Mister Sandman

by Barbara Gowdy

  “Are you all right?” Marcia says.

  “Hmm?” Sonja says.

  “I said, are you all right?”

  “I’m a bubble,” Sonja says, sitting up straight. “A bubbly, bouncing bubble.”

  “Are you stoned?” This would be as mind-blowing as her having an orgasm.

  “How do you mean?”

  Marcia stares at the shrinking circles of pink on Sonja’s cheeks. When you turn off the TV you get that same implosion to a dot. “Nothing,” she says, but she is entertaining the idea of Sonja as capable of broadcasting who knows what startling programs. “Forget it,” she says.

  “How was your day?” Sonja asks.

  Marcia has a summer job typing and filing at a large employment agency in a renovated Victorian house. The boss, a stocky middle-aged man, greasy black hair, a habit of announcing himself by means of tragic sighs in the doorway, pats her bum and makes her promise never to wear a girdle. His secretary, who is also pushing fifty, and married, takes dictation with one hefty leg hoisted over the arm of her chair. The night after Marcia’s first time having sex with the secretary’s shy, girlish son is the night Paul asks.

  They are lying naked on his bed. It is so soon after his saying “Mercy” that she hasn’t spit the semen out yet. Unintentionally she swallows it and her sense is that it acts as a truth potion because before she knows it she is saying, “Yes, I have. Fairly steadily with two other guys right now. Since school ended, though, there have been four, sorry, five altogether.”

  He is propped up on one elbow, hair falling straight past the bed like drapes. He cocks his head this way and that as he is prone to but for what seems like hours, cocks it, shakes it as if to dislodge a response. Which, after all that, is, “I thought you were, like, too uptight about your breasts.”

  “I’m not any more.” She looks at him, her love a motherly pang. “Thanks to you.”

  He frowns.

  “I love you,” she says. “That hasn’t changed. You are still my beloved.”

  “Do you love any of them?”

  She nods, pulling the smelly grey sheet up to her neck. She feels translucent with honesty.

  “How many?”

  “All of them. I wouldn’t have done anything with some boy I didn’t love.”

  “All four?”

  “Not as much as I love you.” Here come the lies, she thinks.

  Down the hall in the kitchen Brandy snaps the newspaper and hacks. Never in a year and a half has she demanded to know what the two of them are doing in there.

  “Man,” Paul says. He reaches for his cigarettes, mouths one out of the pack and lights it. “Do I know any of these cats?”

  She shakes her head. He knows one.

  “Like,” he says, “like, possessiveness is nowhere, man, but, man…”

  With the tip of one finger she touches his forearm. “It doesn’t mean I don’t want you any more. And if you want to have other girlfriends, that’s okay.”

  He glances at her. “Fuck that.”

  A new tone, it quivers between her legs. She rolls into him but he jolts away.

  “You’re not even all that pretty,” he says. “Your head’s too small. I hate the way you talk, like a fucking librarian. And by the way, you look like shit in your glasses.”

  She laughs, shocked.

  “Fuck off,” he says and jumps out of bed.

  While he pulls on his jeans she lies there scanning herself for the wound. Not a scratch. She watches him doing up his shirt. He is stuck on one button. She thinks of his dead father and crazy mother and her heart starts ripping. Why can’t she be true to him? Why can’t she forsake all other gods for him, be a nun for him? “What do you want?” she asks. Whatever it is, she’ll do it.

  “What do I want? You want to know what I want?” His voice is unnaturally high. “I want you not to have told me you loved me. I want you never to tell anybody else you love him because you don’t know what the fuck love is, man!” He’s shouting. The button comes off and he pitches it at her, then lunges for her neck. “I want this—“ He grabs the necklace, jerks it like a collar. She gags. He lets go. “I want you to get the fuck out of my house, you fucking slut!”

  She can’t take back having said she loved him, but she gives him his fingernail peace necklace, leaves his house and never tells another boy she loves him.

