Хлоя Бенджамин: The Anatomy of Dreams

Gabe dropped his shoulders so his neck was long and his chin lifted, like a prairie dog. He turned his head from side to side, as if searching for someone in a crowd.

“Well, the woman wasn’t any less awkward,” I said, though it occurred to me that awkward was the wrong word. It was more that she made me feel uneasy—as if she didn’t understand how to do small talk or wasn’t playing by the rules.

“The weirdest part,” said Gabe, squatting, “was that when we got here, he suggested the four of us get together for dinner. He said his wife had thought of it.”

“Really? I didn’t think she liked me very much.”

“Why not?”

The tape ended. Gabe turned off the TV, and we flopped to the floor, our stomachs rising and falling in unison.

“It was just a feeling I had.”

But the more I thought about it, I couldn’t be sure I was right. The next morning, I slipped a note under their door inviting them to eat with us that night, and despite what Gabe had told me, I was still surprised when they accepted.

Kraft macaroni, tomato soup, cream of mushroom casserole: these were all things that my mother had made when I was growing up and that seemed painfully unsuitable now. Gabe cooked more often than I did, in part because he enjoyed it but mostly because I had not inherited certain womanly qualities from my mother, who did not have them to give me. I had never known how to bake scones or how to bounce an infant to keep it from crying. When Gabe approached me in college, I was becoming acutely aware of the differences between me and other girls, and the idea of Keller’s work—so divorced from typical gendered life, divorced even from typical human life—felt like a blessedly alternate universe.

Now, for the first time in years, I felt real social anxiety. I wanted to prove I could play hostess. So I told Gabe I would cook and found a recipe for skewered chicken, the breasts slippery as silk in my hands. I set the table with my grandmother’s red tablecloth and a small vase, which Gabe filled with daisies he picked along the train tracks.

Janna had called to say they’d be by at seven thirty. But it was eight when our doorbell rang, and the chicken had almost gone cold. Gabe and I had dressed up—he wore a button-up shirt with his jeans, and I had on a knee-length navy skirt—but Janna and Thomas looked like exotic birds in our entryway. She wore a short, canary-yellow dress, he a three-piece herringbone suit that looked much too hot for the late summer weather.

“I’m Janna,” she said, turning toward Gabe. “And this is Thomas.”

After I began to call him Thom, I found it odd she never did. I still remember the way she introduced him that day, as if it was her duty to preserve something old-fashioned and noble in him.

“Pleased to meet you,” said Thomas. He shook my hand, his grip boyishly enthusiastic; he nodded his head at the same time, the fuzzy strawberry-blond hair flapping up and down on his forehead. He wore a bow tie at his neck, and that, combined with his freckles and glasses, made him look like a character in a newspaper comic. But behind the glasses, his eyes were a deeply concentrated brown. They anchored his energy, like a mooring dropped in busy water.

“For you,” said Janna, holding out a porcelain dish, fuchsia, with plastic wrap on top. “Blueberry soup, for dessert—something my mother used to make. Mustikkakeitto , in Finnish.”

The words had a staccato beauty. In her high, lilting voice, they sounded sharp and delicate as glass shards.

“Thank you,” I said, taking the bowl. The liquid inside was a deep magenta stain. Gabe reached for Janna’s hand.

“Gabe,” he said. His smile broke open as easily as it did with Keller’s patients, and he held Janna’s hand in a firm grip, then Thomas’s.

“Quite nice of you to have us over,” said Thomas, flattening the front of his vest with his palms and looking around at our walls, which were bare. “It occurred to us too late that we should have hosted you. But here we are, and we brought Janna’s soup. Though now I wish we had something better—a housewarming plant or something, yeah? Bit bare in here, unless that’s how you like it?”

“Don’t be rude,” said Janna. “Thomas says the first thing that comes to his mind, and usually the first thing isn’t the best. They’ve just moved in, they haven’t got time to get the place decorated. It was that way for us, too, in the beginning—everything packed away in boxes and boxes.”

Later, I would marvel at the change in Janna. Alone, she hadn’t seemed to worry about small talk and propriety, but with Thomas she acted like a moral handler. As time went on, I began to notice that he did the same to her, however subtly. They seemed to exist in this constant state of checks and balances, one catching the other whenever they swung too far.

But I didn’t have time to sort through this then; I was too busy feeling embarrassed about the state of our walls, for the truth was we had nothing in boxes. Gabe had wanted to hang some of my paintings, but I didn’t want to look at them every day. Each piece felt like a minor exorcism, a dredging up of all the silt and sludge that collected around my consciousness. When I finished one, I felt accomplished, but I never thought they were beautiful.

As we sat down at the table, a train approached. We paused to listen to it whistle, then howl.

“It’s a lovely noise,” said Janna, her back erect. “I always like it when I hear one go by.”

I found it intoxicating, too, like a missive from another world. The trains came through erratically that year; we never knew what they were carrying or when the next one would come. But if it was at night, and we were asleep, I always woke up.

I’d put the chicken back in the oven to keep it hot, and it had dried, but Janna professed to love it. I felt too jittery to eat much, so I asked questions: How long had they lived here? What did Thomas do? He was a graduate student in the English department, he told us, studying Romantic poets of the nineteenth century.

“My third year here,” he said. “But we try to get out in the summers. This year we went to South Carolina to see my mother—didn’t get back until August.”

“Thomas was studying for his preliminary exam,” said Janna. “He read two hundred books, and then he wrote eight essays in eight hours. Doesn’t it sound awful?”

“I was supposed to read two hundred books,” said Thomas, with a bite of chicken. “I read one fifty. No—make that one forty. I shouldn’t lie to myself, I skimmed at least ten. How can you skim Lord Byron? The point is, you can’t.”

“Sounds like a huge task,” said Gabe, leaning forward. “And what about you, Janna? Are you involved in the university?”

“Nope,” said Janna. She swallowed a sip of wine. “I garden.”

“She used to study botany,” said Thomas. “Before that it was biology. She likes the way all the little parts of a thing fit together.”

“No, if I’d liked it I would have stayed,” said Janna, with a sharp look at Thom. “I dropped out our senior year of college. I’d rather be touching things, you know, than reading about them. But let’s talk about the two of you—where did you meet?”

Though she’d been effusive about the chicken, she hadn’t eaten much of it. Now she picked the chunks off the skewer with her fingers and grouped them on one side of her plate. Gabe and I looked at each other.

“It was in high school,” I said.

“High school!” said Thomas. “Fantastic!”

“Thomas goes wild for a good love story,” said Janna. “Were you sweethearts back then?”

“We dated for a while,” said Gabe. “But then we went in separate directions. We got in touch again partway through college, before Sylvie’s senior year.”