Emma Rathbone - Losing It

I laughed.

“I was actually looking at our New Age section the other day,” she said. “And guess what I found?”

“What?”

“Lucid Dreaming for Beginners.”

“No way. Was it the same?”

“Yup. Floating shoe and all.”

One of the earliest parallels about our lives Grace and I had discovered was that when we were roughly ten or eleven years old, we had both developed a voracious interest in lucid dreaming, and both went to a lot of trouble to furtively research it, her in her godfather’s modern glass home office in Massachusetts, and me in the public library close to my parents’ house, where I would spread out a bunch of books of Jaguars to deflect any suspicions. It turned out we had both read the same book, which inexplicably had, among other things, a woman’s floating high-heel shoe on the cover.

I thought of those quiet, absorbed hours. “Man,” I said, “I miss whiling away the day like that.”

“You’re telling me,” she said. “I’ve never been so in the moment.”

A tired woman pushing a stroller walked by. I passed an old-fashioned-looking water fountain, its base a cascade of concrete flowers.

“I bet she scream-whispers at him,” I said. “Elliot’s wife. Her name is Devon.”

“Devon. Huh.”

“I bet they’ll be at a cocktail party and she’ll get mad and scream-whisper right in his ear.”

“It’s certainly possible.”

“I bet she’s always violently applying hand lotion.”

“That book did not work,” said Grace. “Remember how we’d try to dream of flying or breathing underwater but then we’d end up just dreaming of being random adults?”

“Yeah. We talked about that. Having a superpower. Me and Elliot. Sort of. We talked about what it would be like to stop time. I was just in his office and we got into this conversation and it was really easy and we were just in it.”

“I would always dream about being in an airport lounge…” Grace trailed off.

I stared at another metal sculpture. It was a hump with spikes on it. Then I realized it was related to the dragon’s tail. The whole thing was supposed to be a large sea creature, its body coming out of the surface of the grass in different places.

I looked around. I started walking again.

“Wait, what were you saying?” I said. I wanted to find the head.

“Never mind.”

Grace was quiet for a few moments. The sound of cicadas swelled in the air.

“Can I ask you something,” she said, “aside from all of this?”

“Yeah.”

“What are you going to do?”

“What are you going to do?” I said. “What is anyone going to do?”

“I’m asking — where did you see yourself? At this age?”

“Remember that guidance counselor at Arizona?” I said. “With all the stacked-up pudding cups?”

She waited.

“Okay, the way I saw myself at this age? I’m wearing a black leather jacket. I’ve got a searing expression on my face and my long hair is flowing in the breeze. There’s obviously a lot on my mind. Maybe I’m holding a sacred key. Then the camera pulls back, turns out I’m standing in the middle of Stonehenge. It’s like, ‘Who’s that girl? What’s she thinking? What is her life?’”

“Okay, well, in case that exact scenario doesn’t play out.”

“I also saw myself wading through a beautiful lake with purple mountains in the distance.”

“You know what I mean .”

I sighed. “I don’t know. I have to get some job, I guess.”

I came up to a large marble statue surrounded by shrubs. I stared at the copper plaque without reading it. I wheeled around.

“I have to tell you something,” I said.

“What?”

“You’re not going to believe it.” I laughed a little too hard.

“What is it?”

“Aunt Viv? Who I’m staying with? She’s a virgin.”

Grace cleared her throat. The pause was complicated and I could feel her choosing her words. She knew, of course she knew, about my situation, and she also knew that whatever she said now would reflect on it.

“Well, that’s— How do you know?”

“She told me.”

“How? What did she say?”

“She just said it. We were in the kitchen.”

“So you guys are getting along?” She was stalling.

“Yeah,” I said. “More or less. I think.”

Grace was quiet.

“But I mean, how could this happen?” I said. “There must be something wrong with her.”

“Not necessarily.”

“But it’s so strange. Don’t you think it’s so strange?”

“No,” said Grace. “What’s strange? I mean, really, in this life? Remember that book? Remember the testimonials? That one lady said she dreamt about crawling through a giant baby’s hair. There was that guy with the mustache who said all he wanted to do was not worry and be carried along in a toucan’s pouch.”

“Yeah.” I’d come up to the sea creature’s head. It was sticking out of the ground, its neck a long metal trunk. It stared straight ahead with a kind of grimace. Someone had stuck gum in one of its eyes. I felt grateful for Grace. For a moment, I felt like everything was okay. “You’re right,” I said. “It’s a weird world.”

I stood outside the door of Viv’s studio with a heavy copper key in my hand. She’d just left for work, her car crunching the gravel as it ambled down the drive. The day before, while taking a phone message, I’d shaken out a ceramic jar to find a pen. A key fell out, and as soon as it bounced onto the counter I knew what it would unlock.

This was where she holed up often after work, taking a plate of leftovers in, and staying sometimes until late into the night.

I turned the key in the lock and it clicked. I pushed the door open. The first thing I noticed was the cluttered feel and the smell — sweet tea and wood. There was a purplish glow coming from a window that looked out over the side of the house.

Lots of books, framed sheet music on the walls, a flimsy computer desk on one side with knotted nylons underneath next to stacked dusty magazines.

In the middle of the room was a large wooden table. Spread out on top were paint-stained newspapers and mason jars with murky water and brushes inside. I walked around it, studying the plates she was working on. She was creating a meticulous lace-like gold trim around one of them. Another one showed layers of green, with a faint sketch on top, probably meant to be filled in, of a figure on a horse. I paged through a sketchbook where she was trying out ideas and stared at a drawing of a few polar bears swaying to the earth in parachutes.

I went over and sat in the chair across from her computer and laid my hands on the keyboard. A screensaver of a bouncing cube blinked on. I wanted to poke around online — I had a feeling she didn’t have the technological prowess to cover her Internet tracks. It was all ordinary, a few gardening websites, some moderate political blogs, her e-mail account. It looked like she was contemplating bidding on old maps at an online antiques auction. I was hoping she had all her passwords set, so that you didn’t have to log in, and my fingers were jittery with the possibility of reading her e-mail. But I couldn’t; it was closed.

There was a set of drawers next to a sofa and I rummaged through them. They were messy, no rhyme or reason — a few seashells, a cobblestone, fancy stationery on which she’d been practicing her signature, one loopy and casual, another formal and long. There was a tiny Rubik’s Cube on a key chain, some leftover antibiotics.

I got up and then sat down on the couch next to a wicker basket holding pincushions — how was it possible for people to acquire so much random stuff? I picked up a box of blank cards with birds on them that was lying there and started to feel a roving, prickly irritation.