Dreaming in Daylight

By Susan Merson

Rose Shiner's father Leo, a one time carnival barker and opera producer, prefers Puccini's world to his own. Belle, Rose's mother, fights debilitating depression, desperate to step up from her youth on the Canadian prairie to a suburban castle. Rosie struggles mightily to grow in this shadow world, fighting through nightmares to find dreams steady and safe enough to sustain her in daylight.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Susan Merson
• Release date: Mar 2, 2021
• ISBN: 9781393763307

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Dreaming in Daylight

Susan Merson

Dreaming in Daylight

©2011 Susan Merson

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, by photocopying or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage or retrieval systems, without permission in writing from both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book, except for the minimum words needed for review.

Dreaming in Daylight is a work of fiction.

Any similarities to real places, events, or persons living or dead is coincidental or used fictitiously and not to be construed as real.

Edited by Janet Elaine Smith

Cover Photo by Veerendra from Pexels LLC

Prologue

Detroit 1958

"Watch out! screams my brother Robbie. Holy crap!"

A black sedan careens around the corner. The music runs fast.

Mama looks up from the sock she’s trying to save. Watch your language!

Smoke obliterates the sedan as a police cruiser in hot pursuit crashes into its side. The impact is so strong the black and white TV picture, already challenged by snow, starts to jump, and Dad leaps to his feet to fiddle with the vertical hold.

"God damn it!" His fingers thrash the knobs.

"Did you see that, Dad? Jeez! The cops creamed them." Robbie is crowing now, jumping on the quilted sofa.

"Stop that! Mama says to Robbie then, then turns and adds, Turn that down, Leo, for Chrissakes!"

"Aw, Belle! We’re missing it! We’re missing the whole damn thing!" But he’s wrong, because when Paul Burke, the handsome detective who looks a lot like Dad, steps from his squad car, the picture is steady and his detective’s trench coat is a bunch of carefully folded wrinkles.

"That score is settled," says Paul Burke, lighting a cigarette.

"There are eight million stories in the Naked City. This has been one of them," says the serious announcer.

"Man says my brother, that is so cool."

"The good guys won, Robbie, Dad says, pleased, revved. Now the good guys can go to bed."

My dad stretches his arms a little too wide and switches off the set.

"Faye’s not home yet, says Mama. I’ll have a cuppa tea and wait for her."

"What time?" Dad looks up.

"She’ll be back soon. Mama adjusts her sweater, fitting it to her shoulders. Faye will be back soon. I’ll wait for her." She pokes her needle into the sock.

"I’m going to bed, Belle. Now. I’m going." He turns to face his wife.

"We heard you, Leo. Go to bed. She digs in her heels. We heard you are going to bed, so go to bed."

My stomach starts to hurt.

"And you’re not coming up? You’re waiting for your daughter?"

"I’m waiting for my daughter. Gary will be home with her soon. I told you that," Mama says, her voice growing louder, like the music on TV when it warns of a crash.

"Check outside, says Robbie. I bet they’re sitting right there. Right now. Going at it. Kiss, kiss."

"Go to bed, Robbie!" Mama says. She sounds like that snapping turtle at the pet store that she told me was too dangerous to have at home. Dad turns away and mumbles.

"He’ll be a hell of a lot luckier than I will be tonight. I’ll tell you that."

Robbie starts to giggle. His laughter is so sharp it leaves razor edges all over the room.

"Outta here, you!" my dad commands my brother with a look. Robbie scampers quickly across the living room, avoiding the jagged edges, making it to the stairs. Mama goes on the attack.

"Leo, take Rosie upstairs now! I want a cuppa tea!"

"Go to bed, Rosie. Go to bed." Dad makes that an order, not to be outdone.

Mama keeps poking at that sock.

"You heard your father. Now they are both at it. You’re eight years old. You can put yourself to bed." Her voice whacks at me. Up the stairs, under the covers, I escape. They rumble and hiss at each other down there in the living room. Thunder clouds negotiate lightning and somebody loses. Daddy climbs the stairs alone. He closes the bedroom door. On the radio a fat lady sings.

Mama turns on the TV for the late night news. The teakettle sends out its alarm. The whole house is screaming.

