Mister Sandman Read online

  Al Yothers.

  It’s him, all right. The orange hair. He has on a black leather jacket. He looks furtive and menacing, until he catches sight of Gordon, and then his face opens like a child’s.

  “Hey!” he calls.

  Gordon pretends not to hear. He turns back around.

  “Hey! Mr. Canary!”

  Gordon takes a deep breath and turns again. The boy is trotting over to him. “Oh, hello,” Gordon says.

  “Al Yothers.” He holds out his hand.

  Gordon shakes it. “Yes, I remember.”

  “I wanted to ask if your rad was giving out any heat.”

  Between the thumb and forefinger of his left hand he holds a stogie. Gordon stares at it and says, “Yes, I’m quite comfortable now, thank you.”

  “Glad to hear it.” Al takes a last puff and flicks the cigar to the sidewalk, crushing it under the heel of his black boot. “I got a few complaints this morning about the friggin’ things still being ice cold.”

  “Mine’s doing fine.”

  Al nods. He smiles and looks down, not shyly but as if Gordon wouldn’t get the joke.

  “Well, goodnight,” Gordon says because he knows that Al is going to ask if he wants to have a drink in that tavern behind them. Because his life up until now calls for some show of resistance, however counterfeit.

  The tavern turns out to be a new Chinese restaurant that hasn’t changed the old sign, but they go in anyway, Al saying he hasn’t eaten “Chink chow” in years. When they are seated he removes his leather jacket and hangs it on the back of his chair. Today he’s wearing a blue janitor’s shirt with “Al” stitched on the pocket, which holds another cigar. He yawns and stretches. He seems breathtakingly young and exotic to Gordon, his big white hands like shells. “Hoo Wah Family Restaurant,” he drawls, reading the aluminum-foil letters hanging from a string behind the bar. He looks at Gordon. “You a family man?”

  “Yes, I am,” Gordon says quietly.

  “The family man is the cornerstone of civilization. Am I right, Charlie?” This addressed to the waiter, who has brought their menus.

  “Family man,” the waiter says energetically. “Very good.”

  “Famry man,” Al mimics before the waiter is out of earshot. He withdraws the other cigar, lights it. Exhales out his nostrils. His nostrils are huge, gorilla-sized. He looks up at the ceiling, and Gordon gazes at the pillar of his neck as he knows he is being invited to. Gordon is someone counting the seconds between lightning and thunder. It’s out of his hands, it’s imminent. A recurring dream that he should know to manoeuvre his way through except that in this dream he’s a sucker. This is the dream where he opens the door to midair and strides right out.

  “What is it?” he says. Al is looking at him now, squinting.

  “Shoot,” Al says, “you’re the spittin’ image of that fella on TV, who am I thinking of?”

  Gordon takes off his hat and sets it on the chair beside him. “You’re from the South,” he says, changing the subject.

  “Greenville, South Carolina. Population 58,161 as of 1953.” He nods to Gordon’s left. “Your coat fell.”

  It has slipped off the chair. When Gordon picks it up he feels something sticky on the lapel. It was his father’s coat, high-quality camel-hair, an heirloom, and normally Gordon would be anxious to clean it right away but he just hangs it on a hook in the wall behind him, then sits down with the feeling of having crossed a point of no return. Another one. He wonders if what an affair amounts to is a series of points of no return. “Shoot,” the boy is saying, “that skinny fella with the curly hair,” still trying to figure out who Gordon looks like, and as Gordon can only imagine being mortified by the comparison he says, “Are your folks still in Greenville?”

  “They were killed in a car accident when I was two months and two days old.”

  “Jesus. I’m sorry.”

  “Nuns raised me. I was Al for Alan but the sisters christened me Albert after Albert the Great, 1193 to 1280 A.D.” He picks up his menu and blinks hard, and Gordon fears he has opened a wound, but this isn’t grief, this is memorization. A few moments later Al looks up and starts reciting: “Moo goo guy pan—sliced chicken with mushrooms and mixed Chinese vegetables. Tai dop voy—chicken, shrimps, barbecued pork with mixed Chinese vegetables. Soo guy—buttered breast of chicken with almonds and sauce. Ma po dow fu—bean curd with minced pork and hot sauce.”