  Though she knows what love is. Though she loves him.

  Twenty

  Back in June, Marcia graduated from high school second out of 197 students and won a scholarship to York University. Her parents presented her with a twenty-four volume set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in its own two-level mahogany bookcase, her father holding her shoulders and standing her back from the case for the panoramic view. “Try to read them before Joanie does,” he joked. In July he cashed in a Canada Savings Bond to pay for her textbooks. But in August she tells him that she has decided to keep on working at the employment agency.

  “I need a break from school,” she says as he prods the ceiling tiles with his fingertips. It is a thing he does when the news is bad. Maybe one of the tiles is a magic door. He will lift her through it and angels wearing mortarboards will haul her off to the registrar’s office. “Dad,” she says, “I know how proud you are and everything, but I’m tired of being a student.”

  “You can’t help being a student,” he says. “You’re a natural student.” He pulls out a chair and sits across from her at the kitchen table. “I’m going to ask you a question. Are you on drugs?”

  “Of course not!” She means, drugs have nothing to do with it.

  “Well,” he says. He tugs at his new sideburns, which have grown in like balls of cotton batten. “I’m sorry, but I had to ask.”

  When her mother finds out, her question is, “Is this because of you and Paul?”

  Good idea. “I suppose,” Marcia says, giving it a try. “I mean, I’m so depressed.”

  “Sweetie, Paul was a very interesting, very nice boy. I wasn’t crazy about his hair, but that’s another story. But he’s not the only boy in the world! Boys are like buses. Miss one, and twenty minutes later”—she snaps her fingers—“along comes another.”

  Marcia bites her lips as if she isn’t thinking that twenty seconds later is more like it. She blurts out a laugh, and her mother laughs and says, “I’m telling you! Buses!” Snap! Snap! Snap!

  By playing up the heartbreak angle Marcia reconciles her parents to her taking one year off. That’s what they think. She is never going to university. What her father doesn’t know is that the “natural student” he allowed out on weeknights because she seemed to be one of those lucky people who could get straight A’s without studying, that natural student did homework until two, three o’clock in the morning on the bedroom floor in the feeble wedge of light from Joan’s closet, and now she’s more blind than ever. What he doesn’t know is that she needs a steady paycheque so that she can go on surprising her boyfriends with little gifts—cigarette cases, silk scarves, belts, gloves. There’s nothing like seeing them all flustered and happy. Or stunned. Scared! Opening the box like a demolitions expert.

  Keeping up the heartbroken act requires keeping her two new boyfriends secret, even the one her mother has been pushing at her since she was fifteen. Andy McPhee, the clean-cut Catholic boy who lives across the street and calls women “Ma’am,” and went to St. Mike’s where he was a famous quarterback known as “The Hands.” Whenever he used to walk down the street in his school uniform her mother would say, “If I were thirty years younger…” and roll her eyes in Marcia’s direction.

  “How many times do I have to tell you he’s going steady with Susan Boylan,” Marcia would say. Still says, although as she recently discovered that shouldn’t have stopped her. “I wish Sooze would do this,” he moans when she has his penis in her mouth. He holds her head between his hands and she wonders, Is he thinking of a football or when he’s holding a football is he thinking of her head?

  Afterwards he wor
ries about having hurt her. He can’t stop fingering the bruises on her legs and upper arms. “What kind of guy—“ he mutters.

  “I bruise easily,” she says, but he’s convinced she is protecting some thug because he doesn’t bruise her. (That he never touches her below the head during sex she can’t bring herself to point out.)

  He tells her that when she was a little girl and her eyes were always swollen, his parents thought that her father was beating her up.

  “I had styes!” she says. “Oh, my God, that’s terrible they thought that!”

  He says, “We prayed for him. Teach Mr. Canary to be a patient and gentle father.”

