Little Nightmares, Little Dreams

by Rachel Simon

  I wore skirts in high school. Had to. My mother’d thrown all my other clothes in the garbage, everything that wasn’t proper and feminine. Checked my closet when she came to visit once, turned around and faced me like I’d betrayed her. Yanked everything off the hangers, the floor. Carried it outside in a big bundle, pitched it into the dumpster. Right in front of the other students. After that, she had copies of her own skirts made. That’s what I got for my birthdays, then.

  I was always cold, especially outside. The winter air would snake between my legs, tickle my crotch. I wanted to bind my thighs together to keep myself warm. She wouldn’t even let me wear knee socks or pantyhose. Only stockings, the kind she wore, with lace at the top. She’d make surprise visits to check up on me.

  Lewis would have liked me then. Dressed so nice, looking so fine. Wearing all the right clothes. Skirts.

  “Who’re your friends?” the shrink says.

  I don’t much like people, I say.

  “But you’re a literature student. Literature’s about people.”

  Oh, yeah. But they’re not real people. They’re better than real. You can close the book when you want.

  “Those men — you couldn’t make them leave when you wanted.”

  Sure I could. I’m in control with them. I’m in control with everything here. My work. Myself.

  “But, honey, for any woman, what you did with those men was a way of giving up all your control.”

  Maybe for other girls. Not for me.

  “But don’t you see, that they could have done anything to you?”

  No they couldn’t have. They did what I told them.

  “Did you always do what you were told?”

  When I was at my mother’s house. Sure.

  “Always?”

  Once I didn’t. It was after dinner. I was getting ready for bed, and she ran upstairs and told me to leave.

  “Leave for good?”

  Leave. Take a walk. There was a man coming up the driveway. She told me she didn’t want him to see me.

  “And you didn’t leave?”

  No, I did, I left. Threw on a robe. She ran me down the back stairs and shut me outside.

  “And then?”

  And then I walked around. It was January — no ice, but all I had on was my nightgown and the robe and the wind was blowing like mad. I hid and watched him go inside, then checked out his car. The plates were a name instead of numbers, that’s how I realized it was her father. The engine was still warm. I sat on the hood till it cooled.

  Then I went to the kitchen door, tried to sneak in. Only she’d locked it. I walked around to find a window to climb through. That’s when I saw him standing in the living room. His arms were going wild, looked like he was yelling at her.

  “What was she doing?”

  Kind of cringing. Kneading the seat of the chair with her hands. Not saying anything. Her face was red.

  “And what did you do?”

  Tried to figure out what was happening. Kept shaking the cold out of my hands. Finally it got the better of me. I ran around the house. All the doors were locked. Felt like my toes were breaking away from my body. We have this trellis with vines on it. I ran to that and climbed it. I didn’t think I’d be able to hold on, my fingers were just frozen. And the wind was so cold, it felt like it was slapping me. Oh, just thinking about it.… But I got in. I climbed through my bedroom window.

  “Did she find out you disobeyed?”

  She went to her room right after he left. Turned on her shower. I waited a few minutes, then tiptoed downstairs, to see what would’ve happened if I hadn’t climbed in. And you know what? The doors were still locked. She’d forgotten me. I would’ve frozen to death. Can you believe that? Can you fucking believe that? And she didn’t even mention it the next morning. She didn’t even mention it ever.

  “Are you OK? Would you like a tissue?”

  No. I’m fine.

  “You sure?”

  I’m fine.

  “Did this happen before or after you started sleeping with men?”

  What?

  “How soon after this did you become sexually active?”

  She sent me away to school after this. To another girls’ school, but away.

  “The men — when did that start?”

  Men? I don’t know.

  “When you went away to school?”

  Couldn’t have been before that. Couldn’t breathe if she didn’t want me to.

  “So it started after you left. Do you have any idea why?”

  What?

  “Can you think of why you started to do what you did?”

  … I don’t have to answer you, you know. I can just get up and leave.

  “But those men — they didn’t help you with anything.”

  They don’t need to help me. I don’t need help. I can do whatever I want.

  “Can? You’re not still doing it, are you?”

  Whatever I do, it’s my business.

  “Oh, honey —”

  It’s my business. It’s my business. I have to go now. I have a test. I have to go.

  I skip my next appointment. The shrink calls me at my dorm and asks what’s wrong.

  I don’t want to come anymore, I tell her.

  “Why?”

  I don’t have anything to say.

  “But there’s so much to discuss.”

  There’s nothing to discuss. Leave me alone.

  “I know you don’t want to come back, but trust me — you’re in trouble.”

  I’m fine.

  “Will you just consider coming in for one more session?”

  I have too much work.

  “Then remember I’ll be here to help you, if you need someone. I’m concerned about you.”

  Sure, I’ll remember. When I need someone, that’s when I’ll call.

  The first frost makes our bed stiff and hard. I wear my jeans, my shirt, his wool pants, his tattered jacket. I unpin the skirt and wrap it around my head for a hat.

  “You’re not going to leave it there, are you?” Lewis says.

  “Yeah. My head’s cold.”

  He unbuttons his shirt, holds it out to me. “Pin this on, then,” he says.

