Mister Sandman Read Free

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 feelingunworthy 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 themother’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,