Dreamology Read online

  Dedication

  To my family,

  and to our late summer dinners

  where I learned to tell a story

  Contents

  Dedication

  August 28th 1. Museums Are for Visiting, Not for Living In

  2. Venom of the Beaked Sea Snake

  3. Noodly

  September 13th 4. Beep-Beep-Honk, Toot-Toot-Whistle

  5. Law & Order: Special Cookie Unit

  6. Mrs. Perry Requested Peacocks

  September 16th 7. And, They’re Vegan!

  8. Crew Is a Sport, Rowing Is a Movement

  9. We’re Looking for Us

  10. For Normal People

  September 17th 11. Fetal

  12. Please Choose an Orb

  13. Welcome to the Bat Cave

  September 23rd 14. We Are All Surrealists

  15. Attack of the Pekingese

  September 26th 16. Swans Mate for Life

  17. We Missed Everything

  October 10th 18. Wakey-Wakey

  19. Nocturne

  October 11th 20. They’re Merging

  21. Hi

  22. He’s Not Your Boyfriend

  23. They Were Really Smart Birds

  October 15th 24. They’re Just Breasts

  25. It’s Called a Gi

  October 17th 26. Rio de Janeiro, 22 Miles

  27. I Like Your Alpacas

  28. Your Dog Is Really Lucky!

  29. He Always Shows Up

  October 18th 30. The Fuzzy Fish

  31. Teddy Bears

  October 18th 32. It’s Not the Same

  33. Patio Lights

  34. All We Have

  November 1st 35. Sparkly

  36. See You Soon

  Acknowledgments

  Back Ad

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  AUGUST 28th

  I am smack-dab in the middle of the Great Hall at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, exactly three feet from the spot where I barfed on my tenth birthday, just outside the Egyptian wing. But this time there are no fanny packs, no sounds of sneakers squeaking against well-polished floors. Pooling at my feet this time isn’t bright pink vomit (raspberry gelato, if you’re interested) flecked with Lucky Charms pieces (“Only on your birthday,” my dad said—and never said again). It’s a fifteen-pound gown, encrusted with crystals, just like the one Beyoncé wore to the Grammys. Tonight, the lights are bright and flashing and people are whispering and looking in my direction. Tonight, for some reason, I am someone. I sip champagne and glide from room to room, admiring the art. And that’s where Max finds me, standing in front of the Degas ballerinas, in the Impressionist section.

  “You know, I can dance, too.” He slips an arm around my waist, and my whole body feels instantly warmer.

  “Prove it,” I say. I don’t have to look away from the painting to feel his eyes on me, to know he is smiling. I have every inch of his face mapped in my brain, all of his mannerisms. I am constantly afraid of forgetting him.

  He takes my arm and gives me a twirl, and I close my eyes. When I open them again, we’re in the rooftop garden, swaying. The shrubs are covered in twinkle lights.

  “You look good in a tux,” I mumble into his neck.

  “Thanks. It’s the one Beyoncé wore to the Grammys,” he says in a serious tone, and we both burst into laughter. Before I can even catch my breath, Max’s arms grip me tighter and he kisses me, tipping me so far back I lose all balance and sense of self. I didn’t realize there was a good kind of dizzy until this.

  “I missed you,” he says then, and twirls me again.

  The delivery guy from Joe’s Pizza on 110th appears, looking impatient.

  “You hungry?” Max asks. “I ordered.”

  But inside the pizza box there’s no pizza, just a giant Oreo cookie cut in eighths like a cake. We reach our hands in and each pick up a heavy slice. No sooner have I brought it to my mouth than I catch mischief reflected in Max’s sea-gray eyes, and he swiftly smushes his cookie into my cheek. Whap. I throw mine right back at him.

  We race through the galleries, ducking behind Roman statues and dodging mortified patrons as we hurl handfuls of Oreo cake at each other. I notice a museum security guard marching in our direction. When I look more closely, I see he’s also my middle-school science teacher. I always hated that guy. We run faster.