  Gordon laughs, amazed.

  Al signals the waiter. Word for word, in the same inert voice and gazing above the menu at a spot on the wall, he repeats the recital, adding three more dishes while the waiter and Gordon pretend that there’s nothing unusual about ordering this way. “A big amount of food” is the waiter’s only reaction, which it is. Gordon thanks God that Doris gave him ten dollars this morning. It goes without saying that the bill will be on him, not just because he makes more money but because (this also goes without saying) he will be the one to fall in love.

  That he already is in love he doesn’t yet know. He sits there like a man who still takes an interest in everyday life. When the soup arrives he makes a show of savouring the aroma, and the steam fogs his glasses. The noodles are as fine as corn tassel. He winds them around his spoon. Al dices his up with a knife and fork. Al holds the floor, the theme being “Chinks,” their eating habits (slurping, shovelling it in), the food they themselves eat (Labrador retrievers and stray cats), their feelings (none). Anyone else and Gordon wouldn’t still be sitting there, but it’s as though he has to let the boy dig this hole because if they’re headed anywhere together, it’s down there.

  All the same, he is glad they are by themselves in a corner and relieved when Al, after a pause, moves on to encyclopedias. Does Gordon own a set? He owns several… no, not the Encyclopaedia Britannica, although they have two sets at his office. Has Gordon read it?

  “I refer to it now and again,” Gordon says. “Of course.”

  “I’ve read it right through twice,” Al says. “All twenty-four volumes, start to finish. I’m on my third go-round, up to the D’s.”

  “You’re kidding.”

  “Everything you need to know is there. All the facts there are and ever were. That’s all I’m interested in. The facts. The truth.” He drains his glass of rice wine.

  “Well,” Gordon says, “the truth is only a version—“

  Al bangs down his glass. “Test me on a D fact. Something before Delilah.”

  Gordon laughs.

  “Go ahead,” Al says, frowning.

  Gordon opens his hands. “Daphne.”

  “From Greek mythology,” Al fires back. “The nymph that turned into a lily pad.”

  Gordon is curiously relieved. “Laurel tree, actually,” he says. “She turned into a laurel tree.”

  Al blinks. “You sure about that?”

  “Yes. Yes, quite sure.”

  Al’s face goes slack. “Daphne, laurel tree,” he says. “Daphne, laurel tree.”

  “You got the gist right,” Gordon says.

  Al shoves aside his soup bowl and folds his mammoth arms and says, “Gimme some C’s. I’ve got the C’s down cold.”

  Gordon doesn’t want to do this. A quiz is not what he’s here for. “I seem to be drawing a blank,” he says.

  “Go on,” Al says impatiently.

  So Gordon says, “Lewis Carroll.” Al gets that right. Gordon says King Charles. And concerto. The rest of the food arrives, and he says Cervantes, cubism, Castries, curlew—facts and things, words that would be in an encyclopedia, although it doesn’t seem to matter, Al takes a stab at anything and isn’t frustrated when he is wrong, even when he is idiotically wrong. Glassy-eyed he listens to the right definition and then repeats it twice. Every time he is idiotically wrong Gordon’s tender feelings dilate a little.

  They carry on like this—at Al’s insistence sticking with the C’s—until the check arrives, by which time Gordon is down to words like chop suey and China. “Check,” he says, reaching for it.


  “A resident of Czechoslovakia,” Al says.

  If he’s joking, Gordon can’t tell.

  Al picks up one of the fortune cookies from the tray and cracks it open. “The person should take it easy,” he reads. He comes to his feet. “Shoot, I was hoping to take it hard.”

  Gordon is standing to get his wallet out of his coat pocket. When Al says that, Gordon freezes, and then so does Al. They stand there looking at each other like a pair of gunslingers.

  “I know a place we can go to,” Al says. “Just up the street.” He strokes his own head. Gingerly pats it as you would an unfriendly cat.

  Five

  One night when Sonja and Doris are in Vancouver, Marcy dreams that Sonja is being stabbed in the stomach by a man whose head is on fire. She wakes up crying. She gets out of bed and goes into the living room to tell her father that he’d better phone Vancouver right away. The living room is dark but she knows that her father is in there because his “Mister Sandman” record is playing.

