“Honey, you all right?” says Cloris, and her hand is on Doris’s thigh. A smaller hand than you’d think, and older, corrugated like tree bark. Is
this
a pass? Doris knows that she’s being way too impatient, vulgar is more like it. Even most men would have the decency not to try anything so early in the game. But she can’t help herself. She could cry. She has a better idea, and given that her heart is going like a troupe of tap-dancers, it’s not completely an act. She half rises out of the chair and then collapses into the stage faint that she taught
herself almost thirty years ago and that, at last, has come in handy.
Except that Cloris’s crowded little apartment isn’t a stage. Instead of hitting the floor, Doris’s head hits a horse-head book-end she hadn’t noticed sticking out from under the chair, and she really does black out. For a good half hour, she’d swear, because while she is unconscious she dreams that she and Cloris make love.
The dream starts with her curled up on a bed between orange sheets, exactly like the ones Harmony used to have. She lifts the top sheet to verify that she is naked and sees how the orange makes her flesh look peachy and slender, years younger. She’d like to know where you buy these sheets. Another thing: how did Cloris manage to lug her onto the bed? Well, Cloris is a nurse, Doris reminds herself, nurses are strong. She lets the sheet waft down.
And hears breathing. Then registers the warmth of it on the nape of her neck. And something brushing her upper back. Nipples. She knows that feeling. In exquisite slow motion she feels the nipples press, give way to the breasts, which flatten on her back as her rear end is cupped in a belly, flesh arriving and spreading over her in waves.
She doesn’t move in case she’s dreaming and wakes up. No, she can’t be dreaming! You don’t see colours in dreams! A leg parts hers and starts a gentle pumping. A hand skims down her arm to her hip, barely touching. She hears the bracelets. That settles it, she must be awake. In a dream like this would she think to include the bracelets? What’s more, if she was dreaming, Cloris would be wrestling with her by now. All Doris’s dream women tend to be on the rambunctious side. They would
roll
her over. They wouldn’t ask, as Cloris just has, “Can we kiss, Honey Baby?”
From here on it’s
like
a dream, which for Doris is only more proof that it isn’t. During sex with Harmony, Doris always
hallucinated that the two of them were some kind of marine life. What she and Cloris have become are starfish. Her albino, Cloris inky. Their tongues entwine in impossibly long helixes. Doris’s jaw seems to unhinge, it opens so wide, until she has Cloris’s entire chin in her mouth. Cloris then sucks Doris’s chin into
her
mouth. They feed over each other’s bodies. A seashell pink underwater light. When Cloris slides on top of her, their mouths lock onto each other’s cunts as if driven by tides and the principles of physics. Whatever Cloris does, Doris does, this synchronization a natural law. Doris rolls her lips over Cloris’s labia, she makes her tongue as soft and fat and wet as Cloris’s labia, she nurses Cloris’s clitoris with more tenderness than she kissed her own sleeping babies. And though her mouth is full, she keeps saying, “Cloris,” and Cloris keeps saying, “Doris,” in voices very clear but far away, as if they have lost each other.
“Cloris.”
“Doris?”
“Cloris.” And there is Cloris’s face, upside-down above her own. How did that happen? Who turned on the lights? Cloris is dressed. That was fast. Doris goes to touch her own temple, and touches Cloris’s hand. What is Cloris doing? It hurts like the dickens there. “Mama may have,” sings Billie Holiday, “and Papa may have …”
“How do you feel?” Cloris asks.
“How long was I out?” She scours her beloved’s eyes for some aftermath. Okay, she was dreaming, but it’s not inconceivable that Cloris had the same dream. Look what happened with her and Sonja on the train back from Vancouver!
Cloris glances at her wristwatch. “Almost four minutes.”
She must be kidding.
“One more minute,” Cloris says, “and I was phoning for an ambulance.”
“Four minutes?” Doris is still aroused, her cunt throbbing
along with the song in her head
(If you get me going, you get what’s coming
…) and with the pulse in her temple, which Cloris is pressing an ice pack to. “What the heck did I fall on, anyway?”
“A book-end. Lord, you’ve got a bump to beat the band.”
Doris swallows hard.
“You aren’t nauseated, are you?” A cool, alert look, her pupils contracting. Her nurse’s look, Doris thinks, and feels so bereft she releases a little whimper. “Let’s sit you up,” Cloris says, starting to lift her.
