Gordon and Doris were Sonja’s parents. They had one other child—Marcy—who had left for kindergarten that June first morning in 1956 when Sonja vomited into her cereal bowl.
“We’ll say I’m the one who’s having it,” Doris announced once the cards were on the table, these being that Sonja had missed three menstrual periods, that she had been bringing up in the toilet for weeks, that the young man she’d had intercourse with was someone she’d known only for an hour, that what this young man had told her to call him was Yours, and that “Try the slammer” was the superintendent’s suggestion when, a week ago, she’d gone to his apartment hoping to find him.
“We’ll say it’s mine and Dad’s,” Doris said. “When you have a baby at our age it’s referred to as an afterthought.”
By now Sonja was sucking her fingers and sitting on Doris’s lap, and Doris was patting Sonja’s belly and feeling like the biggest Babushka doll in a nest of dolls within dolls, although she and Sonja were both the same height—five-foot-two—and tomorrow, at the doctor’s, they’d find out that they now weighed the same, as well—153 pounds.
(The doctor would be chosen randomly out of the phone book for the sake of secrecy. He would keep mixing Sonja and Doris up, that was how alike the two of them were. Small, flat-featured faces like faces painted on balloons. Dark, curly hair. For the appointment they would hide behind sunglasses, and since only Sonja would remove hers the doctor would assume, wrongly, that her dopey expression was inherited. He’d assume that they were both putting him on—Sonja acting dumber and more innocent than she was, Doris pretending to be overjoyed—and he’d be wrong again. They were putting him on, all right. Sonja was fifteen, not nineteen, and there was no husband overseas. But Sonja was innocent. In all of those fifteen years, maybe ten minutes had been devoted to thinking about sex and another minute or so to having it. And, no, Doris wasn’t overjoyed, but that was how she always sounded. Thrilled, bursting with news that would knock your socks off.)
Even that morning at the breakfast table, if you didn’t know Doris you’d think that having a daughter pregnant out of wedlock was her dream come true. In her breathy little-girl voice she said that as soon as Sonja was out of school, the end of the month, the two of them would go stay with Aunt Mildred in Vancouver until after the baby was born.
“She’s starting to lose her marbles,” Doris said about Aunt Mildred. “She’ll hardly know we’re there. We’ll tell everyone here she’s on her last legs and needs us, her only living relatives, to look after her, and we’ll just keep stringing that out.” She clapped her hands once. “Play it by ear!”
“Okay,” Sonja said dreamily.
Gordon went along, too. Out of being stunned, out of no choice. He stood just inside the kitchen doorway (he’d been about to leave for work, he had his coat and hat on) and kept reaching up and touching the ceiling to reassure himself that he still could, although being a stringbean wasn’t something that normally heartened him. At the part when Doris said they would tell people the baby was theirs, “Now hold on” came out of his mouth, and Doris waited, but he was a desperado pretending that the finger in his trench-coat pocket was a gun. Abortion, adoption … he couldn’t even say the words.
This was his daughter.
Their other daughter they would keep in the dark. Doris pointed out that you couldn’t expect a six-year-old to hold in a secret as big as this one. Marcy would stay in Toronto with Gordon, and Doris would hire somebody to babysit her after school.
“Can we afford all this?” Gordon asked when Sonja was out of the room. Doris was the one who banked his salary and handled the bills.
“Sweetie, you just leave it to me,” she said, her tone even more thrilled and hush-hush than usual so that he allowed himself to envision a secret nest egg, whereas all they had was a huge long shot, something like a five-hundred-to-one chance that she would be crowned queen.
Any day now she should hear. It was pure luck she saw the ad. She’d been unwrapping frozen chicken livers from a newspaper and had spotted the words “To All Ladies in Dire Straits.”
“Are you wrestling with severe money difficulties?” the ad had gone on. “Caring for ailing loved ones? Recently widowed? Are you doing everything in your power to improve your circumstances but still can’t seem to get out from under?” And then it had said that if this was you, you might be eligible to win thousands of dollars worth of fantastic prizes by appearing on ABC-TV’S Queen for a Day show, which was holding auditions at the Royal York Hotel—that very afternoon, as it happened.
