From Grandma Gayler’s grocery bag three cans of Campbell’s beef consommé, a can of Carnation evaporated milk and a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli roll down the sidewalk. Of the half-dozen small grade “A” eggs, at least one oozes out of the box and starts frying. The Milky Way chocolate bar squashes and liquefies under her shoulder. The bottles of Tab and Pepto-Bismol shatter, the pink fluid going stringy where it comes into contact with the fizzing brown.
Grandma Gayler lives long enough to take stock of the damage. She hopes that the other eggs aren’t cracked. That will make it an even dozen in two days if they are. On Thursday she dropped her bag of groceries while trying to open the screen door, and there went all six eggs, what an awful mess it made, and the peaches were bruised as well, of course. “Isn’t that the limit,” she thinks as her heart pumps itself out. She imagines she is speaking but she is not. She has no idea she is dying, otherwise she’d be preparing her soul for its embrace in the arms of the mother who illegitimately bore her eighty-four years ago, her senility having progressed to the stage where, by mother, she means Queen Victoria.
She does not die alone. A girl she is presumably acquainted with (but cannot place) crouches next to her and fans her with a magazine while the girl’s mother phones for an ambulance. The girl is a chatterbox. Grandma Gayler tunes her out and yet does hear this full sentence: “I’m going to take a commercial course so I’ll have something to fall back on.”
“Very sensible,” Grandma Gayler thinks she replies. She is not in pain, she feels no pain at all. How lovely to be basking in the sun on such a gorgeous day in the company of this sensible girl who she now believes is Doris thirty years ago, Doris wearing odd shoes. Who, a minute later, her gaze having come to rest on the girl’s white latticed stockings, she believes is the rose trellis behind her old house on Robert Street. Who, in the final seconds of her life, she believes is a light in her eyes, a benevolent interrogation. “Mind the frogs,” she tells her interrogators, or thinks she does. Her last imagined words.
Her last spoken words turn out to have been, “Oh, no, not again!” Cried out when she dropped her grocery bag and heard by the girl, Cynthia, and her mother, Alma. Mentioned, in their lowdown, to Doris. Overheard by Sonja.
All four of them are on the lawn of the funeral home, a half hour early. Sonja immediately makes the connection to Callous Alice, to reincarnation… to Grandma Gayler already starting to reincarnate in the throes of death! What a thought! It buckles Sonja’s knees. “Mommy,” she says and clutches Doris’s arm.
“Are you all right, Sweetie?” Doris thinks the heat is getting to her.
Sonja, speechless, just gapes. “Excuse us, please,” Doris says to Alma and Cynthia, and she hustles Sonja over to a bench in the shade where for some reason Joan is sitting by herself. “Where’s Marcy?” Doris asks. Joan shakes her head, keeping her hands over the lenses of her sunglasses and continuing to imitate the cicadas. Doris turns to Sonja. “Are you all right?” she asks again.
In a whisper so that Joan won’t hear, Sonja explains.
“Oh, for crying out loud!”
“But Mommy—“
Doris plants her hands over her ears. “I don’t want to hear another word about it!” she says, her voice winging to a breathless, ecstatic timbre, which Alma and Cynthia (the only mourners to arrive so far) hear as a crack … poor Doris cracking up under the strain. Sonja hears it for what it is. A slam. Case closed. Stymied, and still flabbergasted by the Sign, Sonja covers her mouth with her hands.
(So to Marcy, who is keeping an eye on the bench from the far side of the parking lot where she’s flirting with the car-park attendant, the three of them seem to be putting on a see-no-evil, hear-no-evil, speak-no-evil monkey act. “What’s going on?” she murmurs, and the attendant looks where she’s looking and says, “You know those people?”)
Back at the bench, Doris says, “I have enough on my plate with your father in the hospital.” She springs to her feet and peels one of Joan’s hands from her eyes. “Now come on, both of you, let’s go inside and face the music. Where’s Marcy? Marcy!”
It is an open casket. Grandma Gayler believed that the soul hung around in the body until after the funeral and should therefore have the opportunity of seeing everybody file past. Her other argument was, “What if I’m not really dead yet?”
