(It wouldn’t be signed love because Gordon would be feeling unworthy of using the word. He would still be a wreck from having received, the day before, a consolation card. Sent by a man named Al Yothers. The picture on the front of the card would be a cartoon of a squirrel, and inside it would say, “Hope all your troubles will soon be nuttin’.” There would be no message, only “A.Y.” encircled in a heart. Marcy would see it—she would come into the kitchen while he was still staring at it—and she would ask if it was from her mother and sister. Because her hopeful, lovelorn face would be slaying him he’d answer yes. He’d say, “It’s for you,” and then have to account for the A.Y. “All yours,” he’d come up with. “A.Y. means all yours,” he’d say, and she’d think a minute and say, “Like the convertible!” which would first bewilder and then grieve him, since by that time the car would be scrap metal.)
That day, the day Sonja and Doris left for Vancouver, the car didn’t have a scratch and it cruised along as smoothly and quietly as a car sailing off a cliff.
Doris had splurged on a sleeping cabin. There was a sink, toilet and what was supposed to be a double bed but turned out to be more like a good-sized single.
“Let’s see how the springs hold up anyways,” she said, and with the old Negro porter right there she climbed on and started jumping in her high heels, then bounced onto her back and thought it was a scream when her dress billowed up and the porter saw her garters.
That was the first sign of the new her. Up until then she had been a woman who flushed when the doctor pressed the stethoscope against her breast and who, once she was in a chair, preferred to stay put. Try telling that to the people who were on the train. On that train she couldn’t even sit through a meal. Ten times she’d get up to stretch her legs, visit the ladies’ room, cuddle somebody’s squalling baby, yank the baby out of the mother’s arms and stride with it like a mad sentry, up and down, up and down, almost running. At night in bed she was still so keyed up that Sonja had to wrap her arms around her to keep her from thrashing.
Sonja was the opposite—so relaxed on that trip she couldn’t detect her own pulse. Every morning she squeezed herself into a lounge chair in the observation car and more or less stayed put, snoozing, eating Animal Crackers and Tootsie Roll Pops from the snack counter, reading her Nancy Drew book, looking out the window. Off and on she pressed her hand over her heart to try to feel her heartbeat while under her new Miss Chubette dress with its Peter Pan collar and daisy-shaped buttons her baby’s cells multiplied.
Now that her morning sickness was over and nobody had seemed to notice that her stomach was swelling, she didn’t think about the baby too much apart from something precious that she was temporarily in charge of, as when you’re the one with the tickets or the money. For the most part she felt nothing but cosy and puffy. She felt like an angel food cake. Her only distress, and it was a very slight one, arose at either of these two thoughts: that Marcy would forget to feed her hamster, Sniffers, and that, because she’d already missed too many lessons to ever get back into Miss Gore’s tap class, her dancing days were over. Her ultimate view on both prospects was, Oh well.
Sometimes Doris perched on the seat beside her to see how she was doing, and Sonja curled up with her fingers in her mouth and her head on her mother’s lap and let herself be lulled by the rhythm of her mother’s breakneck chatter, its pleasing accompaniment to the rhythm of the train. Frankly, she didn’t actually hear much of what Doris was going on about.
One morning, though, the third morning, she had her head in Doris’s lap and Doris said, “I wonder what the heck’s gotten into me?” and Sonja heard that.
“What, Mommy?” Sonja asked.
“Sweetie, you tell me and we’ll both know.” She knocked both her fists on Sonja’s skull, absently and too hard, but as Sonja usually had to see blood before it occurred to her that she hurt, she didn’t mind.
“You’re still excited about winning the draw,” Sonja suggested.
“Well, that’s the truth,” Doris said.
“The truth is only aversion,” Sonja reminded her.
“I feel like I’ve eaten Mexican jumping beans,” Doris said. She laughed, her new high-speed hyena laugh. “Brother, listen to me go.”
She was panting.
Three
Joan was born on Friday, November thirtieth, 1956, at around one-thirty p.m. Pacific time in the basement guest room of Dearness Old Folks’ Home. The same room that, two years earlier, a seventy-year-old woman named Alice Gunn wrote backwards in the window grime ROT IN HELL then choked herself to death with her rubber restraining belt.
