Ellen Datlow - Off Limits

She teaches creative writing at Princeton University. With her late husband, Raymond J. Smith, she ran a small press and literary magazine, The Ontario Review , for many years.

AS SOON AS SHE saw it, she knew she had to have it.

There amid the finely wrought silver and turquoise jewelry, the hand-tooled leather goods, glazed earthenware pottery and baskets and coarse-woven fabrics in the Paiute Indian Reservation gift shop at Pyramid Lake, Nevada, the curious item seemed to leap out at Eunice’s eye: no more than four inches in diameter, an imperfect circle made of tightly woven dried vines or branches threaded with small filmy feathers. An artifact of some kind, exquisitely fashioned, its colors, like most of the colors of the handmade items in the shop, predominantly brown, beige, black. Eunice found herself staring at it, and there, suddenly, it lay in the palm of her hand—virtually weightless. Remarkable! Dream-Catcher the printed label explained. It was so dry Eunice feared it might crack in her fingers. When she lifted it to examine it more closely, noting how the interior of the woven branches was a net, or web, braided with leather thread, in the center of which a tiny agatelike stone dully gleamed, the filmy feathers came alive, stirred by her breath. The feathers, too, were beautiful, finely marked, streaks and speckles of dark brown like strokes of a watercolorist’s brush on a fawn-colored background.

Seeing Eunice’s interest in the dream-catcher, the Indian proprietor of the store explained to Eunice that it was a gift given only to those who were “much loved”—especially to be hung over a cradle or a crib. “The spiderweb inside catches the good dreams, but the bad dreams—no. Guaranteed!” He called out affably to Eunice, as if speaking to a child. Presumably a Paiute Indian, he was a man of vigorous, muscular middle age, who wore a faded black T-shirt, faded jeans, and a hand-tooled leather belt with a brass eagle buckle; his graying black thinning hair was caught in a loose, careless ponytail that gave him a disheveled yet playful look. His forehead was veined and knobby—scarred?—as if vexed with thought and the voice of exaggerated good cheer in which he spoke to Eunice, as to other customers, verged on mockery. From an exchange Eunice had overheard between him and a previous customer she gathered he was a Vietnam veteran. Yet he managed to smile at most of his customers as he rang up their purchases; he certainly smiled at Eunice.

“Yes ma’am!—the good dreams are caught for you,” the Indian said, handing over Eunice’s fragile dream-catcher in a paper bag, “—and the bad dreams go away. You hang it over your bed, O.K.?—even if you don’t believe, something will happen.”

“Thank you,” Eunice said. “I’ll do that.”

Eunice was not so young as she appeared, but with her pale, faded-gold hair and her smooth, fair skin and large, intelligent gray eyes she was an attractive woman, and she was alone. She smiled at the Indian proprietor though seeing that his smile held no warmth. His lips were drawn back tightly from discolored, uneven teeth, and his eyes, agate-shiny, recessed beneath his blemished forehead, were fixed upon her insolently. As if to say I know you. Even if you don’t know me. Eunice, who was not accustomed to being treated impolitely, still less rudely, maintained her poise, and her forced smile; leaving the store, she felt the man’s gaze drop to her ankles and rise rapidly, assessingly up her slender figure. She did not glance back when he called after her, “Come back again soon, lady, eh?” with exaggerated good cheer.

Even if you don’t believe. Something will happen.

When Eunice returned to Philadelphia, to her Delancey Street brownstone, she impulsively fastened the dream-catcher to the foot of her bed, and lay down to sleep. Exhausted from the plane flight, her brain assailed by images, impressions. Her twelve-day visit to the Southwest, to Nevada and Arizona, was the first extended vacation she’d taken in years. How vivid, many of its moments!—the ceramic blue sky, the extraordinary complex, ravaged-looking beauty of the mountains, the dun colors, shimmering salt flats, whitish silence of Death Valley… Yet, travel itself fatigued her, and bored her. There was no personal identity to it. No sense of mission.

Eunice was thirty-seven years old, unmarried, vice provost at the Philadelphia Academy of Fine Arts. Her Ph.D. was from Harvard; her dissertation, subsequently published as a book, was titled Aesthetics and Ethics: A Postmodernist Debate. Early on, as a girl, Eunice had hoped for a life that would be a public life and not a domestic life, involved in some way with the arts. She had been the only child of older parents, her father a popular philosophy professor at the University of Pennsylvania, and she had a memory of herself as a shy, precociously intelligent child, pale hair hanging heavily about her narrow face. The odd mixture of vanity and insecurity of the “special” child. Yet, disconcertingly mature as a young girl, Eunice seemed hardly to have grown much older in adulthood—a common phenomenon among the precocious. Now in young middle age, she still retained a slender, lithe girlishness; her attractive face unlined, her manner cheerful; she possessed an air of innocent authority that suited her as a professor at Swarthmore, and subsequently as an administrator there, and elsewhere. Her reputation among her professional colleagues was for exceptionally fine, detailed work; she was prized, if perhaps sometimes exploited, for her generous, uncomplaining good nature. It was said of her, not unkindly, that Eunice Pemberton lived for her work, through her work, in her work. If she had a personal life, it was kept very private. If she’d had lovers, she never spoke of them.

Nor was she a religious, certainly not a superstitious, woman. She’d become moderately interested in the culture of the Native Americans indigenous to the area of the Southwest she’d visited, but it was no more than a moderate interest, an intellectual’s speculation. Since early adolescence, Eunice had been incapable of believing in anyone or anything “supernatural”: she’d inherited from her mild-mannered, skeptical father a distrust of faith, which is to say the objectification of mankind’s wish fantasies into codified religions, institutions. What was skepticism but simple common sense?—sanity? An island of sanity in a seething fathomless ocean of irrationality, and often madness. The contemporary world of militant, fanatic nationalism, fundamentalist religions, intolerance.

Something will happen. Even if you don’t believe.

Eunice had affixed the feathered dream-catcher to the foot of her bed in the hope that it might stimulate her to dream, for she rarely dreamed; her nights were deep, silent pools of water, featureless, rippleless. Yet, so far as she knew, she did not dream that night, either. Her sleep was unnaturally heavy, like a weight pressing against her chest and threatening her with suffocation. Her breasts ached; she woke several times, her nightgown damp with perspiration. In the early morning, before sunrise, she woke abruptly, eager to get up. Her eyes were sore as if she’d been staring into the desert sun and her mouth was badly parched. And there was an odor in her bedroom as of something humid, overripe, like rotted fruit—a faint odor, not entirely disagreeable. And so — did I dream? Is this what a dream is?

Eunice quickly showered, and dressed, and would have forgotten the dream-catcher except, as she made her bed, the shimmering feathers drew her attention. How like a bird’s nest it looked—she hadn’t quite seen that, before. She touched the cobweb of leather twine at its center, and the glass gem which was like an eye. No dream, good or bad, had been caught in it. Still, the dream-catcher was an exquisite thing, and Eunice was glad she’d bought it.