Machine Dreams

as he sat at his desk building model airplanes, humming to himself. The sound was muffled, soft, inexact. Different from the radio in the dark:
Come on baby, baby please.
She imagined her mother’s room: the big antique bed, the L-shaped bank of windows, the Victorian bureau and its tall mirror bordered with knobs and spires. In Billy’s room, just the other side of the shelves, there were twin beds on opposite walls. Usually Mitch slept in one of them and Danner heard her father’s snoring behind the sound of the radio. His sleep was labored, oblivious. The sounds didn’t seem like her father at all but became instead the rhythmic workings of the house, the blind labor that got them all through the night. He caught his breath and held it, exhaling with a long high sigh that ended in a groan so deep it was nearly a word. In the old photographs at Bess’s house he was a blond heavy-lidded baby in a girl’s white dress: whose baby was he, orphaned, raised by Bess? The high cheekbones; the blue, long-lashed eyes in a graduation picture; the lips sensual, a little hard. The face too beautiful before his nose was broken, broken twice, fighting.
I’m begging you, baby:
often Danner put the radio inside her pillowcase and tried to fall asleep on it, her own breathing nearly silent. Listening, she knew the look of the larger bedroom: Billy turned on his side, legs drawn up, in the bed under the windows. Mitch asleep on his back, big in the other twin bed. Above them both, Billy’s model planeslined up on the windowsill. He built them behind his closed door in the afternoons, moving the smallest wheels and wing fittings to their proper places with a spot of glue on the end of a toothpick. When he finished a plane, he ceremoniously applied a decal of numbers to the tops of the wings, like a name. He put the planes on his windowsill, which was wide and covered with a patchwork of cotton from Jean’s jewelry boxes: long, narrow cotton from necklace boxes; square cotton from bracelet boxes. Danner is the one listening at night, imagining shapes: each airplane impervious and gray on cotton snow. Some of them have plastic men at the controls—tiny, frozen men with billed caps, looking out through cockpit windows.
Let it shine on me
while Mitch sleeps with the sheets folded down to his waist, arms at his sides; sleep such work that he spends part of each night awake. Smoking a cigarette at the kitchen table in the glow of a night lamp. Even sitting on the porch, smoking, looking at the dark fields. Sitting in the bathroom on the toilet, smoking cigarettes and reading paperbacks. Danner hears him get out of bed, clearing his throat, coughing.
Oh let it shine shine shine:
the whisper of the radio no longer really heard but felt, beating near her hand,
I feel all right I feel all right I feel all right.
    Danner and Billy sat in the back seat on the way to the dance; Jean and Gladys sat up front.
    “I think it’s nice the Raffertys have made a dance floor at the pool.” Jean stopped for the light on Main Street, her hands dark against the white steering wheel of the Mercury.
    “They can well afford a few lights and some poured concrete, the way they’ve bought up all those old houses near the college. Rent them all out to college students who tear them up, and make plenty. Rafferty will keep on until they own the whole town.”
    “Got a lot of mouths to feed.” Jean smiled.
    “Feed?” Gladys snorted. “They work those kids like slaves.”
    Danner wondered about the dance at the pool; she’d never been there at night before. Mayor Rafferty owned the Mobil station and some real estate, and he owned the pool. Over the double doors of the poolhouse hung a long sign with black letters: S.T. AND VIRGIE, STEVE, SAMMY, SONNY, SUSIE, SALLY, NICK ANDNATHAN. Nick and Nathan were their cousins who lived with them; Danner supposed that’s why their names were listed last, even though they were older than Susie and Sally, who were just little girls, not in school yet. The boys were always at the pool, running the office or being lifeguards.
You’re benched! Ten minutes!
The shrill of the whistle signaled rest periods, and then the Rafferty boys swam in the empty pool. Steve and Sonny were in high school and they’d teased Danner last summer when she rented her basket from the window on the girls’ side:
You sure you just got out of seventh grade?
they’d said, and,
Where do you live?
Confidential laughter at her answer;