Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Don’t worry,” she says at the bedroom door. “She won’t come up.”

  Well, she does come up. Floats up, maybe, because Perky doesn’t bark until she scrapes back the piano bench.

  Marcia whips the sheet over Chuck. At the foot of the bed Perky yaps and pops in and out of view like a dog on a trampoline, ears sailing.

  “What the hell?” Chuck throws the sheet off again. “Shit.” Back comes the sheet. Gripping it at his neck, he rolls over and shunts up to the pillow.

  Joan is also yapping. An impeccable, faint echo that after a minute or two shuts Perky up. For a few seconds longer Joan stares at him. Then she turns to the keyboard and starts playing the Goldberg Variations.

  “Get dressed,” Marcia whispers.

  “She’s sitting on my clothes!”

  “Shh.”

  “Shh.” From Joan. Otherwise it’s as if she doesn’t know they are there. What’s going on? It took her a year to work up the nerve to meet Paul. “Joanie?” Marcia says softly and is ignored. “Joanie, stop a second, okay?”

  “How old did you say she was?” Chuck asks.

  “Shh.”

  “Shh.” The echo.

  Chuck folds his arms over his chest. “This kid’s unbelievable,” he whispers loudly.

  “I guess we’ll just have to wait. She usually only plays it through once.”

  By the fourth variation Chuck’s foot is a metronome and he’s stroking Marcia’s thigh. In the middle of the fifth variation he ducks under the sheet.

  “Don’t!” Marcia punches him.

  “Ah, come on,” he says. “It’s like balling in front of the dog.”

  When spring arrives and her father starts pestering her about the university application she hasn’t filled out yet, she decides to leave home. He’s one reason. The other is needing a place where she can entertain her boyfriends. Lately, in front seats, she wants to break out, smash her foot through the windshield. The Seven Year Itch is all right, but three dollars a time adds up, and those rooms are not paradise. The water is Coke-coloured, the vibrating mattresses smoke and give you shocks.

  She’d have left home before Christmas if it wasn’t for Joan. The thing is, she still sleeps in Joan’s bed. Should she believe it when she hears, “Go”? Never before has she doubted that the voice in her head, when she is looking straight at Joan, is other than Joan’s.

  “Are we sure?” Marcia says. “We won’t miss us too much?” Cupping Joan’s small white face in her hands. Skin cool as stone, eyes undetectable behind the dark-green lenses of her cat’s-eye sunglasses. All Marcia can see is her own face. There and there. Murky and bigger-eyed, as if floated up from a mind so unselfish that whatever enters it shines back not only improved but twice.

  She goes to see about a furnished basement apartment in a house on St. George Street. The landlord is a middle-aged Italian thug named Danny Vitalis who says, “Anybody give you any trouble, I’m here day and night.” “Here” is directly above the apartment in a living room of beer-case high-rises and at least ten framed photos of a younger him as a boxer.

  “Pretty girl like you,” he says, “don’t need no creeps hanging around. Nice guys, why not? I got no problem with that. You’re young. Live it up.”

  It’s as if he knows her.

  There is only a fridge, stove, card table and two rickety wooden chairs, but when her parents finally accept that there’s no changing her mind, they ply her with furniture and small appliances. All Grandma Gayler’s worldly goods—the maroon wing-backed chair and mouldy carpet and brocade drapes that smell like broccoli, her dresser, her bed with the huge picture of Queen Victoria’s head glued onto the headboard, her silverware with the engraved “G” that Marcia used to think stood for “Grandma,” her hand-embroidered pillowcases and linen towels, her rusty electric kettle, her electric clock whose face is Queen Elizabeth’s, her rusty toaster whose sides open so you can turn the bread, her dented pots and pans. With some ceremony her mother gives her the set of china that used to belong to Grandma Canary. “These were hers?” Marcia says. Who would ever think to connect the dainty rosebud patern with the Battle-axe, as Marcia’s mother affectionately refers to the insane-eyed old woman in the photo albums?

  As for Marcia’s own possessions there are only books and clothes. And her dolls. She looks at the dolls lined up along her bed, pink and frilly, leaning into each other like drunken débutantes. She sees them through the eyes of her boyfriends and says that she’s throwing them out.

