As far as Joan can tell everything vibrates like something else. The exceptions are corpses, music and herself. She doesn’t vibrate at all, she knows from her reflection. The mirror vibrates but not her in the mirror, even though other people’s reflections sound exactly as they themselves do. She believes that this absence is why she is beautiful. Having heard all her life how beautiful she is, she believes that what people are talking about is her dead stillness, her hollow hush, and that they find it as pleasing as she does.
She had always thought that corpses wouldn’t vibrate either. Or that they would boom like old cheese—too loud, too deep and slow. But the vibration of Grandma Gayler’s corpse was so fast that it levelled into one long, silky tone from which glowed a glorious silver light that didn’t hurt Joan’s eyes. Heavenly light, she guessed it must be.
There was no heavenly music, however. She wishes there had been. Would it have vibrated like anything else? Earthly music vibrates only like itself and causes Joan to quiver along with it… because she herself is hollow, that’s what she thinks. The quivering is lovely when the music is good but like an electric shock when the music is off key or crude. Bad music coming from the television is the worst. Even turned off, the screen discharges a sickly, descending ruffle that she takes for granted must have inspired canned laughter. After hearing bad music she used to listen to her circulation and digestion while picking up the most distant sounds she could, back and forth, that long systole of the near and the remote working as a pain killer. Now what she does is play the piano, and this is literally a shot in the arm, in each arm, high and low frequencies flowing from the keys up her fingers, up her arms and pouring over her skin until the frequencies are in balance, at which point the pain wisps away.
Print is the opposite of bad music. Print is a sight for sore eyes. She reads three books a week from the lending library (this doesn’t include the one or two a month that Gordon reads to her) and she has close to a hundred books and twice that number of magazines of her own.
She has been reading since she was three, a year before Doris set up the classroom. Because Doris is her darling she pretended for another year to be illiterate so that Doris would think she was teaching her.
Everyone asked why she wouldn’t write. Why she wouldn’t talk. She couldn’t have told them even if she could have. At the time that they were asking, she was still years away from articulating to herself the perception that words have colour in her head but not outside of it, or that the draining of colour is not a reduction of the word so much as it is a transformation she finds too eminent to tamper with.
She will write numbers, though. Numbers are different, they are almost always colourless. Unless they are blue. Certain numbers are a shade of deep blue that is the blue of everybody’s breath in her dream where people are crowding into the closet. She has another recurring dream, the one where she’s talking. “I hate you,” she says in this dream. And then, “I’m so sorry.” No, she doesn’t! No, she isn’t! She hasn’t the faintest idea what hate and sorry feel like.
She eventually learned that these dreams were nightmares, and that nightmares are evil spirits that oppress people while they sleep.
The word “nightmare” is not listed in the “General Information” section of Pears Cyclopaedia, which is where she first looked for it. It is not listed in any of the sections, as she found out when she read the encyclopedia straight through, a page a day from January first, 1961, until February eighth, 1963. In the autumn of 1965 she learned of the genetic tie responsible for her being disposed to such an undertaking. That September, a few days after returning home from the hospital, her darling Gordon told her that the man Al Yothers was her real father.
“I wish Al could hear you” is what he said. “Imagine having Glenn Gould for a daughter and not even knowing she’s alive.”
“Mister Sandman is Al Yothers” was Joan’s first thought. (She’s fast.) When she was three, Sonja said that she and an orange-haired giant named Yours were her real parents. Later, when Joan first heard the song “Mister Sandman,” she got it into her head that Mister Sandman was Yours. This was around the same time that Gordon told her about a man named Al Yothers who liked to read the encyclopedia cover to cover. So her immediate response after putting together Mister Sandman and Al Yothers was that it made sense. She may not look like Mister Sandman’s daughter, but what do you know? They both read the encyclopedia!
