The Flicker of Old Dreams

by Susan Henderson

  “I knew it,” she says. “I tried to drop in on Doris the other day and her son just stood there at the door, telling me she needed rest. He wouldn’t even let me speak to her myself.”

  “I guess she’s pretty tired.”

  “He’s controlling his poor mother,” she says. “He’s keeping Doris from what she loves.”

  I watch my hands.

  “Come here, Mary,” she says and sits at the polished upright piano. “These are the songs we’ve practiced for so long.”

  She begins to play. “It Is Well with My Soul,” “How Great Thou Art,” “Blessed Assurance.” She is obviously the soprano of the group. I hum along, leaning all my weight first on one leg, then the other.

  “I’m sorry for all the work you’ve put into this,” I say when she’s finished playing. I unfold the note I’d written. “Maybe you could tell the other Adelines.”

  She takes the note.

  “You’ll need to tell Kay yourself,” she says. “That’s just the kind of person she is. She likes to get her information straight.”

  “She was my music teacher,” I say.

  “I think she was almost everyone’s music teacher,” Minnie says, smiling only briefly. “Why don’t you go talk to her at the school. She’s there now.”

  Minnie shows me out, and I walk toward the school. The gray cloud that hovered earlier has darkened, casting a shadow in my path, and the old anxiety of being in that building returns. I spent years watching my feet as I walked down one hallway and another, the roar of voices echoing off the walls. It seemed I was the only person not having a conversation between classes. I open the main door and head to the office.

  “Mary. Hello,” the secretary says. “Minnie called to say you were coming.”

  “Hello,” I say. “I just need to drop off a note for . . .”

  “I know who you’re here to see,” she says. “And you have good timing. This is Kay’s planning period.”

  “I don’t want to disturb her,” I say. “I could just leave a note.”

  But the secretary is already calling her over the intercom. She holds up a pointer finger.

  “Kay, you have a visitor on her way down to see you,” she says. And then to me, “Go on, Mary. You know your way to the music room.”

  Most of the noise seems to come from the other end of the school, where the cafeteria is, and I’m grateful for the empty hallway. It smells of Lysol and pencil shavings. I touch the tiled walls. I pass crimson pennants, a framed photo of the first students to paint the giant letter P, and a mural featuring Dead Eddie’s jersey.

  I pause outside the door to the music room. Kay Gundersen was a teacher I feared because she demanded perfection and obedience. I feel the dampness in my armpits and behind my hair when I peek inside.

  “Mrs. Gundersen?”

  She sits at her desk, sprinkling pepper on a hard-boiled egg.

  “Come sit here, Mary,” she says, nodding to the chair beside her desk. “I’ve spoken with Minnie.”

  As she takes a bite of her egg, I turn toward the musical notes drawn on the chalkboard. And as she swallows the last bite, I study the back counter, covered with autoharps and bins filled with recorders, wood blocks, and shakers.

  “I want to tell you a story about my friend Doris,” she says, wrapping eggshells in a napkin. “Do you know when I first got to know her?”

  “No.”

  “She was living alone. Her husband and her youngest son had left her, and she came here to work at the cafeteria to make a little money.”

  “I was a student here when she served lunch.”

  “Yes, that sounds right,” she says. “And she asked about more work opportunities so I told her she could help in the music room. She wiped down instruments and set up chairs at first. And then I discovered she was a lovely baritone.”

  I put my hands in my lap as if I’m still in Mrs. Gundersen’s class.

  “Do you know why the Sweet Adelines are so close?” she asks.

  “You love music?”

  “No,” she says. “It’s nothing special to love music. We are close because it takes work—persistence, attentiveness, and trust—to find harmony.”

  I wonder if she can tell how much I’m sweating.

  “I’m sorry we won’t have a chance to sing for Doris,” she says. “I feel like I may never see her again.”

  “You can still come to the service,” I say.

  She shakes her head no, walks me to the door.

  “Other way,” she says, when I turn deeper into this wing of the school.

  “Is it all right if I stop by the art room?” I ask.

  “Yes, but your teacher moved on years ago.”

  “Where to?” I ask. “I always wondered.”

  “I’m not sure,” she says. “Petroleum is not for everyone.”

  I don’t know why I need to see the art room. I just notice that this hallway is quiet right now, and it’s the direction my feet chose.

  35

  The art room, with its long tables and wall of windows, has remained unchanged since I was a student here. Pinned up about the room, I find familiar projects: studies of hands and faces, light and shadow, still lifes, mosaics. But soon, the kinds of art I never knew existed captivate me: distorted portraits, wire sculptures, collages, and papers, still drying, layered in wax, pastel, and paint.

  I wonder how long it will be before these students set their art aside?

  I find my old seat—back row, nearest the counter, where empty cans with stewed tomato labels hold paintbrushes and pencils. The only light in the room comes from the soft gray out the windows. The scent of paint, charcoal, and turpentine rouses a deep-rooted longing. Sometimes when I sat back in this corner, the chime would sound, calling us to our next class, and I’d rather be late than not see my idea on paper, even though the idea was always better in my head.

