For her part Sonja read to Joan from the TV
Guide
in a vain attempt to entice her into the living room or just because Sonja had the
TV Guide
handy. Lying on Joan’s bed, she recited the children’s-show listings and, in case something rang a bell, the synopses from old movies and “Yesterday’s Newsreel.”
“‘Yesterday’s Newsreel’ looks at 1936 and the death of King George. King George! Do you remember him, Bunny?”
From inside the closet, Joan clicked her tongue.
“You do?”
Joan mooed.
“You don’t?”
Sonja watched TV all day. After failing grade eleven she had left school and was now working at home for the Schropps Pin Company. Her job was counting bobby-pins and clipping them on cards, twenty-four to a card, and she did this at the fold-out
writing table in front of the
TV
while eating Planters peanuts and licorice Allsorts, her fat hands skittering from the box of pins to the box of cards to the food to her mouth.
After Joan was born, Sonja never lost the weight. Now she was up to 210 pounds, but the bigger she got the happier and lighter she felt, as if she were being inflated to the point where a little breeze would lift her out of her chair and bounce her around the room. Maybe it wasn’t the extra pounds that were making her so happy, though. She had another theory, a harebrained one, she knew, that Schropps had coated the bobby-pins with something like a laughing gas to keep the clippers in good spirits, because she could wake up on the wrong side of the bed but the minute she started working she’d be calm, completely relaxed all over except for her hands. Her hands, when she worked, felt mechanically operated, the way her feet had felt when she was a tap-dancer. Month after month for filling up the most cards she won the five-foot-high cardboard bobby-pin that said “I’m Tops at Schropps.” Plus she was hauling in a weekly paycheque of twenty-five dollars. At Doris’s insistence twenty of that went straight into the bank, into a “dowry account,” even though Sonja couldn’t see herself marrying.
“I’m a born career girl,” she confessed to Joan from a deep vein of content.
Marcy’s confessions were the most intimate, in these years anyway, and the raciest—“We touched his tongue with our tongue.” “We had ‘the feeling’ today.” She had picked up Doris’s habit of using the plural pronoun, with the difference that when
she
said “Time for our bath, Joanie” she climbed into the bath, too. Joan was her. The her that was tiny, magical, celestial… not entirely real. If Joan whimpered, Marcy’s eyes welled up. To her parents, Marcy pointed out that she could do the talking when she overheard them fretting over Joan’s speechlessness. She brushed Joan’s wispy hair with Gordon’s
shaving brush, and her own scalp tingled. She adorned Joan’s head with ribbons and barrettes and felt all dressed up.
When Joan was younger and in a high chair, Marcy had fed her. Marcy still insisted on cutting Joan’s meat (while Joan covered her ears at the scraping noise). Usually Joan then cut the meat into even smaller portions, and she could do it without a sound. At three and a half she had the table etiquette of a finicky duchess. She ate one pea at a time. She chewed silently and forever and with her mouth closed. She swallowed as if her throat was sore, touching her neck with the tips of her fingers. Doris never bothered to put out napkins, but Joan always had a tissue handy to dab the corners of her mouth. Where had she learned such manners? Not from any of them, although to make her life easier they had all become fastidious, quiet eaters. There were no raw carrots or celery to munch on, for instance, and they kept their voices down. If Marcy wanted to say something directly to Joan, to be extra quiet she often only thought it.
In bed at night Marcy’s communication with Joan was entirely telepathic. Doris used to shout “Go to sleep!” if Marcy talked, so now, as soon as Doris was out of the room, Marcy left her own bed and climbed into Joan’s and “thought” to her. Her challenge was to keep thinking conversation until Joan fell asleep, but she never managed it. The last thing she saw every night before drifting off was the first thing she saw every morning—Joan looking at her (the green plastic lenses of Joan’s sunglasses weren’t so dark that you couldn’t make out her eyes). Joan lying there, staring. And parroting some soothing noise, like a drip or the refrigerator motor.
I
n the autumn of 1960 Doris took Joan to another doctor, who recommended a third doctor. This third doctor fastened Joan to an electroencephalogram while she sat limply with her eyes shut, apparently asleep except that she imitated the electric shaver cropping patches of her hair. A small desk fan wafted some of the hair in Doris’s direction, and as if it were dandelion tuft Doris caught it, balled it up and released it with a wish—“Please don’t let her be brain-damaged.”
