American Dream
by Katerina Voegtle
It’s a steep way up to this City on a Hill. Dixie, Winn Dixie, Dust Bowl, Death Valley. Sweet home, home on the range, color of a scab just before it breaks open.
In the backseat of a pickup, I sit between memories I’ve never made. My father a paper doll in a Navy uniform, come to lift my luggage from the bus station. Feeling our way in the dark, shadows shift to landmarks, and Sinatra tries to remind us of something from behind the radio. I wouldn’t say I know Frank, but I know his songs by heart. Maybe it’s the same thing? My lips taste of Shirley Temple, and big-band blue bursts from the speakers, luring me to some pooled past, 5 memories split among 5000.
The American Dream is a lawn that never ends. White-picket-fenced Manifest Destiny, the kinda lawn you can walk barefoot in. The kinda lawn you mow daily just because you can. The kinda lawn you can birth 2.5 kids and a dog on. Water that lawn. Fertilize that lawn. The biggest threat to the American Dream are brown spots. Brown spots can be caused by overfertilization or dog piss, but sometimes it’s just bad soil.
Sunbathing on stolen land—where do you place the doormat when “Welcome Home” is a spit in the face? The American Dream is just that—you can only see it when your eyes are closed. This sure isn’t land of the free, but you’ve got to be brave to make your home here. Because behind the welcome mat is a bed with a thousand ghosts and an oasis of lead-flecked Holy Water.
We’re all welcomed home in different ways. For my friend, it was a punch to the face, pavement’s kiss so passionate it nearly knocked his turban off. Red red red seeping into the yellow fabric. “Go home!”
But it’s also the smell of salt and magnolia, neon burning on an August night. The taste of warm grape soda on a Field of Dreams, barefoot prom dance that never ends. A beautiful and aching scar to which the mountains can only bear witness.
Social studies: shooting drill. Twenty small bodies against the bulletin board. Bulletin board, barricade. Once a week, Mr. Orsini tells us how, if the time comes, his 70-year-old body will shield us from the bullets as we jump from the third story window. Social studies. Shooting drill. Class dismissed, saved by the bell.
“This is my rifle. There are many like it, but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Without me, my rifle is useless. Without my rifle, I am useless. I must fire my rifle true. I must shoot straighter than my enemy who is trying to kill me. I must shoot him before he shoots me. I will . . .”
Electric night at a baseball game, dusk air the texture of cotton candy, dissolving just when you think you’ve grasped it. The night only exists in your headlights, anyway, and we play hide-and-seek in the tangled-up country roads. Campfire sparks turn to fireflies turn to stars.
Six and in my Sunday best, me and Saddam Hussein spend break- fast together. Me at the kitchen table, him on TV, me eating pancakes, him on the execution block. One last sip of orange juice and it’s time for church.
Marlboro Man, saddling up to ride from the mountains to the prairies to the oceans white with foam. A silhouette with leather hands, cutting his hair with a pocketknife. A puff of smoke in the blood-red dawn, disrobed emperor of the Wild West.
“My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life. Thus, I will learn it as a brother. I will learn its weaknesses, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel. I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready. We will become part of each other. We will . . .”
That cold molasses lake, summer-frozen: skinny dipping was our first freedom, flat chests burning against black inner tubes smelling of burnt rubber. The cold undercurrent a lingering reminder . . . Down there, the struggle for life is going on, the occasional thrashing of a fish punctuating the flat water. But up here, the late-August sky is the color of peach syrup, and the crickets are tuning for the night’s concert.
My uncle joins the NRA but he still has a Syrian accent. Super- bowl on TV, sweet potatoes in the oven, he rushes to be the one to carve the Thanksgiving turkey.
With every Polish word butchered by my stiff, All-American tongue, I’m living out my grandparents’ American Dream. In the diner, my grandmother impatiently twists the right consonants from behind my teeth—gołąbki, pierogi. But it’s all a show. If she really wanted perfect pronunciation, she wouldn’t have spent generations ironing it out of all of our mouths. She joked that it was just to keep se- crets from the kids. Maybe one of those secrets was her own mother’s name—leafing through photo albums, she stumbles over it.
Maybe the American Dream is just the river’s sweat dripping from oars between each stroke, droplets shattering the dawn. Maybe we’re expecting too much. Maybe we’re not expecting enough.
Things in my father’s closet: too many Hawaiian shirts. A poster of the Loch Ness Monster from his childhood he refuses to give up. Shoe polish in a rainbow of brown. More than one flag, properly folded. Nine empty cans of WD-40. Service khakis. Summer whites. A photo- graph of my mother with a perm. A napkin holder he made in Home Ec in seventh grade. A Winchester-22. A suit for each day of the week.
Blind plunge into an old quarry. Treetops soaked in honey. Movie theater hand jobs and drunk driving to the cemetery.
My little brother plays soldier all the way to the enlistment office. It’s his eyes, 20/20, that make him the Maverick my four-eyed fighter pilot of a father never could be, but it’s my father’s hands that guide the signature that makes it all official. The Holy Trinity: father, son, and Uncle Sam, an incestuous I-Want-You sticking its finger into our family photos.
“When Johnny comes marching home again
Hurrah! Hurrah!
We’ll give him a hearty welcome then
Hurrah! Hurrah!”
Leather boots dangle off the hospital bed. Wayne McLaren, David McLean, David Millar, Eric Lawson, four muscled men dying under the same aseptic sheets. Together they are Marlboro Man, wheezing the last cancerous air out of sooty lungs.
Harvest time by the hanging tree, last apples clinging for dear life. The rest gather at the foot of the tree to putrefy together, a festering excess, a Thanksgiving bounty.
Maybe the American Dream is no more than four walls and an air mattress to fuck on.
“So be it, until victory is America’s and there is no enemy, but peace!”
And so, Rome fell, the sun rose again, and it was time for breakfast.
Oh yeah, it’s the American Dream. American Fever Dream. American Wet Dream. Back-whippin’, boot-lickin’ American Dream.