  “Oh, no!” her mother cries. “You’ve kept them all these years. You’ll want to give them to your own daughters one day.”

  Her own daughters. Marcia thinks about that. The balloon heads of newborns come to mind but burst when she tries to concentrate on them. She looks at her mother and draws back a little because her mother’s rabid expression makes her feel like a tube at the other end of which are priceless granddaughters. For the first time Marcia realizes that since Sonja and Joan will probably never have kids, it’s up to her or the Canarys will die out. This particular line of them, anyway. They’ll be like one of those disappeared countries on old maps.

  “Save them,” says her mother.

  Marcia picks up Little Lovely and puts her upside down in the bag of garbage. A small, pained sound from her mother. “I’m twenty years old,” Marcia says. “It’s sick that I even still have them.” Her throat tightens. “They’re my dolls,” she says angrily. “I’ll throw them out if I want to.” She snatches them by their heads, by their white shoes. Their rigid limbs graze her wrist as she shoves them down into the bag. A hand rips through, fingers splayed. That’s Betsy Wetsy. Her mother sighs and leaves the room. Marcia grabs another bag, tosses in the last three dolls. Out the top, Cindy the Mardi Gras Doll towers, one eyelid stuck shut but she’s waving. She’s smiling. Marcia takes the bags outside and drops them in the pails. Thunder.

  It isn’t until the next day when the garbage men have emptied the pails that Marcia’s mother says, “Oh, we should have given them to the Salvation Army.”

  For the move, her father borrows a delivery truck from work. All that morning they load the furniture, Sonja lifting the heaviest pieces, saying “Upsadaisy” as she single-handedly hoists the solid-oak dresser (to spare her father, his bad heart).

  “We’ll miss you around here,” her father says.

  “I’ll be home every Sunday,” Marcia reminds him. He tugs at his sideburns. “Dad,” she says, “I’m doing the right thing.”

  And he says in a slightly puzzled tone, as if testing this out, seeing if it fits the occasion—“For the children of this world are in their generation wiser than the children of light.”

  “Honestly,” she says, exasperated. She has been through her religious phase.

  So has he, forty years ago, and now he’s in another. A strange, half-hearted one, it seems to her. He goes to church and is taking private Bible-study classes with Reverend Bean, her old minister, but he confesses that he doesn’t pray and doesn’t believe in God. “I’m still feeling it out,” he says. “Keeping an open mind.”

  Well, it’s his life. None of her business now that she’s leaving home and won’t have to listen to his quotations from the Bible. They get to her, she hates to admit. It’s like hearing him read from her old love letters. It’s like being forced to remember what she saw in the guy who wrote them.

  She adopts a split personality. One for day, one for night. Day is longer skirts and her glasses. Hardly any make-up. Day is the serious young career woman she now half is. She is accustomed to working hard, standing first. She tells her boss that she would like to go places in the company, and he says he’ll tell her what—as a reward for not wearing a girdle, she is promoted effective immediately to overseeing typing and I.Q. tests to job applicants. So now she sets a timer and says, “Go.”

  In November she is given a raise of thirty-five dollars a week, the better to spoil her boyfriends with. First, though, she buys herself a red leather mini-skir
t to wear at the Corral, which is a student nightclub decorated to look like a barn. Boys straddle hobby horses and chew pieces of hay. Watch her squint-eyed. Night is padded bras and hairpieces and black false eyelashes. It has taken her years but she has finally figured out that, for boys, the illusion lasts even after it is strewn all over the bedroom. The next morning is when they snap out of it. Opening his eyes and seeing her standing at the foot of the bed dressed for work, one boy asked where Marcia was. “In the hospital,” Marcia said. “Her appendix burst but she said not to wake you.”

