Later, around midnight. Down by the expressway in a derelict parking lot, Paul’s beat-up fifty-nine Dodge convertible, its shattered seats and a hole in the floor big enough for Marcia to hang her bare foot through and caress her instep on dandelions.
They’ve smoked a joint. She has jerked him off (being too nervous for intercourse). She has told him. It’s an aftermath of watching cars stream by on the expressway, cars becoming cars across the windshield. His left hand drums the dashboard, his right saws the bobby-pins in and out of her French-roll hairpiece. The last thing he said was “Mercy.” This was back when he ejaculated, and although it’s what he usually says after he comes and is, she appreciates, less a play on her name than a hangover from when he used to listen exclusively to rhythm-and-blues, she chose to interpret it as a divine message that he was in the proper, compassionate frame of mind to hear her news. (She no longer believes in God but she is like somebody who speaks a new language and dreams in the old one.) “I think you should know I wear a padded bra” is how she put it.
Now, in the long, long silence she is envisioning every conceivable outcome, from him wanting his fingernail peace necklace back (his mother’s red fingernail clippings glued in a repeated peace-sign pattern onto a suede strap) to him slicing open the bra and grooving over the fibrefill. Finally she can’t stand it. “Well?” she says.
“Well what?” Lazily. And then he shouts “Ahh!” as her hairpiece comes off in his hand. “Shit!” he yells and throws it out of the car.
They search for it in the sword grass and thistles. He says he thought it was a dead bird.
“Every girl I know wears a fall,” she says, on the verge of tears. Two girls she knows do. But it never occurred to her that falls were deceptive, any more than false eyelashes are. God, does he think her eyelashes are hers? She swallows around what feels like a nest of hornets. She can see herself coming apart, she means literally, a child’s fat ruthless hand plucking out her eyes, her nostrils. In kindergarten they took pipe-cleaners, buttons, wool, scraps of fabric, stuck them on potatoes and made dolls. When the potatoes started to rot they pulled the buttons and things off and returned them to a shoe box. The potatoes they set on the window ledge to watch grow mould.
“Hear birdie, birdie,” Paul calls to her hairpiece. Hunched over, he sweeps his pole-vaulter arms through the grass. The grass is brownish, the margarine lights of the parking lot having bronzed the scene. His hair is long and blond for real. Gleaming like tin. Seeing—at that angle and in that light—a better girl than she thinks she is, she just gives up. “Do you want to break off with me?” she asks.
He straightens. “Huh?”
“It’s okay if you don’t want to go out with me any more,” she says, irritated at having to repeat it.
He cocks his head this way and that. “Why wouldn’t I want to go out with you?”
She unhooks her bra, wriggles out of it. “That’s why,” she says, flinging it at him.
He paws it off his head. “What about it?”
“It’s padded, okay?”
“Yeah?” he says. “Like, so?”
It’s as if she leapt out of a high-rise and landed on a soft mattress. She is alive. She stands there breathing, waiting for the relief.
Which seems to be held up by a kind of sludge. Suddenly clogging her heart, a thickening bloat where a hallelujah choir should be. She presses a hand over her heart, and the surprising sensation of her own unpadded flesh there seems to be why Paul shouts, “Hey!”
He’s right, it does look like a dead bird. He holds it aloft, her bra dangling from the wrist of the same hand.
After that night, when they’re making out, she feels free to leave her bra on or take it off, he doesn’t care. If it is going to be only the two of them by themselves she can dispense with the false eyelashes. Marcia is a girl who wears a fall and contact lenses, but alone with him she doesn’t have to. “Do your own thing,” he says. He has the hair to get away with saying.
Boys at her school used to make cracks about his long hair, but even when it was calling him “Sweetie” or “Girlie” he just nodded in his easy-going, half-impressed way and after a few months some of those same boys were growing out their Beatle bangs. There’s no question he’s popular. Besides owning a convertible and a motorcycle, he’s a star pole vaulter, six-foot-two and lean. As the school’s first real hippy he should be an outsider. As a hippy who is also a jock, he’s more like an ambassador from a place that might not be so twisted after all. A big draw for Marcia, the big initial draw, was that she hadn’t grown up with him. With most of the cute boys in her class she shared a humiliating sexual history. Spitting into each other’s mouths and thinking they were French kissing, to give an example. Now here was a boy from three thousand miles away. He’d never been her boyfriend, he had never ditched her, he didn’t hate her, he had no reason to kick an ugly freak dog in the head and then mail her a snapshot of the corpse with “Whose Fault?” scrawled on the back.
