Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Why were you crying?” Jack asked. He glanced at the door. It was shut, he’d shut it. He shifted from the chair to the edge of the bed while Gordon, simply by keeping his hand still, found it halfway up Jack’s thigh.

  “I don’t remember,” Gordon answered.

  Jack walked his fingers under the sheet. On Gordon’s thigh they halted. “What about your heart?” Beads of sweat like braille across his forehead.

  “Strong as an ox.”

  Jack nestled into his shoulder. “God forgives everything,” he whispered.

  Fourteen

  Sonja’s friend, Gail, glances up from her magazine and says, “You’re eating it! Oh, you pig, I can’t believe it! What a fat pig!”

  There is only the head and halo left. The rest Sonja ate last night. She selects a melting chocolate-stick whisker and quickly nibbles it down to nothing. “If you don’t want to get fat,” she advises, “you’d better not have any.”

  Gail turns to one side, exchanging blank looks with an invisible witness. “Well,” she says, turning back to Sonja, “thank you very much.” She has two voices: disgusted and—this one—sarcastic. “Thank you for that truly fantastic helpful hint.”

  A fond smirk from Sonja. She knows when her leg is being pulled.

  It is about two o’clock in the afternoon, another scorcher. For the seventh day in a row Sonja is doing her pin clipping in the back yard. Doughnut glaze turns to water in this heat, so Gail has the day off from her job (again), and since she lives in an attic room with no air-conditioning and “there was nothing better to do” now that she has broken up with her boyfriend she came over to work on her tan. She is wearing a madras bathing suit with a lacy bodice that gives the impression she is developed. A matching madras bow is in the crease where her bangs fringe off from the rest of her hair, which when she and Sonja first met—at Schropps, where Gail was a clipper herself for a total of three days—was egg-yolk yellow but is now silver-white and crackly looking, reminding Sonja of that stuff you put in the bottom of Easter baskets. Her toenails are painted skin colour, the colour of the skin-colour crayon. Her feet are so thin that when she took off her shoes Sonja mentally counted toes, doubtful that there could be five across. This was when Gail was sitting in the other lawn chair and had her feet on the table … before Sonja described Gordon making a sink-draining sound, then keeling over in the chair. “Not this chair,” was Gail’s reaction, and she held her arms aloft as if the arms of the chair were splattered with manure, then she got up and spread her towel on the grass, ordering Sonja to do the back of her legs.

  Sonja hauled herself out of her chair and lowered herself onto her hands and knees. “You’re one skinny minny,” she said as she applied the suntan lotion.

  “Go suck eggs.”

  “Go jump in the lake,” Sonja shot back cheerfully. Does Gail ever remind her of Sniffers, the hamster she used to have! Every time she tried to pat Sniffers or even slip food into his cage, he bit her. Eventually she had to flush him down the toilet.

  Gail, likewise, isn’t thrilled with the arrival of food. When Doris brought out the cat cake, what was left of it, Gail said, “Oh, barf.”

  “Don’t charm me to death,” Doris said, setting the cake on the table.

  Gail sighed. “I’m sure it’s delicious, Mrs. Canary. It’s fattening is all I meant.” She had to shout the second part because Doris was already over at the clothesline, yanking the sheets off. “By the way, Gail,” Doris called, “could you babysit Joanie tonight? Just for a couple of hours while we’re at the hospital?”

  “Gee, I’d love to,” Gail said. “But I have a date.”

  This wasn’t true. Only a few minutes ago she’d been moaning about having nothing to do that evening.

  “Isn’t Mrs. Jolley going to babysit?” Sonja asked.

  “She can’t,” Doris called. “She’s picking Tibby up from the taxidermist’s.”

  When Doris was gone, Sonja asked Gail why she had lied, and Gail said, “‘Cause your little weirdo sister gives me the creeps.”

  “Huh,” Sonja reflected after a minute. She couldn’t fathom it. It was like a rose giving you the creeps, like a bunny. “It takes all kinds,” she observed, knowing this to be the truth. Knowing the truth to be only aversion.