Chapter 1

I wait on the front porch for my dad every day after school. I want him to see me first, give me a chuck on the chin and say, Hiya, Gorgeous, like it was my name. I just float around till he comes home, feeling like a leaky cloud. When he shows up, he sees me and it makes me feel better. I try to look busy on the front porch, but I’m not always. Sometimes I twirl on the front grass and then fall down and feel the world like a Tilt-a-Whirl, then I float above myself and feel all my edges slip and slide. It’s kind of scary sometimes, but I am used to it.

I usually sit on the porch after school, if it’s warm. I draw chalk lines around the outline of my bare feet when I have nothing else to do. It reminds me of crime shows on TV. Sometimes I toss a rock into the v-shapes of the front walk and pretend that I discover gold. My dad won’t be home for hours yet. Mama calls him the Sol Hurok of the bilik furniture trade.

The kids in the neighborhood are all three years older than I am. They are skinny and go to church and are never outside when I am outside. I have black eyes and straight black hair and a tummy that sticks out round like a muffin. I mostly wear a black leotard in the summer and pretend I am a dancer.

It is usually quiet on the street until, all of a sudden, the other kids swoop in a gaggle, running from one house to the other, screeching as they fly, making the summer afternoon ragged and raw. Then the elms soak up the sound again and all that’s left is an occasional whoosh of a passing Ford and the click-click of cicadas, as though the gash of sound never happened at all. My chalk scratches against the day—and sometimes it breaks.

School is over for the year and I look at the long prospect of hot days, with no real friend but the sprinkler. My family doesn’t send us to camp.

What? You want to go with the goyim? asks Mama.

The older kids have summer jobs, but I’m too little. When I ask Mama what I will do this summer she says, Read a book. Sing to your papa’s screechy music. Me, I got a pot roast in the oven.

I set out for Bobbie St. Amour’s house and perch myself on the big rock that sits next to her walk. Her house reminds me of Leave It To Beaver on television. The other neighborhood kids—Susie, Bevvy, Nancy, Bobbie, Linda—are somewhere inside. I see the curtains move in the front window and then someone grabs them. The kids rustle in the background. I know it’s them. They are like an enormous set of mutant Siamese twins, inseparable, with lots of shared parts.

Sh—h-h-h. Shut up, you guys. She’ll see us! Oh look! A cascade of giggles hiss like hot air from behind the curtains. She’s got that black thing on again. You can see her fanny. Look! More whispers, hissing, bubbles of contempt float to heaven.

I saw The Diary of Anne Frank at the Jewish Center last week. The little girl the play was about said, I still believe that people are really good at heart. She had a follow spot and swell music to help her out. I heave a sigh and sit tight.

I dangle my feet and kick my heels against the St. Amour’s granite boulder, trying to look casual. My feet start to hurt. The kids will come out soon. I know that. My heels get raw and achy. I stand and wiggle my feet to get the hurt out. I’ll be taller than them if I get up on the rock. I’ll play Wallendas, like the acrobats that come with the Shrine circus every year. The kids inside will think that is cool, man.

I balance on the rock, stretching my arms high over my head. I spread my arms wide. I feel the leotard stretch taut against my tummy. I am the top Wallenda on the pyramid, inching my way across the high wire. I do a one-footed balance and hop to change direction. I miss the wire. The rock… I am flying. Great acrobats must think the same thing when they miss the wire, wishing for wings.

"I don’t think I am dead," I figure as I lay spread-eagle on the sidewalk. My ankle hurts. There is blood on my knees. Little ice picks, like salt pellets of sound, tinkle toward me and land in my wounds. I rise and limp, defeated.

Let them laugh, Mama tells me. I look up at her. She’s busy, her eyes scanning the damage. Ignore them, she says as she puts a pack of Birdseye frozen carrots on my ankle. Read a book! Flying is overrated, she says.

Next day, I walk stiffly over a block to Sussex Street where the boys are playing touch football. I’m going to watch my brother, Robbie, play after he finishes up with his paper route. I don’t bend my knees. The scabs aren’t set yet.

