In his tiny, cabbage-smelling kitchen she watched him kneel before a roly-poly, pus-coloured dog with an ugly bat face and a bunch of tits drooping to the floor. “Yah, yah,” he cooed, and the dog, who a minute earlier had been yapping furiously and attempting to bite the bobbing yoyos that were its own eyes, now sat still and silent while Ziggy first wet both hands in a bowl of warm salted water and then carefully lifted the right eyeball up into its socket, tucking in, as he went, the purple elastic band that Marcy presumed was the nerve.
“Why do you go and get so excited?” he said. “It’s just a girl. She won’t hurt you.”
Marcy was reminded of Gary and Cedric. Did every loner have a repulsive creature waiting at home for him? Or was this just the case with the loners she loved? With the boys she loved, because when she thought about it, even Al, her popular boyfriend, lived in the same house as a blind, cranky aunt who peed in her chair, and maybe he didn’t clean up after her but he read her the newspaper. Heal the sick, cleanse the lepers, Marcy thought apprehensively, wondering what it meant that she found herself surrounded by them.
When its eyes were back in, the dog waddled out of the kitchen, piggy tail churning, toenails clicking on the grimy red-and-green linoleum, and Ziggy carried the bowl of water to the sink. A big, pink-skinned boy, his shapely little ears like the handles on china teacups. Her beloved. What was he doing in this filthy kitchen? Right up from the floor, grease spattered the pea-green walls so that her first impression had been that they were papered in a modern design, similar to her family’s green living-room drapes whose flecks she believed to be real silver.
Oh, that she could offer him a robe of her living-room drapes.
He turned on the tap. A thin wail issued from the water pipes, a sound that seemed thrown from her throat. She took a step toward him. Another step. With one finger she touched the small of his back.
He froze. Like a guy with a gun in his ribs he went dead still, hands half up. So she froze, too. Not a single word occurred to her and no conceivable next move until the pipes started clanging and he reached to turn off the tap. She stepped back, a prickly sensation paring down her skull. What had she done? In Germany did you never touch the boy first? “Verily, verily,” she said to herself. Tears scalded her eyes. She turned to see where she had put her homework books and as she did he spun around and grasped her upper arms. Pure fury was what she beheld, his jaw working in such a way that she thought he was preparing to spit.
It was a dry, closed-mouth kiss, a hard push of his lips against hers.
“Is that what you came for?” he asked sharply when it was through.
“Yes,” she whispered.
He kissed her again. Lips slammed shut, pinching her gums against her teeth.
That night she demonstrated the kiss to Joan, who wrenched her face away. “Well, how do you think we felt?” Marcy asked, insulted. Joan resumed humming. Like melting, came her unspoken response. Marcy sighed, remembering, and Joan sighed. “He’s so passionate,” Marcy explained dreamily. “He’s the jealous type, though,” she said after a minute. “We’re going to have to be careful.”
She yawned. Joan’s yawn was the echo, not tiredness. In a few minutes they would go to bed to continue the conversation there, but Marcy would immediately drift off in the midst of a romantic fantasy about her and Ziggy trapped in the school basement following an atomic-bomb explosion.
(Joan, meanwhile, would lie with her eyes wide open behind her sunglasses, expectation eventually causing her legs to make small trotting movements.)
Some nights Marcy wakes up and goes into her mother’s bedroom to watch from the window. “You shouldn’t even be out of bed,” her mother will say if Marcy says she wishes she could go out to play, too. Years ago her mother said, “Pretend it’s a dream,” and in the mornings Marcy often wonders if it was. It’s a bit scary. Her father wanders into the edges of the yard and vanishes. Out of almost any glint or arrangement of shadow she can assemble him, but it’s usually where she wasn’t looking that the man shape re-emerges.
Whereas Joan, by her hair and pyjamas, is always visible. Joan is a pearly light. Her arms are white wands. The ball she catches and throws is not a tiny dove but is the white part of her red-white-and-blue rubber ball. She hops and wiggles and thrashes around, you’d never know it was the same person.
Joan is the little piano player of whom Marcy’s dreams foretold. In front of whom “balling”—whatever that means—is like “balling in front of the dog.”
