Mister Sandman (16 page)

“Remember you used to have this record?” Marcy says as they’re listening to it. “Remember?” Pulling on his thumb, she sings along—“Please turn on your magic beam …”

“That sounds great. I wonder why Bunny wants another one,” Sonja says.

“Another what?” Doris asks.

“Another thingamee there, another tape recorder,” says Sonja, who bought Joan this one for her seventh birthday. “Last night she handed me a picture of a big expensive kind. She cut it out of the newspaper.”

Sonja, during these visits, squeezes into the chair in front of the electric fan and does her knitting. The clicking of the needles is louder than at home, or so it seems to Gordon. And her body odour—a chicken gumbo soup smell—is stronger. He wonders if his other senses are overcompensating for his blurred vision. He can’t make out her face. In her muumuus and with her knitting she is a rampage of colour that outdoes the flowers hands down. At the end of her first visit, when she bent to kiss him, he whispered, “Honey, I’m sorry.” Meaning about Al Yothers, not that she’d know that, but meaning also that the heart attack didn’t finish him off. Not that she’d know that either.

“I just thank my lucky stars I was there,” she replied. “And
that Mr. Jolley was at home. He did artificial respiration on you for, oh, jeepers, ten minutes! To tell the honest truth, I thought you were a goner and so did Mrs. Jolley, but Mr. Jolley, he wouldn’t stop, uh
-uh,
not him. He puffed up his cheeks”—a display here—“and kept on blowing.” Out came her breath in a peanut-scented gust. “Blowing and blowing and blowing.”

Gordon has worked out that Al Yothers seduced Sonja while he and Al were lovers. He has gone further: he has worked out an interval of not more than five hours between penetrations—Al’s of her, and his of Al because he is certain that he and Al saw each other that same night. It was the night Al wouldn’t shut up about virgins. “Like taking candy from a baby,” was his threnody. “Candy from a friggin’ baby.”

“You enjoy taking candy from babies?” Gordon asked.

“Depends on the baby,” Al said, throwing him a sneaky look that, given Gordon’s assumption they were talking about virgin
hoys,
pointed to the cherub Gordon had seen him lighting a cigarette for outside the Chinese restaurant where he and Al rendezvoused.

He has worked out that it isn’t his fault. How could he have guessed the stunning wattage of Al’s vindictiveness when he was so blind he didn’t even know the lights were on? Writing
AL WAS HERE
on his back was more than a flicker, he can see that now, but by then the affair was over and you could argue that that was only Al’s lame idea of a joke or even Al’s way of ensuring that Gordon wouldn’t want to come back, wouldn’t turn up again and tempt him. As Gordon keeps telling himself, to know that somebody doesn’t love you is not necessarily to know that somebody lies awake nights mentally poking you all over for where the knife will go in.

No, it isn’t his fault. It isn’t even a tragedy. It’s a blessing. It is how Joan entered the world. Gordon has worked this out. Now all he has to do is buy it. He can’t stop thinking about when he was six or seven, how after his mother had kissed him
goodnight he would make her look under his bed and in his closet. “All clear,” she’d say. “No murderers.” He never bought that either, although he believed her. Some nights he didn’t sleep until dawn, and he is still persuaded (irrationally, you don’t have to tell
him
) that by refusing to fall for her version of “all clear” he saved his own life.

Saving his life is the last thing he’s interested in these days. Except that he has to plug on to pay the bills. What are the odds anybody will sell him a decent life insurance policy now? One evening, after Doris and the girls left, he felt so bleak he climbed out of bed and stretched his arms heavenward because the doctor had said that one of the most dangerous things he could do during the next few months was to stretch his arms over his head. Why that should be, Gordon couldn’t imagine, but he tried it. He stood there with his shirt riding up and his fingers near enough the overhead lights to feel the heat. Down by his shins the breeze from the fan flapped his pyjama leg, a derelict sensation. With his arms still stretched high he walked over to the window and wondered if this was one of the most dangerous things you could do because the windows are big and easy to open, so once you’re locked into position what’s to stop you from diving into the parking lot?

Back in bed he wept. And wouldn’t you know that’s when the minister from the Presbyterian church, the one that Marcy used to go to, made his appearance. As if he’d been lurking outside the door all week, waiting for his big break. To make a long story short he ended up jerking Gordon off. Throughout the chitchat and the prayers Gordon put on his exhaustion act, but when the minister said that as a boy he’d spent a year in an iron lung Gordon opened his eyes and said, “Geez, you poor kid.”