“Callous Alice” the newspapers called her in their features about Joan, because that old tragedy was dredged up and tied in to the reincarnation story. A week after Joan’s birth, by which time both Doris and Sonja thought it was safe to leave her on her own for a few minutes, a reporter sneaked into the room and took her picture and then drove to White Rock and showed the snapshot to Alice’s ninety-seven-year-old mother, who after Alice’s death had changed old folks’ homes.
“That’s Ali, all right,” Alice’s mother was quoted as saying. “I’d know those bug eyes anywhere.” She said, “Tell her new mother I’m still paying monthly instalments on the headstone, if she’d care to pitch in.”
Not just Doris and Sonja but everyone at Dearness took exception to the bug-eyes crack. Everyone at Dearness was bowled over by Joan’s beauty, even the old men were. Men who found the soup-spoons too heavy asked to hold her. One man believed that Joan was the reincarnation of his first wife, Lila, who in a recent seance had talked of returning to earth for “another go-round.” When Joan started making that odd clicking sound she sometimes did, he said, “Yep, hear that? Those are her teeth, those are her new uppers,” resting his case. “Well, Lila!” he said, propping Joan astride his scrawny knee, “I took the nervous breakdown, expect you heard.”
Even Aunt Mildred was under Joan’s spell, and she was the one who’d predicted that Joan would be a midget or a dwarf, “something deformed and bunched-up like” because of the tucked-in, round-shouldered way Sonja had carried herself when she was pregnant.
Aunt Mildred had gone downhill a lot further than Doris had realized. On the phone back in June she’d said come on out, failing to mention not only her throat cancer but also that she had lost her house to creditors and was moving into an old folks’ home just a week before Doris and Sonja were due to arrive.
“For crying out loud, why didn’t you tell us?” Doris said when they finally located her after a morning of taking taxis all over Vancouver.
“Give me the name again?” Aunt Mildred rasped.
“Doris! Gordon’s wife!”
Aunt Mildred shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell, honey.”
Doris decided they might as well stay at Dearness anyway, might as well move into the basement guest apartment for the time being since it was dirt cheap and included meals. She booked it for the maximum allowable duration of two weeks, signing in both herself and Sonja under fake last names (and when the reincarnation story hit the headlines was she glad she had!). That same day she found a cottage for them to live in when the two weeks were up, but four days before they were supposed to go there she fell in love with a nurse named Harmony La Londe. Unhinged by this voodoo rapture and by the thought of Harmony being out of her sight for more than a few hours, she staged a little drama in Dearness’s office. She pretended to telephone Gordon, then over the dial tone pretended to be hearing that he had been fired from his job and there would be no money for her and Sonja’s return train fare, not for many months. She hung up slowly. She sat there blinking, one hand over her mouth. She allowed the woman who owned Dearness to pry the news out of her and she said, with dignity, “I’m very grateful,” when the woman said, “You and your daughter stay right here for as long as you need to.”
“You are a liar,” Harmony La Londe said upon hearing this story. She sounded nothing but charmed. She found Doris e
xotic, if you can believe it. When all she knew about Doris was that Doris was a housewife from Toronto who had tried to swing on the hot-water pipes, she said, “Are you exotic or what?” This from a lesbian Negro career woman who wore see-through negligées and had painted her apartment to match her parrot.
On the ceiling of the basement corridor the water pipes were runged like monkey bars, and early one morning when Doris was on her way to the lounge for coffee she saw that a ladder had been left propped against the wall next to the stairwell. Out of pure high energy and without thinking, she climbed the ladder and reached for the nearest pipe. Harmony heard the yelp. “Are you all right?” she called from her door.
“I had a little accident!” Doris said, scuttling down the ladder.
Harmony hurried toward her. She was wearing a red chiffon négligée, she looked on fire. Doris extended her hand and there were two pink slashes—one across her fingers, one across her palm. “Better get that under cold water,” Harmony said.