What if she isn’t? Doris wonders and resists the urge to get out her compact and hold the mirror at her mother’s mouth. They’ve put pink lipstick on her mouth. Her mother would have been scandalized. It’s nice, though, Doris thinks. Really, her mother was a pretty woman… for whom prettiness was a cross to bear, a scourge in the eyes of the Lord. When Doris was growing up there was an ugly, bad-tempered girl named Arlene living next door, and every time Arlene had a tantrum, Doris’s mother reminded her that Arlene was homely, which was not an appeal to Doris’s sympathy, as you might imagine, but to her respect.
“Well,” Doris says. She rips expired petals from the white lilies in her mother’s folded hands. “These aren’t the calla lilies I ordered, but what the heck. She looks peaceful, don’t you think?”
“She doesn’t look like her,” Marcy says. She is whispering, although nobody else is in the room, only the four of them. This is the “Private farewell between the immediate family and the diseased” (as Sonja thought the funeral director said).
“You know who she looks like?” Sonja whispers now.
“Who?” Doris says.
“Queen Elizabeth. An old Queen Elizabeth.”
Pause.
“No, she doesn’t,” Marcy whispers.
Doris suspects that Sonja said this only because it was the nicest thing she could think of. Her poor, batty mother. “You hear that, Mother?” she says. “Queen Elizabeth!”
“It’s her hairdo.” Sonja really does see the Queen. “The way it’s curled up like that.”
“She just looks so white,” Marcy says and glances at Joan to compare pallors.
Across the room in a huge brown-upholstered chair Joan imitates the low roar of the air-conditioner. This makes for stereophonic sound at the casket. “Shouldn’t Joanie come and say goodbye?” Marcy asks. She doesn’t like how Joan is teetered rigidly to one side with her twig legs sticking straight out like a doll somebody left behind.
“No, she’s too young,” Doris says sharply. “It’ll spook her.”
But Joan has already climbed off the chair and is walking over. Her at-home walk—arms trailing, fingers strumming.
“No, you don’t,” Doris says.
Joan dodges by her. She grips the edge of the casket and stands on tiptoe. Very faintly, she continues to roar.
“Okay, you win,” Doris says. “Can you lift her, Sonja?”
“Upsadaisy,” Sonja says, plucking her up by the waist.
Joan leans right in. Her hair has come loose of its barrettes and brushes Grandma Gayler’s face.
“Don’t hold her so close.” Doris says. But when Sonja pulls her back a bit, Joan thrashes and her sunglasses fall into the casket.
“Oh, cripes,” Doris says, going to snatch them. Joan beats her to it and puts them back on.
“I think she wants to smell her,” Marcy says.
“For the love of Mike—“
“She does,” Marcy says. “Look, she’s sniffing.”
“Okay, that’s enough,” Doris says. Before she can say “Put her down,” there is a loud crash outside.
“What was that?” Marcy runs to the window and parts the brown velvet drapes. “Uh-oh!” she says as Doris and Sonja come up behind her, Sonja still holding Joan, who shuts her eyes and plants her hands against the glass, baby-like.
Right outside the window, there has been a collision between a hearse and a blue car. The hearse is only dented, but the front of the car is balled up like paper. “Oh, great,” Doris says when the driver of the car opens his door. “It’s Reverend Bean.”
“He’s bleeding,” says Marcy. She means the hearse driver. Blood runs down his chin. He is the boy she was flirting with, she must go to him.
“If this doesn’t take the cake,” Doris says, rushing out of the room after Marcy. So Sonja sits Joan in a chair and goes out, too.
A quarter of an hour later, they return with a gang. Alma and Cynthia, Reverend Bean, the usherette who lived upstairs from Grandma Gayler and a loud, drunk butcher named Alf whom nobody has ever heard of but he claims to have been a very close friend of Her Ladyship, as he calls Grandma Gayler. “To me,” he shouts, “she was a duchess!” He spirals his hand in a courtier’s salute. He has no thumb. He is a large old man with ears like telephones, and desperately sad eyes.
“Wait’ll you see her,” Sonja says, taking pity on him. “She looks like the Queen now.”
It was only a small cut on the hearse driver’s chin, and although Reverend Bean has assumed complete blame (“Never pray at the wheel… you can’t resist closing your eyes”), the funeral director is going to cover the damages. Marcy sees him give Reverend Bean a stack of business cards and say, “Maybe you’ll pass them out to your elderly parishioners.”
Marcy is the first to enter the room. She wants the funeral to hurry up so that she and the boy have time to meet at the Dairy Queen later. “Hey,” she says, “somebody closed the lid.”