A car comes by that disturbs the boys’ game. They yell, Go down Whitcomb! in a singsong attack on the burping Chevy. They smirk and scuffle their Keds against the curb. My brother is playing happily with these boys. He is littler than the big ones, but bigger than I am. Robbie has glasses and they don’t slide down like what happens with some of the kids at school who have glasses and tiny turned up noses. Robbie’s glasses stay put because my brother’s nose is so big.

You got a Yid nose, Tommy Pike tells him.

A Yid nose! My brother laughs along with him when he says it. Tommy is older and three inches taller than Robbie. Tommy looks over at me.

I’ll walk your baby sister home for you. She shouldn’t be here anyway. She might get hurt.

Robbie doesn’t say anything. I know he’d rather play with the boys alone, without me or Tommy Pike hanging around.

One time Robbie forgot me at the flagpole at school. The time he did that I got a ride home in a red convertible from his English teacher. She had bleached blond hair and a German name. This made her suspect in our house, even though she drove a red sports car convertible. Robbie got in real trouble for that one.

C’mon, says Tommy. He takes me by the hand, though I am big enough to cross the street by myself.

Here. C’mere. I want to show you something, Tommy says when we get to his garage. We go inside and he stands behind his older brother’s souped up Ford. He unzips his pants and takes out his penis.

Touch it. Touch it. I blink. He grabs my hand. Touch it.

Why? I ask. I don’t know what he wants me to do with it. You want me to... itch it or something?

It’s floppy and white, with grey veins all over it, kind of like a crummy potato.

Touch it. Touch it, he chants. Then the sound of his mother’s car coming up the drive stops him.

Run! he yells. Run away home. I start to follow orders, charged with some vague sense of bad, but he sticks his foot out and I fall on my bandaged knees.

You tell anyone and I’ll come and get you! I look up at him and see that he thinks he’s in a movie. What a jerk. I have oil on my shorts from the garage floor. That’s the real problem.

My mama’s going to kill me, I say.

Run away. Run away home.

I do. Oh man. It’s going to be a long summer. I can tell.

****

The days pass. I am not interested in watching Tommy Pike wave his penis around at me or in flopping from high wires to prove some point. I go to the library and get books from Miss Thompson, the librarian, who thinks I am smart. I read them, all of them. I eat popsicles and go to Crystal Pool once a week when Mama decides she can take me. My dad is always working in his office or driving around in his big Buick special. It is blue and has three black scoops in the right front panel. It is a design I find convenient for storing M and M’s when I am in the front yard and the car is at rest. The heat from the engine melts the chocolate to a warm gooey mess. Perfect. The car sometimes watches me for my dad, making sure I am safe. I wait for my Dad. He comes home late and says Hiya, Gorgeous. Then I eat dinner and go to bed. That’s my summer. Everyday—I read, I float, I wait.

Most days Mama bustles around inside, laughing on the phone with her sister.

"Vus macht dzu, Frannela. What’s with you and the kids?" Running the vacuum, making the beds, that’s a Mama day. Tommy Pike’s mother never calls wondering if I am okay. I know she saw me beat it.

As the summer passes, I read four Nancy Drews and decide on a Trixie Belden. Time goes by. My shorts get shorter and my feet now reach the second step on the front porch.

It is almost time for school to start again. Mama refuses to take us to Crystal Pool to swim anymore. She buys our school clothes at Monkey Wards, which means our bathing suits and my leotard are packed away in the summer closet. No matter that it’s still eighty-five degrees, with air as thick as a Kaiser roll. The calendar says it’s almost fall.

So be it, she pronounces. Besides, Crystal Pool is where you can catch polio. You know that.

It’s true, they closed the pool a few summers earlier because of a polio scare, but I don’t remember actually knowing anyone who ever really got it. Why is it she never told me that when I was swimming there all last month?

And besides, I say, we all stood in line at the doctor’s office on Wyoming Avenue while Dr. Bernstein shot us with his polio gun and we ate lollipops and didn’t cry. Lines and lines of us. Now no one will get polio anymore.

Except your uncle, Mother says. Remember your uncle. Bad things happen.

Bad things don’t always happen. I protest.

I suppose that’s why children are born, she says with a sigh. That must be the reason. To say just that.

