This Shared Dream (30 page)

As she worked, she thought about her Bank plan to propagate schools as if they were plants, letting her mind run wild. Children in the most politically unstable parts of the world, which was where these schools were most needed, would have to be protected from those who might prey on them. She yanked out huge hanks of weeds as she envisioned how pheromone detectors, or cameras using biometrics, might trigger the emission of a chemical that would put the adults to sleep, instantly, yet leave the children awake and able to escape. Then, the pheromones, or whatever, would go to work on those adults, transforming them into paragons of humanity. She laughed out loud now and then as her vision became more and more audacious, impossible, and illegal. But later, she would recruit people to do hard research on the more possible options.

The saw rang throughout the day, and a myriad of power tools roared, popped, hissed, and buzzed. Constantly mopping sweat from her face, Jill worked mulch, fertilizer, and black dirt into the beds around the porch.

By seven, the front porch steps had been repaired and painted, flowers glowed beneath the mist of sprinklers, a haystack-sized pile of tree branches and weeds stood next to the mulcher, and the grand old house, now actually visible from the sidewalk, drew admiring comments from people on their evening stroll.

“The new steps make the rest of the porch look kind of shabby,” said Cindy, as she, Jill, and Nate rested on lawn chairs out front, drinking cold beers.

“The whole porch needs to be sanded and painted.” Nate lit a cigarette.

“That would be wonderful,” said Jill. “Thanks so much for the offer.”

“Whoa, wait a minute,” Nate said, holding up both hands in front of him.

“I think we have some down time this week,” said Cindy. “We’ll put you on it. You can at least get going on the porch.”

“All that damned gingerbread.” Nate flicked ashes on the lawn. “I think there’s a law against it now.”

Cindy’s phone rang. She pulled it out and smiled. “Brian. Maybe the next time I’ll answer it.” She stood and stretched. “Feels good to do something besides talk to uncaring bureaucrats all day.”

“Yeah,” said Nate. He lit another cigarette and slouched deeper in the chair. He stared up at the gingerbread. “I feel completely invigorated.”

*   *   *

Although Jill’s body ached all over from the unaccustomed work of the day, she was mentally alert even at ten o’clock that night. Whens had eagerly chosen to stay all night with his cousins; Elmore and the Lavender Lady had gone on a no-children trip to some kind of fantasy Caribbean place with three-hundred-dollar-an-hour spa treatments that Tracy, thought Jill rather meanly, might benefit from.

Jill was lying on the library couch reading a book about how history can just jump. It examined the genesis of several huge historical conflicts using an unusual lens, that of statistics. The author claimed that many such events were completely unpredictable.

Right,
thought Jill.
Like my life jumped.
In 1970 and 1963 at the same time. Like history was playing a dissonant music in her head, two lines, two instruments. Two sets of memories.

And this house was where they converged.

She threw the book on the floor and got up. Walked around restlessly. Went down the hall past the stairway. Flipped on the light.

Here. This large back sunroom. Her mother’s Montessori classroom during the sixties.

And, not. That is, her mother hadn’t even been here after 1963, a year after they moved here from Germany. She’d opened her school, but soon afterward was gone. Brian and Megan probably didn’t even remember it at all. Although … Jill closed her eyes; tried to remember what their stories were, for theirs differed so starkly from hers—and perhaps, she realized, even from one another’s. She wondered what the results would be if she had Brian and Megan write time lines of their lives. They all shared Hawaii, and part of Germany, but not anything past November 21, 1963. Perhaps the Montessori materials had remained in the sunroom, for a time. Perhaps Sam had quietly closed it and cleared everything away, and this space, which held so many other memories for Jill, had just been Brian and Megan’s playroom, their rainy-day room.

That was all it was, now, and an unused playroom at that, with its storybooks, rocking horse, and blocks. Jill darkened the room and went back to the summer-warm kitchen. She hoisted the windows higher, turned on the overhead fan.

