Distortions

Wolf Dreams

when Cynthia was seventeen she married Ewell W. G. Peterson. The initials stood for William Gordon; his family called him William, her parents called him W.G. (letting him know that they thought his initials were pretentious), and Cynthia called him Pete, which is what his Army buddies called him. Now she had been divorced from Ewell W. G. Peterson for nine years, and what he had been called was a neutral thing to remember about him. She didn’t hate him. Except for his name, she hardly remembered him. At Christmas, he sent her a card signed “Pete,” but only for a few years after the divorce, and then they stopped. Her second husband, whom she married when she was twenty-eight, was named Lincoln Divine. They were divorced when she was twenty-nine and a half. No Christmas cards. Now she was going to marry Charlie Pinehurst. Her family hated Charlie — or perhaps just the idea of a third marriage — but what she hated was the way Charlie’s name got mixed up in her head with Pete’s and Lincoln’s. Ewell W. G. Peterson, Lincoln Divine, Charlie Pinehurst, she kept thinking, as if she needed to memorize them. In high school her English teacher had made her memorize poems that made no sense. There was no way you could remember what came next in those poems. She got Ds all through high school, and she didn’t like the job she got after she graduated, so she was happy to marry Pete when he asked her, even if it did mean leaving her friends and her family to live on an Army base. She liked it there. Her parents had told her she would never be satisfied with anything; they were surprised when it turned out that she had no complaints about living on the base. She got to know all the wives, and they had a diet club, and she lost twenty pounds, so that she got down to what she weighed when she started high school. She also worked at the local radio station, recording stories and poems — she never knew why they were recorded — and found that she didn’t mind literature if she could just read it and not have to think about it. Pete hung around with the men when he had time off; they never really saw much of each other. He accused her of losing weight so she could attract “a khaki lover.” “One’s not enough for you?” he asked. But when he was around, he didn’t want to love her; he’d work out with the barbells in the spare bedroom. Cynthia liked having two bedrooms. She liked the whole house. It was a frame row house with shutters missing downstairs, but it was larger than her parents’ house inside. When they moved in, all the Army wives said the same thing — that the bedroom wouldn’t be spare for long. But it stayed empty, except for the barbells and some kind of trapeze that Pete hung from the ceiling. It was nice living on the base, though. Sometimes she missed it.

With Lincoln, Cynthia lived in an apartment in Columbus, Ohio. “It’s a good thing you live halfway across the country,” her father wrote her, “because your mother surely does not want to see that black man, who claims his father was a Cherappy Indian.” She never met Lincoln’s parents, so she wasn’t sure herself about the Indian thing. One of Lincoln’s friends, who was always trying to be her lover, told her that Lincoln Divine wasn’t even his real name — he had made it up and got his old name legally changed when he was twenty-one. “It’s like believing in Santa Claus,” the friend told her. “There is no Lincoln Divine.”

Charlie was different from Pete and Lincoln. Neither of them paid much attention to her, but Charlie was attentive. During the years, she had regained the twenty pounds she lost when she was first married and added twenty-five more on top of that. She was going to have to get in shape before she married Charlie, even though he wanted to marry her now. “I’ll take it as is,” Charlie said. “Ready-made can be altered.” Charlie was a tailor. He wasn’t really a tailor, but his brother had a shop, and to make extra money Charlie did alterations on the weekends. Once, when they were both a little drunk, Cynthia and Charlie vowed to tell each other a dark secret. Cynthia told Charlie she had had an abortion just before she and Pete got divorced. Charlie was really shocked by that. “That’s why you got so fat, I guess,” he said. “Happens when they fix animals, too.” She didn’t know what he was talking about, and she didn’t want to ask. She’d almost forgotten it herself. Charlie’s secret was that he knew how to run a sewing machine. He thought it was “woman’s work.” She thought that was crazy; she had told him something important, and he had just said he knew how to run a sewing machine.

