At exactly nine o’clock the next morning she and Joan stood facing each other at their desks, Joan dressed in the coral silk blouse and lime green velvet skirt that she shared with Marcy’s two-foot-high Miss Sophisticate doll, her hair festooned with twice as many barrettes and ribbons as usual, thanks to Marcy. And Doris wearing the pleated skirt, one of the white blouses
and brown high heels that her swollen feet knuckled out like shoes on fists.
“Okey-dokey,” she said, “here we go.” She blew the pitch pipe any old place (it didn’t matter what came out, she couldn’t carry a tune). She waited for Joan to imitate the note, then she sang “O Canada” and “God Save the Queen,” hardly above a whisper because her singing usually sent Joan under the bed. As it was, Joan covered her ears. Ignoring this, and how Joan wasn’t singing along, she conducted with one hand. She didn’t believe in God but the Lord’s Prayer was part of a school morning routine, so she raced through it without bothering to ask Joan to close her eyes. This was a child who once you had her attention didn’t blink, let alone close her eyes.
She did sit at Marcy’s desk, however, perched on two pillows, and she continued to do so every day without protest. Provided that the bedroom curtains were drawn and there was only the one desk light on, provided that the phone didn’t ring and nobody came to the door, she stayed put for a good two hours at a time, a lot longer than Doris herself was able to. Doris paced and fidgeted. Whenever she had a minute she pored through magazines for coupons and contest-entry forms. Joan, meanwhile, although alert (unnervingly alert, breathing fast as a bird), sat straight and still. It is no exaggeration to say that she didn’t move a muscle unless she was writing or there was some sudden sound from outside the room, and then she gave a little start and trained one rose-petal ear in that direction.
She learned fast. By the end of the first month you could say any number or letter to her and she wrote it. Three months down the road she was adding and subtracting double-digit numbers in her head. Doris would ask, for instance, “What are eleven and thirteen?” and Joan would continue looking at her as if this question, gripping as it might be, was rhetorical, but a few seconds later she would push her sunglasses up her nose, pick up the pencil, write a tidy “24,” set the pencil down and
then suffer Doris to praise her as she suffered all the family’s attentions—patiently and without reciprocation, although she liked to echo the smack of a kiss, not against skin but into the
The next step—reading and writing words—seemed foregone. Anyone who could produce a “d” followed by an “o” followed by a “g” should be able to write “dog,” if you told her that this is what those three letters in that order amounted to.
You’d think so. But every time Doris asked her to spell “dog,” or if she wrote “dog” on the blackboard and asked what it spelled, Joan played dumb. Eventually Doris began to wonder if there was a scar over the part of her brain that allowed her to comprehend the joining of letters, and so she phoned one of the neurologists. “Maybe,” he said. He couldn’t be more specific than that because the scars were hard to pinpoint. “Think of them as uncharted islands in a fathomless ocean,” he advised. He said, “Keep trying!”
Advice that Marcy took passionately. On all fours in the closet Marcy wiggled her bum, softly barking, and said, “Write what animal we are!” She found pictures of dogs in magazines and asked in an excited, encouraging voice, “Joanie, what’s this?” She knelt on the floor, and with her nose an inch away from the paper (this was a few months before anyone noticed that she needed glasses), wrote “dog,” saying, “Down, around, now a circle …,” trying to get Joan to copy her. Joan watched all this, leaning over the magazine in her lap to see the word. Sometimes she even picked up her pencil and held it poised. Sometimes she sniffed the word.
Sonja was the one who thought to bribe her. She used licorice Allsorts, Joan’s favourite candy. One afternoon when Joan appeared in the kitchen to refill her water glass, Sonja fetched a piece of paper and a pencil, shut the curtains to make the room more hospitable, enticed Joan to sit at the table, then poured the candy into a bowl and said, “Spell dog and you can
help yourself.” Joan waited, hands folded on the paper. A few minutes passed and Sonja ate a candy herself. Then another. And another. Joan didn’t write dog but she watched Sonja like one, watched her hand go from the bowl to her mouth, watched her chew until Sonja couldn’t stand it any longer and said, “Oh, forget it, dig in,” and Joan did. She ate, even candy, in little bites, fastidiously.