He was nineteen. In her grade because he had failed but not in her class, so from September until May he was little more to her than a mop-like blur in the hallways. She wore her glasses only in the classroom, and then only in the manner of a lorgnette, whipping a frame up to one eye when it was imperative to see the blackboard. In May she bought contact lenses. There went her life savings. The day before she wore the contacts to school for the first time, she and her friend Pammy were about to cross the street when Paul zoomed by on his motorcycle, so close that if Pammy hadn’t yanked her back onto the curb she would have been hit.
“Didn’t you see him?” Pammy cried.
No, Marcia hadn’t. Tomorrow she would. Standing there, squinting at his blond hair streaking afterjets, she knew who the first boy she was going to lay her twenty-twenty eyes on would be.
As she put in the lenses on the morning of that big day she had an old, slightly creepy sensation of miracle. The finger of God, not her finger, daubing her eyeballs. She walked to school gasping at every little leafand blade of grass. When she walked up to Paul before first period his sub-atomic clarity made him seem embarrassingly vulnerable, as if she were seeing him naked through x-ray glasses. Behind her, Pammy squealed into her hands. A minute ago, when Marcia had said she was going to ask him for a ride on his motorcycle, Pammy had squealed at even the idea, the nerve.
“It’s not nerve,” Marcia had said.
“What is it?” Pammy said.
“I don’t know. Not nerve.” Instinct, she thought, although of course she couldn’t tell Pammy that.
It was seven hours later smoking her first joint in a field surrounded by poplar trees and scattered with lambs that the prospect of being completely honest with a boy first entered her mind. She and Paul lay back in purple clover under little balls of white cloud that she took for the innocent thoughts of the lambs. White butterflies, like an evolution of those thoughts, flickered in the intricate distance and bloomed before her eyes, one alighting on her hand when she reached for the joint. Does life get any sweeter? Set down in this crib of trees she and Paul were pure, new beings.
There was all that, and there was his long blond wavy hair. One day years from now, looking at a photograph of the two of them, she wouldn’t rule out the possibility that she confessed and then devoted herself to him alone based entirely on his resemblance to Jesus. But maybe it was only his showing up in her life when she happened to be going through a stage of flirting with truth and monogamy anyway. “I’m not a virgin,” she said, starting big, and the field and sky seemed to enlarge, as if to accommodate an audience.
“Virgins are nowhere,” he croaked through an inhalation.
“I’m a brain,” she said. “I pretend to be barely passing, but the lowest mark I’ve ever had is seventy-nine percent.”
“Far out,” he said. “You can help me with my homework.”
“I don’t talk like it but I have a dirty mind.”
“Far fucking out,” he said, rolling her way while, wi
th the joint between her lips, she quickly wrangled herself out of her bra.
They had sex, another distinction in that to keep her reputation on this side of slut she had never before gone all the way with a boy from her school. Two days later, moved by him cupping his hand to light a cigarette in the wind, she told him she loved him and said she had a feeling he loved her, too, and he cocked his head this way and that and then drawled, “Yeah,” sealing it with a couple of slow nods.
But back up. She has loved all her boyfriends, from Dug on. Not necessarily loved who they are, who they are counts, but she is capable of overlooking no personality. Before a boy speaks to her, her heart is pretty well loaded up anyway … on him lounging at his desk, for instance. It doesn’t take much more than that. The swoons she used to go into over boys with hands like shovels doing the fine woman’s work of taking down notes while every now and then looking through the window to size up the world out there. As if he were being frisked, a boy stood with his hands pressed up against the window of the history classroom, gazing out, and he was no longer Michael, not to her, he was Beloved.