Thirteen
For years now Sonja hasn’t needed to look down or add up. It’s all in her fingers, a sensation, as certain as anything she knows, of having clipped exactly two dozen bobby-pins onto the card.
If that sounds hard to believe, watch her knit. The needles crackle. Before your eyes, scarves descend like foreign banners in primitive zigzag designs and garish colour combinations. Pink, purple, turquoise and orange. Black, red, peach and yellow. “I just grab a bunch of balls” is her stock response to why those particular colours? “Huh!” she says, appraising a finished product as if it had just dropped from the sky into her lap. In one evening she can turn out two scarves and a hat.
Family and friends are welcome to take whatever they want, and the rest she stores in cardboard file boxes to be collected, come Christmas, by the Salvation Army for distribution among the poor. Over the course of a year that’s approximately eighty boxes, or five hundred scarves and three hundred hats, all told. That’s a lot of poor people’s heads and necks, so many that it’s not unusual for Gordon to be driving downtown and spot a bum wearing one of her creations.
There’s no mistaking it—the blinding colours, the long dense fringe on her scarves, the colossal pompoms on her hats. He tells her that his heart swells when this happens, but the truth is it sinks. Not for her sake or even for the bum’s, it sinks over the clash of bum and hat. It sinks over every preposterous, well-intentioned coupling of which this one seems to be the wretched gist. Once he saw half a dozen drunks sprawled on a subway grating, all of them wearing her hats and scarves, and it was like coming across a flock of tropical birds crash-landed on an Arctic shore.
This is not to say that he isn’t proud of her. Naturally he’s proud. Of her charity, her generosity, but more than that of her talent. It turns out that she is clever after all! Slow-witted, there’s no getting around that, but a wizard with her hands. At work he keeps his eye out for young men he can picture falling for a good-natured, overweight, slow-witted girl who is a wizard with her hands. So far there have been four prospects: Bernie, the chinless short-order cook who works in the cafeteria; Ed, the pock-faced proofreader who wins speed-typing contests; and the Bowden brothers, tubby bookbinder twins who give away the punch lines of each other’s cornball jokes. Homely bachelors all of them but with kind hearts and narrow horizons, and not a queer bone in their bodies as far as he can tell, although you never know. He invites them home for dinner and they come. They talk to Sonja, they admire her five-foot-high “I’m Tops at Schropps” bobby-pin, they act bowled over by her scarves and hats, they leave wearing a scarf and hat.
But do they ask her out?
“If she’d only wear some lipstick,” Gordon frets to Doris one evening over their rum-and-Coke nightcaps. It is the end of July and they are standing at the living-room window to watch a lightning storm. “Or do something with that hair of hers,” he adds.
“She’ll meet somebody someday,” Doris says, rapidly patting down that hair of hers but taking no offence. She is too fired up. This morning in the Dominion store line-up she met a beautiful dusky woman who could have been Harmony La Londe, right down to the nurse’s uniform, gold tooth and smoky laugh. Her name was Cloris Carter. “Hey, we rhyme!” Doris said, and that laugh of Cloris’s, that first gust of it, left her feeling all golden brown at the edges. When she suggested that the two of them have coffee one afternoon, Cloris clutched her by the wrist and said, “Yes, yes, you come to my place.” It was something els
e, the look in her eyes. Bloodshot, boiling, as if she were letting Doris see right into her arteries. They arranged a date for Saturday at two o’clock. Doris would bring her shortbread cookies. Walking home, pulling the bundle buggy in a state of dread and rapture (in case she hadn’t read Cloris right, in case she had), Doris noticed three small bruises on her wrist.
Now, watching the storm, she finds herself bringing that wrist up to her lips and sensing from the bruises the slightest emanation of heat. “Somewhere there’s somebody,” she says to Gordon, “who will love Sonja just the way she is.”
“Where will she meet this somebody?” Gordon asks as lightning—three, four flashes—stutters across the sky.
“Five Mississippi, six Mississippi—“ Doris counts. When the thunder claps, she jumps and spills some of her drink. “Where?” she asks. “On the doorstep.” She swipes at her wet blouse. “He will suddenly appear on the doorstep!” she says in a starry-eyed voice (she is now thinking of Robin the Avon Lady). “You’ll see.” She pats his arm. She clicks her fingernails on her glass. She makes an unconscious leap from Robin to birds and says in her English-accented stage voice, “It was the nightingale and not the lark that pierced the fearful hollow of thine ear. Nightly she sings on yond pomegranate tree.” She dashes to the corner and pulls the cord to open the drapes wider.