  “Shut up and listen,” Gail said. “Thirty-two ways to beat summer boredom.’” She was reading from her magazine. “‘One, have an anti-boredom party. Picket around a pool, along a beach. Best placard wins a prize.’” She looked up, her face all horror and disbelief, exactly like a person having a heart attack (Sonja could now appreciate). “Who comes up with this retarded b.s.?”

  Now, while Sonja wolfs down the cake before it melts, Gail is making her do something called a “Miss Sophisti-quiz,” the topic of which is, “Are you in step with the sixties?”

  “He’s very impressed with Bob Dylan,’” Gail reads. “Do you say Bob Dylan is, one, a terrific comic? Two, a protest folknik to be reckoned with? Three, an exciting Welsh poet?’” She squints up at her. “You better know this.”

  “An exciting Welsh poet?” Sonja tries.

  “You are so stupid!” Gail screams. She slaps the magazine shut, rolls onto her back. “I can’t believe how stupid you are.” She writhes. She appears to have burst her appendix. “I don’t even know what we’re doing this quiz for anyway. As if anyone would ask you out.”

  “For your information, Little Miss Know-it-all, I’ve been out on a date or two in my life.”

  Gail laughs, that laugh of hers that always makes Sonja want to grab anything breakable. “Oh, yeah?” Gail sputters. “With who? Mr. Schropp?”

  Mr. Schropp, Sonja’s boss, is over seventy.

  “That,” Sonja says, “is for me to know and you to find out.” By “date or two” she means three. All with Hen Bowden. (She doesn’t count Yours.) They took place on consecutive Saturday afternoons almost a year ago, and up until now they have been her secret. Not even Doris knows. The first date, which was more like a pick-up, was toward the end of September. She was standing at the bus stop, on her way to Schropps with her shoe box of no-good pins. The way it works at Schropps is you buy your own pins and cards, and on the last Saturday of every month, if you can be bothered, you have the opportunity of returning any no-good pins (the ones without plastic tips) in exchange for a cent a pin. Sonja can be bothered. In a single month she goes through so many cartons of pins she can make an extra ten dollars on the no-good ones.

  The only person in on Saturdays is Mr. Schropp. He hates it when clippers show up for a refund. Handing over the money, he wheezes pitifully, as if you were killing him. But Sonja wasn’t dwelling on what was in store for her. As she often does when she’s waiting for a bus and there’s nowhere to sit down with her knitting, she was envisioning the secret adventures of the poodles in her bedroom, what they get up to when nobody’s looking. There are fifty-seven of them not including Mimi, the jewellery-box poodle. Mimi is the leader, she communicates by doing semaphore with Kleenex tissues. The rest of them, the bedspread-and-curtain poodles, stand on each other and form a pyramid to see out the window. Because they love Sonja they become living dusters and clean her room. Afterwards they dance on their hind legs. Since Sonja was going to be gone for several hours that Saturday the poodles were getting into mischief. “Behave yourselves!” Mimi signalled. But the poodles burrowed in Sonja’s underwear drawer and played skipping with the laces of her old saddle shoes and, oh, no! now the little rascals were having sword fights with the bobby-pins!

  It hardly needs pointing out that when the horn beeped, Sonja was a million miles away.

  A white Volkswagen. The driver—a man with reddish-brown curly hair and a big, happy face—leaned over, rolled down the window and said, “Jump in, Kiddo.”

  “That’s okay,” she said.

  “It’s Hen Bowden!” the man bellowed. “What? You’ve forgotten me already?”

  “Oh, Mr. Bowden,” she said, remembering the twin brothers her father brou
ght home for supper about a month ago. She laughed as she approached the car. The Bowden brothers! What a pair of kidders.

  “Do me a favour, drop the Mister, sister … Gimme that—“ He reached for the box. “I’ll throw it in the back.” She was trying to squeeze into the passenger seat but couldn’t fit with her box. “What’s in it?” he said, giving it a shake. “Ant bones?” He laughed, a single, blared “Ha!” that caused her to jump. His brother had had the same laugh. When they came for supper, between them their separate “Ha’s” had sounded like one person laughing normally but at slow speed.

