Citrus and Sandalwood

Citrus and Sandalwood

I.

Step One: Calm yourself. Sit quietly in a chair. Do not move. Focus on your breathing.

Step Two: Visualize a door you have stepped through before. It can be any size or shape or color. A note: take great care that the target door is not one that is associated with deep pain, emotional upheaval, or regret.

Step Three: Remember what you see, on the other side of the door. Write out what you can remember of your dream dance and mail to POB 333, Tucson, AZ, 85731-2581. Manuscripts will not be returned.

II.

Donna, after you left, I lost that brave face and fell to pieces in that grease-stained armchair you always hated for me to sit and smoke in. I went out for a carton of orange juice, and I thought about that way you looked when you were leaving with the kids like you knew the three of you would get through somehow. I could imagine you at your mother’s, lying to Finn and Julie that I would be along soon, but also feeling better with me gone. Lord knows your mother would. And meanwhile, I would be here, smoking cigarettes in the chair and sitting up all night with the boys from the shop, dirty from the work on transmissions, marking the walls with grime, sleeping on the sofa where we four; Julie and Finn and you and I once watched family-night movies together.

Most nights, it was me and the boys eating bowls of cold spaghetti in the kitchen, where I used to come behind you and make you dance with me while Celia Cruz played on our hi-fi. The boys would say, they will be back. But the other night I woke up on the itchy shag floor in the living room before the boys did. I could see something there beneath the sofa, that black notebook your grandmother gave you for story writing before she passed; the one with the rhinestone moth piece on it. You were so careful never to let me read from it, always quick to say the stories inside were not ready. When I saw it there shining and holding the light, I knew you were never coming back.

III.

After that, I would go out driving the dark wet streets looking for you. I had bills coming due and the bank kept sending men out to ask about the house. It still smelled like you in there, citrus and sandalwood. I stopped sleeping. You know I had always been too light a sleeper for dreaming. Instead, I drove from sundown to that deep morning when it started to get cold. Then, I’d come back and sit in that stained armchair in front of the set until morning, shaving oranges into long spiral peels, waiting for first light. Oranges and spaghetti were the only appetite I had left.

What was worse; I got used to watching late at night Public Access. It was a call-in show offering advice and a chance at a cash drawing on every first Friday. The host, Camille, was Romani. I had heard about them my whole life but did not know they were a nomadic people. Turns out that, for most of human history, they wandered; belonging wherever they settled, demonized as outcasts and scapegoats by kings for their coming and going. Their children were kidnapped, and their names changed until they did not know who they were anymore. I bet they still knew they were wanderers deep inside. Camille had small eyes that seemed dreamy and always half-closed. But when she got a caller, she always treated it full-serious.

I was amazed with her patience! Her little switchboard, occasionally full of profane crank callers, would light up and she took every call unscreened; sitting very still and poised while listening to each of them. The callers came in all types, spilling it to Camille on the air, soaking up this television stranger’s advice. I did too. I do not have much patience for advice, but Camille’s advice seemed reasonable. For people in long drag-out fights with lovers, it was always: “Focus on the root of why you have distanced yourself in the first place.” For people who needed to make a choice, it was: “No choice will be the right one until you got ‘clear.’” Getting ‘clear’ always seemed to be the trick at the center of everything. I did not know how that might work, but I knew you would like the show. I wanted to call you and tune you to her station but never knew what I would say if I got you on the phone.

On first Fridays, Camille always got a lot of angry calls. At the start of those shows, she rolled a transparent safe that was filled-up with a pile of green and white cash onto her carpeted stage and hosted the show while sitting in front of it. The safe did not seem very sturdy, I knew from the way it smudged and wobbled beneath the stage lights that it was likely simple plastic. Still, the way the money inside was dirty and crumpled, you could tell it was real bills, mostly Jeffersons—the grand prize, twenty-thousand dollars. It was a great way to get callers. It made us all nuts. Money like that could change things for me. A contest like that—a person had to pay attention.

I had never won anything but you and the kids, and even that you put in the lions’ share of work. This one seemed easy but impossible for someone like me. According to the rules, all you had to do was sit in the chair, and breathe, and dream about a door—any door would do. Callers would dial in asking for clarifications, “What kind of door? What color? Is a dream dance a religious experience?” But Camille never gave up any hints or strategies. Sitting there watching, I got to thinking it was one of those puzzles that got harder the more you thought about it. I was never much of a dreamer or a dancer for that matter, but I know you always wished I were.

I usually turned off the set around first light and slept until noon, but that night I sat in our grease-stained chair with the room going pink with dawn. I had a little bit to drink. Not so much that it would black me out, just enough to settle me. Do you remember that drink you used to mix? Those nights after Finn finally knocked out, when we would sit around the dinner table talking and laughing, not believing our luck for the life we had managed; you’d pour grenadine over the back of a spoon. Tequila Sunrise? I breathed in and out a long time, my own humming body, like the sound of the surf. I thought of our beach days. I breathed. I thought of your mother’s door coming into view. Your smile in the beveled strip, blurry through the glazed glass.

IV.

When I go to your mother’s door, I am hoping to surprise you with my new clothes, my working car and shaved face, but judging from the estate’s cliff-faced view to the Pacific, my twenty-thousand cash pay-out is just a single drop. It is years later, and we are both getting fatter and losing our hair. You are kinder to me than you have to be. I can see that now. Your mother comes out into the sun. She greets me gray but still with a firm handshake, insisting you give me a tour of the grove. This wide-open space of fruit suits you, but I can see the discomfort in your smile—like the trees’ tight lines, their simple promise of harvest only come after years of unseen labor.

We take your husband’s coupe between the rows of grove trees; that smell of sharp citrus and the tilled taste of wet dirt. Overhead, the arch of sprinklers makes damp rainbows for us. We glow in that dream light and it breaks my heart to see the two of us glowing. What can I do but laugh with you? Lord knows I owe you the laughs. When you stop, we sit surveying the spread, breathing easy and in rhythm. You tell me,

“Sometimes I like to think of the leaves as waves moving all around me, like a deep ocean rising over me, ready to swallow me up until I’m in the deep dark where I can finally feel peaceful.”

“You are a nut,” I say.

I love the way it dimples your cheeks in a blocked chortle.

Donna, if we had been here even just ten years ago, I might have walked with my bare feet in the black dirt with you. I could have picked ripe fruit off a tree and pared it into long spilling spirals. We could get lost for a while in the smell of your hair, sharing oranges, tangling up our sticky fingers. But you turn your hands backward on your hips while I get out.

I can hear you have gone serious; we are almost out of time. Your face, like the light, is a clock I do not want to see, so I avoid looking. I take off my linen jacket, fold it gentle into the backseat. I cut one of the exotic cigars my father used to roll in a factory. I smoke it until I cannot smell you anymore or see your face behind the scrim of curling wisps. You say,

“I’d like to go back now,”

“So would I.” I say.

“Why did you come? Doesn’t it hurt?”

But when I show you the black notebook with the moth relief, you press it back into my hands. I cannot hear what you are saying. But they are smooth tones; words I do not know, but it sounds good and soft to me. When I wake up, inside me everything feels good and soft. And now that I have put it down in your grandmother's notebook I do not know if I can tear out this page or even mail it away. You are the first dream I have ever remembered. I guess it makes sense you would be the first one that I would have to give away.