Now I remember what woke me. THE DREAM. They are scary even now. The two girls. Well, they are girls, sort of. But they are HUGE, like Macy's Day parade float characters. And each of them has the face of Baby Sally in our first grade reader. One is brunette; one is a yellow blonde, hair identical to Baby Sally, tight yellow curls covering her entire head.
They are enormous, and they are walking, maybe rather floating, around in our house, mute, but with strange fixed grins on their pudgy faces. They seem to circulate through the house together since every door leads to another room, no hallways, making them able to traverse the entire house (except the boys' room upstairs) by traveling from one door to the next. I don't remember their ducking to cross through the doors, yet they are like big blowup dolls, at least 7 1/2 feet tall almost brushing the ceiling with the tops of their heads.
They move through our house at will, then all of a sudden, when they return to the living room, where they started, they pull out sharp objects that look like footlong hatpins and pause, readying to stick them in themselves.
I am so terrified I wake up before I see what happens. But my heart pounds like the hatpins are destined to end up in me, not them. Eventually I calm myself, not waking anyone, and go back to sleep once I realize the two "girls" really did no harm to anyone. Somehow, though, the terror remains in the back of my thoughts, even after I wake the next morning.
The dream returns once or twice more in the next few years, before we leave Purdon when I am nine. But now it doesn't terrify me as much because I know how it will end. I always wake just as the girls/dolls are about to stick the pins in themselves.
It only troubles me because when I remember it, it makes no sense. And how to explain the terror?
Was it something about my blonde baby sister Jan, 2 1/2 years younger. I didn't even remember bringing her on a pillow to Mother, who was eating dinner. when she was about 5 days old, just home from the hospital, causing my Mother to almost faint. My mother ended up having surgery for appendicitis just a few weeks later, but I didn't think anything I did caused that.
I remembered lying on the soft green chenille bedspread on my parents' big double bed while Mother rocked Jan in the rocker and sang to us. I don't remember feeling mad because Jan was in Mother's lap, not me. After all, I wasn't a baby. I was a big girl, and proud to be considered so.
She slept in my parents' bedroom at first, but I didn't want to sleep in there. My daddy snored like a barreling freight train, sucking all the air out of the room, then exhaling it all in one long loud snore. Every few breaths he momentarily stopped breathing, causing me to strain to listen, wondering if he'd start back. Then the thunderous snoring began again. How my mother slept through that I wondered, yet she'd wake up at the first cry from one of the kids, if we got sick during the night.
Nope, I liked being in the room with Susan, our twin beds touching at the ends, each beside a large screened window. She usually stayed up even later than I did. I liked to stay up as long as possible and I never got grouchy late at night. I seemed to gather more and more energy the longer I stayed awake.
Sometimes I went to bed, then saw a little tiny flicker of light and sat up, looking toward Susan's quadrant of the room. I could see a pinpoint of light moving back and forth under the white cotton sheet, which rose like a small mountain at the head of the bed.
"What are you doing?" I stage whispered.
"Shhh. I'm reading. I'll be through in a few minutes. Go to sleep."
Anyway, I felt secure and happy at home. It was just a big, happy family, primarily because of the total stability and steadfastness of Mother, who smoothed everything with her laugh and general good humor. She stood between us and everything and everyone else. Well, that's how I saw it anyway. My life was all about playing and going to school and eating.
"That's what kids are supposed to do," she'd say. "There'll be plenty of time for other things later."
So why did the dream bother me? I kept thinking there was something the two girls were trying to tell me, warn me about, or teach me. But I never figured it out, and the dream never appeared after we moved to Corbet. Entering fourth grade at Bowie School in Corsicana, an elementary school three times the size of the total student population of Purdon school, I had more things to worry about than getting a hatpin stuck in me.
And I graduated from the Baby Sally books, so I never gave her another thought. I never liked yellow hair anyway.
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