“Maybe pots and pans,” Doris suggested. As she understood it, the queen always won a stupendously expanded version of the humble thing she asked for, plus, the humbler this thing was, the more fur coats and appliances were heaped on her.
“A few measly pots and pans,” the man said.
“Then one day, God villing, I open my own beanery.”
The telegram arrived June fourth, the Monday after they found out that Sonja was pregnant. It said that Belle Ladovsky was one of three lucky audition winners from the Toronto-Buffalo area and would be flown down to New York City on June twelfth for a June thirteenth taping.
All day Doris worked on a story to tell Gordon, but seeing as the only times in eighteen years she’d been away from home overnight were when she was in the hospital giving birth,
everything she came up with made it sound as if she were having an affair. Eventually she decided she’d have to resort to the truth. She waited until evening, until after the girls had gone to bed, and then she put on the outfit—the stole, the turban, the dress and shoes, plus a pair of Gordon’s old glasses for extra disguise—and went into the living room where Gordon was sitting on the chesterfield, reading a manuscript. She had the audition ad and the telegram as well as the Dutch Masters cigar box that she kept the overdue bills in. Without a word she handed him the ad and when he’d read it she gave him the telegram.
“I take it you’re Belle Ladovsky,” he said.
She emptied the box onto the coffee table. “I was hoping to spare you this,” she said about the bills.
He studied each one, flattening it first under his jumbo hand, unbending folded corners. Because she was wearing his old glasses she couldn’t make out which bill he was looking at, but a few of them, like the ones for Sonja’s and Marcy’s pink bunny-fur muffs, were extravagances, she knew that.
China man, he had a wife, led him such a miserable life
the lyrics in her head went. Why didn’t Gordon say something? “Say something,” she said to the hunched-over blur of him, feeling as though she were addressing a man in a dream or through frosted glass. Or through time … the unsung clerk. The bowbacked, myopic, genius book editor, unappreciated by everyone except for her and a few alcoholic has-been writers whose stacks of unpublishable manuscripts were her footstools and bedside tables.
He didn’t speak. He held a bill closer to the light.
“Nobody vill recoknice me in dis get-up,” she said, sitting beside him.
He shook his head, at her or the bill there was no telling.
“I’m promisink hew.”
When he was done he neatly piled the bills and returned
them to the cigar box. “I had no idea,” he said into his hands.
“Heck, it’s not that bad,” she said. “Eleven months out of twelve, I can manage just fine.”
“Now this baby—“
“Okay, we need a miracle, and hallelujah!”
Gordon looked at her. Then he looked her up and down as if he had only just registered what she had on. “Jesus, Doris,” he whispered.
“Listen to me.” She took his hand. Kissed his mountainous knuckles. “Sweetie,” she said, her voice trembling with righteous fervour. “I’m a shoo-in.”
She was. She got to be the third contestant, a lucky break because it allowed her to top the agony of the other two. The first contestant was an arthritic cleaning woman with nine kids and a bed-ridden husband. Then there was a wall-eyed pea sheller whose husband had ditched her for a good-time girl. Neither of them knew how to build a story let alone how to play to an audience. But you should have seen Doris. When she sobbed, “I am so ashamed to be beggink,” two fatsos in the front row sobbed along with her. Before the applause meter had even confirmed it she knew she’d clinched the crown. Her winnings included two full-length fur coats (one sable, one mink), two wheelchairs, a colour television, a twenty-piece set of pots and pans, an electric range and a year’s supply of beans. Back in Toronto her explanation to neighbours was that she had entered a draw and what do you know?
She sold the fur coats back to the dealer who’d sold them to the show. Just the money from them alone paid off their debts with enough left over for fibreglass living-room drapes—pea-green, shot with what Doris told the girls was real silver—
and
(here’s why Gordon couldn’t muster enough annoyance to even shake his head at that lie) a convertible. Baby blue, brand new, their first new car and not one he’d have dreamed of buying if they hadn’t hit the jackpot and she hadn’t haggled
the price down by trading in the beans and wheelchairs.
On the drizzly morning that she and Sonja left for Vancouver, Gordon picked up the car from the dealer’s, and so the first family outing was the drive to the train station. To everybody’s disappointment the weather obliged them to leave the top up.
