Me and My Baby View the Eclipse (15 page)

“Listen, Mama,” he says suddenly. “You remember Mr. Joyner?”

“Who?”

“Mr. Joyner, you know, my history teacher from last year. You met him at the end of school when you came over to see the concert.”

“No, I don't believe I do,” says Melanie, who can't recall even hearing the name before, of course she was busy last spring, what with Stan and the guys from WHIT.

“Well, now he's gotten a divorce, and he came up to me in the hall and asked me what my mother was doing these days.”

Melanie just stares at him. A high school history teacher is not really her idea of a good time. “How old is he?” she asks.

“About forty-five.” Sean lights a cigarette, he's been smoking since he was twelve, she can't do a thing with him really. “He's real nice, Mama, sort of an ex-hippie.”

“Too old,” Melanie says flatly, because no matter what anybody says, she's not over the hill yet. She can get somebody sports-minded and cute if she can harness her subconscious long enough to do it, but Sean stares at her through the smoke. “Maybe you could just talk to him sometime, Mama,” he says, and she says, “Maybe so.”

That night Melanie dreams that she is in a supermarket where a lot of men are for sale and Margery Cooper Boyd is working the cash register. She says to Melanie in a Northern voice, “Take your pick, half-price today only, all sales are final.” So in the morning Melanie dresses very carefully for work, the yellow dress with the black patent belt, the black patent shoes, she knows this dream is prophetic.

And sure enough, when he comes bouncing past Linens N' Things that morning, Bobby gives her a big wink. His intentions are perfectly clear.

“I saw that,” says Grace, right behind her, and Melanie just can't resist, she tells Grace that actually she caused that wink herself, by harnessing her subconscious. Grace asks if this is some kind of new diet or what, and Melanie says, “No, silly, don't you remember my dream book? I've learned to interpret my dreams,” but Grace turns up her nose and says Melanie ought to get a grip on herself, she ought to go to a doctor, it might be PMS. Grace's big blue eyes are watering the way they do when she thinks she's on to something. Melanie looks at her carefully. “Why, Grace!” she says suddenly, “I believe you're jealous!” As soon as she says it, she knows it's true. It's been true probably for years, only she never realized it before because she wasn't listening to her heart, she wasn't going with her instincts. Right now Grace is especially jealous because Melanie can interpret dreams, but not too jealous to hang around later while Renée tells Melanie what she dreamed last night. It was all in color, which proves Renée is very intelligent, according to Mrs. Boyd.

Renée says she dreamed she was supposed to go out to dinner with her boyfriend so she got all dressed up. She wore a red dress. In this dream she did her hair and then painted her nails and then her toenails, it seemed to take forever the way things sometimes do in dreams, and she was so hungry, she kept looking at the clock. Seven o'clock, eight o'clock, nine o'clock and still he didn't come, she was starving, she'd done her nails about seven times. Then finally at ten o'clock she realized that she'd been stood up and so she went to the refrigerator and got a frozen pepperoni pizza and put it in the oven to cook for dinner.

“Then what?” asked Melanie.

“What do you mean, ‘what'?” says Renée. “That's
it
, honey. That's the end of the dream.” It's not much of a dream, and Renée knows it. “I don't care if you like it or not,” she says, all huffy. “It's
my
dream anyway.”

“No, no, it's fine, Renée, I just need to concentrate on my interpretation, that's all.” Melanie is getting nervous now because Grace and Deborah Green and Mrs. Small, the bookkeeper, have all gathered around to listen.

“Look up ‘Dinner,'” says Grace, “or maybe ‘Pizza,'” but there's no listing for either one.

“Oh, honestly!” Deborah Green acts like she knows it all. “The meaning is perfectly obvious. Renée is afraid her relationship's nearly over. She's afraid he's losing interest or something.”

“
Roy?
” snorts Renée. “Roy is doing anything
but
losing interest.”

“Maybe that's just what
you
think,” Deborah says, which starts a big commotion that allows Melanie some time to consult Mrs. Boyd and think about Renée's dream. The interpretation, when it comes to her, is very serious. So she doesn't tell Renée until lunchtime, when she can catch her alone at Orange Julius.

“Renée, I'm afraid I have some bad news for you.” Melanie is very formal. “I believe you're pregnant.”