This tickled Sonja. “You dickens,” Sonja laughed with her mouth full, patting Joan’s angora hair, and that was the extent of her contribution to Joan’s literacy. Like Marcy, she found the brain-damage theory off base, her hunch being that in previous lives Joan had suffered from words. As a gossip, maybe. As a tattletale.
Gordon entertained a similar thought. Not that Joan had been reincarnated but that she was deliberately forswearing words out of an instinctive sense that it took only one to flatten you. On his bad days he wondered if her muteness wasn’t highly evolved. He wondered why people didn’t hit the dirt whenever other people talked. He wondered what possessed people to read! On his bad days he found nothing as discouraging as the sight of reflection that has been dislodged from the preserving climate of the mind and then arranged—all dried out and shrunken—on paper.
On his good days he wasn’t prepared to say that Joan could talk if she chose to but he suspected that she could read because when he read to her he sometimes caught her head moving back and forth, very slightly, as though she was following the words with her eyes. He said to Doris, “She’ll come around,” and he didn’t doubt it.
No matter what his mood, if he was home he read to Joan every night before she went to bed. The books were ones he picked up from the library twice a week. Fairy tales mostly, stories about snowy-skinned princesses and girls no bigger than your thumb. Down in the laundry room, the only place
she didn’t seem to mind leaving the closet for, the two of them sat on the lumpy, spring-sprouting sofa while on the clothesline overhead his laundered white shirts swayed like his own ghosts.
After everyone had gone to bed he devoted himself to the books he had “borrowed” (temporarily stolen) from another library, the university’s medical library or his old stomping grounds you might say because when he was eighteen he spent the month of August in a corner cubicle reading about his “affliction,” as it was referred to in books with titles like
Curing the Male Homosexual
and
Demonology and Homosexuality.
Back then, these books were catalogued under “Mental Disorders” and “Sexual Deviance” and were not on the open shelves. So he had always waited until the librarian was alone before handing her a request slip … printed in perfect block letters (the last thing he’d wanted was her reading it aloud for clarification!). As the librarian frowned at the slip he would mention that he was a student of psychiatric neuroses, or that he was writing a paper, doing research for Professor So-and-so. He suspected that the librarian would have preferred to have conducted these exchanges in silence, but every time, he couldn’t help himself, he blurted out some story. The librarian never met his eye. She brought him the books. He took them to a remote corner cubicle where, behind a bulwark of other, innocently titled books, he read them. They were dry, scholastic, densely footnoted, but also shocking, operatic. Bland passages would explode in such graphically clinical descriptions that he would be driven to the washroom to masturbate.
Which was not at all why he was there that August. He was there for information. And for a kind of punishing reassurance that it was true. He
was
sick. He was ungrown, unmanly. The authors tended to agree that the remedy was to discuss the problem with your priest or pastor (unthinkable!), failing which you might try self-healing—lowering the timbre of your voice,
playing football. The premise of
Curing the Male Homosexual
was that you should enter into a serious study of “real” men. (As if, Gordon thought, that wasn’t why he was in trouble in the first place.) In this book there were diagrams showing you how to walk and sit in a masculine manner, how to cross your legs, for instance, by lifting your left leg and resting the ankle on your right knee. If you must masturbate, like a real man you should imagine beautiful naked women just as you were ejaculating. If your mind drifted to naked men, the trick was to picture them covered in suppurating sores.
Gordon gave it his best shot. There in his cubicle he practiced leg-crossing, he practiced sitting as if a yardstick were prying apart his thighs. In the library washroom he summoned breasts as he was climaxing, cysts and scabs as he fought his arousal. It was the strangest time. Oddly featureless, even tranquil in stretches. There
was
frustration, off and on, toward the doctors who had written the books. Who
were
these men? Were
they
homosexuals? If they were, why hadn’t any of them figured out that the best you could do was the only decent thing you could do: keep your affliction under wraps, live with it.