  He laughs. The laugh is over the prayer, not the praying. He still goes to mass and is always praying. Before digging into a bag of popcorn he murmurs, “For thy bounty, Jesus, I am truly grateful.” Before sex he says, “Forgive me, Jesus.” Before he comes it’s, “Sweet Jesus!” After he comes it’s fingering her bruises and saying a dozen what-kind-of-guys, if-I-get-my-hands-on-the-guys. He’s such a throwback. For the wall over his bed she buys him a poster of Ursula Andress in a cave-woman get-up. She buys him a near replica of the hula-girl cocktail shaker her father used to have.

  “For me?” he says, awed. “You shouldn’t have.” He says this.

  He is studying physical education on a football scholarship. He lives in residence, so they have a place where they can make out, but his roommate is always barging in and there’s the risk of Sooze, a nursing student, suddenly showing up. Twice they have gone to a sleazy motel on Kingston Road, Marcia’s treat. It’s the same motel her other boyfriend takes her to, and as she tells Andy the first time, when he balks at checking in, “You don’t call your motel The Seven Year Itch if you’re not catering to illicit escapades.”

  Her other boyfriend, Chuck, isn’t really a boyfriend. He’s a married man with three daughters. Thirty-five is how old he says he is, and even if he hasn’t knocked off five years she has decided she’s interested only in boys around her own age. Baby-smooth skin, small tight testicles. Right out of the package, that’s how she wants her boyfriends.

  Chuck, though, was her first lover, and when they ran into each other again on the street (he was walking a little white poodle shaved so severely it looked like a poodle twisted together out of balloons) he begged. “For old time’s sake,” he said. “For me,” he finally said, “do it for me,” and considering that he once rescued her from what she’d been sure at the time was a lynching, she concentrated on his laugh lines and scraped up some love. Besides, he buys her lunch and is an expert at giving oral sex (he calls it “balling”), which she never would have believed of a steam-shovel operator.

  Here’s how she met him the first time. She was sixteen. It was mid-July, and she hadn’t been able to find a summer job. Then, in a magazine that Sonja’s friend, Gail, left in the bathroom, she read an article about how teens could earn extra money over the summer. “Make paper dresses and sell them door to door.” “Make vinyl aprons and sell them to restaurants.” Were they nuts? In comparison, “Make box lunches and sell them at factories and construction sites” sounded like such a good idea she immediately worried that every girl from her school had already thought of it. Especially since, at the end of her street, there was a construction site.

  That same day she borrowed twelve dollars from Sonja and bought two loaves of white bread, three cans each of tuna and salmon, a large jar of mayonnaise, a head of lettuce, a basket of Mcintosh apples and another of carrots, two ready-made apple pies, waxed paper and paper bags. The next morning her mother helped her fix the sandwiches. Twenty to start with.

  “Let’s cut off the crusts,” her mother said. “Go that extra mile.” It was her suggestion that Marcia write on the front and back of an old white shirt of her father’s “Fresh Homemade Lunches. Only $1.00” and wear the shirt over her shorts and tank top.

  At eleven-forty-five Marcia carted the lunches up the street in her mother’s bundle buggy. The shirt came down to her knees. Her legs were bare, she wore thong sandals and her hairpiece in a French roll. A sex-kitten look except that she suspected her scrawny legs ruined it. What if the workmen laughed at her? Some of them would be foreigners. What if they hated tuna? Her stomach leapt up. “Al was here,” she chanted to herself because she had been reminded of that other shirt she wrote on when she was six and because she was hearing the words in an altered and fear-quenching sense—“Al was here, Al was here”—as if an orphan named Al who sold box lunches many years ago under terrible conditions lay down his life.

  The site was surrounded by a plywood wall. At the entrance she paused and squinted (this was almost two years before she bought her contact lenses). An enormous pit. Bulldozers, a steamshovel, a long white trailer. A machine roar that buzzed down her bones, and twenty or so red-helmeted men moving like doomed shapes in a beige haze she tried to blink into focus. She walked in and along a wooden plank, stopping next to a Johnny-on-the-Spot. It seemed to her that a few of the heads turned her way. She smoothed down the front of the shirt to draw their attention to the message.

