Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (14 page)

We get to Biscuit Kitchen and pull up to the speaker and Kim orders a Coke and a sausage biscuit. I order two biscuits with steak and onions and one ham biscuit and a big Sprite. I won't get a lunch break at Copy Quick until 1:30, don't ask me why, so I have to eat a lot. Also, I am still growing. Anyway, we've ordered these biscuits and we're just sitting there in the truck waiting for our turn to drive to the little window and get them. We are listening to this REM tape but all of a sudden Kim reaches out and ejects it. Kim is not what you call a morning person. I have got the hang of this now, I try not to say too much, just let her slide into the day.

“I had a dream about you last night,” Kim says.

“Oh, yeah,” I say. “Just what was I doing in this dream?” I ask. I reach over and feel of her.

Kim pushes my hand away but I can tell she likes it, she is smiling at me. “Something like that,” she says. Kim is smiling very sexy at me, she looks great this morning.

I say “Hey!” all of a sudden because now I remember
my
dream, which I would not of remembered if Kim hadn't said that. Gran-Gran always said if you don't tell your dreams you will lose them, and I reckon I was about to do that, lose the dream I mean. But now I get upset, because it was an awful dream. I remember it all now. I'm looking at Kim. The dream comes clear as day. “I dreamed we were in a motel someplace, you and me,” I tell her, “and this guy came in.”

“What guy?” Kim asks. She looks very interested in my dream.

“That's the weird part,” I tell her. “I don't know the guy. I mean, I can't place him. I think I've seen him around, though. He looked kind of familiar.”

“What does he look like?” Kim asks.

“Well, he's kind of a big guy,” I tell her, “with long hair and a moustache. . . .”

“What color hair?” she interrupts me.

“Black,” I say. “Definitely black. He looks like he might be part Indian or something, you know?”

Kim nods. She is looking at me the way she looks at TV. “Then what happened?” she asks.

“Hey.” I start laughing. “Hey! This is
my
dream,” I remind her. But the next part of the dream is hard to tell. “Well, what happens next is, this guy comes in the motel room, like I told you. We aren't doing anything in particular. We're just sitting there in this motel room.”

“What's he wearing? The guy, I mean.”

“A suit,” I say. It all comes back to me like it was happening now. “Anyway he's got on this suit and he's a little bit older than we are, and for some reason, like I said, I kind of know him, it's like maybe I did a landscaping job for him or something, and so I say, ‘Let me introduce you to my wife.'”

This is the bad part.

“But he says, ‘We've already met.' Then he comes over and throws you down on the bed and starts kissing you like crazy.”

“What?”
Now Kim is staring at me in that skin-busting way I was telling you about before. Slowly, a big grin comes over her face and her cheeks turn red underneath her tan, like she's actually been caught in bed with this guy, like she is embarrassed.

Behind us in the line of cars, all these people start blowing their horns. So I throw the truck in gear and cruise up to the window and we get our biscuits and our drinks. All of this costs $7.41. Sun is breaking through the fog by the time I pull back out on Wade Avenue. While I'm driving up Wade Avenue I look over at Kim, her hair is all clean and shiny in the sunlight. Actually, she has got a lot of blond hairs and red hairs mixed in with the brown. She's eating her biscuit in tiny little bites. And she is still blushing, which makes me mad.

“Listen, Kim,” I say. “You didn't do anything. It wasn't even your dream. It was
my dream
, remember?” Kim can tell I am getting upset now, so she slides over and gives me a big sexy kiss on the neck and puts her hand on my leg. “You silly,” she says. We ride up Wade Avenue like that. I pull over in front of Tanfastic, and Kim gives me another kiss before she gets out of the truck. But I don't know. I still think she thinks it's her dream, and I still feel weird about it.

