What We Dream

Chelle lives in one of those cream-colored cookie cutter homes at the top of skull hill. The native people named it Calavera, and until the builders dug into the hard scrub dirt, no one knew why. The bulldozers unearthed dozens of skeletons - ancient, peaceful, weathered - buried with pottery and scraps of frayed arid clothing. I heard ugly rumors that the builders gathered the bones and dumped them from a speed boat in the dead of coastal night. They graded the land, then displaced coyote and mountain lion with sewage lines and concrete paths, and now two hundred fifty homes of cheap dimpled stucco stand in ringed layers around the water tower, a birthday cake of progress and death.

Chelle found my Avon brochure at the Filipino nail salon. It was wrinkled and sticky with several missing pages, so she copied my name and number from the back cover and called me one Sunday while my young boys made newspaper starships and I read an article praising healthy-sized women in a trashy tabloid. An ad for a popular herbal weight loss supplement accented one corner of the page.

"Hello? Is this Birdie?"

She squeaked the words, a high pitched voice, a queen parakeet voice, and I had to ask her to repeat herself three times before I understood her question and answered yes, I am Birdie.

"Good. I had a dream the other night and then I found your book at Bagasbas Nail Salon. I need a new book because this one had someone's lunch smeared all over it. Pizza, I think."

She squeaked out her address and I promised to visit the next day.

I closed my eyes and took a deep breath. My left hand still held the tabloid in a death grip, the front cover now ripped in three places, a mirror of my funky Filipino Avon brochure. I let it fall to the floor and cursed my Avon career. She lived next door to my ex-lover. The last time I drove down skull hill I grabbed my multivitamins out of his medicine cabinet and shoved clean pink lace underwear, cheap drugstore shampoo and my copy of Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, slammed the screen door and screamed I would never visit skull hill again. Never!

But time and money talk. They talk. I drove to skull hill after I thought my ex-lover left for work. I took the back roads past the new Wal-mart, through the construction wax ripping the hair from the back of the hills, thousands of silver pipes organized in piles, and I wanted to grab a stick and hit them, hit them like an unholy marimba, make music for the uprooted dead. I coasted into her drive and ran from my van to her door, hiding my face with my backpack. I knew her house well, the way oil spots marred her drive, the saggy azalea under the mailbox, the way my lover's avocado tree reached across the fence toward her bedroom. I stood in the entryway, under stucco eaves, gathering my wits, but before I pressed the bell she opened the door.

"Good. I saw the name and I thought it was you. Come in. I had a dream about you and you need to hear it."

Chelle motioned me inside. I didn't know her name during the days I had my next door lover, but I remembered her round face and the way she pulled back her jet-black hair with carved abalone combs. She was chubbier now, softer, and the extra weight filled the lines around her eyes and made her look younger. I remembered watching her tend the roses in a circular redwood planter next to the door, the way they always looked fragile, wilted, unhappy in such an arid climate, no matter how many times Chelle carried them water and sprinkles of flower food. They looked that way now, looked like the perpetual frown on Chelle's face, like her hunched shoulders and cracked pain almond eyes.

"Please sit down. We never did get to know one another, did we? Why haven't I seen you in so long?"

Chelle directed me to a crinkled black leather easy chair, and I saw an elderly man out of the corner of my eye, sitting at her kitchen table. From my seat, all I could see was his long blotchy fingers, wrinkled wrists, and a pile of small jade tiles on the black wood table. He picked up one tile at a time, lifted it out of range of my sight, and brought it back to the table, placing it on top of another tile. The tiles made some kind of complicated stepped pattern, and I forgot Chelle's question as I listened to the click, tap, click of the tiles.

"You don't have to answer if you don't want to. I assumed you broke up with Mark. I don't see him much anymore. He comes inside after work and I don't see him again until he leaves in the morning. I don't know why he has those gardeners come. They charge a lot of money and he doesn't use the yard anymore. At least when you were around he kept the windows open and I heard music sometimes. Must have been your music. What was that, country?"

I just nodded. It wasn't just country, wasn't just music, you can't call that crazy Lyle Lovett disk anything but heartbreak-love-train-wistful-dream-time music. The moments before I slammed his screen door that last time, I slapped that CD on his nightstand next to the topaz ring he gave me on my birthday. I covered them both with a note of just seven words.

I won't be second to your ghosts.

I leaned over and opened my backpack, tried to catch my breath, tried to stop the old pain dead in its tracks, unzipped the top and pulled out a fresh Avon brochure and a handful of samples, handed them to Chelle with a crazed pain smile and a joke.

"So Chelle, here's a clean brochure! And what did you dream? About Avon? That new My Lip Miracle lipstick will make you look like a dream! Ha ha! It comes out in just a month!"

Chelle knitted her eyebrows together and set the brochure on her lap.

"I dreamed that you came back here and moved in next door. But you looked different. You had long, long hair. You looked like me. You know. Chinese. And then a policeman came to my door and told me you drove your car off a cliff. It bothered me all day and all night and then I got my nails done by Lucy and your book was sitting there. It's a sign. I had to call you and warn you. Watch where you drive. I'm serious. Dreams don't lie."

"Uh, ok. Thanks for the warning. I don't think I ever drive near any cliffs, but if I do, I'll be extra careful. Thanks."

I tried to sound sincere, but I know my voice gave away tired roll eyes disbelief and the certain knowledge that whatever would come out of this house call, it would not include a big fat Avon sale.

A man's voice, squeaky and fast like Chelle's, echoed from the kitchen. I couldn't tell what he said, it was in Chinese, and Chelle's eyes lit in a fire of vindication.

"My father says I am right. You cannot discount dreams. You must pay attention. I'm not crazy. This dream was real. He's a very old and respected man. He knows."

I heard the old man cough, and the click tap click of more tiles against tiles. Why didn't he say this in English, I growled in my mind, why bother with all this cryptic Chinese mysticism. I'm not coming back to my old lover, I'm not driving over a cliff, I'm not growing out my hair, and I'm not Chinese.

Chelle ordered one of the new lipsticks in a dusty rose, and I gave her more samples, a weak smile goodbye, and snuck out the door and snaked back down skull hill perplexed and only two dollars more rich than when I left.

A couple of weeks later I walked to my mailbox and gathered the usual pile of bills and junk and school notices and found a small bubble wrap package nestled in the middle. No return address. I opened it there in the front yard, under the jacaranda, holding the other mail under one strong arm. Out fell a topaz ring and a CD, no note, no explanation. And my heart, my worn Avon heart, leapt twenty rocky cliffs into an ocean of sadness.