“Where did Joanie go?” Sonja says, coming through the door.
A chair has been moved in front of the coffin. “Don’t tell me,” Doris murmurs. With a queasy, tranced sensation she recalls from when she used to walk onto an audition stage, she goes to the casket and lifts the upper half of the lid. It’s as heavy as rock. When she has it opened a crack, enough to see in, it slips from her fingers. Bang!
Reverend Bean is there in a second. He quickly lifts the lid back up. For a little man he is strong. “Oh, dear,” he says, opening the lid all the way.
Joan is squeezed in along the nearest side, on her back. Her wrists are crossed over her chest, her head turned toward Grandma Gayler and the end of one of Grandma Gayler’s curls between her opened lips so that the curl looks like a little horn Joan has drunk from, died from, that white curl the same white as Joan’s hair, Doris notices with particular horror. “Get out,” she hisses. She snatches Joan’s hands. They are ice cold. When Doris pulls her up, her head flops.
“Here, let me.” Reverend Bean says. He has already opened the lower half of the lid. He reaches under Joan and scoops her out.
“Joanie!” Marcy cries.
“What do we have here?” the butcher shouts.
Joan’s arm dangles as Reverend Bean turns this way and that for a place to put her.
“The floor!” Doris says.
He lays her down. He grabs a cushion from the chair and tucks it under her head. On each side of her Doris and Marcy kneel. “Snap out of it!” Doris says. She pushes the sunglasses up. Blows on Joan’s face. Joan’s eyelids don’t even flutter. “Come on!” Doris says.
“She’s probably just napping,” Sonja says to calm her mother down.
“Her hand is freezing!” Marcy says, terrified.
“What seems to be the problem?” shouts the butcher.
“Could you please move away?” Doris says to him and the others. “She’s afraid of crowds!”
He stumbles back. By now the funeral director and more mourners have come in. Reverend Bean corners the funeral director to explain. Alma whispers to the butcher, who bellows, “Ah, a cretin!” In front of the casket the usherette paces.
“Joanie, wake up,” Marcy says, shaking Joan’s arm. It wobbles like a rope. “Joanie!” She has an idea. She brings her mouth to Joan’s ear and clicks her tongue three times—“Tsk, tsk, tsk.”
It works.
“Tsk, tsk, tsk,” Joan echoes, then opens her eyes.
Doris sits her up while Joan puts her sunglasses back down. “What was that all about?” Doris asks in a high, trembling voice that sounds like she’s tittering.
The butcher’s face breaks into a wild-eyed smile. “All’s well that ends well!” he bellows.
“We were hiding,” Marcy says. In her agitated state she doesn’t realize that she is speaking of Joan in the plural. “The crash scared us and we needed to hide.”
“Don’t you ever do a thing like that again,” Doris says to Joan.
“We’re getting warmer!” Marcy says. She hasn’t let go of Joan’s hand.
“Poor little tot!” shouts the butcher, striding back to them. Before he reaches them, Joan pulls free of Marcy and scrambles to her feet. She runs to a chair, climbs into it and covers her ears. A few seconds later, she is back to imitating the air-conditioner.
An hour later, in the car, Marcy silently grills her. Wasn’t Joan scared in the casket?
No.
“Why did it take so long to wake up?”
We didn’t want to leave.
“We didn’t want to leave the coffin?”
No.
“Where, then?”
Where we were.
“Yeah, but we mean, where was that?”
Asleep.
“We mean, we didn’t want to wake up from our dream?”
Yes.
“What was the dream about?”
A silver place. All cold and silver.
“Gold and silver?”
No, cold.
“She had a dream she was cold!” Marcy says to her mother and Sonja in the front seat. (At the funeral home Doris had said that Joan’s skin got icy from lying next to Grandma Gayler.)
“I’m not surprised,” Doris says now.
That night in bed Marcy asks Joan about the dream again, but all she hears is that it was cold and silver; it was a cold, silver place. Finally she thinks, “Just don’t do it again.”
Silence.
“Promise,” she thinks. She touches her forehead to Joan’s. Her eyelashes brush the lenses of Joan’s sunglasses. “Promise!”
No.
“Okay, we won’t take us to another funeral, then,” Marcy thinks, turning away. And figures, that settles that. It never occurs to her (why should it?) that Joan doesn’t need to climb into a coffin to imitate a corpse.
