Machine Dreams (22 page)

Danner tried to imagine them now, sitting across the street amongst the families, but their faces stayed coldly vaporous in smoke and winter breath. She was sweating and the sun shone in her eyes. The Bellington band had stopped to perform, three minutes of a fancy march-in-step. Horns glinted sideways above shoulders as the band dipped its knees, strutted, retraced its steps, and rocked. Farther up, the majorettes would be doing a routine; from here, Danner saw batons fly into the air above the numberless blue hats of the band. The bobbing hats were like those of wartime soldiers, garrison caps billed in black, the crowns flat. The jackets were dark blue with gold piping and fringed epaulettes; the trousers straight-legged; the shoes black, polished, the flying shine of trombones reflected on their surfaces. The band was beautiful and massive, a well-practiced shock of gold and silver against the mourning of the dark blue. The gold bowls of the tubas turned left to right above it all. In the back row were the boys with chimes and the base drummers, huge blank drums strapped tight to their bodies with belts. Danner felt a pounding in her stomach as the boys marched near her; they stepped in place and beat double time. The rest of the band kept silence and the boys stood pounding with both arms, their bodies vibrating in the center of the noise. Then it was over and the band marched on, “Stars and Stripes Forever” with horns in full and chimes ringing. Relieved, excited, the crowd stood and cheered.

Danner looked for Billy; he’d like the drums, and she thought she heard him yelling. Inclining her head, she saw him farther down the row. He was sitting on the Styrofoam ice chest, slumped forward in his white T-shirt and dirty shorts, his skin sun-beiged and his blond hair bleached almost white.
You kids tan dark as Indians: you can thank your mother’s Black Irish blood.
Did that mean Irish Negroes? Last night they’d watched the news on the big Motorola television: police with attack dogs in Birmingham, columns of dark bodies scattering suddenly, as though the film were sped up by mistake.
Those niggers have made a fine mess down there
, Mitch said, and Jean had called from the kitchen,
You don’t need to speak that way.
His voice, harsh:
Don’t you try telling me how to speak.
Then silence but for the water running as she rinsed dishes, and the announcer’s voice continued. Billy had thrown his leg over Danner’s as they lay on the rug; he turned to her and silently mouthed,
Jigaboo.
It was a word that had made them laugh when they were younger, but Danner turned away now contemptuously. The police were the bad ones; they were the ones with the dogs. No one spoke of it in social studies class at the junior high. They were supposed to discuss current events every Thursday when the
Scholastic Readers
were handed out; once the front of the six-page paper was a big murky photo of the marchers. Further on was a photo of President Kennedy in the new Rose Garden, and the teacher discussed the history of the White House.
Hurrah for the red, white, and blue
were the real words of the familiar “Stars and Stripes Forever” march, but the kids at school sang a parody about mothers and ducks. Bored at school, Danner had sung the words to herself, a silent rhythm in her mind, but she thought the word
fuck
instead of
duck.
Fuck was the word written all over basement walls of the old school; it was scrawled even on the big round pipes that were too hot to touch. Scrawled with crayon that melted and left a bright wax thickness, then a pale stain after the janitor scraped the texture off. There were ghostly fucks every few feet along the round steaming pipes; an angry, clinched word, wild. A while ago Danner had mentioned the graffiti to her mother, but Jean wouldn’t say the word even to comment.
It’s just as bad to curse about sexual matters as to take the Lord’s name in vain.
Danner didn’t talk about fucking to Billy, but surely he already knew.

The noise of the band moved off and Danner wished she were at home; the Boy Scouts were marching past and she was embarrassed to see them. Her embarrassment, an anxious sadness, confused her. The Scouts were some of the same boys from school, their crew cuts covered by the khaki caps, and the backs of their necks nearly shaved. Their thin necks looked shy and vulnerable; they did nothing but walk, shuffling a little, the sound barely audible. It wasn’t easy to walk through the entire parade in the heat; only boys thirteen and up were allowed. Billy wouldn’t march with the Scouts until next year, but Danner wished he’d
quit before the event took place. Why couldn’t he just lose interest? The little cloth merit badges looked like women’s jewelry on the sashes they wore across their chests; the yellow scarves seemed feminine too, caught at the throat with metal clasps. She’d seen Billy’s up close—it was an eagle like those on Army uniforms or military seals. Painted to look like gold or brass but only iron underneath, dull gray where the wing was scratched. Danner stepped back from the curb and wished them all out of sight as the two leaders, men dressed in drab green and wearing berets, shifted the banner they carried. Of course the men carried it; adults would have felt silly walking along empty-handed. The boys, perhaps fifty of them, were all too warm in their long-sleeved dark shirts. The two Negro boys in the fourth row were wearing Keds instead of leather Buster Browns with laces, but their socks were dark. Danner knew Scouts had to have special black nylon socks with elastic garters; the garters had pleased Jean because they were old-fashioned.
Billy, you will so wear them; they’re part of the uniform and I paid good money for them.
Danner stared at her own feet so as not to look; her white sandals were grass-stained and knicked where she’d scuffed them. “Left, Left, Left right left” came the soft voices of the Scouts, meant to be so soft no one could hear.