For Ann Moss

M
elanie stands dreaming against the open door, the entrance to Linens N' Things in the outlet mall in Burlington, North Carolina. It's raining. Melanie loves how the rain sounds drumming down on the big skylight at the center of the mall right over The Potted Plant and Orange Julius, it sounds like a million horses running fast, like a stampede in a western movie. She loves movies, she loves Clint Eastwood, now what if
he
came in the outlet mall right now and walked over to her and said, Excuse me, ma'am, I need a king-size bedspread in a western decor? She'd say, Why yes, come this way, sir, I've got exactly what you need. Only the trouble is that he won't come in probably, or any other real man either, men don't come to outlets unless of course they happen to work there, especially not to Linens N' Things, which is where Melanie works.

She's between men. Stan left Tuesday for a new job at WRDU in Raleigh, which has a soft country format. Stan the Man, they called him on the radio, what a joke. Melanie and him didn't really get along that good anyway, it was mostly a mistake caused by too many piña coladas. Stan turned out to be real self-centered like most media personalities, at least in Melanie's experience and she has known several. Like sometimes you'll have a boyfriend for a while and then you'll go out with his buddies after that, which was true of her and the guys at WHIT. All of their voices were so loud, plus they were kind of neurotic which is often true of artistic types. Melanie would like to steer clear of artistic types now and find a person who is basically down-to-earth, which she is.

Or maybe a healthy sports-minded man like Bobby of Bobby's Sport which is just opening up now in the corner space vacated by Pottery World. Mr. Slemp didn't have any heart for business after his wife died, they all watched her waste away before their very eyes, Mrs. Slemp, but she kept coming into Pottery World every day until the very last, when she had to go in the hospital. Mrs. Slemp was only forty-six years old. It was tragic, what a nice long marriage the Slemps had, they'd been at the outlet mall ever since it opened.

This is what Melanie wants, a sweet regular man she can watch TV with, and not have to put on her makeup or kick up her heels. A solid sports-minded man to be a role model for her son Sean, Lord knows he could use one even though he is almost grown up now and probably it's too late anyway.

Melanie sighs, nibbling a piece of her long red hair. Her sister says she's too old (thirty-seven) to wear it long, that a woman should cut her hair by age thirty at least. But men like it long. Melanie knows this. Long hair is sexy, short hair is not. Mr. Rolette, her boss, keeps calling to her but she doesn't answer him back, she's going to act like she doesn't hear, it's still early, and speaking of husbands, she's had three.

Some people might not count the first one since it was annulled, so it was like it never happened at all, like an abortion. She's had some of those too. But he was so sweet, her first husband. After she lost him she tried to be philosophical and think, Well, I was lucky to have him at all, but this was wrong. The fact is, he almost ruined her for anybody else. She'd been married and annulled by twenty, it was all downhill after that, or so it seems on some days like today when it's raining and she's feeling blue. He was the one she really loved. He was so intelligent. In fact he was in Army Intelligence that summer she met him, she was waiting tables at Wrightsville Beach, she'd just graduated from high school and he was a year out of college but real young, since he was so intelligent.

His name was Andrew, called Drew, he had gone to school up North. He was an only child whose parents lived in Greenwich, Connecticut, where the clocks are. Melanie never met his mother and she met his father only once, when he came down to Fayetteville to get them annulled. Drew's father looked like the guy on
Masterpiece Theatre
. He gave her a thousand dollars and kissed her on the cheek and said, “No harm done.” This was not exactly true. Because never again did Melanie come across a boy who was so intelligent or could make her laugh so hard. He was going to be a professor, probably he's one now at some university up North, only Melanie doesn't know this for sure because his parents' phone is no longer listed in Greenwich. Sometimes over the years when she's been drinking, she's tried to call. Her second husband was nothing but a flash in the pan but at least she got Sean out of that one. Sean is the best thing that has ever happened in Melanie's life so far. And her third husband, Gary Rasnake, was cute but he was trouble from the word go, he wouldn't work and all he wanted to do was play, he loved equipment and gadgets for their own sake such as Weed-Eaters and remote-control toy airplanes and guns and cars and VCRs. They had the first VCR in Burlington, when nobody else had ever heard of them. A man ahead of his time.

