During the fit (it goes on and on) Paul leans across the corner of the kitchen table to thump her thin back between pointy shoulder blades that have their only-slightly-larger counterpart in the old-fashioned bra she’s wearing. When she’s down to puttering noises that might be a bitter laugh she sucks her cigarette then smacks her way through the smoke to clutch Marcia’s wrist. “You’re all skin and bone,” she growls. Then, “Hell of a lot of make-up.” Again, look who’s talking. False eyelashes thick as hula skirts, purple eye shadow, blood-red lipstick, orange foundation cracked on her cheeks in a brick-wall pattern.
Her eyes are Paul’s, but a paler blue and filmed over. To try to drum up some friendly feeling within herself Marcia imagines the crap being beaten out of her and thinks, “Poor lady.” Out loud she says, “I’m so glad to meet you.”
“Are you a thingamajig?” Brandy shoots back. Her red spiky fingernails gnaw at Marcia’s wrist.
“A what?” Marcia glances at Paul, who goes on beaming like a matchmaker.
“You know …,” Brandy says fretfully. She releases Marcia and pokes a finger through the shellac of her yellow bouffant. Way down in there she scratches. “A … a … a … ah, shit.”
She twists to glare at Paul. “A thingamahooey,” she barks at him. “You know, untouched.”
“A virgin,” Paul offers. He helps himself to one of her cigarettes.
“A virgin!” Brandy barks at Marcia. “Are you a virgin?”
Marcia nods. She doesn’t look at Paul.
Brandy’s eyes narrow to slits. “Don’t mess with me,” she growls and slides one hand under the table.
Marcia shakes her head—no, she wouldn’t mess with Brandy. When Brandy’s hand comes out from under the table without a gun, Marcia starts breathing again. “So,” Brandy says, “did he tell you we’re a team, him and me?”
“A team?”
“We’re like this.” She crosses her fingers. “Where he goes, I go.” She skewers back round to address Paul. “Right?”
“That’s right, Brandy.”
Brandy grunts and returns to giving Marcia the once-over. Put ‘em up, her eyes say. Spread ‘em, sister. She stubs out her cigarette and clears her throat for a spell while crumbling a corner of the yellowed newspaper that is spread all over the table. Marcia looks at Paul. Paul holds up two fingers in the peace sign. Brandy’s spiky little fist nudges Marcia’s forearm. “What do ya think of that?” she says.
“Of what?”
“Paul and me being a team.”
“Oh!” Marcia says. “Fine. I think it’s really great.”
Brandy nods. A slow wise-guy-eh? nod. With a wave of her hand to include Paul, she mutters, “Go play in traffic.”
“I wasn’t kidding,” Marcia whispers to Paul out in the hallway. What she means is, Brandy is no one that she hasn’t made allowances for years ago. She means, where her boyfriends go, hasn’t a Brandy usually gone with them? At least Paul’s mother isn’t a retard who tortures you with endless Jack Benny imitations. But what about Paul’s American draft dodger friends, the
three guys Paul says they’ll be sharing a commune with out in Vancouver? Won’t
they
mind him showing up with Brandy?
Marcia doesn’t ask, not right away, maybe because the whole commune-draft dodger idea still seems unreal to her. When she does ask, by then her visions of the future keep forgetting to include him and she has reached the stage of slapping together a left-over future that he can pick at after she’s gone.
(His answer will depress her. “Are you kidding?” he’ll say. “Another chick to do the cooking?” That he imagines she
can
cook she’ll find touching, that he imagines Brandy
will
cook she’ll find pathetic.)
After knowing him a few months she realizes that not once has she seen Brandy at the stove. Paul’s the one who makes all the suppers, alternating between broiled steak and chile. Two portions, two plates, but only for show. Because eventually he blows the cigarette ash off of Brandy’s portion and eats that, too.
Brandy, meanwhile, goes on reading the
Toronto Star.
Sitting at the kitchen table, she reads it start to finish, every word including page numbers. The weekday paper can take her three days to complete, the Saturday edition takes five. When Marcia first meets her she is still working her way through 1966, barking out headlines about the Watts riots and the first artificial heart.
In response to which Paul says “Bummer” or “Far out.” Depending.
“What the hell are you talking about?” Brandy sometimes snaps at him. “This is ancient history.” And a minute later she’ll read that steak is on sale at the Dominion store and mutter that she should pick up a couple of sirloins.
