Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  Nobody knows, not even Jeanie. Marcy is too ashamed. When she wakes up in the middle of the night her big anxiety is what if the baby doesn’t die? “Please let it die,” she prays. In her fervour she pulls her hair out in clumps. She makes deals with God. To be good. To be silent. She Scotch-tapes her lips together so that she can’t talk. She knows that she is too young to marry, and yet as an alternative to being an unwed mother she finds herself reflecting upon Dug, the boy Jeanie’s Ouija board said was going to be her husband. Except that Marcy doesn’t know any Dugs, not yet.

  The dream that invariably wakes her up these nights is the talking-baby one. It’s not her baby, and it’s not her mother’s, either. If only when she woke up she could remember what the baby said, then she might know who it belonged to. She’s not certain but she thinks it’s a girl. On the way to and from school she searches for it in the bulrushes along the river. She is frightened of quicksand and won’t step where the earth is wet.

  Meanwhile, throughout November and despite her baby worries, she is obsessed with giving Jeanie baths. After school, as soon as Jeanie arrives and lets them into the house, Marcy chirps, “How would you like a nice, relaxing soak in the tub?” In bed at night she has found that if she presses her palm between her legs she can bring on “the feeling,” just by thinking about washing Jeanie’s breasts. Not without guilt though. The suspicion that she is doing something wrong has entered the picture and loiters during the day in the creases of clothes and between the slats of the Venetian blinds in her classroom, and yet “the feeling” itself, when it washes over her, is white and glorious, like heaven. Her ensuing prayers tend to cancel each other out. “Thank you, Jesus,” she says, heartfelt. “Thank you, dear Lord.” And just as heartfelt, “Please forgive me, Jesus.”

  The night before her mother’s baby is born, Marcy’s baby dies. A sharp cramp wakes her from a dream about it dying. She goes into the bathroom and sits on the toilet because in her dream that was how it happened. She was on the toilet and the baby dropped out of her down there, still alive, a puny blue baby that could do the dog-paddle. Eventually it sunk but not before holding up one tiny finger, then two fingers, then—last chance—three fingers. When Marcy was sure that it had drowned she fished it out of the bowl and put it in a Pez dispenser for burial.

  Her father is still up, listening to his “Mister Sandman” record. “Please turn on your magic beam,” Marcy softly sings along to quell an unnameable fear. “Bring me a, bring me a, bring me a—“ she sings where the record always sticks. She sits on the toilet for half an hour, in the dark. Finally she gets off and switches on the light to assure herself of her flat stomach. There is blue lint in her navel. Knowing it is only lint, she nevertheless picks it out and saves it to bury.

  That following day, just when it doesn’t matter any more, she meets a Dug. He reminds her of her dream poodle, his tight, curly blond hair and brown, snappy eyes. She doesn’t make fun of his baggy Bermuda shorts. When the teacher says, “This is Doug Green all the way from London, England,” if he had been a poodle, Marcy would have held her flat palm under his nose and said, “Good boy.” She would like to bite his chubby legs.

  At recess, intending flattery and consolation, she tells him he has ruby-red lips. He is alone beside the Elmer the Safety Elephant flagpole. He says, “Don’t talk rubbish,” and proceeds to do a series of hectic, crab-like cartwheels. The kind of cartwheels they do in England, she supposes. She tells him she has a crown at her house (the Queen for a Day crown, although Marcy has been led to believe it’s her mother’s lost prom-queen crown, only recently discovered in the attic). She brags that her father once mailed the Queen of England six books and that the Queen phoned him to say thank you. (This is a dream, not a memory, induced by her belief that the words “Send her victorious” are actually “Send her six storybooks.”)

  The boy says, “Watch this,” and stands on his head. His shorts riding up produce in her the sentiment that her field of prospective husbands is narrowing.