  Yes, he’s there. On the floor. “Lie beside me,” he interrupts the telling of the dream. He paws at the tears on her face, and she smells the familiar pencil odour of his fingers. She tugs at his hand until he is on his feet. He sways. He clutches her shoulder so hard her knees buckle. Thinking that his leg must still be sore from the car accident, she takes his hand and leads him down the hall to the kitchen, where the phone is. Three times he gives the operator the wrong number, although Marcy is piping it at him. Through the threadbare cotton of her pyjamas, which have a red-and-yellow watering-can pattern, she pinches her thin arms.

  Finally her father hands her the receiver, but she has to speak to two other women before Sonja’s crackly, faraway voice comes on the line. Marcy is not especially relieved that Sonja doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Marcy says, “I’m warning you.” She says, “No, I think he’s a fireman… or something …,” her voice unravelling as in her mind the dream unravels.

  “Say goodbye now,” her father slurs.

  Marcy has two recurring dreams. One about a talking baby and one about a little girl playing the piano in a room where Marcy and a man wrestle on a bed. There’s a dog in this dream as well, a poodle biting its leash. The man says, “Ah, come on, it’s like balling in front of the dog.” In the dream Marcy understands what the man means by “balling.”

  Her dreams wake her up. If she doesn’t fall right back to sleep she’s apt to start fretting over all the pages in her school textbooks the teacher hasn’t even got to yet. She’ll touch the dolls that are aligned like bridesmaids on each side of her. Lightly, so as not to wake them, she’ll feel their brittle dresses and the rigid brush of their eyelashes. Eventually she’ll climb out of bed and go to her desk and pore over her exercise books in the bar of streetlight where her curtains don’t meet. It’s not out of the question that she’ll sit there for hours, erasing and rewriting entire pages.

  She has straight, coarse hair the colour of cardboard. She worries that it is actually fur, as she has seen hair so coarse and that colour only on dogs. She is prone to styes that puff and redden her eyelids and that (as she will eventually discover) give the new neighbours across the street the impression that she lives in a violent household. She is ruining her eyes, and like her father will wear glasses. Not for another four and a half years, though. In the meantime she prays for twenty-twenty vision, human hair and the death of the tub of lard. She prays on her knees in her closet where she believes that sparks of static electricity indicate the presence of Jesus.

  Jesus is present during her babysitter’s bubble baths as well, the sound of static electricity and the bubbles bursting being identical. Being the sound of Jesus. Worshipfully, Marcy washes her babysitter’s back, which because it is covered in moles is a starry sky. The soap circles Marcy makes are clouds. Sometimes, to scare herself, she prints AL WAS HERE in the soap, believing that this means BEWARE. The babysitter moans with pleasure. Jeanie is her name, Jeanie with the cornflake-coloured hair. When she is lying on the floor in front of the TV Marcy straddles her back and brushes her hair. To Marcy, Jeanie’s dandruff is confetti.

  Jeanie has told Marcy that the scar under her eye is from when her mother hit her with the buckle end of a belt. Jeanie cries not because of her mother but because her boyfriend dumped her for a tub of lard who shaves her arms. Marcy strokes Jeanie’s slender, unshaved arm and dips her finger into Jell-0 powder for Jeanie to lick off. She feeds her Cheez Whiz on Windmill cookies. “There you go,” she says soothingly, coaxing a cookie into Jeanie’s mouth. “Is that good? Mmm, good.”

  Before Jeanie was her babysitter Marcy heard that you could give her a jar of worms and she’d eat them by the handful. Did Jeanie really? “That’s classified information,” is all that Marcy can get out of her. Jeanie admits to having been a worm picker, however. Picking and selling worms to fishermen for a quarter a can. She has a secret method. First you mix three tablespoons of Keen’s hot mustard in a glass of water. You fill a second glass with plain water. Then you crawl around your lawn knocking the tops off of the tiny clumps of earth that are actually worm mounds. When you have uncovered twenty or so holes you pour a bit of the mustard mixture down each one.

  “Now wait,” Jeanie tells Marcy the day she demonstrates the method. “And don’t move, they feel our vibrations.”