“I'm coming,” Melanie yells to Mr. Rolette. It's true she ought to go back in there now, Mr. Rolette's been nervous lately and the mall is filling up, it's getting real busy, everybody comes to the mall when it rains. The worst thing Gary Rasnake did was charge all those things on Melanie's Visa card and then leave town. She stopped payment of course, but still. Later, she found out that he'd done this before at least twice, once in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, and once in Spartanburg, South Carolina. But it wasn't all bad she guessed, they had some fun too even if she can't remember what they did exactly, it seems like such a long time ago.

And now she's getting old, too old to have long hair. It's time for another husband. The boyfriends she's had since Gary have not seemed like husband material, or else they just took off. Melanie is basically domestic, which is why she enjoys working at Linens N' Things. “Coming,” she calls.

But as Melanie turns to go back in the store she catches sight of Bobby of Bobby's Sport coming to work. He wears a navy-blue running suit and bounces along on his brand-new athletic shoes like an advertisement for himself, which in a way he is. Melanie stands half turned in the door to watch him go by, and then to her surprise he gives her a big flashy grin. “Morning,” he says. Bobby's teeth are so even and white, he must have had braces as a child.

“I saw that,” says her best friend, Grace, who has been married to the same man for a million years so she is fascinated by this kind of thing.

“What? Nothing happened,” says Melanie, but Grace says, “Huh!”

“Girls, girls, let's settle down now.” Mr. Rolette claps his hands. They are getting ready for a back-to-school sale. Deborah Green at the cash register looks up from her book and glares at him. Deborah is an intellectual, working her way through school. Mr. Rolette sets the two black girls, LaWanda and Renée, to unloading sheets and scatter rugs for the back-to-school bin by the cash register, while Grace tidies up the bath area and Melanie waits on customers. She's good at it. Over the years she has gotten so she can match up a woman with a sheet in five minutes flat, it's like a sixth sense or something. In fact she's so good at it that she doesn't have to think much, she can go on dreaming although it's hard to say exactly what she's dreaming about, nothing special, it's still raining outside, all the people who come in Linens N' Things are dripping wet. That's the only bad thing about working at the mall, you miss so much weather. All you know is basically if it's raining or not raining, from the skylight which is frosted glass. Bobby of Bobby's Sport has a deep cleft chin which Melanie likes in a man.

At lunchtime she and Grace go to The Magic Pan. They always eat lunch together even though Grace is so persnickety. For instance she will say, There is too much cheese in this blue-cheese dressing, or, This Coke is flat. You can't satisfy Grace, which is probably one reason she is Melanie's best friend, opposites attract, and Melanie's easily pleased. Also they have worked together every day for the past nine years.

“Do you think Bobby is cute?” Melanie asks.

“Well, yes, I do think he is sort of cute,” Grace says, “but he looks like he might be real bouncy, I think you ought to look for somebody older and more stable,” says Grace. You can trust her to find some fault. Grace is married to her own high school sweetheart, Gene, a tall skinny man with big black glasses who is always worrying about things, he'd be the last man in the world that Melanie would be interested in, whether he was stable or not.

Grace fixes Melanie with her watery blue-eyed stare. “I think if I was you I'd try to look at all my options,” she says, “and not just fall into something else.”

Melanie opens her mouth and then shuts it. Grace means the best in the world of course, she just does not have a lot of personal tact, so what. Still, Melanie feels real down as they walk back to Linens N' Things together. Just the other day her sister said, “Melanie, you need to get a grip on things.” Melanie knows her mother and her sister talk about her on the phone. They pass Shoe Town, Revco, The Casual Male, The Christmas Shoppe. Melanie thinks she would die if she worked in there and had to listen to Christmas carols all day long. They pass Deborah Green, sitting on the bench by the little fountain, reading a book. She doesn't look up. This reminds Melanie again of Drew, who was always reading.

“You go ahead,” she says to Grace. “I'll catch up with you in a minute, I want to buy something to read.”

Grace looks funny. “Huh!” she says.

