“Very sensible,” Grandma Gayler thinks she replies. She is not in pain, she feels no pain at all. How lovely to be basking in the sun on such a gorgeous day in the company of this sensible girl who she now believes is Doris thirty years ago, Doris wearing odd shoes. Who, a minute later, her gaze having come to rest on the girl’s white latticed stockings, she believes is the rose trellis behind her old house on Robert Street. Who, in the final seconds of her life, she believes is a light in her eyes, a benevolent interrogation. “Mind the frogs,” she tells her interrogators, or thinks she does. Her last imagined words.
Her last spoken words turn out to have been, “Oh, no, not again!” Cried out when she dropped her grocery bag and heard by the girl, Cynthia, and her mother, Alma. Mentioned, in their lowdown, to Doris. Overheard by Sonja.
All four of them are on the lawn of the funeral home, a half hour early. Sonja immediately makes the connection to Callous Alice, to reincarnation… to Grandma Gayler already starting to reincarnate in the throes of death! What a thought! It buckles Sonja’s knees. “Mommy,” she says and clutches Doris’s arm.
“Are you all right, Sweetie?” Doris thinks the heat is getting to her.
Sonja, speechless, just gapes. “Excuse us, please,” Doris says to Alma and Cynthia, and she hustles Sonja over to a bench in the shade where for some reason Joan is sitting by herself. “Where’s Marcy?” Doris asks. Joan shakes her head, keeping her hands over the lenses of her sunglasses and continuing to imitate the cicadas. Doris turns to Sonja. “Are you all right?” she asks again.
In a whisper so that Joan won’t hear, Sonja explains.
“Oh, for crying out loud!”
“But Mommy—“
Doris plants her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear another word about it!” she says, her voice winging to a breathless, ecstatic timbre, which Alma and Cynthia (the only mourners to arrive so far) hear as a crack … poor Doris cracking up under the strain. Sonja hears it for what it is. A slam. Case closed. Stymied, and still flabbergasted by the Sign, Sonja covers her mouth with her hands.
(So to Marcy, who is keeping an eye on the bench from the far side of the parking lot where she’s flirting with the car-park attendant, the three of them seem to be putting on a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkey act. “What’s going on?” she murmurs, and the attendant looks where she’s looking and says, “You know those people?”)
Back at the bench, Doris says, “I have enough on my plate with your father in the hospital.” She springs to her feet and peels one of Joan’s hands from her eyes. “Now come on, both of you, let’s go inside and face the music. Where’s Marcy? Marcy!”
It is an open casket. Grandma Gayler believed that the soul hung around in the body until after the funeral and should therefore have the opportunity of seeing everybody file past. Her other argument was, “What if I’m not really dead yet?”
What if she isn’t? Doris wonders and resists the urge to get out her compact and hold the mirror at her mother’s mouth. They’ve put pink lipstick on her mouth. Her mother would have been scandalized. It’s nice, though, Doris thinks. Really, her mother was a pretty woman… for whom prettiness was a cross to bear, a scourge in the eyes of the Lord. When Doris was growing up there was an ugly, bad-tempered girl named Arlene living next door, and every time Arlene had a tantrum, Doris’s mother reminded her that Arlene was homely, which was not an appeal to Doris’s sympathy, as you might imagine, but to her respect.
“Well,” Doris says. She rips expired petals from the white lilies in her mother’s folded hands. “These aren’t the calla lilies I ordered, but what the heck. She looks peaceful, don’t you think?”
“She doesn’t look like her,” Marcy says. She is whispering, although nobody else is in the room, only the four of them. This is the “Private farewell between the immediate family and the diseased” (as Sonja thought the funeral director said).
“You know who she looks like?” Sonja whispers now.
“Who?” Doris says.
“Queen Elizabeth. An old Queen Elizabeth.”
Pause.
“No, she doesn’t,” Marcy whispers.
Doris suspects that Sonja said this only because it was the nicest thing she could think of. Her poor, batty mother. “You hear that, Mother?” she says. “Queen Elizabeth!”
“It’s her hairdo.” Sonja really does see the Queen. “The way it’s curled up like that.”
