Read Online Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy - Free Book Online

like a court jester’s. But with cleats. Out on the sidewalk, for every scraping chink from him, her penny loafers produced three feeble little slaps, and trying to change her pace didn’t make any difference, he automatically adjusted. He said that she was so graceful, she must be a ballerina.
    “A tap-dancer,” she admitted.
    “Hey, show me a few steps,” he said, but she said it didn’t work without tap shoes. They walked on. He kept looking at her, she could feel it. She looked straight ahead, clutching her books to her chest, scurrying alongside what felt like the sway of steel girders.
    When they reached the corner he badgered her to walk with him just three more blocks, and seeing as she wasn’t really going out of her way, she gave in. “Oh, all right” was her half of the conversation until they arrived at his place. It turned out tobe in a new apartment building. He said she’d see a grown man cry like a baby if she didn’t take a ride in his elevator.
    “Oh, all right,” she said and followed him through the ritzy lobby. Partly out of curiosity because she’d never been in a highrise. Partly out of sheer surrender.
    The elevator was mirrored, even the ceiling, which he came up to. He punched the highest button, nine, then clamped her shoulders and turned her in a circle. He said, “No matter which way you look, darlin’, there we are.”
    It was true. Her so short and chubby and him so tall she thought for a minute they must be fun-house mirrors, except that he’d been that tall outside.
    “You and me,” he said.
    He turned her again.
    “Going on to infinity,” he said.

Seven
    S he’s not
like
any of us,” Sonja would marvel at least once a day as the weeks and months passed and Joan’s face articulated into gorgeousness, especially around the eyes, whose expression was so intent and focused that combined with her astonishing ability to mimic sounds and to hum the first two bars of “In the Mood” on key it seemed obvious that the family had a genius on its hands.
    When she was about eighteen months old, however, Doris began to wonder. Here Joan was doing amazing impressions of creaking hinges, screeching tires, radio static, and yet she hadn’t uttered a comprehensible word yet, not even “Mama” or “Dada,” and when you spoke to her she just went on staring at you in her detached way until (if you were pressing for a response) she cooed or chirped or mooed or gobbled or made some other animal sound. For two months now, she’d been walking and feeding herself. But throw a ball at her, and her hands didn’t so much as twitch to catch it. Or try to get her to wave or clap, or to give you a kiss or hug. Or to laugh. Or to even smile! Good luck getting her to go outside without covering her eyes with her hands. The worst was that she couldn’t bear the sight of anyone except the immediate family. Somebody rang the doorbell, and first she reproduced the sound and then she sank to the floor, and not even putting Glenn Miller on the record player could persuade her to get up.
    By the time she was two and a half she still had not said a single word to any of them, and she spent much of the day either down in the windowless laundry room or in her andMarcy’s closet. Mostly in the closet, which was not as cramped as you might think because it had once been a dressing room. She had unearthed her old potty from under a stack of blankets and she was using it again, presumably to cut down on outings. Back in a corner she listened at barely audible volume to the big-band station on the transistor radio that Doris won on
Queen for a Day.
How did she know that the aerial had to be poked into the room for good reception? The other mystery was what was she doing with Sonja’s old high-school textbooks and Gordon’s
Webster’s Dictionary
and
Pears Cyclopaedia?
There they were, in two stacks. Never opened as far as anybody had witnessed. She had also brought in the Eaton’s and Simpson’s