The Girl with Two Left Breasts

That Will Be Then and This Is Now

216 That Will Be Then and This Is Now Dreams are boring, Daryl, and you know it. How many times have you smiled absently at your girlfriend as she narrates whatever details from the previous night’s dream she’s able to summon into memory and coherence, the two of you eating breakfast here on the patio, the cheap all-weather furniture purchased on sale from Builder’s Emporium wobbling in precarious counterpoint to her every lively gesture? Her habit, maddening, is to sit with her spoon frozen in the air above her favorite white ceramic cereal bowl, the one with the cheesy feline motif, the spoon dipping every so often as though to plunge wholeheartedly into the arid brown tweed of the bran flakes, only to be arrested in its descent, then used to underscore some particularly exciting or puzzling or repulsive aspect of the dream. Once again, you smile, Daryl, since you pride yourself on the sensitivity and receptiveness you display in all matters concerning communication and listening, especially with the opposite sex, and you hope the queer scintilla of vacancy in your eyes isn’t apparent. It’s not, evidently, because she goes on and on, encouraged by the fixity of your sightless gaze, by the well-timed nodding of your head which punctuates from time to time her fragmented storyline. You appear to be so fascinated by what she’s saying that you even forget to D. V. Glenn 217 pick up your coffee mug. In fact, you won’t pick up the coffee mug until she has offered up the anarchy of her dream in its entirety for your interpretive scrutiny. You fake it, improvising expertly, grabbing onto the dream’s more obvious elements and tossing Jungian and Freudian theoretical fundaments together in a fairly convincing pasticcio. You don’t necessarily like this tendency you have toward facile deception, this unblinking delivery of half-lies, but you seem to be really good at it. Yet there’s a principal involved here. Since you are bored by your girlfriend’s recitation, you don’t think it would be fair to tell her about the dream you had sometime after 4:00 a.m., after rising from the tabby cat of oblivion your consciousness had curled into, stumbling to the bathroom to empty your bladder, then returning to bed and sleep. (When the hypodermic of sleep injects you into the vein of nothingness, your sleep is typically dreamless, a mysterious vacancy into which you disappear , and you’re often terrified when you wake up and think about it, so the cute tabby cat image you dress the oblivion in removes some of the terror. The hypodermic needle image appeals to you, based on your wayward past of extensive drug experimentation.) What happens then is that instead of being more or less seamlessly transported into sleep, you’re aware of a deluge of hypnogogic images like road signs streaking backward , as seen from the window of a speeding car. Suddenly, you’re in the dream. Everything is hyperreal: the colors, the scale, the sense of depth and dimension in the scene. The atmosphere is one of arrested turbulence, flux barely contained, as though bolts have been employed by the hidden mechanisms of the dream to hold everything in place and prevent it from dissolving back into the chaos from which it was constructed. You’re back in Wisconsin where you grew up as a child, in the backyard of your next-door neighbors, the Rushens. In “real” life, the backyard seemed to be little more than a depository for junk, boxes, old furniture, broken appliances, rotting garbage and car parts. The house was a ramshackle double-storied affair the neighborhood kids loved in the 218 The Girl with Two Left Breasts summer, because the parents of the Rushen children worked nights and there was no parental intrusion into the exuberant pandemonium that flourished there daily. But, in the dream, the backyard is spotless, filled with perfectly parallel rows of slender trees. You know these trees—they’re white ashes. The leaves shimmer and enliven the air with a plasmic chrometinted radiance and there’s an aura of palpable purity so intensely beautiful that it brings tears to your eyes. You stand there in awe, Daryl, gazing open-mouthed at these trees that are spangled and webbed with a silvery beauty, and you spread your arms wide...