Her response upon reflection was to adjust her name from Joan Yours to Joan Sandman and to double-check the word “queer” in the dictionary because she remembered Gordon having used it once in connection with Al Yothers, as well as with a bar. Considering that Gordon often hinted at what amounted to his own “sexual desire toward a member of his own sex,” namely Al Yothers, she supposed that Al Yothers (Mister Sandman) was likewise queer in this fashion. She did, however, wonder if on top of that he might be “eccentric” or “mildly insane.”
Mister Sandman. Her darling. He is so fascinating.
But then, to her, who isn’t? What isn’t? Even pain, even her nightmares, even indexes and tables of contents are lit up like sparklers—unforgettable! For many years she assumed that reading and memorizing were the same function. Once, after she had finished investigating a little book about card games, Marcy gave her a memory test, which at the time Joan thought was a mind-reading test since Marcy had been right there to see her read, and therefore memorize, the book.
Marcy flipped through the pages. “Okay,” she said, stopping at a page in the middle. “Here’s a good one. How many possible poker hands are there in a deck of fifty-two?”
That number was blue. Joan couldn’t write it. She touched the pencil to her lips.
“We know what we’re thinking,” Marcy said.
“Two million, five hundred and ninety-eight thousand, nine hundred and sixty,” Joan thought.
“We’re thinking if we give the right answer, then everybody will know what an incredible memory we have and they’ll say we’re so smart we have to go to school.”
Was Joan thinking that? She assumed she must be, if Marcy said so.
“We won’t tell anybody,” Marcy said.
Joan wrote, “52.”
Marcy sighed. “Fifty-two. Oh, sure.” She slapped the magazine shut, and Joan was driven to swat her own thigh to echo the slap. “We never give a straight answer,” Marcy said. “We’re so exasperating.”
When Marcy left the closet Joan looked up “exasperating” in the dictionary. It was another way of saying “causing irritation or annoyance.” She already knew what irritation and annoyance were. They were like loud noises. She knew that a straight answer was a single answer you stuck to. For instance, “Are you happy?” Yes. “Really?” Yes. “You’re not just saying that?” No.
But there are so many answers to a question like that—sometimes, maybe, yes, no, yes and no. Which is the straight one? Gordon is always asking her if she is happy, and to tell him the truth she moos one time, clicks her tongue the next. Shrugs. He only wants to make her happy. That’s why he gave the CBC radio producer the tape of her playing the piano. “I only wanted to make you happy,” he said.
He then said, “I really put my foot in it, didn’t I?” and this was a question to which she was able to give a straight answer.
Supper time, November 1965. Spaghetti and tomato sauce, white bread stacked on a plate, margarine so blindingly yellow that Joan can’t look at it until Doris turns off the overhead light.
“A nice, soft dinner,” Doris says. (Soft dinners are ones that eliminate the blare of chewing.) “Unlike last night,” she says, referring to the undercooked carrots. She nudges Joan, and Joan blinks to acknowledge her while looking at her face in the new aluminum salt-shaker. She is so transfixed by her slightly warped reflection that she misses Gordon reaching over to switch on the radio. The click gives her a start. She imitates it with a click of her tongue.
There is music, the last bars of what she recognizes as Bach�
�s Prelude and Fugue No. 5 in D Major played by Glenn Gould. Then a man says, “What you are about to hear will astonish you.” His voice is a windy bass like the sound of blowing over a bottle but the frequency within it is as high as a mosquito.
“Self-taught,” he says. And, “Just eight years old when she made this recording.” Between her face in the salt-shaker and that mosquito hum Joan is too distracted to hear more than these words. But one note and she twigs. All it takes is that first note.
Her heart skips and races. This syncopation makes her gasp. Involuntarily her mouth opens so wide she has the impression that the word she won’t speak is there in the cavity, hardened into block letters wedged between her molars.
