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Issues
» 2005
Issue About
GR
Georgetown
Review
G&R Publishing |
Spring
2005
from Wildflowers Ben Brooks ~~~~~~~~~ It was a wedding -- that's what it took to get us back together. It was outdoors, at the bottom of a wide, green expanse of lawn that sloped down to a beach. Boats were massed in the water, sailboats and small fishing boats, bunched up near the shore, tipping one way and then the other in the waves, and there were people on the boats, sitting on the gunwales, holding onto the masts, watching the ceremony. We were on the lawn with more people. It was a bigger lawn than I had ever seen before, although there were no trees, no hedges, no flowers, just grass. I was with Charlotte again -- either it was before she died, or she had come back from that, come back to be with me one more time. We didn't know the people getting married, and we didn't know any of the other guests. We didn't know why we were there. I had her hand in mine -- we stood off to the side. The bride turned out to be very small and very young-looking. It looked to me like she could have been a child, or else some sort of midget. As the ceremony progressed, it turned out that she and the groom, who was adult-sized, and also many of the guests, were contortionists. In the middle of the wedding they all turned over and stood on their heads, without using their hands at all, and somehow they propelled themselves across the lawn upside down. Somehow they were able to glide along on their bare heads. They all moved closer toward the water that way. The people in the boats began to clap, as if this was a stage performance or some great athletic feat, and Charlotte and I clapped, too. We were the only ones on the lawn still on our feet. Then I saw that Ricky was there, but I wasn't certain Charlotte had noticed him. He was the minister, presiding over the event. He had also flipped onto his head. Once everyone settled down, Ricky continued with the wedding, reading passages and advice from a Bible, still standing on his head. I looked at Charlotte and smiled, but she looked very grave. I said, "I guess this is the way people are doing it now." She pulled her hand away from mine and said, "If that's how it's going to be, it's better not to do it at all." * * * * * She appears in my dreams once a week, as if to make sure I won't forget her. I can never predict which night it will be. Sometimes we're happy together, sometimes we're arguing, and sometimes we're just awkward, as if we don't know one another. Usually I wake up thinking there are things I wanted to say to her, but that I didn't get them out in the little bit of time I had, or that I couldn't. I wake up thinking how nice it would be if I could control my dreams for a change, be in charge of them, instead of the dreams being in charge of me -- how I'd like to be able to say in them all the things I want to say. I wake up with words still in my mouth, stuffed into it like a sock, but even awake I can't say the words. If it's still dark outside I try to go back to sleep, and I think that if I do, I will be able to continue with the same dream and get the words out, or have another dream with Charlotte in it, but that's never the way it happens. Either I don't sleep, or I sleep without dreaming, or I have different dreams altogether that have nothing to do with her. It's three years since the accident -- Tuesday was the anniversary -- and still, the dreams do not waver. Exactly one dream per week -- in three years, that's a hundred and fifty-six dreams. When I first began having them, right after she died, I wrote them down in great detail. I read them over and re-lived them. But after a couple of months I stopped. I wanted to move on. I thought that by writing them down I was only calling for more dreams, generating new ones. I thought that if I stopped writing them, the dreams themselves would cease, but they didn't. I never dreamed about Charlotte before the accident. My dreams took place in the real world, the world I lived in. Mostly they had to do with people I knew from business -- people who worked for me, clients, vendors, contractors. Sometimes real situations were repeated, though occasionally they ended in a different way. The places were real places I went to in the course of my days. People didn't glide around fairy-tale lawns on the tops of their heads. I call it an accident -- nobody has proved otherwise, and as far as I know, nobody is trying to prove it anymore. For a time it was an open question, but then the police decided the circumstances were too murky to ever clarify. They questioned me four times, and I know they questioned Ricky, too. They had clues, they had bits and pieces of evidence, they put together various motives and theories, but there was nothing conclusive, nothing more than inference, and everything pointed in different directions. She died on Mount Hamilton. She fell off a ledge nearly a hundred feet. Nobody ever came forward and said they saw or heard anything. It was an outing of our garden club, and there were nearly sixty people along, so if somebody gave her a nudge, there were plenty of possibilities. It was a spring morning, a morning in May, and people were hunting for wildflowers. We scattered in different directions, everyone eager to find the one most rare, the one most delicate, the one most colorful. Charlotte kissed me on the ear and said she was going to head down that path over there, pointing with her basket. She was wearing a bright blue shirt, her gray plaid slacks, and a pair of red sneakers. Her black hair was shiny in the sunlight. She said she was hungry, so I gave her a pear out of my pack. Except in my dreams, heading down that path was the last time I saw her alive. The police could not understand how with such bright clothes on, nobody saw a thing. They thought for sure she would have screamed. I remember how looking down over the rock face, I thought her red sneakers were spots of blood. Someone had to pull me away from the edge. When I turned around, my head swimming, the black starting to form behind my eyes, I saw that it was Ricky who had grabbed hold of my shirt. Ricky is fourteen years younger than me, somewhere between a brother and a son. I took him into the business straight from high school. First he worked as an office boy, then more and more as my assistant, and then he was my protege. I taught him everything and pulled him along. I even had him accompany me to certain meetings. Every Thursday evening he came to the house for dinner. We called it Ricky Night, and those were the nights Charlotte cooked up her most elaborate spreads. We put a tablecloth on the table and used our good silver. She'd pull out her cookbooks in the morning and find new recipes, then go off in the afternoon to specialty shops to hunt down the ingredients, no matter how exotic and out of the way they were. Ricky brought a bottle of wine -- he knew the labels Charlotte liked the most. Quail, she made, stuffed and roasted, stitching the legs together with silver thread. She blackened truffles in a pan with burnt butter. At the Asian market she located species of fish that don't swim in our waters, fish that are bred in hidden ponds for their aphrodisiac powers -- or if the wrong parts are consumed, for their deadly kick. We lit candles in the center of the table, though we all sat at one end of the oval, close together, our legs touching beneath the wood. Charlotte was situated snugly between Ricky and myself. Most of those evenings we ate in near-silence, savoring the food, watching the light through the windows fail as night came on. We disconnected the telephone before we sat down to eat. Only the occasional remark or sigh broke into the reverie, and the sounds of chewing and sipping, of knives scraping plate and of crystal glasses being returned with satisfaction to the wood of the table. |
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