By Dianne King

Winnona’s eyes, frog-lidded and unwaveringly blue, follow my march from bureau to bed. I fill one suitcase with sweaters, a smaller one with pastel nylon nightgowns, presents from my mother that I never wear. I am moving in a week and already I can see that I don’t have enough bags.

She hangs from the top bar of a wrought-iron bed I rescued from the junkyard and painted egg-yolk yellow.

“Look, Martha,” she says, and balances her weight on her stomach. “Look,” she says, more insistent. She swings high, a trapeze artist, legs extended, arms held in wobbly precision to the side. “Good,” I say. “Don’t fall.”

They are automatic now, my warnings. Don’t run, don’t eat too fast, don’t jump, don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t.

“Where are you moving?” she asks. I sigh. Winnona is Sam’s only child from a marriage that didn’t survive her first year, and she has asked me that question endlessly since her father and I told her I was moving out.

“I told you,” I say. I am edgy today. Too much sugar, too much coffee; something. “To an apartment.”

The apartment is really a duplex on the other side of Austin. The walls need painting, the tile floors are crumbling, and I am afraid to look in the cupboards.

She sticks out her tongue. I stick mine out back. She sticks hers out farther. “Winnona Pilloma,” I say.

“Dooooon’t,” she wails. She is four years old and sensitive about her name. I butt her stomach with my head and pick her up. “You chowderhead,” I tell her. She wraps her legs around my waist and burrows her face in my neck. “You chowderhead,” she says. I catch Sam’s movement in the doorway and turn to stare at him over his daughter’s head. He looks at us and moves on.

Winnona’s hair is the color of muddy sand. I stroke its length down her neck, thin strands under my fingers. In her baby-album pictures, her head is oversized, and half of her face is taken up by her eyes. Sam worries that she will never grow a chin to speak of, and her head will always be too big. I tell him she will grow into it.

Winnona stirs. “Color with me, Martha,” she mumbles into my collarbone.

“I will later,” I promise.

“Help me with my puzzle.”

“Later,” I say. “Later.”

“What apartment?” Winnona asks.

“Just an apartment. You can come visit me.” I hold it out for what it is, a promise, a bribe, and she pecks at it and gives it back.

“Maybe,” she says, slips down, and wanders from the room.

I have a friend at work, a sweet man with the energy and temper of a child, who acts as if his marriage and divorce happened to somebody else. At the end, he says, while his ballooning wife ate her way through her unhappiness, he felt nothing. He is lying. No matter what he pretends, when he talks about her his voice rises and he flaps his hands and I can tell that even after five years, he still doesn’t understand what happened to him.

I don’t understand, either. Sometimes at night, when we are lying in bed with the fan playing over our stomachs, I can hear my voice at a distance while Sam turns his head, his private self tucked away from my prying fingers.

“We just got together at the wrong time in your life,” I say, as if by stating it I can accept it. What I do not say is that, even after three years together, I know he is still not sure of what he wants. If he would only just once turn over and tell me to stay, I would. It is only the next morning that I turn to the mirror in the bathroom and stare at myself, eyes wild, and feel a howl of rage and pain that I will have to leave him.

It is when I realize that I am leaving Winnona, too, that I feel something close to panic. It’s no use telling myself that things will be the same. They won’t. We are in a long, narrow corridor, Sam on one end, me on the other, and already I see her walking away from me toward her father. She doesn’t look back and I can’t call out.

Late afternoon, I stand at the drainboard, scraping the black spots off Idaho potatoes with a serrated knife. I leave the water running because it irritates Sam and because I like the feel of it, cold and rushing, on my hands. I am making mashed-potato soup. It is my indicator of trouble and my solace both, this soup. The secret is not to peel the skin.

Out back, Winnona shapes mud pies with a large cooking spoon. She sprinkles the lawn with her shoes and socks and pants and brings the mixing bowl dripping with mud to the back door. “I’m making a cake,” she says happily. “For Daddy and Mommy and you and Tommy.” Tommy is her mother’s new boyfriend. Winnona, who lives half the time with each parent, wants all of us to live together.

Sam comes through the kitchen in his stocking feet, wearing yesterday’s T-shirt and khaki shorts, black ink from the want ads smeared on his fingers. He lost his job as a civil engineer with the city six months ago, and he’s been looking for work and living on unemployment ever since. He shields his eyes with his hand and presses his forehead to the screen. I scrape a sprout from a soft potato, waiting for him to say something.

