“Your dream, however, seems to cut clear through the difficulties and reach the point without hesitation. The teacher acts decisively in assigning you your place. Interestingly, you are the only foreign student; this has to do with your feeling of alienation and your anxiety as to whether you are American, Italian, or Italo-American. Then, without your objection, she eliminates the grand-sounding words from the blackboard and has you concentrate on grossness. What does that mean to you?”

“Well, I’m not exactly sure it was grossness; maybe it was grossesse in the French sense of pregnancy, or grossolano in the Italian meaning of coarseness. In any case, a sense of roughness, earthiness, elementariness. Or was it the German gross?”

“And what does that say to you?”

“All those abstractions on the blackboard were written in gorgeous blinking neon lights and made to appear fabulously alluring. But in spite of their attraction, the teacher wipes them out. Then, bare and unadorned, only ‘Grossness’ remains. And the teacher—is it really you?—tells a certain girl (me?) that if she does well on this theme of grossness, she won’t have to come to class regularly. Is that it? If I do well, I’ll be able to pull out of analysis? What do you think?”

Puffing on his pipe, his legs crossed carelessly, he smiled and said in his teasing manner, “It’s what you think that counts.”

“I like this dream, this kind of Zen riddle and play on words: gross or grows. The confusion of languages—four different possibilities of meaning in four languages. The Jungian four. It could be a signpost, finally, after all the phoney distractions. Distractions and abstractions. Being pregnant, giving birth, growing. Or something like that. Stripping away the fancy notions and rhetoric and getting down to earth. What do you think?”

“You insist on hearing what I think when it’s you who’s important.”

“Then you are like the teacher who won’t answer my question,” she said with a smile, pleased at her quickness. “Anyway, I like this dream. I even liked it while I dreamed it.”

“Yes, it’s a good dream,” he said, bending over toward her and stomping more tobacco into his pipe, soiling his hands indifferently. “A good sign. And it would seem that the nut of it is truly getting back to the elemental that perhaps you’ve lost track of, lured by the neon-lighted abstractions you think you should believe in. The very uncertainty of the final word is important, too—as if nothing precise can be counted on in any one language. It’s elusive, it can’t be pinned down, it seems to merge into associate meanings, have overtones that keep evolving. And yet the basic sense, or feeling, is clear: Wipe out the labels and stick to the essentials. What are the essentials for you? Who is the essential you?”

“Yes, the essence,” she said with a laugh. “It reminds me of when I first got to Europe—my parents sent me to get over my lurid past—and I visited an American girl in Grasse whose job in a perfume factory was showing American tourists how essence is extracted from flowers and stuff. Maybe my dream was Grasse as well as gross to underline the essence bit.” She paused, startled. “Or could gross be grocery? My grandmother had a grocery store—and that would really be getting back to the base of everything. That’s it!”