Janet Berliner

This October I wanted to share a story that was published earlier this year in DOORWAYS, the wonderful magazine edited by our own Mort Castle. If you’re not a reader of it, you should be. There are many wonderful stories to be found in its pages. I hope you think this is one of them. –Janet

The sun rose over Bloody Pond, promising another hot and humid Tennessee day and heightening the odor of decay and death. Little moved in the stillness of that dreadful morning, little except the shoulders of the slim Union soldier who knelt at the edge of the pond, looking out across the bodies. Thinking how well the night breezes had masked the stench with the heavy smell of peach blossoms from the orchard that lay at the eastern end of what, two days before, had been dubbed the Hornet’s Nest.

Next to the soldier lay an open haversack which held a stack of papers inked with the smudged words of a lengthy war report. Working with deft hands, the soldier transformed the pages into miniature boats, the kind that children construct when they go to the park to feed the swans. They formed a flotilla, which one by one the soldier floated out into the water, watching each boat until it wedged between bodies on a sea of mud and caked blood.

When the last boat had been launched, the soldier dug into the knapsack and retrieved Peter Louis’ journal. A drizzle began, soft and gentle. Grateful for the slight relief from the heat, the soldier formed a makeshift umbrella over the pages and began to read.

On a march, Peter wrote, a battery can travel up to five miles an hour on a good road. He wrote of the fires they built in holes in the ground, of the Confederate belief that food traveled less heavily in the belly than the haversack so they ate their 3-day rations at once and went hungry for the rest of the way. He wrote in the rain and on mud-stained pages of hearing Yankee bugles, of rumors of coughing cured by the application of red-hot pokers, of diarrhea and of nightmares of dead men yelling retreat, retreat. The only pleasant occurrence, he wrote, was the day they came across Northerners eating a breakfast of hot meat, white bread, and sweet coffee. Stealing into their camp, he filled his belly with food and his haversack with letters and photos.

He wrote that General Johnston sanctioned the scavenging by acquiring for himself a Yankee tin cup. He would use it to direct battle, he said, index finger hooked through the handle.

According to the journal, Peter endured intermittent showers and steamy sunshine with a certain degree of stoicism. He strangely felt no real fear until he was shot at by fellow Confederates who saw the dress-blue uniforms of the Orleans Guard and, thinking them the enemy, fired upon them. At that, he and the others turned their dress-blues–”graveyard clothes” the Federals called them, when they found out what had happened–inside out and wore them with the white silk linings visible. This to prevent being killed by their own who naturally assumed that anyone wearing blue had to be a Union soldier.

On April 5, 1862, encamped within a short distance of the enemy army which was going about its normal business, Peter wrote in his journal, unconsciously echoing what Sherman had written to Grant that very day: “I don’t believe that anything much will happen today. Some picket firing maybe. Nothing more.”

I will walk toward the picket line, he wrote.  No attacks are made at night on the line. It is an unspoken rule. It is a time for the swapping of tobacco and coffee and tall tales, a time for the gathering of firewood and courage. I will be safe there.

The reading was slow going, for between the lines the soldier’s mind set passages which did not exist on the page.  Finally, eyes blurred by fatigue, the soldier reread the last words of that last entry.

I will be safe there.

Then the words on the page gave way to the pages of memory—

#

—The walls of her room at Mrs. Rice’s House of Ill Repute were like sugar cookies, stippled, cream-colored, wafer thin. Even though she had pulled her bed away from the wall, she could hear everything in the room next door. The conversation wasn’t a problem, but when the sounds of intimacy started, she covered her head with her pillow.

Most of the time.

Today was not one of those days. Today she heard familiar laughter and covered the sounds with quiet sobbing. When the springs ceased to squeak and the laughter stopped, she moved to the open window and watched the pathway until she saw him.

Peter.

She bit down upon her lip to stop herself from heaping curses upon his head.

As if he had heard her, he turned and stared upward. She moved quickly aside. When she returned to her post, he was nowhere to be seen. She looked sideways at the small form lying so still, so very still, in its cot in the corner of the room.

Behind her, Mrs. Rice tapped lightly on the doorframe. “He ain’t never made a sound, has he?”

Lucy jumped, turned around, swiped at her tears with her sleeve. “No, Ma’am, Mrs. Rice. Not a single cry since…. What year is this, Mrs. Rice?” she asked.

