Machine Dreams

years by the time they met at the VFW, a dance like the one tonight, except it had been no special occasion. Once they started going out, they’d seen each other every afternoon and night for three weeks; in the last week, they were planning their wedding. Jean hadn’t needed anyone to talk to then. She’d had so much to do—with her job and nursing her mother. Then she’d quit her job, and she and Gracie moved closer to the approaching death as though partners in it. After they realized there was no way out, they’d talked openly and freely about what might happen, how it would be: a mystery.
    Main Street was nearly deserted, the street lamps on. Christmas decorations, red aluminum bells and flocked pine, swung heavily in the wind. The street, so familiar, was quiet and empty and clear. It was how every day had been, in every season, since her mother had died. There was no more talking, not really—no one whose past she knew, who knew her.
    Even when Mother had been so ill the talking stopped, Jeanhadn’t felt alone. Old Doc Jonas, Reb’s father, still practiced then. Gracie was one of his last patients: when the time came, just as he’d promised, he gave her drugs to stop the pain. Suddenly, it was as though all the consciousness she’d used to combat her sickness was now free to float forward and backward, witness to all that happened. Oh, Jean had felt things in those weeks that didn’t seem Christian, things she’d never tell anyone. Most nights she slept on a cot beside Grade’s bed, and she’d have such dreams, all through the fitful hours, and wake exhausted. She thought she dreamed her mother’s dreams, not hers. She’d empty the bedpan, straighten the sheets, give her mother the morphia—then lie down and plummet into a sleep she never owned. She saw her father standing outside a baroque locked door, begging to be let in. He hadn’t had a thing to drink tonight, he promised, oh Gracie, this time he’d be gentle. Jean woke with her heart pounding in a rush of heat and panic. She’d check on her mother, whose thin body seemed pressed to the bed, oblivious.
    It was a relief then to go downstairs and fix breakfast for Mitch, who by six had shaved and dressed and made coffee. It was a blessing to sit opposite him at the table and talk as though to an acquaintance. They talked about the concrete company, just started then by him and Clayton, or about some harmless gossip in the town. Sometimes, on those still-dark December mornings, they made love quickly in a downstairs bedroom, a small room behind the kitchen, where Mother had always kept household accounts. A tall wooden file cabinet stood sentinel beside the narrow bed; the drawers still held business papers from JT’s lumber mill, and sales receipts from the Depression years, after the mill had failed and they’d scraped along selling milk and butter and eggs to townspeople and renting the upstairs to roomers. Jean would turn from those dark knobbed drawers and press herself tight against Mitch as though fighting his weight, and the weight of the sickness above them. The fighting took her in until kissing him was deep and hard and unfamiliar, like kissing a stranger with whom she was trapped, with whom she was drowning. Behind her eyelids she saw the face in the bed upstairs, and she was able to cry. She never realized she’d cried until afterward, when her throat and temples were wet. Mitch and she didn’t speak aboutthe crying, as though they’d made some agreement. All their agreements became silent ones. The four months they’d slept in the same bed, down the hall from Mother, seemed another life, and their four-day wedding trip to a hotel in Baltimore seemed long ago. Even then, what had they talked of? Mitch never spoke of his childhood, as most people did, or of the war. And Jean didn’t ask about what came between. He’d been thirty-seven when they married—he’d had experiences, of course, judging by the crowd he’d run with—but those years weren’t her business. Oh, what was it she wanted from him? What could she have?
    Jean turned the Nash onto Gladys’ narrow street. The aching nervousness she’d felt all week, with Christmas a tinsel backdrop, had eased. None of her questions had answers. She parked the car and let it run, sitting a moment in the comfortable warmth, and looked with a placid curiosity at the modest, snow-sheathed houses. The houses were lovely, lit with yellow, each one a shelter private and