  On the way home from school he runs up behind her and says, “You better watch out or I’ll kiss you,” then keeps running. She stands still as white flowers open in her head. Boys gallop by her, all of them wearing Davy Crockett coonskin hats, the first such hats she has seen not on TV, herds of boys with tails on their heads. She has to go to the bathroom. She crouches behind a cedar hedge, and while she is peeing remembers the Pez container in her pencil case. Next to where she has peed she digs a hole with a sharp stone and buries her baby, finishing up with the singing of “What Can Little Hands Do to Please the King of Heaven?”

  By the time she arrives home Jeanie is already there, watching Secret Storm. Jeanie declines a bath, so Marcy brushes her hair instead. Almost in a trance Marcy runs the brush and her hand over Jeanie’s hair until Jeanie grunts and rolls onto her back. Marcy falls off her but climbs on again, astride her stomach. They look at each other, Marcy revelling in Jeanie’s eyes. She has heard her father refer to Jeanie’s eyes as beady, and she believes this to mean like jewels, sparkling.

  “You know what?” Marcy says. Her throat aches. Her chest aches with a kind of bursting.

  “What?” Jeanie says.

  Marcy is suddenly inspired. “You better watch out!”

  “Or what?” Jeanie asks in a sarcastic voice.

  “Or I’ll kiss you!” Marcy cries to her own enthralled disbelief.

  Jeanie tries to heave her off, but Marcy drops forward and clings with her wiry arms and legs. “Jeanie!” she cries, earnest now, her entire body chiming with joyful noise. “I love you so much!”

  Six

  To the four of them baby Joan was what the new car was until Gordon smashed it into a tree. They often stood together in a group and just looked at her. They ran their hands over her body and strove to find words worthy enough and took her for spins around the block to show her off. At the very thought of her they laughed. They had their picture taken with her.

  To the four of them baby Joan was what the sales brochure had said the new car was. Glamour plus. A supreme thrill, and a joy, and a blessing.

  Now that they were back home Doris’s apprehension about her was gone. Now that they were away from those senile Dearness crackpots was how she saw it. (Just like the nuts that fall, I’m a little cracked, that’s all! were her theme lyrics for the whole bunch of them.) Strangely, she felt redeemed when she was holding Joan, as if Joan were the miraculous flowering of her own illicit sex.

  Sonja felt redeemed all of the time. Those days of shame back when she’d first learned she was pregnant out of wedlock were no longer even a memory, let alone an unpleasant one, and any time Yours crossed her mind, after she had shuddered at the recollection of his nostrils, she thought almost fondly, “What a character.” Without him there would be no Joan, there wasn’t any getting around that. And the way he had pounced on her and got it over and done with in no time, that struck her as pretty smart now, like a doctor slipping the needle into your arm when your mouth is open for the thermometer. She never did see his penis, so it wasn’t as if she had nightmares about it, although she’d had two weird dreams about green hammers—going into Ted’s Cigar Store and all they were selling was green hammers, and a dream about her father having green hammers for arms.

  There’d been a hammer with a chipped green handle lying in a nail box on Yours’s windowsill. When she felt something pushing between her legs, it happened so suddenly and the thing was so solid she thought he was trying to stick the hammer handle up her. With his hand over her mouth she couldn’t cry out. The blood on the fingers of his other hand, which he showed to her while she was still pinned down, was from splinters, she thought. What’s more she thought it was his blood. She wasn’t hurt. She hardly felt a thing. “Serves you right,” she said as soon as his hand left her mouth. She was embarrassed to have been touched down there, she was scared to death because he was obviously a mental case after all, but even when he zipped himself back up she didn’t catch on. She
had to see the unbloodied hammer still lying in the nail box before another possibility struck her.

  “Did we go all the way?” she asked.

  He patted down her skirt and brushed a coil of hair out of her eyes. “We sure did,” he said, smiling as if remembering a wonderful, romantic time.

  “We did?”

  His eyes emptied. “You give a fella the come hither, what do you expect?”

  It was like missing the last bus. It was like losing her wallet. And she knew, she knew that she was pregnant. Yes, there it was—already!—another, faster heartbeat behind her own. Yours got up and left the room and she just sat there, listening to her two hearts. When he came back he had a facecloth. For her, she thought, but he used it to wipe the blood on the chesterfield. He asked if she could name the four blood groups.