A little later that night, in her bed, Doris thrashes and sweats. She can’t get used to Gordon not being beside her. She can’t stop seeing Joan in the coffin.
The pediatric endocrinologist they took Joan to last year warned that if her smallness indicated a certain rare type of dwarfism (Doris has forgotten the name for it) she might not live to see her twentieth birthday. The tests were inconclusive, and the endocrinologist said that the odds were she wasn’t this type of dwarf, but Doris now realizes that ever since then, in some quarantined precinct of herself, she has been expecting Joan to suddenly drop dead.
She kicks off the sheets. Think about something else! she orders herself. The butcher, think about him. Well, what a boor he was! She can’t imagine her mother having given a man like that the time of day. She wonders why he called Joan a cretin, what Alma whispered to him. Then she remembers Alma and Cynthia saying that her mother’s last words were, “Oh, no, not again!” and is startled because she completely forgot about it until now.
“Oh, no, not again!” Why would her mother say that? Not what again? And Sonja is absolutely right. “Oh, no, not again!” is what Aunt Mildred and those superstitious crackpots at Dearness claimed Joan was born screaming.
It’s a coincidence, all right. Enough of one to make Doris wonder if Harmony is messing around with voodoo dolls. Look who’s calling who superstitious! True, but this much is also true: the coincidences have been piling up since Doris fell for Cloris Carter in the Dominion store line-up, and the message appears to be: Don’t.
A week ago Saturday. She is sitting beside Cloris on Cloris’s sprawling chesterfield, which is upholstered in a silvery fabric like whatever ironing-board covers are made of. Cloris herself is adorned in pounds of silver jewellery. Gigantic hoop earrings, an incalculable number of necklaces. Wire-thin bracelets segment the length of her arms, those at her wrists jingling like sleigh bells. All that silver. So queenly, so dazzling. In comparison Doris feels like the unworthy palm waver she was in Antony and Cleopatra. How dare she? But she can’t resist. She lays a hand on the tea-coloured flesh of Cloris’s knee. And as if a siren has been tripped, the phone rings. And it’s for her. And it’s Sonja saying that Gordon has gone off in an ambulance.
Then this past Saturday. She phones Cloris for the first time since Gordon’s heart attack. The line is busy. She hangs up, and her phone rings. It’s the news that her mother has died.
And not only died but, according to the latest bombshell, died wailing, “Oh, no, not again!”
Why not again? What has happened to Doris that she wouldn’t have happen again and gladly? Would she marry Gordon? The lyrics that have just popped into her mind are All I want to see is the back of your head, getting smaller, and smaller, and smaller, but she mentally smacks them away as being ridiculous and thinks, “You’re darned right I’d marry him again.” Would she have kids? If it were up to her alone she’d have a litter of them. What about Sonja getting pregnant out of wedlock? Well, that all turned out for the best, didn’t it? What about her father dying at sixty-seven, twenty years before her mother? From the day he retired, her father did nothing but suck on a bottle of Canadian Club and listen to his scratchy polka records. So, guess.
Would she give up the stage? She’d even do that again, although that was a hard one.
She’s on shaky ground here, thinking about the theatre. It has always hurt and mystified her why she never got a foot in the door. Why didn’t she? She had what it took—moxie, she could do any accent. And she wasn’t bad looking in those days, either. How long ago was it? Nineteen thirty-seven. So twenty-eight, twenty-eight years ago.
She was nineteen, working in the typing pool at Nesbitt Insurance. A good job for a girl during the Depression. For another girl. In her last year of high school Doris had brought down the house playing Eliza Doolittle in Pygmalion. Standing ovations. Flowers at her feet. Her drama teacher, Mr. Waldorf, had urged her to go to London, England, and pursue his theatre connections. As if he had any, she thought, but this was years later. At the time she had said, hopelessly, “My parents could never afford to send me.” Which, of course, he would have known.
“Whatever you do,” he said, “don’t waste your life in some dreary office.”
Words that echoed.
Back then there was a magazine called Centre Stage that listed where auditions were being held across the province and just south of the border. When a part sounded promising Doris pretended to get a blinding headache so that she could leave work and go to the try-out. (Her boss, who really did get blinding headaches, would become almost hysterically sympathetic.) Some days Doris rode the train as far as Buffalo and back.
