Well. I’m not sure my dream persona can say the same for herself. In my hand is a half-empty martini glass. Unlike Frieda, who adores a good martini, I rarely drink martinis in real life; nonetheless, I take a sip. It’s surprisingly sweet. It must have something else in it, besides the usual gin and vermouth. I sip again, thinking that I could get used to this—if it were real, of course.
Lars and I are standing with a redheaded woman who is wearing a black satin sheath dress and holding a martini like mine. The room is crowded with couples, the men in suits and the women in cocktail dresses. I scan the room for Bill and Judy, our dinner companions from a few dreams ago. I smile inwardly; even here in a dream, a recognizable face would be a fine thing to see. But I don’t see them.
We are in a house, but it is not our house. Like ours, however, this home is contemporary and lean. The living room stretches the width of the front of the house, with a bank of floor-to-ceiling windows looking toward the street. Over my shoulder I see that the dining area is open to the kitchen, which in turn has a sliding glass door that presumably leads to the backyard—which is no doubt as expansive as everything else in this world.
“Katharyn, that color is gorgeous on you,” the redhead says, bringing my attention to the conversation in front of me.
I smile and sip my fruity drink. “Thank you . . .” Of course, I have no idea what her name is, so I cannot call her by it. This bothers me greatly. My mother always impressed upon me the importance of learning—and using—other people’s names. “You’ll always have plenty of friends and social invitations if you remember names,” Mother told me throughout my formative years. I’m not sure she’s right about that, because I am quite good at names—yet in the real world, at least, I have a fundamentally nonexistent social life. I give a little laugh, and suddenly realize I feel a bit light-headed. I wonder how many martinis I’ve already put away.
Gently but firmly, Lars takes my elbow. “Jean, I always tell Katharyn that she’s pretty in pink.” He raises his eyebrows. “Of course, I told her that tonight before we left home, and she insisted that it’s coral, not pink, that she’s wearing.” He lifts his shoulders in the playful shrug of a hapless male. “What man could be expected to know a thing like that?”
I laugh merrily. “Jean,” I say, planting the name in my mind. “Would you call this more of a coral, or more of a peach? The saleslady called it peach, but . . .”—I finger the sateen fabric of my skirt with my free hand—“I think it’s more of a coral.”
“It’s coral,” Jean says firmly. “Peach would be lighter, which wouldn’t be suitable for this time of year. But that . . .” She looks me up and down. “It’s perfect, my dear.” She glances toward the darkness outside the front windows. “Just make sure you bundle up before going home. What a storm! You didn’t walk, did you two?”
“Sure we did,” Lars replies. “It’s only a block.”
A mustached man walks up and hands Jean a fresh drink. “You looked thirsty,” he says to her, taking her empty glass from her hand. I notice that their fingers touch for a few extra seconds.
“Ah, George.” Jean looks impishly at the man over the rim of her glass, her green eyes large behind false eyelashes. “Such an attentive host.”
Suddenly I realize who he is. It’s the man with the dog, the one I saw on the street when I walked alone past where our house would be. When I walked there in the real world.
So actual, live people reside in the dream world, too. This strikes me as amusing, and I laugh aloud. Everyone looks at me, puzzled. “Did I say something funny?” Jean asks.
“No, of course not,” I reply quickly. “I’m just in a happy mood tonight.” I raise my glass. “It’s so nice to be here with you all!”
Lars still has a solid hold on my elbow. “Katharyn, do you need to sit down?”
Suddenly, what I need to do most is use the bathroom. How is that possible, when I am not even awake? I laugh again, absurdly wondering if I am wetting my bed in the real world. “No, thanks,” I say to Lars. “I’m off to the little girls’ room.” I extract myself from his grip and weave toward the back of the house, figuring there must be a bathroom somewhere in the vicinity, if I just keep my eyes peeled.
In the kitchen, a gaggle of maids is preparing food and placing it on trays. To my surprise, I see Alma, our own housekeeper, among the workers. Like Alma, the others are all Mexican. Even in my imaginarily inebriated state, I find the situation distressing. This world, this place in which brown-skinned people wait on white-skinned people—this is not how I live in my real life. I’ll concede that in the world where I’m Kitty, I don’t personally know many people of other races. But I do believe in conducting myself equally toward everyone. We have the occasional nonwhite customer at the shop, and I go out of my way to treat these patrons the same as I would a white person. It’s how I was raised. It’s just a matter of good taste and of being a decent human being, my mother would say, and she’s right. My father worked with men and women of all races at his job; my mother cares for babies in a rainbow of colors in her volunteer work at the hospital. I may have graduated from college, and I may travel in more educated circles than my parents ever did, but my blue-collar upbringing has made me who I am.
Who I am in my real life, that is.
In any case, I am thrilled to see a familiar face at the party. “Alma,” I hiss, catching her eye. She comes over to where I stand next to the dining room table, one hand on it for support.
“You okay, Se?ora Andersson? You enjoying lo borlo?”
I giggle. “I’m fine. I’m having a terrific time!”
“No bronca? No trouble, se?ora?”
I wave my arm about and almost knock over a tray of hors d’oeuvres on the table. Alma quickly reaches forward and catches it.
“I just have a . . . lil’ . . . dilemma,” I slur. “I cannot . . . for the life of me . . .’member where it . . . where it is.” I look around. “The bathroom, I mean. Do you happen to know?”
Alma smiles. She has a kind face, Alma—a warm smile with large, white teeth. Like me, she gets crinkles around her eyes when she smiles, and I wonder vaguely if she is as self-conscious about that as I am. “No hay pedo, se?ora. Follow me.”
I follow her down the hallway. I hazily make out several large abstract paintings on the walls, lit with small artist’s lamps bracketed above the canvases. There are a number of sleek doors with no panels on them, all of them shut. Closets, I suppose, and bedrooms. The woodwork is rich and dark-toned. At the third door on the right, Alma knocks gently. No one answers, so she opens it for me. “Lo ba?o,” she says, as if to reassure me. “You are all right?”