  She still finds three boyfriends the optimum number. Three at a time. When she loses one, inevitably there is a stretch of one night stands before the position is filled. That’s right, “position.” She tests them, sets the timer, in a manner of speaking. A boy who can’t get or keep an erection is out of the running. So are boys who want to marry her, want to have her all for themselves. Boys who are mean to her or start acting weird she doesn’t give time to get dressed. When a farm boy slapped his belt on the palm of his hand and said he’d “sure like to thrash her little backside,” she didn’t care if he was joking, she shouted, “Danny!” up through the grate, and her Italian thug landlord bellowed, “Yeah?” and the boy was hopping across the floor into his cowboy boots.

  If Danny thinks she’s a hooker, he doesn’t say so. If he’s attracted to her, he doesn’t show it. “Anybody give you any trouble …” is his sole hallway greeting, whether she’s alone or not. She tells Pammy that he’s her guardian angel. “The kind God sends when you stop believing in Him.”

  “What kind is that?” Pammy asks.

  “Hairy.”

  Pammy looks up at the ceiling. “I couldn’t sleep at night if I were you.”

  “If you were me, you’d have better things to do than sleep.”

  “Oh, don’t talk like that!” says Pammy. Who was shocked enough to learn that Marcia wasn’t a virgin. Who—and this is why Marcia stays friends with her—is just as shocked that she herself still is.

  Pammy comes by Sunday mornings to vacuum the apartment and do the laundry, gasping at hardened balls of Kleenex between the sheets and at marijuana butts in the ashtray. These regular gasps give Marcia the impression that her place is being ventilated by uprightness, so who needs church? Meanwhile, at the kitchen table, Marcia rewrites Pammy’s essays to her courses in twentieth-century American literature and the Romantic poets. Sunday afternoons she takes the subway to the Broadview station where her father picks her up in the car. He is the only man she knows who feasts on her mousy daytime appearance.

  “You’re looking well,” he says enthusiastically.

  “So are you,” she says, but how he really looks is different. More different each week.

  They all do, except for Joan. Joan, who is going to be fifteen, who of all of them should be changing, is frozen in a six-year-old’s body. That isn’t even it, though, not what Marcia is talking about when she says to Joan, “We haven’t changed a bit.” The Joan before her eyes is the Joan who has been in her mind all week … all Marcia’s life, it seems. Like the kitchen clock, and the tin plates with the deep blue rim, Joan is a surprise because there she is—the same! Or maybe not even the same, just recognizable.

  Her parents and Sonja mutate compared. Every Sunday they are taller, shorter, fatter, louder, smarter, dumber than the previous Sunday. What were they like before she left? She can’t remember. Who are they, the elder inhabitants of this house, which itself is a foreign country she feels like a refugee from? She never noticed when she was living here that as soon as you walk through the front door there is a potato odour. It didn’t used to bother her that no matter what they are having for supper her mother puts a plate of white sliced bread on the table. There are coat-hanger ducks on the kitchen wall. In the living room there’s a footstool made out of old manuscripts. Get her out of here!

  When her father drives her back to the subway she is anxious in case for some reason they don’t make it—the car breaks down, or he does. The car reeks of turkey or ham from the mammoth doggy bag her mother pushed at her. Nothing is so primitive as that warm, smelly lump in her lap. As is the custom of these backward but kindly people, they have presented her with a goat’s head. A pregnant sow’s uterus. She will stuff it into a wastebin on the subway platform.

  Months go by. A year, and another year. Joan turns seventeen and her school lessons with Doris and Gordon end. Doris says she has a feeling she never taught that kid a single thing she didn’t already know. “Who’s kidding who?” she asks Joan. She gets a part-time job at her friend Angela’s lingerie shop on the Danforth, so now Joan spends whole days in the laundry room or “her office” as Gordon started calling it after he moved her books and magazines down there.

  The whole family has given up wondering when she will finish her composition. Into everyone’s subconscious a constant, irregular clicking has long since been absorbed to the extent that it is indistinguishable from dead silence. The clicking travels up the cold-air ducts. It is Joan starting and stopping tape and it is her echo of each click. If you are Sonja and sitting next to the duct directly above the editing bench, it is the sound of your knitting needles slowed down, paused over. It is no sound you register except on the level at which you know that the world is good and a click means “yes.”

