She says, come down to the lake to swim, and I do so, dutiful as I always have been. But in place of a lake is a sea of grass—porcupine grass, little bluestem, side oats grama, wild rye, switchgrass, laced through with coneflower and spiderwort and scarlet mallow. At first, I started to walk through the field while overhead killdeer and crows spiraled then fell, spiraled then fell.
No goddammit, swim, she said. I looked at my fingers, such clumsy fingers, fingers that could never draw a straight line, cut with scissors, or undue the hook on a bra. I don’t think I can use these fingers, I say.
She wasn’t listening. My mother had always been a wonderful listener. Now that she was dead and only a part of my dreams, mother had a bit of a foul mouth and didn’t listen well. In the distance, hillocks of green and a vibrant purple sky. A steady breeze was shaking the crowns of trees and undulating through the grass. I noted this, then my fingers again, my useless fingers not made for water or grass. I needed lessons in everything.
It was my father who’d taken me to swim lessons. We only spent a month with father each year during the summer. He’d moved away when I was very young, before I could even say dada. Father used to take us to the pool in the early morning, the stinging scent of chlorine, light scattering across the water. I dreaded the lessons, the shock of cold water, my genitals retreating. Back then, as now, I was a terrible swimmer. I’d flail my arms and legs, hacking at the water as though mere effort and not skill would keep me afloat.
Where was father? I asked.
Not here. He’s off with that whore of a second wife, she answered.
I didn’t mean in the dream, mother, I said. I meant at swim lessons. I can’t seem to remember where he was while his children swam.
My mother was in the distance now, a pair of hawks were dive-bombing the grass, trying to rip mice from warm nests, small corridors of chlorophyll where they’d been sleeping away the day. Mother doesn’t seem to mind, her long arms, lily-white, glide through the grass. She’s on her back, looking up into the vainglorious clouds, which look like dogs, cats, Neptune, and sometimes the face of a horse, then startlingly, the body.
I’m frozen in the field though, no longer dutiful. My mind is occupied with the thought of where father was during swim lessons. In short, where was my absent father even when he was there? It seems my mind had created a second absence I couldn’t account for. But perhaps this is just faulty memory and needn’t be chalked up to anything more. For instance, what to make of this dream mother who says, cock, fuck, shit. But who also sometimes likes to walk down the broad avenues of Paris, commenting on the flower pots, and certain pleasing wooden doors.
Finally, perhaps sensing that I will be waking soon, I take a tentative swing with my right arm and the grasses part like water. I find myself lifted up, buoyed by the wood lilies and prairie clover, held close by sand reed and bluestem. Mother was right, but I keep it to myself.
Of course, I’m right, you asshole, mother says, reading my thoughts.
And though my mother wouldn’t have said it, I begin to see, in my dream mother, a glimpse of the woman she might have been as one sees a city, sometimes, through the eyes of a stranger as elegant instead of maudlin.
After the swim, when we’d reached the other side of the grass, we sat beneath a yew tree filled with large spiders. The spiders, though terrifying, were polite, bumping into one another and saying, pardon monsieur, and then scrambling around through the branches bumping into one another time and again, such that above us was a chorus of pardons.
What if? I asked
Stop asking the wrong questions, she answered.
I wondered what the right questions were. What they would have been for either of my parents when they’d still been alive. The truth is that I’d asked them and been unsatisfied with the answers. I held their lives to a different standard than my own. For in my life, I was also often unsatisfied with the answers I gave.
A worm was crawling along the edge of a log and several spiders sprang into action, spinning him round in threads of silk, but all the time, very politely asking if he was comfortable and apologizing for what was about to take place.
Why are you telling this story, she asked.
At first, I thought I’d defend myself by reminding her that it was a dream, not a story.
But why this dream, she asked.
I intended this dream to be about father and how once he watched me in a little league game, and I made an error. He’d driven four hours to see me, and I let a ball skip through into the outfield and how I’d cried and cried beneath the low curled bill of my hat. And how men, most men at least, don’t really touch each other. And how when you ask a male friend if they want to do something, there always has to be a sporting event going on, or an activity, and it makes me sad, I said, to think that you always have to have a reason to spend time with another man other than just enjoying their company.
My mother pointed out that my dream had gone awry. She said it very tenderly though as if she was sad to see such a heartfelt thought about the emptiness of masculinity go to waste.
Andrew Bertaina's short story collection One Person Away From You (2021) won the Moon City Press Fiction Award (2020). His work has appeared in The Threepenny Review, Witness Magazine, Redivider, Orion, and The Best American Poetry and notable at Best American Essays 2020. He has an MFA from American University in Washington, DC.
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