Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  Dr. Ackerman, their family doctor, an elegant, burly man with black eyebrows like fur stoles, declared her “As healthy as …” He opened his hands balletically.

  “A horse?” Doris said.

  He smiled. He asked Doris if she had considered Einstein. “A genius,” he said in his soothing bass, “who didn’t speak a word until he was …” Another opening of the hands.

  “Did he act like that?” Doris said, indicating Joan. In a chair in the farthest corner of his office Joan sat with her eyes squeezed shut and her palms pressed over her ears. A little ghost (only when she was out of the closet did Doris appreciate how white her skin and hair were), her lips moving quickly as if in desperate prayer, but Doris knew that what she was doing was faintly echoing a repeated sound—the clock, maybe.

  “Joan is high-strung,” Dr. Ackerman said, his lovelorn gaze floating over to her. “That’s all.”

  “High-strung?” Doris said after a minute.

  “There’s nothing physically the matter with her eyes. There’s nothing physically the matter with her ears. So, that leaves us with?” His smile wafted back to Doris.

  Doris waited. “Nerves?” she said finally, sceptically.

  A single, savoured nod.

  “Well, how do you explain this closet business if it’s nerves? I’m telling you, she just sits there hour after hour. I’ve never heard of a kid sitting still for that long.”

  “And you stand for it?” He was still smiling but as if despite a tragedy.

  “How do you mean?”

  “I mean it seems to me she has the whole family worried as …”

  “Can be,” Doris admitted.

  “Have you thought of trying …” He clapped. Up by his ear, like a Spanish dancer.

  “What?”

  Another three claps. A suggestive lift of the eyebrows.

  “Applauding?”

  “Warming her fanny.” His tone so kindly that it took Doris another minute.

  “Spanking her?” she said.

  He might as well have asked if she had tried slamming her across the head with a two-by-four. As far as Doris was concerned he might as well have said string her up.

  What she and Gordon did instead was make the closet more hospitable. If she must hide, they preferred her to be upstairs where it was warm and dry and from where she didn’t materialize clutching centipedes. Gordon removed all the boxes and blankets and clothes and installed a piece of thick-pile rose carpet. On the inside of the closet door he taped a miniature reproduction from Life magazine: Monet’s “Garden at Argenteuil,” and right next to it, on the wall, he hung a three-foot-high mirror (which from then on she always sat facing so that at least she now faced the door as well). He hooked up a shaded twenty-five-watt light designed to illuminate a small circle while keeping the rest of the closet in relative darkness, but before doing that he bought her a pair of pink-framed sunglasses (why hadn’t he thought of sunglasses sooner? he wondered guiltily) and once she had them on, that was it, she wouldn’t remove them to undress, to go to bed, wash her face, those sunglasses were glued to her. The wax earplugs that he bought a few days later were not such a hit. Them she used to patch a hole in the closet wall where some plaster had fallen away.

  She seemed happy enough, but Doris could hardly stand the sight of her stowed in there with only reading material and a radio like some blind midget scholar hiding from the Nazis, so she collected her dolls and stuffed animals from the shelf where they were gathering dust, loaded them into the wicker laundry basket and put that in, frankly surprised it wasn’t pushed back out the same day and then realizing that why it wasn’t was because, with the boxes gone, it served as a partial barricade when the closet door was opened.

  Which it only was for getting or hanging up clothes or when any of them were paying a visit. To Joan’s credit she suffered the door to remain open during visits from the family.

  And there were a lot of these, a regular pilgrimage throughout the day—Doris always racing in, Sonja dropping by whenever she felt like taking a break from pin-clipping, Marcy joining her before and after school, and Gordon going straight there as soon as he arrived home from work. The half hour before supper that he used to spend reading the newspaper Gordon now spent stretched out on the floor.

