Stephanie Friedman

I Want the Copy that Dreams

Jean felt nettled for no reason she could name, a prickling just beneath her skin. Usually, a few hours in the library would soothe her like a session in an immersion tank. Today, she could not block out the chattering students who broke the seamless silence into staccato bursts, their conversations about hookups and house parties ruffling whatever placidity might have settled over her. She set down her pile of books with more of a bang than she had intended, and began to sort what she would take home from what she would leave behind.

A photocopy of an old photograph poked out of the recycling bin. She pulled it loose. A boy, about nine years old, walked along a narrow dirt path through a field of corn stubble. The landscape around him was open and treeless, the sky broken only by two thin clouds. He wore a dark cardigan with three white stripes on the upper part of each sleeve, jeans cuffed wide, and sneakers of the old dime store variety, dark canvas with three white stripes. His light hair was cut close to his head. His lowered face was half in shadow. He looked down at the ground as he walked, but not because he was looking for something there. He looked down because he was looking inward. That was how he appeared.

I want the copy that dreams. Someone had cut these words out and affixed them to the photograph before copying it. Some undergraduate attempt at art. Jean fingered the photocopy for a moment. The boy’s body was blurry, his posture drawn down toward a point that was not there. She could cup the shadowed curve of his face in her hand. No one was watching her. She slipped the photocopy into a folder, and took it home.

* * *

As she pushed into the sun porch she had converted into an office, Jean’s tote bag caught on the wooden folding door. She fumbled it free, then cracked her knee against the girl’s dressing table she used as a desk. The table had been an indulgence, but she loved the lines of it, the worn keyhole, the places where the mahogany veneer had split away. Sunlight filled the room with the idea of bright warmth, despite the chill that slipped in around the window frames. Once she settled her body into the available space, she would be fine.

Jean was an appraiser. She had always had an affinity for things. In graduate school, more than one well-meaning professor had tried to steer her away from the decorative arts toward a true artistic medium like painting or sculpture. She would not be swayed. She delighted in the slope of a handle, in blue glaze against white porcelain. What painting could fit cool and smooth into your hand?

Now, she went to estate sales and secondhand shops, where she sorted through clutter discarded by efficient nieces and impatient grandchildren, mementos with no one to give them context and meaning anymore. She bought them, studied them, and passed them to others, who would start the cycle of possession and meaning again. All she wanted was the chance to regard the object, to lift it up and come to know it. Salesmanship did not interest her. Thankfully, she had enough connections with dealers to get by, and eBay took care of the rest.

She took up the manila folder where the photocopy nestled among the other papers, as if it were a photograph or a print to be protected from creasing or undue exposure to light. She even handled it along the edges with her fingertips. Silly, she knew, but she did it all the same.

Those last months at the auction house, whispers had skittered at the edge of her attention, but she remained focused on the objects before her. Then a smooth-faced woman, gleaming with sympathy, came to tell her that the acquiring firm wanted the stock and the clients, but not the staff. Of course, they would honor her retirement benefits. Surely she had been planning to retire soon anyway.

“Oh,” was all Jean could say. She remained seated at her workstation, only half-turned from her computer. The woman seemed to grow annoyed, as if she expected some response that Jean did not know how to offer. After the woman walked away, Jean reimmersed herself in the task at hand. It had been all she could think to do.

The boy in the blurry photograph had been caught at the full extent of his stride, walking and dreaming, moving over the ground. Jean loved to stride along the sidewalk, losing herself in the noises rising around her like a fugue, although she could not remember the last time she had felt a part of that music, rather than a venue for the clash of her own thoughts, as she walked.

She could feel the sun heating the thatch of hair on the boy’s head and the cool wind whispering against his cheeks. She could feel the hard ground pressing against the soles of his sneakers, every bump and rise in the terrain beneath his feet. Insects rattled and whirred. The air smelled of cornstalks and dry earth.

The door slid back a small span. “Ready for lunch?”

Her husband Arthur’s presence gradually made sense to her, like a lens turning to focus. “Lunch is fine.”