But Doris already knew she was. The diagnosis when it came—after more tests, after x-rays and separate physical examinations by two other neurologists—was only confirmation, in Doris’s eyes as pointless as the bathroom scales spelling out that you’re broad in the beam. The nature of the damage was scar tissue, almost certainly from the fall at birth. The scar tissue was fickle. It enhanced certain abilities but interfered with others, mainly the ability to vocalize words. So although Joan could reproduce certain sounds and could understand what was said to her, she couldn’t talk and likely never would.
“She could if we wanted to!” Marcy protested when Doris broke the news to her.
“We don’t know that, Sweetie.” In the back of her mind, the song “Happy Talk” babbled.
“She
could
!” She appealed to Joan, who had suddenly appeared in the doorway. “Couldn’t we?”
Joan stepped over to Marcy—that cautious, lightfooted way she had of walking in the house, arms trailing, fingers moving like cilia. She stood on tiptoe (she was only half Marcy’s height)
and sniffed, a thing she sometimes did when you asked her a question, and Doris mentally added “smelling people’s faces” to her “Signs of Brain Damage” list.
“Couldn’t we?” Marcy repeated.
Joan stepped back and made clucking noises that Marcy took for “Sure.”
“She said yes!”
“You know Zorro’s servant?” Doris said. “What’s his name, Leonardo?”
“Bernardo,” Marcy said sullenly.
“Bernardo. Well, you know how Bernardo can’t talk but he can hear better than anybody? That’s like Joanie. Joanie can’t talk but she can make sounds better than anybody.”
“We could talk if we wanted to,” Marcy said, clasping Joan’s hand.
“Listen tome,” Doris said. “Parts of Joanie’s brain just don’t work,” she said, her voice reaching the jubilant-sounding pitch it did when she wanted to make no bones about a thing and engendering in Joan a quiver of delight that, through their joined hands, Marcy detected and mistook.
“Mommy, you’re upsetting us!” she said. “You’re hurting our feelings!”
One of the doctors advised Gordon and Doris that when it came time for Joan to go to school she be sent to the Mother Goose Home for Mentally Retarded Children, a spanking-new factory-like building with portal-sized windows and a few hole-faced Mother Goose characters on the lawn (Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee), the kind of statues you stick your own face through and someone takes your picture.
“She’s hardly a drooling idiot,” Doris said.
“Don’t let ‘Mentally Retarded’ throw you,” the doctor said. “They kept the old name for some reason but they’re taking in all kinds of kids now. Mongoloids, deaf-mutes, your straight delinquent cases.”
“When the time comes, I’ll teach her at home,” Doris said.
“Are you qualified?”
“Before I got married, I was a teacher.”
A Sunday-school teacher when she was twelve, she meant. Not that either she or Gordon cared about the lie. “Do you think you’d be able to manage it?” Gordon said on the drive home. “That’s all I’m questioning.”
“Oh, for crying out loud!” Doris said. “Look at all the dimwit teachers there are! The only thing they have that I don’t are the textbooks.”
A few months later, when the three diagnoses were in, she went to Marcy’s school after four o’clock, just marched in the unlocked gymnasium door and down to the grade-one classroom and stole two Dick-and-Jane readers, a spelling book and an arithmetic book.
Now that she had the idea of doing the teaching she was raring to get started. As much for her own sake as for Joan’s. Scouring magazines for contests and scrawling out hundreds of reasonable facsimiles gave her a kick, but it wasn’t enough any more. She knew the signs—not being able to sit still for a second and then, when she did, falling into daydreams about the sexpot cashier at Ted’s Cigar Store. Night-time dreams about making love with strange women in public places, such as in front of the meat counter at Dominion.
She had been hoping that she was done with women. Her explanation to herself had been that indulging in women was a stage she’d gone through with a lot of help from voodoo. Lately, though, she’d been wondering if it wasn’t Harmony who had set her off, but Joan—the shock of Joan’s arrival, the shock of becoming a grandmother.