  The truth was, the best part of the day those bleak days in his life was lying with his head in his daughter’s closet. Shoes and tie off, listening to the turned-down radio, so unwound he often found himself talking to her as if she were the family dog. “I’m just not a corporate man,” he might say. Or even, “Between you and me I’m not cut out for married life.” Once, to his horror, he realized that he had asked her if she’d ever contemplated suicide. He was a private person, tormented by almost everything he felt. But here he was spilling his guts to a toddler. It was eerie, inconceivable. Sometimes the words he’d just said would boomerang back to him and he’d come to as if out of a coma. Aghast, but refreshed as well, he had to admit—and usually assuring himself he’d only imagined he’d spoken out loud—he’d sit up and take a peek at her sitting back there so straight with her legs out and a magazine opened on her lap.

  He couldn’t see the expression in her eyes, not with the sunglasses on, but her lips were almost always parted, and this, combined with her utter stillness, gave her a highly expectant look. He would reach in and pat her barrette-laden head. What fine hair! Like spider webs, her ears poking through the strands. He might click his tongue or whistle through his teeth to hear her imitation. To be wowed by her.

  Gordon wasn’t alone in confessing to Joan or using her as a sounding board. They all did it, although maybe not so involuntarily. Without a pang, Doris tried out lies on her. When the mail arrived and the sound of it coming through the slot sent Joan fleeing into the closet (if she wasn’t there already), Doris would chase after her and sit in the closet doorway to open the letters, never failing to get a charge out of Joan’s perfect echo of the envelopes ripping. If there were any overdue notices or final invoices Doris would announce them and ask how they were going to weasel out of paying. Joan would look at her, seemingly rapt. Then Doris would say something like, “I know! I’ll tell them I moved the bank account and they mustn’t have transferred the money yet!” If she snapped her fingers, Joan immediately snapped hers.

  When a letter arrived from Harmony, Doris would read parts ofthat, too. Harmony had a one-tracked, colourful mind. “My woman,” Harmony wrote, “I pine for your breasts like fattened geese. In reveries I taste your mango honey.” These were not the parts Doris read. “The mist falls like arpeggios” was what she skipped to, that kind of thing. Harmony’s envelopes were lilac-scented and had her initials embossed on the flap. “Feel,” Doris would say, extending the envelope into the closet, and Joan would touch the HLL with the tips of all ten fingers like a person reading braille. Then Doris would hold the envelope under Joan’s nose and say, “Smell,” and Joan’s nostrils would flare and contract daintily. Sometimes she gobbled, a sign of pleasure.

  For her part Sonja read to Joan from the TV Guide in a vain attempt to entice her into the living room or just because Sonja had the TV Guide handy. Lying on Joan’s bed, she recited the children’s-show listings and, in case something rang a bell, the synopses from old movies and “Yesterday’s Newsreel.”

  “‘Yesterday’s Newsreel’ looks at 1936 and the death of King George. King George! Do you remember him, Bunny?”

  From inside the closet, Joan clicked her tongue.

  “You do?”

  Joan mooed.

  “You don’t?”

  Sonja watched TV all day. After failing grade eleven she had left school and was now working at home for the Schropps Pin Company. Her job was counting bobby-pins and clipping them on cards, twenty-four to a card, and she did this at the fold-out writing table in front of the TV while eating Planters peanuts and licorice Allsorts, her fat hands skittering from the box of pins to the box of cards to the food to her mouth.

  After J
oan was born, Sonja never lost the weight. Now she was up to 210 pounds, but the bigger she got the happier and lighter she felt, as if she were being inflated to the point where a little breeze would lift her out of her chair and bounce her around the room. Maybe it wasn’t the extra pounds that were making her so happy, though. She had another theory, a harebrained one, she knew, that Schropps had coated the bobby-pins with something like a laughing gas to keep the clippers in good spirits, because she could wake up on the wrong side of the bed but the minute she started working she’d be calm, completely relaxed all over except for her hands. Her hands, when she worked, felt mechanically operated, the way her feet had felt when she was a tap-dancer. Month after month for filling up the most cards she won the five-foot-high cardboard bobby-pin that said “I’m Tops at Schropps.” Plus she was hauling in a weekly paycheque of twenty-five dollars. At Doris’s insistence twenty of that went straight into the bank, into a “dowry account,” even though Sonja couldn’t see herself marrying.