“We wouldn’t want to ruin the
regally luxuriant, stylishly elegant upholstery,”
Doris said in her tone of confidential exhilaration. She was reading from the sales brochure.
“You see the road but never feel it,” she read, twisting around to the girls in the back seat. “This car has glamour plus.” She batted her mascaraed eyelashes.
She wasn’t one to get “all dolled up,” as she put it, but for the train ride she was wearing fire-engine-red lipstick, moss green eye shadow, mascara and a smudge of rouge on each cheek. To the girls her face looked like a movie star’s. To Gordon it looked like a clown’s, not that he let on. He loved her a great deal, protectively and sheepishly. “What do you think of my new hat?” she’d asked that morning, and he’d said, “Very smart,” although it was ridiculously tiny, like a chimpanzee’s hat, and her hair springing out from under it made her head look detonated.
She had sewn on an elastic chin strap to keep the hat from blowing off. As she read from the brochure the strap gave the girls the funny impression that her jaw was hinged, like a marionette’s. They laughed at her into their hands. “It’s a supreme joy and a thrill and a blessing,” Doris read, and the girls giggled into the white cotton gloves they were both wearing.
“And,” Doris read, “it’s all yours!”
Yours being the baby’s father’s name, Sonja swallowed hard before laughing. She wasn’t quite free of him yet but would be once she was on the train. A few weeks from now she’d get a postcard signed “Yours, Dad” and all she’d swallow over was that he hadn’t signed it “Love.”
(It wouldn’t be signed love because Gordon would be feeling
unworthy of using the word. He would still be a wreck from having received, the day before, a consolation card. Sent by a man named Al Yothers. The picture on the front of the card would be a cartoon of a squirrel, and inside it would say, “Hope all your troubles will soon be nuttin’.” There would be no message, only “A.Y.” encircled in a heart. Marcy would see it—she would come into the kitchen while he was still staring at it—and she would ask if it was from her mother and sister. Because her hopeful, lovelorn face would be slaying him he’d answer yes. He’d say, “It’s for you,” and then have to account for the A.Y. “All yours,” he’d come up with. “A.Y. means all yours,” he’d say, and she’d think a minute and say, “Like the convertible!” which would first bewilder and then grieve him, since by that time the car would be scrap metal.)
That day, the day Sonja and Doris left for Vancouver, the car didn’t have a scratch and it cruised along as smoothly and quietly as a car sailing off a cliff.
Doris had splurged on a sleeping cabin. There was a sink, toilet and what was supposed to be a double bed but turned out to be more like a good-sized single.
“Let’s see how the springs hold up anyways,” she said, and with the old Negro porter right there she climbed on and started jumping in her high heels, then bounced onto her back and thought it was a scream when her dress billowed up and the porter saw her garters.
That was the first sign of the new her. Up until then she had been a woman who flushed when the doctor pressed the stethoscope against her breast and who, once she was in a chair, preferred to stay put. Try telling that to the people who were on the train. On that train she couldn’t even sit through a meal. Ten times she’d get up to stretch her legs, visit the ladies’ room, cuddle somebody’s squalling baby, yank the baby out of the
mother’s arms and stride with it like a mad sentry, up and down, up and down, almost running. At night in bed she was still so keyed up that Sonja had to wrap her arms around her to keep her from thrashing.
Sonja was the opposite—so relaxed on that trip she couldn’t detect her own pulse. Every morning she squeezed herself into a lounge chair in the observation car and more or less stayed put, snoozing, eating Animal Crackers and Tootsie Roll Pops from the snack counter, reading her Nancy Drew book, looking out the window. Off and on she pressed her hand over her heart to try to feel her heartbeat while under her new Miss Chubette dress with its Peter Pan collar and daisy-shaped buttons her baby’s cells multiplied.
Now that her morning sickness was over and nobody had seemed to notice that her stomach was swelling, she didn’t think about the baby too much apart from something precious that she was temporarily in charge of, as when you’re the one with the tickets or the money. For the most part she felt nothing but cosy and puffy. She felt like an angel food cake. Her only distress, and it was a very slight one, arose at either of these two thoughts: that Marcy would forget to feed her hamster, Sniffers, and that, because she’d already missed too many lessons to ever get back into Miss Gore’s tap class, her dancing days were over. Her ultimate view on both prospects was, Oh well.
