“No.”
“Well, good. Do you have a boyfriend?”
“There is a man I’m seeing, yes.”
“Do you love him?”
“Yes. I do.”
“Do you love me?”
“Yes.”
“Is this guy married?”
“No.”
“Doesn’t
he
want you to leave me?”
“No.”
“Anybody I know?”
Pause. “No.”
“Well, guess what? I’m in exactly the same boat. I have a gal friend, I love her, she’s not married, she doesn’t want me to leave you, and you don’t happen to know her.” He lied about the last part, so she will, too. Back to the white lies. She can’t say it’s not a relief. “What are you staring at?”
“Your hair.”
“My black roots.” She rakes her fingers through the tangles. “I look like a two-bit hooker.”
“That’s not what I was thinking. I was thinking how…”
“What?”
“Exuberant your hair is.”
“Exuberant! Ha!”
He reaches across the table and takes her left hand. “I don’t want anything to change, Doris. I’m not unhappy. Are you?”
“Not unhappy? Well, this week was no picnic, but so long as Joan stays out of the woods. Sure, I’m happy enough.”
“Let’s go on as we have been, then. Why not?”
“What’ll we tell the girls? I wouldn’t bet my last dime that Marcia bought your splicing story.”
“If she asks … Well, let’s wait and see.”
“Lie our heads off.” A tired, reckless laugh.
“There’s something to be said for that.”
“Oh, my God!” she says suddenly. “She had no pulse!”
While she weeps, he squeezes her hand and gazes at her crumpled, red face, taking absolute responsibility for it, taking a curiously resigned comfort in it, as if it were a face made up in his mind.
When they visit Joan later that day she is under the blanket reading
Time
magazine. She is still in Intensive Care and
hooked up to the cardiac monitor, but she is not panicking and this is amazing considering all the people and noise. Somebody combed her hair and put her barrettes back in. Maybe she did. With moistened bits of Kleenex she has made herself earplugs. She points them out, tucking her hair behind her ears, and Marcia says, “I know what, I’ll bring you your earphones. They’ll work way better.”
Joan gobbles.
A complete recovery it looks like, but Dr. Shack says they’ll have to keep her in for observation another three or four days at least. So they stand around the bed for a half hour, looking at her motionless shape under the blanket, hearing the pages turn, then they leave.
In the car Marcia decides to go to her own place after supper. The reason is not her boyfriends, though they stretch out naked wherever there’s a gap in her thinking. Let them wait. She wants to be alone. She wants to feel how she feels. Joan is her niece! Sonja isn’t a virgin! Her mother and father are grandparents, homosexual grandparents! But… so? Should she talk to them about it? Should she talk to Sonja about it? She’s pretty sure that Sonja didn’t believe for a second that what their parents said on those tapes was true. She wonders if Sonja even knows what “queer” means. Here’s what Marcia wants: to get to the last feeling, the one that comes after you’re surprised, after you’re upset, after you feel nothing, after the feeling after that.
But she doesn’t get past
nothing.
Because once she is alone in her apartment, the fact that Joan was dead for five minutes takes over. She keeps thinking about it—“She was dead!”—and feeling vertiginous and then thinking it again as if she can’t stop looking over a cliff she almost fell off. She wonders where Joan was during those five minutes, and how she brought herself back. You can haul back an entire dream by pulling on a wisp of it, but that’s so precarious. When she asks Joan where she was, what she hears is, Gone.
“Where?”
Gone.
“To the cold and silver place?”
Gone.
This is on the Wednesday evening. On Thursday afternoon Dr. Shack gives the okay for Joan to be discharged, and Gordon and Doris go to pick her up. It is the eighth of August. You can’t turn on a radio without hearing the news that President Nixon has resigned. In the car they hear Nixon say that he has never been a quitter, which annoys Doris, and she switches the radio off. “He might not be a quitter, but he sure as heck is a nincompoop,” she says. “Anybody with half a brain would have burned the evidence the minute the break-in story leaked.”
