

  “Let’s go to the lake,” Fielding said. “I haven’t made my summer swim across the lake. I was waiting for Russell to get home, but I don’t guess he’ll be back in time so I might as well go on and swim it myself.”

  “I’ll swim it with you,” I heard myself saying. “I’m a Junior Red Cross Lifesaver. I can swim forever.”

  “You couldn’t swim this,” he said. “It’s five miles.”

  “I can swim a lot further than that,” I said. “I practically taught swimming at camp. I never got tired.”

  “What about your… you know… your condition?”

  “That’s all right,” I said. “Exercise is good for me. I’m supposed to go swimming all I can. The doctors said it was the best thing I could do.”

  Baby Gwen looked puzzled. “You can’t swim all the way across the lake without a boat,” she said. “Girls don’t ever swim across the lake.”

  “I can swim it,” I said, “I’ve been further than that at camp lots of times. What time you want to go, Fielding?”

  By the time he came to pick us up the next morning I had calmed Baby Gwen down and convinced her there was nothing to worry about. I really was a good swimmer. Swimming was of no importance to me one way or the other. What mattered to me was that a boy of my own choosing, a first-rate boy, was coming to take me somewhere. Not coming for Baby Gwen and taking me along to be nice, but coming for me.

  I had been awake since dawn deciding what to wear. I finally settled on my old green Jantzen and a white blouse from Big Gwen’s wardrobe. The blouse had little shoulder pads and big chunky buttons and fell across my shoulders and arms in soft pleats. I wasn’t worried at all about swimming the lake. The only thing that worried me was whether the blouse was long enough to cover my stomach.

  Baby Gwen went with us. As soon as we left the shore she was supposed to drive around to the other side and watch for us. All the way out to the lake she sat beside me looking worried.

  “You ought to have a boat going along beside you,” she said.

  “We don’t need a boat,” I said. “I’m a Junior Red Cross Lifesaver. I can swim all day if I want,”

  “It’s O.K.,” Fielding said. “Russell and I do it every summer.”

  By the time we got to the lake I felt like I could swim the Atlantic Ocean. The sun was brilliant on the blue water, and as soon as Fielding stopped the car I jumped out and ran down to the shore and looked out across the water to the pine trees on the far shore. It didn’t look so far away, only very blue and deep and mysterious. I took off my blouse and shoes and waded out into the water. How clean it felt, how cool. I put my face down and touched my cheek to the water. I felt the water across my legs and stomach. My body felt wonderful and light in the water. I rose up on my toes and my legs felt strong and tall. I pulled in my stomach until my ribs stuck out. I was beautiful. I was perfect. I began to throw handfuls of water up into the air. The water caught in the sunlight and fell back all around me. I threw more into the air and it fell all around me, falling in pieces of steel and glass and diamonds, diamonds falling all around me. I called out, “Come on, Fielding. Either we’re swimming across this lake or we aren’t.”

  “Wait,” he called back. “Wait up.” Then he was beside me in the water and I felt his hands around my waist and the pressure of his knee against my thigh. “Let’s go then,” he said in a low sweet voice. “Let’s do this together.”

  Then we began to swim out, headed for the stand of pine and oak and cypress on the far shore.

  The time passed as if in a dream. My arms moved easily, taking turns pulling the soft yielding water alongside my body. I was counting out the strokes, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight… over and over in the good old-fashioned Australian crawl. Every now and then Fielding would touch my arm and we would roll over on our backs and rest for a few minutes, checking our position. Then we would swim for a while on our sides, resting. There were long banks of clouds on the horizon and far overhead a great hawk circling like a black planet. Everytime I looked up he was there.

  We swam for what seemed to be a long, long time, but whenever I looked ahead the trees on the shore never seemed to come any closer.

  “Are you sure we’re going in a straight line,” I said, when we turned over to rest for a moment.

  “I think so,” Fielding said. “The current might be pulling us a little to the left. There’s nothing we can do about it now anyway.”

  “Why,” I said. “Why can’t we do anything about it?”

  “Well, we can’t go back,” he said. “We’re past the point of no return.”

  The point of no return I said to myself. Maybe we would die out here and they would change the name of the lake in honor of us. Lake LeLe, Lake Leland Louise Arnold, Lover’s Lake. “Don’t worry about it then,” I said. “Just keep on swimming.”

  Perhaps an hour went by, perhaps two. The sun was hot on the water, and every now and then a breeze blew up. Once a barge carrying logs to the sawmill passed us without noticing us. We treaded water while it passed and then rocked in the wake for several minutes. They had passed us as though we didn’t exist. After the barge went by we began to swim with more determination. I was beginning to feel cold, but it didn’t seem to really matter. Nothing mattered but this boy and the sun and the clouds and the great hawk circling and the water touching me everywhere. I put down my head and began to count with renewed vigor, one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, one, two, three, four,…

  “LeLe,” Fielding called out. “LeLe, put your feet down. Put your feet down, LeLe.” I looked up and he was standing a few feet away holding his hands up in the air. I let my feet drop and my toes touched the cool flat sand. We were on the sandbar. Then we were laughing and hugging and holding on to each other and moving toward the shore where Baby Gwen stood calling and calling to us. It was wonderful, wonderful, wonderful, wonderful. I was wonderful. I was dazzling. I was LeLe Arnold, the wildest girl in the Mississippi Delta, the girl who swam Lake Jefferson without a boat or a life vest. I was LeLe, the girl who would do anything.