“Far as I know, it’s the Year of Our Lord, Eighteen Hundred and Sixty-two. Least it was this morning. Why you asking, Girl?”

“Just countin’ how long I been in Memphis. Wonderin’ if I’ll ever get used to it, is all.”

“There’s a man downstairs on his way to New Orleans  says he saw you in the garden yesterday, and again just now right here.” Mrs. Rice joined Lucy at the window. “Says you remind him of someone. Says he’ll be back here in a week and wants you. No one else.”

Lucy stared out of the open window, across the rooftops of the city that had given her refuge. A breeze drifted into her small room. It brought with it a heavy scent of magnolias, so different from the soft fragrance of that other spring–the trees heralding Peter’s arrival with a celebration of flowers, as if the Lord had planned for him to be there during peach blossom season and fall in love with her.

By virtue of her roots, Lucy was born the light-skinned daughter of a slave family on a farm in Southern Tennessee, in the rich lands southwest of Pittsburg Landing. By virtue of her nature, she was born free as the flies that pecked at the sweet syrup of the peaches that grew in the orchards of her childhood.

Her master was a good enough man who did not ask much of her and let her go when he could have stopped her from leaving. He liked having her around. Every now and again he had her lift her skirts for him and show him her ankles, but he was a God-loving man and didn’t touch where another master might have touched. Truth to tell, she wouldn’t have minded a night here, an afternoon there, pleasuring him, but her Mama put the fear of The Lord into her. Her Daddy, he didn’t speak much, but her Mama, she was a different matter.

“Don’t you go making no white babies, Lucinda,” she said.

“I’m not making babies, Mama,” Lucy said. “Not ever.”

Which was true then and might have stayed true, were it not that during that spring of her fifteenth year, she fell in love with her master’s second cousin, come to spend Easter of 1859 in the countryside.

What a time they’d had, rolling around in the fragrant reds of fallen blossoms in the ten-acre peach orchard, in full bloom at the west end of the pond. How they’d laughed, scratching their initials into the trunk of the tree beneath which they had consummated their passion.

Making a baby, just as her Mama had feared.

She said nothing about this to Peter, not even when the blossoms fell, the fruit ripened, and he returned to his home in Cairo, Illinois. By the time she figured out how to follow him there, throwing herself successfully upon the mercy of her unusual master, her slim and boyish frame was distorted and heavy with child.

How angry Peter had been when she presented herself to him, Lucy thought. How ashamed before his fashionable Cairo family.

“It’s your child, too,” she’d said. “You got to care for it, Peter.”

Too late, she learned that though the disposition of her lover’s birth in Cairo, Illinois, made him a Yankee, he was, by disposition of his heart, a Confederate.

“Listen to you, talking like you’re white folk,” he said. “Me care for a nigger child? You’re crazy.”

Believing he would get over his shock, she let him take her to the local hotel. There, he made love to her once or twice, then beat her roundly until she was sure the baby loosened.

“You’re murdering your own child,” she sobbed.

“I hope so,” Peter muttered. Looking relieved, he told her he was leaving home to board the Mississippi steamboat captained by his old acquaintance, twenty five-year old Samuel Clemens, and dispatched her back to the South.

Only she didn’t go back to the farm. She headed straight down the Mississippi river on a cotton barge to the only place where she’d been told she’d be given shelter. This place, here, in Memphis, where she and her unborn child and her newly born hatred could find protection.

“What about the young man?” Mrs. Rice said. “I’ve not asked this of you before, but times is rough and he’s willing to pay a lot of money.”

“I’ll do it,” Lucy said, because she owed this to Mrs. Rice. To herself. To–she glanced again into the corner. “In one of the other rooms.”

The days and nights passed, as they were wont to do, and the time came for Lucy to keep her promise to Mrs. Rice.

“There is only one Lucy,” Peter said, as if they had last seen each other in the orchard and not in Cairo. “Only one Lucy and as desirable as ever.” He loosened the top button of his uniform jacket, reached out to touch her long hair, and let his gaze linger upon her breasts, still swollen with mother’s milk. She thought about killing him there and then. He deserved no less.

“Let us talk, Lucy,” he said. “Let us laugh and make love, as we did before.”

