The First Principles of Dreaming Read online

  Praise for The First Principles of Dreaming

  “Beth Goobie blends generous servings of sex, religion, the supernatural­—even horror—into a deliciously creepy coming-of-age tale unlike any other you’re likely to have read. The award-winning author of numerous young adult novels, Goobie knows the mind of teenagers­—especially teenaged girls—like few others, and puts that knowledge to terrific use in this most adult of stories which ultimately transforms itself into a beautiful tale of healing and redemption.”

  —Dave Margoshes, author of

  Wiseman’s Wager and A Book of Great Worth

  One

  My mother had a private kingdom of high, bright pain—it was her solace and comfort, her secret delight. Angels dwelled above her head; she had only to close her eyes and she would be with them, lifted upward into constant wingbeats, the currents of passing spirits. My mother endured the temporary war that was her earthly body; within this war existed the flicker of her true self, the divine spirit that spied on the rest of her life, tabulating moments of good and evil, acts of obedience and acts of the will. This true spirit lived always in waiting—the war might be temporary, but the waiting was eternal—for my mother knew she was one of the chosen few, the 144,000. Someday, the Rapture would take her on a rush of angel wings; the gates of light would open; she would enter and receive a small white stone with her secret name written upon it, and then she would understand everything—the reason why, the meaning.

  My mother did not trust meaning that carried an earthly stench. A tall, plump woman with glasses and a beaked nose, Rachel Hamilton never acknowledged her physical appearance in any way. The year I turned fifteen, she was forty-three. For the last thirty years, she had twisted and pinned her hair into tight pin curls every night before going to bed; it had never occurred to her that this could change. My mother fenced herself in with words like sacrifice and surrender, read books by Billy Graham and William F. Buckley Jr., never allowed a negative word to be spoken against my father, a positive word to be spoken about herself. If I said, “Mother, you look nice,” she would respond, “Oh no, I don’t look nice. I’m very plain. But your father—he’s so good-looking. You’re lucky you got your looks from him.”

  Any insistence on my part would send her from the room in a rush of anger. My mother brooked no disagreement; as I grew older, the wooden spoon disappeared and she ruled me with her wound—that unspoken sacrifice she had made for her only child and continued to make daily through every action, so that my father and I ate her homemade bread and apple kuchen as if from an invisible altar, ate them like the flesh of her body while her spirit floated above our heads, trapped in the ether, waiting for the gates of Heaven to open so she could enter and learn her secret name.

  Everything my mother did carried the echo of her pain. A member of the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle’s Women’s Auxiliary Prayer Group, she met weekly with other female members to pray, gossip, and legislate what Waiting for the Rapture children could eat, speak, wear, and watch on TV. Throughout childhood and adolescence, I was not allowed to wear pants, and my mother sewed all my clothing—the Women’s Auxiliary Prayer Group exchanged sewing patterns until their children looked like a Christian fundamentalist Mickey Mouse Club minus the big ears. Since I was the only Waiting for the Rapture child in our neighborhood, I survived elementary school relatively unscathed, but junior high meant several girls from my Sunday school class walking the same halls in the same McCall’s sewing patterns, each of us with our arms crossed over our chests in a vain attempt to hide the darts none of our mothers seemed able to sew in properly. In a Waiting for the Rapture family, sacrifice and silence were the highest fashions. If my mother pulled out a pattern and I mentioned that I had seen Elizabeth Morgan or Janey Carruthers wearing that particular dress, wings began to beat in my mother’s head and her compressed mouth trembled, but she did not speak. Instead, her wound spoke for her, a wound of silenced lips and waiting eyes—ah, those years and years, those decades, millennia of waiting.

  There was no arguing with such eloquence. And so I would watch, digging deeper into agony as she chose department store fabrics with plaids, paisleys, and stripes. The darts she sewed into any patterned cloth turned my bust into a hallucinogenic apparition, and no matter how carefully I rotated, standing on the kitchen stool, the hemline that she chalked onto each new skirt never failed to make me look as if I wobbled as I walked. While other girls wore hot pants and miniskirts, my hemlines never left the fifties, yet my suffering could not compare to the way my mother’s wound burned in silence. It might have been her only beauty, but it was glorious; she transformed her shame into magnificence and laid down her life as an altar to it. My mother taught me this—it was her greatest gift to me—but even so, I was never able to explain her secret heart to anyone else—the way it ruled me. In the end, I was simply her only daughter, for whom she opened secret gates that remained closed to everyone else. I had seen into those places, and they had shaped me.