  When I’m finally cornered in the courtyard of Perneb’s tomb, I stop and face Max. We’re covered in cookie. Jewels from the European textiles exhibit dangle around my neck and arms, and Max has a medieval helmet on his head. We look like a royal couple gone horribly awry. A country under our rule would surely revolt.

  Max says something, but I can’t hear him through the helmet, so he flips the facepiece up, exposing flushed cheeks.

  “Let’s take a time-out,” he says again. We lie on our backs in the courtyard of the tomb, listening to the symphony music and the low hum of chatter continuing outside. Above our heads, where the ceiling of the Met should be, there is instead a starry sky.

  “You know when Egyptian royalty died, they often had loved ones buried with them,” I say.

  “I think it was just servants, actually, so they could be waited on in the afterlife,” Max corrects me. Always such a know-it-all.

  “Well, if I died, I’d have you buried with me.” I turn over on my side to face him.

  “Oh, babe, thanks,” he exclaims. “That is by far the creepiest thing you have ever said to me.”

  A low snort echoes against the stone walls, and I notice a small African warthog lying beside Max, staring at him fondly.

  “Who is this?” I ask.

  “This is Agnes.” Max nods to the pig. “She’s been following me since the Oceania wing. I think she’s in love.”

  “Well, get in line, Agnes,” I say, resting my head on his chest and breathing deeply. As always, he smells like laundry detergent and something woody. The sound of his heartbeat lulls me.

  “Don’t fall asleep,” he pleads. “We haven’t had enough time.”

  But I disagree. This evening was perfect, all I could ask for.

  “I’ll see you soon,” I say, praying I won’t drift off until I hear him say it back. It’s our thing, an almost superstitious habit, to make sure we find each other again.

  “I’ll see you soon,” he finally says with a sigh.

  My eyes float slowly closed, the sound of Agnes lightly snorting in my ear.

  1

  Museums Are for Visiting, Not for Living In

  JERRY IS SNORING directly into my mouth, his warm dog breath wafting at me with every exhale.

  “Well, that explains Agnes,” I mutter.

  “Who’s Agnes?” my dad calls from the driver’s seat. Behind his voice comes the light clicking of a turn signal, back and forth like a metronome.

  “Nobody,” I say quickly, and he doesn’t notice. My dad is a brain guy. A well-known neuroscientist—which doesn’t mean much unless you also happen to be one—he understands things about the mind that are a mystery to most. But when it comes to the heart, he’s clueless. I have no interest in telling him about Max, so at moments like this his shortcomings work in my favor.

  I stretch and sit up. “I must have nodded off,” I say, my voice a little hoarse.

  “Motion has been knocking you out since you were a newborn,” my dad explains, perpetually in professor mode. “Planes, trains, and automobiles … You and Jerry have been out for hours, but you picked the perfect time to wake up.” He smiles in the rearview mirror. “Get a good look at your new city.”

  He makes an awkward Vanna White wave, as though Boston were a puzzle made out of giant block letters yet to be filled in. We are
just easing off of I-90, and the historic downtown greets us politely from behind a picturesque Charles River. It makes New York, where we’ve lived for ten years, look like … well, New York. Does anything really compare?

  The sounds of our wheels on the concrete off-ramp create a rhythm—one-two-three, one-two-three—and I nervously tap the three middle fingers on my right hand to the beat, like I’m playing piano keys. I was never any good at the piano. My teacher told my father I “lacked discipline” before quitting me, which must have been a first in the history of music lessons. But I still love music, particularly rhythm. Rhythm is a pattern, and patterns make sense of things. I find myself tapping one out whenever I’m nervous or unsure.