  “I’m a born career girl,” she confessed to Joan from a deep vein of content.

  Marcy’s confessions were the most intimate, in these years anyway, and the raciest—“We touched his tongue with our tongue.” “We had ‘the feeling’ today.” She had picked up Doris’s habit of using the plural pronoun, with the difference that when she said “Time for our bath, Joanie” she climbed into the bath, too. Joan was her. The her that was tiny, magical, celestial… not entirely real. If Joan whimpered, Marcy’s eyes welled up. To her parents, Marcy pointed out that she could do the talking when she overheard them fretting over Joan’s speechlessness. She brushed Joan’s wispy hair with Gordon’s shaving brush, and her own scalp tingled. She adorned Joan’s head with ribbons and barrettes and felt all dressed up.

  When Joan was younger and in a high chair, Marcy had fed her. Marcy still insisted on cutting Joan’s meat (while Joan covered her ears at the scraping noise). Usually Joan then cut the meat into even smaller portions, and she could do it without a sound. At three and a half she had the table etiquette of a finicky duchess. She ate one pea at a time. She chewed silently and forever and with her mouth closed. She swallowed as if her throat was sore, touching her neck with the tips of her fingers. Doris never bothered to put out napkins, but Joan always had a tissue handy to dab the corners of her mouth. Where had she learned such manners? Not from any of them, although to make her life easier they had all become fastidious, quiet eaters. There were no raw carrots or celery to munch on, for instance, and they kept their voices down. If Marcy wanted to say something directly to Joan, to be extra quiet she often only thought it.

  In bed at night Marcy’s communication with Joan was entirely telepathic. Doris used to shout “Go to sleep!” if Marcy talked, so now, as soon as Doris was out of the room, Marcy left her own bed and climbed into Joan’s and “thought” to her. Her challenge was to keep thinking conversation until Joan fell asleep, but she never managed it. The last thing she saw every night before drifting off was the first thing she saw every morning—Joan looking at her (the green plastic lenses of Joan’s sunglasses weren’t so dark that you couldn’t make out her eyes). Joan lying there, staring. And parroting some soothing noise, like a drip or the refrigerator motor.

  Eight

  In the autumn of 1960 Doris took Joan to another doctor, who recommended a third doctor. This third doctor fastened Joan to an electroencephalogram while she sat limply with her eyes shut, apparently asleep except that she imitated the electric shaver cropping patches of her hair. A small desk fan wafted some of the hair in Doris’s direction, and as if it were dandelion tuft Doris caught it, balled it up and released it with a wish—“Please don’t let her be brain-damaged.”

  But Doris already knew she was. The diagnosis when it came—after more tests, after x-rays and separate physical examinations by two other neurologists—was only confirmation, in Doris’s eyes as pointless as the bathroom scales spelling out that you’re broad in the beam. The nature of the damage was scar tissue, almost certainly from the fall at birth. The scar tissue was fickle. It enhanced certain abilities but interfered with others, mainly the ability to vocalize words. So although Joan could reproduce certain sounds and could understand what was said to her, she couldn’t talk and likely never would.

  “She could if we wanted to!” Marcy protested when Doris broke the news to her.

  “We don’t know that, Sweetie.” In the back of her mind, the song “Happy Talk” babbled.

  “She could!” She appealed to Joan, who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Couldn’t we?”

  Joan stepped over to Marcy—that cautious, lightfooted way she had of walking in the house, arms trailing, fingers moving like cilia. She stood on tiptoe (she was only half Marcy’s height) and sniffed, a thing she sometimes did when you asked her a question, and Doris mentally added “smelling people’s faces” to her “Signs of Brain Damage” list.

  “Couldn’t we?” Marcy repeated.

  Joan stepped back and made clucking noises that Marcy took for “Sure.”

  “She said yes!”

  “You know Zorro’s servant?” Doris said. “What’s his name, Leonardo?”

  “Bernardo,” Marcy said sullenly.

  “Bernardo. Well, you know how Bernardo can’t talk but he can hear better than anybody? That’s like Joanie. Joanie can’t talk but she can make sounds better than anybody.”

