The Dreams that Float Above Our Heads

When Lilith and Gerald were married, it was because they should be.

When Lilith and Gerald were married, it was because they should be. Lilith didn’t allow this to bother her until their wedding night, when she realized she was expected to give herself to him and she couldn’t bring herself to.

It wasn’t that Gerald wasn’t attractive. He was tall. Lean. With a strong face, defined jawline, cheekbones. He had the beginnings of facial hair, as a young man would, hairs still finding themselves, figuring out which direction to turn. But he had large hands that felt like weights on her shoulders, on her waist, and the weight made the air she sucked in feel stifled and unfamiliar. He smelled of outside and heat, and his skin was slick with sweat. She tried to remind herself that he was only Gerald. The Gerald she had always known. The Gerald who she caught crabs with on the beach as a child. And how he would chase her with them and how she would be terrified of their little bead eyes—and his own bead eyes—but how she also enjoyed his attention, secretly.

When Gerald had gone away for boarding school, so had the crabs. They had become harder and harder for Lilith to catch on her own. Then Gerald had come back man—man with the musk of a man, with those hands, and the heavy mass of them—boy gone. And Lilith had felt embarrassed having needed him.

When they were married, it was because they should be. He was a man who would make her a woman. They were to become two people who would need things from one another, who now would catch and chase each other, with all of the thrill and the fear they had experienced on the beach, for the rest of their lives.

It was this full realization that unsettled Lilith on her wedding night. It was the idea of exposing herself: undressing as a girl and moving forward in the body of a woman, someone womanly. Making love like that, it haunted her. So as they stood in front of the bed in what would be their new home, she clung to her gown, tailored to shield the sharp angles of her body, and she clung to her length, her innocence, refusing to remove any of it. She contemplated the bed that would hold them together in the night. Blind to each other, blind to themselves. Dreaming and then dreaming again over. And when their dreams left them, as Lilith had always imagined, they would float in the space between them, just above the temple. So close the dreams could become one.

*

The dress had been made by Lilith’s auntie, who was a drunk with a lazy eye. It wasn’t glamourous. It was not bridely. It was not something that said “I love you.” It didn’t say, “and now I am yours.” It had something to do with the embroidery, Lilith thought, but had told no one. It had something to do with the fit, which accentuated her boyness. Flatness of her chest. Straightness of her legs. The thin in her waist, in her hips. It could have also had something to do with the color, the purest of whites. The kind of white that made you picture the dark skin folded between her legs, untouched, unknowing. Perhaps it was also the smell, as the fabric had been stripped from the wedding gown of Lilith’s mother, Esther. It had been stored in the closet where her brother hung himself. And so there was the smell of fish, salt, of nonliving around Lilith while she wore it. She figured that someone’s essence was left behind at the place where they died. But it was what her mother could afford. It was all there was to be had.

Esther cried when she first saw Lilith in the dress. “God is all around you,” she had said.

*

“Why ya so cold to me?” Gerald asked. Lilith had turned her back to him and stepped away from his reach, hugging herself, keeping God close. The walls were cracked, and she suddenly had the urge to squeeze herself into the tiny fissures.

“Won’t let me see ya?”

“Won’t let me hold ya, no?”

“Won’t let me love ya none?”

*

Gerald’s father was a beautiful man. Attractive in the handsomeness of his face, striking, like Gerald’s, but also his physique. Erect, taut, muscular. His mother had pressed his father’s tailored shirts each day to work. Not a day working the lands without proper dress.

Gerald’s mother became mute in the final years of her life. She spoke only to the Lord in her prayers. When he asked why his mother no longer spoke, he learned from relatives that it was because she had gotten so mad at his father she thought she would spit fire if she opened her mouth. When he asked his father if it was true, he responded that he hadn’t heard a ting of it before.

Dreaming and then dreaming again over. 

Gerald had once thought that a colony of ants lived in his shoes. Took shelter in the spaces between his toes. They would climb his legs, starting at the feet, when he traveled with his father for deliveries. They wanted to suck the sweetness of the sugar cane and water coconut that his father had cut down, nestled with him in the buggy. He always remained still and let them roam, remembering again and again and again what his father had told him: “Just likkle ants, mighty mon. Just likkle ants.”

He often said this to himself now, when things were happening that felt out of his control, that scared him, to remind himself to remain calm, patient, mighty.

*

Lilith remembered one day long ago, when her mother had let her go down to the beach to play with Gerald. They were standing face-to-face. He was holding a baby blue crab. The crab flared its limbs as if it were reaching out to her.

“We should name it! And love it! And be its Mumma and Papa,” Lilith said.

“Yuk. Me not play dat game.” He dropped the crab at their feet. Into the sand. Lilith had whimpered as she fell to her knees, hoping to catch it. She had not feared this one as she had the ones Gerald usually tormented her with. Instead, she felt sorry for it, left alone to grow and to be. She hoped it would follow her home, but she had walked too fast, and it had moved too slow, and so it never found its way.

Now, Gerald is saying, “Tell me someting. Anyting. And I’ll tell you.”

Lilith began to tell him about her mother, which made her think to tell him about her aunt, a person God had planned for laziness and had to mark as such with an eyeball that never sat right in its seat. Which made her think to tell him about the closet. And since she had told him all of that, she felt she could tell him her thoughts of the dress. She waited for him to disapprove of her vainness. As she spoke, she realized she had said it in a way that had made her seem selfish, ungrateful. But he listened. Really listened. In a way that she had not experienced before.

“What do you tink bout it?”

“Tink bout what?”

“The dress?”

“Just likkle ants.”

Gerald answered as sleep found its way to him. He had undressed and climbed into the bed comfortably. She stood over him, listening to his breathing, trying to memorize it. The dark was too dark for him and so she lost him. But she knew he was there, somewhere around her, from his breaths, the gargles in the back of his throat, and that was enough for her.

Just likkle ants, she mouthed to herself, repeating him.

*

In the night, Lilith became mush. Something not of herself. She had melted through her dress into the sheets, into the floorboards, into the earth. She was going because she had to be someplace. Going and going and.

*

Lilith woke to Gerald watching her. Watching her expectantly. As if he had asked her a question and was waiting for her answer. But it was as if he had already known what she would say—he was just waiting for her to realize it for herself. That’s what his eyes told her. His bead eyes, deeply black, like the crabs. Which then reminded her of her dream. Of being a mound of soft flesh, uncovered: no hardness to her, no protection, finding her way to somewhere that would be the somewhere she would know safety. Lilith accepted the hand that Gerald placed on her cheek, the lips that kissed her forehead. Knowing that her dream had not left her, because when it had floated in the space above them, he had caught it.