As Dearness’s head nurse, Harmony lived rent free in what had once been a second guest apartment. Doris followed her down the hall. “Ow, ow,” she said, graduating to “Wow” when she walked through Harmony’s door. The layout was the same as Doris and Sonja’s apartment but the walls were painted a brilliant lime green, and instead of Venetian blinds there were drapes, orange with a black dust-web pattern. In the centre of the room, in a glittery cage that hung like a chandelier from the ceiling, a parrot squawked and flapped around.
“That’s Giselle,” Harmony said. “She’s the jealous type.”
The bathroom was sunny yellow. Harmony turned on the tap and took hold of Doris’s wrist to direct her hand under the water. As if Doris were a child. No, as if she were an old lady, Doris realized. But Harmony was the older one here. In her short, slicked-back hair (Doris presumed she’d had it straightened) were single white strands like cracks. Not a line on her face, but ancient eyes and furrowed bony hands that made Doris’s plump white hands look like they belonged to a lady of leisure.
“That better?” Harmony asked.
“I’ll say. Listen, I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Oh, no, no, it’s my day off. I was just lounging around.” She turned off the tap, then dabbed Doris’s hand with the corner of an orange towel. “What were you doing, anyway?”
Doris told her.
Harmony laughed. “You crazy?”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“You really wanted to swing on the pipes?” She had stepped out into the hall and opened the closet there. Doris saw shelves crammed with bottles and vials, medicines, bandages.
“Good thing I didn’t, eh?” Doris said. “I’d have brought down the whole plumbing system.”
Harmony took a tube of salve from the back of one of the shelves. “Mrs.—“
“Oh, call me Doris.”
“Doris.” She turned and planted a fist on her hip. “Are you exotic, or what?”
“Me?”
Doris wasn’t aware that she had been avoiding glancing at the negligée until she glanced at it. She only wanted to give it an exaggerated once-over, as if to say, You’re the exotic one around here! But the light coming from the living room had made the chiffon transparent, and so what Doris found herself looking at was her first naked woman. The high, conical breasts, the darkness of the nipples, the darkness at the crotch and the long thighs pouring down. She stared, all right. For how long? (“Long enough,” Harmony said later.) Say, fifteen seconds. Dead seconds, so evacuated of everything except for Harmony’s body that staring seemed natural to Doris, a serenely clinical act, a polite one even, until the bird started squawking, “Giselle! Giselle!”
“Yes, you,” Harmony said then. Quietly. She stepped back into the bathroom and took hold of Doris’s wrist again to apply the salve.
“God, God, God,” Doris thought. She felt faint from embarrassment. Her vision blurred. Now what? Don’t tell her she was going to cry!
“There you go,” Harmony said.
Doris whispered, “Thanks.” Okay, it was over.
No, it wasn’t. Harmony still held her wrist. Doris looked at both their hands, hers the most helpless thing she had ever seen. She watched Harmony lift it like food to her mouth.
“A kiss to make it better,” Harmony said before her lips touched down.
Five months later, ten days late, Sonja’s water broke. It was Friday, early afternoon, and the Jolly Kitchenaires—the little band of wheelchair-bound ladies who met after lunch in the dining room to bang cutlery on cookware and belt out show tunes—were working on “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No.” You could hear them all the way down in the basement, that’s how loud they were. Happily, languidly, Sonja was pencilling loops in a notebook, eating licorice Allsorts and trying to balance her grammar book on her head while, sitting next to her at the card table, her starry-eyed little tutor, Miss Florence Butson, cooed encouragement. (It turns out that a retired teacher of penmanship and deportment isn’t the same thing as a retired teacher of English after all, but at a nursing home you take what you can get in the way of tutors was how Sonja and Doris were looking at it.)
Doris wasn’t in the apartment that afternoon. She was hardly ever there, being too full of pep to just sit, she said, and when she did fly in, by then Sonja was usually asleep. But Sonja was often awakened by her mother’s hands on her belly. First thing in the morning Doris would go for Sonja’s belly again, feeling for the feet and hands, listening to the heartbeat through Sonja’s navel. In her sleep she sometimes moaned, “Baby … baby,” and Sonja pressed her mother’s hand against herself and said, “Right here, Mommy. Feel, Mommy.”
Nobody had prepared Sonja for her water breaking, so when she felt the sudden pressure she thought she was dying to go to the bathroom. She came to her feet, forgetting about the book, which slid off her head and onto the floor, right under the downpour.