  My fingers glide along the huge roll of butcher paper, sparking the old thrill of the blank page—how no ideas became a jumble of vague emotions and images to sort through, how sometimes mindless scribbling lured me someplace deeper, where the hand and pencil could discover what was locked away. I tear off a sheet, touch pencils of different lengths until one feels right. My foot hooks the metal leg of a plastic chair, pulling it from under the table. I’m shaking.

  Art, I had convinced myself, was a frivolous way to spend time. This disowned side of me, beaten back, hunches over the long white sheet.

  I wait. I wait until the hand and pencil remember their alliance. I wait until they move together, uncoordinated at first, the lines faint. This doesn’t look right. Why? I have drawn the memory of a window, flat and square. No. Look at what you’re drawing. Find the lines, the light. Don’t watch the hand. I move my chair to face real windows and try again.

  The rough outlines of children huddle there. I feel them wanting to breathe. Faces, blank at first, begin to emerge—one is skeptical, the other proud, the third resigned.

  Most will never meet these children who play pretend at the rusted stove, poke sticks down badger and snake holes, dare friends to eat live tadpoles. When these children travel with their parents to bigger towns—to shop for clothing or fill up with gas or sell their cattle—they discover how different they are from the larger world. They feel the press of crowds, the headache brought on by so many colors, so many choices. This strange world they glimpse makes little sense to them. Its people seem too soft, too concerned with trivia, incapable of the strain and sweat required for hard work. And yet many will be lured away by the opportunities they see on TV, and the town will continue to shrink. It seems there’s no way to stop it.

  The children here at the window are the last gasp of a town that’s fought so hard to hold on to its existence. They know, year to year, the population never rises. For every birth, for every marriage that brings a new spouse to Petroleum, more will die or move away. And these children must decide whether to stake their future here, a decision this community watches and
judges.

  The decision isn’t an easy one. They know from their laptops and TV sets that there are cities where it never snows, where they can dance in nightclubs, where pizzas are delivered right to the front door. And they know their families’ struggles—always hoping to dig out of debt, hoping disease and severe weather won’t threaten their livestock and crops. Always hoping their equipment, their backs, their marriages last another season.

  My hand cramps but refuses to let go of the pencil. I draw roads, a handful of homes and businesses, the cluster of unemployed men, the gray tower in the distance, the ranches beyond it. Then I return to the hotel and draw one more child at that window. A young girl who fears standing so close to the others. She stares from the hotel toward the funeral home, wondering, Is this what I want?

  We are all feeling the pressure to be loyal, to treasure this inheritance, to fight for it as hard as our parents have. But is this even our fight?

  I draw Robert’s gnarled crabapple tree, a little house made of scrap lumber in its branches. Where is there a place in Petroleum for the academic, the artist, the dancer, the sensitive soul? I feel something about this town that I don’t want to feel. It’s as if there’s a system in place that prefers one type of person over another, that protects some and lets others fall. Those of us who don’t fit in are pressured to tamp down our true nature and desires—become something we’re not, or else move along.

  A three-tone chime sounds over the intercom—time to change classes. I stand up, quick, noticing how dark the room has grown. I’ve stayed too long. The hallway fills with the rumble of clomping feet and slamming lockers, students hollering from one end to the other. I return the dulled pencil to the can, shove my chair back under the table, and after only the slightest pause, toss my drawing in the trash. Head down, I merge into a throng of students, head down, head down, until I reach the exit.

  Once outside, I gulp air, the musty, wet taste of a storm brewing. Clouds darken and bulge, while the merry-go-round turns on its own, only the wind riding it.

  I feel light-headed, unmoored.

  I want to talk to my father.

  I’m used to puzzling out business decisions with him. What is the easiest way to take a body out of this space? Which body should I restore first? And there was one decision that felt big at the time—Should we leave the severed hand behind if we can’t extract it quickly?—though that was more a matter of coming to grips with the only choice we could make. We consult each other often because the questions are unexpected, the answers unclear, and we are willing to get them wrong in order to have company with the consequences.

  But can we talk deeply about more than work? Because I don’t know what I think about Petroleum, or anything, really, since Robert Golden returned. It’s as if this looming storm has moved inside of me—churning, swelling.

  “Out of bread and meat,” someone calls as he leaves Vinter’s grocery. I’ve been watching the ground and only now notice the trucks, parked two deep, in front of the store.

  “Laundry soap, too,” calls another.

  I’ll bet most of Petroleum is in there buying up the last supplies. The clouds hang low and full as if they are touching the rimrocks. Back on Crooked Hill Road, the same dog barks at the sky.

  I’m exhausted when I walk through the door. I find my father in his office, nearly hidden among the mess.

  “You should see all the trucks parked outside Vinter’s,” I say.

  “You look flushed,” he says. “Are you feeling all right?”

  “I don’t know.”

  He comes close, touches my forehead when it’s my heart that hurts.

  “How did it go, talking to the people on the list?”

  I exhale and lean against the wall.

  “I thought that might be a bad idea,” he says. “I got calls from two of the Sweet Adelines today, and they were very upset to be cut from the service.”

