37

But it wasn’t dark, in the dream. In the dream it was light and sunny. Not the rumored white light of heaven, nor the sunniness of a clear sky, but the incandescent amber glow of a small lamp bought long ago at Woolworth’s and set on a bedside table. Its paper shade had yellowed, its tiny flowers faded to the thinness of a butterfly’s wing, their colors impossible to discern. The shade rested askew on its base of cheap yellow glass, shaped like an oversized tulip bulb, fluted at the top but too coarse to be pretty. A thick brown wire that ran from the back of the base, still bearing its round “UL Approved!” tag, stamped in authoritative black ink onto soft, thick paper.

Bennie remembered the lamp, recognized the lamp, it was one that had sat on her mother’s nightstand, atop a cotton doily crocheted by hand. By her mother’s hand, from when she had been well. A time Bennie could never recall in her waking moments, but which came back to her in the dream with a clarity remarkable in its detail.

The lamp rested always next to an empty perfume bottle of lead crystal, not Waterford but a quality her mother could have afforded so long ago, when she was well enough to place it, even empty, on her nightstand, in a storybook understanding of the way rich ladies lived. It was a naive fantasy her mother had, of privileged women who owned lovely items like French perfume bottles and other luxurious things, strands of lustrous pearls and gold bangles and long-handled brushes of sterling silver, engraved with monograms in incomprehensible swirls. It was Hollywood’s version of wealthy women that stayed with her mother, and she would envision these lovely women who sat at vanities before bedtime, brushing their long hair until it shone—one hundred strokes, she always said, and no cheating.

And in the dream Bennie’s mother became that woman at the movie vanity, her round, dark eyes serene, her lips full with dark lipstick, and she was brushing her long wavy hair in the mirror, letting her curls bounce back shiny with each stroke of the gleaming brush, a great lady of a great house, surrounded by beautiful bottles of real crystal, full of heavy, fragrant perfumes from Paris, their amber glowing like liquid gold in the lamplight and somehow shooting light like sunbeams, suffusing the place with the warm golden orange of a late afternoon in summer.

In the golden light Bennie went up to her mother, her shining mother, now seated at her vanity of light, and stood behind her for a minute, enjoying the vision she’d never had, of her mother happy and whole and finally getting everything she wanted, becoming at last the woman she always wished to be. And in the next moment her mother’s dream became Bennie’s own, for her mother turned glowing from the mirror, set down the precious shiny hairbrush, and smiled at Bennie with the sweetest of smiles.

“Benedetta,” she said, her voice soft and familiar.

And she raised her loving arms to embrace her daughter in the light.