These Dreams of You

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Over these few minutes the room has gradually, at first imperceptibly, filled with sound, as though frequencies are crossing, catching half a dozen musics from anywhere and everywhere. Zan still isn’t clear on the woman’s genealogy but says, “What are you doing here?” which doesn’t come out the way he intends. “I mean, in London.”

“So far I have been taking care of children,” indicating Parker and Zan, “sometimes I clean houses. . ” She shrugs. “I do what I need to and what I can.”

“Seriously, jerkwad?” Parker says to his sister. “I just spent like twelve hours gluing that! You don’t even know how to play this game.”

“Poppy!” Sheba wails.

Zan says, “Parker, I asked you to—”

“There’s nothing I want to do or watch or play with her,” Parker answers.

Zan indicates to Molly the hotel television. “It only gets half a dozen channels and nothing the kids care about.”

“I am certain it must be difficult for them in a strange country,” she says.

“I think they’re liking it,” though he doesn’t really think so at all.

“Not the dark place with the dummies or the place where the heads are cut off,” says Sheba.

“Very civilized children, then,” she jokes. “I have never been to your country,” she adds, “but my mother lived there, in the late Sixties and much of the Seventies, after leaving England.”

“Really?” says Zan. “Where?”

“Around and about. Mostly in Los Angeles.”

“That’s where we’re from.”

“Yes,” she smiles, “I know.”

“Where’s your mother now?”

“She is no longer alive.”

“I’m sorry.”

“It happened long ago. I would like,” she says, “to go to your country someday. Especially now. Now it must be a very exciting place.”