“We’re not going to live in any apartment,” Charlie said. “We’re going to live in a house.” And “You’re not going to have to go up and down stairs. We’re going to find a split-level.” And “It’s not going to be any neighborhood that’s getting worse. Our neighborhood is going to be getting better.” And “You don’t have to lose weight. Why don’t you marry me now, and we can get a house and start a life together?”

But she wouldn’t do it. She was going to lose twenty pounds and save enough money to buy a pretty wedding dress. She had already started using more makeup and letting her hair grow, as the beauty-parlor operator had suggested, so that she could have curls that fell to her shoulders on her wedding day. She’d been reading brides’ magazines, and long curls were what she thought was pretty. Charlie hated the magazines. He thought the magazines had told her to lose twenty pounds — that the magazines were responsible for keeping him waiting.

She had nightmares. A recurring nightmare was one in which she stood at the altar with Charlie, wearing a beautiful long dress, but the dress wasn’t quite long enough, and everyone could see that she was standing on a scale. What did the scale say? She would wake up peering into the dark and get out of bed and go to the kitchen.

This night, as she dipped potato chips into cheddar-cheese dip, she reread a letter from her mother: “You are not a bad girl, and so I do not know why you would get married three times. Your father does not count that black man as a marriage, but I have got to, and so it is three. That’s too many marriages, Cynthia. You are a good girl and know enough now to come home and settle down with your family. We are willing to look out for you, even your dad, and warn you not to make another dreadful mistake.” There was no greeting, no signature. The letter had probably been dashed off by her mother when she, too, had insomnia. Cynthia would have to answer the note, but she didn’t think her mother would be convinced by anything she could say. If she thought her parents would be convinced she was making the right decision by seeing Charlie, she would have asked him to meet her parents. But her parents liked people who had a lot to say, or who could make them laugh (“break the monotony,” her father called it), and Charlie didn’t have a lot to say. Charlie was a very serious person. He was also forty years old, and he had never been married. Her parents would want to know why that was. You couldn’t please them: they hated people who were divorced and they were suspicious of single people. So she had never suggested to Charlie that he meet her parents. Finally, he suggested it himself. Cynthia thought up excuses, but Charlie saw through them. He thought it was all because he had confessed to her that he sewed. She was ashamed of him — that was the real reason she was putting off the wedding, and why she wouldn’t introduce him to her parents. “No,” she said. “No, Charlie. No, no, no.” And because she had said it so many times, she was convinced. “Then set a date for the wedding,” he told her. “You’ve got to say when.” She promised to do that the next time she saw him, but she couldn’t think right, and that was because of the notes that her mother wrote her, and because she couldn’t get any sleep, and because she got depressed by taking off weight and gaining it right back by eating at night.

As long as she couldn’t sleep, and there were only a few potato chips left, which she might as well finish off, she decided to level with herself the same way she and Charlie had the night they told their secrets. She asked herself why she was getting married. Part of the answer was that she didn’t like her job. She was a typer — a typist, the other girls always said, correcting her — and also she was thirty-two, and if she didn’t get married soon she might not find anybody. She and Charlie would live in a house, and she could have a flower garden, and, although they had not discussed it, if she had a baby she wouldn’t have to work. It was getting late if she intended to have a baby. There was no point in asking herself more questions. Her head hurt, and she had eaten too much and felt a little sick, and no matter what she thought she knew she was still going to marry Charlie.

Cynthia would marry Charlie on February the tenth. That was what she told Charlie, because she hadn’t been able to think of a date and she had to say something, and that was what she would tell her boss, Mr. Greer, when she asked if she could be given her week’s vacation then.

“We would like to be married the tenth of February, and, if I could, I’d like to have the next week off.”

“I’m looking for that calendar.”

“What?”

“Sit down and relax, Cynthia. You can have the week off if that isn’t the week when—”

“Mr. Greer, I could change the date of the wedding.”

“I’m not asking you to do that. Please sit down while I—”

“Thank you. I don’t mind standing.”

“Cynthia, let’s just say that week is fine.”

“Thank you.”

“If you like standing, what about having a hot dog with me down at the corner?” he said to Cynthia.