It seems that Brandy got into reading the newspaper about a year before Paul’s father died. “Hey, it’s her bag,” Paul says. “Keeps her spaced out.” He is prone to mentioning how spaced out she is, “what a spaced-out lady” eventually becoming his
entire contribution to any conversation about her. From his admiring tone you’d think he was talking about her cherry pies. In Marcia’s opinion Brandy is more out of her mind than spaced out, but she lets it ride until Paul meets Joan and says about her that
she
is spaced out. Marcia goes rigid as sticks. “What do you mean by that?”
“Truly weird,” he says.
“What do you mean?” she says again.
“Living on the outside.”
“Joan doesn’t live on the outside. She never leaves the house.”
“I’m talking about where she’s at in her head, man.”
He puts his arm around her. She jerks away. “How would you know where she’s at?” she says.
“It’s right there.” Tapping under one eye. “You can see it.”
“What do you mean, you can see it!” High in her throat something flaps in a tight little circle. “Joan wears sunglasses! It was dark down there!”
“Not that dark.”
“What are you saying?” she cries. “That Joan is the same as Brandy?”
His face tries that on, likes it. “They both read stuff cover to cover. Right? You said Joan reads indexes, right?”
Marcia swallows.
“Copyright page to
the
end,” Paul says with relish. “That’s weird, man.”
It is, Marcia thinks for the first time. For the first time concerning Joan’s reading habits, that is. Otherwise it isn’t news to her that Joan is weird. That Joan might be a weirdo is the black-edged telegram. She wonders… and here they come, popping up like Indians on the horizon—Cedric Short, Ziggy’s dog, Ed’s uncle, Paul’s father, Brandy. That whole gang of weirdos. Gingerly, she dips Joan into the middle.
Immediately snatches her back out. Joan isn’t one of them! Is she?
Is
she? In her mind she holds a salt-shaker-sized Joan
just above the babble, the lolling. She takes a breath and gives the group a closer look. Are they really so awful? Tuck in a few eyeballs, straighten up that head, pull up those pants. That’s it. That’s better. Feeling almost chipper now, she tells herself that even in so-called perfect families there are webbed feet and kleptomaniacs, perverted gerbils, some loony genius ancestor.
She thinks this but she can’t do it, she can’t not draw a line. “Well,
there
the resemblance ends,” she says to Paul.
“Right on,” Paul says. “Two spaced-out chicks.”
That he has laid eyes on Joan is an inaugural event. Of all Marcia’s friends only Pammy has met Joan, and that was only the one time. None of Marcia’s other boyfriends ever met her. Usually they weren’t even aware that she existed.
But with Paul, for the first year anyway, the ideal of no secrets is more of a drug to Marcia than drugs. She wants him to know everything about her and her family. With a kind of thirst she hauls out the photo albums. She opens underwear drawers, her own and Sonja’s. “Look!” she urges him. Always on her lips, not “love” as much as “look!” Look at her pimples, her fillings, her ear wax, the period blood on her underpants. He cranes to see. He says, “Wow.” In his bed she can just lie there like a starfish, limbs outflung. Up until him, lying naked on her back like that would have been unthinkable because of how it wipes out her breasts.
(She admits to herself that getting into position for an orgasm was tricky in the old days. And as for telling her old boyfriends what she wanted them to do to her, are you crazy? If she had smoked dope back then it might have been a different story. Give her a few tokes and she’ll ask for anything, say anything, there’s no shutting her up. Stoned, she is convinced that marijuana might even make Joan talk. Now is as good a time as any to mention how she tried to get Joan to take a puff. Joan accepted the joint, she rolled it between her fingers, sniffed it, but no way would she hold it to her lips.
“Maybe when you’re a bit older,” Marcia said, finding herself relieved. Joan was only eleven, after all. When she was sixteen, seventeen, who knew? Because for all that Joan digs in her tiny heels, she can change her mind like that.)
About meeting Paul she changed her mind after a whole year of mooing “No.” Shutting herself in the closet and closing the door when he dropped by, despite loving the sound of his motorcycle—from far off, anyway. In fact, how Marcia knew that he was about to arrive, and arrive on his motorcycle rather than in his convertible, was that Joan would climb onto the desk and press her ear against the curtained window, and a minute later Marcia would hear the hum that could have been any motorcycle but never was and in another minute would be a roar in the driveway. By that time Joan would be back in the closet.