“She just looks so white,” Marcy says and glances at Joan to compare pallors.
Across the room in a huge brown-upholstered chair Joan imitates the low roar of the air-conditioner. This makes for stereophonic sound at the casket. “Shouldn’t Joanie come and say goodbye?” Marcy asks. She doesn’t like how Joan is teetered rigidly to one side with her twig legs sticking straight out like a doll somebody left behind.
“No, she’s too young,” Doris says sharply. “It’ll spook her.”
But Joan has already climbed off the chair and is walking over. Her at-home walk—arms trailing, fingers strumming.
“No, you don’t,” Doris says.
Joan dodges by her. She grips the edge of the casket and stands on tiptoe. Very faintly, she continues to roar.
“Okay, you win,” Doris says. “Can you lift her, Sonja?”
“Upsadaisy,” Sonja says, plucking her up by the waist.
Joan leans right in. Her hair has come loose of its barrettes and brushes Grandma Gayler’s face.
“Don’t hold her so close.” Doris says. But when Sonja pulls her back a bit, Joan thrashes and her sunglasses fall into the casket.
“Oh, cripes,” Doris says, going to snatch them. Joan beats her to it and puts them back on.
“I think she wants to smell her,” Marcy says.
“For the love of Mike—“
“She does,” Marcy says. “Look, she’s sniffing.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Doris says. Before she can say “Put her down,” there is a loud crash outside.
“What was that?” Marcy runs to the window and parts the brown velvet drapes. “Uh-oh!” she says as Doris and Sonja come up behind her, Sonja still holding Joan, who shuts her eyes and plants her hands against the glass, baby-like.
Right outside the window, there has been a collision between a hearse and a blue car. The hearse is only dented, but the front of the car is balled up like paper. “Oh, great,” Doris says when the driver of the car opens his door. “It’s Reverend Bean.”
“He’s bleeding,” says Marcy. She means the hearse driver. Blood runs down his chin. He is the boy she was flirting with, she must go to him.
“If this doesn’t take the cake,” Doris says, rushing out of the room after Marcy. So Sonja sits Joan in a chair and goes out, too.
A quarter of an hour later, they return with a gang. Alma and Cynthia, Reverend Bean, the usherette who lived upstairs from Grandma Gayler and a loud, drunk butcher named Alf whom nobody has ever heard of but he claims to have been a very close friend of Her Ladyship, as he calls Grandma Gayler. “To me,” he shouts, “she was a duchess!” He spirals his hand in a courtier’s salute. He has no thumb. He is a large old man with ears like telephones, and desperately sad eyes.
“Wait’ll you see her,” Sonja says, taking pity on him. “She looks like the Queen now.”
It was only a small cut on the hearse driver’s chin, and although Reverend Bean has assumed complete blame (“Never pray at the wheel… you can’t resist closing your eyes”), the funeral director is going to cover the damages. Marcy sees him give Reverend Bean a stack of business cards and say, “Maybe you’ll pass them out to your elderly parishioners.”
Marcy is the first to enter the room. She wants the funeral to hurry up so that she and the boy have time to meet at the Dairy Queen later. “Hey,” she says, “somebody closed the lid.”
“Where did Joanie go?” Sonja says, coming through the door.
A chair has been moved in front of the coffin. “Don’t tell me,�
� Doris murmurs. With a queasy, tranced sensation she recalls from when she used to walk onto an audition stage, she goes to the casket and lifts the upper half of the lid. It’s as heavy as rock. When she has it opened a crack, enough to see in, it slips from her fingers. Bang!
Reverend Bean is there in a second. He quickly lifts the lid back up. For a little man he is strong. “Oh, dear,” he says, opening the lid all the way.
Joan is squeezed in along the nearest side, on her back. Her wrists are crossed over her chest, her head turned toward Grandma Gayler and the end of one of Grandma Gayler’s curls between her opened lips so that the curl looks like a little horn Joan has drunk from, died from, that white curl the same white as Joan’s hair, Doris notices with particular horror. “Get out,” she hisses. She snatches Joan’s hands. They are ice cold. When Doris pulls her up, her head flops.