Sometimes Doris perched on the seat beside her to see how she was doing, and Sonja curled up with her fingers in her mouth and her head on her mother’s lap and let herself be lulled by the rhythm of her mother’s breakneck chatter, its pleasing accompaniment to the rhythm of the train. Frankly, she didn’t actually hear much of what Doris was going on about.
One morning, though, the third morning, she had her head in Doris’s lap and Doris said, “I wonder what the heck’s gotten into me?” and Sonja heard that.
“What, Mommy?” Sonja asked.
“Sweetie, you tell me and we’ll both know.” She knocked both her fists on Sonja’s skull, absently and too hard, but as Sonja usually had to see blood before it occurred to her that she hurt, she didn’t mind.
“You’re still excited about winning the draw,” Sonja suggested.
“Well, that’s the truth,” Doris said.
“The truth is only aversion,” Sonja reminded her.
“I feel like I’ve eaten Mexican jumping beans,” Doris said. She laughed, her new high-speed hyena laugh. “Brother, listen to me go.”
She was panting.
J
oan was born on Friday, November thirtieth, 1956, at around one-thirty p.m. Pacific time in the basement guest room of Dearness Old Folks’ Home. The same room that, two years earlier, a seventy-year-old woman named Alice Gunn wrote backwards in the window grime
ROT IN HELL
then choked herself to death with her rubber restraining belt.
“Callous Alice” the newspapers called her in their features about Joan, because that old tragedy was dredged up and tied in to the reincarnation story. A week after Joan’s birth, by which time both Doris and Sonja thought it was safe to leave her on her own for a few minutes, a reporter sneaked into the room and took her picture and then drove to White Rock and showed the snapshot to Alice’s ninety-seven-year-old mother, who after Alice’s death had changed old folks’ homes.
“That’s Ali, all right,” Alice’s mother was quoted as saying. “I’d know those bug eyes anywhere.” She said, “Tell her new mother I’m still paying monthly instalments on the headstone, if she’d care to pitch in.”
Not just Doris and Sonja but everyone at Dearness took exception to the bug-eyes crack. Everyone at Dearness was bowled over by Joan’s beauty, even the old men were. Men who found the soup-spoons too heavy asked to hold her. One man believed that Joan was the reincarnation of his first wife, Lila, who in a recent seance had talked of returning to earth for “another go-round.” When Joan started making that odd clicking sound she sometimes did, he said, “Yep, hear that? Those are her teeth, those are her new uppers,” resting his case.
“Well, Lila!” he said, propping Joan astride his scrawny knee, “I took the nervous breakdown, expect you heard.”
Even Aunt Mildred was under Joan’s spell, and she was the one who’d predicted that Joan would be a midget or a dwarf, “something deformed and bunched-up like” because of the tucked-in, round-shouldered way Sonja had carried herself when she was pregnant.
Aunt Mildred had gone downhill a lot further than Doris had realized. On the phone back in June she’d said come on out, failing to mention not only her throat cancer but also that she had lost her house to creditors and was moving into an old folks’ home just a week before Doris and Sonja were due to arrive.
“For crying out loud, why didn’t you tell us?” Doris said when they finally located her after a morning of taking taxis all over Vancouver.
“Give me the name again?” Aunt Mildred rasped.
“Doris! Gordon’s wife!”
Aunt Mildred shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell, honey.”
Doris decided they might as well stay at Dearness anyway, might as well move into the basement guest apartment for the time being since it was dirt cheap and included meals. She booked it for the maximum allowable duration of two weeks, signing in both herself and Sonja under fake last names (and when the reincarnation story hit the headlines was she glad she had!). That same day she found a cottage for them to live in when the two weeks were up, but four days before they were supposed to go there she fell in love with a nurse named Harmony La Londe. Unhinged by this voodoo rapture and by the thought of Harmony being out of her sight for more than a few hours, she staged a little drama in Dearness’s office. She pretended to telephone Gordon, then over the dial tone pretended to be hearing that he had been fired from his job and there would be no money for her and Sonja’s return train fare,
not for many months. She hung up slowly. She sat there blinking, one hand over her mouth. She allowed the woman who owned Dearness to pry the news out of her and she said, with dignity, “I’m very grateful,” when the woman said, “You and your daughter stay right here for as long as you need to.”