Free Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy

daintily. Sometimes she gobbled, a sign of pleasure.
    For her part Sonja read to Joan from the TV
Guide
in a vain attempt to entice her into the living room or just because Sonja had the
TV Guide
handy. Lying on Joan’s bed, she recited the children’s-show listings and, in case something rang a bell, the synopses from old movies and “Yesterday’s Newsreel.”
    “‘Yesterday’s Newsreel’ looks at 1936 and the death of King George. King George! Do you remember him, Bunny?”
    From inside the closet, Joan clicked her tongue.
    “You do?”
    Joan mooed.
    “You don’t?”
    Sonja watched TV all day. After failing grade eleven she had left school and was now working at home for the Schropps Pin Company. Her job was counting bobby-pins and clipping them on cards, twenty-four to a card, and she did this at the fold-outwriting table in front of the TV while eating Planters peanuts and licorice Allsorts, her fat hands skittering from the box of pins to the box of cards to the food to her mouth.
    After Joan was born, Sonja never lost the weight. Now she was up to 210 pounds, but the bigger she got the happier and lighter she felt, as if she were being inflated to the point where a little breeze would lift her out of her chair and bounce her around the room. Maybe it wasn’t the extra pounds that were making her so happy, though. She had another theory, a harebrained one, she knew, that Schropps had coated the bobby-pins with something like a laughing gas to keep the clippers in good spirits, because she could wake up on the wrong side of the bed but the minute she started working she’d be calm, completely relaxed all over except for her hands. Her hands, when she worked, felt mechanically operated, the way her feet had felt when she was a tap-dancer. Month after month for filling up the most cards she won the five-foot-high cardboard bobby-pin that said “I’m Tops at Schropps.” Plus she was hauling in a weekly paycheque of twenty-five dollars. At Doris’s insistence twenty of that went straight into the bank, into a “dowry account,” even though Sonja couldn’t see herself marrying.
    “I’m a born career girl,” she confessed to Joan from a deep vein of content.
    Marcy’s confessions were the most intimate, in these years anyway, and the raciest—“We touched his tongue with our tongue.” “We had ‘the feeling’ today.” She had picked up Doris’s habit of using the plural pronoun, with the difference that when
she
said “Time for our bath, Joanie” she climbed into the bath, too. Joan was her. The her that was tiny, magical, celestial… not entirely real. If Joan whimpered, Marcy’s eyes welled up. To her parents, Marcy pointed out that she could do the talking when she overheard them fretting over Joan’s speechlessness. She brushed Joan’s wispy hair with Gordon’sshaving brush, and her own scalp tingled. She adorned Joan’s head with ribbons and barrettes and felt all dressed up.
    When Joan was younger and in a high chair, Marcy had fed her. Marcy still insisted on cutting Joan’s meat (while Joan covered her ears at the scraping noise). Usually Joan then cut the meat into even smaller portions, and she could do it without a sound. At three and a half she had the table etiquette of a finicky duchess. She ate one pea at a time. She chewed silently and forever and with her mouth closed. She swallowed as if her throat was sore, touching her neck with the tips of her fingers. Doris never bothered to put out napkins, but Joan always had a tissue handy to dab the corners of her mouth. Where had she learned such manners? Not from any of them, although to make her life easier they had all become fastidious, quiet eaters. There were no raw carrots or celery to munch on, for instance, and they kept their voices down. If Marcy wanted to say something directly to Joan, to be extra quiet she often only thought it.
    In bed at night Marcy’s communication with Joan was entirely telepathic. Doris used