Joan was born on Friday, November thirtieth, 1956, at around one-thirty p.m. Pacific time in the basement guest room of Dearness Old Folks’ Home. The same room that, two years earlier, a seventy-year-old woman named Alice Gunn wrote backwards in the window grime ROT IN HELL then choked herself to death with her rubber restraining belt.
“Callous Alice” the newspapers called her in their features about Joan, because that old tragedy was dredged up and tied in to the reincarnation story. A week after Joan’s birth, by which time both Doris and Sonja thought it was safe to leave her on her own for a few minutes, a reporter sneaked into the room and took her picture and then drove to White Rock and showed the snapshot to Alice’s ninety-seven-year-old mother, who after Alice’s death had changed old folks’ homes.
“That’s Ali, all right,” Alice’s mother was quoted as saying. “I’d know those bug eyes anywhere.” She said, “Tell her new mother I’m still paying monthly instalments on the headstone, if she’d care to pitch in.”
Not just Doris and Sonja but everyone at Dearness took exception to the bug-eyes crack. Everyone at Dearness was bowled over by Joan’s beauty, even the old men were. Men who found the soup-spoons too heavy asked to hold her. One man believed that Joan was the reincarnation of his first wife, Lila, who in a recent seance had talked of returning to earth for “another go-round.” When Joan started making that odd clicking sound she sometimes did, he said, “Yep, hear that? Those are her teeth, those are her new uppers,” resting his case. “Well, Lila!” he said, propping Joan astride his scrawny knee, “I took the nervous breakdown, expect you heard.”
Even Aunt Mildred was under Joan’s spell, and she was the one who’d predicted that Joan would be a midget or a dwarf, “something deformed and bunched-up like” because of the tucked-in, round-shouldered way Sonja had carried herself when she was pregnant.
Aunt Mildred had gone downhill a lot further than Doris had realized. On the phone back in June she’d said come on out, failing to mention not only her throat cancer but also that she had lost her house to creditors and was moving into an old folks’ home just a week before Doris and Sonja were due to arrive.
“For crying out loud, why didn’t you tell us?” Doris said when they finally located her after a morning of taking taxis all over Vancouver.
“Give me the name again?” Aunt Mildred rasped.
“Doris! Gordon’s wife!”
Aunt Mildred shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell, honey.”
Doris decided they might as well stay at Dearness anyway, might as well move into the basement guest apartment for the time being since it was dirt cheap and included meals. She booked it for the maximum allowable duration of two weeks, signing in both herself and Sonja under fake last names (and when the reincarnation story hit the headlines was she glad she had!). That same day she found a cottage for them to live in when the two weeks were up, but four days before they were supposed to go there she fell in love with a nurse named Harmony La Londe. Unhinged by this voodoo rapture and by the thought of Harmony being out of her sight for more than a few hours, she staged a little drama in Dearness’s office. She pretended to telephone Gordon, then over the dial tone pretended to be hearing that he had been fired from his job and there would be no money for her and Sonja’s return train fare, not for many months. She hung up slowly. She sat there blinking, one hand over her mouth. She allowed the woman who owned Dearness to pry the news out of her and she said, with dignity, “I’m very grateful,” when the woman said, “You and your daughter stay right here for as long as you need to.”
“You are a liar,” Harmony La Londe said upon hearing this story. She sounded nothing but charmed. She found Doris exotic, if you can believe it. When all she knew about Doris was that Doris was a housewife from Toronto who had tried to swing on the hot-water pipes, she said, “Are you exotic or what?” This from a lesbian Negro career woman who wore see-through negligées and had painted her apartment to match her parrot.
On the ceiling of the basement corridor the water pipes were runged like monkey bars, and early one morning when Doris was on her way to the lounge for coffee she saw that a ladder had been left propped against the wall next to the stairwell. Out of pure high energy and without thinking, she climbed the ladder and reached for the nearest pipe. Harmony heard the yelp. “Are you all right?” she called from her door.
“I had a little accident!” Doris said, scuttling down the ladder.
