The House of Discarded Dreams

The sand under her feet—bare, her sneakers tied by their shoelaces slung over her shoulder—felt wet and solid, tamped down by the waves. Seaweed and driftwood, the usual refuse of the Atlantic, studded the solid sand surface and Vimbai wandered along, her sharp eyes looking for signs of movement of any critter left behind by the waves. She was skipping class, but let no one say that she did not study.



It was time to return to the car and drive back to school; before the inevitable, Vimbai went for a quick skip across the dunes—the signs and wire fences warned that any such behavior was illegal in the nature preserve, but Vimbai knew that the migratory birds had left already, and the rangers rarely visited the beach in October, so there was no one to witness her impropriety. She ducked under the wire slowly undulating in the wind, and staggered across the warm loose sand that sucked in her feet and stuck to her skin. The thickets of low shrubs and occasional grass patches clung to the sand with admirable, if misguided, determination; the scattering of yellow flowers surprised her—nothing was supposed to be flowering at this time of year, at least in New Jersey. Then her attention snagged on another dead horseshoe crab. It lay among the flowers, belly up, with something bright and white clutched in its stiff little legs.



It was a piece of paper with a fringed edge, of the kind usually sported by homemade ads. None of the pieces with the phone number on it was torn off, though, and Vimbai crouched over the dead crab and its white piece of paper as if it was an exotic chimera composed of animal and inorganic parts. The paper lay blank side up, and Vimbai tried to guess what was on its other side and how it got here. It could’ve been blown here by the wind, after being torn from whatever wall or bulletin board it had previously graced; it could’ve been thrown from a window of a passing car, speeding on the way to or from the town, a sleepy place after August but screaming and bustling in the summer, in contrast to the quiet nature preserve of the beach and its environs.



Vimbai wrested the piece of paper from the clasping pincers and turned it over. The ad was handwritten in a generous loopy scrawl, and it took her a moment to decipher what it said. “Roommate wanted for house in the dunes. Own bedroom and bathroom, separate entrance. Very reasonable rent plus one-third utilities. Any pets except fish.” And the phone number.



It was true that Vimbai had thought about moving out—but the thought had remained soft and amorphous, hiding in the long creases of her pillow and only surfacing with any determination in that half-asleep state at nights and mornings. The ad had brought the thought into daylight, and as Vimbai walked back to her Saturn parked in the small paved lot off the only road that bisected the island, she thought, why not? House in the dunes and a very reasonable rent sounded quite appealing, and she had never owned any fish. She decided to call as soon as she found herself near a phone with decent reception and away from her parents’ superior hearing.



The thought of the house in the dunes was put away as soon as she reached the campus and stopped by her mother’s office to say hello and to check on the latest drama. There was always plenty in the Africana Studies, the most current being her mother’s threats to complain and quit after the program appointed a white man as a department chair; the said chair busily set about redefining the agenda, and Vimbai’s mother would simply not stand for it on general principle.



She was in her office, looking run down even though it wasn’t even lunchtime yet.



“You okay?” Vimbai asked. “Sorry you’re not having a good day.”



“I’m fine.” She looked up from the sheaves of paper strewn on her desk, memos and attendance reports and student essays mixed into a terrifying entangled mess that threatened to consume any mortal’s sanity with its sheer size and complexity. “Another meeting, and after that I just have to grade.”



“Don’t work too hard,” Vimbai advised.



Her mother only shrugged in response, not bothering to pretend that she would even consider such foolishness. “And you should probably go to your next class.”



Vimbai left the office marveling at her mother’s ability to sniff out any shirking of one’s responsibilities, no matter how otherwise preoccupied she was. And she had been preoccupied—ever since the new department chair, Dr. Bouchard, was appointed, Vimbai’s mother seemed to know no rest. Even late at night, she paced the hallway, sometimes muttering to herself in English and Shona; Vimbai could hear her voice through her closed door. All the more reason to move out, Vimbai thought.