A boy named Norman she fell in love with for his hairy, Roman-centurion calves. Hair on calves and forearms can make her feel just lost. An Adam’s apple can hypnotize her. She would like to ride her finger on it. How can she not think of his penis, bobbing up the same? There’s hardly a boy alive she isn’t already a bit in love with for his penis. Just the idea of a simple little penis (simple when compared to the brain, little when compared to a leg) having the power to pull the whole boy along, lug him like an ant carrying a hundred times its weight. When a boy drops her, usually for a prettier girl, she mentally kisses him off with “Al was here” (this phrase having mutated from meaning “beware” and “bruise” to expressing a state of stoic wistfulness) while consoling herself with the knowledge that there are more Beloveds where he came from. In the palm of her hand are usually two more.
Until Paul, her pattern was to have a school or public boyfriend (a boyfriend she brought home to meet her parents) and a couple of secret “back-door” boyfriends. The school boyfriend tended to be straight, a bit shy. If he tried to paw her below the waist he was apologetic to the point of wanting to smash his car into a brick wall when she shoved his hand away. The other boys she met at dances held in other schools. She met them on the Broadview bus, in stores. Last summer she picked one up at a free clinic where she pretended she was a runaway in order to qualify for the birth-control pills they were handing out.
In their cars and houses she had sex with her back-door boys. They were dangerous in that they seemed to walk a fine line, although they were usually still in school and law-abiding. A gearing-up for danger is closer to what she saw in them, some quality like that apparent in a man arranging his shoulders before striding through saloon doors. Gloomy boys also excited her, as did a look (provided that it was not directed at her) that could kill. In the same vein she was a sucker for a sneer, imagining it to be the tail of a black streak. Not once was this the case. Far from it, her back-door boys no matter how evil-eyed turned out to be a mess of soft spots. They were the ones who spent their own money to feed a bald, bony cat that collapsed into walls and went into gymnastic twitching fits. They shared a single bed with an uncle who blew apart half of his brain after first attaching balloons to his gun so that it would float away from the corpse and give the impression that somebody (namely his business partner) had murdered him. But before hearing the full story Marcia would simply see the weirdo and think, “Not again.”
The boyfriend who slept with his brain-damaged uncle was Ed Oates. Both Ed and the uncle muttered out of the corners of their mouths like spies, and like a spy Ed operated a short-wave radio in his basement bedroom. When she told Ed about her other boyfriends’ deranged uncles, cats, brothers, etc., and wondered what the story was here, he muttered, “You’re like a short-wave radio operator up in Alaska. You’re picking up the only signal that goes as far as you are.”
What does she pick up from Paul? From the boy for whom she dropped Ed and two other Beloveds? That he was born cool and that he and Sonja are tied for the most contented people she has ever met. “Blissed out,” he’ll announce when he’s doing nothing except standing there. She has seen him mad, though. Short blasts of rage so unexpected and out of place in the otherwise laid-back conversation she thought they were having that if she hadn’t heard the swear words she would have thought there was something stuck in his windpipe. The blasts happen only when he’s talking about his father.
On Paul’s fifteenth birthday his father died of cirrhosis of the liver. “A small planet” is how he describes the size of his father’s gut by then, and he says that what made it such a drag was that his father couldn’t keep his pants up. At one time or another everybody in Paul’s neighbourhood had seen his father on the street with his pants around his ankles, bawling and staggering, and “Everybody goes, poor guy.” This is Paul, still mellow. “All they see,” he says, “is like a pitiful lush panhandling for brain surgery in England. That was his pitch … he had some rare type of brain tumour. And half the cats fall for it or, hey, maybe they don’t fall for it, but they dole out the bread to good old Jim who used to fix their cars. What does good old Jim do? Buys a mickey of rye, goes home and beats the crap out of my mom.” Paul looks nothing but reminiscent. A shake of his head shimmies his hair before he says, “Fucking sadistic piece of human-shaped shit,” in that choked, enraged growl. Returning to his normal voice he adds, “If he hadn’t croaked I’d have iced his ass, man.”
So half of the weirdo at his house is dead, and it’s not as if he was anybody Paul ever loved blindly. That honour belongs to the other half. His mother.
“Call me Brandy,” she tells Marcia when they meet. She sounds like a gangster. Then she has a coughing fit.