The minute Gordon and the girls were out the door Doris phoned a neighbour to come by at noon and fix Marcy’s lunch, then she put on her frowziest house dress and rifled through Marcy’s box of dress-up clothes for an old purse, cracked high heels, that fake fur stole and the tatty purple turban, her plan being to carry these in a bag and change into them at a restaurant washroom near the hotel. On the subway she hatched her sob story. She’d never actually watched Queen for a Day but she knew about it. Housewife contestants took turns describing their miserable lives, after which the studio audience decided who was the most miserable and that’s who won. It was such a tasteless idea that Doris had always figured that the contestants were actresses. Or so she told herself until she arrived at the Royal York and walked down the line-up of mangy women, and either they were world-class impostors, every one of them, or she shouldn’t be there.
She joined the line anyway. A long wait on hot pavement during which she thought of the men on the Titanic who had dressed up in turbans and fake stoles and too-small pointy high heels, and what she wanted to know was, how many of them had been responsible citizens with another baby on the way? Answer her that. In her head the buoyant refrain of the Titanic song screamed—It was sad, so sad, oh, it was sad, so sad…
For virtually any occasion Doris knew a song that went with it, or at least she knew the first verse, and she sang it to herself—involuntarily, ceaselessly—until the occasion changed, at which point another song usually took over. This was just background, like a radio playing or her own footsteps, but today it was as if she had crossed wires with Ethel Merman. On the subway Clang, clang, clang went the trolley, ding, ding, ding went the bell had blared the whole way. Now that her feet were really starting to hurt It was sad, so sad was blending into an ear-splitting “Your Feets Too Big.” Oh, it was sad, so sad that your feets too big. And, boy, her feet really were killing her. By the time she was finally ushered into the room where they were doing the interviewing, her stagger was no act.
A fast-talking, sweat-soaked man in shirtsleeves paced in front of the chair where she was told to sit. “Do you work, Belle?” the man asked. (Doris had given her name as Belle Ladovsky.)
“Twelve-hour shifts in a beanery,” Doris said, putting on the vaguely East European accent she had cultivated years ago to audition for the Yiddish niece in a play. “Nothing but beans do I eat.” This to suggest that her round figure was from bloating rather than three square meals a day. “The doctor—“
“How’d your husband die?” the man cut in.
Doris hadn’t even mentioned a husband yet. A heart attack, she almost said, since what with his heart murmur that was how she had always pictured Gordon going. She had a better idea. “In Korea,” she said. “Killed in action.” She thought of the saddest thing she could, which was going on seven years since Gordon had made love to her, and her eyes filled.
“How many kids?”
“Eight.”
“Any of them sick, deformed?”
“My twins, they are cripples. When my husband died—“
The man stopped pacing. “You mean with crutches?”
“Oh, yes. Crutches, yes.”
“So you’re saying that those kids could do with a couple of top-of-the-line wheelchairs.”
“Yes, of course,” Doris said, immediately catching his drift. “But, oy, who can afford—“
“What’ll get you on your feet, Belle?”
“Maybe pots and pans,” Doris suggested. As she understood it, the queen always won a stupendously expanded version of the humble thing she asked for, plus, the humbler this thing was, the more fur coats and appliances were heaped on her.
“A few measly pots and pans,” the man said.
“Then one day, God villing, I open my own beanery.”
The telegram arrived June fourth, the Monday after they found out that Sonja was pregnant. It said that Belle Ladovsky was one of three lucky audition winners from the Toronto-Buffalo area and would be flown down to New York City on June twelfth for a June thirteenth taping.
All day Doris worked on a story to tell Gordon, but seeing as the only times in eighteen years she’d been away from home overnight were when she was in the hospital giving birth, everything she came up with made it sound as if she were having an affair. Eventually she decided she’d have to resort to the truth. She waited until evening, until after the girls had gone to bed, and then she put on the outfit—the stole, the turban, the dress and shoes, plus a pair of Gordon’s old glasses for extra disguise—and went into the living room where Gordon was sitting on the chesterfield, reading a manuscript. She had the audition ad and the telegram as well as the Dutch Masters cigar box that she kept the overdue bills in. Without a word she handed him the ad and when he’d read it she gave him the telegram.