Danner wiped her face with her hands. She wanted to sit in the shade but the best part of the parade was coming; she looked down the route and saw the first of the Queen’s Court floats, vast, shuddering as it moved forward. The biggest floats were constructed over the tractors that pulled them, tractor and driver and hitch hidden in a frame of wood and chicken wire. They were hay wagons decorated in barns, the frames completely covered with crepe paper and thousands of Kleenex roses, colors arranged to make patterns or spell words:
MONONGAHELA POWER, ALLEGHENY BELL.
But the Queen’s Court floats were always purely white, surging constant and slow through the long parade. Hidden teenage boys watched from inside through rectangular peepholes to drive them at five miles per hour. The blockish floats were like an awkward herd of mechanical cakes tiered with girls in gowns and children in white under bowers. The first one always carried part of the Children’s Court, six-year-olds who’d participated in the
crowning ceremonies on the lawn of the local college. Little girls in organdy and gloves, boys in white suits with short pants, bow ties. Danner squinted up at them against the sun—oh, it was hot up there—the warm pavement radiating heat, and they felt like giants.

Danner had been one of those children; somehow Billy hadn’t. She remembered riding in the parade: a confusion of caretaking by strangers before it began, the frothy dresses and the heat,
sit just like this and don’t move.
Endless slow progress of the oceanic float, the spell of continuous scattered applause while the street unwound below her. The cool, green-shaded park where she was lifted off the float by a parade marshal and fell at his feet as he released her, her legs completely without sensation.
You mean you never moved once in the whole parade?
His big face above her as he put her under a tree to wait for her mother, wait for her legs to come alive. The dreamy, sensual time in which she sat, immobilized, the green park dense with heavy trees and the parade fallen to wandering fragments across the dappled ground. The coldness of the shaded grass, her drowsy exhaustion, her legs tingling. She’d seen Jean walking into the park, wearing a full white skirt and sleeveless blouse—her hair was long then, pulled back in a chignon at the nape of her neck; her lipstick was red. Jean looked beautiful and anonymous, yet deeply familiar. Danner felt herself alone, unattached and content. Her mother was a familiar body moving over grass, the way sun moved and stopped abruptly at the shade of the trees.

Where was Jean now? Danner saw her then, sitting in the middle of the line in one of the aluminum lawn chairs, pouring a glass of iced tea from the cooler. She held up the glass and gestured to Danner; Danner approached her, and her mother’s dark face, framed in the red scarf and the line of her black hair, was calm and steady in the heat. The colors of another band jangled behind her.

She put her hand on Danner’s forehead. “Take a drink of this. You’re so hot your face is flushed. It’s that long hair. I don’t know why you won’t let me get you a nice haircut for summer.”

Danner took the glass. “I don’t want short hair.”

“All the girls have short hair this summer. Did you see Bonnie Martin’s hair?”

Bonnie Martin was a majorette. “No,” Danner said.

“Sure you didn’t.” Jean smiled. “Don’t you want me to pull it back for you? Want my scarf?” She touched the scarf to pull it off.

Danner shook her head. The scarf would smell of Jean’s hair, a perfume dense and subtle at once, like heavy waxen flowers wilted by warmth. How could her hair smell that way? Danner wanted to touch the scarf and hold it.

Jean sighed. “This parade will go on another two hours. Why not sit on the porch with Katie?” She nodded at Bess’s house. “See how cool Katie looks.”

Danner turned. Katie didn’t see them looking and peered at the street, the porch swing under her moving slightly. Her skin was very pale and she swung absently on the broad white swing, as though the street were empty and she were totally alone. Usually she was alone on her frequent visits; her husband owned a hardware store in Winfield and came to Bellington only a few times a year. Danner turned back to Jean. “Mama, is Gladys coming out for dinner?”

