Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  Actually, not that funny because it isn’t Al who gives Marcy hickeys, it’s Gary Short, the Telegram paperboy. “Punk,” her mother says, fishing the newspaper out of the rose bush, but she never complains to him, far from it, she overtips—fifty cents, a dollar once—and even flirts, calling after him not to do anything she wouldn’t do. It’s obvious to Marcy that like everyone else her mother is afraid of getting on his bad side.

  Gary Short is a criminal. When he was only eight years old he stole the stethoscope from his father’s doctor bag and tried to crack the Dominion store safe. He just strode through the meat department and up the stairs to the office, and nobody saw him, not even Miss Slitz, the old woman who was working there that day. When the alarm sounded (the hitch in Gary’s plan: an alarm set to go off after ten unsuccessful spins of the combination), Miss Slitz fainted, and the meat manager ran in to find Gary listening to her chest with the stethoscope. “She’s dead,” Gary announced. Lucky for him, she wasn’t.

  Two years later he set fire to his own bed and burned down half his house. But did he? Marcy wonders if the culprit wasn’t his retarded brother, Cedric. Why isn’t Cedric at the Mother Goose Home? Marcy would like to know. Cedric scares her, his big lolling head and lumpy body, his Jack Benny imitation. “Woo-ell,” Cedric says, crossing his arms and slapping his own face.

  What nobody would believe is how kind Gary is to Cedric. “Not now, okay, Ceddie?” Gary says. “Later, okay?”

  “Woo-ell,” Cedric says, stumbling backwards out of the garage.

  “Go watch TV and I’ll be in soon,” Gary says. Then he slides a crowbar through the handles of the garage doors and sits back up on the barrel. And Marcy, who hasn’t appreciated the interruption, resumes her stripping, undoing the neck buttons of her powder blue surgical-collared Ben Casey blouse, working her arms out of the sleeves. So as not to knock her glasses off she tugs the blouse down over her hips and steps out of it, carefully because her boots are mucky.

  Her teeth chatter. Her breath smokes. Light from the setting sun slices through the slats between the wall boards and fashions gold bracelets all down her arm when she lifts it to drape her blouse on top of her navy-and-green kilt. From the other handle of the lawnmower, which has been hoisted up on a rack, hang her navy cardigan, her red wool jacket and her red-yellow-and-purple angora tam with the grapefruit-sized orange pompom. The tam was made by Sonja. Sonja knits gloves too, but she didn’t knit the white angora ones that Marcy is wearing, still wearing as she wiggles her half-slip down her legs. When it is off she holds it out like a silk sash and drops it over her kilt.

  She is getting better at these stripteases. Not so hurried and clumsy, more like a lady in a magic act. She wishes she had a bra, though. Nobody in her class (nobody except for the fat, grandmotherly-looking Karen Kennelworth) wears a bra, and usually Marcy doesn’t want one, but as she manoeuvres her arms out of her undershirt she imagines reaching behind herself to undo hooks, how that would make her arms wings. How she could dangle a bra from her baby finger and then toss it at him.

  No, she would never do that! She can’t even look at him. She looks straight ahead, at that piece of wood laddered in light. There or at herself, her white gloves, her clothes peeling off. She is the beautiful, elegant lady. He is the man. With her first boyfriend, Dug, she used to play a game they called “Romantic,” where the haughty lady slinked by the man who whistled and said, “Hows about a kiss, baby” and “Hey, good-looking,” and the woman said, “Flattery will get you nowhere” and “Fresh!” and slapped at his groping hands but eventually let him kiss her. Sometimes Marcy was the lady, sometimes Dug was. This switching was his idea, and led to fights. “You be the man,” he’d say. “No,” she’d say, “you be the man.”

  She should have pulled down his pants, she thinks now. That would have shown him who was the man. She isn’t serious. Her own underpants she has never pulled down for anyone. She has never had to, she has never been made to. The first time Gary suggested she take her clothes off she naturally assumed he meant all of them, and her only qualm was what if her underpants were dirty? It didn’t occur to her, either to refuse or that he wouldn’t be interested in seeing her bum.

