One night when Sonja and Doris are in Vancouver, Marcy dreams that Sonja is being stabbed in the stomach by a man whose head is on fire. She wakes up crying. She gets out of bed and goes into the living room to tell her father that he’d better phone Vancouver right away. The living room is dark but she knows that her father is in there because his “Mister Sandman” record is playing.
Yes, he’s there. On the floor. “Lie beside me,” he interrupts the telling of the dream. He paws at the tears on her face, and she smells the familiar pencil odour of his fingers. She tugs at his hand until he is on his feet. He sways. He clutches her shoulder so hard her knees buckle. Thinking that his leg must still be sore from the car accident, she takes his hand and leads him down the hall to the kitchen, where the phone is. Three times he gives the operator the wrong number, although Marcy is piping it at him. Through the threadbare cotton of her pyjamas, which have a red-and-yellow watering-can pattern, she pinches her thin arms.
Finally her father hands her the receiver, but she has to speak to two other women before Sonja’s crackly, faraway voice comes on the line. Marcy is not especially relieved that Sonja doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Marcy says, “I’m warning you.” She says, “No, I think he’s a fireman… or something …,” her voice unravelling as in her mind the dream unravels.
“Say goodbye now,” her father slurs.
Marcy has two recurring dreams. One about a talking baby and one about a little girl playing the piano in a room where Marcy and a man wrestle on a bed. There’s a dog in this dream as well, a poodle biting its leash. The man says, “Ah, come on, it’s like balling in front of the dog.” In the dream Marcy understands what the man means by “balling.”
Her dreams wake her up. If she doesn’t fall right back to sleep she’s apt to start fretting over all the pages in her school textbooks the teacher hasn’t even got to yet. She’ll touch the dolls that are aligned like bridesmaids on each side of her. Lightly, so as not to wake them, she’ll feel their brittle dresses and the rigid brush of their eyelashes. Eventually she’ll climb out of bed and go to her desk and pore over her exercise books in the bar of streetlight where her curtains don’t meet. It’s not out of the question that she’ll sit there for hours, erasing and rewriting entire pages.
She has straight, coarse hair the colour of cardboard. She worries that it is actually fur, as she has seen hair so coarse and that colour only on dogs. She is prone to styes that puff and redden her eyelids and that (as she will eventually discover) give the new neighbours across the street the impression that she lives in a violent household. She is ruining her eyes, and like her father will wear glasses. Not for another four and a half years, though. In the meantime she prays for twenty-twenty vision, human hair and the death of the tub of lard. She prays on her knees in her closet where she believes that sparks of static electricity indicate the presence of Jesus.
Jesus is present during her babysitter’s bubble baths as well, the sound of static electricity and the bubbles bursting being identical. Being the sound of Jesus. Worshipfully, Marcy washes her babysitter’s back, which because it is covered in moles is a starry sky. The soap circles Marcy makes are clouds. Sometimes, to scare herself, she prints AL WAS HERE in the soap, believing that this means BEWARE. The babysitter moans with pleasure. Jeanie is her name, Jeanie with the cornflake-coloured hair. When she is lying on the floor in front of the TV Marcy straddles her back and brushes her hair. To Marcy, Jeanie’s dandruff is confetti.
Jeanie has told Marcy that the scar under her eye is from when her mother hit her with the buckle end of a belt. Jeanie cries not because of her mother but because her boyfriend dumped her for a tub of lard who shaves her arms. Marcy strokes Jeanie’s slender, unshaved arm and dips her finger into Jell-0 powder for Jeanie to lick off. She feeds her Cheez Whiz on Windmill cookies. “There you go,” she says soothingly, coaxing a cookie into Jeanie’s mouth. “Is that good? Mmm, good.”
Before Jeanie was her babysitter Marcy heard that you could give her a jar of worms and she’d eat them by the handful. Did Jeanie really? “That’s classified information,” is all that Marcy can get out of her. Jeanie admits to having been a worm picker, however. Picking and selling worms to fishermen for a quarter a can. She has a secret method. First you mix three tablespoons of Keen’s hot mustard in a glass of water. You fill a second glass with plain water. Then you crawl around your lawn knocking the tops off of the tiny clumps of earth that are actually worm mounds. When you have uncovered twenty or so holes you pour a bit of the mustard mixture down each one.
“Now wait,” Jeanie tells Marcy the day she demonstrates the method. “And don’t move, they feel our vibrations.”