  All the way home in the car Fielding kept his arm around me while he drove and Baby Gwen fed me little pieces of the picnic lunch and I was happier than I had ever been in my life and I might have stayed that way forever but when we got home there was a message saying that my parents were on their way to Clarksville to take me home.

  My parents. I had forgotten they existed. My father had gotten lonely and driven to New Orleans and talked my mother into coming home.

  Later that afternoon they arrived. It seemed strange to see our Buick pulling up in Baby Gwen’s driveway. My father got out looking very young and my mother was holding on to his arm. She looked like a stranger, thin and beautiful in a black cotton peasant dress with rows of colored rickrack around the hem and sleeves. Her hair was cut short and curled around her face in ringlets. I was almost afraid to touch her. Then she ran from my father’s side and grabbed me in her arms and whirled me around and around and I smelled the delicate perfume on her skin and it made me feel like crying.

  When she put me down I turned to my father. “I’m not going home,” I said, putting my hands on my hips.

  “Oh, yes you are,” he said, so I went upstairs and began to pack my clothes.

  Baby Gwen followed me up the stairs. “You can have the kimono,” she said. “I want you to have it.” She folded it carefully and packed it with tissue paper in a box from Nell’s and Blum’s and put it
beside my suitcase.

  “Come sit by me, Baby Gwen, and tell me the news,” my mother said, and Baby Gwen went over and sat by her on the chaise. My mother put her arms around her and began to talk in a bright voice inviting her to spend Christmas with us in Indiana.

  “It will snow for sure,” my mother said. “And LeLe can show you the snow.”

  We left Clarksville early the next morning. Baby Gwen stood in the doorway waving good-bye. She was wearing a pink satin robe stained in places from where she had sweated in it during the hot nights of July, and her little nipples stuck out beneath the soft material.

  I kept hoping maybe Fielding had gotten up early to come and tell me goodbye, but he didn’t make it.

  “I’ll fix those hems when she comes to visit,” my mother said, “and do something about that perfume.”

  I was too tired to argue. All the way to Indiana I slumped in the back seat eating potato chips and sneaking smokes in filling-station restrooms when we stopped for gas.

  Then it was another morning and I woke up in my old room and put on my shorts and rode my bicycle over to Cynthia Carver’s house. She was in the basement doing her Saturday morning ironing. Cynthia hated to iron. How many mornings had I sat on those basement steps watching the forlorn look on her face while she finished her seven blouses.

  “So I might as well be dead,” I said, taking a bite of a cookie. “So, anyway, I wish I was dead,” I repeated, as Cynthia hung a blouse on a hanger and started on a dirndl skirt. “Here I am, practically engaged to this rich plantation owner’s son … Fielding. Fielding Reid, LeLe Reid… so, anyway, my mother and father come and drag me home practically the same day we fell in love. I don’t know how they got wind of it unless that damn Sirena called and told them. She was always watching everything I did. Anyway, they drag me home and I bet they won’t even let him write to me.”

  “What’s that perfume?” Cynthia said, lifting her eyes from the waistband of the skirt.

  “That’s my signature,” I said. “That’s what I wear now. Tigress in the winter and Aphrodisia in the summer. That’s what this writer’s wife always wore. She got pneumonia or something from swimming in the winter and died when she was real young. Everyone in Clarksville thinks I’m just like her. She was from Mississippi or something. I think she’s sort of my father’s cousin.”

  Cynthia pulled the dirndl off the ironing board and began on a pair of pedal pushers. I leaned back on the stairs, watching the steam from the pedal pushers light up the space over Cynthia Carver’s disgruntled Yankee head. I was dreaming of the lake, trying to remember how the water turned into diamonds in my hands.

  Summer, an Elegy

  His name was Shelby after the town where his mother was born, and he was eight years old and all that summer he had to wear a little black sling around the index finger of his right hand. He had to wear the sling because his great-granddaddy had been a famous portrait painter and had paintings hanging in the White House.

  Shelby was so high-strung his mother was certain he was destined to be an artist like his famous ancestor. So, when he broke his finger and it grew back crooked, of couse they took him to a specialist. They weren’t taking any chances on a deformity standing in his way.

  All summer long he was supposed to wear the sling to limber up the finger, and in the fall the doctor was going to operate and straighten it. While he waited for his operation Shelby was brought to Bear Garden Plantation to spend the summer with his grandmother, and as soon as he got up every morning he rode over to Esperanza to look for Matille.

  He would come riding up in the yard and tie his saddle pony to the fence and start talking before he even got on the porch. He was a beautiful boy, five months younger than Matille, and he was the biggest liar she had ever met in her life.

  Matille was the only child in a house full of widows. She was glad of this noisy companion fate had delivered to Issaquena County right in the middle of a World War.