The second bedroom was Arthur’s study. He spent more time there than ever since his retirement, working on his critical biography of Charles Pierce. Office space was at such a premium at the university. Emeritus faculty members were relocated to an out-of-the-way building nicknamed the archive. In an effort to console him, she had pointed out how the offices there had oak paneling and stained glass windows. Like a funeral chapel, he had replied.

“I’m sorry. I thought you might like a little break,” Arthur said. “You keep working.”

She slid the copy into its folder with careful nonchalance, and pressed it to the desk with a covering hand. “Salami and eggs okay?”

Jean and Arthur had met decades ago as graduate students, literally bumping into each other: he stepping into the library elevator while reading Hume, she stepping out while reading about seventeenth-century Dutch silver. She was a head taller than he was, an unusual thing in those days, but Arthur had not even noticed until a friend pointed it out to him. Jean came to appreciate Arthur as someone with whom she could both discuss much and comfortably leave off talking altogether.

“We will build a life dedicated to simple pleasures and scholarly pursuits,” Arthur had toasted her one night over tea with lemon. They brewed it on a hot plate in his room, and drank it with sugar cubes held between their teeth. The cube’s hard edges pressed into her tongue before it softened into a paste of shocking sweetness, then melted away.

Arthur laid the red and white plates on the table. He said, “That Levinson is teaching a course on happiness—a waiting list three pages long.” Arthur’s course on the Pragmatists had only a handful of students.

Jean sprinkled chunks of salami over the surface of the pan.

“I don’t dispute the worth of asking what constitutes a life well-lived, but what about the greater question of what constitutes a just society?” He rattled open the silverware drawer, addressing it as he spoke.

She had let the pan get too hot, and the chunks of salami were charred around the edges. She dumped in the beaten egg anyway.

He used his fingertips to line up the forks beside each plate. “This current generation may mean well, but so long as they see society only as an oppressive force, they’re doomed to solipsism. They think anything worth celebrating only happens on the margins. The individual can only be heroic to the degree that he resists the norms of the mass. So what do they worry about, then, but happiness, narrowly defined. Self-fulfillment over all else.”

The burnt salami grease had given the eggs a grayish tinge. She stared at the pan for a moment, and then forced herself to turn off the flame and scoop the mess on to the plates.

Arthur frowned at the black-speckled lump on his plate for a moment, only a moment. Then he bent to his food and ate, shoveling it in quickly and silently.

She took the breath prior to speaking, ready to apologize. She let it dissipate, then bent to her own plateful, trying to ignore the carbon aftertaste.

* * *

Dime stores had ceased to exist years ago. Today’s drug stores had no lunch counters, no perfume counters, no racks of comic books. They did not have the sneakers either.

Jean finally approached a student in the library. His sneakers were not exactly like those in the photocopy, but they would do. The amused young man referred her to a store that sold “retro stuff.”

A bald female mannequin dressed in a silver lurex sheath and green wellies pushed a shopping cart full of disembodied legs. “Shooz!” said the hand-lettered sign hanging from the ceiling above her. The bare concrete floor was scuffed, and sticky like a movie theater after a matinee, with dust balls in the corners. It softened the assault of racks and hangers poking out at every turn and the squealing music pressing against her eardrums. It made her think of being in the compact stacks, tucked away in the subbasement of the library, with bits of pages from crumbling books on the floor, or being at an estate sale, picking her way through a jumble of things.

Jean hated shopping for shoes. Her feet were large, white, and lumpy, like bratwurst left too long to boil. She had the same oxfords in black and tan, and a pair of “comfort step” pumps for more formal occasions.

The first rack held slingbacks of lavender snakeskin, black mules of different heights, a pair of clear plastic stilettos threaded through with white ribbons. She had not come here for these. She could not have worn them in any case.

The next rack had black and white golf cleats, oxblood boots with too many grommets, wingtips with the color worn away at the toes. And dark blue canvas sneakers. Dark blue canvas sneakers with three white stripes and white-sided soles with a cross-hatch pattern on their tan bottoms.