Doris resists. “No, I’m fine. If I can just lie here for a second.”
Cloris eases her back down. “Well, sure you can.”
“Only four minutes? Really?”
“Shush. Don’t talk now.”
Doris gazes at her. Her gorgeous mauve lips that a minute ago—unbeknownst to them!—were kissing her. The eyes that saw her stark naked. Upside down, Cloris’s eyes are reptilian, unreadable. What Doris can’t get over is that Cloris missed the whole thing! It is all Doris can do not to roll over and sniff Cloris’s crotch for that nut smell. Why doesn’t she? The point of the faint was to end up in Cloris’s arms, better still her lap.
Doris thinks about this and can’t quite believe it. Gradually she is appalled. What was she trying to pull? An old bag like her taking advantage of this beautiful woman. She thinks of Cloris saying, “You’re my first white friend in Toronto,” and feels stunningly corrupt. She feels like a sack of garbage somebody dropped in Cloris’s lap. She sits up—too quickly—and groans.
“Take it easy,” Cloris says.
“I’m okay.” Although there’s a bowling ball tumbling around inside her skull. “Let me hold that,” she says about the ice pack, and when her fingers touch Cloris’s she gets aroused again. She can’t shake the sensation that she and Cloris actually did make love. She feels blessed by it. Except that because only
she
knows that they made love, she also feels slimy and forlorn. And protective. Wanting to shield her new lover from the sex-starved housewife on the loose in this room.
“Can I get you a glass of water?” Cloris asks, coming to her feet.
Doris looks at her way up there. “A glass of water?”
Cloris smiles, a wise, loving smile so exactly like the one Joan beamed on her that time in Grandma Gayler’s basement that her face seems to drain of pigment and age.
“Or would you like more tea?” Cloris says.
Doris can’t speak at all now. Cloris’s smile has stupefied her.
“Iced
tea,” Cloris says.
“Um—“ Doris gets out. Her stopped heart generates a thicket under her breast. What does it mean, a smile like that? How can you tell if it’s for you alone or for the idea of someone like you? Or if you are beside the point? If you have waned into a transparency through which the real cherished thing is being seen?
“You say,” Cloris says.
“You
say.” One thing she’s figured out—all the decisions from now on will be Cloris’s.
“Iced tea.” She walks to the kitchenette, sandals slapping, bracelets ringing.
“Then I’d better be going,” Doris says, but not so that Cloris will hear.
R
olled up under the rose-coloured carpet in the closet that Joan calls home is the white shirt Marcy wrote
AL WAS HERE
on. The day that Sonja found this shirt, Joan was watching her from behind the sofa and under the laundry tubs. She had been curled up on the old bath mat there, softly imitating sounds at the farthest rim of her hearing: a hum of traffic two streets away, a train whistle, a collision between a car and the train at a level crossing, sirens, a yapping dog whose eyes had just popped out and were dangling from their nerves (not that she knew this, although she knew about that dog from Marcy). Despite the damp she was drawn to the laundry room because it doesn’t have windows and because she had discovered that in basements the sharper sonorities are tempered. (In Grandma Gayler’s basement, sound was so velvety it burst into the open as mould!)
When Sonja started fishing through the rag bag, Joan switched from yapping to echoing Sonja’s aimless hum. There was no resisting it. To a decibel Joan had registered the hearing range of each member of her family, so she was able to stay just outside of Sonja’s. The beat of her own heart she retarded to keep time with the slow two-four rhythm of the hum. Sonja’s yell, which was like the scraping of gears, she mimicked with enough volume to give away her whereabouts had Sonja not been so alarmed. Joan herself was alarmed, all sudden or loud noises affecting her like firecrackers. Normally she would have run for cover, but here she was already under cover, and the noise, after all, had come from her darling Sonja. Who was now backing out of the room.
With the soles of her own feet Joan reproduced the thumps
of Sonja ascending the stairs. Then, curious, she crept over to the shirt that Sonja had dropped.
She saw the letters. Quickly she smoothed the shirt out, and what
she
read was
ALL WAS HERE.
All was here. It rang a bell. For at least four of her six years she had been aware of how close at hand everything was, of how whatever she wanted tended to be wherever she was. “Come out,” Marcy said. Why should she? What was in the bedroom that was not in the closet? All was in the closet. All was there.