Swallowing the bile that rose at the thought of coupling with him again, she offered him a glass of wine. He took it, and several more. Becoming loquacious, he talked of his broken dream of joining Samuel Clemens on the river. “By the time he had made up my mind it was too late,” he said. “Clemens had been elected 2^nd Lieutenant in an irregular unit of 15 men whose self-proclaimed duty it was to keep an eye on Grant’s forces.”

Clemens being something of a hero to him, Peter had deliberated joining the same unit. Again, he thought too long. Quickly bored by saddle sores, Clemens said the hell with it. Riding an old mule because he’d injured his foot jumping out of a hayloft, he hightailed it back to silver country to take up a career as a journalist.

Peter lay back on the pillows and motioned for Lucy to join him. “Does that not sound to you to be the perfect life,” he said. “How much better to be a reporter than a soldier.”

He’d tried to get a job with the local paper, he told her. When that didn’t immediately pan out, he took a civilian job in the local telegraph office, where he figured he could read and learn from the important papers that passed regularly through his hands.

Though Grant was, to his regret, a Yankee, he was worthy, Peter thought, of admiration and imitation. This led to an affect which he’d adopted, that of chewing incessantly on an unlit cigar.  It also led to a deep interest in the Yankee reports that passed through his hands, many of which came from the pens of Generals Sherman and Grant.

When the papers particularly fascinated him, he took them home to study at his leisure, so that when the war was done–”I figure that to be only a matter of a few months”–he could make a name for himself by writing about them. He became familiar with the reports, returns, and information that Grant sent to Washington, telling of the strength and position of his command, as demanded by Secretary of War Stanton, otherwise known as “Old Man Mars.”

Since Peter kept the reports, they never reached their destination. Furious, Secretary Stanton complained to General Halleck, who at once suspended Grant from command and ordered him to Ft. Henry.

Learning of this, Peter felt pleased with his contribution to the war effort. After all, he had caused it to happen by secreting away the documents.

“I thought about ceremoniously burning the valuable papers I had kept,” he said, “but I could not let go of so significant a trophy.” Unless they actually saw the orders, Washington Headquarters would never know whether the General had dispatched the messages or failed to do so while in some alcoholic haze. “It will forever remain a mystery to which only I, Peter Louis, and you Lucy, hold the answer.”

“And if I tell them what you have done?” Lucy asked, almost casually.

“You wouldn’t do that.  You love me,” he said, and went on talking.

Peter’s pleasure at having changed the course of the war was short-lived. Grant’s replacement had received a leg injury; Grant was returned to duty to await first Buell’s army, then the arrival of Halleck who would take command.

By the end of February of the year 1962, Peter was ready to make a new contribution to the war effort. While he did not want to join the regular army and risk being wounded or killed, he had become enchanted by the romance of war and wanted to learn more first hand.

“I went down the Mississippi, involved myself in what some refer to as the illicit cotton trade, then decided to proceed to New Orleans and become a recorder. In truth, I had no special need to experience The Elephant, combat, first hand, but when I set eyes on this uniform I could not stop myself.” He paraded before the tall mirror that stood atop the dresser. “Do you not think I look handsome decked out in the dress-blues of the Orleans Guards Battalion, Sweet Lucy?”

“Where are you headed now?” Lucy asked.

“Dead in the direction of the peach orchards,” he said. “Wouldn’t you know they’d send me to Shiloh.”

Lucy never said another word, not then, not while he had his way with her, not afterward. Fate, synchronicity, coincidence–whatever it was that had brought Peter here–turned her into a puppet obedient to visions and voices that filled her mind. What exactly they meant her to do she did not yet know. But she would, she told herself. Soon enough, she would.

As Peter left, he put a generous wad of money on the dresser. “We’ll see each other again when it’s over,” he said.

Oh yes, we’ll see each other again. The thought came unbidden to Lucy. And then it will be over.

She returned to her room and stood, as she so often did, before the open window. “I have to go away for a while,” she whispered, her voice softer than the Memphis breeze. “But I’ll come back.” She drifted toward the cot in the corner. Bending over, she blew softly on her son’s face and wiped the trickle of sweat from his brow. “I promise I’ll come back.”

“Come back from where?” Mrs. Rice asked, moving from the frame of the doorway toward the battered rocking chair near the child’s cot. She sat down heavily. “You’re not going back to that place are you?”

