Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  Unlikely scenarios were Doris’s specialty, but this one was out of her league. Anyway, Gordon wasn’t Harmony, even if you drank too many rum-and-Cokes and kept your eyes shut. By the same token, Harmony wasn’t Gordon. Nobody was anybody else, although people resembled each other and linked hands like paper dolls.

  If she knew this, then why after all these years did she persist in thinking of Cloris Carter as another Harmony La Londe? As Harmony but with Robin’s urgency? There was harm in that. And harm in thinking of herself as herself nine years ago. No roaring heck in the looks department, but a big draw for Negro women. The afternoon of Gordon’s heart attack when Doris pressed her hand on Cloris’s arm she may have felt she was overstepping the bounds but at the same time she believed that Cloris felt nothing of the kind.

  Sixteen

  Billie Holiday on the portable record player—“Gimme a Pigfoot and a Bottle of Beer.” On the silver chesterfield Doris and Cloris drinking iced tea and taking another stab at the shortbread cookies Doris brought over almost six weeks ago now. Talk about stale. Cloris cracks them like nuts between her front teeth. “Hmm-mmm,” she says. She is kind. Stupendous. Wearing mauve slacks and a short-sleeved yellow blouse today and the countless silver bracelets that make cyclones of her arms.

  It’s a half hour since Doris arrived in her black mourning dress. The dress is for Cloris’s sake, to milk the loss. (That still makes it a loss. Doris has wept as much as anyone would for a mother who in the last year of her life went through her photo albums cutting out her daughter’s head wherever it appeared and substituting Queen Elizabeth’s at an appropriate age, which didn’t always guarantee a match in size.) Doris is now regretting the dress. It’s too tight under her arms and it’s sticking to her like tar because the heat wave may be finished outdoors but not in Cloris’s bachelor flat above Hollywood Dry Cleaners. A laurel of beads at her hairline seems to be the full extent of Cloris’s perspiration, whereas Doris feels like an irrigation system. She’s been thinking of getting the show on the road, asking whether Cloris would mind if she took the dress off and hung it in the bathroom to dry, except that what if two seconds later the phone rings and somebody is dead? One of the girls this time? You don’t have to be superstitious to acknowledge that things happen in threes.

  No, here’s what’s really holding her back. What if Cloris isn’t game? A month ago she would have sworn that Cloris was. Why? She can’t remember why she was so sure. She can’t believe she was that trusting. A wide-eyed kid reaching for a sparkler when the odds are it’s a blowtorch. Careful, she’s telling herself now. Careful is the lone lyric in her brain, so paramount it doesn’t need a song.

  She is still thinking of Cloris as another Harmony but she’s taking into account that Harmony was starting her menopause before she woke up to women, and Cloris can’t be much over thirty-five. For the sake of describing Doris’s state of mind you could say that she is keeping three running tallies: Looks Good, Looks Bad, and Can’t Tell. Under Looks Good is Cloris at the door crying, “Doris!” as if they were sisters separated for years, and then hugging her so hard her spine cracked. Cloris laughs and says, “Lord, I snapped my husband’s rib that way,” and this (the husband, not the injury) is under Looks Bad for the second or two it takes her to add that she ditched that bastard in Detroit. The photograph on top of the TV turning out to be her brother goes under Looks Good. As does Cloris seeming fascinated with whatever Doris says. Under Can’t Tell is, does she look at everyone like that? (Like Joan does, come to think of it.) The whites of her eyes are webbed with red veins. Is that genetic or from suffering? Under Looks Good is that when Doris loses her train of thought for the second time because of Cloris staring at her and she blurts out, “Your eyes are something else,” Cloris laughs with her mouth opened as wide as the Hertz rent-a-car woman’s.

  A moment later Cloris’s face is all sadness and sympathy. She wants to tell Doris how sorry she is about her mother dying. A beautiful crooning in the back of her throat as she clutches Doris’s hand (Looks Good). She says she can’t even think of her mama dying. “That woman is my rock of ages,” she says. For a moment this Looks Bad—she’s a church-goer—but it turns out that, like Harmony, she lost her faith because God is a man and she’s had it with men. “They’re all lowdown snakes.” Looks Very Good, although Doris feels obliged to point out that there are exceptions.