“I started packing today,” I say, finally.

“I saw that.” He turns his face toward me. The wire mesh has bitten tiny squares into his forehead. He shakes his shoulders as if to loosen them and opens the door. “Where is my babybums?” he calls, and gives chase. Winnona runs, squealing around the corners of this old house in her bare feet.

We had given Winnona what we finally agreed would be the official story of our separation, which ended up not being an explanation at all. I wanted to tell her that we love each other, but had decided to be friends. Too vague for her to understand, Sam argued. His version was that I wanted to live by myself for a while, and he wasn’t sure that he was ready to settle down yet. I cut my eyes at him sideways. “She’s four years old, not twenty,” I reminded him. What we told her, together, was that I was moving into an apartment, and I would see them. We both looked at Winnona, prepared for questions.

“I’m thirsty,” she said.

Sam got her a glass of water.

“What are you making, Martha?” Sam asks. He brings Winnona through the kitchen door balanced on his back. I hold out my arms to take her and settle her on my hip. When she leans over to see what’s in the pot, I breathe in the smell of outside on her clothes, and do not answer Sam. He hates my mashed-potato soup and the moods that come with it.

“Mashed-potato soup,” he answers himself, neutral. “What else?”

He knows there is nothing else. “We eat too much red meat,” I tell him. It is not true; we rarely eat red meat. He raises his eyebrows at me. “Winnona will like it,” I say. “It’s good children food.”

“I don’t like it,” Winnona says. “It’s got peels in it.”

I am not so surprised by my anger as my lack of control over it. “Here,” I say. I handed him Winnona, and rip off my apron with trembling fingers. “You cook if you don’t like it.” I scowl at him while Winnona’s head is turned, turn off the potatoes, and go read the newspaper.

Winnona slips her shoes off during dinner and leaves them under the table. She refuses to eat her soup, so Sam makes them both a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. He leaves the crumbs on the counter and the lid off the jelly.

“Would you put your shoes away, Winnona?” I ask when she has eaten everything but the crusts.

“No.”

“Put your shoes away, please.”

“No.” It is defiant. Her face wears an old challenge. For a long time after I first moved in, we tested each other constantly, pushing each other’s limits, until we both realized we meant each other no harm. “Put your shoes up,” I say.

“I’m too tired,” she says. She pouts.

“Young lady…” Sam starts, but I hold up a restraining arm. It is my battle. Sam shrugs, stares down at his empty plate a minute, then gets up and disappears into the living room.

Winnona and I face each other. “I’m sorry you’re tired,” I say, traitorously. “After you put your shoes away, maybe you need to go to bed.”

“No, I don’t,” she says, and starts crying. In a moment she will have a full-fledged temper tantrum. I try another approach, bend down and give her a hug. “Sweetheart, just put them in your closet,” I say. “Please.”

She picks them up, stomps three feet toward her bedroom and then drops the shoes and herself to the floor. “My legs are too tired,” she says.

“Pick them up.”

She kicks her feet. “Pick them up,” I say again. This situation has become ludicrous, but I am too far into it to back out now. She picks up her shoes, drooping the entire way, and throws them across the bedroom. “In the closet,” I order.

She cries some more, slowly picks them up, and throws them in the closet. I restrain myself. Good enough. Sobbing, Winnona crumples to the floor. It is her hurt-feelings cry. I see myself standing over her, enormous with control, and I am ashamed. I pick her up.

“There,” I say, hating myself. “That wasn’t so bad, was it?” She shakes her head no, still crying, and I tuck her head under my chin and rock her. “Winnona Pilloma,” I sing, and there is an immense pressure in the back of my throat. “Sweetest little girl in North Saloma.”

Winnona’s hand reaches out and pats my hair. “Don’t,” she says.

She sings, “Row, row, row your boat” to herself while she colors, fresh and still damp from her bath. Her hair hangs wet on her shoulders.  She switches to a tuneless sing-song. “I hate you, I hate you, I hate you,” she sings without looking at me. “And I don’t want you to live with us.”

My hand stops, by itself. I stare at it. It holds a purple crayon. I put it down slowly and stare at Winnona, not sure I heard what I heard. She still doesn’t look at me. I look up when Sam passes by the living room on his way from the shower, an orange towel wrapped around his head, a green one tucked in at his waist. “What’s wrong?” he asks when he sees me.

“She hates me,” I say.

“I didn’t say it,” Winnona screams. “I didn’t say it.”

