Mister Sandman (7 page)

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.

S
he’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.

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.