“Oh, my,” said Miss Butson and scraped back her chair.
Sonja waddled in the direction of the bathroom. Halfway there a knifing pain bowed her backwards and she fell hard on her rear end, bringing a table and lamp crashing down with her.
“When a person tries to kiss a girl!” shrilled the Jolly Kitchenaires.
Another pain. Another. Unaccustomed as she was to pain, Sonja wasn’t a good screamer and could manage only a few broken whinnies.
“I’m going for a nurse,” Miss Butson said, scurrying for the door as it opened and “I can’t be prissy and quaint!” blared in together with Aunt Mildred.
“What’s all the racket?” Aunt Mildred rasped.
“She just fell right over!” Miss Butson said at a hysterical pitch.
“I want my mommy,” Sonja whimpered.
“Is she having it?” Aunt Mildred got down on her knees, joints cracking like popcorn. “Let’s take a look-see,” she said, throwing up Sonja’s soaking dress and peering in. “Huh,” she said.
“What?” cried Miss Butson.
“Get up,” Aunt Mildred ordered Sonja.
Another pain. During its long trajectory Aunt Mildred moved behind her and hooked her under the arms. “Well, don’t just stand there like a nitwit,” she rasped at Miss Butson.
Miss Butson clutched Sonja’s hands and tugged, her sweet, milky eyes ogling Sonja with an expression of terror-stricken reassurance. Sonja was no help. Between pains she felt numb from the neck down. She felt like a tiny, melting snowman’s head. “Whut you goin’ to do when a feller gits flirty?” shrieked the Kitchenaires. Finally Aunt Mildred growled at Miss Butson to get out of the way, then mustering astonishing strength managed to heave Sonja onto the high four-poster bed.
“Now then,” she wheezed.
“Is it the baby?” Miss Butson asked, tremulous.
With one quavering hand Aunt Mildred fumbled at her cardigan pocket while regarding Sonja under half-closed, leathery eyelids. She pawed out a cigarette and a book of matches. When she had the cigarette lit she took a deep drag, lips puckering li
ke a draw-string purse. “I’ll tell you what you do with left-over mashed potatoes,” she said to Miss Butson.
Miss Butson made a whimpering sound.
“What you do is—“ She frowned at Miss Butson. “What is it again?”
The next pain produced a dozen little pains that flew like sparks. “Better get her drawers off,” Aunt Mildred said. Sonja felt hands scrambling on her belly, and then her underpants being jerked down her legs. The caressing coils of vein and the crib-like little bones, the cosy pink-and-white chamber she had envisioned her baby living in she now envisioned being scraped away by the slow, sinking rotation of a cement-block thing. “Make way,” her aunt said, and Sonja felt her mouth opening wider and wider as if obeying or as if pantomiming her other end, but the cry skidded in her throat.
“It’s out.”
“Oh, my.”
“What do you know about that, it just jumped right out.”
“Oh, my.”
“You got a hold of it there, Flo?”
“Yes, yes I think so …”
“Let me see,” Sonja murmured.
“It’s a girl.”
“You’ve got yourself a girl, honey.”
“Let me see,” Sonja said.
“She’s not breathing!”
“You’ve got to smack her.”
“Please,” Sonja said.
“Go on, Flo, really whack her one.”
“I can’t…”
“Give her here.”
“Mind your cigarette.”
A loud slap, a faint bleat…
Then…
“FLO! FLO! SHE’S INSANE!”
Or was it, “OH! NO! NOT AGAIN!”
Whichever, that famous, disputed scream was loud. Even the Jolly Kitchenaires heard what they agreed among themselves sounded like bad news in the hot-water pipes, likely a rupture. Write off that ear-splitting cry as something mechanical or as a hysterical, multiple hallucination and you still have the mystery of why a head-first fall onto the floor didn’t kill her let alone cave in or crack her skull. The only visible injury was a bruise to the left of her soft spot, a mauve quarter-sized circle from which radiated a wavy starburst of hair-thin veins so that you had to wonder (or at least Sonja did) if the bruise wasn’t transmitting urgent bulletins from the afterlife.
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