Lucy nodded. “I got to.”

“You’ll never make it through. Look at yourself in the mirror. At best you look like a defenseless young woman, at worst you look like what you are.”

“A runaway?”

“Target practice or worse for the first trigger happy Confederate soldier who crosses your path.”

Reaching into the top drawer of her dresser, Lucy removed a pair of scissors and cropped her hair close to her head. Then she tore her petticoat into strips and bound up her breasts. A couple of Henna rinses and the transformation would be complete, she thought.

“I been through worse dangers. I been waiting for this time, Mrs. Rice.” Lucy glanced back down at the crib, at the child who had never uttered a sound, never opened his eyes, never talked or walked or shed a nightmare tear. Were it not for his bodily functions, he might as well not be alive. “Take care of him for me while I’m gone,” she said. “Take care of my little boy.”—

#

— The rain stopped. The moon rose, lighting peach orchards in full blossom reminiscent of the spring of Lucy’s youth. On the march to the farm, it had seemed to her that she would never be dry again, that her feet in their over-sized Union army issue boots would never lose their blisters or her stomach its need to unburden itself of its contents. Her thoughts were mostly of her parents, to whom she had many times written in care of the master.  After a long silence, he had written back, telling her with what seemed like genuine sorrow that her mother had died.  He had buried her in the family cemetery.  After the funeral, he wrote, her father had simply disappeared.

She would see them both again, she thought, as Peter moved toward picket line.  If God forgave her for what she had to do.

“Are you not afraid, Soldier?” she asked, keeping her voice muffled.

“Yes,” Peter said, surprising her. “Grant is a clever man. He must be prepared for all eventualities.”

“One can never be prepared for all eventualities,” she said, her face half turned away and masked by the brim of a cap pulled low.

“I would like to forget about the war for this night,” Peter said.

“I have thought of nothing else since we buried fifteen of our dead at Fallen Timbers. Would you walk with me in the orchard, Soldier?” Lucy said. “Surely if we decorate ourselves with blossoms we will be protected from harm.”

She slouched, head averted and walking awkwardly in a uniform that was much too big. They continued for a while in silence. Then, stopping several feet before a tree that stood directly in the moonlight, she pointed at the trunk.

Using her normal voice this time, she said, “Look. It’s still there.”

“Lucy?”

“Took you long enough,” she said. “I thought perhaps you had forgotten me again.” She removed her hat and turned to face him.

“How could I place you in this context? How could you be a soldier?”

“Why not? After what you did to me, it was easy. Besides, do you think I told them that I was a woman? A nigger woman?” she said, though her voice held more sorrow than hatred.

“I buried it here. Our love. Here among the blossoms. It has been waiting a long time for your return to this place where it was born, only to be silenced by your own hand.”

“What are you talking about?”

She laughed, a hollow, humorless sound. “Our love has no voice. You stole it. Now it’s time for you to give it back.”

At 8 a.m. April 6^th–the following morning–Sherman heard picket firing in his front.

Lucy heard it, too.

And Johnston, who hoped to drive the disorganized Federals into the swamps of Snake and Owl Creeks and destroy them.

To the Country Boys of Shiloh, the shots were an overture. They were young and inexperienced volunteers, but what they lacked in experience they made up for in valor. Advancing upon the enemy, they broke silence and sang as they marched to the band playing Dixie.

The shelling began, every fifteen minutes, red streaks arcing against the sky. By the end of the day, the Federals had been driven back to Pittsburg Landing, but that night, while the Rebels looted from captured Yankee camps and did little to reorganize their scattered units, Grant reinforced his lines with the fresh troops of General Buell and Lew Wallace and at dawn on the 7^th launched a counter attack which, by early afternoon, had the Confederates in full retreat.—

#

—Present reality pushed away the press of memory.  The sun, now at its height, fulfilled its brutal promise, burning into the back of Lucy’s neck and charring the flesh of the bodies floating face down on Bloody Pond. Lucy did not have to look down into the pond for Peter. There was no need. The bayonet was planted too deep. He could not have moved from the tree where she had left him.

