Mister Sandman Read Free Page B

deformed and bunched-up like” because of the tucked-in, round-shouldered way Sonja had carried herself when she was pregnant.
    Aunt Mildred had gone downhill a lot further than Doris had realized. On the phone back in June she’d said come on out, failing to mention not only her throat cancer but also that she had lost her house to creditors and was moving into an old folks’ home just a week before Doris and Sonja were due to arrive.
    “For crying out loud, why didn’t you tell us?” Doris said when they finally located her after a morning of taking taxis all over Vancouver.
    “Give me the name again?” Aunt Mildred rasped.
    “Doris! Gordon’s wife!”
    Aunt Mildred shook her head. “Doesn’t ring a bell, honey.”
    Doris decided they might as well stay at Dearness anyway, might as well move into the basement guest apartment for the time being since it was dirt cheap and included meals. She booked it for the maximum allowable duration of two weeks, signing in both herself and Sonja under fake last names (and when the reincarnation story hit the headlines was she glad she had!). That same day she found a cottage for them to live in when the two weeks were up, but four days before they were supposed to go there she fell in love with a nurse named Harmony La Londe. Unhinged by this voodoo rapture and by the thought of Harmony being out of her sight for more than a few hours, she staged a little drama in Dearness’s office. She pretended to telephone Gordon, then over the dial tone pretended to be hearing that he had been fired from his job and there would be no money for her and Sonja’s return train fare,not for many months. She hung up slowly. She sat there blinking, one hand over her mouth. She allowed the woman who owned Dearness to pry the news out of her and she said, with dignity, “I’m very grateful,” when the woman said, “You and your daughter stay right here for as long as you need to.”
    “You are a liar,” Harmony La Londe said upon hearing this story. She sounded nothing but charmed. She found Doris exotic, if you can believe it. When all she knew about Doris was that Doris was a housewife from Toronto who had tried to swing on the hot-water pipes, she said, “Are you exotic or what?” This from a lesbian Negro career woman who wore see-through negligées and had painted her apartment to match her parrot.
    On the ceiling of the basement corridor the water pipes were runged like monkey bars, and early one morning when Doris was on her way to the lounge for coffee she saw that a ladder had been left propped against the wall next to the stairwell. Out of pure high energy and without thinking, she climbed the ladder and reached for the nearest pipe. Harmony heard the yelp. “Are you all right?” she called from her door.
    “I had a little accident!” Doris said, scuttling down the ladder.
    Harmony hurried toward her. She was wearing a red chiffon négligée, she looked on fire. Doris extended her hand and there were two pink slashes—one across her fingers, one across her palm. “Better get that under cold water,” Harmony said.
    As Dearness’s head nurse, Harmony lived rent free in what had once been a second guest apartment. Doris followed her down the hall. “Ow, ow,” she said, graduating to “Wow” when she walked through Harmony’s door. The layout was the same as Doris and Sonja’s apartment but the walls were painted a brilliant lime green, and instead of Venetian blinds there weredrapes, orange with a black dust-web pattern. In the centre of the room, in a glittery cage that hung like a chandelier from the ceiling, a parrot squawked and flapped around.
    “That’s Giselle,” Harmony said. “She’s the jealous type.”
    The bathroom was sunny yellow. Harmony turned on the tap and took hold of Doris’s wrist to direct her hand under the water. As if Doris were a child. No, as if she were an old lady, Doris realized. But Harmony was the older one here. In her short,