  Marcy hugs her knees. Maybe her Thursday underpants are showing. She has “Day of the Week” underwear—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on stitched across the back of seven pairs. To wear a pair that didn’t match the day would be unthinkable to her, crazy, like eating breakfast in the middle of the night. She hugs her knees to keep perfectly still. She is prepared to stay like that for a long time but within seconds worms start shooting up all around her. It’s a fountain of worms. Long, plump, segmented, writhing and crawling up out of the grass. Marcy jumps to her feet.

  “Big fat juicy ones, long slim slimy ones,” Jeanie sings, plucking up the worms and dropping them into the glass of plain water.

  Marcy is terrified. “Do they love us?” she cries, knowing it’s a stupid, babyish question, humiliating herself and yet asking it again. “Do the worms love us?”

  Jeanie snorts. “Are you out of your mind? We’ve just burned them. They hate our guts.”

  A little later, because her devotion is undiminished but also to distract Jeanie from mixing more Keen’s hot mustard and water, Marcy brings Sonja’s precious tap-dance shoes into the kitchen and urges Jeanie to try them on. “They’re broken,” Jeanie says when she can’t get them to click. Marcy returns the shoes to the box that says “Private Property” and comes back into the kitchen with her piggy bank whose contents add up to five dollars and thirty-seven cents, her life savings. “It’s all for you,” she announces. “I present it unto you.”

  “Don’t tell your father, okay?” Jeanie says, shaking out the coins.

  With the money, Jeanie buys tomato-red nail polish and a Ouija board that zooms out the answers but is a bad speller.

  This is July, when Marcy is still the person she has been all her life. She is crazy about Jeanie, but not yet swooning over her. This is before everything. Before Marcy is pregnant, although pregnancy is on her mind because her mother is pregnant. Sometime before Christmas her mother and Sonja will return from Vancouver with what Marcy imagines will be more or less an alive doll. Her dream! She understands that babies come from a seed given to the mother by the father, and so while her mother is away and it is her father who makes breakfast and supper, nothing goes into her mouth that she hasn’t first picked through for a seed that doesn’t match the others. A suspicious-looking seed. She is aware of the ignominy of unwed mothers, there being a home for unwed mothers at the end of the street where if you climb the brick wall you sometimes catch a glimpse of them in their white maternity dresses, drifting around the back lawn like dandelion seeds.

  It is not until the beginning of November that Marcy has her first talking-baby dream. When she wakes up, her ears still ri
nging, she can’t remember what the baby said. But was it loud!

  The next afternoon while she is soaping Jeanie’s back she is suddenly inspired to let her hand slide under Jeanie’s arm and touch her bosom. She knows a hymn, “The Mothers of Salem,” in which Jesus says, “For I will receive them and hold them to my bosom,” and calling this hymn to mind as her hand circles closer and closer to Jeanie’s left breast provides not just absolution, not just permission, but encouragement. Jeanie pretends she doesn’t notice anything, whereas Marcy feels strips of velvety light coiling up and down her legs.

  A few nights later she dreams that she is pregnant. In the morning she awakens to a pot belly and the inflation of the black, unknowable world. She climbs out of bed and uses her hand mirror to try to see in through her navel. She swallowed a seed, she thinks. Somehow she swallowed a darned seed! She presses her stomach with her fingers and feels a stem-like thing. An arm! In common with Sonja she has the idea that babies in the womb are like baby birds, their heads drooped back and their mouths wide open waiting for food to drop in. With a sense that it ought to be a snap, she resolves to let the baby wait until it starves to death.

  For two days she eats nothing. Her father tries to bribe her with promises of money and Creamsicles but Marcy shakes her head. She says she’s the one who eats all the food that Jeanie wolfs down. “I’m stuffed,” she says. “Look,” she says, brazenly drawing her father’s attention to her pot belly.

  On the third day she eats a slice of summer sausage and two crusts of bread. She squares this with herself by chewing until the food is a paste so that there is hardly anything left for the baby. Just as her mother craved liver and onions when she was pregnant, Marcy craved the slice of summer sausage. “I have cravings,” she thinks, a bit disturbed by such irrefutable evidence of her condition.