  First somebody wolf-whistled. Then a short, black-haired man (no red helmet) ran toward her, socking the sky with both fists and yelling in a thick accent, “Young lady! What you doing! Young lady! No sandwiches here!” He came right up to her, so close she was sprayed by his spit.

  “I’ve got… I thought…,” she stammered, backing up.

  “You no business!” he shouted. “No sandwiches!” She backed up, he stepped forward. “I have licence for here!” he shouted. He jabbed his chest. Jabbed in the direction of a small truck—a lunch wagon, she realized, although it was a blur. “Who you think you are, young lady?” She could see right down his throat. His teeth were corn kernels. He shouted, “This private property, young lady!” All the while she was backing along the plank and pushing her bundle buggy behind her but he kept stride like an infuriated flamenco partner.

  By now the workers were gathering round, laughing, hollering at him in their language. “I call police!” the man yelled. His rage just kept soaring. “What you say, young lady?”

  Nothing. She could no longer even open her mouth or she would cry.

  “Leave her alone, Giovanni,” a friendly, unaccented voice called.

  That was all it took. Giovanni turned like a dreamer toward the voice. The workers parted like the Red Sea and another of their number, only taller, appeared.

  When he looked into her face, his jowly, fatherly smile started her sobbing. As she later learned he wasn’t the boss, he was only a steam-shovel operator, but he had pull. He took her into the trailer, poured her coffee in a Styrofoam cup. Gave her a twenty dollar bill for her sandwiches and gobbled down three of them and two pieces of pie. Said, “Honey, you bake one hell of an apple pie.” Patted his beer belly. Patted her knee. Patted her thigh. Locked the trailer door.

  Four years later, due to a back injury, he drives a taxi. He picks her up a block away from where she works, and either they park for a dollar in an underground lot and make love in the front seat or, if he’s had a lucrative morning, he forks out three bucks for half an hour at The Seven Year Itch. Some Saturdays she meets him in the ravine where he walks the dog, Perky, and while Perky keeps an eye out for passersby, they lie back in high grass.

  By November she’s tired of him. His assets—generosity, kindness, prowess—are lost on her, although she recognizes them and can appreciate them when he’s not between her legs. It boils down to, he’s too old, a close-up preview of the bodies she might be stuck with twenty years from now. Not a sight you can’t get enough of. Anyway, she never was all that crazy about being on the receiving end of oral sex. Lately when he’s down there flicking away, she is repulsed and anxious. What goes through her mind is that he is dead except for his tongue, which has gone into fibrillations. She fakes instant orgasms.

  “One last time,” he begs.

  It’s a Saturday. They are standing on the sidewalk at the end of her street, Pe
rky leashing their ankles together. As it happens her parents and Sonja are spending the afternoon at a winter fair in Uxbridge where Sonja has donated a hundred of her knitted hats as free give-aways if you contribute to the local Humane Society. So, since it will be the last time and it’s too cold to do it outside, Marcia says they can go to her house. “I’ve never done it in my own bed,” she says, warming to the idea.

  She returns home alone and uses the front door, and five minutes later Chuck and Perky arrive at the back door by way of the woods behind her yard. Perky’s toenails tick across the kitchen floor to the hall. At the stairwell Chuck nudges her and points down, his eyes signalling something more than anxiety. She has told him that Joan is in the laundry room. Over the past few months she has corrected the stories (Joan was deformed, a retard) that he’d heard from his daughters. But when he points, it’s as if to ask, Is that where you keep the deformed retard? and what’s left of Marcia’s love drops dead. She could slap his face, if she wasn’t suddenly feeling so free of him that it would be like slapping a side of beef. If she wasn’t feeling the superiority of her entire family to his family (his stupid daughters, his frigid wife) together with a sense of herself—which somehow exonerates him—as being no part of her family, although she’d kill for it.