For a whole year Joan resists meeting the driver of that motorcycle and then, in seconds, she capitulates over a strand of his hair. It is wound round a button of Marcia’s yellow cardigan, which is hanging from the closet doorknob. On her way into the closet Joan spots the strand, stares at it, frees it. Glancing up from her homework and catching this meticulous extrication, Marcia says, “That must be Paul’s.”
Joan reads the length of the hair like ticker tape. She switches on the penlight that is attached to her visor and strokes it with the beam.
“There’s more where that came from,” Marcia says. The beam hits her in the left eye. “We could bring him around,” she says carefully, awning her eye with one hand. “We could feel how silky his whole head is.”
Joan clicks her tongue.
“Really?” Marcia says, quietly so as not to startle her into a moo. “We’re not kidding?” The beam holds steady. If Joan isn’t shaking her head neither is she nodding. “Tomorrow afternoon,” Marcia suggests in her softest voice. That is, she thinks it.
M
ost afternoons you’ll find Joan working at her editing bench down in what used to be the laundry room. The bench is a long, toddler-height table that Gordon constructed out of a door. The seat is a bar stool whose legs he amputated halfway up. He shaded the bulb and hung it from its wire about six inches above the bench, but a few weeks later, apparently because it got in her way, Joan had him remove it. By then she had purloined his high-powered penlight and fastened it with wads of masking tape to the brim of his green visor, the one he wore in the thirties when he was a proofreader. First, though, she cut and shortened the strap at the back and then sewed it together again using red thread and a perfect cross-stitch that Sonja said
she
hadn’t taught her.
Strange about Joan going to so much trouble over the light considering that she hardly ever turns it on. Upstairs she occasionally does, but downstairs, except for the odd times she refers to the manual Mr. Rayne mailed to her (fifty type-written pages) she sits in virtual darkness and tracks through the tapes. Listening, stopping, rewinding, listening, stopping. Since she wears earphones and has made it clear that the tapes are her private property, nobody could swear on a Bible as to what they contain, but even Marcia takes it for granted that it must be Joan playing the piano. Four years of playing for herself when she was alone. What else could be on them? It isn’t as though her old tape recorder was ever seen out of the closet more than once or twice. It isn’t as though she was capable of carrying the thing around. The family figures that what Joan did was open
the closet, sit at the piano and record from across the room, and if that made for less than perfect quality it hardly matters now. Because they also figure that her aim is to pull the pieces apart, note by note, and rearrange the notes in some modern, dissonant collage inspired by the bizarre compositions of David Rayne.
Once Gordon finally appreciated why Joan was so entranced by this Rayne character, his delicate heart (already swollen and leaping over Reverend Jack Bean) started booming in his ears like cannons. All gung-ho he consulted Rayne himself about the equipment she would need, about the nuts and bolts of sound editing. In Rayne’s swanky Rosedale home he listened to Rayne’s records which the old man conducted in the manner of someone trying to wave down a plane as he shouted over the music how his compositions were stories told in the language of pure, arbitrary sound.
“If you think of individual pitches as words,” Gordon later explained to Doris, “then, extrapolating from that, a series of pitches is a phrase. A series of phrases, or a tune, is a sentence. And so on. Do you see what I’m driving at? What Joan might be trying to do—and Rayne is with me on this—is come up with a really sophisticated way of communicating with us. A formal language!”
Such was his enthusiasm that he found a collector to buy his bedside table (which was a twenty-year-old, two-foot-high stack of correspondence between him and a has-been author who signed up with another publishing house and became hugely famous) and used the money to have the washer-dryer removed from the laundry room and hooked up under the cellar stairs. He sprang for shag carpet, black (Joan’s choice), and for the three top-of-the-line tape recorders that Rayne had recommended.
“Your heart!” Doris fretted.
He yelled, “To hell with my heart!” and carried the old door
downstairs to build the editing bench. He hauled gallon paint cans. After blackening the walls and laundry tub, he suspended an oval mirror from the ceiling to hang between two of the editing machines at Joan’s eye level, then he affixed a reflective silver strip along the edge of the bench so that she wouldn’t bump into it. (As if she would!)