Little Nightmares, Little Dreams

by Rachel Simon

  “But there’s so much around here for you to do. I bought you that microscope you’ve been asking for, and you’ve got your Hebrew lessons, and of course there’s your regular homework. You shouldn’t waste your time spying on other people.”

  “I wouldn’t have to spy on them if I could go out and be with them.”

  “During the day, dear, not at night.”

  “But all I can do at night is watch the neighbors or TV.”

  “Or do your homework.”

  “I’d rather go out.”

  “I want you where I know you’ll be safe until I get home from my dates.” She said this in a voice as sweet as syrup, and pulled the curtains shut.

  My mother makes the two men wrap each pound of powder individually. Then she has the entire shipment loaded into Acme shopping bags. The men make a series of phone calls, and in no time a squadron of tough-looking boys appears at the door. The men hand each boy a bag.

  “Now, don’t dawdle,” my mother tells them. “I must get back to the ship by lunch.”

  The boys nod and whisper to each other in Asian.

  Some people have joined Grandpa and me at the window. “This is a pretty good show,” they say. “Who is it?”

  “My mother,” I say.

  “Mothers,” says one of them. “My mother shipped me off to a military academy when I was seven.”

  “That’s nothing,” another says. “Mine ran away one night and didn’t get in touch with us for eleven years.”

  “Your mothers really did that?” I ask.

  “Yes,” the first one says.

  “You just can’t make sense of mothers,” the other one adds.

  I think about this. During my life — well, until the last year — my mother kept the house clean and the refrigerator stocked. She always sewed my Halloween costume from scratch and dressed me every morning during those months in fourth grade when my arm was broken. She was a great cook. She never bothered me about my weight. And at dinner every night she asked me how my day had gone, and really listened when I talked, and then told me how her day had gone, too, if I thought to ask.

  Maybe my mother was not so bad. Maybe, for whatever reason, she just fell apart. I would have to give this possibility some consideration.

  The crew of my mother’s ship lifts anchor, and the ship pulls out of port. My mother and her lover flutter down to their bedroom.

  “I do so love helping Third World economies,” my mother says, flopping onto the round bed. She leans against some pillows and clicks on the television with the remote control. Dallas is on. J.R. looks into the camera and says, “Hi choi, enki gen sheh, Bobby.”

  I realize I have seen this episode before, so I get up and walk to a shop on the corner. Through the plate glass window I observe stout young girls gathered around a seamstress, trying on bridal gowns. They suck in their stomachs and stand before the mirror. The seamstress opens her hands, palms up. “So, we can alter it,” I hear her say through the glass.

  I step in closer, until I can look at myself reflected in the plate glass of the bridal shop. My new blond hair is so well coiffed it seems dipped in glue. I touch my full, rosy lips, rest my slender fingers beside my watery blue eyes. Inside, I feel the same. But outside it’s wrong. This is a perfect face. It has never been slapped by truth.

  I go to God the Butcher and tell Him I want to look like myself again. Back to hips, breasts, nose, and belly. A body built to bear babies. He slices me some corned beef — my mother’s favorite meal. “Cook it up with some of this,” He says, handing me a jar filled with hyssop. “Then eat it. All of it. That should do the trick.”

  I go home carrying my corned beef, wondering if I’ve ever heard of cold cuts being cooked with hyssop. On the way I see Grandpa leaning over our manhole. He glances at me.

  “I think your mother’s on her way up here,” he says. “She’s about to get it from some drug pirates.”

  I scramble over to join him. My mother is standing on her deck, facing a pair of thugs with pronounced underbites. “You’re bluffing,” my mother says. She begins to turn away. One of the thugs whips out a gun and pulls the trigger. My mother crumples to the deck before she can show fear or surprise.

  “Well, that’s a shame,” Grandpa says, rising to his feet. “But I want you to remember this: A shlechteh mameh iz nish-tu. There is no such thing as a bad mother.”

  “How can you say that, given what she did to me?” I ask.

  “Bad acts do not necessarily make someone a bad person,” he says.

