Queen of Dreams (5 page)

“Sonny, you wouldn’t recognize appreciation if it came up and bit you on the nose.”

“Besides,” he continued with a dramatic sigh as though I hadn’t spoken, “in my heart, you and I will always have a relationship.”

I hung up in disgust.

Soon after, my mother phoned. She was angry, which was rare for her. “I can’t believe you’re jealous of the poor boy, lonely as he is. I can’t believe you want him not to see me.”

“That tattletale! Just wait till I—”

“There you go, jumping to suspicious conclusions. I’d like you to know Sonny didn’t say a word to me.”

“Uh-huh, sure,” I said, using my best ironic voice, but strangely, I did believe her. My mother has a way of knowing things.

“I don’t want him sponging off of you,” I added. I had to bite my lip to stop myself from adding, And how is it you cook him all that fancy stuff you never make for me?

“He doesn’t sponge off of me. He brings your dad and me something every time he visits.” Here she paused meaningfully— to help me realize, no doubt, that I could show some improvement in that area. “He does a lot of things for me, in fact. Last week he took me to the doctor for my checkup.”

“But you always go on your own—”

“I don’t like to drive so much nowadays,” she said.

“What do you mean? Are you sick? Why didn’t you ask
me
if you needed—?”

She changed the subject deftly. “And he brings over the latest Hindi movies and watches them with us, the ones with all the hit songs. Your father really enjoys that. You know how he loves music—”

“Since when did you start watching Hindi movies? You never let
me
watch them when I was growing up. You called them brainless, sexist fluff.”

“Since when did you start wanting to eat my Indian food?” countered my mother, who believes in offensive play. “It was always pasta and pizza and
Oh mom, not alu parathas again!
when you were growing up.” Then she added, “I love you both, you should know that. You’re not in competition, even though you did decide to get a divorce.”

My mother has never made a secret of her utter and irrational fondness for Sonny. I can’t figure out this aberration in a woman who is otherwise one of the most intelligent people I know.

Maybe there’s another Sonny, Belle told me once. A kinder, gentler Sonny that only your mom can see, the way she sees her dream people.

Yeah, I said. A kinder, gentler Sonny. That would have to be a dream for sure.

To give my mother credit, she never tried to pressure me into staying with Sonny once I’d decided to leave. Even though I could never bring myself to tell her why.

But here I am, obsessing on ancient history when I should be tackling the problem on hand. This has always been my shortcoming, one more way in which I’m different from my mother, who is the original Do It Now poster girl. Perhaps this is why she dreams and I paint. Because dreams look to the future, and paintings try to preserve the past.

We watch from the window of the Chai House as movers unload another truckload of expensive-looking equipment and wheel them into Java.

Belle gives me a you’d-better-get-back-to-the-phone-and-make-that-call look.

I give her a why-do-we-have-to-drag-my-mother-into-this look.

“Rikki, this is not the time to indulge in false pride. We need your mom’s help.”

“We can handle it ourselves,” I say in my most confident tones.

But inside, I’m afraid. I’ve never been a planner. Mostly, I’ve fallen into things that life has swept up against me. Going through with the divorce is the only difficult decision I’ve made. My mother, now: she’s the fighter in the family. Once she decides on a goal, she never lets go. “Like the tortoise,” my father would say, “in the tale of the hare and the tortoise.” With a wry smile and a wink, he’d add, “And guess who’s the hare?”

I was never sure if he meant himself or me.

But there were races my mother didn’t win. She never could get my father to stop drinking, though periodically she’d get mad and throw out his bottles.

“Why should I quit?” he told us once. “It gives me happiness—or keeps me from sorrow, the same thing. And I’m not harming anyone, am I?”

His drinking was erratic. I could never understand what brought it on. Sometimes he’d go for a month without touching alcohol. Other times he’d start drinking on a Friday night and continue through the weekend. He only drank red wine—he claimed it was good for his heart—and was never abusive when he drank. He sat in the corner of the living room and played songs by dead people on his antiquated stereo, mostly love songs by Sehgal or Rafi or Kishore Kumar, though sometimes he’d surprise me by playing Lady Day. From time to time he would sing along—he had a powerful baritone—a rapt and distant smile on his face. When he got too drunk to sing, he’d curl up on the couch and cover himself with a blanket he kept ready for that purpose, and go to sleep. On Monday morning he’d go off to work, apparently unaffected by his weekend escapade.

I never hated him for drinking. Not until my mother died.

My mother tried to stop him every way she knew. After the binge was over, she’d cook his favorite dishes. She’d stand behind his chair, massaging his neck. “You’re going to kill yourself, drinking so much!” she’d say. She’d make her voice light. Only I, glancing across the table, would see the troubled look in her eyes. I waited for her to ask him why he did this to himself, but she never did. She did beg him to go see someone—a doctor, the priest at the Shiva Vishnu temple, an AA counselor. But he never listened.

“As long as I don’t kill you,” he’d joke, “you shouldn’t complain.”

“Maybe you’ll do that, too, one of these days,” my mother would say, annoyed.

“Where’d you get that? In one of your dreams?”

Her face would lose all expression whenever he said that, as though she’d shut something off inside. She didn’t like either of us mentioning her dreams.

