Mister Sandman
Barbara Gowdy
Mister Sandman
For Christopher Dewdney
P.S.
Ideas, interviews & features
“Lies and Whispers”: A Review of
Mister Sandman
, by Katherine Dunn
An Excerpt from
We So Seldom Look on Love,
by Barbara Gowdy
J
oan Canary was the Reincarnation Baby. Big news at the time, at least in the Vancouver papers. This is going back, 1956. Joan was that newborn who supposedly screamed, “Oh, no, not again!” at a pitch so shrill that one of the old women attending the birth clawed out her hearing aid. The other old woman fainted. She was the one who grabbed the umbilical cord and pulled Joan head-first onto the floor.
Joan’s mother, Doris Canary, attributed everything to the brain damage. Joan’s inability to talk it goes without saying, but also her reclusiveness, her sensitivity to light, her size, her colouring … you name it. Joan’s real mother, Sonja Canary, attributed everything to Joan’s past-life experiences. Sonja was
there
for Joan’s famous first cry, and it’s true she had thought it was one of the old women screaming, “Flo! Flo! She’s insane!” but that didn’t make any sense because the woman who could have screamed it had throat cancer. If Joan was either braindamaged or reincarnated, Sonja preferred reincarnated. She would, being the real mother.
To be fair, though, there was something unearthly about Joan. She was born with those pale green eyes, and the hair on her head, when it finally grew in, was like milkweed tuft. That fine, that white. And look how tiny she was! Nobody in the family was tiny. Nobody in the family was anything like her, her real parents least of all. Sonja was fat, and had dark brown corkscrew hair and brown eyes. The real father was an orange-haired giant, eyes a flat creamy blue like seat-cover plastic. He had remarkably white skin, and Joan did, too, but without the
freckles, pimples and hair. Flawless. Joan was flawless. Another way of saying not like any of them. Sonja, of course, went further, she said that Joan was not of this world, and it drove Doris Canary crazy. Baloney! Doris said. Brain-damaged, brain-damaged, brain-damaged! she said. Face it. Ask the neurologists.
Doris even told strangers that Joan was brain-damaged. Her husband, Gordon, never publicly contradicted her but he winced and sighed. “It’s the truth,” Doris would say then, as if normally she wasn’t a brazen liar. As if Gordon had ever agreed with the brain-damaged diagnosis let alone that you could point to anything and call it the truth. “The truth is only a version” was one of his maxims.
(Which Sonja heard as “The truth is only aversion” and, although she had no idea what it meant, automatically quoted whenever the subject of truth was raised.)
G
ordon and Doris were Sonja’s parents. They had one other child—Marcy—who had left for kindergarten that June first morning in 1956 when Sonja vomited into her cereal bowl.
“We’ll say
I’m
the one who’s having it,” Doris announced once the cards were on the table, these being that Sonja had missed three menstrual periods, that she had been bringing up in the toilet for weeks, that the young man she’d had intercourse with was someone she’d known only for an hour, that what this young man had told her to call him was Yours, and that “Try the slammer” was the superintendent’s suggestion when, a week ago, she’d gone to his apartment hoping to find him.
“We’ll say it’s mine and Dad’s,” Doris said. “When you have a baby at our age it’s referred to as an afterthought.”
By now Sonja was sucking her fingers and sitting on Doris’s lap, and Doris was patting Sonja’s belly and feeling like the biggest Babushka doll in a nest of dolls within dolls, although she and Sonja were both the same height—five-foot-two—and tomorrow, at the doctor’s, they’d find out that they now weighed the same, as well—153 pounds.
(The doctor would be chosen randomly out of the phone book for the sake of secrecy. He would keep mixing Sonja and Doris up, that was how alike the two of them were. Small, flat-featured faces like faces painted on balloons. Dark, curly hair. For the appointment they would hide behind sunglasses, and since only Sonja would remove hers the doctor would assume, wrongly, that her dopey expression was inherited. He’d assume
that they were both putting him on—Sonja acting dumber and more innocent than she was, Doris pretending to be overjoyed—and he’d be wrong again. They were putting him on, all right. Sonja was fifteen, not nineteen, and there was no husband overseas. But Sonja
was
innocent. In all of those fifteen years, maybe ten minutes had been devoted to thinking about sex and another minute or so to having it. And, no, Doris wasn’t overjoyed, but that was how she always sounded. Thrilled, bursting with news that would knock your socks off.)
Even that morning at the breakfast table, if you didn’t know Doris you’d think that having a daughter pregnant out of wedlock was her dream come true. In her breathy little-girl voice she said that as soon as Sonja was out of school, the end of the month, the two of them would go stay with Aunt Mildred in Vancouver until after the baby was born.
“She’s starting to lose her marbles,” Doris said about Aunt Mildred. “She’ll hardly know we’re there. We’ll tell everyone here she’s on her last legs and needs us, her only living relatives, to look after her, and we’ll just keep stringing that out.” She clapped her hands once. “Play it by ear!”
