Mister Sandman by Barbara Gowdy

Author:Barbara Gowdy [Gowdy, Barbara]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction, C429, Extratorrents, Kat
ISBN: 9781443402583
Publisher: Harvest
Published: 1995-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Fifteen

From Grandma Gayler’s grocery bag three cans of Campbell’s beef consommé, a can of Carnation evaporated milk and a can of Chef Boyardee ravioli roll down the sidewalk. Of the half-dozen small grade “A” eggs, at least one oozes out of the box and starts frying. The Milky Way chocolate bar squashes and liquefies under her shoulder. The bottles of Tab and Pepto-Bismol shatter, the pink fluid going stringy where it comes into contact with the fizzing brown.

Grandma Gayler lives long enough to take stock of the damage. She hopes that the other eggs aren’t cracked. That will make it an even dozen in two days if they are. On Thursday she dropped her bag of groceries while trying to open the screen door, and there went all six eggs, what an awful mess it made, and the peaches were bruised as well, of course. “Isn’t that the limit,” she thinks as her heart pumps itself out. She imagines she is speaking but she is not. She has no idea she is dying, otherwise she’d be preparing her soul for its embrace in the arms of the mother who illegitimately bore her eighty-four years ago, her senility having progressed to the stage where, by mother, she means Queen Victoria.

She does not die alone. A girl she is presumably acquainted with (but cannot place) crouches next to her and fans her with a magazine while the girl’s mother phones for an ambulance. The girl is a chatterbox. Grandma Gayler tunes her out and yet does hear this full sentence: “I’m going to take a commercial course so I’ll have something to fall back on.”

“Very sensible,” Grandma Gayler thinks she replies. She is not in pain, she feels no pain at all. How lovely to be basking in the sun on such a gorgeous day in the company of this sensible girl who she now believes is Doris thirty years ago, Doris wearing odd shoes. Who, a minute later, her gaze having come to rest on the girl’s white latticed stockings, she believes is the rose trellis behind her old house on Robert Street. Who, in the final seconds of her life, she believes is a light in her eyes, a benevolent interrogation. “Mind the frogs,” she tells her interrogators, or thinks she does. Her last imagined words.

Her last spoken words turn out to have been, “Oh, no, not again!” Cried out when she dropped her grocery bag and heard by the girl, Cynthia, and her mother, Alma. Mentioned, in their lowdown, to Doris. Overheard by Sonja.

All four of them are on the lawn of the funeral home, a half hour early. Sonja immediately makes the connection to Callous Alice, to reincarnation… to Grandma Gayler already starting to reincarnate in the throes of death! What a thought! It buckles Sonja’s knees. “Mommy,” she says and clutches Doris’s arm.

“Are you all right, Sweetie?” Doris thinks the heat is getting to her.

Sonja, speechless, just gapes. “Excuse us, please,” Doris says to Alma and Cynthia, and she hustles Sonja over to a bench in the shade where for some reason Joan is sitting by herself.

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