Almost thirty years later, whenever Gordon walked through the doors of the library, he was struck by how remarkable it was that he’d had the answer to his homosexuality way ahead of any real grasp of what it was. He was a virgin at eighteen, staggeringly innocent about everything, not just the choreography of sex. And yet even before he read those books he’d had a feeling that they weren’t going to change anything. Hide it, live with it, he was already weathered by what he would end up doing. It seemed to him now that when it came to all the big decisions he acted and
then
he was driven to act so that his whole life had been lived in the light of consequence rather than of expectation. That sad old light, and here it was incarnate: the yellow flush of a library at sunset, dust motes fat as stars.
He avoided glancing at the table where he used to sit (the
tables were the same ones, the same gold wood), striding straight to the books about the brain. Striding as opposed to skulking. The brain as opposed to the mind. No different from when he was eighteen, however, he was looking without much hope but resolutely for an answer as empirical as the circulation of blood.
And was finding that brain damage was where medicine became vague and overblown, wacky even, as if the mind couldn’t contemplate its own peril with anything like objectivity. Of an aneurism one neurologist wrote, “Envision a red balloon bursting in a bucket full of noodles.” Another spoke of bulges “like ripe berries lodged in the serpentine crevices of a walnut.” The damaged brain as a berserk telephone exchange run by demented operators was a popular image.
His own images—the dreams he had when the book slipped from his fingers and he nodded off—tended toward snake clusters and the braided limbs of gas-chamber corpses.
When he came to, past midnight, the living room would clang around him like a place whose dreary familiarity comes from long hours of keeping vigil. He’d turn off the lights, go down the hall to his and Doris’s bedroom and jiggle her shoulder to wake her in case she wanted to watch from the window. Then he’d tiptoe to Marcy and Joan’s bedroom and stand right at the door.
Never a sound from the other side, but a moment later the door would open and Joan would come out. How she always knew he was there, he had no idea. He’d pick her up, and if it was a cool or rainy night he’d go to the hall closet for shoes and jackets before taking her outside.
This started one night when he’d been about to check on her and Marcy but had paused, because no matter how quiet he was he seemed to wake Joan up. Either that or she was never asleep. He’d had his hand on the knob and had felt it turn from the inside. Don’t think that that didn’t startle him. When the
door opened and it was only Joan in her nightgown (and sunglasses), he lifted her up and pressed her against his hammering heart. Without thinking, he carried her down the hall and out into the front yard.
It was warm and hazy that night. Mid-July. A buttery glow from the sky down, a soft, sulphuric light, and what sounded like a thousand crickets. The air quivered with them. There were also a lot of moths, the small white ones, fluttering like ash under the streetlights. Joan saw them right away. He felt her body tense and then her head began to move in rapid jerks and he realized, astonished, that she was following individual flight paths.
“Moths,” he said.
Instantly she slumped in his arms, her normal outdoor behaviour. He was sorry he’d spoken. He stood her on the grass, expecting that she would just run back inside.
She did run. She ran to the door, but stopped. Then—arms trailing and fingers wiggling—she ran across the yard to the shadow of the hedge and crouched down.
He waited, not sure what to do. In the wet grass her footprints were like silver coins she’d thrown to find her way back. She was stark white—her hair, her nightgown. The crickets were like live wire, and after a minute she joined them.
When she fell silent he pretended he couldn’t see her. He had a feeling that this was what she wanted. He said, “I wonder where Joanie is.”
She made a shivery noise he had never heard from her before. Was that a laugh? Could she actually be laughing? Then she bolted across the lawn to the shadow of the wisteria and crouched.
“Joanie?” he said, and she made that sound again. She darted by him, jumping over the crevice that was his long shadow and crouching in the shadow of the house.
He waited a moment. Aside from the crickets there was a
sprinkler going next door. “Where is she?” he said, and she shot back over to the hedge.
A blizzard passed behind his eyes. Why hadn’t any of them thought of this before? To take her outside to play
at night,
for Christ’s sake? He felt like a scientist who has neglected to do the most obvious thing—turn on the Bunsen burner, add water. He wanted to wake up Doris so she could witness it, but he didn’t want to break the spell. He couldn’t even bring himself to take a step. He just stood there calling, him and the whippoorwill and the crickets, while Joan laughed and zigzagged from shadow to shadow until the entire lawn was spangled with her footprints.