  He isn’t interested this time, either. As soon as she steps out of her undershirt he jumps down from the barrel and comes over, and she holds out her goose-bumped arms and is perfectly still to be outlined by knives. Neither of them say anything. He touches her left breast first. Her left breast is bigger than her right one, which is not saying much. Both are always sore. Always. Just him dabbing with the palm of his hand hurts. He dabs for a while then pushes her nipple with one finger, in and out, lightly, testing, as if he expects to hear a buzz. Then he starts squeezing and rubbing, not hard but it’s torture.

  After a minute or so he stops squeezing and begins to rub the nipple back and forth between his thumb and forefinger, the way you turn a knob. Or a combination lock. Why does he do this? She’d give anything to be a mind reader. He is screwing a nail into her it feels like, but she doesn’t blame him, he knows not what he does. Darling, she thinks. He moves on to her right breast, and she allows her aching held-out arms to drift down and around his back. Shivering into his jacket, she inhales his steel-bar and Arrowroot-cookie smell. Oh, my dreamboat, she thinks, soft and amazed.

  It is no secret to her that she is not a femme fatale. She is a four-eyes. She is a stork. Her feet are already bigger than her mother’s. In her basement, in a cupboard under the bar, there is an electric cocktail shaker that is a black-haired lady with huge bare breasts and a round rump skimpily covered in a hula skirt and with tiny, tiny hands glued to a glass. Now that is Marcy’s idea of a femme fatale. When she notices a boy staring at her own button breasts she is always surprised. What does he see worth gawking at? At the same time she doesn’t dismiss the possibility that boys can see more somehow, just as dogs can hear sounds humans can’t.

  Gary is the only boy who has ever seen her bare breasts. Who has ever touched them under her undershirt or squeezed them (he has resumed squeezing). By now her right breast is almost numb, and she is thinking of saying something when he stops and takes a long, satisfied-sounding breath.

  “I’m cold,” she says.

  He hikes up his blue jeans. “I can fix that.” The next thing she knows his arms are around her, and his mouth is clamped on her neck. She lets herself go limp to feel him holding her up. For his age—thirteen—he might be small, but he’s no weakling. “He is fearfully and wonderfully made,” she has told Joan. “His lips are like a Negro’s, but a lighter colour, like a hot-dog bun.”

  Does she ever wish he’d kiss her on the mouth. He never has.

  The hickey ends with a loud smack. “Okay, you’re branded,” he says.

  Shy now, she folds her arms over her bare chest, and rubs her upper arms with her gloved hands. “Can’t I give you a hickey?” she asks. She has asked once before.

  “Well—“ He tightens his lips. Sighs. Finally gives his head a shake. Years from now she will be reminded of him by car mechanics and men working in hardware stores. “It’s getting late,” he says, looking past her at the garage doors, and she knows that he is worried about Cedric in the house waiting for him.

  His house is in a well-to-do neighbourhood twenty minutes away from her quadrant of identical, garageless bungalows. When she is halfway home the streetlights come on, producing splashes of light that she walks more slowly through in case they contain heavenly light. The cleansing light of heaven is everywhere, she believes, but in disguise. “Verily, verily,” she has been chanting off and on the entire way. “Verily, verily, verily,” her nervous, irresolute prelude to certain prayers.

  It’s not as if she is a fornicator or an adulteress. It is not as if she has been selfish or mean. She has yielded to temptation, and she has been a temptress. “But I have loved much,” she protests, thinking of the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and hair and was forgiven. Being forgiven isn’t even the point, th
ough. The point is, if she has loved much, why does she need to be forgiven in the first place?

  It’s an old argument, and she knows who will win. She jumps into it anyway, straight to her biggest weapon—the Song of Solomon. “Thy two breasts are like two young roes that are twins,” she thinks, and as always feels shockingly rude and deeply, deeply excited. “My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him!”

  She could keep it up, she could remind Jesus of almost every verse after all these months of reading the Song of Solomon aloud to Joan. As the only person in her family who goes to church Marcy has taken Joan’s religious education upon herself, and the Song of Solomon is Joan’s favourite book, Marcy has decided, containing as it does the passage about a little sister. A little sister who “hath no breasts.” Reading this part, Marcy is liable to laugh, which is why she usually leaves it out and goes straight from “We have a little sister” to “What shall we do for our sister in the day when she shall be spoken for?”

