Hen twisted around to put the box behind her. When he sat forward again his weight settling in the seat caused it to whoosh. “What’d ya say?” he addressed the seat. “Diet, you fat slob!” he answered in a growly voice. He looked down and yelled, “All right already, I’ll dye it but what colour? Ha!” He turned to her, his bursting mole-splattered face as friendly as a raisin pie. “Where to?” She stopped laughing and gave him directions, and he said, “Down by the train station, right where I was headed. Say, what time does the next train leave?”
“Jeepers, I don’t know.”
“Two, two, two.”
She checked her wristwatch. “I hope you’re a fast driver.”
“Ha!”
All the way to Schropps he wisecracked. “What’s that on your collar?” he asked. When she looked down to see, he flipped her nose with his finger. She asked how his brother was and he
said, “Len? Len’s home playing strip solitaire. Ha!” Then he said, “Poor old Len, thinks he’s a deck of cards.”
“Really?”
“Went to a shrink, shrink said, ‘I’ll
deal
with you later.’ Ha! I know a guy, now this is a true fact, I swear, I know a guy thinks he’s a pair of drapes.”
“Really?”
“Went to a shrink, shrink told him to pull himself together. Ha! ‘Course I think I’m a goat, been thinking that ever since I was a kid. Ha!”
By the time she got the joke, if she did, he was already on to the next one and she had already laughed at his laugh. He was the funniest man she had ever met, way funnier without Len giving away his punch lines. Come to think of it, maybe it had been
him
giving away Len’s punch lines. Her father had said that nobody could tell the two of them apart, that they had driven their wiener dog crazy by seeming to be in two rooms at once. What a ball it must be at their house. She pictured them bumping bellies as they had done that night at supper, pretending to fight, saying, “Why you no good … Why I oughta …”
At Schropps, when she was out of the car, Hen called that he would wait. She bent down to the passenger window and pointed out that it was almost twenty-two minutes after two, he’d better hurry, and he said, “What am I going to do with you, Kiddo?”
“What?”
“Ha!”
When she was back in the car he said he knew where they served the best chicken and dumplings in the city, how about they go and treat themselves? Figuring that he had given up on catching his train, she said, “Sure.” Don’t forget, this was a friend of her father’s. “You won’t be sorry,” he said, licking the drool from the corner of his mouth. She licked her drool. She was suddenly hungry—everything was food. His brown-checkered pants, waffles. His hair, caramel corn. Her drool kept on coming, and so
did his jokes. The reason he and Len were bookbinders was that they were
bound
to do well. He used to be engaged but now he was footloose and “fiancée free.” He wanted lots of kids, and he intended to help with the feedings, since a baby had to have a bottle … “or bust.” “Bust” embarrassed her—although she couldn’t help laughing—and she looked out her window. They were driving along the lake, the strip of park and beach east of downtown. Meringue-crested waves. Brown-sugar sand, gingerbread boys. She thought of a joke. “Do you like Chinese food?”
“Man oh man, do I?”
She pulled back the corners of her eyes. “Eat me,” she said.
He gave her a startled glance.
“Eat me. Get it? I’m Chinese.”
“Oh, all right. Sure, you’re Chinese food.”
She sighed and said, “Brother, I just can’t tell jokes,” and he said, “Let’s keep this to ourselves.”
“Keep what?” Her joke?
“This date.”
“September twenty-sixth?”
He smiled. “Why do you suppose you never got a call from Len or me?”
“Um—“ She tapped her finger against her chin. “Don’t tell me.” Phone, she thought. Dial. Hen. “Because a hen doesn’t call, it clucks?”
“Because we
both
fell for you. Had a fight over you, if you want to know what it came down to. Darn near strangled each other with those scarves you gave us.”
Nothing could be further from her mind than that he was serious.
“Anyhoo,” he said, “we made a deal. Neither of us could ask you out. Hands off the merchandise. But, man oh man …” He shook his head and smiled over at her.
It took her a moment to realize that his hand was on her knee. She looked at it clamped there, freckled and puffy, a kind
of starfish. Except that it was a man’s hand. On her knee. She looked out the window again, sucking her fingers and trying to register how she felt. Not swept off her feet. The truth of the matter was it could be anything on her knee. A poodle. A banjo.