“Okay,” Sonja said dreamily.
Gordon went along, too. Out of being stunned, out of no choice. He stood just inside the kitchen doorway (he’d been about to leave for work, he had his coat and hat on) and kept reaching up and touching the ceiling to reassure himself that he still could, although being a stringbean wasn’t something that normally heartened him. At the part when Doris said they would tell people the baby was theirs, “Now hold on” came out of his mouth, and Doris waited, but he was a desperado pretending that the finger in his trench-coat pocket was a gun. Abortion, adoption … he couldn’t even
say
the words.
This was his daughter.
Their other daughter they would keep in the dark. Doris pointed out that you couldn’t expect a six-year-old to hold in a
secret as big as this one. Marcy would stay in Toronto with Gordon, and Doris would hire somebody to babysit her after school.
“Can we afford all this?” Gordon asked when Sonja was out of the room. Doris was the one who banked his salary and handled the bills.
“Sweetie, you just leave it to me,” she said, her tone even more thrilled and hush-hush than usual so that he allowed himself to envision a secret nest egg, whereas all they had was a huge long shot, something like a five-hundred-to-one chance that she would be crowned queen.
Any day now she should hear. It was pure luck she saw the ad. She’d been unwrapping frozen chicken livers from a newspaper and had spotted the words “To All Ladies in Dire Straits.”
“Are you wrestling with severe money difficulties?” the ad had gone on. “Caring for ailing loved ones? Recently widowed? Are you doing everything in your power to improve your circumstances but still can’t seem to get out from under?” And then it had said that if this was you, you might be eligible to win thousands of dollars worth of fantastic prizes by appearing on
ABC-TV’S
Queen for a Day
show, which was holding auditions at the Royal York Hotel—that very afternoon, as it happened.
The minute Gordon and the girls were out the door Doris phoned a neighbour to come by at noon and fix Marcy’s lunch, then she put on her frowziest house dress and rifled through Marcy’s box of dress-up clothes for an old purse, cracked high heels, that fake fur stole and the tatty purple turban, her plan being to carry these in a bag and change into them at a restaurant washroom near the hotel. On the subway she hatched her sob story. She’d never actually watched
Queen for a Day
but she knew about it. Housewife contestants took turns describing their miserable lives, after which the studio audience decided
who was the most miserable and that’s who won. It was such a tasteless idea that Doris had always figured that the contestants were actresses. Or so she told herself until she arrived at the Royal York and walked down the line-up of mangy women, and either they were world-class impostors, every one of them, or she shouldn’t be there.
She joined the line anyway. A long wait on hot pavement during which she thought of the men on the
Titanic
who had dressed up in turbans and fake stoles and too-small pointy high heels, and what she wanted to know was, how many of them had been responsible citizens with another baby on the way? Answer her
that.
In her head the buoyant refrain of the
Titanic
song screamed—
It was sad, so sad, oh, it was sad, so sad…
For virtually any occasion Doris knew a song that went with it, or at least she knew the first verse, and she sang it to herself—involuntarily, ceaselessly—until the occasion changed, at which point another song usually took over. This was just background, like a radio playing or her own footsteps, but today it was as if she had crossed wires with Ethel Merman. On the subway
Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell
had blared the whole way. Now that her feet were really starting to hurt
It was sad, so sad
was blending into an ear-splitting “Your Feets Too Big.”
Oh, it was sad, so sad that your feets too big.
And, boy, her feet really
were
killing her. By the time she was finally ushered into the room where they were doing the interviewing, her stagger was no act.
A fast-talking, sweat-soaked man in shirtsleeves paced in front of the chair where she was told to sit. “Do you work, Belle?” the man asked. (Doris had given her name as Belle Ladovsky.)
“Twelve-hour shifts in a beanery,” Doris said, putting on the vaguely East European accent she had cultivated years ago to audition for the Yiddish niece in a play. “Nothing but beans do I eat.” This to suggest that her round figure was from bloating rather than three square meals a day. “The doctor—“
“How’d your husband die?” the man cut in.
Doris hadn’t even mentioned a husband yet. A heart attack, she almost said, since what with his heart murmur that was how she had always pictured Gordon going. She had a better idea. “In Korea,” she said. “Killed in action.” She thought of the saddest thing she could, which was going on seven years since Gordon had made love to her, and her eyes filled.
“How many kids?”
“Eight.”
“Any of them sick, deformed?”
“My twins, they are cripples. When my husband died—“
The man stopped pacing. “You mean with crutches?”
“Oh, yes. Crutches, yes.”
“So you’re saying that those kids could do with a couple of top-of-the-line wheelchairs.”
“Yes, of course,” Doris said, immediately catching his drift. “But, oy, who can afford—“
“What’ll get you on your feet, Belle?”