T
aking Joan anywhere during the day was like transporting a narcoleptic whose dreams are about the real and present moment, as if she were watching the same television program but on another channel. You’d swear she was in a deep sleep because her breathing slowed and because of how she drooped and grew warm and still, and yet there wasn’t a horn or a revving she didn’t instantly, almost inaudibly, mimic.
The neurologists agreed that, appearances to the contrary, she was really wide awake. That pretending to be asleep was typical agoraphobic behaviour.
“Neurologists are the brain’s stooges” was Gordon’s response. By then he’d had it up to here with their categorical abstractions. Not even Marcy had ever caught Joan with her eyes shut in her own bed, not since Joan was a baby anyway, so it seemed logical to him that when Joan finally did shut her eyes (and, sure, it took fear and shyness to get her started, he wasn’t arguing with that) she was bound to drop off.
If this was the case, though, it would mean she had no escape from the world, not even in dreams. It would be like trying to leave a room, only to find yourself in an identical room, then trying to leave that room, but the next one was also identical, and so on. A claustrophobic’s nightmare. Which, Gordon reasoned, should make it an agoraphobic’s nirvana. But maybe not. When she was asleep he studied her face for a sign of pain or ecstasy (as he had once, during sex and with as little elucidation, studied Al Yothers’s face).
At their destination Joan preferred to be carried from the car.
But if you stood her on her feet she would walk, hands over her ears, eyes shut or blinking rapidly. Inside, she’d head for a chair in the darkest corner, sit and close her eyes again, and if she was faking it, she was good. One day before anyone noticed what they were up to, a group of boys slapped their hands in front of her face and pinched her leg, and until she covered her ears with her hands and started smacking her lips to imitate the slapping, they weren’t prepared to believe she was real.
Doris’s mother, Grandma Gayler, said that Joan reminded her of the guards at Buckingham Palace. “I used to think those lads were wax,” she said, giving Joan a loving, anguished look.
A look meant for England, not Joan. That was how Grandma Gayler always looked when she spoke of England.
Grandma Gayler was born in Toronto and had never travelled farther than Niagara Falls, three hours away by car. She didn’t own a television set, she never went to the movies and she read nothing but the Bible. So why she had these wistful memories of England, nobody could figure out. If you asked her, “How do you know the Humber River smells like the Thames?” she’d scratch her knuckles and look cornered. Consequently, nobody had the heart to pin her down about her supposed reminiscences.
She lived in the finished basement of the century-old lakeside house Doris had grown up in. After Grandpa Gayler died she’d moved downstairs and rented out the upper floor. She preferred the basement, she insisted, the coolness in summer, the “good” damp. It was so damp that she had to cover the upholstery with plastic or it would rot, but the carpet she left uncovered because it was a cheap old thing, she said, and as a result mushrooms grew under it. Several times a year mushrooms pushed their way right through the fibre, and these she plucked and ate fried on toast—something the English did, according to her. The walls were mildewed, the wooden arms and legs of the furniture furry with mould. Mould was the antimacassar. Frogs were her
“flat mates.” After rainstorms, which flooded the apartment and turned her shoes and wastepaper baskets into boats, bullfrogs showed up and preyed on the centipedes. When Grandma Gayler descended on the frogs to show how they wouldn’t harm you they made gangly leaps to escape her, but she caught them with a ferocious lightning snatch. “Bad boy,” she scolded them, and they wailed like babies.
Every time Doris visited, the first thing she did was dash around squashing the centipedes and harvesting the mushrooms. She scraped the mildew and mould but not from the arms of the maroon wing-backed chair because it was the one Joan liked, and when she sat in it she stroked the arms with both hands, over and over.
Joan was about three when she started acting more at home at Grandma Gayler’s, keeping her eyes open in that dark corner though still refusing to leave the chair. Apart from the fuzz on the chair arms she was preoccupied with her reflection in the mirrored picture frame on the table beside her, and with the movie usherette who lived upstairs and who in soft-soled shoes walked briskly and ceaselessly up and down the corridor as if she had to practice her job. Looking up at the ceiling, creaking when a floorboard did, Joan’s eyes tracked the usherette like radar.
Until her preoccupation became the piano.