  “Like only their feelings matter,” I say.

  “Mary, where is this coming from?”

  “All day,” I tell him, “everyone let me know how bad they feel for themselves.”

  “Can you understand how people counted on being a part of Doris’s tribute? The ladies put a lot of care into their selections.”

  “That’s just it,” I say. “I can understand their feelings, but Robert has feelings, too.”

  “He could have made a more thoughtful decision.”

  “He’s taken time off work to be with his mother,” I say. “He watches her fight for every breath. But no one gives him any sympathy. They just act mean and leave their cigarette butts in his driveway.”

  “Well, now they’re in our driveway, too,” he says.

  “Are you blaming Robert for that?” I ask. “Are you blaming me because I want to treat him with respect?”

  “If this is his influence on you, I don’t like it.”

  “You don’t like that I have an opinion?”

  “Why don’t you sit down,” Pop says. “I think you might have a fever.”

  “Maybe this is how I’ve been feeling for a long time,” I say.

  The phone rings, and Pop turns his head.

  “Don’t answer it,” I say. “Please don’t walk away in the middle of this. I’m trying to talk to you.”

  “Honey, this is my job,” he says. “I’m sorry.”

  He picks up the phone and I hear the soft, reassuring voice he uses when someone has passed.

  I stomp over to the far side of his desk, spotting his wrinkled suit on the floor. I throw the jacket and pants over my arm.

  Your. Suit, I mouth.

  I stomp out of the office to throw his suit in the hamper.

  The other one is already in there, and these will be mine to clean. I am always cleaning up after him. I pace from kitchen to parlor to foyer to kitchen and return to stare at my father until he finally says good-bye to the caller and hangs up.

  He looks at me and says only, “Doris.”

  36

  I pull my van into the driveway. Robert, his face thin and unshaven, waits at the side door. His hair, unattended since I last saw him, hangs flat.

  “I got here as soon as I could,” I say, zipping my coat to the top and opening the back of my van.

  I grab the stretcher and he shuts the doors. He leads me into a house that no longer smells of burning logs but of anxiety, powerlessness, and a body that has released its fluids. The living room looks ransacked—drawers open, books and photo albums pulled off shelves. We go back to the bedroom where Doris danced in her red scarf and beads. She is on the bed, curled on her side, hands closed in fists. I lean over her, the machine rumbling beside us.

  “I’m sorry for your loss,” I say to Robert, then feel silly, like I’ve quoted from one of our pamphlets.

  “Is it possible she’s sleeping?” he asks.

  Doctor Fischer used to give the official word, but since Petroleum has been without a doctor, that role falls to my father (who had to take a yearlong nursing program in order to sign death certificates) and, with a little fudging on the paperwork, to me.

  Robert touches her nightgown, afraid, it seems, to touch her flesh. If he does, he will feel that she has left this life, her skin like a hard-boiled egg, and quickly turning the same gray as the outer covering of the yolk.

  I touch her wrist, her neck. Listen. Look into the cloudy eyes. She is so thin, her body will cool quickly.

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “It’s just that the past many nights, I thought she’d died, the breathing seemed to stop, but then she was up again the next morning asking if I wanted toast or cereal.”

  Doris had probably asked this question since he was a boy.

  Normally I’d put on my latex gloves and get to work removing the body. Instead, we just sit with Doris in this house, where, just upstairs, she used to tuck her boys into bed. Maybe some of their old clothes are still in the dresser drawers. Maybe after they got big, and after they were both gone from this house, s
he sat in their rooms and held their little T-shirts and jeans.

  “It’s okay to turn off the oxygen,” I say.

  He flips the switch. Pauses. Then, so very gently, removes the nose piece for the last time.

  A life ends like that. A woman who painted and sang, who danced in secret, who held her dead and her living son, who struggled for breath is now gone from this world.

  Robert pats the sheet near her arm. Like the relationship they lived, they are close and yet never quite touching. Always a lonely space between one and the other.

  “I finished the paperwork,” Robert says.

  He reaches for a stack on the bedside table. I take the pages filled with his tight scrawl. There is more detail here than most forms I collect. Scanning quickly, I catch words and phrases that make me certain Robert was the right person to plan his mother’s service.

  “I looked everywhere for a photo of the three of us,” he says.

  “So that’s what happened to the living room.”

  “She said she wanted to be together with me and Eddie one last time,” he says. “I wanted to make that happen.”

  He hands me a photo.

  “I couldn’t find one without my father in it,” he says.

  I look at the small boys, their smiling parents, and the lie the photo tells of the life they will live.

  After Eddie’s funeral, Robert tells me, their father disappeared. If there was a note, if there were words, his mother kept them to herself.

  “I can’t think of a worse time for him to leave you,” I say.

  “I don’t know,” Robert says, looking only at his mother’s hands.

  “You weren’t close? Even before?”

  “Everything I did seemed to irritate him. I’d be in the tree house and he’d shout how I ought to be playing football with the others.”

  I touch his back, feel the soft tremor of his breathing. When he raises his head, his hair is a crazy mess. I remove my hand, and the moment I do, yearn to place it there again.