  I lean against the passenger side door on bustling Beacon Street, clutching a box labeled KITCHEN SUPPLIES that almost certainly contains winter coats and dog food. I shield my eyes against the August sun with one hand and try to get a good look at the two-hundred-year-old townhouse in front of me. It’s funny how everything seems so big when you are little, but when you revisit it at an older age, you realize in fact just how much smaller it is than you thought, and how tiny you were at the time. In the case of our house, which was my mother’s before ours, and her mother’s before that, this place is still gigantic. I wonder how I didn’t go missing for days as a child.

  “You did, a few times,” my father calls from the front stoop when I voice these concerns out loud. “But we’d put Jerry on the case and he’d always find you.” At the moment Jerry is slumped against the backseat, head resting in his usual apathy as he stares at me through the window.

  “You must have been more virile in your youth,” I say to him, raising an eyebrow.

  The house is five stories of red brick, and the shutters and front door are painted jet-black, matching most of the other houses on the street. Lined up side by side, they remind me of the cliquey girls at my old school who all wore the same sunglasses. I can’t help but wonder just how much of a New York City block it would cover if we flipped the building on its side.

  “This is all ours?” I ask.

  “Yup,” my dad says with a grunt as he finally pushes the front door open, one suitcase tucked under his left arm. “Now that Nan is gone. Since your mom doesn’t have any siblings, everything goes to us.” He’s trying to be breezy about it, to mention my mother without weight. But it can’t be easy to come back to this house, where we all lived together before she moved to Africa and never came back.

  I step into the circular, oxblood-painted foyer of the house, and gaze up the polished wood banister of a spiral staircase that seems to extend all the way to infinity. It smells old. Not bad old, just … dusty, as if the whole house is a box of antiques that has been left in a basement too long.

  My father tours me through a formal dining room on the ground floor, decorated with landscape paintings and a heavy chandelier, and into the kitchen, which is spare but sizable, like it was designed solely to cater grand parties. Little things jolt my memory—eating cream puffs at the table with Nan, lying beneath the grand piano in the second floor living room while a dinner guest entertained a crowd, the mouse hole where I’d leave jelly beans at night that were always gone by morning, until my secret was discovered and the hole was sealed up. These are not the rooms of a modern family. There are simply too many to live in. And now there are just two of us. Well, two and a hairy half.

  Eventually we find ourselves in a corner room on the fourth floor, with heavy blue brocade curtains and pale lavender walls.

  “I thought this one could be yours.” My dad shuffles his feet a bit, searching for the right words. “It was your mother’s room when she was your age. It’s a little more grown-up than the one you slept in before we left.”

  I look around, surveying the four-poster bed, photographs of faraway places, and the ornate fireplace strewn with little silver boxes and souvenirs shaped like hippos and giraffes. Now my mother lives in Madagascar on a research compound with real-life versions of these creatures.

  “Okay,” I say.

  “Are you sure?” my dad asks.

  “I think so …” I hesitate.

  “Great,” he says, and just like that he’s gone, back out to the car to continue the business of uprooting our lives.

  I have just pulled what feels like my millionth box from the U-Haul, while Jerry follows me to and from the house, staring. They say most dogs don’t make eye contact out of respect and to show that they understand you are the alpha of the pack. Well, Jerry only ever looks me directly in the eye. What does that say about us?

  Inside the foyer my eyes fall on a large manila envelope sitting on the hall table, with my name written in my grandmother’s scrawling cursive.

  “I found that in Nan’s sitting room,” I hear my dad say, and look up to find him standing halfway up the staircase, struggling with a box labeled ALICE’S BOOKS. “Who knows what it is. She saved everything. She called it meticulous; I called it obsessive. You should go check out her closet. If I recall correctly, it’s color coded.”

  I study the envelope, feeling a mix of confusion and an odd kind of relief. It’s the first sign that I am actually meant to be here. Carefully, I spill its contents out on the marble surface of the table. Out fall a bunch of postcards printed on flimsy brown cardboard paper. I pick one up. On one side is a simple image of a trio of balloons, floating into the sky. On the other side, in thick typewriter font, is written:

  HAPPY BIRTHDAY, ALICE!