The minister shrugged. His name was Jack Bean. He resembled a child made up to play an older man. Silver hair and lots of it, slight build, caramel freckles saddling a button
nose, slender damsel fingers strumming the Bible. A prematurely greying thirty, Gordon put him at. The shrug surprised him. On a platter Gordon had offered him an opportunity to talk about God’s mysterious ways, but instead he appeared bewildered, resentful even. “It was torture,” he said, moving Gordon to pat him on the knee, pure fatherliness.

At which Jack’s leg shot out and kicked the bed. They both jumped, Gordon lifting his hand. A look passed between them, unmistakeable. Over Jack’s knee Gordon’s hand hovering like a benediction. Letting the hand drift back down was the most natural thing.

“Why were you crying?” Jack asked. He glanced at the door. It was shut, he’d shut it. He shifted from the chair to the edge of the bed while Gordon, simply by keeping his hand still, found it halfway up Jack’s thigh.

“I don’t remember,” Gordon answered.

Jack walked his fingers under the sheet. On Gordon’s thigh they halted. “What about your heart?” Beads of sweat like braille across his forehead.

“Strong as an ox.”

Jack nestled into his shoulder. “God forgives everything,” he whispered.

S
onja’s friend, Gail, glances up from her magazine and says, “You’re eating it! Oh, you pig, I can’t believe it! What a fat pig!”

There is only the head and halo left. The rest Sonja ate last night. She selects a melting chocolate-stick whisker and quickly nibbles it down to nothing. “If you don’t want to get fat,” she advises, “you’d better not have any.”

Gail turns to one side, exchanging blank looks with an invisible witness. “Well,” she says, turning back to Sonja, “thank you very much.” She has two voices: disgusted and—this one—sarcastic. “Thank you for that truly fantastic helpful hint.”

A fond smirk from Sonja.
She
knows when her leg is being pulled.

It is about two o’clock in the afternoon, another scorcher. For the seventh day in a row Sonja is doing her pin clipping in the back yard. Doughnut glaze turns to water in this heat, so Gail has the day off from her job (again), and since she lives in an attic room with no air-conditioning and “there was nothing better to do” now that she has broken up with her boyfriend she came over to work on her tan. She is wearing a madras bathing suit with a lacy bodice that gives the impression she is developed. A matching madras bow is in the crease where her bangs fringe off from the rest of her hair, which when she and Sonja first met—at Schropps, where Gail was a clipper herself for a total of three days—was egg-yolk yellow but is now silver-white and crackly looking, reminding Sonja of that stuff you put in the bottom of Easter baskets. Her toenails are painted skin colour,
the colour of the skin-colour crayon. Her feet are so thin that when she took off her shoes Sonja mentally counted toes, doubtful that there could be five across. This was when Gail was sitting in the other lawn chair and had her feet on the table … before Sonja described Gordon making a sink-draining sound, then keeling over in the chair. “Not
this
chair,” was Gail’s reaction, and she held her arms aloft as if the arms of the chair were splattered with manure, then she got up and spread her towel on the grass, ordering Sonja to do the back of her legs.

Sonja hauled herself out of her chair and lowered herself onto her hands and knees. “You’re one skinny minny,” she said as she applied the suntan lotion.

“Go suck eggs.”

“Go jump in the lake,” Sonja shot back cheerfully. Does Gail ever remind her of Sniffers, the hamster she used to have! Every time she tried to pat Sniffers or even slip food into his cage, he bit her. Eventually she had to flush him down the toilet.

Gail, likewise, isn’t thrilled with the arrival of food. When Doris brought out the cat cake, what was left of it, Gail said, “Oh, barf.”

“Don’t charm me to death,” Doris said, setting the cake on the table.

Gail sighed. “I’m sure it’s delicious, Mrs. Canary. It’s fattening is all I meant.” She had to shout the second part because Doris was already over at the clothesline, yanking the sheets off. “By the way, Gail,” Doris called, “could you babysit Joanie tonight? Just for a couple of hours while we’re at the hospital?”

“Gee, I’d love to,” Gail said. “But I have a date.”

This wasn’t true. Only a few minutes ago she’d been moaning about having nothing to do that evening.

“Isn’t Mrs. Jolley going to babysit?” Sonja asked.

“She can’t,” Doris called. “She’s picking Tibby up from the taxidermist’s.”