She arrived to her class late and slunk to the back, to take sporadic notes of plants’ inner workings and to brood. The tubes inside the plants formed neat organized patterns Vimbai enjoyed sketching; it felt almost like doodling rather than studying, and her thoughts flowed along with wavy lines and pooled in quiet oases of shading, neat little areas of cross-hatch pencil strokes.



“This is nice,” the girl on Vimbai’s left whispered, peering into her notebook.



Vimbai remembered the girl’s name—Sarah. They were in a few classes together, and Sarah had irritated Vimbai on several occasions with her pre-med student’s obsessive anxiety. “Thanks,” Vimbai said with a little stingy smile.



Sarah smiled back, apparently oblivious to Vimbai’s disinclination to make friends. It always puzzled Vimbai, this implied certainty some people possessed that their attention could not possibly be an imposition.



Vimbai turned the page and took more thorough notes than usual to indicate that she was not going to participate in any conversations.



Undeterred, Sarah waited for her after class. “Boring, huh?” she said by the way of striking up a chat.



Vimbai shrugged. “I like it. I like anatomy.” She took a tentative step away.



Sarah followed, and there was really no good way of escaping her in the long straight hallways, made all the more desolate by the poisonous shade of their green paint. “You have any more classes today?”



Vimbai nodded. “African American Lit,” she said.



“Oh,” Sarah answered. White kids never knew what to say. “How is it?”



“Why don’t you take it and find out?” Vimbai suggested with more vehemence than she felt.



“I don’t think it’s for me.”



“Why not? You know all there is to know about it?”



Sarah shrugged. “I’m just not interested.”



Of course she wasn’t. Vimbai remembered her mother’s frequent complaints that the white kids never took any classes at the Africana studies, that they always assumed that black equaled special interest. As much as Vimbai hated to agree with her mother, she had to in this case. But she didn’t argue with Sarah—the fatigue was overwhelming, the sense that she had had this conversation and this argument too many times before. “Whatever,” she said. “I have to go.”



It wasn’t true—her next class did not start until an hour later, but she was not in the mood for explaining herself. Another thing her mother complained about—the constant necessity of explaining oneself, of answering questions. “People are just trying to be nice,” Vimbai used to argue when she was much younger. “They’re just showing interest.”



“Showing interest,” her mother had replied, “would be bothering to do some research on their own rather than pestering people with questions. Don’t you see? Even when they’re nice, they’re placing a burden on you. Just wait and see how quickly it gets on your nerves.”



Vimbai sighed and headed for the library—it was usually empty during the lunchtime, and in the stacks it might be easy to avoid Sarah or any other overly talkative classmates who would be eager to burden her with their interest or socializing.



The library was located in the new building, adjacent to the science labs. It had tall narrow windows running all the way from the high ceiling to the tiled floors, and Vimbai liked the way sunlight striped the stacks, while others hid in the shadows, light and dark interspersed in regular narrow slats. She headed for the shelves draped in soft shadow, meandered between then into the unexplored library depths hiding reference materials—newspapers from the sixties and the seventies, artifacts no intrepid explorer would be likely to sift through—and sat on the floor, her back resting comfortably against the cloth-bound sheaves of papers. The air smelled of dust and air-freshener, mixed with Vimbai’s own scent of warm skin and salt, and she curled up in this quiet welcoming ambience.



Unlikely to disturb anyone, she dug through her book bag and found her cell and the crumpled sheet of paper from the dunes. She dialed the number and almost chickened out and hung up when the female voice said “Hello.”



“Hello,” Vimbai answered, keeping her voice low out of the old library habit. “I’m calling about the house . . . in the dunes.”



“We still have a room,” the woman said brightly. “The rent is two hundred bucks a month, and you will share with myself and Felix—he has the third bedroom. Interested?”



“I’d like to see it first,” Vimbai said.



“Come by tomorrow,” the woman said, and dictated the address.