Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy Page A

at her. They ran their hands over her body and strove to find words worthy enough and took her for spins around the block to show her off. At the very thought of her they laughed. They had their picture taken with her.
    To the four of them baby Joan was what the sales brochure had
said
the new car was. Glamour plus. A supreme thrill, and a joy, and a blessing.
    Now that they were back home Doris’s apprehension about her was gone. Now that they were away from those senile Dearness crackpots was how she saw it. (
Just like the nuts that fall, I’m a little cracked, that’s all!
were her theme lyrics for the whole bunch of them.) Strangely, she felt redeemed when she was holding Joan, as if Joan were the miraculous flowering of her own illicit sex.
    Sonja felt redeemed all of the time. Those days of shame back when she’d first learned she was pregnant out of wedlock were no longer even a memory, let alone an unpleasant one, and any time Yours crossed her mind, after she had shuddered at the recollection of his nostrils, she thought almost fondly, “What a character.” Without him there would be no Joan, there wasn’t any getting around that. And the way he had pounced on her and got it over and done with in no time, that struck her as pretty smart now, like a doctor slipping the needle into your arm when your mouth is open for the thermometer. She neverdid see his penis, so it wasn’t as if she had nightmares about it, although she’d had two weird dreams about green hammers—going into Ted’s Cigar Store and all they were selling was green hammers, and a dream about her father having green hammers for arms.
    There’d been a hammer with a chipped green handle lying in a nail box on Yours’s windowsill. When she felt something pushing between her legs, it happened so suddenly and the thing was so solid she thought he was trying to stick the hammer handle up her. With his hand over her mouth she couldn’t cry out. The blood on the fingers of his other hand, which he showed to her while she was still pinned down, was from splinters, she thought. What’s more she thought it was
his
blood.
She
wasn’t hurt. She hardly felt a thing. “Serves you right,” she said as soon as his hand left her mouth. She was embarrassed to have been touched down there, she was scared to death because he was obviously a mental case after all, but even when he zipped himself back up she didn’t catch on. She had to see the unbloodied hammer still lying in the nail box before another possibility struck her.
    “Did we go all the way?” she asked.
    He patted down her skirt and brushed a coil of hair out of her eyes. “We sure did,” he said, smiling as if remembering a wonderful, romantic time.
    “We did?”
    His eyes emptied. “You give a fella the come hither, what do you expect?”
    It was like missing the last bus. It was like losing her wallet. And she knew, she
knew
that she was pregnant. Yes, there it was—already!—another, faster heartbeat behind her own. Yours got up and left the room and she just sat there, listening to her two hearts. When he came back he had a facecloth. For her, she thought, but he used it to wipe the blood on the chesterfield. He asked if she could name the four blood groups.
    They had met for the first and last time less than an hour before, at the Swan Restaurant next door to where her father worked. She had gone downtown for a polio shot and to bring her father a manuscript he’d left at home, since his office was in the same building as the doctor’s. “Gin Alley” the manuscript was called. On the bus she opened it to read the recipes but it was a story about a man named Ratface.
    “Potboiler means
trash,”
her father said when she asked why he was always going on about how his company published nothing except cookbooks. “Private-eye novels, shoot-’em-up hoodlum novels.” He spoke nicely but he looked at her as if he couldn’t believe how stupid she was, and suddenly she craved