  The answer is: “If she be a wall, we will build upon her a palace of silver.” Here Marcy slows down. “And,” she reads, “if she be a door, we will enclose her with boards of cedar.” Joan always sucks in her breath at these last words.

  A wind has come up. Marcy walks faster. “Just get it over with,” she orders herself and she manages to think “Dear Jesus” but then goes blank. A roar is shuddering through her, a multitude in her bones. She starts to run. “I charge you, ? daughters of Jerusalem!” she says out loud. She leaps over a hedge. “Thy breasts are clusters of grapes!” She begins to laugh, she can’t help it. “O that thou wert as my brother, that sucked the breasts of my mother!” she says and has to stop, she is laughing so hard. “I’m not joking,” she says, addressing Jesus now. Despite her laughter, she is deadly serious. These are the words of God. More than that, they are weapons.

  The music is coming from her house. Piano music. Somebody must be blaring the radio, Marcy figures, that’s how good it sounds. Then she remembers that today is the day the piano was supposed to arrive from Grandma Gayler’s and she dashes inside, kicks off her boots and races up the stairs to the living room.

  “Please turn on your magic beam,” her mother sings along. “Mister Sandman, bring me a dream …,” looking over her shoulder and miming “Shh” when Marcy charges in, as if Marcy was the one singing.

  To make space for the piano the chesterfield has been pushed in front of the bookshelves. There is that smell, that earthy, wormy smell of Grandma Gayler’s basement, and what’s this green on the carpet? Marcy bends to touch it. Moss. A trail from her to her mother and Sonja, who stand behind the piano bench with an arm around each other’s waists.

  Her mother and Sonja are exactly the same height and have exactly the same dark springy hair, but Sonja is twice as wide from the back and she’s not moving, unlike her mother, who is bobbing and pitching. As Marcy crosses the room she hallucinates that Sonja is the husk that her mother is thrashing out of. For just a second, her mother is Sonja emerging from hibernation, she is the not-so-fat dancer whom Marcy can remember, with a pang of longing, from a time before Joan was born.

  Marcy stands beside her mother. Joan’s miniature femmefatale fingers hop over the keys, picking out a jazzy version of “Mister Sandman,” while her right foot pumps as if it reaches the pedal. Even Marcy’s parents, who say they don’t know if God exists, agree that Joan’s piano playing is a miracle. “Forgive me, Lord,” Marcy manages to think at last. Her eyes burn. “Play ‘What a Friend We Have in Jesus,’ “she says, and without a missed beat Joan does.

  That night Marcy runs her fingers through Joan’s hair in an act of worship over its silkiness. Her own hair, which is coarse, is as a pack of dogs, she would say. Joan’s hair is as a flock of angels. While Marcy combs with her fingers she talks about the striptease and being felt up. Joan hums and looks at herself in the mirror, a Life magazine opened in her lap.

  Every night Marcy sits next to Joan in the closet and reads aloud from the Bible. Then she removes the barrettes and ribbons from Joan’s hair and reviews the day with her, taking for granted that the questions and concerns popping into her head are Joan’s wordless, humming half of the conversation. “We don’t know,” she says now, answering the silent question Which one do we love the best? (Marcy still refers to either of them in the plural when they are by themselves.) “We don’t know,” she repeats anxiously when the question is rephrased as Who is our. one and only? She then hears, What if Ziggy sees it? and touches her hickey and says, “He won’t.” What if he did, though, what would he do? Marcy bites the side of her thumbnail. “We’d be in for it,” she murmurs, “that’s for sure.”

  Ziggy is her handsome boyfriend, blond and tall and another strong, silent type, another outcast, in his case because he thinks everybody hates him for being a Nazi’s son. People claim to have seen a swastika tattoo on his father’s arm, but Ziggy told her that on Remembrance Day his father burned it off using paint stripper. “I’ll never forget his screams in the night,” he said.

