In my dream, Andy Barlow wore suspenders and sold snake oil out of the back of his father’s caravan, all hung with copper pots and gypsy scarves—the caravan, not Andy. Meanwhile, the real Andy Barlow slurped coffee behind the skate-check desk at the rink where my sister and I fumbled on sore ankles and fell on our asses every Saturday during Christmas break. His busted sneakers were crossed at the ankle on the chipped radiator. He scratched the beginnings of a beard with dirty fingernails and read an issue of Ebony that looked twenty years old, its pages stuck together with sweet and sour sauce from the Vietnamese deli where he got his intriguingly stinky lunch.
After that first dream, I’d asked for spare laces and he’d given them, and when his thumb accidentally touched mine, I’d seen it, a buffalo nickel flash into his palm from the silk purse of a heartsick widow. I wanted to tell him how nearly the whole sad-eyed town had bought the miracle serum without him so much as saying a word. It was all in his eyes—the power to heal, but it was a dark sort of healing, the kind that left you wanting more, that cured one ill but created a new one you never even knew you wanted. My head was full of arcane idioms I didn’t understand, concerning sow’s ears and pearls before swine. I imagined my open hand as the arabesque vessel awaiting the press of a single lucky doubloon. He dropped in it a tangle of grey string.
I kept my mouth shut about the scarves and tossed the laces at my kid sister, without saying thank you. She begged me for hot chocolate, then chugged it down and burnt her tongue. I dragged her out of the warming house by her vinyl hood. We were well-to-do kids, and clean. We only knew Andy because his father drove our school bus.
That next spring Andy Barlow graduated high school, quit the ice-rink, and got a job wandering about our small town with his hands shoved in his pockets. He wore the same busted sneakers for five years as he wandered campus, never appearing in classes, but riding the shuttle, scribbling in a notebook. When another five years had passed I assumed he’d just kept buying the same pair of sneakers and busting them.
In college he came to me under a spreading elm, as I was studying poetry, but only in dreams. In real-life I studied floral design at a 2-year technical school. The two reconciled when he crowned me with a lilac wreath and announced that April was the cruelest month. I woke with the taste of dandelion milk on my tongue.
His footwear varied at night. A pair of spats once, as he tapped in his father’s Broadway dance review. He was a pretty good hoofer, but no Fred Astaire. Less graceful, more loosey-goosey, his shirt-tails coming undone whenever he flung his long arms up. He wore pancake makeup and eyeliner in the spotlight, but because he never smiled, he gave the impression of a dancing corpse. Then one night when he slumped onto my table in the first row and knocked down a trio of lit candles, I discovered that his shirt opened in the back to allow for a crank—like the kind on a windup toy. His skin flickered and melted as the tablecloth caught fire.
As I stared at the back of his head on the city bus the next day, all the way from Division Street to Waite Park, I assured him, telepathically, that he did not have to dance, that I knew some cruel stepmother with helmet hair had put the crank there and we could certainly find a nice coat to hide it, or perhaps it could be removed, but in either case, he should keep the shoes.
I married a contractor in my twenty-third year, and when I noticed Andy Barlow hanging around the construction site of a new city commons, always with his nose pointed up at the beams or down at the freshly poured concrete, I asked my husband to give him a job. On account of what, he wanted to know, and I told him that I’d just always thought Andy Barlow had a mind to do something. Something like what he wondered, and when I shrugged and said I didn’t know, he’d told me to go home and not think about people who seemed like they might want to do something. You want to do something get me lunch, he said.
We had a lot of money in those days. I bought dresses from a catalog. We went bowling once, Andy and I. There was no improvement; I was still a lousy bowler in my dreams. The moment my ball reached launching point, my weak wrist involuntarily flipped upward and dropped the ball, never with enough velocity to propel it down the lane. I remained Queen of Gutterballs, but it didn’t matter. We strode over the toy-house carpet under black-lights, our teeth and the whites of our eyes gleaming, our clown-shoes used and rank and beautiful, in perfect synchronicity. The contractor and I divorced three years later when I miscarried. I gave all the baby stuff to my kid sister who was pregnant with her fifth. I cried in her living room and she fed me Jim Beam and ginger-ale, gave me one of her kids’ Star Wars pillows and told me to get busy dreaming. I couldn’t, and I vomited clear liquid on her white carpet. With it came bits of dream stuff—red shreds of tissue, velvet curtain, the walls of my insides, bleeding away, crumbling. I expelled old illusions like lead paint chips, poison, absinthe. The stuff that made me think anyone, including me, could be anyone else. My sister stood above me and I imagined her David Copperfield, before he got into making national landmarks disappear, pulling and pulling and pulling sickly gossamer from my throat, until I was finally empty. I couldn’t dream again.
The city commons floods and freezes the farmer’s market mall in the winter. Andy Barlow skates there to accordion music, in a red scarf. I wonder about the woman who gave it to him because men do not buy scarves. I would have chosen one with more tassels, and a few beads.
