Amy Bloom - Lucky Us

Let me start again. I was thinking about the two big trips we took, Ohio to Hollywood, Hollywood to Brooklyn. On my way up, on my way down.

I know I am leaving out the big middle.

I have this dream about once a week. I take Nembutal sometimes and then I have just the remains of the dream, the watery marks it leaves on me and the bed.

In the dream, you and I are dancing to “We’re in the Money.” Do you remember this? When you first came to live with us (and wasn’t that a pip? I don’t think there was another man in the world who would have said to his sixteen-year-old, recently bereaved daughter, “Yes, dammit, stop bothering me. Obviously, she’s your sister. Now you have someone to play duets with.” Didn’t he just take the cake?), from time to time, you’d do a whole routine from Gold Diggers of 1933. I don’t know what possessed you, but you were much better than the eyeglasses and cut-in-the kitchen hair had led me to expect. You had done the routine with your mother, I think. Or for her. I never got the feeling that your mother was an artiste.

First you did the parade from “Remember My Forgotten Man,” which was hilarious. You marched across the living room, changing hats, helmet to newsie to baseball cap, and then you froze for a second, eyes down, hands in pockets, to demonstrate the plight of homelessness. Suddenly, you lifted your chin like a mad chorine and did the tap dance that the girls in the gold-coin hats had done. We did that number together, once, right before we left Ohio. The Rotarians’ annual talent show, first prize, one-hundred-dollar bond. I made us gold hats, and Mrs. Drysdale (that fat widow next door, who always had her eye on Edgar?) gave me yards of gold braid and we sewed it onto the lapels and cuffs of our blazers. I put pancake on your legs and mine and I wouldn’t let you wear socks with the tap shoes because it wasn’t sophisticated. You had blisters like grapes after, and I’m sorry. I couldn’t figure out how to make those gold-coin bottoms, so we wore short skirts with gold-ball fringe, also courtesy of Mrs. Drysdale, who would have done anything for Edgar’s approval. Poor old thing, I never said a word to Edgar. Of course, we didn’t tell him about the show, and two days later we were on the bus with every bond and dollar bill I’d hidden away.

In the dream, we’re tap-dancing to “We’re in the Money” and we are too, too marvelous. “We’re in the money, come on my honey, look up, the skies are sunny …” We are shimmering , from our gold caps and gold capelets to the gold lamé halter tops down to the giant paillettes of our short shorts and our gold tap shoes. We are Ginger Rogers vulgar and cheerful. We are like white-girl Nicholas Brothers — sharp and sexy, fearless and exuberant. We are not trying to please, we are the Gods of Pleasure, and lucky them who get to see us. We leap from tabletops onto piano tops and then back downstage, light bouncing off our gold coins, gold sweat flying. We come down two long gold staircases, on opposite sides, and dance downstage once more. I give you a twirl, you give me one, and we hold it — I hear myself whispering to you, One, Two, Three, Four, and the camera — I now see we’re in a movie and this is the final shot, a long shot of our bodies, behind a fountain of gold coins, filling the screen.

It would be great if the dream ended here.

In the dream, I’m in a restaurant, just like real life that night when I met Mr. Fox and Mr. Fletcher at Sardi’s after the show. They said I had star potential and they wanted to offer me something big. That’s what hooked me. Directors may be complicated and intellectual (you couldn’t prove it by me) but actors are so simple. Give us the good stuff and we’ll follow you anywhere. Genuine praise (not the “Darling, how do you do it?”), sincere gushing from someone important and not on our payroll and not in our bed and we do whatever you want us to, sucking in that reefer, fucking that donkey. Sorry.

In the dream, Fox and Fletcher are in green suits and I am sitting between them. The table is covered with food, which is not how it was. I didn’t want to seem, one, impressed, two, unladylike, three, presumptuous, so I ordered a small steak, a green salad, and a glass of red wine. They kept saying, Have the shrimp, how about lobster thermidor, and I thought, Not yet, I won’t. In the dream, just like in real life, I am thrilled and suspicious. I had this kind of dinner in Hollywood, and look how that turned out. In the dream, it’s like Rome before the fall: small birds stuffed with glazed, glimmering things. Everything surrounded by frosted grapes and vegetables carved into flowers, a jeroboam of Champagne in a giant bucket (finally saw one this past year, at New Year’s — huge), and two rings of enormous shrimp hanging off a crystal bowl and all facing right, like the Esther Williams swimmers.

In the dream, I drive home with the crystal bowl of shrimp on the passenger seat. This is what I really did want to do. There was a big bowl of shrimp on the table, and I wanted to bring some home to Reenie. She would have made scampi for us, or we would have just sat up and devoured them at the kitchen table. In real life, I didn’t say much to Mr. Fletcher and Mr. Fox that evening, Thanks for the swell meal and the compliments and the expression of serious interest. In the dream, I say thank you and I keep looking at the truly enormous shrimp, thinking about how pleased Reenie will be with them, and me.

In the dream, just like it was in real life, Reenie is waiting up for me, in her pink kimono, with her hair piled up on her head. In the dream, she’s happy to see me, her eyes are sparkling. In real life, she was steaming. It was the way it always was when I came back late. She yelled that she didn’t leave Gus (which is not how I would describe it but …) so she could be my mistress. She didn’t turn her back on her church and her family so she could be my dirty little secret. Once she threw a plate at the wall and once she broke my tortoiseshell sunglasses. I go toward her, to say I’m sorry — and I am sorry but I did think that a little discretion wouldn’t kill us and I was not prepared to have Messers. Fletcher and Fox over for a home-cooked meal in the carriage house with Danny yelling for Mama, and you and Edgar playing dominoes in the front room.

The dream is no different from real life, at this point. Reenie did have a pot of sauce on the stove. She did say, I wasn’t gonna start cooking till you walked in the door. I’m not sitting down to cold food anymore. I did say, Honey, I ate. She lit a cigarette off the stove, and I won’t ever know what she was about to say. A rope of flame leaped from the burner to the end of her hand and wrapped around her chest and shoulders like a blue-and-orange curtain, like a bit of stagecraft pulling her up to the fly loft. Fire ran down the back of her robe. I started screaming and pulled Reenie out of the kitchen, rolling her around and around on the damp grass, until my hands were too burned to be of any use and Reenie had stopped screaming.

In the dream, just like in real life, the yard is dark, no light except for the porch lamp. I can hear Reenie breathing. Her whole body was black and red and ash, a deep shadow on the dark grass in the black night. I’m glad that I can’t see her clearly, although I feel her hair on my arm. I can’t feel my hands. They hang like red, blackened meat from my wrists. My fingers flutter like thick ribbons.

In the dream, the light from the porch fades until I can’t see a thing. Edgar sleeps through everything. You come running downstairs in my fancy green silk nightgown, crying, reaching for me. There’s no Danny. He’s not missing. It’s like he never was.