That surprised her. Having lunch with her boss! She could feel the heat of her cheeks. A crazy thought went through her head: Cynthia Greer. It got mixed up right away with Peterson, Divine, and Pinehurst.

At the hot-dog place, they stood side by side, eating hot dogs and french fries.

“It’s none of my business,” Mr. Greer said to her, “but you don’t seem like the most excited bride-to-be. I mean, you do seem excited, but …”

Cynthia continued to eat.

“Well?” he asked. “I was just being polite when I said it was none of my business.”

“Oh, that’s all right. Yes, I’m very happy. I’m going to come back to work after I’m married, if that’s what you’re thinking.”

Mr. Greer was staring at her. She had said something wrong.

“I’m not sure that we’ll go on a honeymoon. We’re going to buy a house.”

“Oh? Been looking at some houses?”

“No. We might look for houses.”

“You’re very hard to talk to,” Mr. Greer said.

“I know. I’m not thinking quickly. I make so many mistakes typing.”

A mistake to have told him that. He didn’t pick it up.

“February will be a nice time to have off,” he said pleasantly.

“I picked February because I’m dieting, and by then I’ll have lost weight.”

“Oh? My wife is always dieting. She’s eating fourteen grapefruit a week on this new diet she’s found.”

“That’s the grapefruit diet.”

Mr. Greer laughed.

“What did I do that was funny?”

She sees Mr. Greer is embarrassed. A mistake to have embarrassed him.

“I don’t think right when I haven’t had eight hours’ sleep, and I haven’t even had close to that. And on this diet I’m always hungry.”

“Are you hungry? Would you like another hot dog?”

“That would be nice,” she says.

He orders another hot dog and talks more as she eats.

“Sometimes I think it’s best to forget all this dieting,” he says. “If so many people are fat, there must be something to it.”

“But I’ll get fatter and fatter.”

“And then what?” he says. “What if you did? Does your fiancé like thin women?”

“He doesn’t care if I lose weight or not. He probably wouldn’t care.”

“Then you’ve got the perfect man. Eat away.”

When she finishes that hot dog, he orders another for her.

“A world full of food, and she eats fourteen grapefruit a week.”

“Why don’t you tell her not to diet, Mr. Greer?”

“She won’t listen to me. She reads those magazines, and I can’t do anything.”

“Charlie hates those magazines, too. Why do men hate magazines?”

“I don’t hate all magazines. I don’t hate Newsweek.”

She tells Charlie that her boss took her to lunch. At first he is impressed. Then he seems let down. Probably he is disappointed that his boss didn’t take him to lunch.

“What did you talk about?” Charlie asks.

“Me. He told me I could get fat — that it didn’t matter.”

“What else did he say?”

“He said his wife is on the grapefruit diet.”

“You aren’t very talkative. Is everything all right?”

“He said not to marry you.”

“What did he mean by that?”

“He said to go home and eat and eat and eat but not to get married.”

“One of the girls said that before she got married he told her the same thing.”

“What’s that guy up to? He’s got no right to say that.”

“She got divorced, too.”

“What are you trying to tell me?” Charlie says.

“Nothing. I’m just telling you about the lunch. You asked about it.”

“Well, I don’t understand all this. I’d like to know what’s behind it.”

Cynthia does not feel that she has understood, either. She feels sleep coming on, and hopes that she will drop off before long. Her second husband, Lincoln, felt that she was incapable of understanding anything. He had a string of Indian beads that he wore under his shirt, and on their wedding night he removed the beads before they went to bed and held them in front of her face and shook them and said, “What’s this?” It was the inside of her head, Lincoln told her. She understood that she was being insulted. But why had he married her? She had not understood Lincoln, and, like Charlie, she didn’t understand what Mr. Greer was up to. “Memorize,” she heard her English teacher saying. “Anyone can memorize.” Cynthia began to go over past events. I married Pete and Lincoln and I will marry Charlie. Today I had lunch with Mr. Greer. Mrs. Greer eats grapefruit.

“Well, what are you laughing about?” Charlie asked. “Some private joke with you and Greer, or something?”

