Month: January 2016

He is going around and wiping dust from every surface with the palms of special gloves. He then brings his dust-encrusted hands up and places them against my face and holds them there.

I’m sitting on a log before a beach bonfire with Mimi and Mabs. I zip open one of our blue sleeping bags and pull it up across our shoulders. We all go to bed, and when I wake up in the morning, they’re gone. They’ve cleared out completely, leaving no sign they were there apart from two little black-striped silver flashlights they presumably used to find their way around in the dark.

I walk through the Winter Cabin, looking for a note from them. The place is full of things previous people left behind. My attention is briefly snagged by a pad of drawing paper, but I move on. I find a letter in Mabs’ handwriting on the table and pick it up and begin to read. But it’s written to the grandparents, so I put it down again. Someone hands me an envelope that is sealed, addressed, and stamped but hasn’t gone through the mail. I think, Ah, this is it, and tear it open. But inside are only some photographs. My sister is going through some photos of her kids, and I hand it to her. She’s holding a 4″x4″ negative of a cluster of pictures and holds it up to the light to look at them. I move around her to the front of the table where the grandparents sit in state in a sunken alcove in a set of throne-like chairs, which have apparently recently replaced the crumbling seating that was there before.

I’m driving through the cobblestone streets of an unfamiliar town in a car that’s not my own. There are three other people in the car with me, including the car’s owner sitting in the back seat. He is teasing and flirting with me, and I am trying very hard to stay focused on the curves of the road and my speed. We go up a hill and stop at a light at the top. Then I start rolling backward, the pickup truck behind reversing out of my way. I’m trying to stop or drive forward, but I’m stomping around on the floor and can find no pedals. We’re picking up speed, and in a panic I wake up.

A bunch of people from my life are sitting around in a big, loose circle in a room with a fireplace. I walk in to join them and sit down in a rocking chair and start rocking. When it rocks backwards, it keeps going farther and farther until I flip. I do a balletic move and am unhurt but still embarrassed. Someone removes the rockers from the chair despite my objection, and when I sit in it, I’m too low to the ground. We debate what it means to rock back over a cat’s tail.

My friend from college is there with a young child.

I’m flipping through a stack of photographs, trying to decipher the story they tell. There are beaches and waves but no people, and I can’t tell which place and part of my life is depicted. A family of HMC friends comes into the room, and I go over and sit and talk with them. The daughter, my friend, is there with her little boy. They’ve been planning a big party, and we talk about how it’s going. They ask about my dad, and I tell them of his cancer and chemo and radiation.

I go into the party’s one tiny bathroom and close the two flimsy doors and sit down on the toilet and defecate. I start to clean myself, and there seems to be no end to it– just shit and more shit. I look out the window and a girl from my middle school, now grown to a woman, is there with her husband and is following her little toddler son up a hill. Someone bangs into the outer bathroom door, and I’m alarmed because I’m not finished. They bust in through the flimsy door and stand for awhile outside the bathroom stall waiting. I just sit there, not sure what to do. Eventually the person leaves, and I get up to secure the door. The hook and eye latch has been yanked from the wall, and the plaster is all crumbled away, but I manage to find a place to screw it back in enough to close the door.

I’m lying in bed, and the dog is there, too. A squirrel comes in at the window and climbs down through the room. I pull up my calendar on my phone and move the appointment I have set with the squirrel from the future to now.

There are two raised garden beds in the snow. While others work on the one across the way, I’m trying to do as instructed over here. This involves standing, stomping equidistant boot holes into the snow as deeply as possible for planting potatoes. But snow tumbles into the holes from the sides as I step along, and the snow compresses under my boot soles as I stomp, preventing me from making the hold very deep.

I’m trying to lock the car, but the fob isn’t working. I press it and press it, but nothing happens. At first I think the battery has died and consider locking the doors manually, but I’m worried I’ll set off the alarm. I walk around the car and discover one of the doors is open. I close it and try again, but still no luck. I wonder if one of the other doors is ajar. I would leave the car unlocked, but it’s filled with all my stuff.

I follow a Hispanic woman into a cell phone store. She is getting cell phones for her family all on one big contract. We’re trying to exchange numbers, but she walks away before I’ve finished typing in the numbers to call her.

I’m on the ground floor of a big old warehouse building that’s been converted into shops and studios. There’s a restaurant full of people getting tea and sandwiches from the register counter. We’re talking about how many good places there are to eat nearby, and I’m thinking about how I thought the opposite was true when I first started working here.