  Hen twisted around to put the box behind her. When he sat forward again his weight settling in the seat caused it to whoosh. “What’d ya say?” he addressed the seat. “Diet, you fat slob!” he answered in a growly voice. He looked down and yelled, “All right already, I’ll dye it but what colour? Ha!” He turned to her, his bursting mole-splattered face as friendly as a raisin pie. “Where to?” She stopped laughing and gave him directions, and he said, “Down by the train station, right where I was headed. Say, what time does the next train leave?”

  “Jeepers, I don’t know.”

  “Two, two, two.”

  She checked her wristwatch. “I hope you’re a fast driver.”

  “Ha!”

  All the way to Schropps he wisecracked. “What’s that on your collar?” he asked. When she looked down to see, he flipped her nose with his finger. She asked how his brother was and he said, “Len? Len’s home playing strip solitaire. Ha!” Then he said, “Poor old Len, thinks he’s a deck of cards.”

  “Really?”

  “Went to a shrink, shrink said, ‘I’ll deal with you later.’ Ha! I know a guy, now this is a true fact, I swear, I know a guy thinks he’s a pair of drapes.”

  “Really?”

  “Went to a shrink, shrink told him to pull himself together. Ha! ‘Course I think I’m a goat, been thinking that ever since I was a kid. Ha!”

  By the time she got the joke, if she did, he was already on to the next one and she had already laughed at his laugh. He was the funniest man she had ever met, way funnier without Len giving away his punch lines. Come to think of it, maybe it had been him giving away Len’s punch lines. Her father had said that nobody could tell the two of them apart, that they had driven their wiener dog crazy by seeming to be in two rooms at once. What a ball it must be at their house. She pictured them bumping bellies as they had done that night at supper, pretending to fight, saying, “Why you no good … Why I oughta …”

  At Schropps, when she was out of the car, Hen called that he would wait. She bent down to the passenger window and pointed out that it was almost twenty-two minutes after two, he’d better hurry, and he said, “What am I going to do with you, Kiddo?”

  “What?”

  “Ha!”

  When she was back in the car he said he knew where they served the best chicken and dumplings in the city, how about they go and treat themselves? Figuring that he had given up on catching his train, she said, “Sure.” Don’t forget, this was a friend of her father’s. “You won’t be sorry,” he said, licking the drool from the corner of his mouth. She licked her drool. She was suddenly hungry—everything was food. His brown-checkered pants, waffles. His hair, caramel corn. Her drool kept on coming, and so did his jokes. The reason he and Len were bookbinders was that they were bound to do well. He used to be engaged but now he was footloose and “fiancée free.” He wanted lots of kids, and he intended to help with the feedings, since a baby had to have a bottle … “or bust.” “Bust” embarrassed her—although she couldn’t help laughing—and she looked out her window. They were driving along the lake, the strip of park and beach east of downtown. Meringue-crested waves. Brown-sugar sand, gingerbread boys. She thought of a joke. “Do you like Chinese food?”

  “Man oh man, do I?”

  She pulled back the corners of her eyes. “Eat me,” she said.

  He gave her a startled glance.

  “Eat me. Get it? I’m Chinese.”

  “Oh, all right. Sure, you’re Chinese food.”

  She sighed and said, “Brother, I just can’t tell jokes,” and he said, “Let’s keep this to ourselves.”

  “Keep what?” Her joke?

  “This date.”

  “September twenty-sixth?”

  He smiled. “Why do you suppose you never got a call from Len or me?”

  “Um—“ She tapped her finger against her chin. “Don’t tell me.” Phone, she thought. Dial. Hen. “Because a hen doesn’t call, it clucks?”

  “Because we both fell for you. Had a fight over you, if you want to know what it came down to. Darn near strangled each other with those scarves you gave us.”

  Nothing could be further from her mind than that he was serious.

  “Anyhoo,” he said, “we made a deal. Neither of us could ask you out. Hands off the merchandise. But, man oh man …” He shook his head and smiled over at her.

  It took her a moment to realize that his hand was on her knee. She looked at it clamped there, freckled and puffy, a kind of starfish. Except that it was a man’s hand. On her knee. She looked out the window again, sucking her fingers and trying to register how she felt. Not swept off her feet. The truth of the matter was it could be anything on her knee. A poodle. A banjo.