“Gordon, turn it off,” Doris says. Before he can, it turns off by itself. So do the hallway light and the refrigerator motor, all in the same instant. So do the streetlights, but only Joan realizes this because only she is aware of the sudden silence from the electrical transformers. She covers her ears with her hands. Slips off her chair and runs down the hall, the blackness directing her like a thousand hands. On the closet floor, behind a stack of books, she curls up.
Time passes, she has no idea how much. Maybe she falls asleep, and her darlings wake her up. They talk just outside the closet door. Gordon says there’s been a blackout. Doris says, “I guess you don’t have your mom’s taste for the limelight” Sonja says, “Poor bunny, poor little bunny.” Marcy says, “I told them not to.”
Joan keeps her hands pressed to her ears and yet still hears everything they say. Above the underwater squall of her circulation their voices are clear and thin, like dead children calling. She wonders if her being on the radio—that terrible frequency—is what caused the blackout.
Later that evening she hears over her transistor radio that the whole northeastern seaboard suffered a power failure. She still wonders if it was her. By then five people have telephoned to say they caught the beginning of the broadcast. From Doris’s half of the conversation Joan gathers that the last two callers are inviting her to perform somewhere. She covers her ears again at the prospect of evaporation. Too many strangers around her—too many strange, human vibrations—and she will break apart like a cloud and be the air they breathe. Wouldn’t that be something! But it scares her. Not for the first time she is grateful for all the barrettes and ribbons that, she takes for granted, Marcy fastens to her head to keep it from flying apart.
From that night on she stops playing the piano when the window is open or people visit the house. She does not seek fame. She cannot afford to, she cannot ever again tape record herself playing the piano. Not that she has done so more than three times. All those stacks of tapes in the other corner of the closet, they aren’t her.
Despite what her darlings presume. “You’re building up a sizeable record library there,” Gordon says, and she can hear the desire in his voice. How he would love for her to play him a couple of tapes!
He’ll have to wait, she hasn’t even played them for herself yet. One day she will, she’ll summon the whole family and all of them together will listen to selections from the tapes in their entirety. When that day will be and how she will choose the selections she isn’t sure. Meanwhile, the tapes are her private property.
She has forty-four full tapes in four stacks and is eleven years old when she reads an article in Maclean’s magazine about a composer named David Rayne who makes music out of recorded conversations. He does this by extracting individual words and speeding them up or slowing them down to produce the desired pitch and tempo, and then stringing the pitches together to produce a melody. On a separate tape, repeated words or phrases and sometimes entire sentences serve as a rhythm-and-bass line. For the finished product he plays the two tapes together and records that.
“It’s a tricky business,” says Mr. Rayne, “because all the way through the process the melody tape and the bass tape have to be perfectly synchronized with each other.”
In one fast reading Joan not only grasps his technique, she imagines a way to adapt it to a composition of her own. Her heart races. She checks her wristwatch to monitor the acceleration and for a moment is absorbed by how thrilled she evidently is.
Mr. Rayne’s latest record is called Transonic Express. Those two words ripple down Joan’s spine, spiralling, a vibration echoed by the photo of “David Rayne at work in his studio.” In the picture there are three upright reel-to-reel tape recorders that could be the same model as her newest one, her Philips. She looks up from the magazine and scans the closet. Maybe if she moved all her books out. No, there’s more room in the basement. A long table like his, a stool … She studies the picture. Earphones, she’ll need earphones for privacy. What else? How about she leaves that part to Gordon, who only wants her to be happy? And how about she let Sonja, “Miss Moneybags,” foot the bill?
On the evenings that he is home Gordon still reads library books to her. This evening, when he comes to collect her from the closet and says, “What’ll it be, Bates or Beckett?” (they alternate between two novels at a time) she extends the magazine to him, folded back at the article on Mr. Rayne.
“You want me to read this?”
She nods and stands on tiptoe for a better whiff of his face. From certain things he has told her during his before-supper visits as well as from the coincidence of his body odour at those times and from reading an article about semen in Scientific American she has figured out that an alcohol-bleach-armpit odour indicates he has recently ejaculated with a man, a man who (you never can tell) might be Mister Sandman. Not since Christmas has she picked up that combination of scents on Gordon. She closes her eyes and breathes it in like fresh air—that smell!—the closest she might ever get to her real father.
