Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  “I’m sure she’s not, too. Hey, if you want to di-late, become an optometrist. Ha! Listen, speaking of trysts, ours are going to have to be restricted to Saturday afternoons. That’s when Len has his oil painting classes. I tell him, I say, Len, artists are born … which is the problem. Ha! Anyhoo, we’re only going to be able to see each other once a week, Kiddo.”

  “That’s okay.” When had it been settled that they would see each other at all? He patted her knee and said don’t worry, he’d get round to telling Len about her before the wedding but in the meantime—“We’d better keep mum about this, and I mean from daddy-o.” They were now pulled over in front of the bus stop where she had been standing almost three hours ago. He spit the toothpick onto the floor. “Same time, same station?”

  “I guess so.”

  He kissed her, her first kiss. It reminded her of the time a horse nibbled sugar cubes from the flat of her hand. When it was over he looked at her from eye to eye. “We’re going to have to work on that,” he said.

  She settled, walking home, that if he had been serious about the wedding she would come right out and tell him she wasn’t a virgin, and that should put an end to that. She wasn’t a virgin, was she? Did it matter whether or not you’d had a climax? She was fairly certain there had been no climax. She had had a baby, after being “more or less raped,” although she had never thought of it that way.

  She stopped walking and pressed her palms to her temples. Recalling Vicky’s astonishing disclosure made her feel as though her head had been clanged between a pair of cymbals. She tried to think straight. You can’t have a baby and be a virgin, not unless you’re the Virgin Mary. Okay, that made her not a virgin.

  It wasn’t as if she hadn’t worked this out before. She was twenty-three years old. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about a husband before, either. Plenty of times she’d tried imagining how a husband would fit into her life, and what it boiled down to was, he wouldn’t. Who would babysit Joan when her mother was off gallivanting? What would Schropps do without her? And even if her husband moved into her house and let her go on working, where would he sleep? By herself she took up the whole bed.

  And yet…

  And yet she remained open to this one possibility—Being Swept Off Her Feet. Weighing 250 pounds and working as a pin clipper had afforded her a taste of it. The buoyancy, the lightness. The bubble feeling, as she th ought of it. Call her sick (Gail did), it didn’t change the fact that the bubble feeling was why she couldn’t wait to get to her pins in the morning. If a man could offer her anything close to that kind of pleasure, well, now that there was a man in the picture, she figured she might as well give him a whirl.

  Although, judging by the kiss and by his hand on her knee, she and Hen weren’t off to a flying start.

  The following Saturday it’s sunny and warm, in the mid-seventies. An Indian summer day as Hen points out and then he fires off a million Indian jokes. For the first few minutes they were Chinese jokes in a Chinese accent, inspired by the five bags of Chinese food in the back seat. When Sonja climbed in the car, not seeing the bags, she said she smelled garbage. “I’ve never minded the smell of garbage,” she said truthfully after he drew her attention to the bags and told her about his plan for a picnic at Edwards Gardens.

  “Ha!” Right in her face, like a blast from a tuba. “You clack me up, Round-eye.”

  On the fringe of that blast she smelled alcohol and was flattered because she knew that sometimes your date needed to screw up his courage with a few stiff belts. Before, when he had leaned over to kiss her cheek, she had smelled his Old Spice aftershave, the same as her father wore, and had felt a bit apprehensive, she couldn’t have said why. A moment after that she noticed the $14.99 price tag hanging from a thread on the back of his shirt collar and she was amazed. Had he spent all that money just to impress her? The shirt is white cotton knit, short-sleeved. He is dressed entirely in white—white sailor pants, white loafers, which also look new. He is going all out. But, then, she should talk.

  For the occasion—for the First Annual Pin Clippers Luncheon was the story she’d handed her parents—she is wearing her mother’s Evening in Paris perfume and her lipstick (the same and only tube Doris has owned going on fifteen years now). She is wearing her best dress, the red empire-line. She has taken up the hem.