  “We could talk if we wanted to,” Marcy said, clasping Joan’s hand.

  “Listen tome,” Doris said. “Parts of Joanie’s brain just don’t work,” she said, her voice reaching the jubilant-sounding pitch it did when she wanted to make no bones about a thing and engendering in Joan a quiver of delight that, through their joined hands, Marcy detected and mistook.

  “Mommy, you’re upsetting us!” she said. “You’re hurting our feelings!”

  One of the doctors advised Gordon and Doris that when it came time for Joan to go to school she be sent to the Mother Goose Home for Mentally Retarded Children, a spanking-new factory-like building with portal-sized windows and a few hole-faced Mother Goose characters on the lawn (Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee), the kind of statues you stick your own face through and someone takes your picture.

  “She’s hardly a drooling idiot,” Doris said.

  “Don’t let ‘Mentally Retarded’ throw you,” the doctor said. “They kept the old name for some reason but they’re taking in all kinds of kids now. Mongoloids, deaf-mutes, your straight delinquent cases.”

  “When the time comes, I’ll teach her at home,” Doris said.

  “Are you qualified?”

  “Before I got married, I was a teacher.”

  A Sunday-school teacher when she was twelve, she meant. Not that either she or Gordon cared about the lie. “Do you think you’d be able to manage it?” Gordon said on the drive home. “That’s all I’m questioning.”

  “Oh, for crying out loud!” Doris said. “Look at all the dimwit teachers there are! The only thing they have that I don’t are the textbooks.”

  A few months later, when the three diagnoses were in, she went to Marcy’s school after four o’clock, just marched in the unlocked gymnasium door and down to the grade-one classroom and stole two Dick-and-Jane readers, a spelling book and an arithmetic book.

  Now that she had the idea of doing the teaching she was raring to get started. As much for her own sake as for Joan’s. Scouring magazines for contests and scrawling out hundreds of reasonable facsimiles gave her a kick, but it wasn’t enough any more. She knew the signs—not being able to sit still for a second and then, when she did, falling into daydreams about the sexpot cashier at Ted’s Cigar Store. Night-time dreams about making love with strange women in public places, such as in front of the meat counter at Dominion.

  She had been hoping that she was done with women. Her explanation to herself had been that indulging in women was a stage she’d gone through with a lot of help from voodoo. Lately, though, she’d been wondering i
f it wasn’t Harmony who had set her off, but Joan—the shock of Joan’s arrival, the shock of becoming a grandmother.

  Oh, who knows? “You haven’t touched me in over ten years” was what she intended to throw at Gordon if he ever found out, and you bet it was a good excuse but it wasn’t the reason. Her yearning for Gordon and her yearning for women ran on two separate tracks. That much she had always felt, and occasionally she felt the delicacy and the imperiousness of the division, a bit like the reminder when you choke on food that you breathe from one place and swallow from another. The only other thing she was sure of was that loving women was dangerous. Don’t think she didn’t fight it. Since Harmony there’d been only Robin the Avon Lady, and that was only the one time but enough of a close call to scare her off for good. So she had thought.

  Blunt-spoken Robin, who left her with the thrilling, crazy impression that while “normal” women were in their kitchens dreaming up the winning answer to “Why I Love Tender-leaf Tea,” there were bands of feverish Valkyrie lesbians out hunting sex. She knew Robin for all of an hour, but for years afterwards she was convinced that Harmony had been exceptional, that most lesbians scorned romance and long love affairs, and you’d never know they were lesbians to look at them. Except for how they looked at you. And if you didn’t blink when they looked at you like that, you were in the money.

  They had red, spiky nails, these lesbians. They showed up at your front door and sang “Ding dong”! On your chesterfield they sat with their left thigh touching your right thigh while they massaged lotion into your hands and your calloused elbows. Into your bare feet. “How does that feel?” they asked. You said, “Like a million bucks.” You let them test all their products on you, offering your wrist to be slashed with lipstick. The shade you liked best they applied to your lips. They held your chin and brought their own face so close to yours that you inhaled each other’s breath.