The House of Discarded Dreams

Maya blamed the strange effects of the house on Felix, on the gravitational pull of his hair; Felix did not argue. Vimbai thought that it was the dunes, the underwater singing of the horseshoe crabs buried in the sand for the winter; the shifting of sand, the lapping of the waves, the eroding processes that ate away at everything, that made land part of the sea and carried the sea over land, the same forces that pulled Vimbai away from everything her parents were. At night, she listened to the whistle of the wind in the rigging of the old house and its creaking moans, the lapping of the tides, unable to sleep. And so it went.



Vimbai liked to sit in the kitchen in the morning—she made coffee and waited for Maya to come downstairs. Maya, always fascinating and evasive, a strange thing in herself, something that needed to be puzzled out and unraveled. Even though Vimbai was not sure why she felt that it was her job to unravel this enigma wrapped in a striped bath robe, she looked forward to the moment when Maya stumbled downstairs, her eyes half-closed and her nostrils flared in anticipation of the hot, clear coffee; there seemed to be few things in life Maya enjoyed more than that first cup of coffee in the morning.



“Good morning,” Maya said and poured herself a cup. “Thanks for making coffee—before you moved in, I was the one making it. Felix always sleeps late.”



“Sure thing,” Vimbai said. “I enjoy making it—I get up early anyway.”



Maya made a face. “Whatever possesses you to commit such silliness?”



Vimbai considered the question she wanted to ask and then discarded it—there was simply no polite way of asking Maya about the way she spoke, about her carefully cultivated non-regional accent, without sounding offensive. She sighed and gave up on the idea—her mother was right: Vimbai, even though she was born and raised in New Jersey, was still a foreigner to most African-Americans, oblivious as she was to fine distinctions of speech patterns and code-switching. She was informed that she was not getting it when she was still in high school, and she was ashamed to admit that she had made little progress in the matter.



Instead, Vimbai poured herself another cup of coffee. “How do you like working in Atlantic City?” she asked.



Maya barked a short strained laugh. “What’s not to like? Casinos surrounded by a ghetto. Land of contrasts, as it were. Plus, it’s a good place to bartend, really—men are too preoccupied with gambling to hit on you. Which is, you know, a good thing. Like Martha Stewart.”



“I’ve been at the casinos a few times,” Vimbai said. “With my mom, mostly. She does some research there—her specialty is urban folklore, and there’s a ton of it in Atlantic City.”



“But not in the casinos.”



“No. We went there for the buffets.”



Maya laughed. “Oh my god. Those are such freak shows.”



Vimbai’s upbringing urged her to argue, to insist that all people deserved a claim to dignity and respect, and ought not to be called freaks. But she remembered these pale and lumbering shapes, their faces slack and remote, their eyes permanently dilated in the artificial semi-darkness. They seemed to live in the casinos—at least, Vimbai had never seen them anywhere else; they seemed shy underground dwellers, sliding softly through their habitual dusk with white porcelain plates heaped high with pasta salad and ribs, their only break from the life of sitting on a high stool and pulling a lever and putting shiny coins into a large Styrofoam cup, their lives augured by the fast-spinning cherries and lemons in tiny transparent windows.



“I know what you mean,” she finally said. “Are the bars any better? I bet you have stories.”



“You bet right,” Maya said. “See, the casino bar is a great place—people come there when they are not gambling or eating, and that usually happens when they just lost a shitload of money, and cannot gamble anymore but are afraid to go back home. Some celebrate when they win, some are just there to hang out, you know? But it’s always the losers who are interesting. This is why I remember them the most, I guess.”



“Oh?” Vimbai smiled and refilled Maya’s cup. This solicitousness felt natural to her, warm. “What’s so interesting about them?”



Maya patted Vimbai’s hand in gratitude, making her blush a bit. “I don’t really know, but I guess this is when people are . . . honest, I guess. They know they’ve been beaten, and they are out of tricks for a while—they really know that they are fucked. And yet, there’s this thing when they try to tell themselves that it’s not that big of a deal. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s like if they cannot lie to themselves about what happened, they start diminishing its importance. When they are honest, they almost have to be deluded, you know?”