  FROM GUSTAVE L. PETERMANN AND ALL YOUR FRIENDS

  AT THE CENTER FOR DREAM DISCOVERY (CDD)

  I frown at the card, drop it, and pick up another. It says the exact same thing. And so does the next. There are nine postcards, all with balloons on one side, all with the same strange birthday wishes on the back. I check the postmarks and realize one has been sent every year since I’ve been away, on the day of my birthday. I think of the appointment reminders my dentist’s office always sent me in New York—a tooth with a face, wearing makeup. What kind of tooth wears blush?

  At the bottom of the stack is a note, written on light turquoise paper, delicate between my fingertips:

  Dear Alice—

  Who knows if these will be of any use to you, but I simply couldn’t bear to throw any of them away.

  With Love,

  Nan

  I smile and shake my head. It’s exactly Nan. Simple, elegant, to the point. At least in writing, which was mostly how I knew her. My father had never wanted to come back to Boston after we’d left, always coming up with an excuse. I’d seen Nan a handful of times over the years when she would pilgrimage to New York for the opening of a Broadway play or a show at the Guggenheim. Her hair was always perfectly done, her clothes freshly pressed. I wondered, did everyone just become immaculate in old age, or would I be eighty and still wearing sweaters with holes in the cuffs that I can stick my thumbs through?

  Just then my phone buzzes.

  “I thought you were dead,” Sophie says when I answer. “Too busy pahking the cah in Hahvahd Yahd to answer any of my texts?”

  I am already laughing. “So, do you miss me, or what?” I ask.

  “Nope!” she quips.

  “How come?” I whine.

  “Because I have your clone, duh. I’m with her now. She’s kind of pissed I’m talking to you, actually. She wants to know what you can offer that she can’t.” Sophie was my first friend in New York and my best friend ever since. We have an old inside joke that we secretly made clones of each other to keep us company when the other isn’t around. Nobody gets it, and we prefer it that way.

  “Well, I miss you,” I say.

  “What’s wrong?” Sophie’s tone is suddenly serious. She can always tell when something is up. It is totally annoying, for the most part.

  “It’s just weird here,” I say. “You should see the house, Soph. It’s like a museum.”

  “But you love museums!” Sophie exclaims. She wouldn’t understand anyway, because she lives on Park
Avenue in an apartment so spotless I was always afraid my mere presence would stain it. Sophie’s parents sell art for a living. Big modern art, like giant spheres made of Astroturf, and videos of strangers swimming that they project onto the walls of their living room. “Really, Alice, if you went missing, the first place I’d tell the sexy NYPD detective who showed up at my door to look for you would be the Met or MoMA.”

  “I like to visit museums, not live in them,” I say, rolling my eyes. “It’s just not a home.”

  “It’ll get there,” she reassures me. “You’re just tired from the drive.

  “Actually, I slept most of the way …” I trail off, thinking about falling asleep on Max’s chest. I tell Sophie about the night at the Met, and she says it sounds really romantic. But her tone says otherwise.

  “I know I’m crazy to keep thinking about him like this,” I say. “You don’t have to tell me.” We’ve had this conversation a million times before.

  Sophie sighs. “It’s just that you have a fresh start here, Al. Maybe it would be smart to, you know … date a guy you can actually, like, be with?”

  “It feels like we’re together …” I say.

  “You know what I mean, Alice,” Sophie says, sounding ever so slightly impatient. “Someone you can actually have. And introduce to your friends. And make out with behind a bush on field trips. Someone who is … like … real.”

  Real. The last word hangs there between us, and I shake my head, embarrassed. She’s right. No matter how I feel about Max, there is still one problem. The night at the Met was a dream. Every night with Max, for as long as I can remember, has been a dream. Because Max is the boy of my dreams … and only my dreams.

  Because he doesn’t actually exist.