The summer night pulsed with sound. A car drove past, then another; their headlights illuminated the culvert briefly. She remembered watching headlights curve across her bedroom ceiling at night, fascinated. Emerge, grow, retreat, vanish. Pattern repeated with each passing car. Funny what kids noticed.

She didn’t blame her therapist for thinking she was crazy. Maybe she was. She didn’t think so, though. There was another explanation. And the secret was hidden here, in this house. Probably in many forms. She just had to seek them out. Explore.

The thought of exploring made her nauseous. The thought of not exploring made her anxious.

Her restlessness converged in the reality of Whens being away from her. She missed him with every fiber of her being. She took her phone from her pocket; put it back.
No. Don’t foist your own weird anxiety on him. Let him learn to feel comfortable in his own newly split world.
Right now he was dead asleep, or keeping Cindy and Brian awake along with his cousins.

She smiled. Brian had told her that he’d overheard Whens talking to Abbie about a ghost in the house. Whens was fearless. He’d walk right up to a ghost and try to grab hold of it. Shake the stuffing out of it if he could.

Well, then. There was the old Brian, and the new Brian. The old Megan, and the new Megan. The old life, and the new life. Maybe her job was not to try to blend them together, or even to make sense of it all.

Whatever had happened, however it had happened, there was
that world,
and
this world.
The
other world,
and
this world.
Like a lens that the optometrist puts in front of your eyes. Is this better, or (flip) this?

Do it again, she always told the optometrist. Again.

Was the
other world
better? Or
this world
?

And she found that she too, did not really know. Her memories of the
other world
were fading. It was no wonder that her brother and sister, who had been younger, seemed not to recall it at all.

Or maybe double, triple, quadruple time would be common in that place known as The Future. Perhaps time would be woven of a harmony of beings and worlds and times, all playing simultaneously.

The house itself was evocative, a living, breathing being. Her parents had bought it for its spaciousness, its price (cheap, because of its condition), its location, and for the multiracial neighborhood. And right now, she could almost feel it changing, around her. Coming to life again, after being abandoned for so many years. Stirring in the night wind. She heard a sound, outside, and jumped, then laughed. Just night sounds. She thought she smelled cigarette smoke, like the damned Chesterfields her mother used to smoke, and suspected the smell was still being exuded from the couch cushions after all these years.

Her dad loved jazz. Not in the past, but, stubbornly now, in the present. He
was
alive.

And, in fact, his entire jazz collection was right here, from the late 1930s on—here, in the living room, with its comfortable mixture of high modern and chintz. In fact—she squatted down—one record was sticking out of the bottom row, as if it had recently been played. She pulled it out.

A seventy-eight rpm record. Jimmie Lunceford, a big smile on his face, was on the cover, wearing a pencil-thin mustache. She had no idea who he was, but, apparently, he played saxophone.

Jill mused over the stereo setup, which was on an adjoining shelf, for a few minutes, flipped some switches, and moved the turntable control to “78.”

She pulled the record from the cardboard cover; it was further encased in a brown paper sleeve. A piece of paper fluttered to the floor. She picked it up and set it on the shelf while she put the needle on the record. While she listened to “White Heat,” she unfolded the paper and began to read:

It may be a quaint concept now, but in the olden days when radio was king and television was something that you could read about in the pages of
Popular Mechanics
, dance bands occupied the airwaves after prime time (after the ten o’clock news— fifteen minutes), and occasionally before prime time.

Thus it occurred that casting about on the radio dial for something to listen to about 7:30
P.M.
on a warm summer evening, I was electrified by a swing band playing breakneck music in perfect pitch, harmony, and tempo, apparently without effort. At the time I was not a popular music fan; being involved only in high school band and orchestra. In fact, near the end of the school year (eighth grade), the girls’ fad was passing around notebooks with numbered pages in which you entered your name on a numbered line on the first page and each subsequent page would ask you to respond with your favorite color, dessert, teacher, girl (blush, blush), boy, hangout, school subject, dance band, flower and so on to the end of the book. The main objective, I suppose, was to put you on record on the favorite girl/boy question. The question that stumped me, though, was favorite dance band. I had never paid much attention, so I would copy someone else’s answer and then forget it the next time.