  She has shaved her legs. Hence her slashed knees and ankles. (Hence the pinkish bathtub ring that, right about now, Doris is pondering.) It was such a long bath that it turned her the colour of bubble-gum. “Wow,” she said looking at her naked self in the mirror afterwards, something that she never did. When she grew accustomed to her hue, another spectacle hit her. “Wow,” she said, “am I ever fat!” She felt no repulsion, no embarrassment. She was entirely in awe, the same feeling people get in the presence of a stupendous natural wonder that all the photographs have impoverished. After a moment she plumped up her high round breasts. She dabbed at the moles on her breasts and belly. Look at all those moles! She enumerated the biggest ones and came up with thirty-two. Then she slid a finger between one of her belly’s scallops and felt the finger clasped tight. She turned sideways for that view, shook her arms and laughed at the wobble, patted her hands over the alluvium of her bottom and thighs, the miles of it! Then back to the moles. They reminded her of someone’s face.

  “Holy moly!” she said, realizing.

  Now, here in the car, it is hitting home that she can never be completely bare naked in front of him. What if he saw it, his own face blown up on her stomach? She can picture him laughing his head off, as she laughed off hers, but she can just as easily picture him saying, “Whoa,” and backing away with raised hands, hands off the merchandise.

  So here is another reason not to get married. As if she needed another reason.

  At Edwards Gardens the roses gape like water lilies. All the trees are still dark green but along the gravel path there are drifts of yellow leaves, and every now and then a yellow leaf saw-tooths down. There are black squirrels with their tulip heads and doe eyes. They leap out of the aluminum light. Up on hind legs they hold a paw to their heart.

  Sonja carries four bags of the Chinese food, cradling two in each arm, and Hen carries the other, a cooler and the car blanket. He walks in front of her and bellows words over his shoulder—“Nicotiana!” “Cosmos!”—speaking in a foreign language, she thinks, impressed, until it’s “Nasturtiums” and then “Marigolds.”

  He leads them down a secluded slide of lawn to a stream. By now she is pouring sweat and has a stitch in her side. After setting down his load he spreads the blanket right at the verge of the water and kicks off his loafers and sits. He yanks off his socks, shouting at her to do the same. “Don’t peek,” she says as she lifts her skirt to undo the fasteners holding up her nylon stockings. What she doesn’t want him to see is her slapdash sewing job—the length of white elastic that at the last minute she attached to this old garter belt (using black thread because black was handy) to get it to stretch around her waist.

  “Hen no peek.” He’s back to his Chinese accent. “Hen shy guy.” On his knees he is opening the bags and removing the containers. “Hope Round-eye not on diet. Confucius say, Diet is for person who is thick and tired of it. Ha! What is Round-eye’s pleflence—Seven-Up or beer?”

  Thrilling herself (she is a teetotaller) she answers, “Beer.”

  “Now you’re talking,” he says in his normal voice.

  With their feet in the water, their beer in paper cups and with their paper plates balanced on their laps, they eat. Shrimp fried rice, chop suey, sweet and sour pork, egg rolls, chicken balls, beef chow mein, piling up their plates three times each, and anything that falls into the stream is instantly constellated by minnows. The water is cool. The breeze wrinkles the water in places, but by the end of her third beer Sonja isn’t certain that those wrinkles aren’t the scales of big fish almost breaking the surface. She doesn’t ask Hen what he thinks because he is telling her about himself, it would
be rude to interrupt. He is telling her about himself and Len, to be specific. They are thirty-one. They grew up on a chicken farm outside Windsor, no brothers or sisters. What goes peck, peck, peck, boom! is a chicken in a mine field. Their mother is a squeaky-voiced, anxious-to-please woman who wins blue ribbons for her pies. Their father is a pessimist. He breaks mirrors just to make sure he’ll live seven more years. He could never tell them apart so he called them Tweedledum and Tweedledee or just Hey Fatso. When they left home at eighteen they tried their hands at a variety of jobs. Gutting fish, house painting. For a while they were garbage men but they were always at other people’s disposal. Then they worked in a lumber yard where the business was “come see, come saw.” Getting jobs as apprentice bookbinders was a lucky break. Now, nine years later, they make good money, enough for two Volkswagens, their own house. They have made a deal—whoever marries first, the other moves down to the basement.

  Hen looks at her when he says this about marrying, and she tries to keep a straight face but all she sees, looking back at his mole-covered face, is her naked stomach. “Come see, come saw,” she chuckles, pretending that that’s what’s so funny.