  I stand over my frying pan. The corned beef sizzles below me. Outside, on the street, I see God the Butcher talking to my mother. She looks the same except she teeters a little, as if she’s dizzy. Dying, she’ll discover, isn’t so bad, but death itself is boring. I’m sure this is not how she thought it would turn out.

  As I fork the meat onto a plate, I am surprised to realize I am getting excited by her arrival. I walk into the living room, pull up a chair so I can see out the window, and sit down with my plate. Then I start chewing the food, slowly, watching them talk on the street. It’s after midnight, but that’s all right. I’ll wait up for her till dawn if I have to. I don’t mind. I want to be here when she gets in, so I can hug her hello, and tell her I’m OK. And let her see how much she’s worried me. And finally give her a piece of my mind.

  Trains

  A young couple is dancing on a stoop. The boy, who wears headphones, pumps his arms and skips about in time to music only he can hear. The girl, who watches him as if he were a spotlight, sways back and forth in silence, her movements complementing his. She cannot hear a sound. She follows the rhythm of his body. I smile up at them as I walk by. This must be love.

  My new boyfriend says that he was sexually initiated at age eight. At the time, his mother was “sick,” either getting addicted to pain killers in the hospital or withdrawing from those same pain killers in detox. He was home from boarding school for the weekend. The only other person in the house was the maid, Annabel.

  Annabel was a stout, mildly retarded woman with flesh-colored hair. I imagine she had mongoloid features, though my boyfriend has never said this. Still, I see her eyes slanting toward the ground, her boxy head, her watermelon grin.

  That afternoon, she was sweeping the hallway. He was in his bedroom, reading train magazines. He loves trains. The first time he rode one, which was also the first time he visited his mother in the hospital, he decided he liked trains better than people. That was because trains are powerful and hold you securely inside themselves. Sometimes, when I walk home alone after our dates, I think he still feels this way, and I wonder, as I’ve wondered about other things with other men, what I can do about it.

  It was a late afternoon in the fall. Only a sliver of sunlight crept into his room from the westward window in the hallway.

  He got up and walked to that window; to this day, he does not remember why. Annabel was holding the broom. She brushed her hair off her forehead and said, “Sad your mom’s gone?”

  “Yes,” he said, and looked out the window. He remembers a band of red running across the horizon like a trail of blood and the silhouettes of trees stretching like a dozen empty arms into the clouds.

  Then he turned. Annabel was resting the broom against the wall. She stepped over, put out her arms, and hugged him.

  They did not kiss or make love. They did not even take off their clothes. All they did was hold each other and roll around the hallway like tumbleweeds, first in silence, then in laughter.

  This is why, he warned me at the beginning, he is attracted to chunky women. He warned me because I am a size five, four feet eleven inches tall. He said he likes me all right, and he’ll hang out with me if I want, but I must understand that his most erotic fantasy is to live on a bed in the back of a roadside diner that only serves fat women truck drivers.

  I try to understand him, why he feels this way. I try to be sensitive. This is what men like in women.

  Like last month,
when I talked him into coming to my apartment. After dinner, I stripped off my dress and lay on my bed and called him over. He shuffled across the room and sat at the edge of the blanket. With my small fingers, I reached up and began to unbutton his shirt. He shivered before I had opened it enough to see any chest hair. So I stopped. I said maybe we should go for a walk instead. As soon as we stepped onto the street, I knew he was grateful, and I could feel that he liked me more than ever.

  Last night too. That was when I finally got some of his clothes off.

  We went to his room for the first time. He lives across the street from a bus station and a sexual aids store. His single room is empty except for a foam mattress and a folding card table. Its only window is large and dirty and has no curtains.

  We sat on the floor. He bent his legs in front of him like an upside-down V and told me to do the same. Then he pulled me close and clamped my legs between his knees, so everything from my ankles to my thighs was pressed together. I glanced out the window and saw businessmen furtively shoving packages of sexual aids inside their jackets, adolescent prostitutes calling to them from the corner, anxious tourists walking head down along the gutter edge of the sidewalk. No one looked up at us.