  “I’m talking about white mens, too,” Cloris says. She frowns at the floor and then her eyes swivel back up to Doris’s. “Mainly white mens.”

  “Oh, white mens can be s?BS,” says Doris, adopting Cloris’s plural as obliviously as she adopts other people’s accents. Her tone suggests that she has a personal anecdote or two up her sleeve. She doesn’t really, but she could easily invent a few on the spot.

  Cloris declines to ask. “Amen,” she says, reaching for a cookie. She shakes her arm and the bracelets start up like a field of crickets. “You got a fine man by the sounds of it,” she says.

  “Gordon? They don’t come any better than Gordon. Our girls just adore him …” She sighs. “But, you know…” Sighs again and looks straight at Cloris, jamming desire into her eyes.

  Cloris looks back, looks hard. Telegraphs red lightning. It goes on for so long that Doris believes they must have crossed the line and she is this close to saying “He is a man” when Cloris says, “Seems there’s not a man alive doesn’t have some but trailing after him. He’s a good provider, but he’s one mean jackass. Oh, he’s handsome, Lord knows, but is he lazy! More buts than a damn ashtray.” She laughs. Boulders moving underwater. She has the one gold cap, no fillings that Doris can see. What white teeth.

  Doris pretends to laugh along. She fans her thighs with her skirt. Then, suddenly fretful, she stands and starts moving around, saying, “Don’t mind me, I’ve got ants in my pants.” She fingers the starched collar of Cloris’s nurse’s uniform hanging on the back of the bathroom door. Goes over to the kitchenette and taps a line of boxes on the counter. Cheerios, Frosted Flakes, Ritz Crackers, Pillsbury cake mix, Dash detergent. The trouble is, she needs Cloris to make the first move, but if Cloris is new to this then it’s up to her and she just doesn’t have that kind of nerve.

  “That’s for damn sure,” Cloris says. She is talking about having come to Toronto for the better pay at Sick Children’s Hospital—she’s a pediatric nurse—and to start her life over, but the prejudice up here is going to take some getting used to. It’s not the hateful kind, it’s the plain, dumb, happy kind. Her superintendent calling her “Jemimah.” The whole hospital taking it for granted that she and the one black intern on staff must be messing around like a pair of dogs. Doris shakes her head, clicks her tongue, half-consciously registers “black” for “Negro,” all the while breathing deep to ward off the fit she feels approaching. Some kind of convulsion, could be sneezing. It’s an oven in here. Now she’s panting. Maybe it’s a stroke, the third calamity turning out to be her dead.

  “Sit down, honey,” says Cloris. “You look hot as a griddle. By the window. Here, I’ll turn the fan on you.”

  Doris sits, the “honey” working on her like a shot of whisky. It’s been so long since a woman called her honey. Is it a pass? What does she think? Make it a pass, she nevertheless prays, already dying for another one, more sweet talk. Cream Cheese, Baby Lamb, Mango Juice, Honey Baby—Harmony’s names for her were a gourmet meal.

  “Honey, you all right?” says Cloris, and her hand is on Doris’s thigh. A smaller hand than you’d think, and older, corrugated like tree bark. Is this a pass? Doris knows that she’s being way too impatient, vulgar is more like it. Even most men would have the decency not to try anything so early in the game. But she can’t help herself. She could cry. She has a better idea, and given that her heart is going like a troupe of tap-dancers, it’s not completely an act. She half rises out of the chair and then collapses into the stage faint that she taught herself almost thirty years ago and that, at last, has come in handy.

  E
xcept that Cloris’s crowded little apartment isn’t a stage. Instead of hitting the floor, Doris’s head hits a horse-head book-end she hadn’t noticed sticking out from under the chair, and she really does black out. For a good half hour, she’d swear, because while she is unconscious she dreams that she and Cloris make love.

  The dream starts with her curled up on a bed between orange sheets, exactly like the ones Harmony used to have. She lifts the top sheet to verify that she is naked and sees how the orange makes her flesh look peachy and slender, years younger. She’d like to know where you buy these sheets. Another thing: how did Cloris manage to lug her onto the bed? Well, Cloris is a nurse, Doris reminds herself, nurses are strong. She lets the sheet waft down.

