8
I don’t tell Bill about the dreams, but he knows that something is strange, off, knows it as he has to shake me again and again in the night.
“Honey? It’s just a dream, honey, it’s just a dream, wake up.”
I wake into my life, whatever life I have. I’m sweating and panting. I look in the darkness at my husband who feels like an interloper now, someone who doesn’t belong here between me and my dreams, my memories. Who is this man with his bald head and soft belly? I push him away, rush to the toilet, vomit.
By day I function well enough. Sunlight and interactions with people bring me back to reality, what people call reality. Talking to Bill about the upcoming day, not mentioning the nighttime episodes. Pleasant with each other. A friendly kiss as he heads out the door, this one-time revolutionary, now a domesticated family man with coffee on his breath. Getting Gracie ready for school, packing her lunch—cheese sandwich, Oreos, carrot sticks, juice box. Getting her into the car and heading off to the pre-school. Dropping her off, then heading the ten blocks to the Cutts School and becoming for one more day Ms. Straw to groups of unruly middle-schoolers. Yet I like Ms. Straw, she’s comfortable, an easy and familiar persona I can step into and hide in. The children can’t imagine the nighttime Ms. Straw, don’t even know she exists. The feel of the bike seat on my bottom, the handlebar grips in my hands, the smooth road rolling by beneath me.
As autumn slides into winter the entire neighborhood seems to grow darker. Not the simple, obvious dark of seasonal change. Some other kind of dark, a dark I can’t define as I wrap a robe around myself in the morning and push my feet into my old slippers and pad out the front door to get the paper. It’s six-thirty in the morning and I can see dawn brightening the sky beyond the maple trees all around but somehow the light only seems to reinforce, to intensify the darkness it mirrors: rolled newspaper in hand I look around myself, at the familiar houses silhouetted against the morning, and feel as if there is some horrible secret looming here, some awful black nightmarish truth waiting to lean close to me and snatch me up, reveal itself to me, rip me to shreds. As if the shadows of the houses and the trees will come alive. I stand there in the driveway with my hair askew and a useless rolled newspaper in my hand, eyes wide, perspiration rolling down my face, my breath shallow. For an instant I see it, I know it, the doom that’s waiting, the darkness that’s approaching, ready to swallow me whole.
Again and again when I feel this despair, this panic, I find myself thinking of Connor Blue. Most of my students are blurs to me when I’m not standing before them, looking directly at them: I can’t remember their faces, not really. A smile maybe, a pretty set of eyes, but not the actual face, not the person. But as autumn drains into winter I notice Connor Blue appearing in my mind increasingly often, increasingly vividly. I can picture him quite well when he’s not around, even disturbingly well. I can’t remember ever having this feeling about a student, though it’s not really a feeling, it’s more a sensation. I simply don’t forget him as I forget the others. I can be making a snack for Gracie at the kitchen counter or vacuuming the living room carpet or driving to the supermarket or brushing my teeth and suddenly he’ll be there in my mind, as vivid as the kind of religious vision reported by the old prophets. The blonde, nearly white hair, the way it sticks up in back and falls down in front, covering his left eye so that he has to brush it back with his hand. His green eyes, their steady expectant gaze, the long black lashes over them. The cute little nose, oddly small for his face and flat. The little-boy freckles splashed over his pink cheeks. And the smile, maybe the smile most of all, his thin cherry lips, his front teeth very slightly protruding—he’ll probably end up with braces in a year or two—but very white, very even, very, yes, pretty. That’s the word for Connor Blue: Pretty. In a couple of years he won’t be. No boy is. He’ll get his growth spurt—right now Connor is barely five feet tall—and his features will begin to change, elongate, harden. His voice will start to creak and crack and suddenly one day it will be deeper, harsher, no longer a boy’s, high and fluty and insubstantial, but a man’s instead. The clarity of his youthful gaze will vanish to be replaced by a more reserved, knowing, suspicious look. The quick innocent smile will disappear into adolescent lassitude and cynicism. It’s a tragedy, really. It makes me understand why centuries ago the Italians favored castrati in their operas: to hold a boy just there, to not let him be corrupted by time or experience. Yes. And yet that would fail too: only their voices would remain pure, after all. The rest of them would still become men, inexorably, irretrievably.
The winter shadows deepen until it’s hardly light at all when I gather Gracie up to head to her pre-school in the mornings, hardly light at all by the time I finish with the after-school study group in the afternoons and go home. In fact it’s almost full dark. I see little light during my waking hours. Just little rectangles of it now and then during class, when I have a moment to look out. The way the buildings are situated much of the light is blocked, leaving me with the sense that the darkness is encroaching on me—into me—all the time. I function well enough. I teach perfectly adequately. I laugh with my students, I make jokes, I play around. I go where I’m supposed to go during the day, pick up Gracie when I need to, shop for dinner, greet Bill cordially, I’m agreeable to whatever sexual activity he suggests before sleep, say nothing about how distasteful I’ve begun to find his big, hairy body, his stubbly cheeks, his eternal coffee breath. The darkness is growing, inside me and outside. Inside like a cancer, outside like a truck grill slamming into me over and over again. I need light, purity, clarity, anything but this blooming winter darkness that seems to stifle and choke me.
9
Through all of this is Connor Blue and his sunshine smile and his old movies and his appreciation for anything I do for him no matter how small.
It occurs to me more than once that I have developed an unhealthy preoccupation with this boy, but I can’t think what to do except to try to forget it. I’ve been a model teacher for Connor these past months. I’ve helped him learn sentence structure and spelling. I’ve tutored him in his other subjects, especially math, where his grades are slowly improving. I’ve been a support system for Connor, a cheerleader, just as a good teacher should be. I have nothing to be embarrassed about or ashamed of regarding Connor Blue.
And yet I’ve begun to feel that I’m hiding something from people, that behind the smiling Mona Straw they know is a subterranean other, a strange girl-woman whose mind is filled with smoke and shadows and darkness. This alternate Mona, this private soul, begins to alarm me. She’s not unfamiliar—I’ve known her since I was a child—but something about her is becoming increasingly insistent, as if she were literally inside my body struggling to get out, to burst through my belly or climb up through my throat and take over my life, my family, me. For some time I don’t know what to do about it. I wake in the middle of the night from sweat-drenched dreams, I turn away from my husband, my body goes haywire with menstrual blood and diarrhea and vomit. I miss days of work due to illness, something Ms. Straw never does. Lying in bed the entire day, all alone—Bill gone, having taken Gracie to school himself—weird visions seem to play in my mind and along the walls of the bedroom as I fade in and out of wakefulness. I hear voices, male voices, some consoling, some accusing, none speaking words but rather just sounds, guttural dark man-sounds. Except Connor’s voice, which comes clear and sharp: You okay, Ms. Straw?