She had found them. She wanted nothing more than to disappear, even as she reached for the shoes and held them in her hands. Everyone was looking at her. No one was looking at her. She was a spectacle, trying on the sneakers there in the middle of the store, where people would have had to step around her, had there been any one else shopping for shoes. They fit.

After she bought them, she went to the coffee house next door. A Café for Travelers, they called it. She sat beneath the outstretched wings of a carved wooden frog from Bali, and drank Russian Tea. “India Red Label tea,” the menu said, “sweetened with sour cherry preserves.” She stirred it, and watched the soft fruit swirl inside the glass mug. When she reached the tannin-stained cherries at last, she chewed them slowly.

* * *

Jean parked the old Volvo on the strip of gravel and grass beside the road. This field had rise and fall enough where the path cut through the corn.

She had approximated the outfit as best she could: dark blue v-neck sweater and elastic-waist blue jeans. The dark blue canvas sneakers, three white stripes on each side, made her feet appear odd, not a part of her at all, like passengers she had driven somewhere.

Could she be seen from the white farm house beyond the fields? What if someone driving along the road saw her car parked there? Someone stopping to help, the car presumed disabled, or the driver lost. The local sheriff wondering why this city woman was wandering in the Johnsons’ field. She should have brought binoculars, to play the overzealous birder. She had not thought of binoculars.

Through the thin, flat soles of the sneakers, she felt crunching gravel, dying grass, and, at last, hard earth. Her feet fit over every bump and dip in the path. Stubble spread out all around her, gray and yellow in the bright sun. The air vibrated with an emptiness she realized was silence. She was moving, moving over the hard autumn ground.

She slowed down when she reached the center of the field, until she was no longer walking, but shifting back and forth slightly on her feet. She could feel them pressing against the earth. A breeze, chilly and soft, stroked her hands. A wisp of dry corn scented the air.

* * *

The day had turned cold with the coming dusk. Her nose and fingers were red and aching with it. Arthur was standing in the doorway to his study, waiting for her as she pulled her key from the lock.

“A bit nippy, is it? I’ll make some tea.”

“Tea would be lovely,” she said.

She went into the sunroom to be surrounded by the fading light. The windows of the building across the street glowed orange, and the figures walking along the sidewalk were becoming dark and featureless, like three-dimensional shadows.

Arthur came in with the tray, lined with a tea towel and arrayed with mismatched cups and saucers, the small iron teapot, and a plate of cookies. He set it on her desk. She poured out in silence.

“I like your shoes,” he said. “I had a pair very much like them as a boy.”

She felt a twinge, that she should not have imagined that Arthur ever could have had such shoes. “I bought them to go walking in.”

“Yes, they were good for that, as I recall.” He took the saucer gently, and drank a slurp of tea.

She held her teacup in both of her hands, feeling its curved shape fill her palms and warm her skin to a point just below burning. She ran her thumb over the spot where the violet pattern was crazed with dark lines. “I went walking today. In the country.”

“In the country? Whatever for? The leaves must all be down by now. Were you out for an estate sale?”

She did not look at him, although she could sense him at the edge of her vision.

“I wish I had known you were up for an outing. We could have packed a hamper and made a day of it. I didn’t get much accomplished today, at any rate.”

What could she say? Only the echo of sensations, right under her skin. “Do you remember the sugar cubes?”

Arthur’s face clouded, but then he leaned back, his eyes soft. “Ah, yes. The intellectuals’ tea.” He cocked an eyebrow at her. “Do you wish we had sugar cubes now?”

He would bundle up in his tweed jacket and striped scarf, and walk to the store for sugar cubes. He would present them with a flourish, and she would brew a fresh pot of tea.

She pressed the teacup against her lips to feel the heat of it. “No,” she said at last.

He flinched. “As you like.”

Some sad sympathy for him rippled through her as she listened to his short slurps, but it faded as she pressed the hot teacup against her lips once more. The objects around her let go of their color and shape as the daylight disappeared. She felt solid as everything faded in the dimness, her body humming at a pitch only she could hear.

Return to Volume 7.1

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