Vimbai considered. “I’m kind of getting it, I guess.” She wasn’t really sure that she was getting anything, but she wanted Maya to like her so badly. Vimbai suspected that the spell of the house that lulled her so much tried to tie her not only to the house, but also to its inhabitants. Otherwise there didn’t seem to be a reason for her to feel so invested in what Maya thought of her.



Vimbai attended classes, dutiful but disengaged, caught in the slow molasses of movement of time and the sucking embrace of gravity. The world came through muffled, and only the house and the dunes and the ocean remained real. Winter was coming, and there was a first dusting of miserly snowflakes scattered almost invisible on the frozen sand one morning in November.



That day, Vimbai stepped onto the hoary porch and saw that the very character of the dunes had been transformed—they lost their fluid, mutable aspect and even though they remained the same in appearance they now stood motionless, seized by the ice within, trapped into immobility.



Vimbai’s bare toes curled instinctively, cringing away from contact with the cold boards of the porch (which, as her investigations had shown, harbored no nests of adorable foxes). She hugged her shoulders and stared at the leaden water, visible between the dunes, barely puckered by waves. Her fingertips grew numb, and the hairs inside her nose grew stiff with frost, singed with the smell of ozone. Still, Vimbai lingered in her robe, thinking of her mother—the first serious frost always put Vimbai in that frame of mind. As long as she could remember, it was the time when her mother grew pensive and quiet, and when pushed given to reminiscence. It was in November that Vimbai’s parents left their home and came to the U.S.



Vimbai strained to see over the water—it just seemed impossible that the entire continent could be hidden by the curving razorblade cut of the horizon, bleeding now the first red streaks of dawn. Her breath formed tight white clumps in the air, like the memories of the still invisible clouds overhead.



Her mother had to regret something—and Vimbai suspected ever since she was little that her mother still, twenty years later, was not convinced that she had made the right decision. How could one know something like that, how could one not agonize over how life would’ve turned out if one had made different choices? Even Vimbai, with her sheltered existence and precious few choices with any consequences, wondered. Those were small things, insignificant perhaps, but she wished sometimes that she had chosen differently.



She breathed open-mouthed on her fingers, numb and discolored by cold, and thought about that kid, the little ten-year-old whose name she never learned. She was in high school then, old enough to largely ignore the kids playing in the elementary-school yard she passed on her way to classes. She walked alone, absorbed in her thoughts, and paid no mind to the persistent cries emanating from the schoolyard. The word that jettisoned her out of her preoccupation was ‘lion’—not the sort of thing one heard often under such circumstances.



“Go hunt a lion,” a largish and very pink boy shouted. “Go back to Africa.”



Vimbai stopped and stared at the small black kid in ill-fitting white shirt and khaki shorts, backed up against a set of monkey bars. A few other children surrounded him in a tentative semicircle, not quite backing up the assailant but not dissuading him either. Non-committal, waiting to see how things shook out. Little vultures.



The small kid said nothing and just swallowed often and hard, as if trying to dislodge the words stuck in his throat.



The pink boy advanced half a step, and the semicircle drew up on itself tighter, the kids smelling blood now, just a moment away from taking part.



“Leave him alone,” Vimbai said.



The pink kid turned to look at her; she still remembered the expression of contempt in his eyes. Without saying a word, he returned his attention to the cornered kid in the white shirt. “Go hunt a lion,” he said again, with rather more force, as if challenging Vimbai to climb the fence and kick his plump behind.



Vimbai looked at her watch; she was already running late, and kids did this sort of thing all the time. “Stop it.” She raised her voice to be heard over the rising hum of the other voices that had decided to join in.



Her stomach had ached when she turned and walked away.



In her darker moments, like that day watching the cold ocean over the frozen dunes, she wondered if she somehow upset her karmic balance that day, if everything that ever went wrong since then was the result of her failure. She had wished she would see this kid again, but no matter how many times she walked past the elementary school, he was not there.

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