Cynthia saw an ad in the newspaper. “Call Crisis Center,” it said. “We Care.” She thinks that a crisis center is a good idea, but she isn’t having a crisis. She just can’t sleep. But the idea of it is very good. If I were having a crisis, what would I do? she wonders. She has to answer her mother’s note. Another note came today. Now her mother wants to meet Charlie: “As God is my witness, I tried to get through to you, but perhaps I did not say that you would really be welcome at home and do not have to do this foolish thing you are doing. Your dad feels you are never going to find true happiness when you don’t spend any time thinking between one husband and the next. I know that love makes us do funny things, but your dad has said to tell you that he feels you do not really love this man, and there is nothing worse than just doing something funny with not even the reason of love driving you. You probably don’t want to listen to me, and so I keep these short, but if you should come home alone we would be most glad. If you bring this new man with you, we will also come to the station. Let us at least look him over before you do this thing. Your dad has said that if he had met Lincoln it never would have been.”

Cynthia takes out a piece of paper. Instead of writing her mother’s name at the top, though, she writes, “If you are still at that high school, I want you to know I am glad to be away from it and you and I have forgotten all those lousy poems you had me memorize for nothing. Sincerely, Cynthia Knight.” On another piece of paper she writes, “Are you still in love with me? Do you want to see me again?” She gets another piece of paper and draws two parallel vertical lines with a horizontal line joining them at the bottom — Pete’s trapeze. “APE MAN,” she prints. She puts the first into an envelope and addresses it to her teacher at the high school. The second is for Lincoln. The next goes to Pete, care of his parents. She doesn’t know Lincoln’s address, so she rips up that piece of paper and throws it away. This makes her cry. Why is she crying? One of the girls at work says it’s the times they are living in. The girl campaigned for George McGovern. Not only that, but she wrote letters against Nixon. Cynthia takes another piece of paper from the box and writes a message to President Nixon: “Some girls in my office won’t write you because they say that’s crank mail and their names will get put on a list. I don’t care if I’m on some list You’re the crank. You’ve got prices so high I can’t eat steak.” Cynthia doesn’t know what else to say to the President. “Tell your wife she’s a stone face,” she writes. She addresses the envelope and stamps it and takes the mail to the mailbox before she goes to bed. She begins to think that it’s Nixon’s fault — all of it. Whatever that means. She is still weeping. Damn you, Nixon, she thinks. Damn you.

Lately, throughout all of this, she hasn’t been sleeping with Charlie. When he comes to her apartment, she unbuttons his shirt, rubs her hands across his chest, up and down his chest, and undoes his belt.

She writes more letters. One is to Jean Nidetch, of Weight Watchers. “What if you got fat again, if you couldn’t stop eating?” she writes. “Then you’d lose all your money! You couldn’t go out in public or they’d see you! I hope you get fatter and fatter and die.” The second letter (a picture, really) is to Charlie — a heart with “Cynthia” in it. That’s wrong. She draws another heart and writes “Charlie” in it. The last letter is to a woman she knew when she was married to Pete. “Dear Sandy,” she writes. “Sorry I haven’t written in so long. I am going to get married the tenth of February. I think I told you that Lincoln and I got divorced. I really wish I had you around to encourage me to lose weight before the wedding! I hope everything is well with your family. The baby must be walking now. Everything is fine with me. Well, got to go. Love, Cynthia.”

They are on the train, on the way to visit her parents before the wedding. It is late January. Charlie has spilled some beer on his jacket and has gone to the men’s room twice to wash it off, even though she told him he got it all out the first time. He has a tie folded in his jacket pocket. It is a red tie with white dogs on it that she bought for him. She has been buying him presents, to make up for the way she acts toward him sometimes. She has been taking sleeping pills, and now that she’s more rested she isn’t nervous all the time. That’s all it was — no sleep. She even takes half a sleeping pill with her lunch, and that keeps her calm during the day.

“Honey, do you want to go to the other car, where we can have a drink?” Charlie asks her.