  When I was eight, my mother began reading aloud to me after school. Daily I came home to find her seated on the couch and hunched over Billy Graham’s My Answer or Peace With God; as I entered the living room, she would point silently to a nearby chair, flip to passages she had marked earlier that day, and start to read.

  “Oh, Mary-Eve,” she would say throatily after finishing a section. “Isn’t that powerful?”

  Awe vibrated her voice as her unfocused eyes fixed on some distant place, and my unblessed vision strained after hers, desperately trying to catch a glimpse of that high, bright world where angels with flaming swords stood all around, protecting souls from communism and the lesser forces of evil. Sometimes at these moments, the veil fell from my eyes and I suddenly saw the four horsemen of the Apocalypse galloping through our living room on waves of white light while the lake of fire burned below, awaiting the imprisonment of the Beast. Ponderously, full of portent, my mother would read on, words like Antichrist and revelation, apocryphal and doctrine spilling from her tongue—each a drumroll of syllables, majestic and divine; later, I conjured their sounds in my head as I lay awake in the dark, sending them out to do battle with the evil I was certain lurked everywhere, hiding in the four apocalyptic corners of my bedroom.

  My mother knew the second that I lost interest. The last months of junior high, I came awake within myself and realized I did not want to become my mother—did not want to dress like her, talk like her, or live in her high, bright world. Her pain was still my pain; it was a small, precise tongue licking my secret wound—keeping it alive and within her reach, familiar to us both. In spite of this, however, changes had begun to ripple through me—quick, shimmering tremors that left me trembly as a horse’s nose, wanting to whicker and run. My mother’s pain reached out to me, the Apocalypse and the four horsemen guarded me close, but she knew the moment I slipped free, the moment she lost me and I lost her. It was a spring afternoon in 1972, the lilacs in full bloom, their mauve scent calling through an open window; as my mother read aloud, I began to drift. Some minutes later, I caught and returned my wandering thoughts to find myself confronted by silence and the full weight of my mother’s hooded gaze.

  Quietly, she set World Aflame aside. “Well,” she said, glancing out the window. “I suppose that’s the end of that.” Without another word, she got to her feet and left the room.

  “Mother,” I called after her, but my betrayal had been evident to us both—I was no longer the chosen one who believed enough to forsake earthly pleasures and follow her through the fiery gates of faith to walk the mind of God. After she exited the room, I sat staring at a nearby coffee table piled wit
h copies of Christianity Today, Moody Monthly, and Reader’s Digest. Within me beat a wild huge-winged pain, for I knew she was right—something had come to an end; without being aware of it, I had broken faith and no longer believed.

  That night at dinner, my mother’s eyes were red. She did not look at me, did not speak to me for the next two weeks. If I entered a room in which she was present, she walked out, except during meals and church services, when she tolerated my presence. Finally, she began speaking to me again, but I remained fallen from grace; it was obvious she held no more expectations of me than she did for the children of mundane women.

  •••

  After they had been friends for several months, Mary-Eve Hamilton learned that when Dee Eccles turned fourteen, her mother gave her the keys to the family Volkswagen Bug and said, “It’s yours. Now stay out of trouble until you get your goddamn license.” It was, Mary-Eve reflected, the sort of incident that typified the enormous difference between them—her own mother still had not applied for her learner’s permit, preferring to sit, staring vaguely through the front passenger window, while her husband piloted their 1962 Valiant to and from the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle. Dee’s mother, on the other hand, drove a ’70 Chevy, her father a ’72 Ford, and her older brother had just placed a down payment on a Camaro the year Dee inherited the Bug and entered grade nine, Eleusis Collegiate, and the outer perimeters of Mary-Eve’s life. The two girls shared no classes, as Mary-Eve was enrolled in the academic stream and Dee was not. Dee then went on to fail grade nine; for these reasons they became aware of each other only gradually, Mary-Eve watching from classroom windows as Dee erupted through school exits with the smoking crowd for midmorning break. Short-sleeved and shivering from the cold, individual smokers huddled together, silky white laughter sifting from their mouths. United by an invisible rapport, they swallowed anyone with a cigarette into their ranks, and above their heads, Mary-Eve thought she could see a unique brand of angel hovering—nicotine angels, each cradling the raw cigarette ember of one smoker’s fiercely burning heart in its hands.