“Here, let me.” Reverend Bean says. He has already opened the lower half of the lid. He reaches under Joan and scoops her out.
“Joanie!” Marcy cries.
“What do we have here?” the butcher shouts.
Joan’s arm dangles as Reverend Bean turns this way and that for a place to put her.
“The floor!” Doris says.
He lays her down. He grabs a cushion from the chair and tucks it under her head. On each side of her Doris and Marcy kneel. “Snap out of it!” Doris says. She pushes the sunglasses up. Blows on Joan’s face. Joan’s eyelids don’t even flutter. “Come on!” Doris says.
“She’s probably just napping,” Sonja says to calm her mother down.
“Her hand is freezing!” Marcy says, terrified.
“What seems to be the problem?” shouts the butcher.
“Could you please move away?” Doris says to him and the others. “She’s afraid of crowds!”
He stumbles back. By now the funeral director and more mourners have come in. Reverend Bean corners the funeral director to explain. Alma whispers to the butcher, who bellows, “Ah, a cretin!” In front of the casket the usherette paces.
“Joanie, wake up,” Marcy says, shaking Joan’s arm. It wobbles like a rope. “Joanie!” She has an idea. She brings her mouth to Joan’s ear and clicks her tongue three times—“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
It works.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Joan echoes, then opens her eyes.
Doris sits her up while Joan puts her sunglasses back down. “What was that all about?” Doris asks in a high, trembling voice that sounds like she’s tittering.
The butcher’s face breaks into a wild-eyed smile. “All’s well that ends well!” he bellows.
“We were hiding,” Marcy says. In her agitated state she doesn’t realize that she is speaking of Joan in the plural. “The crash scared us and we needed to hide.”
“Don’t you ever do a thing like that again,” Doris says to Joan.
“We’re getting warmer!” Marcy says. She hasn’t let go of Joan’s hand.
“Poor little tot!” shouts the butcher, striding back to them. Before he reaches them, Joan pulls free of Marcy and scrambles to her feet. She runs to a chair, climbs into it and covers her ears. A few seconds later, she is back to imitating the air-conditioner.
An hour later, in the car, Marcy silently grills her. Wasn’t Joan scared in the casket?
No.
“Why did it take so long to wake up?”
We didn’t want to leave.
“We didn’t want to leave the coffin?”
No.
“Where, then?”
Where we were.
“Yeah, but we mean, where was that?”
Asleep.
“We mean, we didn’t want to wake up from our dream?”
Yes.
“What was the dream about?”
A silver place. All cold and silver.
“Gold and silver?”
No, cold.
“She had a dream she was cold!” Marcy says to her mother and Sonja in the front seat. (At the funeral home Doris had said that Joan’s skin got icy from lying next to Grandma Gayler.)
“I’m not surprised,” Doris says now.
That night in bed Marcy asks Joan about the dream again, but all she hears is that it was cold and silver; it was a cold, silver place. Finally she thinks, “Just don’t do it again.”
Silence.
“Promise,” she thinks. She touches her forehead to Joan’s. Her eyelashes brush the lenses of Joan’s sunglasses. “Promise!”
No.
“Okay, we won’t take us to another funeral, then,” Marcy thinks, turning away. And figures, that settles that. It never occurs to her (why should it?) that Joan doesn’t need to climb into a coffin to imitate a corpse.
A little later that night, in her bed, Doris thrashes and sweats. She can’t get used to Gordon not being beside her. She can’t stop seeing Joan in the coffin.
The pediatric endocrinologist they took Joan to last year warned that if her smallness indicated a certain rare type of dwarfism (Doris has forgotten the name for it) she might not live to see her twentieth birthday. The tests were inconclusive, and the endocrinologist said that the odds were she wasn’t this type of dwarf, but Doris now realizes that ever since then, in some quarantined precinct of herself, she has been expecting Joan to suddenly drop dead.