Oh, who knows? “You haven’t touched me in over ten years” was what she intended to throw at Gordon if he ever found out, and you bet it was a good excuse but it wasn’t the reason. Her yearning for Gordon and her yearning for women ran on two
separate tracks. That much she had always felt, and occasionally she felt the delicacy and the imperiousness of the division, a bit like the reminder when you choke on food that you breathe from one place and swallow from another. The only other thing she was sure of was that loving women was dangerous. Don’t think she didn’t fight it. Since Harmony there’d been only Robin the Avon Lady, and that was only the one time but enough of a close call to scare her off for good. So she had thought.
Blunt-spoken Robin, who left her with the thrilling, crazy impression that while “normal” women were in their kitchens dreaming up the winning answer to “Why I Love Tender-leaf Tea,” there were bands of feverish Valkyrie lesbians out hunting sex. She knew Robin for all of an hour, but for years afterwards she was convinced that Harmony had been exceptional, that most lesbians scorned romance and long love affairs, and you’d never know they were lesbians to look at them. Except for how they looked at
you.
And if you didn’t blink when they looked at you like that, you were in the money.
They had red, spiky nails, these lesbians. They showed up at your front door and sang “Ding dong”! On your chesterfield they sat with their left thigh touching your right thigh while they massaged lotion into your hands and your calloused elbows. Into your bare feet. “How does that feel?” they asked. You said, “Like a million bucks.” You let them test all their products on you, offering your wrist to be slashed with lipstick. The shade you liked best they applied to your lips. They held your chin and brought their own face so close to yours that you inhaled each other’s breath.
They kissed you. You kissed them back because the coast was clear—your husband at work, your oldest girl at a pin-clippers seminar, your middle one at school, and your littlest one in the closet from where, ordinarily with a stranger in the house, you couldn’t have budged her. So why
did
she budge?
Not needing to use the toilet, she had the potty for that. Maybe it was the tantalizing sound of so many zippers—first the zipper on Robin’s suit jacket, then the one on her skirt, and then the broken zipper on her full-length girdle.
The tip-off was a zipping noise so faint that Doris didn’t register it for a few seconds. And then she knew, and she looked around and gasped. Joan gasped. Robin gasped. Joan gasped.
“Mommy’s just comforting the lady, Joanie, it’s okay. Go back to your room.” In her mind the song “People Will Say We’re in Love” started up. “Go on, honey,” she said and was ignored. Meanwhile, she and Robin were both pulling their clothes on, Robin whispering, “Oh my God, my God,” and Doris’s heart racing, and yet even in those first fluorescent seconds Doris knew that she and Robin were the only horrified ones in the room. “Honey, go back to the closet, I’ll come see you in a minute,” she said.
Joan took a step closer. Her lips moved, she was doing inaudible imitations. Of what?
Out on the front porch Robin said, “I don’t think she really saw anything, do you?”
“She’s only three,” Doris said. Without conviction she said, “She wouldn’t know what she saw.” A year later and she would have said that Joan was brain-damaged, and Robin might have been even more relieved, in a guilty way. For Doris it wouldn’t have made any difference except that she derived a cheerless relief from being able to deliver the official diagnosis. Braindamaged. It meant there was no mystery. You fell on your head and your brain scarred. It had nothing to do with disobedience or the supernatural and it wasn’t a punishment, not unless any tragic accident was a punishment, and Doris wasn’t buying that.
T
he same day that she stole the books, Doris phoned Gordon at his office and asked him to bring home some pencils, erasers and paper. The next morning she rode the bus and subway downtown to a school-supply store and wrote a cheque from a defunct account for a pointer, coloured construction paper, a pitch pipe, chalk, a blackboard, a blackboard eraser and a bundle of pale green writing paper, green because Gordon said that it cast no glare. There was already a desk in Marcy and Joan’s bedroom and she intended to push it in front of the opened closet door and put the chair right inside. For the teacher’s desk she’d slide the mirror off the vanity and use that.
Back home she hung the blackboard where Marcy’s paint-by-numbers Harlequin clown normally hung. She wrote out the alphabet on squares of the coloured paper and taped the squares around the room just below the ceiling, the idea being to create an atmosphere as classroom-like as possible, considering. She then let out the seams on her navy pleated skirt and washed and ironed her two white blouses. While she worked she whistled “Whistle While You Work,” and not once all day did she think about the cashier at Ted’s Cigar Store.