Dreamer : Intermission

By Sand Pilarski

** Intermission: A Summary of Dreamer **

"All I want to do in life is live each day as it comes, with whatever it brings, and try to appreciate how beautiful the world is," I told my mother when she asked me what my plans were for the future. I was sixteen, and had just received my driver's license, and the summer seemed golden and full of promise.

"How can you be that irresponsible?" shrieked my mother, jarring me out of the pleasant clouds of idealism. "Don't be so selfish! You owe it to the world to make something of yourself instead of just lying around taking handouts! Honestly, if I didn't keep you on track, you'd never grow up!"

She kept me on track, all right, and I did well in school because that was on her track for me, and went to college on track, and took science courses that I hated because a liberal arts degree was not on her track. Fortunately a full state scholarship had been on her track as well, so I didn't really owe her the money to go to school, although she reminded me that coming home summers was just paying me to lie around and do nothing. I had a secret track of my own, and every semester, I sneaked in an accounting course, so that when I graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in Chemistry, I was able to immediately land a job in Modesto with an accounting firm. Mother was furious, having had visions of me going on to become a doctor or famous researcher, of course, but I was now beyond her reach and control. Sully Ambris the Accountant, not Dr. Solange Ambris, Rocket Scientist.

In the tiny apartment that my wages bought, I was able to return to that teenaged dream of just living and loving each day, and trying to be a good person. In the eyes of my family, being an accountant was a boring, no-future job; that was sad to hear but I liked seeing numbers add up perfectly, finding and fixing mistakes in the clients' books. I liked being just an everyday kind of girl.

Maybe that was because my nights were so extraordinary. For as long as I could remember, my dreams were vividly colored adventures that I would remember clearly after I woke. Early on I learned to control my dreaming, so that I feared no nightmare; I was able to feel my surroundings in the dreams, so that each unconscious scenario seemed as real as the mounds of papers on my desk at work or the feeling of rain on my face in springtime. If I liked my job as an accountant, I loved my nights as a dreamer.

And no, I never talked to my mother about my dreams, not since I was little and scared of dreams of monsters and she told me to stop carrying on and go say my prayers. That I would do, fervently, praying that I wouldn't have any more frightening dreams. Perhaps a large part of my faith in God stemmed from having that prayer answered so decisively. I ended my days with a prayer for good dreams and began each day with a quick "Thank you" (often grinning while I whispered it) for the wonder and delight of the images that had come to me.

I had been afraid, and prayed, and was saved from my fears and was grateful for the rescue. That's what they call a conversion experience, all right. I wanted to stick to that God character -- He was a good friend to have. Besides, the God of my Catholic spirituality didn't mind at all my life's goal to appreciate living one day at a time.

All things serve the Lord, they say. Would it take my entire life to figure out how my marriage to Adam served the Lord's purposes? At first I thought he was the Grand Prize God's Gift to Sully, for he was the most gorgeous man I ever saw in my entire life. Tall, blonde, broad-shouldered, tanned, voice like honey dripping off hot obsidian; sexy but somehow sweetly innocent, as focused with desire on me as I was on him. He made my knees tremble. He made my heart do backflips. He was more entrancing than any dream lover that I could have imagined.

"He's a trucker!" my mother screeched at me when I told her that Adam and I were engaged, as though being a truck driver was on a par with pickpockets who target the elderly at Christmastime. "You're going to regret this, what were you thinking, why do you have to marry a loser?"

There's no way to explain how annoyed I was, remembering her judgment of him, after I found out that the beautiful and sexy Adam couldn't seem to keep in mind that marriage had included a vow of fidelity. At first I was sad. Then I was angry. Then a friend asked me, "Would you miss him if he was gone?" The answer, of course, was yes, I would miss him as though my heart was ripped out. To never make love to him again? To never again laugh at his silliness when he was home and feeling impish? To lose forever the chance to lean back against him with his arms around me while we stood on the beach on vacation? You wouldn't believe how easy it was just to pretend I didn't notice what a cheater he was, how easy it was to fall back on my religion and say, "What's done is done, what God has joined together, let not man put asunder." I decided to believe that marriage is forever, no matter what, and that one day Adam would settle down and see that his faithfully loving wife was his perfect match and mate.

Right up until the day he divorced me, because I was about 35 and getting a little too old for his plans, whatever they were. I never saw it coming, and couldn't believe that he wouldn't one day show up on my doorstep and tell me he'd made a terrible mistake, and would I take him back? On that day I would smile at him and say, "I'm still your wife, Adam, and always will be."

My sister Jesse was as disgusted at my continued longing for Adam as my mother was, and that's saying a lot. Mom and Jesse had never gotten along well, in spite of the fact that Jesse became an archeologist and world traveler, married just about the richest man in the state, and went on to earn her doctorate while still working in the field and having five kids. I could see a lot of our mother's iron will in Jesse, not that I'd ever tell her that. Jesse would do and would think what Jesse chose to do and think, and no one would say her nay. Her adoring husband indulged her completely, even encouraging her to pursue her excavations around the world while he stayed at home with the kids and piles of money. He was a terrific guy, and encouraged me, the loser Auntie, to be close to the children and have a part in their upbringing.

After Adam left, I'd have had a miserable life without those children. I loved them as though they were mine, and never could understand how Jesse could spend so much time away from them. I taught them to dream like I did, and loved hearing their enthusiastic stories of where they'd been and what they'd done in their sleep.

Where my early family experience had been frustrating, wearisome, and resigned much of the time, what I found with Jesse's kids was comforting, rejuvenating, and joyous. They filled the emptiness left by Adam's departure. And if my relationships with my mother and sister had been detached, the neighbors I came to know in my new house in Riverton became as close as blood kin ought to be: I really wished that Bodie and Andersol, the twins who lived on one side, were my brother and sister; and Mary LeMay, the cheerful older woman on the other side -- why couldn't she have been my mother? Bodie and Andersol and I went river rafting and camping, dancing and drinking together (not infrequently telling people that we were triplets); Mary became my confidante and role model with her unjudgmental kindness and her faithfulness to her dead husband's memory.

My days had slipped into a wonderful rhythm of once again living each day as it came, loving the sunrises and sunsets, waking and sleeping to a dream come true.

Then came what Jesse and I were one day to call "The Year Everybody Died." In the spring, our father was killed in a car accident, and all we had left were a few photographs, our memories of him, and our mother's silhouette. As her widowhood commenced, I began to see how much Dad's life had given her form and color, purpose and reflection. The stories of her life with Dad began to fit, like pieces of a puzzle, into who she had been and what she had done with her strengths and talents. Mom hadn't been more than distantly involved with Jesse or me; she'd hated Adam as passionately as I loved him, and Jesse's husband and kids, with their wealth and social contacts, were like incomprehensible freaks of nature to her. We gave no substance to our mother; she had no real need of us at all. And so, when Death met my father's car, my mother's essence began to drain away, slowly at first, and then quickly, until there was nothing left but the empty shrunken shell she left behind on her chair in the living room.

Jesse and I would have to learn to see each other differently -- and discover what people we were without the background scenery of our parents.

End of Intermission

Dreamer resumes next week with Chapter XXX.