Cynthia didn’t want Charlie to know she had been taking the pills, so when she had a chance she reached into her handbag and shook out a whole one and swallowed it when he wasn’t looking. Now she is pretty groggy.

“I think I’ll come down later,” she says. She smiles at him.

As he walks down the aisle, she looks at his back. He could be anybody. Just some man on a train. The door closes behind him.

A young man sitting across the aisle from her catches her eye. He has long hair. “Paper?” he says.

He is offering her his paper. She feels her cheeks color, and she takes it, not wanting to offend him. Some people wouldn’t mind offending somebody who looks like him, she thinks self-righteously, but you are always polite.

“How far you two headed?” he asks.

“Pavo, Georgia,” she says.

“Gonna eat peaches in Georgia?” he asks.

She stares at him.

“I’m just kidding,” he says. “My grandparents live in Georgia.”

“Do they eat peaches all day?” she asks.

He laughs. She doesn’t know what she’s done right.

“Why, lordy lands, they do,” he says with a thick drawl.

She flips through the paper. There is a comic strip of President Nixon. The President is leaning against a wall, being frisked by a policeman. He is confessing to various sins.

“Great, huh?” the man says, smiling, and leans across the aisle.

“I wrote Nixon a letter,” Cynthia says quietly. “I don’t know what they’ll do. I said all kinds of things.”

“You did? Wow. You wrote Nixon?”

“Did you ever write him?”

“Yeah, sure, I write him all the time. Send telegrams. It’ll be a while before he’s really up against that wall, though.”

Cynthia continues to look through the paper. There are full-page ads for records by people she has never heard of, singers she will never hear. The singers look like the young man.

“Are you a musician?” she asks.

“Me? Well, sometimes. I play electric piano. I can play classical piano. I don’t do much of it.”

“No time?” she says.

“Right. Too many distractions.”

He takes a flask out from under his sweater. “If you don’t feel like the long walk to join your friend, have a drink with me.”

Cynthia accepts the flask, quickly, so no one will see. Once it is in her hands, she doesn’t know what else to do but drink from it.

“Where you coming from?” he asks.

“Buffalo.”

“Seen the comet?” he asks.

“No. Have you?”

“No,” he says. “Some days I don’t think there is any comet. Propaganda, maybe.”

“If Nixon said there was a comet, then we could be sure there wasn’t,” she says.

The sound of her own voice is strange to her. The man is smiling. He seems to like talk about Nixon.

“Right,” he says. “Beautiful. President issues bulletin comet will appear. Then we can all relax and know we’re not missing anything.”

She doesn’t understand what he has said, so she takes another drink. That way, she has no expression.

“I’ll drink to that, too,” he says, and the flask is back with him.

Because Charlie is apparently going to be in the drinking car for a while, the man, whose name is Peter, comes and sits next to her.

“My first husband was named Pete,” she says. “He was in the Army. He didn’t know what he was doing.”

The man nods, affirming some connection.

He nods. She must have been right.

Peter tells her that he is on his way to see his grandfather, who is recovering from a stroke. “He can’t talk. They think he will, but not yet.”

“I’m scared to death of getting old,” Cynthia says.

“Yeah,” Peter says. “But you’ve got a way to go.”

“And then other times I don’t care what happens, I just don’t care what happens at all.”

He nods slowly. “There’s plenty happening we’re not going to be able to do anything about,” he says.

He holds up a little book he has been looking through. It is called Know What Your Dreams Mean.

“Ever read these things?” he asks.

“No. Is it good?”

“You know what it is — right? A book that interprets dreams.”

“I have a dream,” she says, “about being at an altar in a wedding dress, only instead of standing on the floor I’m on a scale.”

He laughs and shakes his head. “There’s no weird stuff in here. It’s all the usual Freudian stuff.”

“What do you mean?” she asks.

“Oh — you dream about your teeth crumbling; it means castration. That sort of stuff.”

“But what do you think my dream means?” she asks.

“I don’t even know if I half believe what I read in the book,” he says, tapping it on his knee. He knows he hasn’t answered her question. “Maybe the scale means you’re weighing the possibilities.”

