Chloe Benjamin - The Anatomy of Dreams

It was a small cat, tawny in color, with rust-colored flecks on its forehead and paws. But what I noticed most was the pressure of its head on my leg, a firmness, as though it wanted to push me into the table.

I dropped my hand and straightened as if I’d touched something soiled. I must have knocked the table with my elbow on the way up, because Rodney’s glass began to quiver. Mr. Keller reached for it, but he wasn’t fast enough, and the cup toppled lightly into the grass, where the sparkling cider barely missed the cat’s tail.

“Is that your cat?” I asked.

“Indeed she is,” said Keller. “Lucy.”

He had been talking to my mother, a cup of champagne in one hand. I could tell she wanted to continue the conversation and wished I hadn’t interrupted it, but I couldn’t pretend I was fine.

“I had a dream about her,” I said.

Keller’s face hardly moved.

“I’m not surprised. You wouldn’t be the first. Lucy’s always lurking around the dining hall and the library. Come finals, everyone’s dreaming about cats.”

There was a pause while my family looked at me. Then my father started to laugh, and Keller smiled briefly before turning back to my mother. But I still felt as though every nerve in my body had been lit with a match, and I couldn’t concentrate on the reception. The whole thing gave the end of my time at Mills an uneasy feeling. Soon, I began to avoid thinking about the school at all. It became easier and easier until the summer before my last year of college, when Gabe returned.

One Wednesday in late September, when the heat was just beginning to lift, I went to our neighbors’ house for the first time. I was standing at our kitchen sink, washing water glasses with the window open, when I heard someone call to me.

“You want lemonade?”

I looked up. It was the woman next door, hanging out of a second-story window that faced our house and the train tracks. She leaned from the waist, so that her upper body tilted out of the frame, her hair streaking the sky.

“Sorry?”

“I said would you like lemonade. I saw you looking at my porch. Sometimes I sit there with a drink but I’m in today, it’s too goddamn hot. So I thought I’d invite you.”

I had planned to go to the office to enter the data from last night’s session. Our participant had wriggled out of his leg straps and walked down the hall to the building’s emergency exit. When Keller brought him back to the lab, he had no recollection that he’d been there before; eventually, he became so agitated that Gabe had to sedate him. We woke him several hours later.

We hadn’t lost control like this since patient 222, a woman named Anne March. She was the first person I worked with, and she left our study abruptly, though I tried not to conflate these two facts. I still wondered if we’d helped her at all; sometimes I thought we’d actually made things worse. Every so often, I forgot about her, but then, like a fussy, chronic injury — a pulled muscle or a bad ankle — she made herself known again. But I didn’t want to spend the day thinking about Anne, and I was too curious about the woman next door to turn down an opportunity to meet her.

“Okay!” I shouted back. “Thank you!”

I put my last glass upside down on a towel and crossed the driveway that separated our houses, the screen door hissing shut behind me.

The woman had left her front door ajar. She stood by the refrigerator, her large feet turned out. She wore a ruffled white dress, and up close, her legs looked even more like a calf’s — shins longer than thighs, with hyperextended knobs for knees. When I stepped inside, she came to greet me, a glass pitcher in one hand. The liquid inside was bright yellow, topped with little pieces of cucumber and strawberry and torn mint.

“I’m Janna,” she said. She pronounced the J like a Y — Yanna.

“Sylvie.”

I held out my hand. Her fingers were long and thin, cool from the refrigerator.

“Sylvie. That’s fascinating. Do you like it?”

The barbell above her eye raised along with her eyebrow. Her irises were the iridescent gray-blue of abalone shells.

“Like it?” I asked. “I guess so.”

“I do,” she said. “Very much.”

She walked to a large standing cabinet, painted yellow and peeling, and took out two ceramic cups. The kitchen’s layout was identical to ours, but the two rooms looked nothing alike. Here, a mix of pots and pans hung from multicolored pegs, and the kitchen table — wooden and water-ringed, one bad leg wrapped in duct tape — had a matryoshka -doll centerpiece. The nesting dolls reminded me of my paintings: the bright figures resting inside each other like secrets, increasing in detail as they decreased in size.

“Janna’s not a name you hear often,” I said. “Are you from the States?”

“Nope. Finland. But the name itself is Hebrew. Mother started out Lutheran, but Daddy’s a Jew and she converted. His family’s from Israel, but he met Mother in Helsinki, where he was born. There are a little more than a thousand Jews in Finland, you know, and that’s where most of them live.”

“I didn’t know. Are you practicing?”

“Ah, no.” She shook her head, and the strands of red and black rustled together. “I left a lot of things behind. But I appreciate it, the ritual. Ritual and ceremony and songs and bitter herbs. And the sweet things, too. Charoset is sweet. You’ve had it?”

She set down the cups, one blue and one green, and poured the lemonade hastily. Drops splattered the table.

“I haven’t,” I said.

“Are you religious?”

She put the mug of lemonade at my place and sat down across from me, waiting for me to drink. But I was trying to keep up with the conversation: like a wild bird, it kept jumping unexpectedly, then resettling on delicate claws.

“No,” I said. “Neither were my parents — my mom is a microbiologist, and my dad’s an ancient historian. He studies ancient history, I mean — the Sumerians. He himself is very modern.”

Janna smiled, distant. “Funny,” she said.

“Anyway, I suppose that’s where I get it, the atheism. I’m in academia, too.”

“What do you study?” asked Janna. But she was examining the fingers on her left hand, her knuckles bent; eyeing something, she brought the fourth finger to her teeth and tore at the jagged skin around the nail bed.

“Oh, it’s complicated.”

I could tell this upset her. Her face and neck flushed, and I became more conscious of the blue veins beneath her skin. Is it terrible to say I was delighted? It was a small moment of leverage — my foot wedged in a cranny of rock, my body muscled above hers.

“I’m not sure I can say much about it, honestly,” I said.

Gabe and I could talk about our work within limits — Keller asked us to be vague, and we were to never share information about individual patients — but we had never done it. Both of us feared we would be seen as quacks — or worse, interrogated, doubted, and criticized. It was safer to keep the truth between us.

“I see,” said Janna. She took a gulp of lemonade and looked out the window to the street, as if waiting for someone to join us.

“What do you do?” I asked. “Sometimes I see you coming back in the evening.”

As soon as I said it, I reddened. I didn’t want Janna to know I’d been observing her as closely as I had. But if she was surprised, she didn’t say so.

“I’m paid to garden. Landscaper is the term, I suppose, but I prefer gardener . I work for one couple at the moment who’ve got a big plot of land, several acres. It’s like a bunch of needy babies crying out for me. That’s what Thomas says: I’m raising my children.”