Dreamland

As a child, Beverly visited New York City with her mother, the only trip they would ever take together. Though they were on a tight budget, they visited museums, ate at a fancy restaurant, experienced Times Square, and had pizza and hot dogs from food carts. While Beverly and her mother were at the Observation Deck of the Empire State Building, a man “dressed in a pirate costume” jumped from the platform, and they were almost trampled in the pandemonium (61). Beverly recalls her mother rushing them out.

Beverly wakes up from a dream in which she had been falling. Now a grown woman and mother, she’s in a house she’s rented for herself and her six year-old-son Tommie, having fled from her abusive husband, Gary. Because he works for Homeland Security and has its resources at his disposal, Beverly has left behind her identifying documents and carefully covered her tracks, donning a disguise, training Tommie to behave as if they are not together, and hitching rides to random places to make her trail harder to track. Though she’s been saving for months, she knows that she will need to find a job that will not require identifying documents. She enrolls Tommie in a local school and works on cleaning the rental house, which seems to have been abandoned by its previous residents as if they had fled with as much haste and urgency as she and Tommie had.

Beverly wears her disguise when outside of the house, using a wig to change her hair length and color and makeup to transform her complexion. While walking to the grocery store, she assesses how secluded the house is from public view. At the store, she’s alarmed when the chatty cashier tells her she looks familiar, but decides she’s being paranoid. Surely Gary could not have found her already.

Leaving the store, she checks a bulletin board hoping to find babysitting or cleaning jobs that would not require government documents. Finding none, she accepts that she will have to “venture farther into town” (85). Returning home, exhilarated that she has escaped and started a new life for herself and Tommie, she strips down to her underwear and cleans the kitchen, preparing the walls for primer and a new coat of paint.

Beverly goes to the bus stop to wait for Tommie. As the bus pulls up, she hopes he will be deep in conversation with a new friend, but he is sitting alone. They go into the house together.

As a first grader, Tommie does not have homework, so Beverly takes him exploring on their property. Finding a creek, she shows her son how to catch tadpoles. He wants to bring one to Field Day for show-and-tell. Beverly recalls her own mother being asked to leave when she had attended Field Day at Beverly’s school, then tells Tommie that a tadpole might not survive being in a jar under the hot sun. He asks when he can see his old friends again but asks nothing about his father. Watching him, Beverly is filled with love for him, happy she “risked everything” to keep him safe from his “very angry, dangerous” father (93).

For the rest of the afternoon, Tommie watches cartoons while Beverly assesses paint for the kitchen. After dinner, they play dominoes, then Tommie has a bath. Beverly reads the one book of his that they brought, Go, Dog. Go! Afterward, she reflects on her marriage to Gary. Initially charming, he had become increasingly angry and violent, with short stints of peace and apologies in between. When Beverly began finding bruises on Tommie, and saw his easy-going, happy demeanor turning introspective and quiet, she made the decision to flee with him, knowing that she would have to leave everything about her old life behind to avoid being found.

After putting Tommie to bed, Beverly is filled with “steady, nervous energy” but is cheered by the thought of painting the kitchen yellow (102). She scrubs the walls again while listening to music, then falls asleep on the sofa. When she wakes up, she feels a sense of dread, sure that she has missed something. She reviews the precautions she took then wonders with terror whether the bus stations have cameras.