  They had met for the first and last time less than an hour before, at the Swan Restaurant next door to where her father worked. She had gone downtown for a polio shot and to bring her father a manuscript he’d left at home, since his office was in the same building as the doctor’s. “Gin Alley” the manuscript was called. On the bus she opened it to read the recipes but it was a story about a man named Ratface.

  “Potboiler means trash,” her father said when she asked why he was always going on about how his company published nothing except cookbooks. “Private-eye novels, shoot-’em-up hoodlum novels.” He spoke nicely but he looked at her as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was, and suddenly she craved apple pie à la mode. And then she remembered that she was next door to where they had the best apple pie she had ever tasted! Her father smiled and said, “Oh, I get it, you were pulling my leg.” With his finger he wiped away the saliva at the corner of her mouth.

  It was a Thursday morning. Phys. ed., math, chemistry—all her worst subjects were on Thursday morning. So she was in no hurry. She ordered two pieces of pie and a glass of chocolate milk, using up her whole allowance. She was just digging in when a huge man with nostrils the size of quarters sat beside her at the counter and extended a pack of Lucky Strikes. “No, thank you,” she said, “I don’t smoke,” and he said in a Southern accent, “I’m with you a hundred percent, stunts your growth.”

  She glanced at him. He winked. She looked down but couldn’t help smiling. Stunts your growth, she thought. That was a good one.

  He pocketed the cigarettes and withdrew a cigar, turning to the woman on his other side for a light. Then he turned back to Sonja and stared at her. After a few minutes he said, “You know who you look like? Elizabeth Taylor. I’ll bet folks tell you that all the time. I’ll bet folks stop you on the street for your autograph.”

  She laughed. “Every day and twice on Sundays.” She knew that she looked nothing like Elizabeth Taylor.

  “Shoot,” he said. “Elizabeth Taylor.” He sat there staring until she wondered if he thought she was Elizabeth Taylor. She wondered if he was a mental case. She gave him another quick glance.

  “You’re of Greek origin, aren’t you?” he said.

  She shook her head.

  “If you were, folks would say you were Aphrodite. Know who she was?”

  “No.” Looking straight at her pie.

  “Goddess of love, beauty and fertility. Daughter of Zeus.”

  At this point the waitress came over, but he waved her away, saying he didn’t need food, he was feasting his eyes. Sonja ate steadily and tried to ignore him and his cigar smoke. She tried to remember what fertility meant. She knew it was rude. Another few minutes passed and then he tapped a finger on the cover of her geography notebook and drawled. “Soncha.” He traced the letters with a ridged, yellow fingernail. “Soncha, now there’s a classy name. Pleased to make your acquaintance, Soncha.”

  “Sonja,” she couldn’t help correcting.

  “Sonja.” He nodded. “Sonja. As in I wanya, Sonja?”

  She let out an embarrassed laugh. “No,” she murmured.

  “You know what you can call me?”

  She started eating faster, shovelling in the last forkfuls.

  “Take a guess.”

  She sighed, flustered.

  “Go ahead, guess.”

  “Red?” she tried with her mouth full. He had red hair.

  “Try again.”

  She swallowed. Scanned him sidelong. “Stretch?”

  “Yours,” he said. “You can call me yours.” He set his cigar in the ashtray and wrested her hand from her glass. She had an idea that he was going to perform a magic trick, the one where a coin suddenly appears in your palm. “I bet this is as soft as beeswax,” he said. He balled up her hands between his. “Mmm, darlin’,” he said.

  She wondered what to do. She didn’t want to be rude. She didn’t want to upset him and make him snap. His hands were the size of baseball gloves, quite pale. By comparison her hand was a little clump of brown bread dough he was working. When he began to pull on her fingers, she tried to tug away, and he gave her a heavy-lidded, broken-down look.

  “I’m not allowed to date yet,” she said. It was true, although up until now it had been beside the point. She tugged at her hand again but he folded it in both of his and brought his cupped hands to his lips.

  “Well, then, how about we just be close friends,” he said.