Joan is no pack rat, but she decided to hold on to this shirt.
She has never once removed the shirt from under the carpet. She doesn’t need to. She is supremely conscious of its pacifying vibration, which is so like Sonja that it is a surrogate Sonja.
For Joan, the whole world vibrates—objects, people, weathers, shades of light and season, and sounds themselves emanating their signature amplitudes and oscillations. At least half of all frequencies, no matter what their amplitude, hurt, especially when they are new to her, but it is not out of the question that if she is subjected to a painful vibration enough times it will turn into a pleasant one.
Too bad this hasn’t been the case with light. Light continues to hurt, sunlight more so than artificial light. Sunlight sounds like the dentist’s drill and assaults like needles in her eyes, whereas the dentist drill, turned off, has a bearable thrum, as does the dentist, Dr. Jhar. When the drill is turned on, within its tortuous buzz is a soothing resonance veering on that of darkness. Darkness purrs. Similar to basements, it softens all vibrations. White paper also purrs. Green paper tinkles. Licorice Allsorts, the shower curtain and a girl named Gail tinkle like a lady’s laugh.
As far as Joan can tell everything vibrates like something
else. The exceptions are corpses, music and herself. She doesn’t vibrate at all, she knows from her reflection. The mirror vibrates but not her in the mirror, even though other people’s reflections sound exactly as they themselves do. She believes that this absence is why she is beautiful. Having heard all her life how beautiful she is, she believes that what people are talking about is her dead stillness, her hollow hush, and that they find it as pleasing as she does.
She had always thought that corpses wouldn’t vibrate either. Or that they would boom like old cheese—too loud, too deep and slow. But the vibration of Grandma Gayler’s corpse was so fast that it levelled into one long, silky tone from which glowed a glorious silver light that didn’t hurt Joan’s eyes. Heavenly light, she guessed it must be.
There was no heavenly music, however. She wishes there had been. Would it have vibrated like anything else? Earthly music vibrates only like itself and causes Joan to quiver along with it… because she herself is hollow, that’s what she thinks. The quivering is lovely when the music is good but like an electric shock when the music is off key or crude. Bad music coming from the television is the worst. Even turned off, the screen discharges a sickly, descending ruffle that she takes for granted must have inspired canned laughter. After hearing bad music she used to listen to her circulation and digestion while picking up the most distant sounds she could, back and forth, that long systole of the near and the remote working as a pain killer. Now what she does is play the piano, and this is literally a shot in the arm, in each arm, high and low frequencies flowing from the keys up her fingers, up her arms and pouring over her skin until the frequencies are in balance, at which point the pain wisps away.
Print is the opposite of bad music. Print is a sight for sore eyes. She reads three books a week from the lending library (this doesn’t include the one or two a month that Gordon reads
to her) and she has close to a hundred books and twice that number of magazines of her own.
She has been reading since she was three, a year before Doris set up the classroom. Because Doris is her darling she pretended for another year to be illiterate so that Doris would think she was teaching her.
Everyone asked why she wouldn’t write. Why she wouldn’t talk. She couldn’t have told them even if she could have. At the time that they were asking, she was still years away from articulating to herself the perception that words have colour in her head but not outside of it, or that the draining of colour is not a reduction of the word so much as it is a transformation she finds too eminent to tamper with.
She will write numbers, though. Numbers are different, they are almost always colourless. Unless they are blue. Certain numbers are a shade of deep blue that is the blue of everybody’s breath in her dream where people are crowding into the closet. She has another recurring dream, the one where she’s talking. “I hate you,” she says in this dream. And then, “I’m so sorry.” No, she doesn’t! No, she isn’t! She hasn’t the faintest idea what hate and sorry feel like.
She eventually learned that these dreams were nightmares, and that nightmares are evil spirits that oppress people while they sleep.
The word “nightmare” is not listed in the “General Information” section of
Pears Cyclopaedia,
which is where she first looked for it. It is not listed in any of the sections, as she found out when she read the encyclopedia straight through, a page a day from January first, 1961, until February eighth, 1963. In the autumn of 1965 she learned of the genetic tie responsible for her being disposed to such an undertaking. That September, a few days after returning home from the hospital, her darling Gordon told her that the man Al Yothers was her real father.