Marcy hugs her knees. Maybe her Thursday underpants are showing. She has “Day of the Week” underwear—Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday and so on stitched across the back of seven pairs. To wear a pair that didn’t match the day would be unthinkable to her, crazy, like eating breakfast in the middle of the night. She hugs her knees to keep perfectly still. She is prepared to stay like that for a long time but within seconds worms start shooting up all around her. It’s a fountain of worms. Long, plump, segmented, writhing and crawling up out of the grass. Marcy jumps to her feet.
“Big fat juicy ones, long slim slimy ones,” Jeanie sings, plucking up the worms and dropping them into the glass of plain water.
Marcy is terrified. “Do they love us?” she cries, knowing it’s a stupid, babyish question, humiliating herself and yet asking it again. “Do the worms love us?”
Jeanie snorts. “Are you out of your mind? We’ve just burned them. They hate our guts.”
A little later, because her devotion is undiminished but also to distract Jeanie from mixing more Keen’s hot mustard and water, Marcy brings Sonja’s precious tap-dance shoes into the kitchen and urges Jeanie to try them on. “They’re broken,” Jeanie says when she can’t get them to click. Marcy returns the shoes to the box that says “Private Property” and comes back into the kitchen with her piggy bank whose contents add up to five dollars and thirty-seven cents, her life savings. “It’s all for you,” she announces. “I present it unto you.”
“Don’t tell your father, okay?” Jeanie says, shaking out the coins.
With the money, Jeanie buys tomato-red nail polish and a Ouija board that zooms out the answers but is a bad speller.
This is July, when Marcy is still the person she has been all her life. She is crazy about Jeanie, but not yet swooning over her. This is before everything. Before Marcy is pregnant, although pregnancy is on her mind because her mother is pregnant. Sometime before Christmas her mother and Sonja will return from Vancouver with what Marcy imagines will be more or less an alive doll. Her dream! She understands that babies come from a seed given to the mother by the father, and so while her mother is away and it is her father who makes breakfast and supper, nothing goes into her mouth that she hasn’t first picked through for a seed that doesn’t match the others. A suspicious-looking seed. She is aware of the ignominy of unwed mothers, there being a home for unwed mothers at the end of the street where if you climb the brick wall you sometimes catch a glimpse of them in their white maternity dresses, drifting around the back lawn like dandelion seeds.
It is not until the beginning of November that Marcy has her first talking-baby dream. When she wakes up, her ears still ringing, she can’t remember what the baby said. But was it loud!
The next afternoon while she is soaping Jeanie’s back she is suddenly inspired to let her hand slide under Jeanie’s arm and touch her bosom. She knows a hymn, “The Mothers of Salem,” in which Jesus says, “For I will receive them and hold them to my bosom,” and calling this hymn to mind as her hand circles closer and closer to Jeanie’s left breast provides not just absolution, not just permission, but encouragement. Jeanie pretends she doesn’t notice anything, whereas Marcy feels strips of velvety light coiling up and down her legs.
A few nights later she dreams that she is pregnant. In the morning she awakens to a pot belly and the inflation of the black, unknowable world. She climbs out of bed and uses her hand mirror to try to see in through her navel. She swallowed a seed, she thinks. Somehow she swallowed a darned seed! She presses her stomach with her fingers and feels a stem-like thing. An arm! In common with Sonja she has the idea that babies in the womb are like baby birds, their heads drooped back and their mouths wide open waiting for food to drop in. With a sense that it ought to be a snap, she resolves to let the baby wait until it starves to death.
For two days she eats nothing. Her father tries to bribe her with promises of money and Creamsicles but Marcy shakes her head. She says she’s the one who eats all the food that Jeanie wolfs down. “I’m stuffed,” she says. “Look,” she says, brazenly drawing her father’s attention to her pot belly.
On the third day she eats a slice of summer sausage and two crusts of bread. She squares this with herself by chewing until the food is a paste so that there is hardly anything left for the baby. Just as her mother craved liver and onions when she was pregnant, Marcy craved the slice of summer sausage. “I have cravings,” she thinks, a bit disturbed by such irrefutable evidence of her condition.
Nobody knows, not even Jeanie. Marcy is too ashamed. When she wakes up in the middle of the night her big anxiety is what if the baby doesn’t die? “Please let it die,” she prays. In her fervour she pulls her hair out in clumps. She makes deals with God. To be good. To be silent. She Scotch-tapes her lips together so that she can’t talk. She knows that she is too young to marry, and yet as an alternative to being an unwed mother she finds herself reflecting upon Dug, the boy Jeanie’s Ouija board said was going to be her husband. Except that Marcy doesn’t know any Dugs, not yet.