Mom bends down and looks into my eyes. She smoothes back the damp hair on my forehead.

Prove me wrong, she says.

I want to, but when I look into her sad eyes I get lost somewhere secret and lonely. It’s something we share—knowing about sad, deep places. I go outside on the porch again to breathe.

I am surprised to see Susie and Bevvy, hand-in-hand, swinging along the sidewalk toward me. They are singing something rhythmic. I am so happy. The whole summer, and they choose now to finally make friends. That’s all right. I forgive them already. I can’t wait to tell mama, to show her that even rotten kids can be friends. That happily-ever-after, the end of so many fairy tales that she always sniffs at can really be true. These are the meanest kids in the neighborhood, heading straight for our porch, their arms outstretched toward me, singing. I get myself into a casual position so I can look surprised, but still welcome them like I expected them all along. They come closer. I listen carefully to their song. I think it is probably something from one of those colored girl groups that are brought to the candy stores after school and sung over loud speakers from the back of pickup trucks. I know those songs. I can sing with them. We can harmonize. I know how. They know I know how.

Pig pot. Pig pot, baby. Oh-ho, pig pot! Rosie is a pig pot, baby, they sing. They shuck and jive, dancing on my front walk, tossing their arms, stomping their feet on the cement, howling their song into the Dutch elm above us. That is not a Motown sound. It is a song written especially for me, and they get a real charge out of it. They dance in a circle and then, with some silent cue, the two of them grab hands and move away down the street, wiggling their fannies at me, wailing their tune, stifling their giggles.

The two girls look like a summer movie, all long legs and pressed short shorts, as they move down the sidewalk. Hand-in-hand. Sauntering three-legged racers. Slithering snakes.

Behind me, I feel my mama standing and watching the children. She doesn’t scream at them or tell them they are bad or rotten. Instead, she looks deeply at me, wondering how I listen to them, what I will do, but she does not come out of the door. She does not rejoice at my humiliation.

I’m okay, Mama. I’m eight years old. I am big enough to put myself to bed, I say proudly. She stands sadly like she has been doing more and more often, and goes back inside.

I take a deep breath at this last cruelty of the summer. Then, I lay flat on the cool green grass, hoping the ground will wash away the terrible feelings that are jumping out of me like spears of yellow lightening. I look up at the big elm tree, wondering if it still shelters the horrible sounds of their song. I don’t wait to get an answer from the tree; I turn over and slide closer to the front garden. I think I’ll just stay here till school starts again. I scootch my head beneath the evergreen bushes. It smells like Christmas under there, even for Jewish children. The furry evergreens make me itch. I know no one can see me, even though half of my body sticks out from under the bushes. Like a corpse. Like on Naked City on TV.

I open my eyes and see a clump of astonishing lilies-of-the-valley growing in a fairy forest right next to my head. I have never seen anything formed with such composure and elegance. The flowers are perfect—white, graceful, at ease. Native to the neighborhood, foreign to me.

Chapter 2

The Carlys live next door. They are Republicans and Mom says that against their better judgment they sent their daughter to Spain for her junior year abroad. Since the daughter has come back she plays the castanets and sings crying Spanish melodies. She stomps on the floor and hurls her voice at the ceiling of her attic bedroom. Her parents cower behind the evening paper and pray that Eisenhower will keep the country safe. My father, busy in his den at our house, sorting orange tissue paper invoices, raises his head as if receiving a message from on high when he hears the Carly girl.

Rosie, he calls to me, come put my papers in order!

He calls me in to alphabetize them, but I know it’s because he wants me to hear her too.

Shh-hh. Concentrate, he says.

It’s Saturday, and Dad’s got heartburn. He finishes his work and he goes and lies down in bed, popping Maalox. I hear him moan from where I sit on the grass down below counting ants.

Oy. Oyoyoy, floats from the window above me.

Daddy?

Whaddayawant, Gorgeous? I got his attention, now I show him I’m a real smarty.

You sound like a ‘stuck pig.’ Stop it. He doesn’t say anything for a minute.

A stuck pig, huh? I heard it on the television show last night.

You know…the sound you’re making.

I don’t want to hurt his feelings, really.

I’ll sing, kiddo. I’ll sing music.