“I take it you’re Belle Ladovsky,” he said.
She emptied the box onto the coffee table. “I was hoping to spare you this,” she said about the bills.
He studied each one, flattening it first under his jumbo hand, unbending folded corners. Because she was wearing his old glasses she couldn’t make out which bill he was looking at, but a few of them, like the ones for Sonja’s and Marcy’s pink bunny-fur muffs, were extravagances, she knew that. China man, he had a wife, led him such a miserable life the lyrics in her head went. Why didn’t Gordon say something? “Say something,” she said to the hunched-over blur of him, feeling as though she were addressing a man in a dream or through frosted glass. Or through time … the unsung clerk. The bowbacked, myopic, genius book editor, unappreciated by everyone except for her and a few alcoholic has-been writers whose stacks of unpublishable manuscripts were her footstools and bedside tables.
He didn’t speak. He held a bill closer to the light.
“Nobody vill recoknice me in dis get-up,” she said, sitting beside him.
He shook his head, at her or the bill there was no telling.
“I’m promisink hew.”
When he was done he neatly piled the bills and returned them to the cigar box. “I had no idea,” he said into his hands.
“Heck, it’s not that bad,” she said. “Eleven months out of twelve, I can manage just fine.”
“Now this baby—“
“Okay, we need a miracle, and hallelujah!”
Gordon looked at her. Then he looked her up and down as if he had only just registered what she had on. “Jesus, Doris,” he whispered.
“Listen to me.” She took his hand. Kissed his mountainous knuckles. “Sweetie,” she said, her voice trembling with righteous fervour. “I’m a shoo-in.”
She was. She got to be the third contestant, a lucky break because it allowed her to top the agony of the other two. The first contestant was an arthritic cleaning woman with nine kids and a bed-ridden husband. Then there was a wall-eyed pea sheller whose husband had ditched her for a good-time girl. Neither of them knew how to build a story let alone how to play to an audience. But you should have seen Doris. When she sobbed, “I am so ashamed to be beggink,” two fatsos in the front row sobbed along with her. Before the applause meter had even confirmed it she knew she’d clinched the crown. Her winnings included two full-length fur coats (one sable, one mink), two wheelchairs, a colour television, a twenty-piece set of pots and pans, an electric range and a year’s supply of beans. Back in Toronto her explanation to neighbours was that she had entered a draw and what do you know?
She sold the fur coats back to the dealer who’d sold them to the show. Just the money from them alone paid off their debts with enough left over for fibreglass living-room drapes—pea-green, shot with what Doris told the girls was real silver—and (here’s why Gordon couldn’t muster enough annoyance to even shake his head at that lie) a convertible. Baby blue, brand new, their first new car and not one he’d have dreamed of buying if they hadn’t hit the jackpot and she hadn’t haggled the price down by trading in the beans and wheelchairs.
On the drizzly morning that she and Sonja left for Vancouver, Gordon picked up the car from the dealer’s, and so the first family outing was the drive to the train station. To everybody’s disappointment the weather obliged them to leave the top up.
“We wouldn’t want to ruin the regally luxuriant, stylishly elegant upholstery,” Doris said in her tone of confidential exhilaration. She was reading from the sales brochure.
“You see the road but never feel it,” she read, twisting around to the girls in the back seat. “This car has glamour plus.” She batted her mascaraed eyelashes.
She wasn’t one to get “all dolled up,” as she put it, but for the train ride she was wearing fire-engine-red lipstick, moss green eye shadow, mascara and a smudge of rouge on each cheek. To the girls her face looked like a movie star’s. To Gordon it looked like a clown’s, not that he let on. He loved her a great deal, protectively and sheepishly. “What do you think of my new hat?” she’d asked that morning, and he’d said, “Very smart,” although it was ridiculously tiny, like a chimpanzee’s hat, and her hair springing out from under it made her head look detonated.
She had sewn on an elastic chin strap to keep the hat from blowing off. As she read from the brochure the strap gave the girls the funny impression that her jaw was hinged, like a marionette’s. They laughed at her into their hands. “It’s a supreme joy and a thrill and a blessing,” Doris read, and the girls giggled into the white cotton gloves they were both wearing.
