Blues for Beginners: Stories and Obsessions by Bacon Press Books

the B vitamins out of
everyone.
    The headache was with me the next day. Food
tasted bad. I couldn’t get rid of the metallic taste in my mouth no
matter what I drank. I came home early from work and crawled into
bed. The headache followed me into my dream. I remember the dream I
had that afternoon the way I remember certain movies.
    In the dream I was 40 years old, and living
in a mansion by the sea. I was married to a lawyer, someone I knew
from college but he didn’t look familiar. For that matter, neither
did I. I was softer, more lady-like, not exactly myself. This
ladylike person wore shirtwaist dresses with Peter Pan collars, and
I don’t. On the other hand, she had my headache.
    .
    The most vivid part of the dream was the
woman with yellow hair. Her hair was the color of whipped pineapple
dessert. She wore it piled on top of her head, bangs drooping over
her forehead like frizzy tendrils. She was a loose woman from a
bedroom community, like the one I grew up in.
    I was her only friend, even though she made
me uncomfortable.
    In the dream we were on the third floor of
Bloomingdales when a teenaged boy on roller skates zoomed past us.
He wore a huge Nixon for President campaign button.
    “How can you support that man?” I screamed at
the roller skating boy like he was everything wrong with the
universe.
    He looked at me like I was some kind of a nut
and winked at my yellow-haired friend.
    “You wouldn’t get so worked up over politics
if you had a more healthy outlet,” she told me. “Try shoes.”
    She used to steal shoes from the wives of her
lovers. Evening sandals, alligator pumps, and once a pair of Old
Maine Trotters. “I take them for my husband,” she said. “I tell him
all about those other women, the wives. I betray their secrets and
make up the rest, as I wear their shoes. We perform unmentionable
acts...”
    Just as she was about to describe these acts,
a knock at the door woke me.
    .
    The knock at the door was Emily, with one of
those foul tasting milkshakes.
    “My marriage is in trouble,” she said.
    The long dreaded confrontation was here. One
of the women from Group, a veteran of affairs with married
professors, had briefed me on protocol. Usually the wife invited
you out to lunch. First you made small talk. Then she’d say
something like: “He’s had others before you. Don’t think you’ll be
the last. I only wish there was more of him to go around.”
    I didn’t expect Emily to be so relaxed. I
expected she’d remind me about our parents going to Far Rockaway
High together and our summer nights on the stoop and my commitment
to Feminism. How could I betray a sister, she would ask, and I’d
feel terminal shame. It would be as humiliating as getting caught
at shoplifting.
    “You seem so happy together,” I said to
Emily, stalling for time.
    Emily said, “It’s those long hours of
paste-ups. I work in this windowless room under florescent lights,
breathing rubber cement fumes. When I come home I’m too tired to
make dinner for Brian.”
    I felt like a low thing. This in addition to
the feeling that my head was being gripped by giant tongs, and a
horrendous desire to go to sleep instantly and not wake up for a
few days.
    “Brian would rather have Campbell’s soup
straight from the can for dinner just so long as he knows I heated
it up specially for him,” she said. “Men are funny that way.”
    Was there anything I could do to make this
magic moment move a little faster?
    “It destroys brain cells, sniffing glue in
windowless space,” she said.
    I wished she’d just get it over with.
    “I can’t take it anymore. You think you could
maybe get us both on welfare?”
    There was a god after all. He had an exacting
sense of humor.
    When I woke up next it was dark out, and
Brian sat next to me. The touch of his hand on my forehead was so
cool.
    “This has to stop,” I said.
    “You’re not well,” he said.
    “Too much guilt and not enough B’s.” The room
swam when I