  From grade nine onward, Dee Eccles was one of the tallest girls in the school, but it was the size of her laughter that marked her—the way it reverberated through a surrounding throng. Ignoring her own age group, she lit up with her older brother and his friends, breathing fire and riding their brain waves as if they were a temporary joyride created just for her; and from where Mary-Eve stood, trapped behind window glass, it seemed Dee knew everything there was to know about guys, everything there was to know about being a girl among guys. Year after year, Mary-Eve studied Dee Eccles like a textbook—memorized the angle at which she held her head when she spoke, the number of degrees the sky tilted as she laughed, the way she could drop every aspect of her surroundings along with her chin and stand scuffing one bored heel in the dirt. Without consciously admitting it to herself, Mary-Eve also kept track of Dee’s extensive wardrobe of halter tops, tube tops, Levi’s 501s, and jean jackets, from a distance sliding them casually off the other girl’s body and studying her heartbeat, the olive sheen of her skin. Each time she watched Dee light up a cigarette and inhale, Mary-Eve came alive within herself—surfaced into warm spots and wet spots and sweet tingling currents, as if the ember at the tip of Dee Eccles’s cigarette were Mary-Eve Hamilton’s fierce burning heart and she needed that specific pair of sucking lips to feel it, to see exactly how cherry red she could become.

  For four full years, Mary-Eve lived off the idea of Dee Eccles—dragging on that ember, sucking its smoky addiction deeper and deeper in. Walking along city streets, she would let herself slide into the low-slung rhythm of the other girl’s hips; staring into her bedroom mirror, she peeled out of her mother’s insane darts and watched the soft hope of Dee’s breasts surface into her own. Mary-Eve wanted Dee’s dark shagged hair and long angular face; she wanted her red-lipped, mobile mouth; and some nights as she kissed, licked, and sucked her pillow, those cherry-red lips did seem to melt into her own—for one crazy, ecstatic moment, Mary-Eve became Dee Eccles, and together they rubbed against the vague necessary boy in her bed.

  Dee had carnal knowledge of guys—it was obvious from the way she moved among them, the way they watched and touched her. She sinned often, on a whim; her daily list of things to do could not have been further removed from Mary-Eve’s. In fact, it probably would have been accurate to say that nothing whatsoever in Dee Eccles’s life related directly to Mary-Eve’s. Dee had an older brother; Mary-Eve was alone. Dee swirled with the school’s rebel current; Mary-Eve attended Inter-Varsity Christian Fellowship. But while even Armageddon would not have had the power to drive Dee through the front doors of the Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle, still Mary-Eve knew that delicate, unspoken currents connected the two of them. For sometimes, as she stood watching through a classroom window, her nerves began to resonate in an invisible siren’s call. And each time, as if in answer, Dee’s head lifted, her nostrils flaring so intensely that even at a distance Mary-Eve felt the other girl’s sharp intake of breath and stepped quickly out of the line of sight.

  By the beginning of grade thirteen, Mary-Eve had been observing Dee Eccles in school hallways, assemblies, and across the cafeteria for so long, the other girl seemed to exist on an alternate plane. If they passed each other in the rush between classes, Mary-Eve’s brain went into overload—Dee was a metaphysical Ziggy Stardust; the light show she carried was all internal, and she was loaded. Mary-Eve wanted that light show; she wanted the ember of that fierce heart burning between her own sweet lips; so in mid-September 1977, she entered the IGA on Wimple Street and handed over a week’s allowance for one pack of Player’s cigarettes—Dee’s brand of cool.