“And,” Doris read, “it’s all yours!”
Yours being the baby’s father’s name, Sonja swallowed hard before laughing. She wasn’t quite free of him yet but would be once she was on the train. A few weeks from now she’d get a postcard signed “Yours, Dad” and all she’d swallow over was that he hadn’t signed it “Love.”
(It wouldn’t be signed love because Gordon would be feeling unworthy of using the word. He would still be a wreck from having received, the day before, a consolation card. Sent by a man named Al Yothers. The picture on the front of the card would be a cartoon of a squirrel, and inside it would say, “Hope all your troubles will soon be nuttin’.” There would be no message, only “A.Y.” encircled in a heart. Marcy would see it—she would come into the kitchen while he was still staring at it—and she would ask if it was from her mother and sister. Because her hopeful, lovelorn face would be slaying him he’d answer yes. He’d say, “It’s for you,” and then have to account for the A.Y. “All yours,” he’d come up with. “A.Y. means all yours,” he’d say, and she’d think a minute and say, “Like the convertible!” which would first bewilder and then grieve him, since by that time the car would be scrap metal.)
That day, the day Sonja and Doris left for Vancouver, the car didn’t have a scratch and it cruised along as smoothly and quietly as a car sailing off a cliff.
Doris had splurged on a sleeping cabin. There was a sink, toilet and what was supposed to be a double bed but turned out to be more like a good-sized single.
“Let’s see how the springs hold up anyways,” she said, and with the old Negro porter right there she climbed on and started jumping in her high heels, then bounced onto her back and thought it was a scream when her dress billowed up and the porter saw her garters.
That was the first sign of the new her. Up until then she had been a woman who flushed when the doctor pressed the stethoscope against her breast and who, once she was in a chair, preferred to stay put. Try telling that to the people who were on the train. On that train she couldn’t even sit through a meal. Ten times she’d get up to stretch her legs, visit the ladies’ room, cuddle somebody’s squalling baby, yank the baby out of the mother’s arms and stride with it like a mad sentry, up and down, up and down, almost running. At night in bed she was still so keyed up that Sonja had to wrap her arms around her to keep her from thrashing.
Sonja was the opposite—so relaxed on that trip she couldn’t detect her own pulse. Every morning she squeezed herself into a lounge chair in the observation car and more or less stayed put, snoozing, eating Animal Crackers and Tootsie Roll Pops from the snack counter, reading her Nancy Drew book, looking out the window. Off and on she pressed her hand over her heart to try to feel her heartbeat while under her new Miss Chubette dress with its Peter Pan collar and daisy-shaped buttons her baby’s cells multiplied.
Now that her morning sickness was over and nobody had seemed to notice that her stomach was swelling, she didn’t think about the baby too much apart from something precious that she was temporarily in charge of, as when you’re the one with the tickets or the money. For the most part she felt nothing but cosy and puffy. She felt like an angel food cake. Her only distress, and it was a very slight one, arose at either of these two thoughts: that Marcy would forget to feed her hamster, Sniffers, and that, because she’d already missed too many lessons to ever get back into Miss Gore’s tap class, her dancing days were over. Her ultimate view on both prospects was, Oh well.
Sometimes Doris perched on the seat beside her to see how she was doing, and Sonja curled up with her fingers in her mouth and her head on her mother’s lap and let herself be lulled by the rhythm of her mother’s breakneck chatter, its pleasing accompaniment to the rhythm of the train. Frankly, she didn’t actually hear much of what Doris was going on about.
One morning, though, the third morning, she had her head in Doris’s lap and Doris said, “I wonder what the heck’s gotten into me?” and Sonja heard that.
“Sweetie, you tell me and we’ll both know.” She knocked both her fists on Sonja’s skull, absently and too hard, but as Sonja usually had to see blood before it occurred to her that she hurt, she didn’t mind.
“You’re still excited about winning the draw,” Sonja suggested.
“Well, that’s the truth,” Doris said.
“The truth is only aversion,” Sonja reminded her.
“I feel like I’ve eaten Mexican jumping beans,” Doris said. She laughed, her new high-speed hyena laugh. “Brother, listen to me go.”
She was panting.