I go sit on swings under an indoor arbor with another woman. We’ve just been in a shop with yearn and fiber goods. She’s telling me about the studios upstairs and how I need to visit them. I’m asking her how she knows about this place, and she tells me she’s taken classes here for years.

I’m inside a woman’s house, and I’m invisible, watching her. She’s holding a young girl captive in the attic, and I’m laying low, looking for an opportunity to rescue her. While the woman moves around her home, I have to edge out of the way and try to be very very quiet. It’s dangerous if she discovers me. She has a key that she keeps stashed someplace on her person. It’s unlike any key I’ve ever seen, narrow and tubular black plastic, but it seems to operate simply enough. Somehow I get ahold of it and am working to remove it from its casing when it makes a small popping sound. Her head snaps up, and I freeze, holding my breath. After awhile she goes back to what she’s doing. Now I’m just waiting for her to leave, so I can make the rescue. I’m moving out of her way and go around to the side of a table where I don’t think she’ll go. Suddenly she’s heading straight for me, reaching to turn out a light, and the back of her hand touches my face. A delighted smile dawns on her face, and it chills me, and I wake up.

I’m sitting in the library with two of my scholarly colleagues from grad school. They’re talking about their progress on their respective projects and about what it means to have two or three masters degrees. I get tired of listening to them and make an excuse and leave.

I walk down some broad stairs and through the school building, heading back to my room to get the right books for class. I’m trying to figure out how I can minimize what I carry, going through in my mind what’s necessary, key card, etc.

I’m in a room, and my old high school boyfriend comes in. We’re being cordial, but then he’s got me in an embrace and is holding on. He seems deeply sad and lonely and to miss me a great deal. And then he’s talking about how well he’s doing in school, how he will probably get some monetary award. I’m annoyed and ask him what he’s going to do after school. He surprises me by not saying what I expect– answer has something to do with going to Riverside in New York City with another schoolfellow. There’s some organization there that they’re going to work with.

I’m walking down a long hallway and see someone turn into a room. I know that a woman chef works in there with her retinue of apprentices. Someone lets the dog out, and it goes bounding down the hall. I call it to me and lure it back inside. It’s bright and friendly and good-smelling in there. There are lots of tables. She invites me to stay, but I say I have to get to class. I head toward the door but realize there are several. I skirt a table and head for the door I think I came in. At the last minute I realize it’s the wrong one, but I’m already going through it and stepping across the green green herbs that are growing up between the paving stones.

I’m in a post-upheaval bivouac with a bunch of other people. I am the newbie, learning the ways. We eat meals of goop and glop from modular plastic containers. Afterward we take the trash and recycling out. We have to separate it carefully, scraping out as much food as possible and then cutting the containers up into small pieces before throwing them in the bins.

Back at the bivouac someone’s been ransacking my clothes. They’re pranking me, but I can’t find a pair of pants to wear. I didn’t have much to begin with, and now they’ve taken half of it away. A bunch of people come in, and they’re rearranging the room and stripping down and retrofitting the computers. The programmers seem to have beds because they work through the night so much. I’m envious and wish I were a programmer.

There is an enormous jade plant stretching out in all directions from the middle of the room. I turn it so that the light will hit its other side and it will grow more evenly. I notice a bit that has broken off and hangs from a narrow strip and pull it off. It tears off the branch it’s attached to in a long noisy strip. I want to take it to keep and sprout my own plant. Someone says, Why didn’t you just take one of these? and shows me a dish of tiny seedlings. I say, It was already broken off.

We’re playing around with two long-handled lollipops I’ve pulled out of one of the pencil holders on the desk. There’s a pink one and a yellow one, and they have little faces or flower designs in the middle. My boss comes in in the midst of this, and I’m anxious about being caught goofing off, but it seems fine, everyone else is too. For some reason this business with the lollipops is hilariously funny, and, as the author of the humor, I have crossed a rite of passage.

I’m setting out on the table six or seven tupperware containers of food I’ve cooked. They had only had a couple of measly pastries, and this is a virtual feast. Everyone is a little stunned, and I’m embarrassed. I cook when I’m nervous, I say. Eventually we all start eating, sitting around the table. We’re talking about somebody, and the woman next to me is nodding knowingly. I’m thinking she has some inside knowledge and ask, Did you go to prep school? Did you play field hockey? She says, No but looks caught out. She says, I played ultimate frisbee and something else and something else. She says she went to Duke and is disparaging it for being small. I say I would have preferred to go to a smaller college, that Michigan was so big you could zing around in it like a rubber band.