“Of what?”

“Well, you’re in a wedding dress, right? You could be weighing the possibilities.”

“What will I do?” she says.

He laughs. “I’m no seer. Let’s look it up in your horoscope. What are you?”

“Virgo.”

“Virgo,” he says. “That would figure. Virgos are meticulous. They’d be susceptible to a dream like the one you were talking about.”

Peter reads from the book: “Be generous to friends, but don’t be taken advantage of. Unexpected windfall may prove less than you expected. Loved one causes problems. Take your time.”

He shrugs. He passes her the flask.

It’s too vague. She can’t really understand it. She sees Lincoln shaking the beads, but it’s not her fault this time — it’s the horoscope’s fault. It doesn’t say enough.

“That man I’m with wants to marry me,” she confides to Peter. “What should I do?”

He shakes his head and looks out the window. “Don’t ask me,” he says, a little nervously.

“Do you have any more books?”

“No,” he says. “All out.”

They ride in silence.

“You could go to a palmist,” he says after a while. “They’ll tell you what’s up.”

“A palmist? Really?”

“Well, I don’t know. If you believe half they say …”

“You don’t believe them?”

“Well, I fool around with stuff like this, but I sort of pay attention to what I like and forget what I don’t like. The horoscope told me to delay travel yesterday, and I did.”

“Why don’t you believe them?” Cynthia asks.

“Oh, I think most of them don’t know any more than you or me.”

“Then let’s do it as a game,” she says. “I’ll ask questions, and you give the answer.”

Peter laughs. “O.K.,” he says. He lifts her hand from her lap and stares hard at it. He turns it over and examines the other side, frowning.

“Should I marry Charlie?” she whispers.

“I see …” he begins. “I see a man. I see a man … in the drinking car.”

“But what am I going to do?” she whispers. “Should I marry him?”

Peter gazes intently at her palm, then smooths his fingers down hers. “Maybe,” he says gravely when he reaches her fingertips.

Delighted with his performance, he cracks up. A woman in the seat in front of them peers over the back of her chair to see what the noise is about. She sees a hippie holding a fat woman’s hand and drinking from a flask.

“Coleridge,” Peter is saying. “You know — Coleridge, the poet? Well, he says that we don’t, for instance, dream about a wolf and then get scared. He says it’s that we’re scared to begin with, see, and therefore we dream about a wolf.”

Cynthia begins to understand, but then she loses it. It is the fault of the sleeping pill and many drinks. In fact, when Charlie comes back, Cynthia is asleep on Peter’s shoulder. There is a scene — or as much of a scene as a quiet man like Charlie can make. Charlie is also drunk, which makes him mellow instead of really angry. Eventually, brooding, he sits down across the aisle. Late that night, when the train slows down for the Georgia station, he gazes out the window as if he noticed nothing. Peter helps Cynthia get her bag down. The train has stopped at the station, and Charlie is still sitting, staring out the window at a few lights that shine along the tracks. Without looking at him, without knowing what will happen, Cynthia walks down the aisle. She is the last one off. She is the last one off before the train pulls out, with Charlie still on it.

Her parents watch the train go down the track, looking as if they are visitors from an earlier century, amazed by such a machine. They had expected Charlie, of course, but now they have Cynthia. They were not prepared to be pleasant, and there is a strained silence as the three watch the train disappear.

That night, lying in the bed she slept in as a child, Cynthia can’t sleep. She gets up, finally, and sits in the kitchen at the table. What am I trying to think about, she wonders, closing her hands over her face for deeper concentration. It is cold in the kitchen, and she is not so much hungry as empty. Not in the head, she feels like shouting to Lincoln, but in the stomach — somewhere inside. She clasps her hands in front of her, over her stomach. Her eyes are closed. A picture comes to her — a high, white mountain. She isn’t on it, or in the picture at all. When she opens her eyes she is looking at the shiny surface of the table. She closes her eyes and sees the snow-covered mountain again — high and white, no trees, just mountain — and she shivers with the coldness of it.