  The cigarette box sat slim but defined between her fingers, a necessary weight. The plastic wrap came off with a satisfying crinkle; the cardboard lid scraped open onto an acrid, dusky scent; then, unbelievably, Mary-Eve was sliding out the pristine shape of her first cigarette, placing its delicate tip between her lips, and striking a match. Hidden in the shadow of the Dumpster behind the IGA, she watched the ember of her heart catch fire, smelled the smoke of its burning, and sucked in. The next few weeks were lonely, coughing work, accompanied by the rustling of falling leaves and the reek of the IGA Dumpster, but for some reason she felt the need to return day after day to the same place; it was a chosen place, a sanctuary—the trees there watched her with knowing, the breeze whispered a silent pact through her hair, and finally, finally came the moment she could breathe smoke like air, triumph drifting, an easy silken white from her lips, to dissipate into the long, blue afternoon.

  Several days later, on a windy, golden October afternoon, Mary-Eve stood hesitating outside Eleusis Collegiate’s east exit, scanning the smoking crowd that had congregated on the school lawn. The face she was seeking, however, wasn’t among them, so without a second thought, she passed on by, headed for Wimple Street and her sanctuary behind the IGA. Then, halfway down the block, she caught sight of a powder-blue Bug idling at the corner, the driver’s dark shagged head bent as if in prayer. Without warning, the head jerked upright and a small yellow object came flying out through an open window.

  “Fuckin’ lighter!” howled a voice.

  Three heartbeats passed as Mary-Eve stood frozen; then she was veering off the sidewalk into the come and go of after-school traffic and flicking her Bic into the terrifying possibilities of an open car window. As if from a great distance, the dark shagged head turned toward her and a pair of large, deep-set blue eyes widened; for a long, stretched moment, two girls stared wordlessly over an orange Bic butane lighter. Finally, the one in the car leaned toward the lit flame. Dragging deeply, she scanned the face in her window, blew out an emphatic line of smoke, and asked, “Who dresses you?”

  Mary-Eve blinked twice. Then, rapid-fire, she reeled off, “The Waiting for the Rapture End Times Tabernacle’s Women’s Auxiliary Prayer Group.”

  “Shit,”
Dee said slowly. “Any chance they’ll stop praying for you soon?”

  “Let ’em pray,” said Mary-Eve. “Just make ’em stop sewing.”

  Dee’s head dropped back and she laughed soundlessly. This close, Mary-Eve could see a small blue butterfly tattoo that flew the tanned skin of the other girl’s upper arm. “Your name’s Mary-Eve, right?” asked Dee, taking another drag off her cigarette.

  “Mary-Eve Hamilton,” Mary-Eve said immediately, as if reporting for duty. “Mary for the mother of God, Eve for the mother of mankind.”

  Dee lifted an eyebrow. “You don’t talk like you look,” she said, revving the Bug’s engine, then added casually, “You hang around school windows a lot.”

  Mary-Eve shifted foot to foot, fighting a flush. “Any way out of a trap,” she said.

  “You got it,” agreed Dee. “This is my last year, and then I’m outta here. Okay, I owe you one—for the light. I’ll drive you home.”

  Stunned temporarily stupid, Mary-Eve stammered, “What—in your car?”

  “No, Jesus-girl,” grinned Dee. “My fire engine. C’mon—get in.”

  Mary-Eve made it to the passenger door so swiftly, she practically leaped the Bug in a single bound, but all Dee said as she climbed in was “Jez. I’m calling you Jezebel, for the mother of fun. Jez for short.”

  “Short fun,” said Mary-Eve. Shakily she lit up, dragged in, and blew out the long, smoky line of her soul. She couldn’t believe it—she was actually sitting beside Dee Eccles in her car—the Blue Bug of Ultimate Cool. “Know what happened to the first Jezebel?” she asked, trying to fake casual.

  Gazing over her shoulder, Dee pulled into traffic with a lurch. “Died of syphilis?” she quipped.

  “Uh-uh,” said Mary-Eve. “Syphilis would’ve been too good for Jezebel. She was the queen of iniquity, you know.” Relishing the phrase—the queen of iniquity—Mary-Eve repeated it in her head. She had always liked the sound of iniquity—it did fascinating things to the tongue. “Eunuchs threw her out a window, and wild dogs licked up her blood.”