ARIELLE MCMANUS
Portrait of a Suburban Family
I. Winter
The kitchen I grew up in was white. White walls, white appliances, white cabinets, white tiled floors. My mom always hated it – she said that it was too much work to keep clean – but as a kid, I always thought there was something special about an all white room. Now, twenty years later, I still have dreams about being in an all-white space. Sometimes I’m in my body, sometimes I’m floating outside of myself, watching myself bump into invisible walls and barriers like a glitching Sim. I search “white room dream analysis” on the internet and find this:
Dreams about a white room can signify dramatic personal change. Dreams about white voids can represent feelings of parts of your life that seem to have no ending, whether positive or negative.
I consider what makes something a room versus a void and decide that a void is characterized by its inherent lack, a room characterized by its state of being filled, whether tangibly or intangibly.
In the winter, when it would snow, the yard would be dusted in a fine layer of white, and muted, gray light would pour in through the window above the sink. Looking out the window was my mom’s crown jewel: the cherry blossom tree. Bare-branched and venerable, it stood, resolute, capable of weathering any storm.
II. Spring
Spring didn’t begin until the cherry blossom bloomed. Thems the rules, we’d say. Speak properly, mom would chide us. The tree would bloom so slowly at first, so stubbornly, until it exploded in a shock of pink, and then all at once, the petals would fall, and the yard would blush.
We’d hung a rattan chair around one of the branches by a rope, and we’d take turns sitting on the chair while the others would wind the rope as tight as possible and let go. The chair would spin so fast that you’d have to tuck yourself inside of your body. Back flat, skull pressed to the rattan, legs pretzel-style, and hands firmly grasping the edges of the chair. One small slip up and the sheer speed and force would pull your limbs in all directions, ripping you from the chair, throwing you to the ground.
Sometimes I still wake up from dreams feeling as though I’m
spinning
hurdling
free falling
Dreams about falling may indicate that you are hanging on too tightly to something. You need to relax and let go.
I’m still learning how to let go, how not to hold onto things so tight-fisted, white-knuckled. I know it’s best to just let oneself fall instead of fighting it – that you’ll end up with less injuries that way – but some habits die hard.
III. Summer
We renovate the kitchen. Gone are the stained white linoleum countertops and the white magnetic fridge covered in report cards and Picasso-esque illustrations. The kitchen now looks like a space station crossed with an Italian villa. Terracotta tile, warmly-hued wood cabinetry, a fridge with an ice machine and a touch screen. It was around that time that dad stopped making it home for dinner. We began the summer by leaving his plate on the table, in case he made it home in time, and by the end we’d learned to put it straight into the microwave.
Sometimes we’d sit on the swing on the cherry blossom tree, now lush with green, to wait for him, but we learned that too, was ultimately fruitless.
I started to have dreams about walking across town, sick with worry that I was being followed, but when I tried to run, my legs wouldn’t work. Though I’m no physicist, I know that according to Newton’s Third Law of Motion, my exertion should be resulting in some generation of motion, but it simply isn’t happening. Why is it that my life seems to be the exception of every previously agreed upon rule?
Dreams of this nature are typically representative of the fact that you can’t seem to catch up to life, which continues to move on around you, despite your stagnace.
IV. Autumn
Late summer through mid-autumn is known to everyone in our town as hurricane season, but it’s also known to everyone that hurricane warnings never amounted to anything other than a little rain, maybe some flooding in the streets. On that one Monday morning, though, we were met with saltwater up to the second to last step up to our house. It was only low tide.
Hours later the water started to recede and we were able to drive a few towns over, more inland, to spend the night in my dad’s office building. The next day, after the storm had passed, we went back to the house. The water line on the front door was at eye level.
October 29, 2012, in our little seaside town, is referred to as the day the ocean met the bay.
We got to work on repairing the house, ripping out the drywall and the floorboards, buying industrial strength fans to dry out what remained of our shell of a home, after we’d thrown out everything in it. I started to have dreams about my teeth falling out.
These dreams typically represent feelings of a loss of power and the ability to be in control of our own lives.
We were able to replace and fix most everything. Only one thing didn’t make it: the cherry blossom tree. We all stood in the yard, one of our few moments as a family, as the arborists cut the tree down and removed the stump. It felt wrong to replace it, so instead they simply filled the hole – a gaping wound in the Earth – and covered it with quick-grow grass seed. It took only a few short weeks to be tricked into believing that nothing had ever been in its place.
Who knew erasure could be so quick and painless?
Who knew that some things aren’t permanent?
Arielle McManus is a dual Swedish-American citizen, learning as she goes and writing from a tiny, sunlit room in Brooklyn. She is an assistant editor at Atlas & Alice, and her writing has been published by a variety of literary publications including Hobart, Passages North, and Entropy Magazine, among others.