Beauty Queen

thought, "you ought to get a bullet between your eyes."
    Chapter 13
    Jeannie continued to have bad dreams.
    Somewhere she had read (maybe it was in the Reader's Digest) that you dreamed during your REM sleep, and that the amount of time you spent in REM sleep increased when you were in a state of tension or anxiety. She had also remembered reading that, if you drank or took pills, this tended to decrease your REM sleep below what you needed— which was why people on pills or booze got even more upset about life.
    She tried discussing her dreams with Reverend Irving. But he didn't have much to say about dreams.
    "I have this feeling that my mind is trying to tell me something," she told him, "but I don't know what."
    "God is trying to tell you something," said Reverend Irving one time.
    Another time he said, "Dreams are vanity." And he pounded with his cane and intoned, "Knowest thou not this of old, since man was placed upon Earth, that the triumphing of the wicked is short. He shall perish forever like his own dung: they which have seen him shall say, Where is he? He shall fly away as in a dream, and shall not be found: yea, he shall be chased away as a vision of the night."
    She was puzzled.
    "But, Reverend Irving, God sometimes uses dreams to tell people things. He sent dreams to the prophets. Daniel. . ."
    "And false prophets pretend to revelations in their dreams," intoned Reverend Irving.
    She left the old man with a queasy feeling that, in a few respects at least, Irving was out of touch with reality.
    "After all, what can you expect?" she told herself. "He's old as the hills."
    She decided that she would not interfere with whatever her mind was trying to work out. She chased away the temptations to take just one little glass of wine, just one wee Valium. "All I need is to get more nervous," she thought. Bravely she drank a cup of warm milk every night before going to bed, and slipped into her bed wondering what new thing her subconscious mind would come up with that night.
    One night, however, she woke up shuddering and terrified to the marrow of her bones. She wondered if she was going mad.
    She was so frightened that she went into the living room and turned on the TV. Feeling morally unable to watch a movie, she sat there trying to watch a late-night talk show. But she could not wipe away the memory of the dream, and it would haunt her for days afterward.
    In her dream, she had found herself in the balcony of a huge auditorium, high above and far from the stage. The place was dark. And she could sense rather than see an immense crowd in evening dress. On the great bare stage, dramatically picked out by a single spotlight, was a woman's figure.
    Slowly she found herself drawing near the figure. It was like she herself was a camera doing a slow zoom.
    Pretty soon she was close enough to see that it was Miss America standing there. The figure's crown sparkled in the spotlight, it carried a trophy, and it was holding a mike with a long cord and singing sweetly, "Don't Sit Under the Apple Tree With Anyone Else But Me."
    Jeannie found herself going closer and closer.
    Finally she was close enough to make out all the details. The woman was wearing an elaborate rhinestone crown and high-heeled rhinestone shoes. She had on a sweeping floor-length cape covered with red and blue stripes and silver stars. Her bathing suit was made of the same patriotic-looking fabric. A tall silver trophy rested across one arm. She was wearing silver lame gloves
    And she was dead. She was a frail shriveled thing, not quite a mummy, because the flesh was rotting all along her skinny limbs, and hanging in moldy pieces off her face. The nose had caved in, and the lips had melted away. The front of the bathing suit hung obscenely loose where the breasts and the pubic mound should have been. Underneath the glittering crown, her matted white hair was stuck to her skull and neck In the eye sockets of her skull she had two giant rhinestones that glittered like lizard's eyes.
    Jeannie found herself zooming in still closer. She realized that, with three or four more feet, she would be forced to touch the thing. She struggled. She felt frozen, trapped.
    Suddenly she became aware that she was screaming. And then she had yanked herself into the safe dark of her bedroom.
    Now she sat staring at the TV set.
    "Like a vision of the night," she said softly to herself. Maybe she only thought that she was saved.
    Maybe she was kidding herself. It wasn't