Mister Sandman Read Free Page A

eating Animal Crackers and Tootsie Roll Pops from the snack counter, reading her Nancy Drew book, looking out the window. Off and on she pressed her hand over her heart to try to feel her heartbeat while under her new Miss Chubette dress with its Peter Pan collar and daisy-shaped buttons her baby’s cells multiplied.
    Now that her morning sickness was over and nobody had seemed to notice that her stomach was swelling, she didn’t think about the baby too much apart from something precious that she was temporarily in charge of, as when you’re the one with the tickets or the money. For the most part she felt nothing but cosy and puffy. She felt like an angel food cake. Her only distress, and it was a very slight one, arose at either of these two thoughts: that Marcy would forget to feed her hamster, Sniffers, and that, because she’d already missed too many lessons to ever get back into Miss Gore’s tap class, her dancing days were over. Her ultimate view on both prospects was, Oh well.
    Sometimes Doris perched on the seat beside her to see how she was doing, and Sonja curled up with her fingers in her mouth and her head on her mother’s lap and let herself be lulled by the rhythm of her mother’s breakneck chatter, its pleasing accompaniment to the rhythm of the train. Frankly, she didn’t actually hear much of what Doris was going on about.
    One morning, though, the third morning, she had her head in Doris’s lap and Doris said, “I wonder what the heck’s gotten into me?” and Sonja heard that.
    “What, Mommy?” Sonja asked.
    “Sweetie, you tell me and we’ll both know.” She knocked both her fists on Sonja’s skull, absently and too hard, but as Sonja usually had to see blood before it occurred to her that she hurt, she didn’t mind.
    “You’re still excited about winning the draw,” Sonja suggested.
    “Well, that’s the truth,” Doris said.
    “The truth is only aversion,” Sonja reminded her.
    “I feel like I’ve eaten Mexican jumping beans,” Doris said. She laughed, her new high-speed hyena laugh. “Brother, listen to me go.”
    She was panting.

Three
    J oan 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