Marzipan Bra

Dream:

The Harvard College Class of 2002/Palo Alto High School Class of 1998 is on a train to its “senior trip” destination: the River Why. It’s as if we are in India: there are thousands of us overloading a colonial-era British train with ten cars, each following the engine car in a seating hierarchy. Air-conditioned and windows closed is the first car; hot gusts of air off the plain flooding the caboose.

At the river, Laura and I venture off on our own. Most people sign up for expeditions, like river-rafting or inner-tubing. Some follow the river downstream. Laura and I go upstream. There are shallow puddles into which we dip our heads–my hair has grown long so I whip the water from it and suffer mild whiplash–and still deep pools into which we effortlessly dive and disappear, like shooting stars. We go upstream for half an hour, and there’s a natural land bridge damming up the river. Just beyond it the river turns into churning rapids flowing the wrong way. We hear the engine’s whistle and know it’s time to head back.

Everyone boards on the third or fourth cars and then squeezes and pushes to get back into their assigned cars. A stranger hands me a red tea kettle, filled to the brim with boiling water, and asks me to shepherd it to the last car in the train. I burn my hands against it and wrap it in a sweater to keep the heat away. I’m now in a wheelchair, so I put the kettle in my lap and push toward the exits.

I’ve accidentally gone the wrong way and ended up at the first car. It becomes immediately obvious that God is conducting the train and the first car is the first two books of the Bible. That is, the heavens and earth are in the first two rows, then Adam and Eve, then all the way to Moses and the desert at the rear of the car. I beat a hurried exit and rush toward the last car with the tea kettle.

The last car is a thirty by thirty foot banquet hall with food laid out near the exit. Ilana or Yuan-Ming, one of the two, or perhaps a blend of both, takes the tea kettle from me and whispers conspiratorially, “C’mere.” I follow. She says, “These pitchers, these glasses”–and points at the drinks table–“Would it be bad to take them?” I say, “Yes,” then hesitate, and say, “It would not be honorable.” Ilana/Yuan-Ming shows me a brittle newspaper clipping but I can’t make out the words. I see that its meaning is more metaphorical than literal anyway, so I say, “If you take the pitchers, one of two things will happen. Either you will feel bad about it, or it’ll be like this clipping. It will be brittle in a few days, and then everything will disintegrate. Polvo.” I mean this to suggest that all bad feelings fade in due time; instead I suggest mortality.

We alight in Central Park. Laura and I leave to walk the loop. It’s the park but it’s not, because there are 200-foot tall redwoods everywhere. One has fallen across a stand of a few more, and it’s balancing precariously. A boy jumps up and down on one end of it while his parents snap photos of him and the fallen tree creaks ominously. I say to Laura, “Book it! We don’t want to get crushed when this stupid ass kicks the tree loose.” We race up the hill and notice a beautiful bouquet. There are daisies with no petals, surrounded by baby’s breath. I say, “This is the most beautiful flower I have ever seen.” Laura pokes one of the flowers with a spatula and says, “This is made of baby corn.” She looks even closer and says, “It is made of marzipan shaped to resemble baby corn.” We wonder who has made this delightful scene, and notice that just beyond it is a farmers market. The first booth in the market bears a sign that says “Mrs. Peters’ Marzipan.”

Laura chitchats with Mrs. Peters while I ogle the verisimilitude of her marzipan concoctions. On her table, there is a basket filled with real green peppers and a handful of green marzipan that has not yet been shaped into green pepper form. I steal half a handful of green marzipan and half a handful of yellow and then drag Laura into a room in a nearby convention hall and sit her at the twin-sized bed that happens to be in it.

A small audience gathers as I sit her in front of me on the bed and take her shirt off. “I’m going to make you a marzipan green and yellow pepper bra,” I say. I spend a half hour diligently sculpting the marzipan into shape, using my thumbs to press out the bellows of the peppers. I make half a green pepper and half a yellow pepper and push them together into one, and then apply it somehow to Laura’s ribcage. She stands up after I take my hands away and shows off her new bra, to great applause from the scattered audience. It is a beautiful bra.

But a closer examination reveals that this bra has virtually no marzipan on it at all. I look at the clasp. “I spent half and hour and all I supplied was the clasp?” I ask. But even the clasp is plastic, not almond paste. I look into the folds of the bedsheets and realize that the marzipan has fallen off Laura’s chest and that Laura is modeling the bra she had been wearing all day.

I woke up to the high-pitched whine of a dog that needs to pee.