Joan is sitting on her bed. She is wearing her sunglasses and earphones and reading a hospital regulations manual. The green blanket is folded on her lap. Gordon says, “Do you want me to carry you?” She nods. In his arms she burrows her head under his armpit. In the car, even with her earphones on, there isn’t a sound she doesn’t echo—brakes squealing, Doris closing the glove compartment, an ambulance siren, the tires sizzling through a puddle.
When they get home, Gordon carries her from the car to the front door. Marcia opens it. She has just arrived from work. Joan stays put on the landing, arms at her sides, while Marcia and Sonja hug and kiss her and Sonja describes supper. Tomato soup, meat loaf, mashed potatoes, tapioca pudding—“All your favourites!” Joan clasps her hands, seemingly glad, then goes down to the basement.
“What are you doing?” Marcia calls.
They hear her opening the door to her office.
“Don’t tell me she’s going to make more tapes!” Doris says.
No, here she comes again, wearing her visor and with an armload of magazines. Up the stairs and along the hall to her
bedroom. A minute later they hear the funeral march “Dum dum de dum …” on the piano.
“Is this a joke?” Marcia says. She goes to the bedroom and stands beside the piano. “This is a joke, right?”
If it is, Joan isn’t smiling. (Not that she ever does.)
She plays honky-tonk piano until supper. After supper she sits in her closet and reads old
Life
magazines in the beam of the penlight. They leave her alone and watch television, President Nixon resigning on every station (Doris keeps jumping up to change the channel). It’s Julie Nixon’s virginal, out-of-style dress that annoys Marcia. She goes to the bedroom to say goodbye to Joan. She thinks she’ll sleep at her own place tonight, but when she lies on the bed she drifts off. Joan stays in the closet reading.
It’s after midnight when Marcia wakes up. She is alone. She climbs out of bed and goes down the hall to her parents’ room and finds her mother standing at the window in (wow!) a babydoll nightgown. “They’re playing monkey in the middle,” Doris says when Marcia is standing beside her.
At first, Marcia can see only Sonja, hopping and waving her arms like a crazy lady, and then she sees the striped beach-ball sail in an arc above Sonja’s head like a fast-moving planet, and her father step out of a shadow to catch it. He throws it just above Sonja’s reach again but not far enough, so that Joan has to race to retrieve it before Sonja does. Sonja pants and chuckles. She and Joan are both wearing white nightgowns.
“How long has
she
been playing with them?” Marcia asks. She doesn’t even try not to sound petulant.
“I don’t know. I just woke up.”
“No, I mean, it was always just Dad and Joanie.”
“This is the first time that
I’ve
seen Sonja out there. Mind you, I don’t watch every night.”
They are speaking softly, like interlopers. The crickets sound like tambourines.
“I’m going out, too,” Marcia says.
“Oh, what the heck,” Doris says, following her. “It’s a big day.”
Joan’s echo of the screen door banging is so-so. As if she were expecting them she throws the ball their way, and Marcia catches it and tosses it to Gordon. Gordon tosses it to Doris, who tosses it to Sonja. They form a circle and keep tossing, industriously, carefully. Without a word. They could be people passing buckets of water to put out a fire. They could be a family spending a day at the beach together. If they were on a beach. If it was day.
F
or their guidance and generosity I thank these people: Susan Cole, Dr. Rick Davis, Clark Deller, Christopher Dewdney, Irene Dewdney, Brian Fawcett, Robert and Claire Gowdy, Susan Swan and Tim Wilson. Special thanks to Jan Whitford for her faith and constancy, and to Patrick Crean for his brilliance and tact.
Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:
Lyric excerpt of “Jeepers Creepers” by Harry Warren and Johnny Mercer.© 1938
WARNER BROS. INC.
(Renewed) All Rights Reserved. Used By Permission.
Lyric excerpt of “God Bless The Child” by Billie Holiday and Arthur Herzog Jr. © 1941 - Edward B. Marks Music Company. Copyright renewed. Used by permission. All rights reserved.
