The Afterglow

Sharon dreams a lot, or, at least, remembers her dreams more than most. She wonders about her dreams. Worries, really, about what they might mean. I suggest Freud’s The Interpretation of Dreams or Jung’s Man and His Symbols. She smiles and looks away. And then the smile fades. She’s afraid of what those books may say, she says, what they may reveal about her. She wants to figure them out for herself, she says, on her own terms—to take the full meaning neat, undiluted by psychological theory. So she writes about her dreams. She is writing her way to understanding them. I admire that.

Sharon is a nontraditional student. She had left college to marry and settle on a farm and raise a family near a small town in northwestern Missouri. She worked for over twenty-five years as a small-town bank teller. The bank folded—the bank bankrupted, she says—and she is back in college, training to be a high-school English teacher. We are discussing an idea for a draft of a writing assignment. It concerns a recent dream.

Sharon enters a second-floor bedroom in her house to find a door she has never before noticed . She opens it and finds what appears to be a long, narrow living room. The furniture and curtains suggest a 1950s décor. She realizes with a start that it is an exact replica, right down to the dollied chair and couch arm covers, of her grandmother’s living room—as if, Sharon says, it had been teleported and compressed to fit what she had thought was an attic space. And sitting in an armchair, in a housedress and Keds Red Ball Jet sneakers, smoking a Salem cigarette, is her grandmother, who had passed away nearly thirty years ago.

* * *

“Grandma?”

“Hi, kiddo.”

“What are you doing here?”

“I’ve always been here.”

“But I’m in this room almost every day, and I’ve never seen this door.”

“Yes, you did. You just didn’t see it. I’ve always been here. Afterglow”

“Afterglow?”

“Afterglow. You remember when I took you to Pioneer Park and cooked you bacon and eggs on one of those outdoor grills? And I told you about the house up on the hill?”

“You said an Indian chief lived there. He was 300 years old and was watching over the park because it was land that used to belong to his tribe.”

“See? Afterglow. And do you remember when I bought you a cane pole and took you fishing and you caught a sunfish?”

“The fin cut my palm. I’ve never fished since. Never even eaten fish.”

“Afterglow. And do you remember when you saw that little bottle of Mogen David wine I had in the cupboard, that little 4 ounce bottle and you wanted to drink it because you thought that little bottle was so cute and you liked the blackberry color? And at first I said no, and you begged and pleaded, so I gave you a little bit in a shot glass?”

“And I had a headache the next day. You said I had a hangover and not to tell mom. It’d be our secret. I don’t think half a shot glass of wine can cause a hangover, though. But I felt like a grownup because I got to drink wine. You had a hard time saying no to me.”

“You were my daughter’s first-born, and I loved you beyond all reason, kiddo.”

“I know. I’m the same with my daughter’s first. I never told mom our secret. Did you?”

“No.” And then she smiles. It’s an eyes-twinkling sly smile. “Still haven’t.”

* * *

Sharon asks if it would be a good topic for her essay. I ask her what she thinks she can do with it.

“Well, the people in our lives, the ones we love, maybe even the ones we just know—they leave us something of themselves. An afterglow. And dreams; I don’t know, it’s kind of like you’re walking on a bridge with a glass bottom and if you look down you see the bridge goes over a reflecting pond.”

Her voice has inflected into a question. She is looking right at me. “Go write,” I say.