“Okay, okay,” my father would say. “I apologize. Forgive me—please?” He’d go down on one knee in front of her and throw open his arms, Bollywood style. “Mere sapno ke rani,” he’d sing in his husky voice until she smiled and said, “Oh, stop it, you ridiculous man!” His words—my Hindi was spotty at best, but I think they meant
queen of my dreams.
Or was it
my queen of dreams
?

6

Rakhi

There were two kinds of interpreting that my mother did, though there may have been others. My knowledge of this facet of her life is furtive, fragmented, gleaned through eavesdropping.

The first—as she had reluctantly told me—was when someone came to her with a dream, and she explained to her what it meant. (But why do I say
her?
I suspect that men came to my mother, too, though I imagine them to be more awkward about it.)

“A dream is a telegram from the hidden world,” I heard her say once. “Only a fool or an illiterate person ignores it.”

The second kind of interpretation was more complicated. I’ll get to it later.

I learned early not to question my mother about her work. Though she talked freely with me about matters that were taboo in Indian families—boyfriends, bodily changes, bad things that happened at school—she was silent on the subject of dreams. If I brought it up, she would look distressed. Sometimes she’d leave the house. Once she took the car and didn’t return for hours. I was beside myself with worry, certain she’d had an accident. I think it was soon after that that I stopped asking questions. Or maybe it was after she’d given up on teaching me.

Let me not misrepresent facts. My mother wasn’t the one who wanted to teach me to interpret dreams. I was crazy for it myself.

As far back as I can remember, I wanted to be an interpreter. But when I turned twelve, I grew obsessed with the idea. I saw it as a noble vocation, at once mysterious and helpful to the world. To be an interpreter of the inner realm seemed so
Indian
. (In thinking this, of course, I deluded myself. Weren’t the American papers filled with advertisements about psychics?) I hungered for all things Indian because my mother never spoke of the country she’d grown up in—just as she never spoke of her past. But if I could be a dream interpreter like her, surely I would understand her without the need for words.

Not all my motives were so pure. I daydreamed sometimes of how my talent would make the more popular girls in the school befriend me, how it would force Elroy Thomas, who played drums in Band, to notice me at last. I imagined running my hands over his hair, its tight, springy curls.

When I asked my mother, she shook her head. “First, you can’t give this knowledge to people who might want to use it for selfish gain.” (Here she looked at me until I looked away.) “And second, you can’t give this knowledge, period.”

I wasn’t convinced. “How did you learn, then?”

“I have to make dinner.”

I caught the edge of her sari as she tried to escape to the kitchen. I told her I wasn’t letting her go until she told me the whole story.

“There’s no story to tell. I had a gift. A distant aunt who was a dream teller recognized it when she came to visit.”

“But how?”

“I don’t remember very well. I think she made me sleep in the same room. Anyway, when she left, she took me back to live with her.”

I stared at her, trying to imagine how it must be to leave everything you love behind and go off with a stranger. “You left, just like that? Didn’t your mother stop you? Didn’t you miss her?”

She stared down at the backs of her hands. Her unhappiness was a tangible thing. I could have held it in my palm, like an injured bird. I’d never noticed before that the ends of her nails were ragged, as though someone had been biting them. My mother, biting her nails? It shocked me so much, I said, “Never mind. Tell me what your aunt taught you. Did she give you lessons?”

“I guess you could call them lessons.” She spoke slowly, the words sleepwalking through her mouth. “But they came later, and only because I already had the gift.”

“And I don’t have it?” I tried to make my voice nonchalant, but it cracked a little.

She hesitated. “I don’t know for sure. I haven’t sensed it, that’s all. Maybe I’m just too close to you to see it.”

I knew what she was saying, under the careful kindness. But I couldn’t bear to give up yet.

“I want you to try, Mom,” I said. “Really try, one more time. Let me sleep with you.”

She drew in her breath to say no—I could see it in the set of her mouth. But then she agreed. Was it because she loved me? Was it some deep, chromosomal guilt, for not having passed on the gift to me?

I slept deeply that night, waking in the morning with a slight headache. My mother’s face was drawn, her eyes rimmed with dark circles.

“Do you remember anything? Anything you saw?” she asked. She sounded hoarse, as though she were coming down with the flu.

When I shook my head, she looked disappointed and relieved at the same time. “It didn’t work,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

Her words were like a door closing, with her on the other side, beyond my reach.

“It’s all right,” I said, turning away, my voice as casual as I could make it. “It doesn’t matter. Thanks for trying, anyway.”

I’ve never been able to fool my mother. I could feel her eyes on me, sharp and sad. But she only said, “Maybe it’s for the best. Being a dream interpreter isn’t as glamorous as you think.”

A year later, I would learn how right she was.

The second kind of interpretation occurred when my mother dreamed. These dreams were not about herself, or us, or anyone she knew. All the people in these dreams were strangers, and usually they didn’t believe in dreams. Or they believed—but in spite of themselves. Which was worse, because when you’re forced to believe in something you wish you could dismiss, it makes you an angry person.

My mother’s duty was to warn these angry people of what was about to happen to them.