Mister Sandman (29 page)

Outwardly her two boyfriends have nothing in common with each other. One is tall, lean, dark-haired, doe-eyed, thoughtful. He is studying radio and television arts. The other is her height, muscular, witty, and has fuzzy blond hair, which is actually straight but when she met him he’d just got a permanent. He works at his father’s shoe store. Both boys are always broke, so she picks up the tab when they go out. She is starting to know wines and can advise them. “A white Bordeaux is nice with trout.” She lends them books by authors she thinks they should like—Durrell and Greene, Kerouac. The dark one handles her books as he does her breasts—as breakable and priceless items he can’t believe she just leaves lying around—and he returns them read. The blond one skims. Returns them,
if
he returns them, battered.

At midnight she goes to bed alone. Not long after moving to the third floor she discovered that she sleeps better in a room by herself. Midnight is closing time for her one-night stands, too, no matter how much fun she’s having. Some boys she has to push out the door and they thrust a foot back in like travelling salesmen. She turns the lock, switches off the light and goes to the dining-room window, listening to them descend the stairs. If it’s the dark boy, it could be a cat burglar. The blond boy, and the one-night stands who resent leaving, explode down, shaking the house. Only the dark boy never slams the front door. Then three to five seconds and they’re on the sidewalk. From this window, if they’re headed for the subway, she can watch them all the way to Bloor Street. She loves them so much! There they go. Away. “Don’t look back,” she thinks. They never do.

A
t around eleven o’clock on the morning of Tuesday, July thirtieth, 1974, Joan turns off the two tape recorders. Half an hour later she removes her visor and goes upstairs and into her closet. It takes another half hour for Sonja to subconsciously register the silence, and when she does she feels dread. But dread is so unfamiliar to her that she mistakes it for hunger, and she pours peanuts straight from the jar into her mouth. That doesn’t help. The sensation is hollow and electrical, chasing through her in little light-bulb bursts. Down her left side, down her left leg to her feet, up the other leg.

“What in the world?” she says and stops knitting. She feels like a movie marquee.

She stands. Falls back into the chair, heart banging. “Oh, I’m having a heart attack,” she thinks, almost relieved. She pats her chest, absently, aware of something else now. Not inside
her,
inside the house, like a bad man. “Joanie,” she thinks, and her whole body lights up, panicked. She stands again, knocking over the chair as she did when her water broke (the only other time she felt anything close to this). She hurries down to the landing. “Joanie!” she calls, and just like that other time her voice is a neigh and yelling won’t help. Holding the railing with both hands she goes down the stairs. As she never did when she was in labour she takes deep breaths. “Joanie!” Not a sound from below. Not a click.

She is barrelling back up to the landing when the front door opens. It is Doris, home from the shop to make them lunch. “Joanie isn’t in her office!” Sonja cries.

“So?” Doris says, but she hurries after her.

Joan is lying on her back, hands crossed over her chest. Remembering the episode in Grandma Gayler’s casket, Sonja drops to her knees with a thud that slams a window. She pushes up Joan’s sunglasses. Joan’s eyes are open and focused but she didn’t flinch at either the thud or the slam and she doesn’t flinch when Sonja’s relieved sigh wafts her hair.

“Go in,” Doris says, giving Sonja a shove. They are both huffing like trains. Sonja crawls around to Joan’s other side. Doris feels Joan’s forehead. “She’s cool,” she says, although she can’t really tell. It’s hot in here and her own hand is burning. Joan squints, and Doris puts the sunglasses back over her eyes.

“Bunny, you took your visor off,” Sonja says. She moves Joan’s hands down to her sides. That’s better.

“Were you having a nap?” Doris asks, disturbed to be putting this question to a person who never naps. She thinks of the ailments Joan has escaped—measles, chicken pox, mumps, the flu. This is a kid who doesn’t even catch colds. Physically she’s a late bloomer (you can say that again), so it’s a long shot but maybe she is finally starting to come down with one of those childhood viruses. Except who would she have picked it up from?

“How about a cup of tomato soup?” Doris asks.

Tomato soup usually elicits a few gobbles. Not this time.

“What if I bring it in here?” Doris says. “Would you like that?”

Nothing.

“Joanie?” She claps her hands.

“Mommy,” Sonja whimpers. Never has Joan not imitated a clap.

Forget Dr. Ackerman, he’ll say warm her fanny. Doris calls instead the lesbian doctor Angela goes to and praises as being down to earth and humble. Dr. Amelia Shack. Who over the phone says that a few years ago she read an article about Joan
in a medical journal. “She’s never sick,” Doris says, and Dr. Shack says yes, that was in the article.