In the restaurant he was a riot. The waitress—Vicky, it said on her uniform—asked if they wanted their chicken smothered in gravy, and he said, “What the heck, Vicky, kill it how you usually do.” He told moron jokes non-stop. Sonja knew a moron joke herself—“Why didn’t the baby moron fall off the cliff? Because he was a little
more on,”
and she got a laugh out of him but she could tell he’d heard it before. Vicky, however, cracked up. As Hen later explained, Vicky was an albino. Dead-white skin, hair like candy floss, matching pink eyes, which blinked a lot. She had a moron joke, too—“Why did the moron walk around with his fly open? In case he had to count to eleven.” Sonja didn’t get it and she guessed because the moron’s fly was open that it was rude, but she laughed to be polite. “Whoa, Vicky, Vicky,” Hen said. “Sonja here’s a nice girl.” Vicky gave Sonja the once-over, then, sighing, pouring them coffees they hadn’t ordered, said, “I was a nice girl once, but when you get pregnant after being more or less raped, excuse me I should probably say ‘forced against your will,’ and then the father runs out on you so you have to give the baby up and then you find out that the baby is brain-damaged, well, excuse me for living, but ‘nice’ has a tendency to fly out the window.”
Hen whistled. “Man oh man, hey, Vicky, that’s too bad.” He slipped an arm around her waist. “Anyhoo, who said you weren’t nice? Show me the dirty rat that said that! Let me at him! Why, I oughta—“ He turned to Sonja. “Vicky’s the nicest waitress we’ve ever had, what do you say?”
Don’t look at Sonja. Her heart was racing, her palms were dripping.
Now
she felt as if a man’s hand was on her knee. Vicky had been talking about
her,
that’s what Sonja thought. Or maybe … was Vicky related to Joan? That white hair, the white
skin? What she meant was, had Vicky and Joan been related in a former life? She watched Vicky roll her pink eyes and laugh at Hen, then write up their bill, then angle around the tables and into the kitchen. In her left ear she heard Hen say, “Two’s company, three’s the result.” Feeling frantic, feeling like a train trying to make it up a hill, she shovelled dumplings into her mouth, her eyes welded to the swinging kitchen doors.
It was the darndest thing. She’d forget all about Joan being reincarnated and then something like this would happen. A sign. The last one was two years ago. She was down in the laundry room going through the rag bag in search of velvet to sew hats with for her china dolls and she found a man’s white shirt that had
ALI WAS HERE
written on the back. Instantly she knew it was a message from Callous Alice—or Ali for short—the woman everyone at Dearness had said Joan used to be before she was born. She dropped the shirt and screamed. That is to say her throat discharged a sound that Doris, up in the kitchen, thought was somebody reeling in the outside clothesline. “Was that you?” Doris laughed. “Sweetie,” she said, “what are you up to?” because when Sonja brought her down to the laundry room to show her the shirt, it was gone!
Meanwhile, in the restaurant, Hen told more moron jokes, and what Sonja took for streetcars rumbling by outside turned out to be herself laughing—her lungs and chest carrying on like a car still chugging after you switch the engine off. Huh! she thought when she realized. She glanced down at her hands, half expecting them to be knitting. You never knew with this body of hers, it had a mind of his own! By now she was breathing easier and repeating to herself, “Joanie was Alice, Joanie was Alice,” to show whoever had sent the Sign that she hadn’t forgotten, although she more or less had.
She was grateful that on the drive home, for the first half of it
anyway, Hen didn’t talk. He flicked a toothpick in the corner of his mouth and belched, so Sonja allowed herself a few burps as well. When he finally spoke it was, coincidentally, to ask about Joan, who of course had stayed in her bedroom the night he and Len had come for supper but he had heard her playing the piano. “How’s Mozart?” he said.
“Funny you should ask,” she said. “Because you know what? Vicky reminded me of her. I’ve never seen anybody else with hair that white and with such white, white skin.”
“What!” His eyeballs seemed to dangle at the end of springs. “Joan’s an albino?”
This is when he explained what an albino was. No pigmentation, the pink eyes.
“Joanie’s eyes are green,” Sonja said.
“Green, that’s good, that’s good. She’s probably just one of those really blonde blondes. Albinos don’t live long, you know.”
Sonja’s heart staggered. “Oh, I’m sure she’s not an albino.” She looked down. There was Hen’s hand on her knee again.
“I’m sure she’s not, too. Hey, if you want to
di-late,
become an optometrist. Ha! Listen, speaking of trysts, ours are going to have to be restricted to Saturday afternoons. That’s when Len has his oil painting classes. I tell him, I say, Len, artists are born … which is the problem. Ha! Anyhoo, we’re only going to be able to see each other once a week, Kiddo.”