Gordon wouldn’t call Doris brain-damaged but he does secretly suspect that six years ago she suffered a small stroke. From reading all those neurology books he knows that changing suddenly from a relaxed person to a jittery, distracted one can be the aftermath of spastic paralysis. Poor Doris. His good, neglected wife. Despite her ambitious plans for his career, has she ever complained about how he failed to measure up? Not once. What she did instead was get them out of debt with that Queen for a Day haul and then go on to make a career out of entering every contest going, sending in box tops by the bagful, composing little ditties. Is it her fault that all she has won since Queen for a Day is second prize in a toilet paper contest? First prize would have been something. First prize was five thousand dollars. Second prize was getting your photo printed on each sheet of ten rolls of toilet paper. For the heck of it Doris mailed in a photo of Bill Cullen (the host of Name That Tune, a TV game show that never replied to her dozens of letters begging to be a contestant) and—who knows? maybe they liked the joke—back came ten rolls of Bill Cullen’s head. Which Gordon couldn’t bring himself to use because he had a crush on Bill Cullen at the time. He sighs. It seems odd to him now, falling for someone that old.
“What?” Doris says.
He looks into her bright little eyes. “You were a fine actress,” he comes up with.
She laughs, pleased. She pecks at her wrist.
“Damn fine,” he says, meaning it now.
“Well, Sweetie,” she says, touched by the quaver in his voice, “let’s just say I was an actress.”
She wasn’t even that. The closest she got, professionally, was palm waver in a summer-stock production of Antony and Cleopatra, and Gordon knows this, not because she slipped up but because for no reason he has ever been able to put his finger on, her oldest lies have grown transparent to him. (He finds it extremely poignant that they have, as if a sad but natural aging process has ravaged some part of her that was once beautiful.) “I wish Sonja had something like that,” he says. “A stimulating outside interest.” Then he remembers that she did have one, once. “Say, why doesn’t she take up dancing again?”
Doris laughs. “Gordon, she weighs two hundred and fifty pounds.”
“Okay, that would give her the incentive to go on a diet.” But already he can’t see it. He sees those hippos from Fantasia, the ones in tutus.
“Don’t worry about her so much.” She taps at moths dithering on the other side of the pane. Fly to Cloris! she silently bids each one. “Sonja’s the happiest person I know,” she says, and perks up a notch because she realizes that that’s the truth. She starts bobbing to the song in her head.
“I wonder,” Gordon says.
“Is that rain?” Doris sets her glass on the arm of the chesterfield and races out of the room. A moment later he hears windows slamming shut.
When she returns he says, “What’s she going to do? Live with us all her life?”
“Well, why not?” She alights on the edge of the chesterfield and drains her glass.
“Go to her grave a virgin,” Gordon says.
Doris looks at him, a clear, blank look like a mirror he is meant to see his blunder in.
“Oh, Geez,” he says. “I don’t know why, but I never count him. What was his name? Some joke name …”
“Yours. Remember?” She springs to her feet. “He said to her, ‘Call me Yours.”’ She shivers. “What a creep. All done?”
She snatches his glass as the sky is splintered everywhere and they both feel a surging, a kind of arterial tug.
It is two days later. Saturday. Day one of the record-breaking continent-wide killer heat wave that before it is over, eighteen days later, will pick off Grandma Gayler and a slew of other retirees as they lug home groceries and mow lawns despite the radio and newspaper warnings. Across two nations, cans of prunes and consommé from dropped paper bags will roll down sidewalks. Unmanned power mowers will charge through hopscotch games and into busy intersections.
It is July thirty-first, 1965, the twenty-seventh anniversary of Gordon and Doris’s first date, not that either of them remembers. It is ten years to the day since Gordon quit smoking and he doesn’t remember that either. From his own life only three anniversaries have ever stuck with him: his birthday, the day his mother died, the day Al Yothers walked into his office.
