Dreams

All of us in bed by ten. An early night with the boy to come in first. A bad dream. Then she wakes sneezing, enough to need a sip of Benadryl and a box of tissues. It is after I've moved the boy back to his bed and she's settled that I have the dream. I am wearing yellow rubber gloves, the ones my mother used to wear while cleaning the toilet or the sink. There's a picture on the package of a woman looking pretty and wearing the gloves. I am in our aqua-tiled bathroom and I am not cleaning. I am looking for a shower curtain, a brown and black and white and green one that I bought at the outlets when we pulled the tile. It has been replaced by a white, vinyl shower curtain and I am frantic. I tear at the white curtain with the yellow gloves, but nothing, until I wake him with a cry, the muffled scream that comes through in my dream. "I had a bad dream," I say, and he wants to know what about. I am embarrassed to say that it's about yellow gloves and a white shower curtain. I'm embarrassed that this is what makes a bad dream for me.

I go back to sleep by three and the baby's up at five. Her fever is gone and she eats a banana. There is peace in the early morning darkness. I hear the train against its tracks and I think about dreams, how we can't stop them or change them. I think about what your dreams must be like as you remember things or fear things or want things, as you remember who you've known and what you've lost.