“That’s okay.” When had it been settled that they would see each other at all? He patted her knee and said don’t worry, he’d get round to telling Len about her before the wedding but in the meantime—“We’d better keep mum about this, and I mean from daddy-o.” They were now pulled over in front of the bus stop where she had been standing almost three hours ago. He spit the toothpick onto the floor. “Same time, same station?”
“I guess so.”
He kissed her, her first kiss. It reminded her of the time a horse nibbled sugar cubes from the flat of her hand. When it
was over he looked at her from eye to eye. “We’re going to have to work on that,” he said.
She settled, walking home, that if he had been serious about the wedding she would come right out and tell him she wasn’t a virgin, and that should put an end to that. She
wasn’t
a virgin, was she? Did it matter whether or not you’d had a climax? She was fairly certain there had been no climax. She
had
had a baby, after being “more or less raped,” although she had never thought of it that way.
She stopped walking and pressed her palms to her temples. Recalling Vicky’s astonishing disclosure made her feel as though her head had been clanged between a pair of cymbals. She tried to think straight. You can’t have a baby and be a virgin, not unless you’re the Virgin Mary. Okay, that made her not a virgin.
It wasn’t as if she hadn’t worked this out before. She was twenty-three years old. It wasn’t as if she hadn’t thought about a husband before, either. Plenty of times she’d tried imagining how a husband would fit into her life, and what it boiled down to was, he wouldn’t. Who would babysit Joan when her mother was off gallivanting? What would Schropps do without her? And even if her husband moved into her house and let her go on working, where would he sleep? By herself she took up the whole bed.
And yet…
And yet she remained open to this one possibility—Being Swept Off Her Feet. Weighing 250 pounds and working as a pin clipper had afforded her a taste of it. The buoyancy, the lightness. The bubble feeling, as she th ought of it. Call her sick (Gail did), it didn’t change the fact that the bubble feeling was why she couldn’t wait to get to her pins in the morning. If a man could offer her anything close to that kind of pleasure, well, now that there was a man in the picture, she figured she might as well give him a whirl.
Although, judging by the kiss and by his hand on her knee, she and Hen weren’t off to a flying start.
The following Saturday it’s sunny and warm, in the mid-seventies. An Indian summer day as Hen points out and then he fires off a million Indian jokes. For the first few minutes they were Chinese jokes in a Chinese accent, inspired by the five bags of Chinese food in the back seat. When Sonja climbed in the car, not seeing the bags, she said she smelled garbage. “I’ve never minded the smell of garbage,” she said truthfully after he drew her attention to the bags and told her about his plan for a picnic at Edwards Gardens.
“Ha!” Right in her face, like a blast from a tuba. “You clack me up, Round-eye.”
On the fringe of that blast she smelled alcohol and was flattered because she knew that sometimes your date needed to screw up his courage with a few stiff belts. Before, when he had leaned over to kiss her cheek, she had smelled his Old Spice aftershave, the same as her father wore, and had felt a bit apprehensive, she couldn’t have said why. A moment after that she noticed the $14.99 price tag hanging from a thread on the back of his shirt collar and she was amazed. Had he spent all that money just to impress her? The shirt is white cotton knit, short-sleeved. He is dressed entirely in white—white sailor pants, white loafers, which also look new. He is going all out. But, then, she should talk.
For the occasion—for the First Annual Pin Clippers Luncheon was the story she’d handed her parents—she is wearing her mother’s Evening in Paris perfume and her lipstick (the same and only tube Doris has owned going on fifteen years now). She is wearing her best dress, the red empire-line. She has taken up the hem.
She has shaved her legs. Hence her slashed knees and
ankles. (Hence the pinkish bathtub ring that, right about now, Doris is pondering.) It was such a long bath that it turned her the colour of bubble-gum. “Wow,” she said looking at her naked self in the mirror afterwards, something that she never did. When she grew accustomed to her hue, another spectacle hit her. “Wow,” she said, “am I ever fat!” She felt no repulsion, no embarrassment. She was entirely in awe, the same feeling people get in the presence of a stupendous natural wonder that all the photographs have impoverished. After a moment she plumped up her high round breasts. She dabbed at the moles on her breasts and belly. Look at all those moles! She enumerated the biggest ones and came up with thirty-two. Then she slid a finger between one of her belly’s scallops and felt the finger clasped tight. She turned sideways for that view, shook her arms and laughed at the wobble, patted her hands over the alluvium of her bottom and thighs, the miles of it! Then back to the moles. They reminded her of someone’s face.