  Screams? Considering that his father’s voice sounds like a record played on slow speed, Marcy detected a lie. “Everybody thinks it’s kind of neat about your father’s swastika,” she said.

  “Maybe you think its neat,” he muttered. “Everyone else hates me.”

  “Nobody hates you.”

  He stabbed a finger at his eyes. “It’s in their eyes!” he shouted. “The eyes don’t fib!”

  They don’t? Marcy tried to make her eyes pools of love. Never does she love him more than when he blows his stack.

  She fell in love with him the usual way for her. One second not loving him and the next second identifying him as an innocent target. Doomed, fingered. One second it was just Ziggy the German boy up ahead of her and the next second it was a boy in some dire peril… of anything, there was no telling what. A car accident one day, a girl like her.

  It was a Friday, and she was by herself, having given up waiting for Pammy, who, when you walked with her, kept stopping to gasp over whatever you were talking about. Now, on this stretch of the road, there was only Marcy and Ziggy. She mentally scrambled for a good excuse, got one, ran up and delivered it: “My mother was wondering if your mother wanted to join her bridge club.”

  Her mother doesn’t belong to a bridge club. On the other hand his mother doesn’t speak English, which Marcy happened to know.

  He stopped and frowned at her. “I don’t think so,” he answered uncertainly, and it occurred to her that he had no idea what a bridge club was.

  “Oh, well, that’s okay, my mother was just wondering.” She continued to walk alongside him, chatting about school, homework, their teacher—Miss Torg. “Did you know she shaves her arms?” she asked.

  “No.” He sounded worried.

  “At about three o’clock they get five-o’clock shadow. Haven’t you noticed?”

  He shook his head.

  “Well, it’s pretty disgusting.”

  It was a dirty lie but she had his attention. She told him that her old babysitter shaved her arms and ate worms. This was only half a lie. “I used to give her baths,” she said. “I washed her bare breasts!” She giggled, startled at herself.

  He stopped again. Had she gone too far? In her mind a Nazi shot a silly woman. “I was only six,” she said quickly.

  He nodded over his shoulder. “Here is my snazzy house.”

  They were in front of a little red-brick bungalow, the last house before the railway crossing. It was a real dump. The lawn all weeds and piles of dog dirt, a picket fence gaped like an old comb, the front door and eaves feathered with peeling green paint.

  He lived here?

  “The picture of order and efficiency,” he said.

  She glanced at him. There was a red perfect circle, a bull’s-eye, on each of his cheeks. With a jerk of his head he loosened his scarf and extracted a key that hung from a black shoelace around his neck. Oh, so his mother worked, Marcy thought.
She began to twist her thumb. If only she could twist her thumb right off! Console him with a catastrophe way worse than his house. “It’s exactly like my Grandma Gayler’s place,” she lied. “Gee,” she said, clasping her homework books to her chest, “I just adore picket fences!”

  She beamed at his awful house, keeping it up because she could feel him studying her. A Nazi’s son, a German boy. There was no imagining herself in his eyes. Was she too skinny? Too forward? Was he homesick for plump, yellow-haired girls in braids and white blouses with short puffy sleeves?

  “When we moved in it was a nest of rats,” he said, “but my dog broke their necks. One by one.”

  She gave him another glance. Either he was trying to scare her off or this was him upgrading his house from humiliating to petrifying. She went on smiling. She was dedicated to being absolutely charmed so she ignored the rats and leapt at the fact that he had a dog. “What kind of dog?”

  “Mutt. Part beagle.” The bull’s-eyes were fading.

  “Can I see him?”

  “Her. Yulia.”

  “Can I see her?”

  He frowned, and she thought she’d been too pushy again. “She has a problem,” he said. “When she meets a new person she barks like crazy and then her eyeballs, they sometimes do”—he flung open his fingers in front of his face—“pop out and hang.”

  “Pop out?” she said.

  “And hang by the nerve.” He shrugged. “She lets you put them back in. She is gentle with people she knows.”

  “Wow,” Marcy said.

  “But it is like you said about Miss Torg. Pretty disgusting.”