Machine Dreams

his side, his feet reaching into the hallway. His face just empty, like you wouldn’t believe anything could look.
    They asked me to plan the funeral and we buried him with his parents. All of that is a blur. I’ve almost no memory of it. A few days later Peggy and I went down to North Carolina for a month, to visit Nate and his wife and their new baby. In pictures from that time, I look like somebody’s grandmother, my face puffy, my hair tied in a kerchief. And Peggy is so blond and bright, too bright, her hair perfectly curled, light blue eyes straining above a set smile. She looks perpetually surprised, but scared and insincere, like a play actor. She felt guilty because she’d insisted they sell the house; Tom was off with his friends all the time and there she was with the cleaning and the upkeep and her teaching job as well. But the fact was he’d had to move out and she hadn’t, since the college turned the place into a girls’ dorm and Peggy stayed on, in her own room, as house mother. She and Tom had argued and three weeks later he was dead—she hadn’t even known he was sick. She thought I blamedher but wouldn’t say so. I did blame her some, but with such a resignation there was no anger. It was all muddled. I kept thinking Tom and I might have broken up anyway when he went off to college, and said so, but they all denied that, as though his honor were at stake. We talked about him endlessly. Finally I sickened of the whole thing and told myself it was his business, his death. We all seemed to have so little to do with it, and no right to such feelings. I suppose I was stunned. All the days were like some repetitive dream—sometime next week I would wake up and be in the real world.
    Mother said, “You’re young. Your life’s not over.” A girlfriend of mine moved in with us and Mother gave us the whole top floor of the house. We moved the Victrola upstairs, played records loud, and practiced dance steps. “Fascination” is a song I remember from that time:
I might have gone on my way empty-hearted
; every jukebox had two or three versions. I wore anklets and heels and did the furniture in gaudy colors. Took one of Mother’s beautiful antique vanities, painted it pink and black, and hung a starched white ruffle around the legs. Wow, I said, isn’t it pretty; Mother said yes, it certainly was. Anything I did was fine with her. My girlfriend and I had jobs as checkers at the grocery, and clothes, and dates—I never went out with the same boy three times. I forced myself to be happy and flip. Really, I was mad at all of them, and mad at Tom for leaving me. There in town with all the same people and sidewalks and buildings, it was as though he still existed but wouldn’t come near me. Like he was watching me all the time, disappointed and sad-faced. What had I done wrong? Nate and Peggy had made copies of all their snapshots of Tom, then given me the originals and the negatives. Envelopes of those stiff dark negatives, squares that rattled when I shuffled them. I kept them in my high school scrapbook. Sometimes I took them all out and held them to the light one by one. We all glowed up like angels. The smiles and unsuspecting gestures made more sense, full of a secret everyone ignored, but what was it?
    So the time went on quietly. I worked, took classes at the college. Life wasn’t like it is now. Look at you—born here andthink you have to get to California, go so far, do so much so fast. Crazy situations, strange people—all this I hear about drugs. We had the Depression and then the war; we didn’t have to go looking for something to happen. And the things that happened were so big; no one could question or see an end to them. People died in the war and they died at home, of real causes, not what they brought on themselves. Living with that was enough.
    Late in ’44 I enrolled in the Cadet Nurses’ Program in Washington, a special accelerated course subsidized by the army. My mother’s trouble, the cancer, had started the spring before—but she wasn’t ill except when she had the treatments, and she so wanted me to have the training, some security. So I went. I lived in a dorm at American University. The food was terrible and we all smoked cigarettes to cut our appetites. Washington was exciting in wartime, choked with soldiers and service people. And I loved the classes. But I only stayed four months; Mother got worse. My brother was in the service, my sister was divorced