During the fit (it goes on and on) Paul leans across the corner of the kitchen table to thump her thin back between pointy shoulder blades that have their only-slightly-larger counterpart in the old-fashioned bra she’s wearing. When she’s down to puttering noises that might be a bitter laugh she sucks her cigarette then smacks her way through the smoke to clutch Marcia’s wrist. “You’re all skin and bone,” she growls. Then, “Hell of a lot of make-up.” Again, look who’s talking. False eyelashes thick as hula skirts, purple eye shadow, blood-red lipstick, orange foundation cracked on her cheeks in a brick-wall pattern.
Her eyes are Paul’s, but a paler blue and filmed over. To try to drum up some friendly feeling within herself Marcia imagines the crap being beaten out of her and thinks, “Poor lady.” Out loud she says, “I’m so glad to meet you.”
“Are you a thingamajig?” Brandy shoots back. Her red spiky fingernails gnaw at Marcia’s wrist.
“A what?” Marcia glances at Paul, who goes on beaming like a matchmaker.
“You know …,” Brandy says fretfully. She releases Marcia and pokes a finger through the shellac of her yellow bouffant. Way down in there she scratches. “A … a … a … ah, shit.” She twists to glare at Paul. “A thingamahooey,” she barks at him. “You know, untouched.”
“A virgin,” Paul offers. He helps himself to one of her cigarettes.
“A virgin!” Brandy barks at Marcia. “Are you a virgin?”
Marcia nods. She doesn’t look at Paul.
Brandy’s eyes narrow to slits. “Don’t mess with me,” she growls and slides one hand under the table.
Marcia shakes her head—no, she wouldn’t mess with Brandy. When Brandy’s hand comes out from under the table without a gun, Marcia starts breathing again. “So,” Brandy says, “did he tell you we’re a team, him and me?”
“A team?”
“We’re like this.” She crosses her fingers. “Where he goes, I go.” She skewers back round to address Paul. “Right?”
“That’s right, Brandy.”
Brandy grunts and returns to giving Marcia the once-over. Put ‘em up, her eyes say. Spread ‘em, sister. She stubs out her cigarette
and clears her throat for a spell while crumbling a corner of the yellowed newspaper that is spread all over the table. Marcia looks at Paul. Paul holds up two fingers in the peace sign. Brandy’s spiky little fist nudges Marcia’s forearm. “What do ya think of that?” she says.
“Of what?”
“Paul and me being a team.”
“Oh!” Marcia says. “Fine. I think it’s really great.”
Brandy nods. A slow wise-guy-eh? nod. With a wave of her hand to include Paul, she mutters, “Go play in traffic.”
“I wasn’t kidding,” Marcia whispers to Paul out in the hallway. What she means is, Brandy is no one that she hasn’t made allowances for years ago. She means, where her boyfriends go, hasn’t a Brandy usually gone with them? At least Paul’s mother isn’t a retard who tortures you with endless Jack Benny imitations. But what about Paul’s American draft dodger friends, the three guys Paul says they’ll be sharing a commune with out in Vancouver? Won’t they mind him showing up with Brandy?
Marcia doesn’t ask, not right away, maybe because the whole commune-draft dodger idea still seems unreal to her. When she does ask, by then her visions of the future keep forgetting to include him and she has reached the stage of slapping together a left-over future that he can pick at after she’s gone.
(His answer will depress her. “Are you kidding?” he’ll say. “Another chick to do the cooking?” That he imagines she can cook she’ll find touching, that he imagines Brandy will cook she’ll find pathetic.)
After knowing him a few months she realizes that not once has she seen Brandy at the stove. Paul’s the one who makes all the suppers, alternating between broiled steak and chile. Two portions, two plates, but only for show. Because eventually he blows the cigarette ash off of Brandy’s portion and eats that, too.
Brandy, meanwhile, goes on reading the Toronto Star. Sitting at the kitchen table, she reads it start to finish, every word including page numbers. The weekday paper can take her three days to complete, the Saturday edition takes five. When Marcia first meets her she is still working her way through 1966, barking out headlines about the Watts riots and the first artificial heart.
Mister Sandman Page 19