“No way I'm pregnant,” Renée says, but her pretty eyes go wider, darker.

“You better find out,” Melanie tells her, “because my book says that if a woman dreams of putting something in an oven, it means she is expressing a fear that she is pregnant or that she will become pregnant, or a desire to do so.”

“Lord,” Renée says. “I've got a tipped uterus, anyway.”

“Well I'd find out if I was you,” Melanie says. “It might be your subconscious trying to tell you something.” Then Melanie's just standing there drinking her Orange Julius when Bobby comes by in a white terry-cloth jogging suit and introduces himself. He asks about business in the mall and whether she likes it here, and whether she runs.

“Runs?” Melanie says.

“You know, jog,” says Bobby. “I just got in a new shipment of ladies' running clothes today.”

“Oh yes, yes I do,” says Melanie, who doesn't but plans to now.

“Well, I'd better get back to business,” Bobby says. “Nice to meet you, see you around.”

That night Melanie tells Sean that she is not a bit interested in meeting his ex–history teacher. She goes to bed early and dreams that she and Bobby are on a vacation in a tropical wonderland someplace like Hawaii, that they go swimming in the warm blue ocean and then they take a walk through a grove of orange trees and Bobby reaches up and picks some oranges which they eat and then they go dancing and so many men keep cutting in that Bobby gets jealous and makes her leave, but then her alarm goes off before she gets to the good part. It's a big rush to get Sean some breakfast and put on her makeup and concentrate on this dream, plus they are out of coffee. Melanie skims the book, Sean gets picked up by some of his friends in a hearse. Basically, water means sex and oranges mean breasts, so it's pretty clear what is going to happen next. Melanie wears her turquoise slacks and her turquoise and white sweater with the diamond pattern, just in case she sees him.

So she's late to work, but once she gets there it's very exciting because Renée runs in all happy and tells everybody that it's true, she
is
pregnant, she took the early pregnancy test last night, and that's not all either, her and Roy are engaged! Renée is glowing she's so happy, and Melanie is so happy for her.

But now it seems like everybody has a dream to tell her, suddenly she's famous in Linens N' Things. In fact Mr. Rolette speaks real sharp to her about it, which oddly enough reminds Melanie of another dream she had last night, it just pops back into her head all of a sudden, a dream that Mr. Rolette's house, the two-story colonial on Cedar Street where Mr. and Mrs. Rolette host the Christmas party every year, suddenly disappeared while she and Grace were walking up the driveway to it, carrying a covered dish. When Melanie tells Mr. Rolette this dream, he gets very mad at her and almost shouts, “Melanie, I think you ought to do this on your own time, it's very disruptive.” Mr. Rolette has been nervous lately.

On Wednesday, everybody knows why. Mr. Rolette isn't there, but he has called Mrs. Small and said he will not be coming in for a while due to psychological factors. Mrs. Rolette has left him. When he got home last night, he found the note. And Mrs. Small, after she gathers them all together and tells them this, stares hard at Melanie. “Now how did you know?” she asks, and everybody else looks at Melanie too like there's something wrong with her, except Grace who has the morning off. Melanie spends the morning worrying whether she ought to go with her instincts so much or not, and whether Bobby is ever going to ask her out or if she ought to just go ahead and bite the bull by the horns and go up to Bobby's Sport right now and give him the opportunity.

Then Grace comes in and tells Melanie she needs to talk to her privately, so they go to the ladies' and lock the door. Grace has circles under her eyes. She has not looked too good lately. She's had this dream, she says, over and over again, and Melanie says, “Then it's probably significant.” Grace smokes a Merit cigarette while she tells it. In the dream, Grace and Gene are in their living room and Gene is sitting at his desk paying the bills—“You know how worried he gets over money,” Grace says, and Melanie nods—but after a little while his pen runs out of ink and he gets mad and throws it down on the floor. Then Grace brings him another pen and it happens again, several times. Then she wakes up.

Melanie flips through her book, past Owl, Park, and Peach. She pauses before she reads Pen out loud to Grace.

“Well, what does it say?” Grace is impatient, trying to see over Melanie's shoulder, but the light is bad in the ladies'.