  I closed my eyes for a moment. Suddenly I felt like he and I were riding a train together, and we were the only passengers. I wondered if he would be able to hear me when I talked, or if the train was clattering so loudly as it rushed along the tracks that he could not.

  He unzipped his pants. He told me to stay dressed. Then he rubbed himself very delicately against my tightly squeezed shins. The motion was so slight, I thought he was sitting still.

  When he was done, I tried to touch him, but he whispered that since this was our first time, he wanted things to be perfect. I did not understand but said that I did. It was our first time together. I wanted things to be perfect, too.

  The Good Lie

  The afternoon of Halloween, as we four kids were trying out our costumes in our apartment and our babysitter was dozing in the kitchen, I got an idea.

  “Let’s put a message in a bottle when we go out tonight,” I said. “We can throw it in the brook at the end of the street.”

  “You know it’s not really a brook,” Susan said. Being twelve and the oldest, she had recently become more worldly than the rest of us. “It’s just a little trickle of a stream with big concrete walls on either side. It doesn’t even have a name.”

  “So what? We should still do it,” the youngest, Tom, said. He was seven, and easily attracted to the kind of adventures we never seemed to have. Our lives were more focused on school, our living room, and, at most, playing with friends on our little street, a dead end in a small city. Our mother, newly single after our father moved out, worked a lot, and the rest of the time she looked beleaguered and miserable. We didn’t want to make matters worse, so we all tried to be good kids. Tom added, “Maybe someone will answer us.”

  “They won’t,” Susan said. “The bottle would have to travel for hours to reach the beach.”

  “Lez go beach,” Lizzie said. Lizzie, who was born between Tom and me, was not like other kids her age. There was a name for her condition, which we never said around her, but basically she had trouble speaking, reading, and learning, so she was in a special class, and didn’t have any friends except us. But we didn’t mind this. Lizzie was energetic and spirited, and we’d do anything for her.

  For instance, we were making her Halloween costume, along with our own. Our mother used to do this, but costume-making was yet another casualty of our father’s absence, so we’d picked up the slack. Along with my coloring a mask to look like H.R. PufnStuff, Tom draping a dark towel for a Batman cape, Susan trying to curl her hair into a backwards flip like Get Smart’s 99, we were helping Lizzie look like a hippie. We’d strung love beads for a necklace and folded a scarf into a headband. She would be matching our dog Snoopy, who was going to be wearing a tie-dyed shirt.

  “We can’t go to the beach, Lizzie,” I said, drawing in PufNStuff’s orange skin.

  “Mommy drive,” she insisted.

  “Mommy’s at work,” Tom said, putting on a bat mask.

  “It’s too cold for the beach anyway,” Susan added, painting her nails hot pink.

  “I wanna go beach,” Lizzie repeated.

  We looked at each other. “Well,” I said, “would you settle on getting a message in a bottle from someone out on the high seas?”

  “Don’t give her ideas,” Susan said.

  “Like a pirate?” Tom said.

  “Or” — and I paused, thinking about any seafaring characters she knew — “Cap’n Crunch?”

  “Yeah,” Lizzie said with a shrug, though it wasn’t clear she knew that we were joking.

  Once our costumes were ready, Tom and I went rummaging around the apartment, looking for bottles. The only one we could find that wasn’t full was the Breck shampoo in the bathroom, which was almost near the end. We poured what remained into the sink and rinsed the bottle out. Then we found some writing paper and, with Lizzie at our side, composed a letter. We had no experience with messages in bottles, so, taking a stab, we just addressed the letter to “Whoever Might Find This,” described who each of us was, and provided our address, asking them to write back. I did the writing, and in script, so we would look grown-up. Since Lizzie was just learning letters, and only in the form of print, she couldn’t follow along.

  Then we rolled our message into the Breck bottle, screwed on the lid, and told Susan we were ready. With a wave to our babysitter, the four of us grabbed our Halloween bags and went out, a costumed Snoopy in tow. Other kids were already out, as dusk was falling, but before we rang any bells, we made a beeline for the footbridge over the brook. There we gave Lizzie the bottle and clapped as she threw it in.