Unbelievably, there was a piano in that saturated basement. Twenty years earlier, when it had been upstairs and when her fingers had been straight, Grandma Gayler had played hymns on it after supper.
“You should sell it,” Doris was always telling her now, “before it gets so rusty and out of tune it can’t be fixed.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Grandma Gayler would say in an anxious—and these days English-accented—voice.
One afternoon, though (it was a Sunday in February, 1963; Joan would have been six), Grandma Gayler lifted her chin and said, “It so happens I still play it now and again.”
“You do?” Doris said suspiciously. Moss sealed the crease where the lid opened.
Grandma Gayler strode across the room, wide arthritic hips gyrating with resolve. She pulled out the bench, sat and lifted the lid, causing the moss to bisect and hang from each end in cords. For a moment she suspended her spiggoty fingers above the keys, then she started banging out a surprisingly in-tune “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.”
Her mouth worked like mad. As if, Marcy thought, she wanted to sing but had forgotten the words, so Marcy supplied them, sliding onto the bench beside her. So then Doris, on the plastic-covered sofa, started singing as well, in her little-girl, offkey voice, and after a few bars Sonja, who’d been lying with her head on Doris’s lap—mainly to oblige her mother to stay put—sat up and joined in, also off-key.
In the third verse Gordon picked up the lyrics. He had been a choirboy once, a descant. He had a beautiful Bing Crosby bass now, and Doris looked at him and wondered why it was that the best things about the people you loved, the very things you loved them for, could take you off-guard like this. Gordon didn’t enjoy these visits to her mother’s. For starters, the humidity fogged his glasses. But here he was, singing, “Tell how the sparrow that twitters on yonder tree …”
He made it through all six verses, him and Grandma Gayler. And Marcy softly garbling along and pretending to know the words by piping up at the cadences. Doris kept glancing over at Joan, amazed that she wasn’t covering her ears. When the singing ended, Doris’s eyes were awash. “Well,” she said. “Aren’t we something?”
Grandma Gayler closed the lid. “So there,” she said and pulled herself to her feet and waddled toward the kitchen.
“Oh, Mother,” Doris said apologetically. She jumped up to help her with the tea, but Gordon tugged her skirt. He nodded across the room.
It was Joan. She was walking over to the piano, echoing the squishing sounds her feet made in the drenched carpet. “Hey,” Sonja said, seeing her, and Doris nudged her to be quiet. Marcy though, spun around and cried, “Joanie!” then looked at the others through her misted glasses with their blue, pointy frames.
Doris touched a finger to her lips. Joan was climbing onto the bench now. She was so small that she still climbed onto chairs frontwards, like a toddler. When she was seated she opened the piano lid.
“Do you want to hear me play ‘Chopsticks’?” Marcy whispered.
Joan mooed—No—and pushed her sunglasses up her nose. She held both hands above the keys and clawed them. Marcy giggled at this parody of Grandma Gayler, then glanced guiltily at her mother. Before she had turned back round Joan was picking out “Tell Me the Stories of Jesus.”
“Holy Geez,” Gordon murmured after the first half dozen bars.
“Who’s that?” Grandma Gayler called.
None of them answered. It was as if a bird had flown in and landed on someone’s finger. Grandma Gayler appeared at the kitchen door as Joan clawed her hands above the keys again and started over. This time she added chords.
“Well bless her heart, who taught her that?”
“Shh, Mother,” Doris said.
“Shh,” Joan echoed but went on playing, jabbing bass notes with her left hand and swinging the rhythm.
Marcy leaned sideways to give her room. Was this a miracle? Marcy was a bit scared.
So was Doris. That old eeriness she hadn’t felt since the train ride back from the West Coast. Joan’s toy hands were now dancing on the keyboard, all her fingers getting in on the act. Her shoulders were nursing the rhythm like an old lounge lizard’s. They were! And now—this was too much—she was playing “In the Mood.”
Gordon came to his feet and took a few steps toward her. Doris glanced at him. The ceiling was low and he had to stoop, his head thrust forward. His face had a bright, famished look. Doris got an impression of a papier mâché head wearing glasses, a head composed of hundreds of layers of faces wearing glasses, and the head with the famished look was the innermost and most private one and had punched its way, indecently, through all the others.
“Gracious me,” Grandma Gayler said. She patted her heart and looked around the room, catching Sonja’s eye. “How long has she been taking lessons?”