  His nipples come out like the stars at night. Goose bumps coat his chest, making it look textured, perforated. He’s got no hair on his body, except of course the part still covered by his briefs.

  I say, “I can’t do this, take your shirt.”

  He leans over me, lowers the shirt onto my pelvis. “Lift up,” he says. I raise myself just a little, just enough for him to slip the shirt behind me. He ties a knot by my hip with the sleeves.

  “You’re going to freeze to death,” I say.

  “Then hold me close,” he says.

  I don’t want to. My hands are cold. I’m afraid to touch him, in that way. He lies beside me, turns me on my side, presses his chest to me. I can barely feel him through the clothes. I put my arm out, drape it around his back. Slowly, I rest my fingers on his opposite shoulder blade. His goose bumps feel as large as blisters.

  “You must be freezing,” I say.

  “No,” he says.

  I don’t want to touch him. I try to push myself back, away from him. “Don’t do that,” he says. I stop. I take my hand off his shoulder and swing my arm in front of me. It stretches straight down, between us, toward his pants. He wriggles nearer. He pushes up against my arm.

  I know what I want. I start to slide my hand inside his briefs.

  “No,” he says, “put it here.” And he reaches between us, takes my fingers, places them on his chest. His heart pulses beneath my hand.

  He inches closer, so we are pressed together, begins to kiss my cheeks. “Maybe you can dump those others and make it just us,” he says.

  I try to back away. He tenses his grip around me. His heart beats through his skin, pumps heat into my palm. My own heart is on the other side of my hand. I can’t feel it through all the clothes.

  The wind p
icks up. Cold air slips between us, sweeps down both sides of my hand.

  “Stay with me,” he says. “I know this place, we can do it inside. It’s got a bed. You could sleep over at night. We could have coffee there in the morning.”

  No, I want to say. I go to open my mouth and then I start to shiver, everywhere, my whole body. I can’t control it. Like it has a mind of its own.

  He pulls me tighter than ever. So tight, I feel like he’s moved inside me.

  The wind keeps gusting. I can’t stop shivering. “I’m so cold,” I whisper. The words tremble through my lips.

  “Just lie here,” he says, and he blows a long puff of breath onto my cheek. It’s soft where it hits my skin. Then he tilts his head slightly, and does it again, this time on my temple. He does this over and over. He rings my face with his breath.

  I am warm under it. But my skin chills as soon as he inhales again, as soon as he moves on to the next spot. “Do you like this?” he asks between breaths.

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  He lowers his head and exhales right onto my lips. It is a large, full, strong surge of air. It shoots veins of warmth into the rest of my face. I close my eyes. “Yes,” I say. “This feels good.”

  I want him to breathe over my whole head. I want him to breathe over my whole body. It feels so good, so warm, I worry I won’t be able to shake him off and walk away.

  “Stop,” I say. “I can’t stay here forever.”

  “Yes you can,” he says. He feels between us for my free hand, the one not on his chest. He finds it and draws it to his mouth and breathes onto the fingers. We are so close, the breath that passes between my fingers falls onto my lips. I open my mouth. The warm air, his air, steams past my teeth, across my tongue. It flows right inside me. It curls deep into me.

  The night is very far away. Something has lifted the wind up, and it is in the trees above us now. I can hear it, but I cannot feel it. It does not touch the two of us down here. It does not get near us at all.

  The Bells of God

  “What is God?” I asked my best friend Naomi, as we made our way in the afternoon sun toward the woods behind our New Jersey houses.

  “God is everything,” she said with some authority.

  “How’s that?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” she said. “All I know is he is.”

  I pondered this, as we followed a band of our older friends, crossing the last known suburban street in our universe, heading toward the discovered-only-by-kids entrance to the woods. Naomi and I were the little ones tagging along, five-year-olds who’d already enjoyed a busy afternoon on our own, doing entirely unspiritual things. We’d ridden our tricycles in front of our houses, then watched Let’s Make A Deal on Naomi’s color TV while savoring her mother’s tuna fish on toast. After that, we’d watched her father climb a ladder, and hook their new set of wind chimes to the eaves of their porch roof. He stood back when he’d finished, then lifted up one silver-hued tube and swung it lightly toward the remaining five. The sound they made, as each gently struck the others, made us think of the way rain pings into puddles. “Remember that,” Naomi’s father said, looking at her. “That’s our sound.” Naomi, memorizing the particular music of this chime, nodded. I nodded too, though in truth the cascading sound made me miserable. Naomi’s family was the last on our block to add bells to her house—besides my family. Now she would be like everyone else when the afternoons arced into dinnertime and the parents called their kids home for the day. Everyone in our neighborhood knew her own sound. My parents had held out for silence.

  I realized that, after hours of typical play, my questions about God seemed to come out of the blue. But I also knew that sometimes people prayed for things they wanted, and since I too wanted my parents to secure a cymbal or sleigh bells or even a gong, and allow me to feel like everyone else, I was wondering if I should learn to pray. Please God, make them go to Woolworth’s tonight. Besides, I felt certain that Naomi understood the material reason motivating my questions. With our birthdays only two days apart, and our houses only twenty yards, my golden-haired, sunny-spirited, all-day-every-day companion had come to feel like my third sister. We could ask each other anything at any time, and we often did.