Next to Lucy lay Peter’s haversack, empty now of all but his journal. She retrieved it once more from the knapsack and held it in her hand like a prayer book.  I must pray for their souls, she thought, but unable to find words, she stared out at that world of bombs and blossoms and blood and just listened to the dead and the dying.

Then, in her mind, or maybe her heart, she heard a different sound–the piercing cry of life floating to her from a whorehouse in Memphis.

Able at last to cry for herself, she wept out loud and began to pray.

-30-

SNAPSHOTS: 20th Century Mother Daughter Fiction is an anthology I edited with the extraordinary Joyce Carol Oates. It was a joyous experience and, for those who might be interested, it remains in print. Here’s the story I wrote for the book:

“Everything Old is New Again

by Janet Berliner

“Thank you for coming.

“Yes, brunch was a good idea, wasn’t it? Thank you for coming.

“We’ll get together soon.”

“Thank you for—”

—Leaving. Thank you for leaving. Don’t call me, I’ll call you. Jenny shut the door, leaned against it, and stared at the label on the last of her birthday gifts, the one still wrapped, the one she’d steadfastly pushed to the end of the line, like the pumpkin people inevitably insisted upon piling onto her Thanksgiving dinner plate.

The parcel was from her mother. At eighty, her handwriting remained clean and firm. Old Doll it said next to Contents. Value: Zero.

Like me, Jenny thought. Value: Zero. Contents: Old.

“Everything Old is New Again,” Peter Allen sang at her from her stereo set. She removed one fashionable black high-heeled shoe and hurled it at the CD player, uncaring of the damage she might do, though of course she’d care later. She always cared later.

“Everything old is old and getting older, you sonofabitch,” she said. Old or dead. Like Peter Allen who was dead, who had written the song as a tribute to Judy Garland, who was dead, too. Her face lived on in reruns, her voice in recordings. But she was dead just the same.

“Everything old is new again.”

Jenny didn’t sing along or think kindly of her friend Harlan whom she generally loved and who, seemingly a hundred years ago, had introduced her to the song. Instead, she drank the rest of her birthday champagne straight from the bottle, using it to swallow her last available dose of St. John’s Wort, which was supposed to cure her depression but so far hadn’t done a thing for her except make her itch. Then she curled up on the sofa with the leather bound special edition of Anna Karenina several of her friends had clubbed together to buy her because they knew it was her favorite book and because she was a writer. Or used to be.

One shoe off and one shoe on, she fell asleep. The phone woke her. She thought about letting it ring, but the residual hope that it might be her daughter changed her mind. It was the same hope that had sent her to the mailbox all week to retrieve cards from old friends with old lives, an ad for plastic surgery, a coupon for pizza, obligatory greetings from her doctor and her dentist.

Her hand hovered over the receiver. Maybe this year, this special year marked by her half century, her daughter would remember. Maybe, like a chrysalis, she had emerged from her Yuppie cocoon and become a caring, mature adult. Right. And maybe Jenny would fly to Vegas and win the Megabucks, or her publisher would offer her a million dollars to move to New York and become the darling of the Literati, scribbling away at the story of her miserable little life.

Which, she reminded herself, hadn’t really been all that miserable. At least not all of the time.

She could probably even persuade herself that her present life was acceptable if they could only all forgive each other — her daughter for Jenny’s treachery in insisting upon being a person, and she for her mother’s — what? She’d hated her mother forever, and she couldn’t remember why.

“Happy birthday, Mrs. Tobias. And how are you today?”

Disappointed, angered by a series of political calls, sales calls, “We’re doing a quick survey” calls, Jenny Tobias felt less than generous toward this one. “If you’re trying to sell me something, save your breath,” she said.

“This is something you need, something everyone needs, but most especially you now that you’ve entered your golden years.”

“My golden years? You must have the wrong Jennifer Tobias.”

“You’re fifty, Mrs. Tobias.”

This was a new wrinkle, maybe not one that showed on her face, but a new wrinkle nonetheless.

“Here in California we care about our senior citizens. We can provide you with a plot…”

“There’s something my editor would appreciate,” Jenny said. She disconnected the voice and laughed at the state of her universe. She hadn’t been able to write in a year and she’d finally been offered a plot. Only it was the wrong kind of plot. It was true what they said. Be careful about what you wish for and never fail to be specific.

On the other hand, maybe she had become a dinosaur. Maybe it was time to think about taking the big dirt nap?

