Reveries, Nightmares, and Dreams (Feldman)

March
My birthday comes—an inconvenient reminder of the misshapen state of our world. I should be on vacation. My older daughter should be on a plane home to attend her sister’s concert. My parents should be joining us for dinner. "Olympics Postponed" - reads the headline on my screen.

I am packing up my office essentials to start working remotely, not understanding yet that it will never be my office again, that my younger daughter’s concert will have no audience, that I won’t be seeing my older daughter for many months, that the pandemic will dissolve thirteen years of work for an organization I love in a vat of Covid politics.

For now the thoughts swarming in my head are about figuring out grocery shopping, a vet appointment for our aging pointer, Charlie, the extended spring break at our kid’s school.

Filling a banker’s box with folders and gadgets, I imagine the pandemic might subside by summer. My mind conjures a scene of a house party with our friends in print dresses and khaki shorts, oohing and aahing over my homemade Bailey’s milkshakes and bruschetta bites, talking over each other and petting the dog. I roll up the computer cables and give myself permission to envision the party as a celebration.

A tiny part of me—the one I keep buried like a dragon’s treasure—retrieves the mirage of having a literary agent. “Here’s what we’ll do,” this unicorn-muse-agent-creature says, the voice full of reassurance and inspiration. In a series of cinematic renderings, I am 1) at my desk, deep in the editorial process; 2) dancing around the kitchen when my manuscript is sold; 3) answering smart questions with graceful sensitivity on Fresh Air. “The publishing industry is hurting,” I hear my published self say. “I’m one of the lucky ones.” A knock on the door startles me back to reality. The fantasy fades.

On the drive home, I use the hands-free to talk to my husband. “We are safe. Our family is safe. We have everything,” we tell each other. I find an eastern European feast waiting for me in our dining room. Zucchini spread, chicken paprikash, chopped liver, mushroom ragout, even my mom’s famous layered Napoleon cake. Each container is labeled with sticky notes covered in my dad’s beautiful cursive. We eat over Facetime, connecting Boston and two suburbs of Cleveland in an awkward medley of cut-off sentences and partial faces.

July
Although it’s only been three weeks since the last time I walked in the park with my parents, life has taken on a new hue. Charlie can’t walk anymore. The white midsummer heat is my only companion now. My father hasn’t been able to overcome his fever. The red blotches on the interactive map, showing the spread of the virus, stir up images of blood. Turns out veterianrians make euthanasia house calls during pandemics.

When I sleep, the nightmare of being swallowed by an unmasked wedding crowd endowed with zombie determination, recycles in my restless brain with the same monochromatic persistence as the questions that haunt me when I am awake. I try to hide from them, to trap them in an empty cellar of my mind, to flush them down a deep well, but they jump from behind trees like the unchased squirrels in our yard; they claw their way out of envelopes with unemployment letters. Should I insist that my father go to the hospital? Could I have saved the dog, spent more money on treatments, given him more time to suffer? Why don’t I cry?

On the day my dad finally agrees to go, my mother can’t make the 911 call. I go to their house, make the call, say the rehearsed words to the kind dispatch woman who assures me that, with his symptoms, my father will be admitted. As the paramedics navigate the tight hallway to the bedroom, I stand on the balcony watching them through the glass like a cat burglar—a safe distance from my father’s illness and my mother’s panic.

“Ma’am,” one of the paramedics says to my mother, “D’you know there’s a lady on your balcony?”

At the hospital, none of the doctors know the exact reason behind my father’s pneumonia. His lungs look like they’re filled with shards of glass. The final consensus is, “It happens.”

Somewhere between the fever, the guilty soliloquies on the patch of grass where I held Charlie, and the meals prepared in the hopes that my mother will eat, an email comes. Dear Jacqueline, we are pleased to accept…

I cry then.

September
I’m on my way to teach a class at Tri-C. Pulling into the parking lot I realize I don’t know which building the class is in or what I’m teaching. There’s a vague awareness this isn’t real but I press on in search of my students. Inside the first door I open is, miraculously, my classroom. A dozen people stand in a circle, each with a puppy on a leash. A dream concocted from my years of teaching community college English, our neighbors’ unruly new puppy, and the hole left in my heart by Charlie’s parting. I am grateful it’s not the zombie wedding. “Dogs thrive in a predictable environment of order,” I inform my spectral students, taking my time to play with the balls of fur. Dream or not, I need this.

In the morning, I walk through our dining room, which now looks like a dance studio. When we bought the house, we had pledged to get rid of the '70s mirrored wall and the tropical wallpaper, but as these things often go, after a year or two we stopped noticing them. When our daughter’s dance rehearsals moved to Zoom, my husband built a ballet barre and we moved the dining table into the living room. With the wall of mirrors, our kid has an enviable home studio. The living room hasn’t been spared either. A music stand donated by a Cleveland Orchestra friend stands by the bookcases. Sheet music is scattered over the couch and floor and, as I head into the kitchen, our daughter rests her cello to her shoulder, tunes into her virtual orchestra class and fills our house with “Eye Of The Tiger.”

I take my coffee out to the garden. The ichiban eggplant looks ready. It’ll be a flatbread with eggplant and mozzarella night. My daughter calls from Boston while she walks. We make plans—careful not to promise each other too much—for her and her boyfriend to visit in October. After sending off another resume, I bake two honey cake loaves, pack up the groceries my husband picked up during senior shopping hours and head to my parents’ house.

We talk through the fabric of our masks, our voices traveling over the threshold of the open door. The sound of the oxygen concentrator fills the hall. “How was your night?” I ask.

“We slept.” My mother sounds like she also can breathe. “Dad ate his breakfast in the kitchen today.” She places a pot of matzoh ball soup on the floor and backs away. “Next year will be better,” we say.

On the drive home, my phone dings. It’s my California cousin. Loved your story. Will I ever stop crying?

My daughter requests a duck for Rosh Hashanah dinner. While it roasts, I simmer the orange glaze and send off another resume. After the meal, we sit shoulder to shoulder to fit on the screen, showing off our honey cake, and scraping together things to laugh about.

The news comes as we raise our glasses. Another layer of grief. It will take me half a dozen mournful tweets, a weepy embrace from my husband, a streamed vigil on the Supreme Court steps, to make room—somewhere between rage and despair—for this new sadness.

When it’s late and we’ve run out of feelings, my daughter plops on the couch next to me. “Star Trek time?” she asks. The old episode comforts us with scaly green villains who lose at the end. We make fun of the sexist uniforms that she calls outfits. My husband teases us about being geeky, takes his poetry books and heads upstairs.

For the first time since I was thirteen, I have no job but so much work. I don’t know what tomorrow will look like, except that it will not look like yesterday. I let my mind wander, and then I write, and I dream.

Jaccqueline Feldman holds an MA in English. She lives and works in Cleveland, Ohio, where she also serves as Programming Committee Chair on the Board of Literary Cleveland. When not writing short stories, Jacqueline is querying agents for her debut novel, Ten Days Until Tomorrow. You can find her on @JFeldmanAuthor