Harmony hurried toward her. She was wearing a red chiffon négligée, she looked on fire. Doris extended her hand and there were two pink slashes—one across her fingers, one across her palm. “Better get that under cold water,” Harmony said.
As Dearness’s head nurse, Harmony lived rent free in what had once been a second guest apartment. Doris followed her down the hall. “Ow, ow,” she said, graduating to “Wow” when she walked through Harmony’s door. The layout was the same as Doris and Sonja’s apartment but the walls were painted a brilliant lime green, and instead of Venetian blinds there were drapes, orange with a black dust-web pattern. In the centre of the room, in a glittery cage that hung like a chandelier from the ceiling, a parrot squawked and flapped around.
“That’s Giselle,” Harmony said. “She’s the jealous type.”
The bathroom was sunny yellow. Harmony turned on the tap and took hold of Doris’s wrist to direct her hand under the water. As if Doris were a child. No, as if she were an old lady, Doris realized. But Harmony was the older one here. In her short, slicked-back hair (Doris presumed she’d had it straightened) were single white strands like cracks. Not a line on her face, but ancient eyes and furrowed bony hands that made Doris’s plump white hands look like they belonged to a lady of leisure.
“That better?” Harmony asked.
“I’ll say. Listen, I hope I didn’t wake you.”
“Oh, no, no, it’s my day off. I was just lounging around.” She turned off the tap, then dabbed Doris’s hand with the corner of an orange towel. “What were you doing, anyway?”
Doris told her.
Harmony laughed. “You crazy?”
“Sometimes I wonder.”
“You really wanted to swing on the pipes?” She had stepped out into the hall and opened the closet there. Doris saw shelves crammed with bottles and vials, medicines, bandages.
“Good thing I didn’t, eh?” Doris said. “I’d have brought down the whole plumbing system.”
Harmony took a tube of salve from the back of one of the shelves. “Mrs.—“
“Oh, call me Doris.”
“Doris.” She turned and planted a fist on her hip. “Are you exotic, or what?”
“Me?”
Doris wasn’t aware that she had been avoiding glancing at the negligée until she glanced at it. She only wanted to give it an exaggerated once-over, as if to say, You’re the exotic one around here! But the light coming from the living room had made the chiffon transparent, and so what Doris found herself looking at was her first naked woman. The high, conical breasts, the darkness of the nipples, the darkness at the crotch and the long thighs pouring down. She stared, all right. For how long? (“Long enough,” Harmony said later.) Say, fifteen seconds. Dead seconds, so evacuated of everything except for Harmony’s body that staring seemed natural to Doris, a serenely clinical act, a polite one even, until the bird started squawking, “Giselle! Giselle!”
“Yes, you,” Harmony said then. Quietly. She stepped back into the bathroom and took hold of Doris’s wrist again to apply the salve.
“God, God, God,” Doris thought. She felt faint from embarrassment. Her vision blurred. Now what? Don’t tell her she was going to cry!
“There you go,” Harmony said.
Doris whispered, “Thanks.” Okay, it was over.
No, it wasn’t. Harmony still held her wrist. Doris looked at both their hands, hers the most helpless thing she had ever seen. She watched Harmony lift it like food to her mouth.
“A kiss to make it better,” Harmony said before her lips touched down.
Five months later, ten days late, Sonja’s water broke. It was Friday, early afternoon, and the Jolly Kitchenaires—the little band of wheelchair-bound ladies who met after lunch in the dining room to bang cutlery on cookware and belt out show tunes—were working on “I’m Just a Girl Who Can’t Say No.” You could hear them all the way down in the basement, that’s how loud they were. Happily, languidly, Sonja was pencilling loops in a notebook, eating licorice Allsorts and trying to balance her grammar book on her head while, sitting next to her at the card table, her starry-eyed little tutor, Miss Florence Butson, cooed encouragement. (It turns out that a retired teacher of penmanship and deportment isn’t the same thing as a retired teacher of English after all, but at a nursing home you take what you can get in the way of tutors was how Sonja and Doris were looking at it.)