When Doris was gone, Sonja asked Gail why she had lied, and Gail said, “‘Cause your little weirdo sister gives me the creeps.”

“Huh,” Sonja reflected after a minute. She couldn’t fathom it. It was like a rose giving you the creeps, like a bunny. “It takes all kinds,” she observed, knowing this to be the truth. Knowing the truth to be only aversion.

“Shut up and listen,” Gail said. “Thirty-two ways to beat summer boredom.’” She was reading from her magazine. “‘One, have an anti-boredom party. Picket around a pool, along a beach. Best placard wins a prize.’” She looked up, her face all horror and disbelief, exactly like a person having a heart attack (Sonja could now appreciate). “Who comes
up
with this retarded b.s.?”

Now, while Sonja wolfs down the cake before it melts, Gail is making her do something called a “Miss Sophisti-quiz,” the topic of which is, “Are you in step with the sixties?”

“He’s very impressed with Bob Dylan,’” Gail reads. “Do you say Bob Dylan is, one, a terrific comic? Two, a protest folknik to be reckoned with? Three, an exciting Welsh poet?’” She squints up at her. “You better know this.”

“An exciting Welsh poet?” Sonja tries.

“You are so
stupid
!” Gail screams. She slaps the magazine shut, rolls onto her back. “I can’t believe how stupid you are.” She writhes. She appears to have burst her appendix. “I don’t even know what we’re doing this quiz for anyway. As if anyone would ask you out.”

“For your information, Little Miss Know-it-all, I’ve been out on a date or two in my life.”

Gail laughs, that laugh of hers that always makes Sonja want to grab anything breakable. “Oh, yeah?” Gail sputters. “With who? Mr. Schropp?”

Mr. Schropp, Sonja’s boss, is over seventy.

“That,” Sonja says, “is for me to know and you to find out.”
By “date or two” she means three. All with Hen Bowden.
(She
doesn’t count Yours.) They took place on consecutive Saturday afternoons almost a year ago, and up until now they have been her secret. Not even Doris knows. The first date, which was more like a pick-up, was toward the end of September. She was standing at the bus stop, on her way to Schropps with her shoe box of no-good pins. The way it works at Schropps is you buy your own pins and cards, and on the last Saturday of every month, if you can be bothered, you have the opportunity of returning any no-good pins (the ones without plastic tips) in exchange for a cent a pin. Sonja can be bothered. In a single month she goes through so many cartons of pins she can make an extra ten dollars on the no-good ones.

The only person in on Saturdays is Mr. Schropp. He hates it when clippers show up for a refund. Handing over the money, he wheezes pitifully, as if you were killing him. But Sonja wasn’t dwelling on what was in store for her. As she often does when she’s waiting for a bus and there’s nowhere to sit down with her knitting, she was envisioning the secret adventures of the poodles in her bedroom, what they get up to when nobody’s looking. There are fifty-seven of them not including Mimi, the jewellery-box poodle. Mimi is the leader, she communicates by doing semaphore with Kleenex tissues. The rest of them, the bedspread-and-curtain poodles, stand on each other and form a pyramid to see out the window. Because they love Sonja they become living dusters and clean her room. Afterwards they dance on their hind legs. Since Sonja was going to be gone for several hours that Saturday the poodles were getting into mischief. “Behave yourselves!” Mimi signalled. But the poodles burrowed in Sonja’s underwear drawer and played skipping with the laces of her old saddle shoes and, oh, no! now the little rascals were having sword fights with the bobby-pins!

It hardly needs pointing out that when the horn beeped, Sonja was a million miles away.

A white Volkswagen. The driver—a man with reddish-brown curly hair and a big, happy face—leaned over, rolled down the window and said, “Jump in, Kiddo.”

“That’s okay,” she said.

“It’s Hen Bowden!” the man bellowed. “What? You’ve forgotten me already?”

“Oh, Mr. Bowden,” she said, remembering the twin brothers her father brought home for supper about a month ago. She laughed as she approached the car. The Bowden brothers! What a pair of kidders.

“Do me a favour, drop the Mister, sister … Gimme that—“ He reached for the box. “I’ll throw it in the back.” She was trying to squeeze into the passenger seat but couldn’t fit with her box. “What’s in it?” he said, giving it a shake. “Ant bones?” He laughed, a single, blared “Ha!” that caused her to jump. His brother had had the same laugh. When they came for supper, between them their separate “Ha’s” had sounded like one person laughing normally but at slow speed.