As for dreams, here’s something I sent to an editor twenty-odd years ago when I was still submitting stuff to the church magazines. He sent it back.

It was supposed to be a poem.

Poetry confused—annoyed—me. Just chop up some regular sentences? How’d that make them poems? So I was experimenting. I thought the editor might fall for it.

“No stalls, 1960,” I titled it. Around then, I’m guessing, is when the ladies had paraded past in my head. On the cusp of the ’60s, we good church people’d known perfectly well between right and wrong. Walls and fences kept things tidy. Stalls, too. Everybody reading the magazine remembered. I knew they’d get Peter, too—at least, his dream. His piety. Strict Jewishness. His kosher beliefs, his deep gut convictions.

Even now, just because the editor didn’t bite doesn’t mean I was totally off. I don’t think.

 

In the middle of the night, folks were marching to Zion. They were lined up double breasted, walking pretty fast down Front Street.

She recognized Mrs. Finkelstein who sometimes came to services at the mission and offered Tootsie Rolls out of her clutch purse, although Jimmy refused to sit in her lap if she was wearing that coat of hers with foxtails sewed around the neck.

Jimmy, please, Mama’d coax.

Parading down Front Street, Mrs. Finkelstein wore open-toe high heel shoes, her fat red toenails sticking halfway out. Gracious.

Somebody going to heaven looking like that.

In a way it wasn’t much weirder than her other dreams, the recurring kind.

Some nights, flying down the cellar steps but never crashing. Or reading at a dizzying speed, scanning entire pages without understanding a single word. Or writing a story for Miss Ebersole, the words pouring out on their own strength and filling up a whole sheet in her tablet.

Frequently she couldn’t find a bathroom that was private.

Just a commode in someone’s dining room, in plain view, or else a whole lineup of commodes in some big hospital ward, every last one clogged to the brim. No stalls. In desperation she’d start going right in her chair, aware there’d be no way to discreetly sop up the puddle, if it was a wood seat, or the upholstery cushions would be ruined beyond repair.

But of course when she woke she really had to go.

There was some call for such a dream.

It occurred to her she’d had Peter’s same vision, the sheet lumped up with camels and swine and herons and maybe eels, lowered down on ropes from heaven. Get up and eat, the Lord commanded.

Things uncloven-hoofed? asked Peter. Cud chewers?

So, however Mrs. Finkelstein was hoofed.

Another lady marching to Zion wore an ostrich-feather hat, the plumy kind, and this was okay, too, going by the lumpy-sheet dream.

Mrs. Finkelstein’s red toenails, though.

Didn’t they just take the cake.