Doris wasn’t in the apartment that afternoon. She was hardly ever there, being too full of pep to just sit, she said, and when she did fly in, by then Sonja was usually asleep. But Sonja was often awakened by her mother’s hands on her belly. First thing in the morning Doris would go for Sonja’s belly again, feeling for the feet and hands, listening to the heartbeat through Sonja’s navel. In her sleep she sometimes moaned, “Baby … baby,” and Sonja pressed her mother’s hand against herself and said, “Right here, Mommy. Feel, Mommy.”
Nobody had prepared Sonja for her water breaking, so when she felt the sudden pressure she thought she was dying to go to the bathroom. She came to her feet, forgetting about the book, which slid off her head and onto the floor, right under the downpour.
“Oh, my,” said Miss Butson and scraped back her chair.
Sonja waddled in the direction of the bathroom. Halfway there a knifing pain bowed her backwards and she fell hard on her rear end, bringing a table and lamp crashing down with her.
“When a person tries to kiss a girl!” shrilled the Jolly Kitchenaires.
Another pain. Another. Unaccustomed as she was to pain, Sonja wasn’t a good screamer and could manage only a few broken whinnies.
“I’m going for a nurse,” Miss Butson said, scurrying for the door as it opened and “I can’t be prissy and quaint!” blared in together with Aunt Mildred.
“What’s all the racket?” Aunt Mildred rasped.
“She just fell right over!” Miss Butson said at a hysterical pitch.
“I want my mommy,” Sonja whimpered.
“Is she having it?” Aunt Mildred got down on her knees, joints cracking like popcorn. “Let’s take a look-see,” she said, throwing up Sonja’s soaking dress and peering in. “Huh,” she said.
“What?” cried Miss Butson.
“Get up,” Aunt Mildred ordered Sonja.
Another pain. During its long trajectory Aunt Mildred moved behind her and hooked her under the arms. “Well, don’t just stand there like a nitwit,” she rasped at Miss Butson.
Miss Butson clutched Sonja’s hands and tugged, her sweet, milky eyes ogling Sonja with an expression of terror-stricken reassurance. Sonja was no help. Between pains she felt numb from the neck down. She felt like a tiny, melting snowman’s head. “Whut you goin’ to do when a feller gits flirty?” shrieked the Kitchenaires. Finally Aunt Mildred growled at Miss Butson to get out of the way, then mustering astonishing strength managed to heave Sonja onto the high four-poster bed.
“Now then,” she wheezed.
“Is it the baby?” Miss Butson asked, tremulous.
With one quavering hand Aunt Mildred fumbled at her cardigan pocket while regarding Sonja under half-closed, leathery eyelids. She pawed out a cigarette and a book of matches. When she had the cigarette lit she took a deep drag, lips puckering like a draw-string purse. “I’ll tell you what you do with left-over mashed potatoes,” she said to Miss Butson.
Miss Butson made a whimpering sound.
“What you do is—“ She frowned at Miss Butson. “What is it again?”
The next pain produced a dozen little pains that flew like sparks. “Better get her drawers off,” Aunt Mildred said. Sonja felt hands scrambling on her belly, and then her underpants being jerked down her legs. The caressing coils of vein and the crib-like little bones, the cosy pink-and-white chamber she had envisioned her baby living in she now envisioned being scraped away by the slow, sinking rotation of a cement-block thing. “Make way,” her aunt said, and Sonja felt her mouth opening wider and wider as if obeying or as if pantomiming her other end, but the cry skidded in her throat.
“It’s out.”
“Oh, my.”
“What do you know about that, it just jumped right out.”
“Oh, my.”
“You got a hold of it there, Flo?”
“Yes, yes I think so …”
“Let me see,” Sonja murmured.
“It’s a girl.”
“You’ve got yourself a girl, honey.”
“Let me see,” Sonja said.
“She’s not breathing!”
“You’ve got to smack her.”
“Please,” Sonja said.
“Go on, Flo, really whack her one.”
“I can’t…”
“Give her here.”
“Mind your cigarette.”
A loud slap, a faint bleat…
Then…
“FLO! FLO! SHE’S INSANE!”
Or was it, “OH! NO! NOT AGAIN!”