But Melanie ducks into News and Notions anyway, it's not much bigger than a closet stuck in between The Christmas Shoppe and Marine Discount.

The very first book she picks up is a paperback named
How to Interpret Your Dreams
, by dream expert Margery Cooper Boyd. She went straight to it, it must be fate. “I'll take it,” she says, and pays the old man behind the counter, who always stares at her bosom, and she buys a
USA Today
also, to find out what's going on in the world, but as soon as she reads the first page of
How to Interpret Your Dreams
she's hooked. It's like Margery Cooper Boyd wrote this book especially for her.

“Got a problem?” the book says. “Sleep on it. If you know how, you can literally dream up a solution during the night. The dreaming mind's ability to find creative and logical solutions for unresolved problems has delighted and intrigued man for as long as he has been in this world. Without the ability to dream, it's doubtful that man would have survived as long as he has. It is safe to say that he certainly would not have attained dominance.” Melanie sits down on the bench in front of Belk's. “History is filled with examples of how dreams have helped men and nations to solve problems. Perhaps the best known examples are Biblical—Pharaoh's dream of the lean and fat cows or Jacob's dream of the sheaves and stars. In more modern times, there are Robert Louis Stevenson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Albert Einstein, Wolfgang Mozart, and others who have had dreams.” Melanie blinks, she doesn't know who all these people are, she can't remember anything about the pharaoh either. Then she reads a lot of these dreams and what they turned out to mean, and it is very interesting. Some dreams have changed the course of history. She doesn't care if she's late or not, she doesn't care if Mr. Rolette gets mad or not. Once you are able to accept your dreams as private messages from your subconscious, you open yourself up to a whole new world of self-understanding. You can get what you want!

“Listen to your dreams,” writes Margery Cooper Boyd. This certainly ought to come easy to Melanie, who lives in a dream world anyway, everybody has always said so. In fact Mr. Rolette says it later that day, “Melanie, pay attention, you live in a dream world,” when she marks the towels down wrong. The interpretation of dreams is done through symbols, everything you dream means something else. Melanie can't wait to start learning what they mean. Her dreams are full of symbols, sometimes at night she dreams so much she wakes up all worn out.

“Isn't it something?” she asks Sean later when they're eating dinner, tacos, something quick, she was too excited to cook much. Sean says, “Isn't
what
something, Mama?” in his normal bored voice, and she says, “Everything in your dreams means something else.”

Sean smiles at her, the long slow smile which is the only characteristic he seems to have gotten from his daddy thank God, who was nevertheless attractive. “Mama,” he says, “almost
everything
means something else.”

Melanie just looks at him. “Well!” she says. Sean's hair is bleached and long on top, he has a rattail in back, his ears have been pierced so many times they look like Swiss cheese. Sean plays guitar, he looks like somebody who just knocked over a convenience store. But Sean is basically real smart and only a few people, mainly his teachers, know this. He'd drop dead before he'd let his friends catch him studying.

“What do you mean?” he asks, and so Melanie shows him the alphabetical listing, which is very complete, going from Abandonment, Accounts, Actor or Actress, Adultery, and Airplane all the way to Tomato, Tooth, Vault, Washing, Yellow, Youth, and Zoo. “Washing!” Sean says. “Who ever dreamed of washing?”

“Well, if they did, I'm sure it means guilt,” sniffs Melanie, because it has occurred to her Sean might be making fun of her again.

“‘Snow,'” Sean reads out loud. “‘Snow is a symbol of purity. It can also symbolize sex. To dream of tracking through untouched snow expresses a desire for sexual intercourse.'”

“Give me that!” says Melanie, grabbing her book.

“So which is it, Mama?” asks Sean. “Sex or purity? How do you know?”

“You just have to trust your heart,” Melanie says, “and go with your instincts that's all, that's what Margery Cooper Boyd says.”

“Well, then it must be true.”

He's teasing her all right, he's always teasing her, still they do have a wonderful relationship, considering, but sometimes it seems like it's gotten all turned around, like Sean's the grown-up here and she's the child.