Chloe Noland
Rainy Day
In my dream we were sitting on the fold-out couch in the living room, you in your bright pink bra and candy cane boxers, sipping a mug of tea. Me in my sweater-vest and tie because I had just come back from a conference, or I was on my way to a conference, I'm not sure which. I have a feeling we had just made love because your cheeks were flushed and your hair, dyed purple this month, was finger-combed back from your face. We were lying together on the fold-out couch side by side, one of your legs draped over mine, and you were sipping slowly from your mug, like it was a glass of wine. I felt half of my mind waiting for you to say something, ask something, because you always ask me the most random questions after we've had sex. You turned your head, squinted your eyes which made your nose squint as well, gazing out the dirty windowpane.
"It's raining," you say. It was; looking closer I could make out fat droplets sticking to the glass, dribbling down like runny syrup. You stare at it a moment, taking in the ugly September sidewalks far below, then turn to look at me. "What were you like when you were a kid?"
My mind relaxes, having found the question, but now there is the trouble of answering it. Those kinds of questions require long explanations.
"I don't know," I muse, taking your free hand, running my fingers along the palm, the pulse point. You have beautiful hands; I am always surprised by them. "Kind of quiet, I guess."
"Did you like the rain?" You ask. A memory flashes through my mind, early December mornings spent on the front porch of my house, five years old and trying to catch rain drops on my tongue.
"Yes," I reply. "Did you?"
"Yes," you say, and take another sip from your mug. The rain pounds harder outside and I shiver, push myself deeper inside the warmth of the fold-out couch, the warmth of your body heat and skin. You have always been next to me, and I can't remember any other time. And then I wake up. I wake up on that same fold-out couch, but it is grayer, dark with the early morning light, and it has been five months since that moment happened. I haven't talked to you in two weeks; not since you picked up the last of your stuff. I feel my body start to shiver uncontrollably. Then the moment passes and I am the same again; the pillowcase against my face smells like sweat and cold mornings, and my stomach starts to hurt. I suppose I fell asleep again, but I really can't remember anymore.
In my dream I am sitting in the bathroom stall at work, listening to a faucet drip a few feet away, and the purr of the air conditioner through the vent in the corner. I am staring at the tan colored walls of the stall, reflecting how even if I tried really hard I couldn't cry over you. It's just not an emotion I'm very good at; you used to joke that I was subhuman because of it. I have been living alone for three months now, and there are ghosts staying in the bedroom. I don't know how they got there, because they weren't there before you left; however, I walked in one night after a long day at work, exhausted, and found a man sitting on the end of the bed, crying softly to himself. I could see that he was a ghost by the way his skin and clothes were gray, and his eyes reflected no light. Since then I have seen him often, in addition to running into an old woman in the bathroom at one in the morning. They don't speak to me, they just stare back, blinking; the man leaks tears from his eyes, his mouth twisted in agony, but he makes no sound. I named him Simon after my great uncle who went crazy and had to be taken away to a nuthouse in the eighties. They both have a similar way of pursing their lips together. I started sleeping in the living room on the fold-out couch, too disconcerted to go back into the bedroom at night. However, the couch reminds me of you. I close my eyes, fumble on the floor until I feel the cold touch of the remote in my hands, and turn the TV off; I lay there in the dark for perhaps three minutes before my brain swells with images, and I have to turn on the TV again, watch infomercials until dawn. That is why I sleep during the day, usually in the stall of the third-floor bathroom. There is a subtle comfort in sitting there, my legs turning to blocks of lead hanging over the sides of the toilet bowl, my fingers interlacing on my lap in a tight embrace.
In my dream you are three years old, and your fat cheeks are dirty with tears because you fell off the monkey bars at the park. I know exactly what you look like; your mouth is a shivering droop of a line, your hair is uncombed and raggedy, hanging in your face, and your eyes are huge and frightened. Your eyes are the only thing that carried with you to older age, the large brown irises extending out according to your mood. I know exactly what you looked like that day because when you told the story it was so accurate the picture came easily to my mind; however, when you told it you laughed about it, able to see the humor of the day in retrospect. I didn't laugh, though. I imagined what you must have felt like and saw the little girl in my head, who was not laughing. Now when I dream about it I only feel sadness. I dream about it often, and when I do you sometimes appear next to the estranged little girl as yourself, grown up now, and look down at her in disgust. You look back at me and ask why I feel so bad. I reply that it breaks my heart; I try hard to explain what the sensation is like, but am not very good at it. You wrinkle your nose at me in that way when you are annoyed at something. I can't remember what I said next; mumbled some sort of unintelligible comment about missing you or something. You nod as if you've known all along. I don't understand why the grown-up version of you has trouble looking me in the eye, but the little-girl version doesn't. Her eyelashes were wet as she stared at me uncomprehendingly, an image that still haunted me days later.