She was a storyteller, born of the Diaspora into a long line of bards, but if she didn’t find a plot soon — the writing kind — she might as well be dead.

She wasn’t sure of much, but she did know that she did not love the new disposable society in which she lived; she did not love arthritis, or the fact that she was growing old. What she did love was Ibsen and Tolstoy, the look and feel of new yellow pads, the smell of newly sharpened pencils. Nor did she want much, just someone to give her back the wasted hours, for in regretting them, she had gained nothing and wasted more of the precious moments of her life.

She’d already lived for half a century and so what? She hadn’t written the Great American Novel, she was neither rich nor famous. Jimmy Buffett had cashed in with Pirate Looks At Fifty; Jong had turned facing fifty into a raging success.

All she was doing was getting older. She needed rejuvenation, a young lover, adventure, perhaps a return trip to Jerusalem and another camel ride.

She’d pack a single suitcase and leave all material things behind. After a lattè, a couple of cookies, and a quick trip to the drugstore for more Wort. After she’d called her daughter to say she’d forgiven her.

After she’d opened the parcel from her mother.

Which she might as well do now. Now was good. Now was fine. There’d never be another now, at least not exactly like this one.

She sat down and, balancing the gift on her lap, tore at the brown paper wrapping and lifted the lid of an old shoebox.

Happy birthday, Puppele, the note inside read.

Jenny flinched. She’d always hated being called Puppele, little doll, though why it distressed her so she had no idea.

I found this in an old suitcase and crocheted a new outfit for her, the note went on. I would have sent it to a doll’s hospital for repair, but there aren’t any around anymore. Perhaps if I’d had it repaired for you years ago, right after I retrieved it, things might have been different between us. Truth is, I put it away and life intruded and I forgot that I had it. Now you are decades older than I was when it all happened.…

The doll lay wrapped in a small, pink, satin-bound woolen blanket. Jenny removed it gently from its cardboard coffin. She opened the blanket and, operating through her fingertips like a blind person, caressed the porcelain. The doll’s hands and feet were chipped. Cold. Frostbitten. A few tiny sprouts of hair grew around the fringes of a jagged hole which exposed an empty, hollow head.

The face was a Dorian Gray wreckage. Shattered. A baby’s face, ravaged by layers of fine spider-web cracks

Crying, Jenny cradled the doll. Then she pillowed its head upon Anna Karenina. Seeing the juxtaposition, she picked up the brown paper wrapping and began to write…

Cape Town station. Winter cold and draughty on a June day in 1943. A child, her curly head lowered, her green eyes closed, sits on a bench marked “Whites Only.” She is hugging a porcelain doll with short, curly brown hair. The doll is her best friend.

“Won’t be long, Puppele,” her mother calls out.

The child looks up. I am the child. “My name’s Jenny,” I whisper. I stare at the words on the bench, distracting myself by sounding them out. I’m a precocious child. At almost four, I can sound out the words, but I don’t begin to comprehend their meaning any more than I understand what is happening on this strange day. My mother has abandoned the uniform of the South African reserves that she wears each day to her bookkeeping post at the Castle. She looks so pretty as she paces the platform, stopping every now and then to call me “Puppele” and hug me. Too hard. Too desperately. “He’s been in North Africa fighting the Nazis,” she says to me in German. “He’s been up there making it with some shiksa,” she will say later, when my eyes are closed and she thinks I’m asleep.

We are waiting for a stranger called Daddy. Waiting to take him home to a table laden with homemade kuchen. I am waiting to find out who he is. I’ve never seen him before but he must be important because Oma, Grandma, crocheted a new dress for me to wear, a pale blue dress with a string threaded through the waist. I roll the end of it around and around my finger until the tip is cold and white and has no feeling — like the rest of me.

I am supposed to be feeling something, aren’t I?

Something.

“Can you hear it? It’s coming. The train. Come over here. No, stay there.”

Mutti is shouting, primping, crying, laughing.

The train pulls into the station. Leaning out of the window waving a doll as big as I — with long blonde hair and an organdy dress and bonnet — is a big man. Smiling, he climbs off the train.

I struggle to find the concrete that’s there somewhere below my white button-down shoes. The man is with me before I reach the ground.

“You must be Jenny.”