  In the restaurant he was a riot. The waitress—Vicky, it said on her uniform—asked if they wanted their chicken smothered in gravy, and he said, “What the heck, Vicky, kill it how you usually do.” He told moron jokes non-stop. Sonja knew a moron joke herself—“Why didn’t the baby moron fall off the cliff? Because he was a little more on,” and she got a laugh out of him but she could tell he’d heard it before. Vicky, however, cracked up. As Hen later explained, Vicky was an albino. Dead-white skin, hair like candy floss, matching pink eyes, which blinked a lot. She had a moron joke, too—“Why did the moron walk around with his fly open? In case he had to count to eleven.” Sonja didn’t get it and she guessed because the moron’s fly was open that it was rude, but she laughed to be polite. “Whoa, Vicky, Vicky,” Hen said. “Sonja here’s a nice girl.” Vicky gave Sonja the once-over, then, sighing, pouring them coffees they hadn’t ordered, said, “I was a nice girl once, but when you get pregnant after being more or less raped, excuse me I should probably say ‘forced against your will,’ and then the father runs out on you so you have to give the baby up and then you find out that the baby is brain-damaged, well, excuse me for living, but ‘nice’ has a tendency to fly out the window.”

  Hen whistled. “Man oh man, hey, Vicky, that’s too bad.” He slipped an arm around her waist. “Anyhoo, who said you weren’t nice? Show me the dirty rat that said that! Let me at him! Why, I oughta—“ He turned to Sonja. “Vicky’s the nicest waitress we’ve ever had, what do you say?”

  Don’t look at Sonja. Her heart was racing, her palms were dripping. Now she felt as if a man’s hand was on her knee. Vicky had been talking about her, that’s what Sonja thought. Or maybe … was Vicky related to Joan? That white hair, the white skin? What she meant was, had Vicky and Joan been related in a former life? She watched Vicky roll her pink eyes and laugh at Hen, then write up their bill, then angle around the tables and into the kitchen. In her left ear she heard Hen say, “Two’s company, three’s the result.” Feeling frantic, feeling like a train trying to make it up a hill, she shovelled dumplings into her mouth, her eyes welded to the swinging kitchen doors.

  It was the darndest thing. She’d forget all about Joan being reincarnated and then something like this would happen. A sign. The last one was two years ago. She was down in the laundry room going through the rag bag in search of velvet to sew hats with for her china dolls and she found a man’s white shirt that had ALI WAS HERE written on the back. Instantly she knew it was a message from Callous Alice—or Ali for short—the woman everyone at Dearness had said Joan used to be before she was born. She dropped the shirt and screamed. That is to say her throat discharged a sound that Doris, up in the kitchen
, thought was somebody reeling in the outside clothesline. “Was that you?” Doris laughed. “Sweetie,” she said, “what are you up to?” because when Sonja brought her down to the laundry room to show her the shirt, it was gone!

  Meanwhile, in the restaurant, Hen told more moron jokes, and what Sonja took for streetcars rumbling by outside turned out to be herself laughing—her lungs and chest carrying on like a car still chugging after you switch the engine off. Huh! she thought when she realized. She glanced down at her hands, half expecting them to be knitting. You never knew with this body of hers, it had a mind of his own! By now she was breathing easier and repeating to herself, “Joanie was Alice, Joanie was Alice,” to show whoever had sent the Sign that she hadn’t forgotten, although she more or less had.

  She was grateful that on the drive home, for the first half of it anyway, Hen didn’t talk. He flicked a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and belched, so Sonja allowed herself a few burps as well. When he finally spoke it was, coincidentally, to ask about Joan, who of course had stayed in her bedroom the night he and Len had come for supper but he had heard her playing the piano. “How’s Mozart?” he said.

  “Funny you should ask,” she said. “Because you know what? Vicky reminded me of her. I’ve never seen anybody else with hair that white and with such white, white skin.”

  “What!” His eyeballs seemed to dangle at the end of springs. “Joan’s an albino?”

  This is when he explained what an albino was. No pigmentation, the pink eyes.

  “Joanie’s eyes are green,” Sonja said.

  “Green, that’s good, that’s good. She’s probably just one of those really blonde blondes. Albinos don’t live long, you know.”

  Sonja’s heart staggered. “Oh, I’m sure she’s not an albino.” She looked down. There was Hen’s hand on her knee again.