In my dream the bookstore walls are green-colored, tinged with some kind of cheap paint; I can't for the life of me figure out if this is what they really looked like, or if it is just my subconscious adding mystery to the scene. All I remember accurately is that you used to come here practically every Sunday morning; early in the dawn light you would get out of bed, leaving me behind in a blanket-covered ball. It was a tradition for you to wear your favorite boots with the soft wool lining on the inside, and shuffle from the apartment to the coffee shop down the street. Then you would continue on to the bookstore. I would wake up thirty minutes later, give or take, disturbed by the emptiness on your side of the mattress. Sometimes I would make breakfast in my pajamas and wait for you to come back, sitting at the kitchen counter reading the newspaper or one of your magazines left lying around; other times I would trudge down to the bookstore. Usually I would find you in a similar realm of isolation to the week before; holed up in a corner scanning the pages of a tattered paperback, sucking furiously on a green straw that you had jammed into your coffee cup top, although they aren't designed to fit into the sipping hole. Some sort of Italian aria is playing softly from the depths of the bookcases. It never bothered you whether people stared or not; you were a bit of an object of fascination: not having bothered to thoroughly comb your hair, it was usually tousled and uneven, your long nails painted some brighter-than-bright color, your outrageous boots scraping loudly on the floor because you rarely bothered to pick up your feet when you walked. However, in my dream the store is almost completely empty, so there is no one to stare, and you are practically blending into the greenish wall. I remember being afraid that it might swallow you. I clear my throat and you look up from your book, but unfortunately that is when I wake up, so I never get to hear what you were going to say.
In my dream it is that freezing morning that I have come to know so well now; when the apartment is cold and unhappy, almost frightening. That was the morning at the end of the month that had been the worst of my life. That was the month when you would stay longer and longer at your job; sometimes you wouldn't even come home until 1 a.m. That was the month when you met the guy who worked at the front desk of your favorite video-rental place. You had brought Pulp Fiction up to the counter, and you both got into a conversation over your shared love of John Travolta. That morning was a Tuesday; it had just snowed last night, and a white sun was peeking out, melting the ice into trails of dirty water. Inside our apartment, though, it was still freezing. We were both sitting at the kitchen table, the rounded plastic one we bought cheap at Ikea together. Your eyes were puffy and golden-colored as you sipped your coffee from your favorite mug, pulled at the hem of your bathrobe. You took a last bite of egg, carried your plate to the sink, and slid it slowly into the murky water. My dream subsided slightly when you turned around and said to me, "I've met someone else." My body was not as present sitting there in the chair at the kitchen table anymore, but I could still feel the coldness of the morning just as easily. Which I thought was a good sign, at first.
Except this makes it harder to realize that I'm not dreaming once I actually wake up, which is not often anymore. It still happens occasionally, though. When I dream of cold mornings and then wake up in cold mornings, it is hard to tell the difference. Sometimes I see Simon staring at me in the bedroom doorway, his face dirty and tear-streaked. Then he floats by and disappears into the bedroom again, his favorite sanctuary. I have been living alone for five months now; everyday when I climb the stairs to the apartment, I can see the landlady peeking at me from around her door, her eyes large and pitying. She reminds me of old grandmothers who watch you when they think you can't see them, casually slip into every conversation, "whatever happened to that lovely girl with the violet hair? We used to discuss politics together when we met in the hall."
I don't miss the way you used to drink orange juice from the carton, I have decided. I don't miss how you would spill beads from your bracelet-making kit all over the living room carpet, and we would spend hours fumbling, trying to gather them all; then I would find another one two weeks later underneath the TV set. I do miss, however, the way I used to not spend so much time sleeping. It seems that my waking life has come to a standstill. In my dreams things appear more realistic. You would tell me that it should be the other way around, and I would agree at first; but then you left, of course, so we never got to discuss it. On that rainy day in September I dream about so often, you stare out the window, your lips cold and purple. Lying next to you, I am starting to fall asleep. Just as I am nodding off though, you turn your head. I have a feeling you were prepared to ask me another question, but when you see that my eyes are closed, you change your mind. I wait until I feel your head turn away again, your body shift, until I allow myself to relax. The rain comes pounding down even harder, and the window is a slick mess of water and tears, nothing visible through it.
©2005 by Chloe Noland