He crouches down, takes away my old doll, the one I love, and places the big new doll in my arms.

I start to cry. The new doll is a stranger, like he is. I want my old dolly back but I don’t know how to tell him. The new doll is shiny and cold as my mother’s face. The man speaks and she listens.

“How are you, Greta? Well, I hope.”

He has not kissed me or my mother. He has not hugged us, touched us.

“No, I’m not coming home,” he says. “Not now. Maybe not ever. I have an — arrangement. A nurse. We met in North Africa.”

Jenny wanted to stop remembering. She got up, showered, made coffee to which she added a dash of brandy, but there was no escaping the story; it was like a physical presence, demanding her attention. Giving in to its urgency, she lit a candle against the waning day and sat down to watch the rest of it play out in her memory. United with the child she had long since buried, Jenny reexperienced her own pain. The pain that had caused her to hate her mother. The ache that had told her that her mother would have liked to throw her away so the stranger would stay and love her.…

“So it’s out with the old and in with the new,” her mother screamed. “You think you can do that? Abandon me? Or is it the responsibility of having a child. Do you want me to throw her away like an old doll? Like this?”

In a fury, she ripped Jenny’s best friend from the man’s arms and tossed it away. It flew through the air toward the train, which was slowly moving out of the station, smashed against it, disappeared.

If only she’d known that her mother had gone back to the station and retrieved the doll, Jenny thought. If only she’d been given the chance then to forgive her, to love her.

Crying softly over the lost years, Jenny picked up the doll. Cradling it in one arm, she picked up the phone and dialed her mother’s number. “I love you, Mutti,” she said.

“I love you, too, Puppele,” her mother responded.

“I know you do,” Jenny said. “I’ll call you soon. I promise.”

She replaced the receiver in its cradle and started to walk away. Darkness had settled on the world outside and the candle she’d lit was fluttering and almost burned out, but there was enough light to dial her daughter’s phone number.

“Forgive me,” she said, when her daughter picked up the phone.

“For what?” Her daughter’s voice was tense with negative expectations.

“For whatever it is you think I’ve done,” Jenny said lightly. “I do love you, you know.”

“I love you, too.” The voice was tentative, but it was a start. “Happy birthday, Mom. I have news for you. I’m going to have a baby. A boy.”

“Congratulations,” Jenny said. Ask his forgiveness early, she thought. But she didn’t say a word except goodbye. Then she flooded the room with light, reset the CD player, and sang along with Peter Allen, because even if he was dead, she wasn’t.

As a matter of fact, she was very much alive and everything old was new again. Maybe she wouldn’t ride any more camels, but she wasn’t ready for that big dirt nap yet, not while there was living and writing left undone.

Hell, if she played it right, she might even have time to inadvertently do more things for which she could ask forgiveness.

—
Early happy Mother’s Day to all, and my warmest wishes to Frank and his family. -Janet

A combination of physical difficulties and crazed deadlines have forced me to decide to forego writing a regular blog post, so instead, here’s a fun story I wrote to rid myself of a recurring dream.–Janet Berliner 

     She is fifteen when the dreams invade her nights.

     By the time she is not-quite forty, the dreams are like lovers she hates, but cannot live without–frightening her as much by their absence as by their presence.  She finds a new therapist, buys a new notebook, records again the details of the dreams . . . 

     . . . she is moving slowly down the corridor of her grandmother’s pre-war Riverside apartment.  She knows that she is dreaming.  At first, everything around her is black and white, then the edges soften, running into each other like wet paint.  She waits for the greyness to come, to release her body from gravity’s constraints.  She can almost touch the sensations free flight will bring–sensual, warm, safe–like love without risk. 

     She is floating now.  She cannot see the end of the passageway, yet she knows with certainty that she will soon be outside.

     Outside.  Color and sunshine.  She hovers at the crest of a tier of rolling lawns, trying to delay her journey to the bottom, anticipating the flight with pleasure, its end with dread.

     But she is not the master of her body.  Setting aside all thought of what is to come, she concentrates on the scent of freesias drifting from the field below, on the poppies and forget-me-nots blooming wild as far as the horizon.  Forgetting, she allows herself to be happy–

     She is in a room, a conference room, standing before what appears to be a tribunal.  At the head of the table sits a woman dressed in black and white.  There is nothing muted about this scene, or about the woman, yet the dreamer cannot see her features, hidden in shadow beneath a wide-brimmed black straw hat.