She kicks off the sheets. Think about something else! she orders herself. The butcher, think about him. Well, what a boor he was! She can’t imagine her mother having given a man like that the time of day. She wonders why he called Joan a cretin, what Alma whispered to him. Then she remembers Alma and Cynthia saying that her mother’s last words were, “Oh, no, not again!” and is startled because she completely forgot about it until now.
“Oh, no, not again!” Why would her mother say that? Not what again? And Sonja is absolutely right. “Oh, no, not again!” is what Aunt Mildred and those superstitious crackpots at Dearness claimed Joan was born screaming.
It’s a coincidence, all right. Enough of one to make Doris wonder if Harmony is messing around with voodoo dolls. Look who’s calling who superstitious! True, but this much is also true: the coincidences have been piling up since Doris fell for Cloris Carter in the Dominion store line-up, and the message appears to be: Don’t.
A week ago Saturday. She is sitting beside Cloris on Cloris’s sprawling chesterfield, which is upholstered in a silvery fabric like whatever ironing-board covers are made of. Cloris herself is adorned in pounds of silver jewellery. Gigantic hoop earrings, an incalculable number of necklaces. Wire-thin bracelets segment the length of her arms, those at her wrists jingling like sleigh bells. All that silver. So queenly, so dazzling. In comparison Doris feels like the unworthy palm waver she was in Antony and Cleopatra. How dare she? But she can’t resist. She lays a hand on the tea-coloured flesh of Cloris’s knee. And as if a siren has been tripped, the phone rings. And it’s for her. And it’s Sonja saying that Gordon has gone off in an ambulance.
Then this past Saturday. She phones Cloris for the first time since Gordon’s heart attack. The line is busy. She hangs up, and her phone rings. It’s the news that her mother has died.
And not only died but, according to the latest bombshell, died wailing, “Oh, no, not again!”
Why not again? What has happened to Doris that she wouldn’t have happen again and gladly? Would she marry Gordon? The lyrics that have just popped into her mind are All I want to see is the back of your head, getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller, but she mentally smacks them away as being ridiculous and thinks, “You’re darned right I’d marry him again.” Would she have kids? If it were up to her alone she’d have a litter of them. What about Sonja getting pregnant out of wedlock? Well, that all turned out for the best, didn’t it? What about her father dying at sixty-seven, twenty years before her mother? From the day he retired, her father did nothing but suck on a bottle of Canadian Club and listen to his scratchy polka records. So, guess.
Would she give up the stage? She’d even do that again, although that was a hard one.
She’s on shaky ground here, thinking about the theatre. It has always hurt and mystified her why she never got a foot in the door. Why didn’t she? She had what it took—moxie, she could do any accent. And she wasn’t bad looking in those days, either. How long ago was it? Nineteen thirty-seven. So twenty-eight, twenty-eight years ago.
She was nineteen, working in the typing pool at Nesbitt Insurance. A good job for a girl during the Depression. For another girl. In her last year of high school Doris had brought down the house playing Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Standing ovations. Flowers at her feet. Her drama teacher, Mr. Waldorf, had urged her to go to London, England, and pursue his theatre connections. As if he had any, she thought, but this was years later. At the time she had said, hopelessly, “My parents could never afford to send me.” Which, of course, he would have known.
“Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t waste your life in some dreary office.”
Words that echoed.
Back then there was a magazine called Centre Stage that listed where auditions were being held across the province and just south of the border. When a part sounded promising Doris pretended to get a blinding headache so that she could leave work and go to the try-out. (Her boss, who really did get blinding headaches, would become almost hysterically sympathetic.) Some days Doris rode the train as far as Buffalo and back.
She told nobody about these trips, not even her parents. When she finally won a role, then she’d tell them, knock their socks off. The typing pool already thought she led a shockingly glamorous life. She had bought a tiny picture frame for the photograph it held of a handsome, curly-haired man wearing glasses, and she carried the photo around in a locket, saying that the man was her beau.
“He’s a famous playwright,” she said. “Dean Lowell.” (Her mother’s brother’s name.) “You might have heard of him.”
Some of the girls in the typing pool said they thought they had.
“He’s very tall,” Doris said, opening the locket. “I call him Lean Dean.”
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