She told nobody about these trips, not even her parents. When she finally won a role, then she’d tell them, knock their socks off. The typing pool already thought she led a shockingly glamorous life. She had bought a tiny picture frame for the photograph it held of a handsome, curly-haired man wearing glasses, and she carried the photo around in a locket, saying that the man was her beau.
“He’s a famous playwright,” she said. “Dean Lowell.” (Her mother’s brother’s name.) “You might have heard of him.”
Some of the girls in the typing pool said they thought they had.
“He’s very tall,” Doris said, opening the locket. “I call him Lean Dean.”
The girls oohed. They said how smart he looked.
“He’s a genius!” Doris said. “He writes entire plays in his head. Of course, he’s very absent-minded. He’s always bumping into things and breaking his glasses. You see there?” She pointed to the arm of his glasses where there was a spot on the photo. “That’s cellotape. He can’t be bothered to go to an optician and have them properly fixed. He hasn’t time for the everyday things.” She kissed the photo. “He knows all of Shakespeare’s sonnets by heart. The first thing he said to me when we met was, ‘Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments.’”
One of the girls waggled her ring finger. “So when’s he going to pop the question?”
“Oh, he doesn’t believe in marriage. We’ll probably live in sin.”
The girls shrieked.
It gave Doris a charge, scandalizing them. Some mornings she pretended to be hung-over from a wild night out with Dean and his actor friends. “I’m blotto,” she’d groan. “Stay back, kids.” She made up stories about these friends. Their dire love affairs, a suicide. She said that a local actress (“I’m not naming names”) went to New York for an abortion. “And the next day she was still bleeding so badly she had to sit on phone books. I brought her ours from home and she bled through to the S’s.”
The typists ate it up. There was nothing Doris told them that they didn’t believe. In fact, the more unbelievable she was the more devoutly they believed her. It was unbelievable. Growing up she’d had a horror of lying. Now she lied all the time, without guilt, without ever weaving a tangled web. There were tricks to lying, she realized. Or not tricks so much as rules. Look people in the eye, remember your lies, stick to your lies, never back down from a lie, salt your lies with the truth, respect lies, know that there is no such thing as a simple lie.
Very quickly she had all this down pat and working for her.
So it isn’t exactly true to say that she didn’t get a foot in the door, because she could talk her way into any audition. It was talking her way into a part that she somehow loused up. That silence as her last line died in the rafters like an electrocuted bird, and then, from a back row, that English-accented “Thank you, Miss Gayler,” which meant she’d blown as much as a dollar on train fare … it was not an experience she ever got used to or entirely over.
Afterwards, instead of going straight home from Union Station she usually consoled herself with tea and a chocolate éclair at Fleming’s on King Street. The set-up of the restaurant was in the form of a daisy, five petal-like counters surrounding a central preparation area, and at one of these petals she sat across from a young man who looked so much like the man in her locket that she opened it to check.
No, it wasn’t him. The mouth was wrong. And the chin. Dean’s had a cleft, this fellow’s didn’t. Still! He was tall, very tall and lean. And the right arm of his glasses was held on with tape! Masking tape, but that’s splitting hairs. And he was reading The Complete Works of William Shakespeare! The same edition that Doris owned! The sonnets were at the end of that edition, and he was concentrating on a page somewhere near the end, looking up every few seconds and then down again, as if committing the words to memory.
Several times he glanced at her. Finally he said, pleasantly, “May I help you?”
“Let us not to the marriage of true minds admit impediments,” she said. “Am I right?”
He smiled. “When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes.”
“You don’t say. Well, I would have tried ‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day’ next. Then ‘When in disgrace.’”
“You’re an actress.”
Were she not already in love with this man from having more or less invented him and therefore knowing all his dear, irreplaceable quirks, she’d be head over heels now. (So much for Ed Metzer.) “Give the man a cigar,” she said. “First guess.”
(Ed Metzer had been her high-school sweetheart. He had called her Pancake and kissed her for hours without going further. A fine young man, he joined the British navy, he always said he would. The night before he set sail he took her to his aunt’s empty house and they lay fully dressed on a bed and kissed while he panted like a dog and slapped her all over, not too hard but almost. “Wait for me, Pancake,” he said. “I will,” she said, half believing she would, half thinking, “Fat chance.”)