     The dreamer is frightened.  The people in the room are all talking at once, talking at her.  Why is she on trial, being judged? She feels herself growing smaller and smaller–

     Lilliputian, she returns to the sunlight.  The door of the tribunal is shut behind her and she feels safe again, surrounded by color.  Though she does not really recognize anything, she knows she is in a small beach community she visited once as a child.  The knowledge comes from the smell of the salt in the air, the texture of the sea breeze, the crunch of sand beneath her feet.

     She looks down and sees that she is wearing a flowing white dress, embellished with lace and seed pearls.  She is carrying a basket on her arm, a picnic basket filled with flowers.  She is sixteen or seventeen, perhaps a little older.

     A young couple strolls along the other side of the street.  Their movements parallel hers.  They know her and she knows them, but they do not acknowledge her as they walk toward the ocean.

     When she reaches the beach, she stops.  A low, concrete divider, no more than four fingers wide, separates the street from the beach. 

     Without looking at her, the two young people step over the retaining wall and head into the water.  She watches them go, sad but unwilling to make a move to join them.  She is frightened again.  Something tells her a tidal wave is coming, and she feels eyes burning into the back of her neck.

     Dreaming still, she recalls another dream–a nightmare–remembering it in such infinite detail that she thinks she might be having a dream within a dream–

     She is swimming in the oily water of a busy harbor.  She has no idea how she got there.  All she knows is that she feels like the ancient mariner, condemned to the water forever.  She is surrounded by immense ships–tankers and cruise ships.  They are black and white.  She knows she will not drown, yet she has the sense that if she breathes in too deeply she will not be able to exhale again.  Ever–

     Back on the beach in the sunlight, she turns at last to identify the eyes staring at her.

     Behind her, she can see a semi-circle of concrete.  In its center, under a striped umbrella, a woman bends over a telescope.  Her hat identifies her as the woman from the tribunal.

     “You’re invading my privacy,” the dreamer says.

     When the woman does not respond, the dreamer moves closer.

     “How dare you!”  She is shouting.  “You’re intruding on my life.  You have no right!”

     The woman looks up and smiles.  She moves into the sunlight, but even then her features are blurred.  She beckons with a gloved hand.

     The dreamer moves to her side and turns to look at the ocean.

     The tidal wave has begun.  It moves in slow-motion.  Though the dreamer is terrified, she keeps thinking how beautiful it is.  The woman has stepped back but the dreamer stays on, watching the wave rise, curl, flatten, rise, curl, flatten.  It moves across the beach in a perfect sine curve, avoiding the couple, sweeping the dreamer into the water.

     For a moment, she enjoys being at the mercy of the ocean.  She tries to relax and move with the wave.  Then the current tugs at her legs and she knows that if she wants to survive she is going to have to fight her way to shore.  She can hear people shouting for help.  She sees a man and a boy, a father and son.  The boy’s head is bobbing in and out of the water, just beyond the man’s reach.  She struggles to find bottom with her toes, to test the depth of the water, but the sand moves too fast beneath her feet.  Her energy is flagging.  If she tries to help the man, the boy, she will drown.

     She makes it to the beach.  Lying on an incline in the safe part of the sine curve, she tries not to listen to the cries for help.  She covers her ears with her hands.  Hearing them still, she begins to scream . . .

     Her screams wake her from the nightmare.  Her pillow is wet with her own tears.  No one is there to hear her scream–to comfort her.  She lies alone in the dark, replaying the dream.  She can remember each detail, but she cannot identify the woman. 

     She takes out her notebook and records the details of the dreams for her new therapist, the one her mother chose.  Her mother calls to remind her about the appointment.

     “This one is well-trained,” she says.  “And he’s single.” 

     The therapist is well-trained.  And clever.  And proud of his cleverness.  It takes him no time at all to identify the dream-figures.

     The woman pays him.  Thanks him.  Leaves. 

     The dreams do not return.

     At dawn on her fortieth birthday, the ex-dreamer stands on a cliff in Half Moon Bay.  She can see two bodies on the beach below and a striped umbrella.  As she raises her arms and begs the greyness to come, she wonders if, this time, someone will hear her scream.