Whichever, that famous, disputed scream was loud. Even the Jolly Kitchenaires heard what they agreed among themselves sounded like bad news in the hot-water pipes, likely a rupture. Write off that ear-splitting cry as something mechanical or as a hysterical, multiple hallucination and you still have the mystery of why a head-first fall onto the floor didn’t kill her let alone cave in or crack her skull. The only visible injury was a bruise to the left of her soft spot, a mauve quarter-sized circle from which radiated a wavy starburst of hair-thin veins so that you had to wonder (or at least Sonja did) if the bruise wasn’t transmitting urgent bulletins from the afterlife.
There was the mystery of Doris calling her Joan, being inspired to call her this the first time she held her in her arms although Anne was the name that she and Gordon and Sonja had agreed on for a girl. Not until almost three years later, when Gordon looked up from his crossword puzzle and said, “Sonja is an anagram of Joan’s,” did anybody realize that Doris had unwittingly branded her with her real maternity.
Her beauty was a kind of mystery, not just because it was genetically inexplicable but because it was so seductive. People always say, What a beautiful baby! but here was a baby who inspired adoration even in the blind. At Dearness the blind faltered their hands over her face and limbs and like everyone else compared her to the disadvantage of all other babies, including their own. The picture of her that the photographer took to show Callous Alice’s mother also appeared in three Vancouver newspapers and generated hundreds of claims that she was the reincarnation of this or that beloved relative, pleas and orders to hand her over.
The newspapers were notified by Aunt Mildred, another curiosity when you consider that her hip broke when she fainted and she had to climb two flights of stairs to get to a phone. Fortunately, by the time the first two reporters showed up, Doris had everything more or less under control. No pictures, she said, no disturbing the mother or the baby, but as she couldn’t put a lid on Aunt Mildred, let alone the other residents, all of whom were declaring they’d heard something mighty eerie, she left it to them to answer the reporters’ questions. Nothing to worry about there. Thanks to her, everyone in the home was under the impression that Sonja’s last name was Gorman, that she was nineteen, and that she was the bride of a doctor who had been sent to the British Honduras as part of a U.N. relief effort.
Until the to-do died down, Sonja and the baby should stay put in the guest apartment, Doris decided. She brought them their meals and otherwise took over, and it didn’t occur to Sonja to feel anything aside from off the hook. The ache she sometimes felt watching her mother give Joan her bottle she thought was her womb shrinking. “There it goes again,” she’d think and feel a reverential affection for the complicated workings of her body. When Joan’s whimpers made her breasts leak she went into the bathroom to squeeze the milk into the sink. Formula was better for babies, her mother said, which was just as well in Sonja’s view. She couldn’t imagine her breasts being sucked by an innocent baby, especially a baby who was supposed to be her sister. Who, for that matter, might still be Callous Alice, although most of the old people who had been willing to entertain that notion had changed their minds. With a few exceptions they now called Joan, Joan.
Everybody bore gifts. Lots of knitwear and blankets, a red and orange hand-quilted blanket from the Negro nurse, which Sonja thought was a bit loud for a baby but which Doris went into raptures over. Some of the residents brought money. One old couple, old pals of Alice’s, showed up with a Black Velvet Chocolates box containing twenty-five silver dollars. This couple was one of the few exceptions. “Cold, hard cash, Ali!” the man said with a wink at Joan, and then he started pestering her with questions about the hereafter. “Blink once for yes,” he said.
“It’s her huge eyes,” Doris said one night after the visitors had gone. Jeepers, creepers, where’d you get those peepers? she sang, venting the song in her mind. She cleared her throat (and Joan made a similar sound, imitating Doris, you’d swear) and said, “The way they seem to see right through you.”
“Maybe they do see right through you,” Sonja said. Leaning over her mother’s arm, she lightly touched a finger to Joan’s bruise, a thing she did from time to time in case she picked up a message. “Ali?” she called softly.
“Cut it out!” Doris said, and then cooed “Sorry” because Joan had flinched. Turning back to Sonja she whispered, “I’ve had it up to here with that mumbo jumbo.”
