To Make a Long Story Short
Dream Home
©2021 Elder Road Books
Written in 1976
Unpublished
“WAKE UP! Wake up!” I shook my wife lying beside me.
She was in a cold sweat and kept mumbling over and over, “I can’t fly. I can’t fly.” I could tell she was having a nightmare. She came to as if teetering at the edge of a cliff.
“Ari! It’s the apartment. It’s terrible. What they’re going to do to us!”
“What apartment?” I asked, knowing all too well.
“The one we’re moving to. It’s just like a martin house. It sits way up on a pole and we have to shinny up to it or fly in order to get to it. I can’t fly! And inside, all the other apartments are connected to it by doors. You open a closet door and walk into your neighbor’s kitchen!”
The nightmares had begun after our scouting trip to the city. Paula and I were married a week before college graduation and were still newlyweds. She’d found a graduate program for us to take in Minneapolis and we’d gone to scout it out. It was time to find a little excitement. We were appalled by the rent on a basic apartment. It was four times what we were paying in Indiana. So, we started looking for an apartment we could manage in return for rent.
The management company had no immediate availability, but said we could have an opening that was coming in July in a newly renovated building. But we returned to Indiana without having actually seen the apartment. They just said to come in July and it would be ready for us.
Paula had been having house dreams ever since.
“Ari! It has thirty-one rooms, all different colors. Like Baskin Robins,” she said, waking me up in the middle of the night. “Can you imagine an apartment with thirty-one rooms? They’re all about the size of our bathroom. And it’s all carpeted—right up the walls. You know, like they never got around to trimming it. Ari, where are we going to put the bed with thirty-one rooms the size of our bathroom?”
It wasn’t constant, but I went to sleep each night wondering if I’d be able to sleep through or get woken up in the middle of the night by another of Paula’s nightmares. Like the classic City Hall dream.
“Our apartment is in the middle of City Hall. The mayor stops in for coffee every day on his way to the office, just outside the kitchen. There’s a secretary typing in our living room. The county jail is under a trap door in the bedroom. And there’s a long black robe hanging in the clothes closet! How am I going to study if they have a trial in the dining room?”
From mid-May to the first of July, the dreams continued.
“It’s in the basement of that restaurant we ate at. We can order lunch from the menu every day.”
“At night they show movies on our window shades for the people in the drive-in movie theater.”
“You have to climb thirty-two flights of stairs because they forgot an elevator.”
“It’s a room in the owner’s aunt’s house and we have to bring her tea every day at four o’clock. Ari, what if I have a class at four o’clock?”
The day finally came. We tranquilized the cat and pulled a U-Haul trailer from Indiana to Minneapolis. We stopped at the apartment management office just before closing on the third of July.
“Hi. We’re the ones who are taking over management of the new renovation. Jim said to get here the first of July,” I said wearily.
“The first of July?” the receptionist said. She hurriedly called the president of the company, who had apparently already left for a long weekend. “They’re here now!” she practically screamed. “They have a U-Haul trailer and everything!” By the time she was finished with the president, she was nearly hyperventilating.
“Is everything all right?” I asked, stupidly.
“There was a little miscommunication was all,” she said, smiling and holding back a panic attack like I’d learned to recognize from Paula. “Um… The apartment isn’t exactly ready yet. Someone was supposed to call you and tell you to hold off a couple of weeks. But you’re here!”
“We have everything we own in the U-Haul,” Paula said, reflecting the receptionist’s panicked look.
“It’ll be okay!” she shot back. I’ve always hated that phrase. It’s inevitably used when things are not going to be okay. “The guys are coming over to get you to a place where you can temporarily store your things. That way you can get rid of the trailer. Then, Jim says we have a furnished apartment in one of the buildings scheduled for renovation that hasn’t been started yet. Don’t worry, please! Jim is going to give you a voucher for dinner tonight and you’re invited to the company picnic tomorrow. It’ll be okay.”
It was, mostly. The ‘furnished’ efficiency we were moved into that night was about the size of a college dorm room and furnished about as well. We managed to cram ourselves into the twin bed without knocking over the kitchen table. We did meet some nice people at the picnic who welcomed us to Minneapolis. Then we spent two weeks living on White Castle hamburgers and cheap three-two beer—New Ulm beer was just $3.00 a case!—as we explored our new neighborhood and the University.
The nightmares continued.
“It’s in that castle-building we drove past, in one of the towers!”
“We’re on the second floor and it’s the only part of the building that’s finished! The whole rest of the building is like 2x4 studs and rafters. They’re still putting in the stairs!”
“They heard we were in theatre and decided to put us in a set on stage!”
And then four burly guys showed up to move all our worldly possessions for us and show us our new apartment.
No more nightmares.
What can I say? It was a dream come true!
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