In the Land of Dreamy Dreams by Ellen Gilchrist

Author:Ellen Gilchrist
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: In the Land of Dreamy Dreams
ISBN: 9781940941158
Publisher: Diversion Books
Published: 1981-04-15T00:00:00+00:00

Generous Pieces

I am poking around the house looking for change to spend at the Sweet Shoppe. It is afternoon, November. The light coming through the windows of my parents’ room is flat and gray and casts thick shadows on the rug my father brought home from China after the war.

I am going through the pockets of his gabardine topcoat. The pockets are deep and cool. The rubbers are in the right-hand pocket. I pull them out, look at them for a moment, then stick my hand back in the pocket and leave it there. I stand like that for a long time, halfway into the closet with my hand deep in the pocket, listening to the blood run through my body, to the sound of my own breathing.

I smell the cold safety of his suits and shirts. I stare down at the comforting order of his shoes and boots. I hold one of the little packets between my fingers, feeling the hard rim, the soft yielding center. It gives way, like the hide of a mouse.

Behind me is the walnut bed in which he was born far away in Georgia. Beside it, the old-fashioned dresser with a silver tray onto which he empties his pockets in the evenings. While he dreams the tray holds his daytime life, his plumb bob, his pocketknife, his pens and pencils, his onyx Kappa Sigma ring, his loose change, his money clip.

How do I know what the rubbers are? How do I know with such absolute certainty that they are connected with Christina Carver’s mother and the pall that has fallen over our house on Calvin Boulevard?

I stand in the closet door for a long time. I want to take out the little package and inspect it more closely, but I cannot bring myself to withdraw it from the pocket, as if to pull it out into the light would make it real. After a while I become afraid my mother will come home and find me in her room so I take my hand from the pocket and leave.

I wander into the kitchen and make a sugar sandwich and talk for a while to the elderly German housekeeper. She is a kindly woman with a thick accent who smiles all the time. She has a small grandson who is deaf, and occasionally she brings him to work and talks with him in the language deaf people make with their hands. I feel sorry for her because of the deaf child and try to remember to pick up my clothes so she won’t have to bend over to reach them. When I am good about this she bakes me gingerbread men with buttons and smiles made out of raisins.

I leave the house and begin walking aimlessly across the small Indiana town. Usually I go by Christina’s after school. We are best friends. We spend the night together on weekends. We stand by each other in lines. I work hard to make Christina my friend. I

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