After today, make that four anniversaries. The fact that July thirty-first is also day one of the 1965 killer heat wave he’ll keep forgetting, year after year, unless there’s an item about it on the news, and then if they say that twelve people died that first day he’ll think, Thirteen. Meaning including himself. Not his near-fatal heart attack but the death of the flimsy idea he had of himself up until then as a Man Doing No Real Harm.
That Saturday in 1965, during the part of it that he still considers himself harmless, he is nevertheless paranoid, suffering one of his regular onslaughts. So it isn’t just the heat he’s sweating from. Sonja, sitting across from him at the card table and affixing her bobby-pins, is raining sweat, but look at her go!
At least there is a breeze out here. Here, under the aspen, there is a breeze and some motley shade and the pleasant hay smell of freshly cut grass baking in the sun. (Unlike the doomed retirees Gordon doesn’t mow the lawn, Doris does. Because of his heart murmur she says, but really because the roar outside their bedroom window at seven o’clock in the morning is her already at it.)
There is a pitcher of pink lemonade. Doris brought it out before she ran off in short-shorts and a halter top. From between their house and the house next door Gordon caught sight of her wavered by heat and the jiggle of her flesh and maybe by his own disbelief that she would go out in public half-naked. What with his being in a state of acute apprehension anyway, he allowed the idea of another man to rear into his mind. “Where is your mother off to?” he asked Sonja.
Sonja, her mouth full of peanuts, said, “She’s taking shortbread cookies to a Negro woman she met who just came to Canada and doesn’t have any friends yet. She has a gold tooth, though.”
That odd bulletin was an hour ago. It is now just after eleven o’clock. Joan is playing the piano. Bach, her new passion. Out of the opened window of her bedroom (they’ve moved the piano in there) her clipped version of the Goldberg Variations marches like ants. If Gordon wasn’t feeling so paranoid he’d find it heartwarming listening to his youngest girl doing her imitation of Glenn Gould while he reads a manuscript in the company of his oldest girl who is likewise working at her trade, such as it is. If he wasn’t feeling so paranoid and this Wild Bill Hickok manuscript wasn’t so awful and if he could come up with a title for it. On Friday his big inspiration was H
ard on the Saddle. He was patting himself on the back until his secretary, Margo, in her customary deadpan, said she didn’t think it would wash.
“Jesus,” he said, suddenly seeing it. He was flabbergasted. “I need a vacation,” he said with a feeble laugh.
“Or something,” Margo drawled. Ever since, he has been fretting that she is on to him. That everybody is on to him. He hasn’t had a lover in over three years but the desire is there like a compounding debt. Like owing the Mafia, there’s no getting around it, cough up or die. Who can’t see the cocks in his eyes is what Gordon would like to know.
So every few pages he finds himself glancing at Sonja and wondering if in her guileless way she has sensed something fishy about old Dad. A far more diabolical possibility is that she knows because Joan knows. That Joan knows and has communicated it to Marcy, and that Marcy has consulted her older sister. Who has consulted Doris.
But hold your horses, does Joan know? Even if he has let a few things slip to her, she wouldn’t understand, she’s only eight, for Christ’s sake. She’s sharp, though, sharper than she lets on. He had better watch himself, stay on the ball. Maybe he shouldn’t lie down, but he’s usually so beat at the end of the day. What is it about lying on that floor? Is it some chemical in the carpet? For a year or so she’s been humming the whole time he’s there, and he finds that really soothing, hypnotically so. Is it her humming, then? No, he has always had an urge to pour his heart out around her. Why? And (here’s where it gets out of hand) why can’t he distinguish between what he’s said out loud and what he’s only been thinking? Dead-giveaway words—“lover,” for example, or, worse: “queer,” even “Al Yothers”—will suddenly seem to be booming off the walls, and he’ll jerk up and gape at her alert little face in the back of the closet while the words, whether he spoke them or not, settle like nuclear fallout. “Did Daddy just say something?” he might ask. She’ll nod or shake her head. Or moo. Or click her tongue. Or just go on staring. He gets the feeling she’s giving him the response that suits some rigorous, unfathomable purpose of hers because never in her face has he witnessed reproach or shock. Never, not under any circumstances.
Mister Sandman Page 11