That was the situation that fateful Sunday evening I happened upon Jimmie Lunceford playing from the Lodgemont Casino. (Much later I realized that the radio announcer, dispatched from his New York studio, was striving to pronounce “Larchmont Casino.”) I discovered that the name of the piece was, appropriately, “White Heat.” I had another shock when I heard his theme song, “Jazznocracy.” Just as fast, just as intricate, just as flawless, just as awesome. I was smitten, never to look back.

I rushed downtown to the Capitol Confectionary (Jimmie the Greek’s soda fountain), the school hangout, to bring my friends up to date, and to make sure that we were together, comfortably ensconced the next Sunday at 7:30 to listen and exchange thoughts on what we heard. There was at that time no affordable equipment to record radio broadcasts or live music. A few rich people bought studio recorders, some of whom had luggable versions built to record dance bands live, but just the record blanks would be beyond our resources. We did have shellac records, seventy-five cents and forty-five cents, seventy-eight rpm; Lunceford, fortunately, was forty-five cents, not a deal breaker. A dud on the second side, however, was a deal breaker for a prospective freshman.

Within our group, however, I think that we managed to buy all of Jimmie’s output for that critical year or two. Our source, at the time, was Lyons Music in downtown Dayton. The store manager (and usually the entire staff) was a lovely young lady named Peggy who was a rabid Ellington fan. She was always pushing Ellington’s latest on us, while we were pushing Lunceford’s latest on her, with no movement in either direction. As an interesting sidelight, the Lyons store was the nearest full-service record store to Dayton’s west side, at the time mostly black population. And which band did the black customers favor? Glenn Miller, that’s who! AND OVERWHELMINGLY!

As our affinity grew, along with our nascent record collections, we met frequently for the purpose of entertaining one another with our latest “finds,” from the likes of Goodman, Shaw, yes, Ellington, Billie Holiday, Claude Thornhill, Raymond Scott Quintet, Wingy Manone, Tommy and Jimmy Dorsey, Jimmy McPartland and the like, culminating in an early winter meeting on a Saturday night in our basement for the purpose of formally organizing the Squounch Club. I had a Wilcox-Gay Recordio player that had no speakers, but it did have an
AM
transmitter (
FM
not yet invented), which I could tune to a dead spot on the radio spectrum so I could tune it in on any radio in a city block radius for clear reception. Certainly one of the earliest examples of off-the-shelf open format wireless transmission!
¹
Refreshments provided by the group assembled consisted of a pony of POC (Known locally as “Pride of Cleveland” or “Piss on Cincinnati”) and a roaster pan of my mother’s baked beans. The meeting got under way with a playing of both “White Heat” and “Jazznocracy,” a brisk invocation by the Lord High Squounch “e saga dah” and equally brisk response “e saga dah” by the assembled multitude (three). The organizing principles were adopted as read:

1. Lord High Squounch for Life: Leonard Gaver

2. Official band: Jimmie Lunceford

3. Official refreshment: POC Beer

4. Guiding principle: No women.

After word got around of our organizing principles, item 4 was changed by acclimation at the next meeting to read, “Closing of official meetings of the Squounch Club shall be conducted by Lord High Squounch Gaver to the strains of Artie Shaw’s ”Gloomy Sunday.” Other than saving a potion of “frumentatious amber nectar of the gods” (POC) for the final “e saga dah,” no further ceremonial changes were permitted. Needless to say, the original Prop 4 was never heard from again.

The record ended. The needle bounced back and forth on an ungrooved portion of shellac. Jill turned it over to hear “White Heat,” and continued to read:

In the ensuing years, Lord High Leonard became a high lord many times, and inducted many new members, both male and female, without inflicting any apparent damage upon the body Squounch. I can’t say that I regret any time I spent with the Squounch Club, at home or on the road.

Jill smiled, intrigued. She played both sides again, several times, straining to hear something that would jog her memory. The tune was very familiar. He must have played it hundreds of times. But what about it had been so important to him? Was it just this memory? Or was there more?