  “Now you, Kiddo.” He runs the backs of his fingernails along her cheek. His fingers smell of soy sauce.

  “Now me what?”

  “It’s your turn to tell me the story of your life.”

  “Oh, okay.” She sets her empty plate on the grass and leans back on her elbows. The sun falls like pins on her head. Her head feels oversized. Her bloated, slightly upset stomach is a fish bowl teeming with minnows. “My name is Sonja Canary. I’m twenty-three years old. My dad, Gordon Canary, is a book editor.” She clicks her tongue. “You already know all this.”

  “Go on.” He seems very serious. He is pulling on a coil of her hair.

  “Um. Let’s see. My mom’s name is Doris Canary. She teaches school at home to my sister Joanie. So does my dad, at night. He just started. He teaches her English, history and geography. I have two sisters. Marcy, who is fourteen, and Joanie, who is almost eight. Joanie’s such a little bunny. She’s … well, the doctors say brain-damaged but my dad says that’s a bunch of baloney because she’s a genius. Not just at playing the piano but—“ She stops, disinclined to talk any more about Joan in case he starts making brain-damaged jokes. “My sister Marcy,” she continues, “is also very smart. And a real skinny minny. She wears a padded bra called Little Fibber. Isn’t that cute?” He nods. “So, anyways,” she says “my mom—“ She rifles through her mind for what else to say. “She doesn’t bake very much. She … oh, I know! She enters contests, hundreds and hundreds of contests every year, and the very first one she entered she won two fur coats, a colour television, ten bushels of beans, two wheelchairs. Just oodles of prizes! She—“

  “Tell me about Sonja.”

  He has let go of her hair, allowing her to lie on the grass and close her eyes. “Well,” she says, “I’ve only had the one job. Clipping for the Schropps Pin Company. Some people can’t hack the clipping profession, but I have a ball. I don’t know, maybe I’m a born career girl.” She opens her eyes at this last part to see how he’ll take it. His face hovers above her, startlingly red and puffy, like a face balled together out of Plasticine.

  “Has Sonja ever had a boyfriend?” he asks.

  “None of your beeswax.”

  He traces his finger along her lower lip. And then he’s kissing her.

  How does the kiss make her feel? Not, this time, as if a horse is nibbling at her hand, more like she’s a baby bird and he is feeding her juicy worms. Even the taste is wormy. It’s not bad. It’s not being swept off her feet, though. It goes on for so long that her mind drifts to the knitting she’d be doing if this was a normal Saturday, and her fingers begin to crave and twitch.

  “You’re not kissing me back,” he says at the end of it.

  “Sorry.”

  “Whoa, Kiddo, Kiddo. Sorry has nothing to do with it. Don’t you feel anything?”

  “Sure.”

  “What?”

  She thinks hard. “Nice?” she says hopefully.

  “Nice!” He shouts it to the world. He sighs, shakes his head. Looks back at her. “Kiddo,” he says sadly. Then he says, “Would you let me …” He bites his lip.

  “What?”

  “Feel you up?”

  “Feel me up?” Her brain is lagging behind the conversation. She is still at him shouting “Nice,” so she speaks without comprehension.

  “Touch your breasts,” he says.

  Breasts, she hears. Her face burns. She crosses her arms over her chest.

  “Hey, don’t tell me you’re the kind of girl who would rather repulse advances than advance pulses.”

  This flies by her but she says, “Maybe I am, maybe I’m not.”

  “Ha!” Half-hearted, running his thumb down her neck. “Ah, let me touch you. I want to make you feel good.”

  She looks to the right, where she has heard children calling. There’s nobody there. Sunlight threads through the trees. “Well, I guess it would be all right,” she says and drops her arms to her sides. Because he bought all the food. Because she doesn’t want to hurt his feelings. Because him feeling her up might get her off the ground.

  He starts with her left breast. Circling his palm, a gentle rub. Since that’s where he’s looking she is free to study his face. It’s a kind face, she thinks. Too red, maybe, but kind. All those moles, one as big as a bean. Before she knows what she’s doing she’s counting them. That’s just her. Whenever she is at the dentist’s and gazing up, what does she do but count the holes in the ceiling tiles.