  To get rid of him she agreed to walk with him as far as the corner. He said, “It’s a deal,” slapping the counter with both hands and coming to his feet. He was even taller than she’d thought, his black boots long and pointed, like a court jester’s. But with cleats. Out on the sidewalk, for every scraping chink from him, her penny loafers produced three feeble little slaps, and trying to change her pace didn’t make any difference, he automatically adjusted. He said that she was so graceful, she must be a ballerina.

  “A tap-dancer,” she admitted.

  “Hey, show me a few steps,” he said, but she said it didn’t work without tap shoes. They walked on. He kept looking at her, she could feel it. She looked straight ahead, clutching her books to her chest, scurrying alongside what felt like the sway of steel girders.

  When they reached the corner he badgered her to walk with him just three more blocks, and seeing as she wasn’t really going out of her way, she gave in. “Oh, all right” was her half of the conversation until they arrived at his place. It turned out to be in a new apartment building. He said she’d see a grown man cry like a baby if she didn’t take a ride in his elevator.

  “Oh, all right,” she said and followed him through the ritzy lobby. Partly out of curiosity because she’d never been in a highrise. Partly out of sheer surrender.

  The elevator was mirrored, even the ceiling, which he came up to. He punched the highest button, nine, then clamped her shoulders and turned her in a circle. He said, “No matter which way you look, darlin’, there we are.”

  It was true. Her so short and chubby and him so tall she thought for a minute they must be fun-house mirrors, except that he’d been that tall outside.

  “You and me,” he said.

  He turned her again.

  “Going on to infinity,” he said.

  Seven

  She’s not like any of us,” Sonja would marvel at least once a day as the weeks and months passed and Joan’s face articulated into gorgeousness, especially around the eyes, whose expression was so intent and focused that combined with her astonishing ability to mimic sounds and to hum the first two bars of “In the Mood” on key it seemed obvious that the family had a genius on its hands.

  When she was about eighteen months old, however, Doris began to wonder. Here Joan was doing amazing impressions of creaking hinges, screeching tires, radio static, and yet she hadn’t uttered a comprehensible word yet, not even “Mama” or “Dada,” and when you spoke to her she just went on staring at you in her detached way until (if you were pressing for a response) she cooed or chirped or mooed or gobbled or made some other animal sound. For two months now, she’d been walking and feeding herself. But throw a ball at her, and her hands didn’t so much as twitch
to catch it. Or try to get her to wave or clap, or to give you a kiss or hug. Or to laugh. Or to even smile! Good luck getting her to go outside without covering her eyes with her hands. The worst was that she couldn’t bear the sight of anyone except the immediate family. Somebody rang the doorbell, and first she reproduced the sound and then she sank to the floor, and not even putting Glenn Miller on the record player could persuade her to get up.

  By the time she was two and a half she still had not said a single word to any of them, and she spent much of the day either down in the windowless laundry room or in her and Marcy’s closet. Mostly in the closet, which was not as cramped as you might think because it had once been a dressing room. She had unearthed her old potty from under a stack of blankets and she was using it again, presumably to cut down on outings. Back in a corner she listened at barely audible volume to the big-band station on the transistor radio that Doris won on Queen for a Day. How did she know that the aerial had to be poked into the room for good reception? The other mystery was what was she doing with Sonja’s old high-school textbooks and Gordon’s Webster’s Dictionary and Pears Cyclopaedia? There they were, in two stacks. Never opened as far as anybody had witnessed. She had also brought in the Eaton’s and Simpson’s catalogues and a box of old Life magazines, and these she studied with the excessive intensity that she studied herself in reflective surfaces—mirrors, windows, the toaster, spoons…

  You could coax her up from the laundry room but not out of the closet. Once she was in the closet you might as well be appealing to a cat, her green eyes shining and vigilant. Stroke her hair, squeeze her feet in their white newborn shoes, the pleasure was all yours. She would emerge when she was good and ready. When you were gone. You wouldn’t hear her walk down the hall, you’d hear her pipsqueak hum, or you’d turn off a light and a second later hear that dry click again, behind you this time.