  These days Sonja knits for a living. In 1970 when Schropps brought in automatic clippers she phoned a man who had once offered to sell some of her hats and scarves to department stores, and for what she can turn out in a week that man now pays her more than Marcia earns after tax, although Marcia has been promoted to manager and has her own secretary.

  Sonja stashes her money away. Marcia spends hers. Not just on clothes but on books (her ambition being to read all the classics from Austen to Zola), china dishes, good sheets and towels, trinkets for her boyfriends. She eats out in restaurants that have linen napkins and wine lists and she has moved from living under Danny Vitalis to living above him in a two-bedroom apartment he renovated himself.

  “Okay,” he warned before showing her the place, “this is class.” And she walked into a room that was wall-to-wall red shag carpet (“Hundred percent synthetic,” Danny bragged), red velvet wallpaper and a chandelier you had to claw your way through.

  The red shag is everywhere, including the bathroom, which has gold faucets, not real (“You kidding me?”), and a mirror on the ceiling above the bathtub. Along an entire wall in the master bedroom is a fake fireplace made of fake marble. You turn a knob and the plastic logs in the grate glow red. The opposite wall is a mirror.

  “For you,” Danny said, “I’ll drop the rent to two ten.” She was touched. “Girl like you,” he said, “professional girl, needs a place that says, Hey, I don’t need nobody.”

  Again, it was as if he knew her.

  She didn’t rent it just to spare his feelings or because she wanted to stay in his house. Or to pretend she was in Las Vegas. She decided to fall for it and then did (as she occasionally falls for a type of snake-hipped boy who dresses like a pimp, letting herself be persuaded by his version of who he is, since her version will get them nowhere). Her one-night stands say, “You live here?” and screech to a stop at the threshold, but after sex, lying naked in the blush of the plastic logs, they lounge like Hugh Hefner. There are sweet boys who see the place through Danny’s eyes and are afraid to touch anything, and they are worth all the static-electric shocks the carpet can throw at her.

  Her one-night stands fill the position of the third boyfriend. She always assumed that the position would be permanent short-term, but it didn’t turn out that way and now she’s glad. She runs into a gorgeous boy on the street, on the bus, and if he is game she brings him home. This happens five, six times a year. Mostly she is content with her two regular boyfriends, who come around on alternate nights and know about each other. Like her, they are constantly falling in love. The last thing they are is jealous. When she raves about the beauty of some other boy’s body, they seem to t
ake it as a personal compliment. They kiss her, softly. She thinks she knows how they feel. When they go on about another girl’s heart-shaped ass or big brown nipples, she doesn’t get mad. She is fascinated and often aroused, but the prevailing feeling is of being appreciated. If they love girls of all shapes and size, doesn’t that include her?

  Outwardly her two boyfriends have nothing in common with each other. One is tall, lean, dark-haired, doe-eyed, thoughtful. He is studying radio and television arts. The other is her height, muscular, witty, and has fuzzy blond hair, which is actually straight but when she met him he’d just got a permanent. He works at his father’s shoe store. Both boys are always broke, so she picks up the tab when they go out. She is starting to know wines and can advise them. “A white Bordeaux is nice with trout.” She lends them books by authors she thinks they should like—Durrell and Greene, Kerouac. The dark one handles her books as he does her breasts—as breakable and priceless items he can’t believe she just leaves lying around—and he returns them read. The blond one skims. Returns them, if he returns them, battered.

  At midnight she goes to bed alone. Not long after moving to the third floor she discovered that she sleeps better in a room by herself. Midnight is closing time for her one-night stands, too, no matter how much fun she’s having. Some boys she has to push out the door and they thrust a foot back in like travelling salesmen. She turns the lock, switches off the light and goes to the dining-room window, listening to them descend the stairs. If it’s the dark boy, it could be a cat burglar. The blond boy, and the one-night stands who resent leaving, explode down, shaking the house. Only the dark boy never slams the front door. Then three to five seconds and they’re on the sidewalk. From this window, if they’re headed for the subway, she can watch them all the way to Bloor Street. She loves them so much! There they go. Away. “Don’t look back,” she thinks. They never do.