  “You’re so beautiful,” he whispers, switching to the other breast.

  “Thanks.” Without losing count. Fourteen, fifteen. His face comes closer. Seventeen—

  He is kissing her again.

  She closes her eyes and orders herself to concentrate. She tries to imagine that she is a balloon, but she falls, she falls like a lead balloon. She tries to dredge up the glimmering feeling that precedes the bubble feeling, but there is only her indigestion, a thousand more minnows in the fish bowl. She sticks her finger through the loop of thread on his collar. He’d better hurry up. Any second now she’s going to burp.

  Just in time his mouth lifts, and she turns her head and lets out a beery belch. “Excuse me,” she says.

  “Kiddo,” he says.

  Sonja isn’t somebody who dwells on the unpleasant side. Neither is her mind a steel trap. So when she thinks about Hen she doesn’t remember that defeated “Kiddo” or that her finger stayed caught in the thread or that his ears lit up baby pink when he realized that the price tag had been hanging from his collar the whole time. She doesn’t remember that on the drive home his jokes were all about suicides. Another kiss, which caught her in the ear because she happened to turn her head just then, might as well have never happened as far as she is concerned, and her recollection of their date the following Saturday is so blurred she isn’t sure she didn’t dream it. A trip to a country fair, a ride in a paddle boat that sunk, and the owner in so many words blaming their combined weight, saying, “All I know is, there’s no holes in her.” A ride on a Ferris wheel that got stuck with them upside down, her vomiting into her hair. And then, even after that, him kissing her but she brought up again down the front of his shirt. About the drive back into town she forgets everything. She forgets him confessing that in the story of his life he left out the year he was married to a nag named Dot who left him for a dentist named Ernest. She forgets the one about the worms who were so hungry they fed in dead earnest. You’d have to hypnotize her to get her to remember him saying, “After Dot ran off I swore I’d never again settle for a frigid woman.”

  She does remember that on those dates he told a hundred hilarious jokes, but can she come up with a single one? And she remembers what they ate. The home-made fudge and foot-long hot dog, the chicken and dumplings, the Chinese food… that entire scrumptious meal. She remembers, or imagines
she remembers, that he was “all hands.” In her opinion this is why they stopped dating. “He was all hands,” she says to herself and feels perfectly justified as well as like somebody not born yesterday.

  What about Vicky? Yes, she remembers the waitress, Vicky. She remembers the Sign. Ten months later on the seventh day of the killer heat wave when she informs Gail that she has had a date or two in her life, it is on Vicky’s confession (which she recalls as having found fascinating rather than hair-raising) that her mind catches. And while she’s on the subject, she wonders when and where the next Sign will show up.

  The answer (talk about coincidence) is: (a) now, and (b) in front of Grandma Gayler’s house.

  Fifteen

  From Grandma Gayler’s grocery bag three cans of Campbell’s beef consommé, a can of Carnation evaporated milk and a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli roll down the sidewalk. Of the half-dozen small grade “A” eggs, at least one oozes out of the box and starts frying. The Milky Way chocolate bar squashes and liquefies under her shoulder. The bottles of Tab and Pepto-Bismol shatter, the pink fluid going stringy where it comes into contact with the fizzing brown.

  Grandma Gayler lives long enough to take stock of the damage. She hopes that the other eggs aren’t cracked. That will make it an even dozen in two days if they are. On Thursday she dropped her bag of groceries while trying to open the screen door, and there went all six eggs, what an awful mess it made, and the peaches were bruised as well, of course. “Isn’t that the limit,” she thinks as her heart pumps itself out. She imagines she is speaking but she is not. She has no idea she is dying, otherwise she’d be preparing her soul for its embrace in the arms of the mother who illegitimately bore her eighty-four years ago, her senility having progressed to the stage where, by mother, she means Queen Victoria.

  She does not die alone. A girl she is presumably acquainted with (but cannot place) crouches next to her and fans her with a magazine while the girl’s mother phones for an ambulance. The girl is a chatterbox. Grandma Gayler tunes her out and yet does hear this full sentence: “I’m going to take a commercial course so I’ll have something to fall back on.”