Chris and I are looking out over the map toward Huron Mountain, using some newfangled GPS device. The thing transports us over the leagues. We’re aiming for the club and end up at Lake Superior just a bit west of it. We start walking east along the rock shelf. W can tell we’re not on club property because there’s graffiti on the sandstone cliff faces.

We come to some beautiful old row houses built right up over the water and are walking past when I am tempted and turn in to one of them. We can tell they’re empty, and some of them are boarded up. I’m heading for one with boards on the windows but change my mind and turn toward the one next door. The door is ajar. We go in, and the place feels and smells old. It’s creaky and none too sturdy, so I’m going cautiously. We climb up an elaborate open staircase, winding up to the third floor. I’m looking out for soft spots in the wooden boards.

We walk through a doorway at the top of the stairs and find signs of habitation. There is a row of beds down the long room, and we make our way slowly along it. There are people lying in the beds. There is a caretaker of some kind who is talking to us about the place and the people in the beds. They seem to trace back over a hundred years or more, as if they’re all the people who have lived in the house, trapped there in slow time. We’re fascinated, but I have a growing sense of unease that we should leave. I’m afraid time is passing abnormally slowly here and speeding by in the world outside and that we’re being lured in to be trapped as well. Finally, with an effort of will, we pull ourselves away and go back down the stairs and out and away. I feel saturated and haunted by the place and can’t seem to shake it.

We go back again and the place is full of people, adults and children, in the midst of a celebration with games and races, and the enchantment is broken.

I’m going down a street in New York when a woman collapses at an intersection. I stop beside her as do a few other people. She’s lying on the ground unconscious. I lean over her to check and say, Somone call 911. A woman on the other side of her has her phone out, and I think she’s going to call 911, but then she’s fiddling with it, texting a friend, taking pictures. So I whip out my phone, exasperated. I’m just starting to dial when a garage door goes up, and I realize we’re right in front of a fire house. We take her inside into an exam room. They put her on a table and tell us that she’s pregnant. The collapse either resulted from the pregnancy or endangers it. I have two big babies under my arms. I’m lugging them like firewood, and the doctor tells me to take them home with me.

I’m in the kitchen of an apartment I’m living in. Someone has been refurbishing it piece by piece. There an old pump that’s been replaced. There’s debris all over the floor, and I start pulling it all together. I realize it’s all pizza boxes. I’m stacking them, and underneath are piles and piles of broken down box pieces. The linoleum is in bad shape and doesn’t go all the way to the walls. I’m considering replacing it, but I only rent and know the management company will never pay for it.

I follow some people into a house and up some stairs. There’s a kind of swooping orchestra pit in the ceiling with a few musicians playing across the way. The people I’ve followed are gathered around the railing at the top of the stairs to see down into the living room below where singers are performing. I slip past and sit on the sloping floor but begin to slide down the slope. I inch my way back up carefully and then peep over the ledge to see briefly into the room below, full of people. At the set change a bunch of folks shift, and the people on the stairs go down to claim better seats. I stand up and get a better vantage point and realize the singer is someone I know from Iowa, and then another and another. The group of women is touring, singing living room shows of old timey music. I catch their eyes one by one and smile and mouth Hi when they recognize me. And then one of them is my friend Laurel. She’s wearing loose country girl braids and sitting on the couch with the other women.

I go back downstairs and turn down a hallway into the kitchen, looking for the bathroom. There are doors everywhere– to closets, to nowhere– old ramshackle country doors– even the floor of the hallway is constructed from old wooden doors painted over. There’s a little handpainted sign that says To the bathroom  with a hand pointing outside, so I follow it out.

Then I’m walking back through the yard, through several yards with a bunch of people from the house show. Laurel lives here with her family, and they’ve been working on changing it. We come to a wide open area, and there is a lake. Little boys run and jump in the water, splashing and diving like slippery little fish. The lake is full of people swimming and enjoying the beautiful water. At the edge the grass just disappears underneath, as if the lake just suddenly came up on the lawn. There are trails of bubbles rising up near the edge from trapped air. Someone asks if the caves are down there. I think it’s a joke, but someone hands me the little town newspaper folded back to a picture under the water of an old flooded part of the town. There is an old fashioned hotel and an assortment of other old buildings way down under the surface. Laurel’s boys are running around, playing on toy structures they’ve built. I go looking for a copy of the newspaper in and out of buildings with screen doors, past softball games and people everywhere having a good time. It feels utterly neighborly and wholesome, and I’m struck with a pang of envy for this life my friend is living.