Perfect Dream

The unreal is more powerful than the real because nothing is as perfect as you can imagine it.

Chuck Palahniuk

She woke begging. 

Just like the last time.

These last few days had been rough.  Every time she closed her eyes the terrors took her.  She could see him, full of anger, hating her as he noticed a smear on the refrigerator door. 

How had that gotten there?  She’d wiped it twelve times yesterday and yet, there it was. A streak, semi opaque in the pale light cast by the stove, mocking her.  She should have wiped it again.  He was right to be mad, I mean, all he asked was for the house to be clean when he came home.  She was there all day, every day.  What an idiot.

Last night’s was worse though.  Last night she’d been at the table reading “Where the Red Fern Grows” to the kids when he’d come home from work.  He seemed alright with it.  He was a little early, dinner wasn’t going to be ready for a few minutes.  She finished the chapter, that horrible chapter, and laughed through her tears with the children.  She had directed them, “Let’s get dinner on the table, ladies.”  And they had. 

Then they’d all sat around that table, eating the delicious Garlic Chicken that she’d made because he’d said he liked it.  As she watched the hate fill his eyes the bite turned to sawdust on her tongue.  Why was he angry? Her eyes fell on the book opened face down on the table, where she’d put it so that they wouldn’t lose the place.

She focused on the book as she ran through her sins. 

Table NOT cleaned completely off when he’d gotten home.  

Book laid out in a way that he said could break the binding (she’d never seen it happen, but he didn’t want her to do that).

Jillie’s hair a kind of hay mow on the top of her head. 

Charlie’s was worse, she’d allowed Charlie to put on makeup and she looked about 5 years older than her 11.  Charlie was sitting there with outlined blue eyes and black lashes made for butterfly kisses, pink mouth ruched around her green bean.  She hoped he hadn’t noticed, that he wouldn’t make Charlie feel like she’d done something wrong by looking pretty.

As is the way of dreams, this one cut from sunlight shining on her beautiful daughter to her husband’s hateful eyes, his mouth a hard line, his shoulders granite.  It didn’t really cut, it more oozed from sunlight through thunderheads into inky blackness that encased him so that nothing else could be seen.

“Don’t you think it’s disrespectful to READ when we should be having dinner?  I thought you were trying to be more respectful of ME…I mean C’MON, I can’t even expect to come home to dinner on the table?”

She felt her face flush.  That was so unfair.  Dinner was only 10 minutes behind him.  We were in a good part of the story.  He had been early.  He’d gone straight up the stairs when he’d gotten home, he’d told her he WANTED a few minutes to himself.

But no words came.  Nothing.

Still in the dream she felt that she had said them.  Felt that she had apologized for any disrespect.  After all, the pastor had said that she needed to try to be more respectful.  She hadn’t realized he would think that reading would be disrespectful.

He backed away, angry. His eyes a magnet.  She reached for him, begged him to hear her, begged him to love her, she would try harder.  He shook his head.  How could he hear her?  She was an embarrassment.  She was worthless, revolting.  She never did anything right.

“Please!”

“No!  You disgust me!”

That’s what woke her yesterday.  Woke her sweating.

It had taken an hour for her heart to return to a normal “thrum thrum thrum” that she could breathe around.

Now, here she was again.  How many times would the cinema that was her mind re-invent the hurt in brilliant perfection?  In these moments where the subconscious and conscious met, she wondered at the clarity of her mind.  The stark line between the milky streak and the shiny fridge.  Seriously, it was far more perfect in her dreams than it had been in reality.

The soft fringe of Charlie’s eyelashes around her incredibly blue eyes in that perfect sunlight.  Her daughter was beautiful, there was no mistaking.  But she was also a beautiful 11 year old, who could belch the ABCs.  In real life that made her even better in her mother’s book.  The imperfections, those real moments that showed the humor and the crassness, or maybe the vulnerability.  That was real.

Had he really hated her that perfectly?  In the light of the streaming dawn, she wasn’t sure.  He had hated her so perfectly for so many nights in her dreams she couldn’t remember his imperfect hatred, only the magnified, crystalline hatred of her dreams.

Had he ever loved her?  She couldn’t remember that either.  The last memory of his love in dream perfection had been more than 10 years ago.  She remembered waking wanting him.  Wanting to touch him.  Lean into his neck and smell him.  Wanting to come alive with his touch and to feel his skin under her hands.  It had been as powerful as these dreams were and she’d shared it with him because she loved him.  And she remembered him brushing off her need.  What kind of a MOTHER wakes up wanting filthy sex?  That’s disgusting.

So no, she couldn’t remember any love, only the hate.  And then only the hate that her mind brought about every night in sharp relief, perfectly insane and resolutely unmovable.

She breathed in deep.  The smell of her sheets intoxicating.  She stretched and watched the dust motes swirl in the beam of sunlight snaking through the blinds. 

“This is real.”

“This is imperfect and real and much better than any perfection my mind can imagine.”

She told herself that every morning.  She hoped that someday, it would be true.