She continued auditioning for parts she never got while spinning Gordon the line that she was taking a vacation from her exhausting stage career. A few weeks before their wedding she announced (and she wasn’t kidding) that she was giving up the theatre for good. Because they would never see each other otherwise, she said. Because the pay stunk. Because she was tired of lying to her parents about it. And so on. The real reasons were: there’s a limit to how much rejection a person can take, and the cost of train fare.
“I’ve had it with the limelight,” she said, and Gordon kissed her as passionately as a man whose hands don’t stray can.
Like Ed before him, Gordon respected her virtue. To her relief, to her disappointment. She was the type of young woman who had been raised to take baths in the dark. On faith she accepted that she must have been seen naked in her life but when she imagined her mother changing her diapers she imagined a photographer changing film—using a box, doing it by feel. Added to which Ed’s idea of romantic bliss had hardly toppled the walls. When she and Gordon kissed, her body yearned. When she thought about what her body was yearning for, she cringed. Yearning and cringing, her seizured rumba to the altar. Which turned out to be the flower stand in her parents’ living room. Her father hadn’t worked steadily since the start of the Depression, so it was only a small family ceremony in the living room.
Afterwards, after the cold cuts, sandwich squares and lemonade punch, Doris and Gordon drove through pelting rain to the waterfront and drank half the bottle of bootleg whisky that was the best man’s wedding gift. Doris had never been inebriated before. She had assumed it would relax her, but it made her so jumpy she screamed at every clap of thunder.
She screamed when Gordon picked her up and staggered over the threshold of the decrepit Victorian apartment house that was their new home. He carried her up the three flights of stairs. She covered her mouth so as not to scream and wake the other tenants. He put her down to open the door, then picked her up again and carried her into their little furnished loft. Earlier in the day she and her mother had cleaned it, you could still smell the Murphy’s soap. He kicked the door shut behind him, wove over to the bed and dropped her. She let out a pure, high, steam-kettle scream, and was applauded it sounded like, but it was the rain pattering into the room. Around the bed was a canopy of drips. He fell down beside her. “I can’t see,” he said. Her response was to remove his glasses, a liberty she had never before taken.
She carefully put them on the bedside table. She felt very calm now. More than calm, she felt a cold formalness, a peculiar expertise, as if her job were to dismantle this very long man feature by feature, limb by limb, and spread him on the bed for the sake of science. In her head a German-accented voice sang, Ze shin hone’s connected to ze ankle hone, ze ankle hone’s connected to ze foot hone, now hear za verd of za Lord. She was all set to undo his tie when he turned toward her and began to pull out pins that held the soggy garland of pink roses in her hair.
With her help he succeeded. He patted her head and murmured, “The bride.” He kissed her. Still kissing her, his hand slid down her hair to the front of her neck and then lower, to her collarbone, and she demolished into the flesh that surrounded her breasts, she was all breasts on a pillow of flesh, but his hand lifted, and where it landed next was stretched along her waist. “Small,” he said, giving her occasion to appreciate the yardage of his fingers. Then he rolled onto his back and closed his eyes.
“Sweetie?” She shook him. Shook him harder. “Sweetie.” Gave up. Let’s face it, for all her brave readiness she was mostly relieved.
The next evening was the first time. It wasn’t her plan but she ended up wearing the Saturday-night nightgown her mother had sewn and wrapped in a Weston’s bread bag and left under her pillow two days before the wedding. Thick flannelette, high-collared, floor-length, a pattern of tiny strawberries … a flap, midway down the front, that you unbuttoned. Doris knew what it was, what it was for. How many Sunday mornings had she seen her mother’s plain white Saturday-night nightgown laundered and drying on the basement clothesline? (Never the outside line.) The strawberries, now those were a surprise. Risqué for her mother. Would Doris wear it? Her reaction when she opened the bag was an embarrassed, insulted snort. Crumpling it up and stuffing it back into the bag.
But she packed it with her trousseau, didn’t she? And that second night, when Gordon set the tone by emerging from the bathroom in grey cotton pyjamas and a housecoat, all her nerve slithered off and she made her entrance in “the contraption,” as they would eventually call it. She caught him squinting at the flap as she climbed into bed. “Don’t laugh,” she said.
“I’m not laughing,” he said and switched off the light.
Eight months went by before she had the nerve to touch him down there. It was February. She remembers, because earlier in the day Ed’s sister had telephoned to say that Ed’s ship, HMs Exmouth, had been lost at sea and that Ed “had gone down defending the Empire against the Nazis.”