Like the Carly girl, I think. So be it.

My mother says that. So be it. It feels bossy and secure. So be it. I return to the front porch and watch some ants make their way from crack to cookie crumb and back again.

"Dovunque el mundo, comes the wavering voice of my father from upstairs. It lilts and sails. El yanqui vagabondo."

I look up and hear another world. A shadowy racket that music creates, the inside of something. I’ve never heard it before. I pay attention. That sound falls on my ears like a velvet bag, like the dark blue one that holds whiskey for my Dad’s goyische clients to drink. I lean against it. Oh, that’s how that feels. I keep scratching for ants, and I wonder what they sound like.

****

That night the Carly girl wails at her ceiling. I picture her opening her mouth and letting a python come out, slithering against the walls, rolling in something lost and gone. It reminds me of someone looking for the way home.

My big sister Faye sniffs and looks out at the light across the way. Faye and I share a bedroom and our window is just across from the Carly girl’s.

You hear that? asks Faye. Pacing around, knocking into walls? That girl has lost her mind.

Where did she put it? I ask. Maybe Faye has the answer. Faye looks at me and tries to figure out if I’m asking a question.

Minds don’t get lost like marbles, Rosie. They kind of crumble—crumble and go away.

She blows some fuzz from her yellow sweater, folds it in a plastic sweater bag and all is right with her world. She doesn’t let things touch her like the Carly girl does. Faye never yells like Mama or sulks like Dad. Faye is exactly as she appears. I like that about her very much.

Faye, slight with green eyes, is the first child of our mother’s marriage to her first husband, Philip, a rich accountant of German Jewish descent, the husband before Leo. Philip married Mama on the rebound, but she took him up on it quickly, counseled to do so by her older sister, Frances. This is good, Belle. You marry him right away.

Belle was nineteen and taking a course in journalism at night school. Her father wouldn’t pay for college for his youngest child. Not for any of his children, actually. Work and marriage was the path he set forth for all of them. Francis was already a floorwalker at Himelhoch’s dress store and she knew what was what.

So my mama Belle married up and Faye was their first child, Named after Faye Bainter or Faye Emerson. Belle’s accountant husband didn’t believe in naming children after dead relatives. They had enough to deal with without that.

Let them look to the future, he said.

Faye lived like a curly-headed Shirley Temple in the early years of the war.

Philip, Faye’s father and then Robbie’s father, was exempt from the war because of his asthma and flat feet. He played cards with his brothers, made a fine living, and was grudgingly kind. This was before my father and mother met, when my father, Leo, was off in Italy, having the adventure that would make him who he was. Mama hadn’t a clue about him then. Her life was perfect and according to plan.

Belle spoke little about Philip after he was dead except to say that her sister Frances and brother-in-law Isadore thought she had married well. When Philip, the accountant with the fine wire-rimmed glasses and pin-striped suits, turned purple from skin cancer, Belle put her children, Robbie and Faye, to bed and watched Philip’s brothers play cards. Her accountant husband morphed stoically into an eggplant behind closed doors. The brothers offered Gin every now and then, and that was it. Mama was forbidden to say a word.

The story is that Philip had been painting a room some months earlier and cut himself. The lead paint covered his skin and a few months later he started turning colors. Robbie, the baby at eighteen months, pounded on the door and held his breath until he, too, turned blue. They closed his father away from him. Faye was less demonstrative. She played with her dollies, was checked every now and then to see that she was still pale and steady, and then she went to bed.

I only know these stories as myth, but I believe that about Faye. Teenage Faye, happy behind the static of her orange clock radio and the curious stack of foam rubber cones that she sticks into her bra before going to school each day. I love the careful way she coordinates her outfits. Faye wears plaid proudly on her slim frame. She wears gold and green and aqua, all colors that work with her fair complexion, blue eyes, and red hair. Wearing Faye’s hand-me-downs is a demonstration in being her opposite. My dark eyes and olive skin, my plump body clothed in Faye’s self-portrait further proves that I am an alien for sure.

Faye is always kind to me. She patiently puts pin curls into my straight black hair. She gives me her old crinolines to wear and holds my hand when we cross a street. It is Faye who checks