The Papers
Steve Gehrke
They were, of course, the two sides
of the American soul, Nixon and Kennedy,
taking a walk one evening around Lake Victoria,
outside of Houston, Texas, in 1962,
when Nixon, nervous, a little agitated,
inexplicably broke out into a little trot,
and Kennedy, already President for a year,
stood dumbstruck and watched him run
around a bend in the path, as if into a future
he would never see, while the Secret Service men
exchanged looks with each other, and finally
shrugged and began to laugh. In another part
of Houston, a woman, a young wife, was,
for the first time, learning to drive a car,
the giant steering wheel before her, like the wheel
of a ship, the car seeming to list a little
on its own, as if the asphalt below her
had broken into waves, so that she couldn’t stop
overcorrecting, tilting the steering wheel
this way and that, stepping on the gas, then
the brakes, the gas, then the brakes. Oh, if only
her husband wasn’t such a brute, he would
have driven her and she wouldn’t have taken
that wrong turn and found herself gazing across
the water at a group of men in suits, one
of them breaking out into a trot, and all of this
is true, except that Lake Victoria never existed,
not in Houston, not then or now, and Nixon
and Kennedy never took a walk together,
not in their entire lives, and all of this happened
only in a novel I was writing in a dream I had
one night a few days after my divorce papers arrived
in the mail. Someone stopped me in the hall one day,
and said “the thing about students is they need
SparkNotes just to interpret their own dreams.”
And I thought, how convenient it would be
if our dreams came with footnotes and title cards.
And then I thought I ought to teach a class
in which students come in each day and tell
each other their dreams. Their homework would
be sleeping! At last, their avocation and
their vocation united. I know what you’re
thinking, that when my divorce papers arrived,
I must have taken them from the mailbox
and broken out into a little trot. But it isn’t true,
though once I heard on the radio that 40 percent
of adult Americans don’t know how to skip,
and because I couldn’t remember if I could skip
or not, I pulled over and began to skip along
the shoulder of the road. Apparently, everyone
was listening to that station that morning
because everywhere I looked cars were pulling
over and people were skipping back and forth
along the shoulder, saying, “see, it’s not that hard!”
Some of them were teaching each other. Some
were watching each other’s feet. Why couldn’t
my marriage have worked out that way? It was a kind
of skipping, wasn’t it, the way we couldn’t stop
overcorrecting, one of us putting a foot on the gas
while the other tapped the brakes? But think
of Dorothy, linking arms with the Tin Man—
even though he can’t get us out of Vietnam—
and with the Lion—even though he can’t stop
cheating on his wife—and even with the Scarecrow,
who keeps his divorce papers buried deep
in the straw. Isn’t it a shame that morning
throws a bucket of water at the witch
of our dreams? In 1962, in Houston, Texas,
at Lake Victoria, I looked across the water
and saw a woman weeping behind the wheel
of a car. I didn’t know what to do. I was a man
made of straw, and I could feel the papers burning
through the pocket of my suit.