“Oh, don’t tell me,” Doris said, although somehow the news seemed like old headlines. She pictured Ed slapping the waves as he sunk.
“You were almost a war widow!” the distraught sister gloated, as if by dumping Ed, Doris had thrown away her one shot at glory.
When, hours later, Doris wrapped her fingers around Gordon’s penis, the impulse was to have something to hold on to in the world. And to verify that being the receiver of this thing was all the glory she or any woman needed. That wasn’t verified, not overwhelmingly or lastingly, but the sense she’d had for months that his penis was no carrot was.
She wasn’t completely innocent, she’d heard that a man’s thing was supposed to feel hard, not be so droopy. His worked perfectly fine, he ejaculated, it was just that it took a lot out of him. Sweat so torrential she sometimes held out a hand to see if it wasn’t the roof leaking. His feeble heart banging away. When he paused for a breather she could never tell whether it was that, or he was having heart attack, or he was through.
That night as on every other night she awaited the warm drool between her legs. She was the one who cried out then, she was so happy for him, so happy for herself, her drawn-out pleasure. As usual her climax had happened way back from all his fiddling around trying to get himself erect and inserted.
In other words his penis was no disappointment. Far from it. The other payoff was that intercourse was painless. Nice and easy, for her it was anyway. At her end it was rather luxurious while being so driven at his end that it was, really, a heartwarming event. Most women have to be pregnant before they experience that rush of protective love that a blind little invader of their body is capable of arousing.
By the time she was pregnant she was so moved by his penis—its helpless pluck—that she was pitching in: rubbing it on her bare breasts (“the contraption” had long since been torn up for rags) and planting little kisses on its German-helmet-like head. Somehow she wasn’t surprised that her lips had what it took to make him erect. Which is not to say that her feelings weren’t hurt. He found her private parts unsavoury—this was the conclusion she drew—and she started washing them in a vinegar solution that seared her numb and within a few days lent an orange tinge to her pubic hair. For a while after that she wouldn’t touch him, but eventually she couldn’t resist. Back to the rubbing and squeezing. The little kisses.
When he ejaculated in her mouth for the first time she spat the semen all over his stomach and groin. She would have sworn there were quarts of the stuff. She was horrified. But even as he was apologizing and pawing at the fanned-out strings of semen linking her lips to himself, even as she was watching his dumb play on this harp, a pulse was drumming between her legs and she was like a bomber of Berlin, gaping down from the stratosphere at the splendid aftermath, saying to herself, “Look at what I just did!”
Did he ever kiss her down there? Seventeen years later Harmony would put the question to her. “Are you crazy?” Doris would answer. She could imagine almost anything but she could not imagine Gordon nuzzling her like a dog. Until Harmony came along, she had thought it was pretty far-fetched that any woman was loved in this way. She wasn’t even sure that it was legal. It had to be slightly demented, she thought, the desire for somebody’s lips on your private parts. Yet there it was, sideswiping her during sex with Gordon, springing up in her dreams where nine times out of ten the kisser was a woman. In one of the first of such dreams the woman was her great-aunt Beatrice! The sleeping Doris thought, “Oh, well, Aunt Beatrice is dead,” and decided to enjoy herself. She woke up aghast, climaxing.
These dreams continued all her life, once or twice a week.
She’d be at a home-and-school meeting or at the beauty parlour, and suddenly she’d be in a clinch with a woman. As in dreams where you’re naked in public, nobody paid attention. Furthermore, the climaxes that rocked her awake made the ones she had with Gordon feel like minor aftershocks. So she wasn’t talking about nightmares. A lick of shame maybe as she emerged from the smoke of the dream, but shame wasn’t inevitable. Could she help what she dreamed?
Could she help what she daydreamed? About the time that Gordon stopped making love to her (it was before then, but here’s the version she lives with) she would be attending a home-and-school meeting for real, no dream, and find herself staring at Harriet Barker and imagining her ironing or cleaning her oven in a see-through black negligée. Harriet was the tall, thin, sophisticated type. Only if Doris dressed her in a sexy nightgown and stuck a cigarette in her mouth could she conceive of her doing housework. When Harriet wasn’t there, Doris gazed at Libby Burt, who was trim and perfect, a little Dresden doll smelling of Jergens lotion. Libby she liked to imagine hanging laundry in white underpants and a white lacy brassiere. Pouty, sighing Libby, bending to pick up a towel, standing on tiptoe to peg it to the line.