  And hears breathing. Then registers the warmth of it on the nape of her neck. And something brushing her upper back. Nipples. She knows that feeling. In exquisite slow motion she feels the nipples press, give way to the breasts, which flatten on her back as her rear end is cupped in a belly, flesh arriving and spreading over her in waves.

  She doesn’t move in case she’s dreaming and wakes up. No, she can’t be dreaming! You don’t see colours in dreams! A leg parts hers and starts a gentle pumping. A hand skims down her arm to her hip, barely touching. She hears the bracelets. That settles it, she must be awake. In a dream like this would she think to include the bracelets? What’s more, if she was dreaming, Cloris would be wrestling with her by now. All Doris’s dream women tend to be on the rambunctious side. They would roll her over. They wouldn’t ask, as Cloris just has, “Can we kiss, Honey Baby?”

  From here on it’s like a dream, which for Doris is only more proof that it isn’t. During sex with Harmony, Doris always hallucinated that the two of them were some kind of marine life. What she and Cloris have become are starfish. Her albino, Cloris inky. Their tongues entwine in impossibly long helixes. Doris’s jaw seems to unhinge, it opens so wide, until she has Cloris’s entire chin in her mouth. Cloris then sucks Doris’s chin into her mouth. They feed over each other’s bodies. A seashell pink underwater light. When Cloris slides on top of her, their mouths lock onto each other’s cunts as if driven by tides and the principles of physics. Whatever Cloris does, Doris does, this synchronization a natural law. Doris rolls her lips over Cloris’s labia, she makes her tongue as soft and fat and wet as Cloris’s labia, she nurses Cloris’s clitoris with more tenderness than she kissed her own sleeping babies. And though her mouth is full, she keeps saying, “Cloris,” and Cloris keeps saying, “Doris,” in voices very clear but far away, as if they have lost each other.

  “Cloris.”

  “Doris?”

  “Cloris.” And there is Cloris’s face, upside-down above her own. How did that happen? Who turned on the lights? Cloris is dressed. That was fast. Doris goes to touch her own temple, and touches Cloris’s hand. What is Cloris doing? It hurts like the dickens there. “Mama may have,” sings Billie Holiday, “and Papa may have …”

  “How do you feel?” Cloris asks.

  “How long was I out?” She scours her beloved’s eyes for some aftermath. Okay, she was dreaming, but it’s not inconceivable that Cloris had the same dream. Look what happened with her and Sonja on the train back from Vancouver!

  Cloris glances at her wristwatch. “Almost four minutes.”

  She must be kidding.

  “One more minute,” Cloris says, “and I was phoning for an ambulance.”

  “Four minutes?” Doris is still aroused, her cunt throbbing along with the song in her head (If you get me going, you get what’s coming …) and with the pulse in her temple, which Cloris is pressing an ice pack to. “What the heck did I fall on, anyway?”

  “A book-end. Lord, you’ve got a bump to beat the band.”

  Doris swallows hard.

  “You aren’t nauseated, are you?” A cool, alert look, her pupils contracting. Her nurse’s look, Doris thinks, and feels so bereft she releases a little whimper. “Let’s sit you up,” Cloris says, starting to lift her.

  Doris resists. “No, I’m fine. If I can just lie here for a second.”

  Cloris eases her back down. “Well, sure you can.”

  “Only four minutes? Really?”

  “Shush. Don’t talk now.”

  Doris gazes at her. Her gorgeous mauve lips that a minute ago—unbeknownst to them!—were kissing her. The eyes that saw her stark naked. Upside down, Cloris’s eyes are reptilian, unreadable. What Doris can’t get over is that Cloris missed the whole thing! It is all Doris can do not to roll over and sniff Cloris’s crotch for that nut smell. Why doesn’t she? The point of the faint was to end up in Cloris’s arms, better still her lap.

  Doris thinks about this and can’t quite believe it. Gradually she is appalled. What was she trying to pull? An old bag like her taking advantage of this beautiful woman. She thinks of Cloris saying, “You’re my first white friend in Toronto,” and feels stunningly corrupt. She feels like a sack of garbage somebody dropped in Cloris’s lap. She sits up—too quickly—and groans.

  “Take it easy,” Cloris says.

