Хлоя Бенджамин: The Anatomy of Dreams

“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 into the kitchen, 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.”

“Thomas,” I said. “Is that the man who lives here?”

Janna nodded. She put her spidery fingers on either side of the mug and began to rotate it.

“My husband,” she said. “He’s in academia, like you—the English department. He’s a Romanticist, studying for his PhD.”

I wasn’t sure whether he was studying the Romantics or if she meant to imply that university work was a romantic gesture in itself, a comment that had to be directed in part at me. Then and even months later, it was difficult for me to gauge Janna’s slyness, to sift it out of what was sincere.

“And you?” she asked. “I’ve seen someone else coming out of your house. Is he your husband? The short man?”

“My boyfriend.”

I was irritated by then. I finished off my lemonade, ready to make an excuse about work. But Janna leaned forward in her chair and began to tell me about her courtship with Thomas—how they met in college when he was studying poetry and she was in botany; back then, she said, she thought she might be a field researcher. Something delicate in the bright sheen of her eyes, her quick, pale hands, stopped me from resenting her.

The tattoo on her arm was a plant, black and white, with slanted flowers and sharp leaves. It traveled from her palm to her elbow. Her skin seemed too thin to withstand such inkiness. But most disturbing was the piercing on the back of her neck, which I only saw when she turned: two balls spaced an inch or so apart without a bar. I couldn’t tell how they’d been inserted, and that was what unnerved me. Keller had shaken my notions of privacy, and though I was now tied to his work, it made me fiercely protective of my core. There was something about the piercing in Janna’s neck that seemed invasive, even if she had chosen it. That was what struck me: her allowance of invasion, her desire for it.

As it turned out, Gabe spoke to Thomas the next day. He told me that night while we did our exercises. In Fort Bragg, we had begun to feel the physical toll of our lifestyle, in which we were either sleeping or observing the sleep of others. Our lower backs ached; our knees popped. Because our work schedule was so irregular, it didn’t make sense to join a gym, so Gabe suggested we use DVDs. We rented stacks of them from the library, our tote bags clattering on the walk home. Today, we were using 8 Minute Abs with 8 Minute Buns .

“I went over to the neighbors’ house yesterday,” I said. “The woman invited me—Janna.”

Gabe grunted. When we finished our sit-ups, we sat up and took a sip of water.

“Funny,” he said. “I met the guy this morning. At the Laundromat.”

We started bicycle crunches.

“You didn’t mention that,” I said.

“It was a little strange, to be honest. He sat down next to me by the dryers. I thought he recognized me, but he didn’t say anything. He took out all these books. And then”—we stood for lunges—“when I was leaving, he asked if I would wait for him, so we could walk back together.”

“So you talked then?”

“Not much. He mentioned the weather—asked did I think it was humid. I said I did. He was sort of looking around like this.”