“‘Pens are phallic symbols representing the male organ,'” Melanie reads. “‘If a man dreams of having a pen that has run out of ink, he may be expressing fears of impotency or that he is sterile.'”

“Well, I didn't know it was a
dirty
dream!” Grace says.

Melanie laughs. “Oh, Grace, it's not, it's all in your subconscious anyway, it says the same thing about guns and nails and pencils and cucumbers.”

“
Cucumbers?
” Grace is furious. “I don't have to listen to this kind of dirty stuff,” she says, leaving, pushing Melanie aside.

Melanie freshens her lipstick before coming out of the ladies', she can't see why Grace is so mad, Grace is her best friend, maybe Grace has got PMS. Melanie goes back over to the bath aisle where she's supposed to be pricing the merchandise, and finds a man there waiting for her.

“Mrs. Willis?” he says.

Melanie takes one look at him—at his longish thinning gray hair and his horn-rimmed glasses and his antique blue jeans and his tweed jacket with the patches on the elbow—and knows he's not there to pick out a shower curtain. She knows immediately who he is, Sean's ex–history teacher, Mr. Joyner. Mr. Joyner says he's been meaning to get in touch with her. He'd like to buy her a cup of coffee sometime soon and talk over Sean's future. He says Sean really ought to go to college and there is plenty of scholarship aid available if you apply in time and the right way. Melanie gives him a big smile. So this is all about Sean basically, it would be great if Sean went on to college which she hasn't thought too much about, she somehow thought he'd go straight into rock and roll. “I think it's real nice of you to be so interested,” she says, and then Mr. Joyner makes a move. He steps closer and says, “I am interested. I'm very interested,” in a significant way, and then he says, “Let's make it dinner.”

“Well, I don't know.” Melanie backs into the towels. Mr. Joyner's dark quick eyes make her uncomfortable. It's like he can see straight into her mind. He's grinning at her, he has a nice wide-open grin, she likes that in a man. “I'll call you,” he says. Then he's gone, off down the mall, he's wearing Hush Puppies. Hush Puppies! Melanie would rather die than go out with a sixties person, they never have any money, and they're so old.

She's so upset she decides to walk right on up to Bobby's Sport and tell Bobby she's interested in his new line of women's running outfits so she does, she doesn't even tell anybody in Linens N' Things where she's going, who cares, Grace is mad at her and Mr. Rolette is at home having a nervous breakdown.

Bobby's Sport is neat and clean. It even
smells
new, like paint. What Melanie needs is a new start in life and a new running suit like this pink velour one. “How much?” she asks the girl, meanwhile looking and looking for Bobby, who doesn't seem to be anyplace around. “Eighty-nine ninety-five,” the girl says, “but it'll last forever, I run in mine every day.” This girl is wearing a white tennis outfit now so you can see her small firm breasts and her tight butt and the muscles in her arms and legs, men don't like too many muscles. She's very young, with a plain, friendly face. “You'll need to try it on,” she says. “You might take a Large in that one.”

Well! Melanie starts to say, who has never taken a Large in anything yet, but here comes Bobby suddenly, all smiles.

“I see you girls are getting acquainted,” he says. “Linda, this is Melanie Willis, who works in Linens N' Things. Melanie, this is my fiancée, Linda Lewis.”

“So pleased to meet you,” Melanie says. Then she doesn't remember what she says next or how she gets out of that store, Bobby can just go to hell, suddenly she's out in the mall again and there's poor Mr. Slemp in front of Bobby's Sport looking so sad, looking the way she feels. She knows he's out there mourning Mrs. Slemp and thinking about all those years when Bobby's Sport was Pottery World.

“Why, Mr. Slemp, how are you?” Melanie makes a big effort, she feels so blue. Mr. Slemp looks terrible. He has egg stains on his white shirt.

“Well actually, Melanie, I'm pretty lonely,” Mr. Slemp says, he sort of spits when he talks, in a very unattractive way, it's some kind of speech defect. “And I've been wondering if you'd care to come over and watch a movie on the VCR sometime.”

Without one word Melanie turns and runs back to Linens N' Things, past Orange Julius and The Potted Plant and The Christmas Shoppe and News and Notions and The Casual Male, suddenly she can't even breathe anymore, too much is happening too fast.