Ahead of her there were swings and a sandbox. There were rhododendrons and other ornamental plants. A flood of children suddenly broke out from under them, shrieking with glee. Surprise! they called. Surprise! Dorothy knew them, from long ago. They danced around her in a circle. Come and play! they said. Oh, Dotty, come and play! They were her friends, they liked her. She knew their faces from long ago. A little red-haired girl covered with freckles who had a high, round forehead. Her quiet little brother in black shorts. Andy and Violet: she remembered their names. Dorothy took their hands and ran with them, and she stood on the swings and pumped back and forth. In her dream, Dorothy felt her hair rise and fall, along with her stomach. She felt the wind on her face. Below, the children turned somersaults on the grass and didn't mind the stains on their clothing.
In the dream Dorothy knew that this was a place where children had been set free. She looked and saw that some of them were not children at all. They were a different kind of adult. They looked like Etta Parkerson. They were tiny and small and giggling, with funny whiskers and conical hats, and they played fiddles or sat with the children who were almost as big as they were, on their laps. They both started fires with magnifying glasses and hopped in sack races. The children and the adults were the same kind of creature.
Bison grazed on the grass and a wildcat lazed in a tree, flicking his tail. In the shade there were wigwams, with white smoke curling from the tops. Indian women sat on the ground sorting dried maize in baskets. The children and the Indians played together on the swings.
All around the park, there were rows of white houses with green shutters. Carts glided past them, pulled by huge gray horses with clopping hooves. The horses wore no blinders and the long white hair around their unshod hooves was flung from side to side by their dancing feet. Over the tops of the houses, there rose great domes of earth. Smoke curled out of them, and Indian ponies grazed on them. The bushes and trees seemed to hiss and whisper in the wind and the flowers made sounds like piano wires snapping.
A dog began to bark. His voice was echoing from far away. Dorothy swung back and forth, over ground that rocked like a pendulum. Then she saw him running toward her, as she always knew he would one day. She always knew he would come back.
'Toto!' she called. 'Here, boy! Toto!'
She saw him charging through the long grass, partridge rearing up into the air around him. Dorothy launched herself from the swing and seemed to fly through the air. She landed in the grass and he burst through it and was all over her, whining and barking and licking her face, and she laughed and hugged him, remembered the feel of his tiny back and its wiry hair. He spun in a circle and his bark broke with joy. He picked up his red ball and dropped it at her feet. She had forgotten his red ball. It was covered with spit that smelled of him. Dorothy picked it up delicately, with two fingers only, and threw it for him. He sprang after it, rolled over the ground snarling, and caught it. Then, with a rambunctious toss of the head, he started to trot away, head and ball held high.
Dorothy followed him. She remembered the way now. She walked between the two huge chestnut trees and crossed the muddy street. She went to the front door, with the lion's-head knocker. Dorothy remembered that there was a latchkey dangling on a piece of string inside the slot for letters. She reached inside for it with fat, clumsy fingers. She had to stand on tiptoe to open the door.
She smelled their hallway. There was the wooden table with the vase of dried flowers and the umbrella rack. There were the beat-up old shoes of the woman who cleaned and lived downstairs. There was the stairway.
Dorothy climbed, past the old framed engravings of the Jews in the wilderness, the parting of the Red Sea, the breaking of the tablets. Coats were hung on hooks, red and green and blue, brightly colored, and she recognized them as if they had been people. Dorothy heard, from behind a closed door, the sound of a piano being played. The door creaked as she pushed it open.
'Mama,' she whispered.
There she was, there she was, in a dress like a candy cane, red stripes, playing the piano, her back toward Dorothy, her hair in ringlets. There was her papa, sitting in his armchair, smoking his pipe, a brown-skinned man with black hair and black eyes and a moustache. I'm not Gael at all, Dorothy remembered. My name is Gutierrez. I am Dorothy Gutierrez.
Her mother saw and stopped playing. She turned and dazzled Dorothy with her smile. She was so young and pretty and she reached out to hold her. Dorothy ran.
'Dorothy. Where has my little girl been?'
Dorothy began to cry and fell into her mother's arms and was held. 'Oh, Mama,' she said. 'I had a terrible dream! Daddy was gone and you were dead, and I had to go away, and I never saw you ever again!'
Dorothy buried her head against her mother's bosom, her mother's dress, her mother's smell of soap and perfume she could not afford, and Dorothy wept. Her mother rocked her and sang to her gently. The song was an old one, one that Dorothy had not heard since St. Louis. She let herself be rocked and comforted.
When Dorothy had stopped crying, her mother patted her back, and moved her gently away from her and looked into her eyes. Dorothy's mother was crying too.
'Everything dies, Dorothy,' she said. 'Everything gets taken away in the end.'
Dorothy looked at the room. There was the rocking cradle in which her little brother slept. Toto peered into it, whimpering, his front paws resting on its edge. There was the divan with its lace covers. There was the black dresser with the cups with the gold edges and the dancing china pony on the piano, and the Nativity in the window, the china figures, the china manger. It was snowing outside.
Dorothy knew all of those things as if they had never gone, as if all she had to do was come here on a visit and find them there, solid, to be used. She looked at her father's face.
'Muy linda,' he said, and smiled at her. It was Spanish, but Dorothy understood. He smiled at her. Her father's smile was not to be trusted. He was so young, young and handsome and not to be held by anything, even love. Everything about him was true, true to the point of cruelty.
'This is just a memory,' her father said. 'Here and then gone. But you have to remember, to have a heart, to have a brain. You have to remember in order to be brave. That's how you grow up.'
'But all you've got,' said her mother, who was pretty and quite tough, 'is now.'
Time left you in another world where everything was different, even you. Memory held it together. So where was home?
Her mother's face crumpled with a tolerant, forbearing smile, and she leaned forward and kissed Dorothy on the forehead and said, 'Look around you, Dorothy.'