She arrives within half an hour. Living up to her reputation, she doesn’t object to crouching in the sweltering closet. When she has finished her examination Doris tells her about the pediatric endocrinologist saying that Joan might not live to see her twentieth birthday if she were some rare kind of dwarf. “An ateliotic dwarf,” Dr. Shack clarifies, but shakes her head and says no, there aren’t any signs of crisis along those lines. There aren’t any signs of anything out of the ordinary. What about a cold coming on? Doris asks. Her first cold? Or maybe the flu? Dr. Shack shrugs. “Her temperature’s on the low side,” she says. All she can recommend is that if Joan is the same tomorrow, they should phone her. And to give her lots of fluids.

Doris reheats the soup that went untouched at noon. She props Joan up on pillows and nudges the spoon between her lips. It’s like trying to feed a groggy baby, soup dribbling down her chin. “Oh, Sweetie, what’s wrong?” she says, frightened. She places the palm of her hand on the top of Joan’s head, over two pink-bow barrettes. Eighteen years too late she still feels as if this spot needs protecting. “What’s wrong?” she whispers. Yes, she is the one who is always saying that telepathy is for the birds, but since her hand is there anyway she may as well see if she can pick up a message.

She can’t. According to Marcia (who has been summoned from work by Sonja), that’s because Joan has switched herself off. In her expensive grey linen pant suit Marcia lies in the closet alongside Joan and thinks, “What’s the matter? Tell us. Please. Please.” Last night she had a horrible dream about Joan shrinking to the size of a mouse and people almost stepping on her.

“What does she say?” Doris asks.

Marcia comes up on one elbow. Her mother’s faith in her ability to read Joan’s mind is scaring her as much as anything. “This has never happened before,” she says. “I always hear her,
even if it’s not in words. But there’s nothing. It’s like she’s not there.”

Then Gordon comes home and tells them to calm down. As the only one who hasn’t had a premonition, he isn’t spooked to start with. “I have a feeling she’s meditating,” he says after taking a look at her. “A couple of days ago she was reading an article on Gandhi. She’s probably fasting as well. Why don’t we all just leave her alone for a few hours.”

So they do. They eat Kraft Dinner in front of the TV and watch the six-o’clock news. The lead story is that it looks as though Nixon is going to be impeached.

“I hope he is,” Doris says. “A liar that bad doesn’t deserve to be president.”

At eight o’clock, when Marcia goes to check on Joan, she has wet her pants. Still lying on her back, she has soaked the carpet. And she won’t budge. Sonja lifts her, a dead weight, onto the bed, and then Gordon leaves the room while Sonja, Marcia and Doris clean her up.

“I can’t believe this,” Marcia says, tugging the soiled pink shorts down Joan’s legs.

“She was toilet trained at eighteen months!” Doris says, near tears.

“Oh, she’s like a baby!” Sonja whispers, because Marcia has just pulled down Joan’s underpants, and Sonja is shocked to see that Joan still has no pubic hair.

Nobody gets much sleep. Marcia, staying overnight in Joan’s bed, gets none. “What’s the matter?” she starts out thinking, but that changes to “Why are we doing this?” Nothing is coming through to her other than the feeling that Joan could snap out of it if she wanted to. “Little brat!” Marcia finally says. She shakes her by the shoulders, then starts crying at how her head flops around. Near dawn she pries open her lips and pours the apple juice in. To hell with it spilling all over the sheets. Joan chokes, but when Marcia clamps a hand over her
mouth and pushes her head back, she has no alternative except to swallow. “Just try dying of thirst,” Marcia mutters, and one of them—she can’t tell if it’s her or Joan—is awed by how vicious she sounds. “Just try.”

At eight-thirty in the morning Doris reaches Dr. Shack at her office. “Get her to Toronto General Emergency,” Dr. Shack says. “I’ll meet you there.”

She tests normal. Blood, urine, x-rays, electrocardiogram. Dr. Shack admits her anyway, for observation. “You can say goodbye to her,” she says, “then I’m afraid you’ll all have to leave until visiting hours. We’ll call you if anything changes.”

What’s she doing with her sunglasses on? And her barrettes back in her hair? Dr. Shack said that these were removed in Emergency. “No, nobody helped us,” a nurse says in a childish singsong. “We must have done it all by ourself!”

“We happen to be almost eighteen years old,” Marcia says coldly, unaware that she herself is using the plural. “So,” she says to Joan. “We
can
move. We knew it.”

