American
mothers six decades ago who dressed up
to
go out on the town coalesced in my dream to become
an
amalgam of Claudette Colbert and a Mildred-Pierce-era-
Joan
Crawford before she’d been offered the ghoulish
reprises
of sleazy send-ups that would plague her and us
on
the screen to the end of her days. But to gaze first at
Claudette
and end with the notion of Joan might be seen
to
have answered alone and together a Freudian phone
as the
dreaming me might have imagined to dial it to try
to
find out what had caused this abrupt interference
in my
soporific estate. Claudette Colbert was the sole movie
great
that my father had ever addressed in a letter;
my
mother resembled the younger Joan Crawford: it might
have
been said that their cheekbones were cousins. But this
wasn’t
alarming and doesn’t disarm me with any portentous
intent.
One begins to believe that the real secret Freud kept
so
far up his sleeve that he couldn’t retrieve it was this:
yes,
dreams may be conjured from bits of a life and may boil
and
hiss to a thin simulacrum of crisis but tend to steam
off
like an infant’s warm breath, do not scare us with death,
rarely
cause that much strife, do not threaten the phallus
(which
rhymes, come to think, with my mother’s name Alice)
nor
wake up one’s demons and cause them to snarl
(which rhymes, come to think, with my father’s
name Carl).
.