I go outside and sit on the curb. Sam’s neighborhood is full of retired people, and it is quiet at night. My face feels numb; I bring my fingers up to my cheek and press them there. Something has happened, something my fault, but I do not understand what.

Today when I picked her up from the day-care center, I found her playing by herself in a corner of the playground; fierce, intent, smaller, younger than I think of her. I felt the jolt of suddenly coming across a reflection in the mirror, and not immediately recognizing it as my own.

Sam comes out carrying a weeping Winnona, a robe thrown over his body. “Somebody wants to apologize,” he says.

“I didn’t say it,” Winnona cries. I take her from Sam. She stiffens. I carry her to the house and sit on her bed. “I’m sorry,” I say, very carefully. “Are you still mad at me?”

She nods yes and sniffs.

“I’m sorry I got angry at you after dinner,” I say. It is inadequate. She stares at the wall with the sideways distant look that I recognize from her baby pictures, as if she knew even then how to remove herself.

“Winnona,” I say, “after I move I’ll still see you.”

She picks up a baldheaded baby and begins to hum. I stroke her cheek with my thumb, struck with an attack of missing her so painful that I have to breathe out fast not to cry.

She sits cross-legged on her bed and fixes her gaze on me. “I’ll take you to the park sometimes,” I say.  She nods. I pick up her hand and play with the pinkie finger. “And if you ever want to talk to me, you can tell Daddy, and he’ll call, okay?”

She nods again, and rocks her baldheaded baby.

Sam reads her a goodnight story in her room. Low murmurs filter through the wall into the living room. I let go of my magazine and press my palms hard into my eyes until blues and oranges blossom on the inside of my lids. This ritual, those voices, this life, will still go on when I am not here to witness it.

After he has put her to bed, he stops behind me and kneads my neck with his fingers. “She didn’t mean it,” he says. “She’s just confused and upset.”

“I know,” I say. I want to scream or slap him, hard. He picks up the front section of today’s paper and sits down in his old easy chair, plaid, with stains on the arms. “There were some bills that came in today,” I tell him.

“Hmm,” he says. He does not look up. Every month I pay the bills, add up the total, and he writes me a check for half.

“I put them on the mantle and marked the envelopes when they’re due,” I say.

“Okay,” he says. He doesn’t like to talk about money lately.

“It’s a gas bill,” I say, relentless, vengeful, “for forty-seven dollars, and your insurance.

One’s not due for a month, but one of them’s due this week.”

Sam lowers his newspaper and stares at me. “I put the date on the envelope,” I say. “On the outside.” Sam nods his head, slowly. I pick up my magazine and turn the page.

Before going to bed, I check Winnona’s room for monsters, for bad spirits. She sleeps on her stomach, arms thrown, bare bottom poking out from my old T-shirt, lime-green and soft from wear. I feel him coming up behind me and speak without turning. “Lock the front door?”

“Yes,” he says. I sneak to the front anyway and test the lock, get the coffee ready for the morning. At her doorway, I stop myself from going in and running my fingers across that hair, splayed in sweaty strands on the pillow.

In the night, I wake first, a green glimmer in the dark, a shuffling. “Martha.” The threat of a cry in her voice.

“Come here,” I say, sitting up, stretching my arms out. I put her on my chest and rub the soft fuzz of her back. “Chhh-chhh-chh,” I soothe, and she quiets. I am half-asleep again before I remember that I am holding her. I take her back to her bed, and she curls her knees up to her chest. “Okay?”

“I had a bad dream,” she says in a whisper. I sit down on the side of her bed and lower my voice too. I smooth her hair back from her forehead. “What happened?”

“There were monkeys,” she says. She twists her head to the side, the remoteness back o her face. “They put me in a box and wouldn’t let me out.”

I rub her arms. “Big monkeys?”

“Yes.”

“It was a dream,” I soothe. “Daddy and I are here; nobody’s going to hurt you.”

She sniffles, unconvinced. “They put me in a box and wouldn’t let me out.” I pick her up and hold her. She is limp with sleep in my arms. “I want you to come in the dream and put the monkeys in a box,” she says.

I bundle her up closer and rock and rock and rock. Even when she is asleep I do not put her down. Her hair smells like baby shampoo; her breath is sharply sour. I stop rocking and sit still. I am empty; I am nothing. I am so light I imagine I could float up to the ceiling and through it, taking Winnona with me.

Monkey Dreams was featured in American Way, the in-flight magazine of American Airlines.