“Do you think it
is
psychosomatic?” Gordon asks Dr. Shack.

“I can’t tell you what it is. We’ll have a clearer picture by the end of the week.”

“The end of the week!” Doris cries. “I was thinking she’d only be in overnight!”

“Bye-bye, Bunny,” Sonja says. She pulls the one flimsy blanket over Joan and tucks her in. She wants to go. She has just remembered Hen Bowden saying that white-haired people don’t live very long, and she is feeling like a marquee again. What was the white-haired waitress’s name? She has forgotten. “Joanie was Alice,” she chants to herself. In case thinking about that waitress is a Sign. “Joanie was Alice”—all the way to the parking lot.

In the car she pulls her needles and a ball of moss green
angora wool out of her purse and starts knitting Joan a warm blanket. Nobody takes her bet that she can finish it before tonight. Gordon drives Marcia to her office, then drops Sonja and Doris off at home before turning around and driving back downtown.

It’s one-thirty. Too late for Doris to go to the shop. She slaps together three peanut butter and jam sandwiches for Sonja (she herself couldn’t eat a thing) then does laundry. She decides that what she’ll do with the soiled carpet in the closet is pull it up and hose it down outside, on the lawn.

The urine has dried but there’s a stain. Where the books were, the nap has flattened hard as burlap. She’s glad the books are gone, it makes her job a heck of a lot easier. Only the old transistor radio left… the pillows, the blanket, a hundred dust balls. And the pitch pipe! So that’s where it got to. Oh, and here’s a piece of chalk, a blue barrette. She tosses everything out into the bedroom and yanks up one end of the carpet.

What’s this? Something tucked away. She unrolls it. A shirt, one of Gordon’s it looks like. Writing on the back. Faded, the first and third letters all but gone, “
HLL
,” she makes them out as. She thinks for a minute, reads the message out loud: “
HLL WAS HERE.”

HLL
? Harmony La Londe? “What the Sam Hill?” she says.

Who wrote it? Not Joan, that’s for sure. It must have been Marcia. Why, though? Well, Joan used to love to touch the embossed initials on Harmony’s envelopes. So maybe Joan got Marcia to write out the letters. But why on a shirt? Now this doesn’t make sense either: the “was here.” Harmony was never here. And what’s the shirt doing under the carpet in the first place?

A sob jumps into her throat. She shuts the door so that Sonja won’t hear. “Please, God,” she sobs, “I’m sorry I don’t believe in You. Don’t take it out on Joanie. I’m sorry I stopped writing Harmony. If I broke her heart, I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I’m bad, I
know. Kill
me.
Take
me.
Torture me first. Give me incurable cancer. But don’t… don’t…” She can’t even think it.

She decides not to hose the carpet down after all. If there’s no smell, why bother? She rolls the shirt up and puts it back where it was. She’ll have to remember to ask Marcia about it.

But she forgets. Marcia arrives at the hospital an hour after the rest of them and starts crying to see Joan hooked up on intravenous. “It hurts,” she says, holding out a bouquet of miniature pink carnations for Doris to take care of. “Oh, God!” she says, and stops crying. She swipes at her tears. “I got that from Joan!” She bends over Joan and raises the sunglasses. “What else?” she thinks. Joan closes her eyes. Her eyelids seem to have gone transparent, like a fly’s wings. “What’s the matter?” Marcia thinks.

Nothing. Only that it hurts.

Marcia looks at her father. “Does she have to have it?”

“She’s still refusing liquids, honey.” Out in the corridor a supper cart crashes by and he goes to the door and shuts it. One blessing of the day is that they were able to move Joan into a private room because of his company’s insurance plan.

“I mean, is she trying to commit suicide?” Marcia cries.

“Marcia!” her mother says sharply from the bathroom.

“She hasn’t pulled it out,” Gordon says, referring to the I.V. “If she could, she hasn’t.”

“You know when she climbed in Grandma Gayler’s coffin?” Marcia says. “Well, what if she has a death wish?”

“That’s enough!” Doris cries.

Marcia rubs her eyes under her glasses. Sits on the edge of the bed and startles at the erotic softness of the angora against the back of her legs. As though somebody made a pass. She just now notices that it is still being knitted. It covers Joan, but Sonja is leaning forward in her chair at the foot of the bed and adding on more rows. Marcia sneaks a finger into Joan’s hand. “Squeeze,” she thinks, and remembers wishing for the same miracle from her dolls. “Is she any better?” she asks.