Machine Dreams

white shirtwaist with linen cuffs at the short sleeves. Surely no one wore such clothes at the pool dances; the high school girls would wear full swingskirts and sleeveless rayon shells that clung. The sweaters would be colors like tangerine, aqua, chartreuse; Danner would be the only one in white. Last night she’d lain in bed and heard her parents quarreling in low tones:
You had no damn business
and Jean’s bitter
I work for my money
as the dress hung pale and crisp in the darkness of Danner’s open closet.
You don’t think I work? You need a good slap
, and Danner lay listening, wondering if she could say she planned to swim, and take her real clothes to the dance in a beach bag. Someone would see if she changed in the poolhouse dressing room; suppose she walked into the tall bushes by the railroad tracks? No one would notice.
Just you touch me, go ahead.
The voices stopped then or Danner slept, the dress in her mind’s eye veiled with tissue paper, offered in her mother’s arms.
    “Mama, maybe we should take the dress back.”
    Jean looked easily away at the parade. “Now why would we do that? You’ll look so pretty in it. I can’t wait to see you.” There was the sound of bells jingling and a steel clack of hooves on cement. “The horses—twice as many this year, and here come the palominos. Oh, roses.”
    Danner knelt by Jean’s chair to look; she saw the closest animals almost from below, and the chests of the horses were beautifully broad. They stepped high in what seemed an effortless gait, but the costumed riders held the reins tense. They prodded the horses sharply, stirrups tight against the veined bellies of the animals. The two palominos, show horses from a stable in Win-field, were always in the parade. This year their ashen manes were plaited and deep red roses sat like knots along their arched necks.
    “Someone was careful and took every thorn from those long stems,” Jean said.
    The wooden floor of Bess’s porch was cool and the boards were vaguely uneven; Danner sat cross-legged and waited for Katie to come back with the celluloid brush and comb, and the round white hand mirror, Bess kept on her dressing table. The porch was a big empty rectangle except for the swing; all the other chairs were set up on the sidewalk for the parade. Rhododendron grew shoulder-high around the front of the house, thelong waxen leaves so close against the white trellis of the porch they seemed to press the lattice. Danner looked across the wide stone steps of the porch and watched the Shriners march past. They wore skirts and played the bagpipes that were so harsh and sad and melodious; the crowd clapped.
    The street, blocked off since the previous night, would have looked completely empty before the parade and the crowds came. Bess would have been up early, sweeping the floor and the thin mats of the porch with a stiff broom. Danner imagined the brushing of the broom in the quiet morning. How would it be to wake up like Katie to that sound; to have a mother so old, nearly seventy; to be an old child nearly thirty and sleep often in the bed you’d always known?
    Katie wasn’t like other people; Danner wasn’t sure why. Katie was thin and willowy and she moved quietly; she wore her dark blond hair in the same pageboy she’d worn in her high school graduation picture, and she wore no makeup. Her face was so fair that the freckles on her cheeks each looked singular and precise, as though someone had painted them on. Her hazel eyes had tiny lines beneath them and in the creases, as if she had to strain slightly to see. Her sweater and sketchbook lay in the empty swing; Danner touched the sweater, a red woolen one. Just touching it made Danner feel too warm, but Katie carried a sweater everywhere, even in the middle of summer. On the hottest days, she wore a white cotton sweater around her shoulders; always, she took a long nap in the middle of the day. Everyone accepted the fact that Katie slept; when she visited Bess, the French doors to the bedroom were pulled shut and Katie lay still, never wrinkling the spread, her arms and chest covered with her sweater. She had been a sickly child, but that wasn’t what made her different: Danner thought it was the way Katie slept that signaled her difference. She slept easily and completely, as though some part of her was constantly engaged in serene rest. She had only to give over the wakeful aspects of herself to slip completely into her practiced sleep, her