“Are you sure?” Gordon says.
She opens her eyes. How sure is she? Absolutely? Fairly? Is she sure? While the prospects strobe across her mind, she tries to elicit the faint frequency of the queer whom Gordon ejaculated with. (Occasionally, if you’ve touched somebody, his or her frequency will ring on your body for a while afterwards.) A hum is what she longs to hear. Over the years she has convinced herself that Mister Sandman discharges a thin, honeyed vibration exactly like the hum of the tape recorder.
No, there’s nothing, but while listening for a hum she has been struck by such a good idea that she beeps.
“I’ll take that as a yes,” Gordon says, and they start down the hall to the basement.
She continues to beep over her idea, which is this: Mister Sandman can be in her composition after all! He can be the hum! She doesn’t have to listen to the tapes to know that on all of them, in the background, is the sound of herself humming to the hum of the tape recorder. So if her humming stands in for Mister Sandman, the voices of all her darlings will be in the music!
Eighteen
In the summer of 1968 Marcy informs her family and friends that from here on in her name is Marcia. The paranoid girl who dated fuzzy male shapes with erections she grabbed on to like a white cane, that was Marcy.
Marcy was a girl who unhooked her bra and writhed herself out of it faster than Houdini, then leaned forward and crossed her arms to give the impression that her breasts were as full as they had appeared to be under the padding, and to her boyfriends this was just her so swept away by passion she couldn’t wait for them to fumble with the hooks. As far as she could tell, her boyfriends never figured out that her bra was padded. None of them (and this includes Chuck, the old guy) ever fondled her with the finesse that would have led her to believe they were doing comparative measurements.
Marcia on the other hand is no escape artist. She doesn’t have to be, her life is sharper, calmer, narrower, down to a single boyfriend named Paul. Whereas Marcy only saw her boyfriends clearly from six inches away and then only in their fine-lined, follicled parts, Marcia, through her new contact lenses, sees Paul all at once and at a distance. As for wearing a padded bra, she came right out and told him she did. On their third date they decided to live together i
n Vancouver after high school and maybe even get married eventually, and she couldn’t see hugging herself for the next fifty years to manufacture cleavage. That was one of the reasons, anyway.
Telling him wasn’t easy. Confessing that she was a murderer or was dying of cancer would have been easier. Saying that she wasn’t a virgin, which she did on their first date, was way easier. Breaking his heart fifteen months later, even for that she wouldn’t have to smoke two joints to work up her nerve.
She smoked them sitting on the toilet, lighting one from the butt of the other. Then she sprayed some of her FDS to freshen the air. In her stupor she left the FDs can in the bathroom where Joan, who’d been waiting outside the door to empty her potty, found it and a few minutes later was caught by their mother spraying it where you were supposed to (as if an eleven-year-old recluse needed an outdoor-fresh-scented crotch). At this point Marcia happened to stagger back to the bathroom, and she was pretty stoned, but what she remembers is her mother snatching the can from Joan, reading the label and then noticing Marcia and asking in a strangely perky voice, “Is this yours?”
“No,” Marcia lied without expecting to get away with it. Who else would a can of feminine deodorant spray belong to in this family?
But her mother said, “I guess I must have left it here,” and gave a little laugh.
What? Her mother used FDS? Her parents still had sex? While the bathroom went into orbit Marcia braced herself in the doorway and tried to act normal. “Hey, maybe Angela left it,” she joked (Angela was her mother’s new best friend, a glamorous redhead divorcée who sometimes slept overnight on the living-room chesterfield when she’d had a few too many), and her mother threw her a sharp look and then dropped the can, whose slow-motion roll under the toilet produced a hollow, scraping sound that Joan made a good stab at imitating.
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