Days of the Locust

Lately I’ve been having dreams about giving birth. These are no ordinary dreams, where you end up with actual human babies. I’ve dreamed about giving birth to kittens and to puppies mostly. But last night I dreamed I’d given birth to monkeys. How many? There were too many to count but not too many to hold on to me with their lanky arms and moist little hands. In fact, of all the animals I’ve given real or imaginary birth to, including my two human offspring, monkeys were the easiest to raise. Because they held on snugly, my hands were free to carry out the ordinary tasks of daily life. And that took a lot of stress out of the endeavor. It was, I confess, a little sad to wake up in the same condition in which I fell asleep, menopausal and unlikely to ever again conceive and bear a child.

I was in my first year at an elite East Coast women’s college in the late 1960s when I was introduced to shoplifting. It was near the end of the fall semester, and Pam, a fellow Californian who lived in my dorm, showed me the Christmas gifts she was bringing home to her family. I was amazed by her generosity—Pendleton shirts and cashmere sweaters. “I stole them at the mall,” she told me. She said she put them on under her clothes in the dressing room and simply walked out with them. I mentioned Pam’s stealing to my roommate, Chris. “Oh, I never buy anything,” Chris said. She showed me her “stealing cape,” which had pockets sewn into the lining for the express purpose of hiding merchandise.  When I asked Chris and Pam what made them steal, they both told me they felt the world owed them something, and stealing made them feel as if they’d gotten even. Pam was an African-American army brat who had had to change schools a lot but had been a cheerleader in her senior year of high school

Lately I’ve been having weird memories surface. Like the time my young son and I watched a pig eat a pair of sunglasses at the Central Park Children’s Zoo. Or the time when I was in third grade and my class held a referendum on whether a girl named Jan must stop picking her nose. (It passed unanimously.) Or the time I got blotto-drunk and found myself driving the wrong way on the divided Interstate 280 freeway—and didn’t die or get arrested.