  Shelby would wait for her while she ate breakfast, helping himself to pinch-cake, or toast, or cold cornbread, or muffins, walking around the kitchen touching everything and talking a mile a minute to anyone who would listen, talking and eating at the same time.

  “My daddy’s a personal friend of General MacArthur’s,” he would be saying. “They were buddies at Auburn. General MacArthur wants him to come work in Washington, but he can’t go because what he does is too important.” Shelby was standing in the pantry door making a pyramid out of the Campbell Soup cans. “Every time my daddy talks about going to Washington my momma starts crying her head off and goes to bed with a headache.” He topped off the pyramid with a can of tomato paste and returned to the present. “I don’t know how anyone can sleep this late,” he said, “I’m the first one up at Bear Garden every single morning.”

  Matille would eat breakfast as fast as she could and they would start out for the bayou that ran in front of the house at the end of a wide lawn.

  “Did I tell you I’m engaged to be married,” Shelby would begin, sitting next to Matille in the swing that went out over the water, pumping as hard as he could with his thin legs, staring off into the sky.

  “Her daddy’s a colonel in the air corps. They’re real rich.” A dark, secret look crossed his face. “I already gave her a diamond ring. That’s why I’ve got to find the pearl. So I can get enough money to get married. But don’t tell anyone because my momma and daddy don’t know about it yet.”

  “There aren’t any pearls in mussels,” Matille said. “Guy said so. He said we were wasting our time chopping open all those mussels.”

  “They do too have pearls,” Shelby said coldly. “Better ones than oysters. My father told me all about it. Everyone in New Orleans knows about it.”

  “Well,” Matille said, “I’m not looking for any pearls today. I’m going to the store and play the slot machine.”

  “You haven’t got any nickels.”

  “I can get one. Guy’ll give me one.” Guy was Matille’s uncle. He was 4-F. He had lost an eye in a crop-dusting accident and was having to miss the whole war because of it. He couldn’t get into the army, navy, marines, or air corps. Even the coast guard had turned him down. He tried to keep up a cheerful face, running around Esperanza doing the work of three men, being extra nice to everyone, even the German war prisoners who were brought over from the Greenville Air Force Base to work in the fields.

  He was always good for a nickel, sometimes two or three if Matille waited until after he had his evening toddies.

  “If you help me with the mussels I’ll give you two nickels,” Shelby said.

  “Let me see,” Matille said, dragging her feet to slow the swing. It was nice in the swing with the sun beating down on the water below and the pecan trees casting a cool shade.

  Shelby pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and untied a corner. Sure enough, there they were, three nickels and a quarter and a dime. Shelby always had money. He was the richest boy Matille had even known. She stared down at the nickels, imagining the cold thrill of the slot machine handle throbbing beneath her touch.

  “How long?” she said.

  “Until I have to go home,” Shelby said.

  “All right,” Matille said. “Let’s get started.”

  They went out to the shed and found two rakes and a small hoe and picked their way through the weeds to the bayou bank. The mud along the bank was black and hard-packed and broken all along the waterline by thick tree roots, cypress and willow and catalpa and water oak. They walked past the cleared-off place with its pier and rope swings and on down to where the banks of mussels began.

  The mussels lay in the shallow water as far as the rake could reach, an endless supply, as plentiful as oak leaves, as plentiful as the fireflies that covered the lawn at evening, as plentiful as the minnows casting their tiny shadows all along the water’s edge, or the gnats that buzzed around Matille’s face as she worked, raking and digging and chopping, earning her nickels.

  She would th
row the rake down into the water and pull it back full of the dark-shelled, inedible, mud-covered creatures. Moments later, reaching into the same place, dozens more would have appeared to take their place.

  They would rake in a pile of mussels, then set to work breaking them open with the hoe and screwdriver. When they had opened twenty or thirty, they would sit on the bank searching the soft flesh for the pearl. Behind them and all around them were piles of rotting shells left behind in the past weeks.

  “I had my fortune told by a voodoo queen last Mardi Gras,” Shelby said. “Did I ever tell you about that? She gave me a charm made out of a dead baby’s bone. You want to see it?”

  “I been to Ditty’s house and had my fortune told,” Matille said. “Ditty’s real old. She’s the oldest person in Issaquena County. She’s older than Nannie-Mother. She’s probably the oldest person in the whole state of Mississippi.” Matille picked up a mussel and examined it, running her finger inside, then tossed it into the water. Where it landed a dragonfly hovered for a moment, then rose in the humid air, its electric-blue tail flashing.

  “You want to see the charm or not?” Shelby said, pulling it out of his pocket.

  “Sure,” she said. “Give it here.”

  He opened his hand and held it out to her. It looked like the wishbone from a tiny chicken. “It’s voodoo,” Shelby said. He held it up in the air, turning it to catch the sunlight. “You can touch it but you can’t hold it. No one can hold it but the master of it. Here, go on and touch it if you want to.”

  Matille reached out and stroked the little bone. “What’s it good for?” she asked.

  “To make whatever you want to happen. It’s white magic. Momma Ulaline is real famous. She’s got a place on Royal Street right next to an antique store. My Aunt Katherine took me there when she was baby-sitting me last Mardi Gras.”

  Matille touched it again. She gave a little shudder.