  Now we snaked along the hidden path, the caboose of a line of girls, making our way between the huge, summer-green trees. We rarely ventured this far, deep into the uninhabited parcel of land wedged between the farthest houses in our development and the back of the synagogue that hugged the main road. But I always loved going here, exploring this mysterious territory. Not only was it off the maps and away from adults, it backed up to a building that my family never entered. God was an important word in our house, and Hanukkah a routine. But rituals, prayers, and sacred buildings were unknown to us. And no one had ever discussed what the concept of God might mean.

  “Well, okay,” I said. “But then, where is God?”

  Naomi pursed her lips in thought. I didn’t know if her family was observant, though they were Jewish, too, as was the whole neighborhood. “I think God is everywhere.”

  “How can he be everywhere?”

  “He just is.”

  I looked around. Brushes of sunlight gilded our skin, the shrubbery, the roots poking up from the earth. Above us stretched enormous trees, their leaves like small hands pressing toward the sky. In front of us, I now saw, rose a gateway of light, indicating that our path was about to reach the end of the woods and enter the field of tall grass. The meadow, as we called it, the far corner of our world. Bounded by the woods on all sides, it was numinous and private and made us think of different things than Barbie and Parcheesi and the other group of kids in the neighborhood, the boys. They called themselves The Cools. We, The Girls, saw The Cools as our adversaries, not that we’d had any battles. We just knew that they saw themselves as superior to us, and so in retaliation we looked down our noses at them. We’d even made up a song that we would sing when they gathered at Jimmy’s house, right behind mine:

  All the girls in France do the hula hula dance

  And the way they shake they could really kill a Cool

  When the Cool is dead they put rats in his head

  When the rats die they put spiders in his eyes

  When the spiders die, it is nineteen forty-five.

  Of course, the final line of the song seemed nonsensical to us, a fact that often made Naomi smile and shrug at me, but no one seemed to mind. We would jump rope to this song in the tool shed in my backyard, where The Girls convened. Our parents never furnished the shed, and it stored no tools; it had been purchased solely to become our giant playhouse. Other parents in our two-block kingdom possessed no such sanctuary in their yards, so ours was the only game in town. However, my brother and sisters and I were not smug about this distinction; other parents had come to favor that more melodic kind of purchase, the one we ached to own but my parents waved off. “That’s ridiculous,” they’d say. “These bells are just a neighborhood fad. We don’t need help calling you in for dinner. We’ll just yell out your name.”

  Only when Naomi and I left the playhouse, and were no longer able to see the familiar glint of brass bells or glass chimes hanging beside the back doors, and only after the grass-bordered sidewalks of our world were far behind us, did God ever come up. I had some notion of him on my own, but also a great vagueness. On the one hand, the thought of God provided me with much comfort, especially in light of the unprovoked Nyah-nyahs of The Cools, or the senility that had stolen my grandfather’s personality, or our family’s cheerful pet parakeet who’d died suddenly in her cage, or the eerie suspicion that kept appearing in my dreams that my father was unhappy in his life. The thought of God gave me the idea that there was something greater, a sense of justice, a goodness watching over us. On the other hand, when I closed my eyes and tried to envision God, I came up blank. And if you weren’t able to see God, how could you ever hear what he’d say, if he wanted to answer your prayers?

  Naomi
said, “He’s all around us now.” She gestured, as we passed out of the shade and into the full press of light in the meadow.

  “Where?”

  “In the trees. In the clouds. Everywhere.”

  I turned around, wondering.

  My parents spoke little of God. Adults seldom did. I loved looking through the picture books we owned with Bible stories, but, I would eventually learn, when my father was only six himself, he had become skeptical of the existence of God. My mother went to temple on and off until she was almost thirteen, when, suspecting her family was too poor to cover her bat mitzvah, she stopped attending. She was in mourning for a God she had yet to meet. My father had concluded that God was an invention.

  How I wanted to feel certain about God. How I longed to see him, hear him, understand what God really was.

  “Is God the same as the air?” I asked.

  “I think so,” Naomi said, her tone growing more doubtful.

  “So are we always breathing him in and out?”

  “I don’t know.”

  I wanted to put my hand out to touch him. But there was nothing to touch, aside from the grass and the soil and the sunlight and all the other children with me, fanning out now across the meadow.

  “Well, he feels real to me,” I said. “Except you can’t touch him.”

  “Maybe you have to make that up,” Naomi said.

  For the next half hour we just made up games. There was much to entertain us in the meadow, from the iridescent bugs on the blades of grass to the vast variety of textures on the surface of the weeds to the ease with which we could appropriate petals for mustaches and seed pods for eyeglasses. I forgot God then, as I always did when the pleasures of life loomed larger than my questions. I forgot time too, as the afternoon aged. Soon, though, the sun was stooping lower, and shadows were wrinkling the veins in all the leaves.

  Then it came. They came. The sounds.

  Ting, ting, ting.

  Bong.

  Rinky-rinky-ring.

  Jingle-jingle.