  Night fell quickly. We walked up one side of our block and down the other, ringing every bell on the way. That meant at least twenty-four, since just about the entire block lived, as did we, in two-family houses. We were friends with most of the kids on the street so we weren’t surprised when Marisol’s parents gave us candy from her father’s home country, Chile, and Sophia’s parents, who’d just moved here from Greece, gave us homemade baklava. Mostly, though, it was the usual — Baby Ruths, Hershey bars, Three Musketeers, caramels, red hots, jaw breakers. By the time we’d reached the end of the block, our bags were filled to the brim.

  We knew we were being greedy when we decided to enter the three-story apartment building beside the brook. This was the one building where we knew no one. In fact, we’d heard that the landlord didn’t allow children to live there, so there had never been a reason for us to walk up to the door. But, wanting our hauls to be bigger than ever, we boldly let ourselves into the front vestibule, peered down the carpeted hallway toward the staircase, and randomly pressed the buzzers beside the little metal mailboxes.

  At first no one responded. We were just about to give up and head home when we heard a door open at the top of the stairs.

  Without being able to see our hosts, we yelled out, “Trick or Treat.”

  “Oh!” a woman’s voice called out. “We forgot.”

  We waited a minute.

  “Well,” she said, “just come up. We’ll do something.”

  We hurried down the hall and up the stairs.

  At the top, framed in her apartment doorway, stood a slim young woman with a pixie haircut. She was wearing a navy skirt and blouse, clearly just home from work, and behind her stood a guy in a red shirt and jeans. They didn’t seem married but they had a joking kind of ease with each other — and with us, because neither seemed to know or care about the rules of the holiday. Instead of making us wait in the hallway while they scrounged up some apples or pennies, they ushered us into their apartment, invited us to take a seat on their sofa, and offered us sodas. Other adults didn’t ever do this, holiday or not, and certainly it was not the standard procedure for Halloween. But it was nice to be around a woman our mother’s age who tal
ked to us, so for the next ten minutes or so, we told her what we liked about Halloween — our favorite brands of candy, our best costumes, the silly ways we sometimes said Trick or Treat.

  When we’d finished our drinks, Susan motioned to us, and we stood up to leave.

  At that very moment, one of us passed gas.

  We looked at each other, too embarrassed to face our hosts. There was a silence in the room. Then the lady said, “Don’t feel bad.”

  How could we not? Here we were, laughing and talking, drinking her soda, keeping her from changing out of her work clothes. Not being bad, exactly, but probably, as our mother might say, adding just a teaspoon more stress than even Superwoman could handle. Which is to say, not being good, either. On top of that, we’d just made the most mortifying social mistake possible.

  We didn’t say a word. The silence hung heavy in the room.

  Finally the lady said, “Well, hey, we always did that too.”

  “What?” the man asked, looking confused.

  We peered at her. She had a pleasant look on her face, and as the man looked on at her, baffled, she said, “Fart contests. Every Halloween, we’d do it, just to see who could make it last the longest.”

  The man looked at her incredulously, and then she turned and nodded hard at him. “Uh … yeah,” he said, catching on, “we did, too. It was the big thing to do when we were kids.” He put his mouth to his arm and made a few sound effects to convince us that he was an expert in this form of competition.

  We were smiling by then, even the culprit. “It’s really okay,” the lady said. “You don’t need to feel uncomfortable at all.”

  And we didn’t, as we headed down the stairs, even though our bags were no fuller than when we’d started. In fact, we felt pretty giddy.

  “She lied to us, you know,” Susan said, opening the door to outside.

  “But she made us feel better,” I said. “So maybe that’s okay.”

  We mulled over this, as we made our way home with our loot.

  Soon the leaves shook loose from the trees, and Christmas lights were strung from the houses. We thought of Halloween only after dinner, when our mother, or, more often, our babysitter, allowed us to extract a single piece of candy from our bags. Occasionally we thought about the lady and her friend, but mostly they receded in our minds.