Lyric excerpts of “Mister Sandman,” Lyrics and Music by Pat Ballard © 1954 (Renewed)
EDWIN H. MORRIS & COMPANY,
A Division of MPL Communications, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Lyric excerpt of “The Trolley Song,” Music by
RALPH BLANE,
Lyrics by
HUGH MARTIN. ©
1943, 1944 (Renewed 1971, 1972)
METRO-GOLDWYN-MAYER INC.
All Rights Administered by
EMI FEIST CATALOG INC.
(Publishing) and
WARNER BROS. PUBLICATIONS INC.
(Print). All Rights Reserved. Reprinted by Permission of Warner Bros. Publications Inc.
Lyric excerpts of “I Cain’t Say No” by Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein II. Copyright © 1943 by Williamson Music. Copyright Renewed. International Copyright Secured. Used by Permission. All Rights Reserved.
I am also grateful to the Canada Council and to the Ontario Arts Council for financial support during the writing of this book.
“Just one of the miracles performed by this brilliant writer is an immediate emotional connection between the most bizarre of her characters and the reader.”
—
The Globe and Mail
“In bumbling for superlatives to describe
Mister Sandman,
you’ll find the everyday ones lack the necessary jam. Astonishing, wonderful, marvellous—fine words but not the
mots justes.
A novel like this, one that pulses with originality, humour, humanity and intelligence, demands a less hackneyed superlative. Something like ‘mirabundous.’”
—The Georgia Straight
“This is a beautifully written, moving book. The portrayal of Joan, in particular, moved me greatly, and I will never forget her.”
—Telegraph-Journal
(Saint John)
“This book holds together quite brilliantly and delivers an engaging, touching story. Playful, witty and wise,
Mister Sandman
is as good as the much-praised
We So Seldom Look on Love.”
—Quill & Quire
“Barbara Gowdy is heading for literary superstardom.”
—Calgary Herald
“A daring and ambitious project, fortified by Gowdy’s complete command of her narrative voice, with its wit, its brilliance of observation, its aptness of metaphor.”
—
Toronto Star
“An accomplished, intriguing page-turner, full of really beautiful writing.” —CBC Radio (Montreal)
“Mister Sandman
firmly places Gowdy in the foreground of Canada’s changing literary landscape.” —
The Hamilton Spectator
“An achingly affecting and wildly funny novel that dances dangerously close to the edge. Highly recommended.”
—
NOW
“With her new novel,
Mister Sandman,
Toronto writer Barbara Gowdy leaves little doubt that the international praise she earned for fiction of first-rate quality is deserved.”
—
London Free Press
“A
gifted storyteller with a unique perspective.”
—
Winnipeg Free Press
“Barbara Gowdy tells confounding and wonderful love stories She writes with enchanting humour…. Gowdy’s ability to write about sexuality in a completely unabashed way—about secrets, what lies beneath the surface, the ostensible abnormal—is mind-boggling.”
—Der Spiegel
“[Gowdy] revels in the eccentricities of her characters with an empathy that makes
Mister Sandman
an exceptional novel of the family—without ever being a satire of it.”
—
Kommune
“Magical and gripping, like a modern fairy-tale for adults…. A disquieting, infatuating book.”
—
Nürnberger Nachrichten
“[Gowdy] presents uneasy absurdities and comical dialogue with enormous ease…. Her language is unpretentious, relentless, but full of sympathy for her characters…. We can’t get enough of Barbara Gowdy’s intelligent, familiar and yet bizarre characters.”
—Hamburger Abendblatt
“[Gowdy is] a master of the oblique view, a literary daredevil….
Mister Sandman
delivers 284 pages of brilliant metaphorical fireworks, the prose of a born storyteller.”
—
Die Woche
“Barbara Gowdy’s books are of the most unusual, ingenious and fascinating kind.”
—
Frankenpost
“Reminiscent of John Irving…. [Readers] will fall in love with Barbara Gowdy’s Canary family…. Sensational.”
—
Facts