The dream that invariably wakes her up these nights is the talking-baby one. It’s not her baby, and it’s not her mother’s, either. If only when she woke up she could remember what the baby said, then she might know who it belonged to. She’s not certain but she thinks it’s a girl. On the way to and from school she searches for it in the bulrushes along the river. She is frightened of quicksand and won’t step where the earth is wet.
Meanwhile, throughout November and despite her baby worries, she is obsessed with giving Jeanie baths. After school, as soon as Jeanie arrives and lets them into the house, Marcy chirps, “How would you like a nice, relaxing soak in the tub?” In bed at night she has found that if she presses her palm between her legs she can bring on “the feeling,” just by thinking about washing Jeanie’s breasts. Not without guilt though. The suspicion that she is doing something wrong has entered the picture and loiters during the day in the creases of clothes and between the slats of the Venetian blinds in her classroom, and yet “the feeling” itself, when it washes over her, is white and glorious, like heaven. Her ensuing prayers tend to cancel each other out. “Thank you, Jesus,” she says, heartfelt. “Thank you, dear Lord.” And just as heartfelt, “Please forgive me, Jesus.”
The night before her mother’s baby is born, Marcy’s baby dies. A sharp cramp wakes her from a dream about it dying. She goes into the bathroom and sits on the toilet because in her dream that was how it happened. She was on the toilet and the baby dropped out of her down there, still alive, a puny blue baby that could do the dog-paddle. Eventually it sunk but not before holding up one tiny finger, then two fingers, then—last chance—three fingers. When Marcy was sure that it had drowned she fished it out of the bowl and put it in a Pez dispenser for burial.
Her father is still up, listening to his “Mister Sandman” record. “Please turn on your magic beam,” Marcy softly sings along to quell an unnameable fear. “Bring me a, bring me a, bring me a—“ she sings where the record always sticks. She sits on the toilet for half an hour, in the dark. Finally she gets off and switches on the light to assure herself of her flat stomach. There is blue lint in her navel. Knowing it is only lint, she nevertheless picks it out and saves it to bury.
That following day, just when it doesn’t matter any more, she meets a Dug. He reminds her of her dream poodle, his tight, curly blond hair and brown, snappy eyes. She doesn’t make fun of his baggy Bermuda shorts. When the teacher says, “This is Doug Green all the way from London, England,” if he had been a poodle, Marcy would have held her flat palm under his nose and said, “Good boy.” She would like to bite his chubby legs.
At recess, intending flattery and consolation, she tells him he has ruby-red lips. He is alone beside the Elmer the Safety Elephant flagpole. He says, “Don’t talk rubbish,” and proceeds to do a series of hectic, crab-like cartwheels. The kind of cartwheels they do in England, she supposes. She tells him she has a crown at her house (the Queen for a Day crown, although Marcy has been led to believe it’s her mother’s lost prom-queen crown, only recently discovered in the attic). She brags that her father once mailed the Queen of England six books and that the Queen phoned him to say thank you. (This is a dream, not a memory, induced by her belief that the words “Send her victorious” are actually “Send her six storybooks.”)
The boy says, “Watch this,” and stands on his head. His shorts riding up produce in her the sentiment that her field of prospective husbands is narrowing.
On the way home from school he runs up behind her and says, “You better watch out or I’ll kiss you,” then keeps running. She stands still as white flowers open in her head. Boys gallop by her, all of them wearing Davy Crockett coonskin hats, the first such hats she has seen not on TV, herds of boys with tails on their heads. She has to go to the bathroom. She crouches behind a cedar hedge, and while she is peeing remembers the Pez container in her pencil case. Next to where she has peed she digs a hole with a sharp stone and buries her baby, finishing up with the singing of “What Can Little Hands Do to Please the King of Heaven?”
By the time she arrives home Jeanie is already there, watching Secret Storm. Jeanie declines a bath, so Marcy brushes her hair instead. Almost in a trance Marcy runs the brush and her hand over Jeanie’s hair until Jeanie grunts and rolls onto her back. Marcy falls off her but climbs on again, astride her stomach. They look at each other, Marcy revelling in Jeanie’s eyes. She has heard her father refer to Jeanie’s eyes as beady, and she believes this to mean like jewels, sparkling.
“You know what?” Marcy says. Her throat aches. Her chest aches with a kind of bursting.
Marcy is suddenly inspired. “You better watch out!”
“Or what?” Jeanie asks in a sarcastic voice.
“Or I’ll kiss you!” Marcy cries to her own enthralled disbelief.
Jeanie tries to heave her off, but Marcy drops forward and clings with her wiry arms and legs. “Jeanie!” she cries, earnest now, her entire body chiming with joyful noise. “I love you so much!”