And she meant it, even though she herself couldn’t shake the feeling that there was something going on with this kid. A few crossed wires from the fall. She’d had two babies, she knew the score. A newborn shouldn’t be able to focus on you the way Joan did, right across a room, it wasn’t supposed to follow you with its eyes like that. Then there was her extreme sensitivity to light and noise, and all those unbaby-like sounds she came out with. The throat-clearing, the droning, the clicking, hissing.
Do you want to know the truth? For a while there, Doris was also looking at Joan and asking, “Ali?” Not out loud, but she was asking it. Later she’d look back and think no wonder. For one thing she didn’t know then that Joan was brain-damaged, added to which she herself was hardly in her right mind around the time that Joan was born. Doris was wild … an out-of-control, madly-in-love nymphomaniac but carrying on as if she wasn’t, like a murderer you find out was a clown at children’s parties. She was either keyed up or so absent-minded that she felt she went into trances. Take the night she was jiggling Joan to bring on a burp, and Sonja drew her attention to how red Joan’s face was turning.
“She looks embarrassed,” Sonja chuckled. And only then did Doris realize not only that she was holding Joan but that she was shaking the poor kid like a ketchup bottle.
This was when Joan was five weeks old.
This was when Doris and Sonja had the same dream.
It happened on the train ride home. What with all the money from the Dearness crowd Doris had splurged on a cabin again, one with a good-sized double bed this time. It was the second afternoon, and Doris had put Joan in her basket and then she and Sonja decided to have a nap along with her. After a few minutes, because Joan was wide awake, cawing and clicking, they moved her into the bed, and that calmed her down.
They all slept—even Joan, who hardly slept at all, even Doris, who never slept soundly any more. When Doris opened her eyes about an hour later, Sonja was also blinking awake. At the end of the bed, over the sink, was a big mirror, and for a few minutes in the grey light the two of them lay there looking at each other… their pie-plate faces (identical except that Sonja’s was fatter these days), their corkscrew hair smoking out, and the train rocking them in time. And a little farther down, in the space where they had each lifted an arm to make room, Joan’s round, bald head like a planet.
Doris, for once, was okay, despite having had a nightmare about Harmony. She smiled, and as if an invisible connection went taut, Sonja’s mouth straightened into a smile, too.
“I had the nuttiest dream,” Sonja whispered, addressing Doris in the mirror.
“Join the club, Sweetie.”
“You know that Negro nurse?”
Doris waited.
“Melody,” Sonja said. “You know …”
“Harmony!” Doris said too vivaciously, too loud. “Harmony!”
“What?”
Doris started pulling a thread from the sleeve of her cardigan. “Her name,” she said, trying to keep a grip on her voice, “is Harmony.”
“Oh, that’s right, Harmony. Well, anyways, I dreamt she was in that play you were in when you were an actress. Julius… no, Romeo and Juliet. She was an old lady and she said, ‘I’m falling apart,’ and then she really did. Her arm fell off, and then her foot and her other arm. Then her head.”
In the mirror Doris witnessed herself blanching.
“And then … And then she changed into a big fish, one of those … oh, what is it…?”
“A dolphin!” Doris burst out.
“What?”
“She changed into a dolphin!” Doris could hear herself—the crazy, tickled-pink gush of her voice.
“How did you know that?” Sonja asked, turning to look at Doris in the flesh.
Doris held her breath.
“Mommy, how’d you know she changed into a dolphin?”
Doris was unravelling her entire sleeve. “A guess,” she got out in an exhalation.
“Well, jeepers, good guess.” She resumed looking at Doris in the mirror. “Anyways, she was a dolphin but with legs, black legs, and then… then I woke up.”
At which point Joan woke up and turned her head to stare at Doris while making tsk-tsk noises, just like scolding, and Doris thought, “It’s her,” by which she meant that Joan being between them was how the dream had passed from her to Sonja, or from Sonja to her. Joan had conducted it! And then the even more harrowing possibility struck her that Joan had made the dream up! A dream about Harmony! “She knows,” Doris thought, completely spooked, while Sonja, oblivious, touched Joan’s bruise and sang, “Bunny, little bunny,” but Joan was fixed on Doris, her eyes like ponds.