“Yes, and she’s bringing the strawberries. Would you rather I have to drive clear up to Hall’s field in this traffic and get them?” She waited for an answer; then her expression softened. “Does Gladys bother you so much? She lives all by herself. Who does she have but us, with Jewel clear up in Ohio? It’s not like Bess, with Twist and his family right here, and your dad, and Katie coming so often from Winfield.”

“I know.”

“Go ahead, sit on the porch. Let Katie do French braids. For the dance tonight. Tight as Katie does them, they’d last. Be pretty with your new dress.” She stroked Danner’s wrist with her warm fingers.

The new dress: Danner’s heart sank at the prospect of wearing it. Jean had gone all the way to Winfield to shop and bought the dress as a surprise; it was a tailored white shirtwaist with linen cuffs at the short sleeves. Surely no one wore such clothes at the pool dances; the high school girls would wear full swing
skirts and sleeveless rayon shells that clung. The sweaters would be colors like tangerine, aqua, chartreuse; Danner would be the only one in white. Last night she’d lain in bed and heard her parents quarreling in low tones:
You had no damn business
and Jean’s bitter
I work for my money
as the dress hung pale and crisp in the darkness of Danner’s open closet.
You don’t think I work? You need a good slap
, and Danner lay listening, wondering if she could say she planned to swim, and take her real clothes to the dance in a beach bag. Someone would see if she changed in the poolhouse dressing room; suppose she walked into the tall bushes by the railroad tracks? No one would notice.
Just you touch me, go ahead.
The voices stopped then or Danner slept, the dress in her mind’s eye veiled with tissue paper, offered in her mother’s arms.

“Mama, maybe we should take the dress back.”

Jean looked easily away at the parade. “Now why would we do that? You’ll look so pretty in it. I can’t wait to see you.” There was the sound of bells jingling and a steel clack of hooves on cement. “The horses—twice as many this year, and here come the palominos. Oh, roses.”

Danner knelt by Jean’s chair to look; she saw the closest animals almost from below, and the chests of the horses were beautifully broad. They stepped high in what seemed an effortless gait, but the costumed riders held the reins tense. They prodded the horses sharply, stirrups tight against the veined bellies of the animals. The two palominos, show horses from a stable in Win-field, were always in the parade. This year their ashen manes were plaited and deep red roses sat like knots along their arched necks.

“Someone was careful and took every thorn from those long stems,” Jean said.

The wooden floor of Bess’s porch was cool and the boards were vaguely uneven; Danner sat cross-legged and waited for Katie to come back with the celluloid brush and comb, and the round white hand mirror, Bess kept on her dressing table. The porch was a big empty rectangle except for the swing; all the other chairs were set up on the sidewalk for the parade. Rhododendron grew shoulder-high around the front of the house, the
long waxen leaves so close against the white trellis of the porch they seemed to press the lattice. Danner looked across the wide stone steps of the porch and watched the Shriners march past. They wore skirts and played the bagpipes that were so harsh and sad and melodious; the crowd clapped.

The street, blocked off since the previous night, would have looked completely empty before the parade and the crowds came. Bess would have been up early, sweeping the floor and the thin mats of the porch with a stiff broom. Danner imagined the brushing of the broom in the quiet morning. How would it be to wake up like Katie to that sound; to have a mother so old, nearly seventy; to be an old child nearly thirty and sleep often in the bed you’d always known?

Katie wasn’t like other people; Danner wasn’t sure why. Katie was thin and willowy and she moved quietly; she wore her dark blond hair in the same pageboy she’d worn in her high school graduation picture, and she wore no makeup. Her face was so fair that the freckles on her cheeks each looked singular and precise, as though someone had painted them on. Her hazel eyes had tiny lines beneath them and in the creases, as if she had to strain slightly to see. Her sweater and sketchbook lay in the empty swing; Danner touched the sweater, a red woolen one. Just touching it made Danner feel too warm, but Katie carried a sweater everywhere, even in the middle of summer. On the hottest days, she wore a white cotton sweater around her shoulders; always, she took a long nap in the middle of the day. Everyone accepted the fact that Katie slept; when she visited Bess, the French doors to the bedroom were pulled shut and Katie lay still, never wrinkling the spread, her arms and chest covered with her sweater. She had been a sickly child, but that wasn’t what made her different: Danner thought it was the way Katie slept that signaled her difference. She slept easily and completely, as though some part of her was constantly engaged in serene rest. She had only to give over the wakeful aspects of herself to slip completely into her practiced sleep, her face still, her pale lips delicate as peach-toned porcelain.