Sonja slowly shook her head. There was a dead composer she was trying to remember. That really famous small one with the white hair.
Doris, too, was now thinking about Mozart reincarnated, but telling herself to get a hold of herself.
Did
you
ever see a cow with a green eyebrow
were the lyrics in the back of her mind. “I don’t believe it!” she said. Unintentionally and at that weirdly jubilant pitch of hers. And everything, everyone stopped, even the usherette.
Even Joan, who twisted around and looked with her usual attentiveness.
“Keep going, Sweetie,” Doris said, trying to sound normal.
Joan then did two more unprecedented things. First she pushed her sunglasses up onto her head. And then she smiled. With her bare eyes, looking straight at Doris, she smiled.
“Sweetie?” Doris whispered.
Joan chirped and turned back to the piano, back to playing “In the Mood.”
I
n the spring of 1927 when Gordon was twelve, he and his friend Tony went down to the creek one warm Saturday and collected snakes coming sluggishly out of hibernation. Garter snakes, milk snakes, green snakes, rat snakes, lots of little deKays the colour of golden-brown sugar. A good thirty snakes all told. Is that possible? Snakes in every spill of sun, on rocks and in the mouths of their pits. Most of them solitary but some in groups of four or more, a haphazard tossing and mortally still like an aftermath.
They threw them into Tony’s wagon. There were so many they didn’t bother about the ones that poured like tributaries over the sides of the wagon as Tony pulled and Gordon pushed it home.
And is it possible that Tony’s mother let them unload the snakes on her front porch? This is how Gordon remembers it. He and Tony sitting on the porch rail, herding the snakes with sticks and dropping bait worms on them, but the snakes wouldn’t eat, so the worms dried and the next day their fishhook shapes were all over the porch as if to illustrate the manner of death they’d been braced for.
By then the snakes were gone. Gordon and Tony had kept them only a few hours before hauling them back to the creek and tipping them out of the wagon. In every direction and stunningly fast they burst into the undergrowth. Quicksilver vanishing down the cracks of a floor.
The next time the two of them went snake collecting all they found were a garter snake and a deKay. They decided to keep
them in a cardboard box at Tony’s, and here again, considering that the snakes would have been too traumatized to eat and would have died pretty quickly, Gordon questions what he remembers, which is days and days of going around bare-chested with a snake wrapped around his neck, him and Tony pretending to be Tarzan.
At that age Gordon’s chest was as hairless as the palm of his hand. It was tubular and soft and a source of horror to him because his nipples were growing. Every night, to fend off breasts, he slept prone on a plywood board, inserting it under his chest before lying down. His snake, the garter, was long enough and docile enough that when he wore it around his neck its ends covered his tender, pink nipples, and he didn’t feel so self-conscious around Tony, who had nipples like pennies, and a compressed chest, heroically muscled.
Tony’s snake didn’t really go around his neck. It was only about eight inches long and he had to grasp its head and tail to keep it on. Gordon had offered him the garter, but the garter always seemed to nose toward Tony’s groin, and Tony was afraid of it biting him. A snake bite there, he said, even from a non-venomous snake, and you could be paralyzed for life.
Gordon had read two books about snakes and there was nothing about groin bites. He didn’t challenge Tony, though, because he believed that Tony knew more than he did about sex and sex organs. Way more. Tony had whiskers and underarm hair and from his navel to the waist of his trousers a stripe of black hair that affected Gordon as if it were an award. As if it were evidence, like a singe or a shadow, that there had been a lot of erections in that vicinity, all of them more adult (bigger, more exciting, more legitimate) than Gordon’s.
Not that Gordon could have said for sure that Tony got erections. He and Tony were modest. They were careful not to look at each other urinating. They were pious, Tony especially so, being Catholic. He was always crossing himself in a speedy,
nervous fashion that Gordon’s mother had initially taken for a palsy. On the shelf above Tony’s bed was a pocked, orange-skinned Jesus statuette with crossed eyes that gazed straight down at the mattress. What did Jesus see? Nights drenched in solitary sex, Gordon imagined. Manly sex. Sex that was all right with Jesus. But he couldn’t imagine anything that Tony actually did because he couldn’t imagine what Tony thought about.