  “I’m okay.” Although there’s a bowling ball tumbling around inside her skull. “Let me hold that,” she says about the ice pack, and when her fingers touch Cloris’s she gets aroused again. She can’t shake the sensation that she and Cloris actually did make love. She feels blessed by it. Except that because only she knows that they made love, she also feels slimy and forlorn. And protective. Wanting to shield her new lover from the sex-starved housewife on the loose in this room.

  “Can I get you a glass of water?” Cloris asks, coming to her feet.

  Doris looks at her way up there. “A glass of water?”

  Cloris smiles, a wise, loving smile so exactly like the one Joan beamed on her that time in Grandma Gayler’s basement that her face seems to drain of pigment and age.

  “Or would you like more tea?” Cloris says.

  Doris can’t speak at all now. Cloris’s smile has stupefied her.

  “Iced tea,” Cloris says.

  “Um—“ Doris gets out. Her stopped heart generates a thicket under her breast. What does it mean, a smile like that? How can you tell if it’s for you alone or for the idea of someone like you? Or if you are beside the point? If you have waned into a transparency through which the real cherished thing is being seen?

  “You say,” Cloris says.

  “You say.” One thing she’s figured out—all the decisions from now on will be Cloris’s.

  “Iced tea.” She walks to the kitchenette, sandals slapping, bracelets ringing.

  “Then I’d better be going,” Doris says, but not so that Cloris will hear.

  Seventeen

  Rolled up under the rose-coloured carpet in the closet that Joan calls home is the white shirt Marcy wrote AL WAS HERE on. The day that Sonja found this shirt, Joan was watching her from behind the sofa and under the laundry tubs. She had been curled up on the old bath mat there, softly imitating sounds at the farthest rim of her hearing: a hum of traffic two streets away, a train whistle, a collision between a car and the train at a level crossing, sirens, a yapping dog whose eyes had just popped out and were dangling from their nerves (not that she knew this, although she knew about that dog from Marcy). Despite the damp she was drawn to the laundry room because it doesn’t have windows and because she had discovered that in basements the sharper sonorities are tempered. (In Grandma Gayler’s basement, sound was so velvety it burst into the open as mould!)

  When Sonja started fishing through the rag bag, Joan switched from yapping to echoing Sonja’s aimless hum. There was no resisting it. To a decibel Joan had registered the hearing range of each member of her family, so she was able to stay just outside of Sonja’s. The beat of her own heart she retarded to keep time with the slow two-four rhythm of the hum. Sonja’s yell, which was like the scraping of gears, she mimicked with enough volume to give away her whereabouts had Sonja not been so alarmed. Joan herself was alarmed, all sudden or loud noises affecting her like firecr
ackers. Normally she would have run for cover, but here she was already under cover, and the noise, after all, had come from her darling Sonja. Who was now backing out of the room.

  With the soles of her own feet Joan reproduced the thumps of Sonja ascending the stairs. Then, curious, she crept over to the shirt that Sonja had dropped.

  She saw the letters. Quickly she smoothed the shirt out, and what she read was ALL WAS HERE.

  All was here. It rang a bell. For at least four of her six years she had been aware of how close at hand everything was, of how whatever she wanted tended to be wherever she was. “Come out,” Marcy said. Why should she? What was in the bedroom that was not in the closet? All was in the closet. All was there.

  Joan is no pack rat, but she decided to hold on to this shirt.

  She has never once removed the shirt from under the carpet. She doesn’t need to. She is supremely conscious of its pacifying vibration, which is so like Sonja that it is a surrogate Sonja.

  For Joan, the whole world vibrates—objects, people, weathers, shades of light and season, and sounds themselves emanating their signature amplitudes and oscillations. At least half of all frequencies, no matter what their amplitude, hurt, especially when they are new to her, but it is not out of the question that if she is subjected to a painful vibration enough times it will turn into a pleasant one.

  Too bad this hasn’t been the case with light. Light continues to hurt, sunlight more so than artificial light. Sunlight sounds like the dentist’s drill and assaults like needles in her eyes, whereas the dentist drill, turned off, has a bearable thrum, as does the dentist, Dr. Jhar. When the drill is turned on, within its tortuous buzz is a soothing resonance veering on that of darkness. Darkness purrs. Similar to basements, it softens all vibrations. White paper also purrs. Green paper tinkles. Licorice Allsorts, the shower curtain and a girl named Gail tinkle like a lady’s laugh.