For at least a year that was as far as it went. Visions of beautiful women doing housework in their underwear and nightgowns. And then one day she put herself in the picture. Showing up unexpectedly, being invited in. (No wonder when Robin knocked at her door, she knew what to do!) And then her dream women weren’t even ones she was acquainted with. Women on the bus, receptionists, nurses, women she spotted as she tore through magazines for coupons. Women who were only drawings! The ScotTissue woman in her tight zebra pants and red sweater with the white fur collar. The Hertz rent-a-car woman! “She’s Got the Hertz Idea,” the ad said. What did that mean? Stupid with longing, Doris tried to decipher the caption, as if the woman herself might have been the author, but the message was impenetrable. The woman had the Hertz Idea, that’s all that was clear, and because of this idea the woman’s lovely forehead was perspiring, and her mouth was wide open, and her tongue—red as her lips—was sticking out as if to catch raindrops.
Whether she could help them or not, Doris’s daydreams did shame her, though not to the degree that she put up much of a fight or was tormented. A rictus under her heart was all it really amounted to, a few seconds of adjusting to the evidence that she was one way and the world was another. She might have fretted more than that but there didn’t seem to be any point. Daydreams like hers were comparable to seeing crazy shapes in clouds—Winston Churchill wearing a poke bonnet, say. What was the chance that that mile-wide Winston Churchill head up there was going to start bellowing, “We shall fight in the fields!” and terrorize innocent bystanders? Until she met Harmony she would have said that she was more likely to win a million bucks than she was to kiss another woman even on the lips let alone below the neck.
So Harmony was a miracle. The absence of shame and guilt was a miracle. There was fear, but only afterwards and only of being discovered. Under Harmony’s hands, Doris’s body turned to bells. She could just lie there, blameless, as Harmony instructed her in the declension of her own flesh. “What’s this?” Harmony asked, touching Doris’s nipple. The nipple chimed.
“My breast,” Doris said shyly.
“Your nipple,” Harmony corrected. She cupped her hand over Doris’s crotch. “This?”
“You know.”
“Lie still, Baby Lamb. What? What is it?”
“It’s… down there.”
“Cunt,” Harmony said.
Doris gave an embarrassed laugh.
“Say it,” Harmony said. She meant business.
“Cunt,” Doris said out loud for the first time in her life.
Harmony stroked her with one finger. “This?”
“Beats me.”
“Lie still. I never knew such a jittery woman. You don’t know what this is?”
Doris shook her head.
“That’s your labia. Your labia majora, to be specific.”
“Labia majora,” Doris said, feeling like Tarzan.
“Labia minora,” Harmony said, moving on.
Sex was something else altogether. Slithery, equatorial. For Doris it almost restored her belief in God, because the lyrics that entered her head as she approached orgasm were from her old Sunday-school hymnal and because after her orgasms she found herself inspired to sing them (with Harmony humming along in a loose vibrato), feeling that at last she really understood “glory on high” and “joy divine,” and what it was to be hallowed and unburdened. On the train home the phrase “abomination of desolation” kept occurring to her. She couldn’t sleep. Come dawn she’d be standing between cars watching the endless basting of the sky by wires and poles while every love song ever written got an airing in her brain. Harmony had told her that lesbians were not as few and far between as Doris had thought, and maybe so, but Doris doubted the same could be said of women who decorated your breasts with gold leaf. She wondered whether, if she bought some gold leaf, she could talk Gordon into plastering it on her. “Well then, Sweetie, what about drizzling me with honey and licking it off? After the kids are in bed, I mean.”
Unlikely scenarios were Doris’s specialty, but this one was out of her league. Anyway, Gordon wasn’t Harmony, even if you drank too many rum-and-Cokes and kept your eyes shut. By the same token, Harmony wasn’t Gordon. Nobody was anybody else, although people resembled each other and linked hands like paper dolls.
If she knew this, then why after all these years did she persist in thinking of Cloris Carter as another Harmony La Londe? As Harmony but with Robin’s urgency? There was harm in that. And harm in thinking of herself as herself nine years ago. No roaring heck in the looks department, but a big draw for Negro women. The afternoon of Gordon’s heart attack when Doris pressed her hand on Cloris’s arm she may have felt she was overstepping the bounds but at the same time she believed that Cloris felt nothing of the kind.