Joy Williams - The Quick & the Dead

Annabel returned and went directly to the bureau. Without a glance at its unevocative surface she pulled open a drawer and took out a beige cashmere sweater. She removed the one she was wearing, the gray one. Rather, it was shale. She didn’t have gray. She didn’t have beige either. God, beige . What were they thinking of back then? Ecru. It was ecru. Changing sweaters always soothed Annabel.

“Daddy thinks Mommy visits him in his room,” she said. “He thinks she’s in there now.”

Alice was relieved she was still speaking to her. “Why doesn’t your mother come in here?” she said. “Did you ask her to?”

“She won’t see me. I mean, I guess she sees me, but she won’t let me see her. I don’t think Mommy ever liked me. She was in love with Daddy.”

“You weren’t one of those awful children who were always asking, ‘Who do you love more? Me or Daddy? Me or Mommy?’ were you?”

“Maybe,” Annabel said. “Maybe I was.” Though she had never truly dared. It would have been too horrible to know, and alarming either way.

“Well, you’re paying for it now.”

“You are incapable of empathy with another human being, aren’t you, Alice? You must lack a gene. You’re just kind of abnormal. You’re like a fifth child or something.”

Alice was not offended.

“Your desert is so creepy,” Annabel went on. “I don’t even like the clouds out here. I think they’re creepy too.… This would never happen back home.”

“The desert has a tradition of very fine clouds,” Alice said. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Why is she here and not here? It’s not right. Have you noticed how much weight Daddy’s lost? It’s like he’s being drained .”

“Why can’t your mother just stay around if she wants? What’s so awful about that?”

“This is not Latin America,” Annabel said coolly.

“What does Latin America have to do with it?”

“In Latin America these things happen, but not here. Didn’t you ever have to read any of their novels in school? It’s because their culture is oppressed or suppressed or something.”

This sweater was coral. And this one was dusk. She had never thought dusk especially flattering, at least with her coloring.

“This is an interesting thing that’s happening to you,” Alice suggested.

“It’s not happening to me at all. It’s happening to my mother.”

“How does she look?” Alice asked.

“You are so morbid.”

“What does your father say? What does she do? Does she say anything? Can you remember what your mother’s voice sounds like?”

“Her voice?”

“The last thing you forget is a person’s voice. The next-to-last thing is the sound of their footsteps. Their tread.”

“Tread? Nobody treads.”

“The next-to-the-next last thing is …”

“You are not an expert on this, Alice. No one ever died for you. I don’t mean died for you, of course, that would be preposterous. I mean died in your personal experience. You didn’t even know your mother. You’re not even entitled to discuss these matters with me, if you want to know the truth. The thing is, if my mother insists on staying here I’ll never have my own destiny. What happens to me will still be part of my mother’s destiny. That’s not natural.” Annabel stopped fluffing and stacking her sweaters and paused dramatically in thought, Alice assumed that’s what it was, then began determinedly to pick apart the memory square. “Do you want this lipstick?” she asked.

Alice shook her head.

“I don’t even think it’s Mommy’s hair in this brush. I’m remembering she used it to clean the backseat of the car. She hated the backseat and was always worrying about it, like who Daddy had given a ride to. He was always giving rides to all sorts of people, particularly in the rain. She used to spray the backseat with poison , practically. And photographs where somebody’s cut out, that looks so dumb, you know? I never realized before how stupid that looks.” Annabel dumped everything into a wicker wastebasket and placed a piece of stationery over it.

The room had its equilibrium back, its sterile calm.

“I have to find another way to grieve,” Annabel said.

“I think you’ve passed through the grieving process,” Alice said. “I think you’re in the clear.”

“Both of them are crazy, they always were.”

“Who?” Alice said cautiously. “Mommy and Daddy?”

“Mommy and Daddy, right. I have to take a nap now. Come back later, okay, much later? You can come back later.”

Alice walked a mile down to the intersection where the bus stop was. Annabel was one of those people who would say “We’ll get in touch soonest” when they never wanted to see you again. Alice expected to hear those words any day now. She didn’t know why she spent so much time at Annabel’s house. The house meant something to her, she couldn’t get enough of it. It was already like some stupid memory of a happier time, a time that she could look back on as belonging to someone who was not quite Alice yet. She had felt a beat off all summer — just an hour off her real life, a year or two, maybe a few hundred miles. She wished she could be outside , in the world, but not of it. Still, being outside was very much like being at the bus-stop intersection where the desert and its flitting birds had been transformed into four identical Jiffy Lubes, one on each corner, none seeming more popular or desirable in terms of patrons than another.

The bus bench was empty, but someone had left a portion of newspaper behind. VOLCANO BURIES 450 IN GUATEMALA, a smallish headline announced discreetly. Alongside the article was a large advertisement for a toenail fungus cure. Didn’t people at the newspaper ever think of propriety and balance? Alice irritably stuffed the newspaper into a bulging trash receptacle.

She waited. After a moment or two she realized, realized fully, that she was waiting for the bus. This seemed to her the ugliest folly. She could always use Corvus’s truck to visit Annabel, or indeed to go anywhere, but she wanted it available for Corvus. She fervently wished that her friend would want to use the truck, but she was in one of her sleep marathons, rising only to go to Green Palms. She slept lightly with her eyes open, causing Alice to suspect she wasn’t sleeping at all but traveling somewhere terrible, following narrow, colored paths to multicolored lakes, all to the sound of jungles burning, waves crashing, mountains collapsing, horrible phenomena leaping out, frightful figures, masses of light — all Bardo bluff and all awful, with the added disadvantage that Corvus was alive while she was experiencing this, not only alive but just sixteen and a half years old. To experience Bardo normally, a person was supposed to be dead. Being dead would give a person some protection from this scary stuff, even though the whole point of the Bardo state, as Alice had struggled to understand it, was that it was just as illusory as life’s little activities and memories were. Maybe Corvus was just trying to speed things up so that when she did die at a respectable age — thirty, say — she would’ve done all her Bardo time and could just slip into that thing that had no beginning and no end, which Alice couldn’t grasp at all and didn’t sound all that fabulous, either. She just wished she could keep Corvus from sleeping so much. When she got home she’d make her eat a Popsicle or something. A Popsicle at the very least.

A bus drew up to the curb, the door opened, and the driver called down, “You going to the Wildlife Museum?”

Alice shrank back. “I certainly am not!”

“It’s Appreciate the Variety of World Wildlife Day. They’re running special buses. The museum’s the only place this baby goes. If you want to go someplace else, you’ll have to wait another five minutes.”