Joy Williams - State of Grace

“Everything’s funny, isn’t it! Everything’s a nasty little joke. Well, I want you two to clean everything up here,” she says. “Washed, dried and put away. We’re going.” She tugs her daughter’s arm for emphasis. Kate’s sister holds herself carefully in a starched white dress. Her face above the collar is like a strawberry cream. “We’re going and we’ll have a nice time.” Her mother looks drawn, even frightened. “You two do what you want, but you needn’t follow us. You needn’t bother us.”

They turn on their heels, the mother and her more tractable daughter and rush away. The door slams. Other doors open and shut. An old engine turns over, backfires, wails out of gear, stalls. A door opens again, the hood is raised, banging on the bound linkage ensues. The hood slams shut. The door slams shut. The car is backed up and driven off.

Kate puffs out her cheeks.

“You still want to go, don’t you?” the Reverend asks her.

“It doesn’t matter, Daddy.” Some people in a boat are shooting off fireworks into the daytime sky. It excites her. The idea of candles burning while it’s still light.

“You had been looking forward to it.”

“Yes,” she admits. “I’d like to see the donkey again. I’d like to go down in the mines in a donkey cart. I’d like maybe to go on the merry-go-round once.”

“Then we’re going, of course. It’s a big park. Your mother doesn’t have to see us there if she doesn’t want to.”

“We give her fits, don’t we, Daddy?”

“Are you ready to go?” he says.

“Oh yes, Daddy.” Kate slides out of her chair and skips outside to where the family’s other car is parked. Sometimes it doesn’t even start. There is no guarantee that a journey will result simply by turning the key in the ignition. Kate and her father get into the car. It is an old white Hudson. Someone has painted it by hand. Hairs from the brush are fossilized beneath the paint. The interior is beige. Kate bounces several times on the seat. She pretends she is aloft in a marshmallow.

The engine rumbles spiritedly. “Good-by, Race.” She waves to her dog graciously. He takes a few steps toward them, ramming his paw into his water dish. Kate and the Reverend drive onto the ferry and are taken across the sound to the Independence Day celebrations and the amusement park.

HER MOTHER LOST HER MIND. Kate saw it. It was not after her sister was killed but before. Kate witnessed it. It flew out of her mother like the black puff of a devil’s breath, and enmeshed itself in the workings of the merry-go-round, entwined itself in its cheerless and monotonous music.

The riders were quaintly solemn, thumbing rings from a chute. All looked desperate and disappointed. The horses were welded into place.

Kate stood with her sister. Her sister was fretting over a spot on her white pleated skirt. They had been sharing a hamburger. Grease had dripped down from the bun. It had ruined her skirt, she wailed. Everything was ruined. Kate looked listlessly on while her sister rubbed at the stain. A woman holding a styrofoam cup had come down from one of the concession stands and she said, “It’s all right, honey, this will take it right up. You just watch this, honey.” The woman had a star cut out of one of her teeth and the star was gold. “Watch this now,” she said, but Kate was watching her mother and father standing on a little scrap of darkness shed by a faded purple awning. Her mother’s face was white and distorted. She looked ancient, inhuman. Before them, fat sea gulls waddled about, for the park was on the coast. They looked like toys. One shuttled around Kate in a stumbling circle, making a poor sound, a long piece of string trailing from its open beak.

Kate heard her sister. “Oh!” she said. Her voice was pained, incredulous. “Oh, what’s happened, what’s happened! Why did she do it? Why did she want to do such a mean thing for? Oh, Katey, look what she’s done!” Kate turned reluctantly. Above them, the woman from the stand was alternately shaking her head with a frown and grinning encouragingly, the star in her mouth sparkling and wet. She was drawing off thick pink milk into a glass for a customer. Kate looked at her sister’s skirt. It was now corrupted by a much worse mark. The woman had daubed cold coffee on the grease and the stain seemed darker and twice as large. The sister wadded the cloth into a brown bunch like a wilted bouquet and little Kate looked at her wryly. She was not interested in this — in clothes, in outward appearances. Besides, it had looked hopeless. She shrugged.

Later that day when her sister was dead, lying between the green oak and the wheels of the mother’s car, Kate wished that she had said something nice, something reassuring. She wished that she had said, Why that dress will be white as ice, white as it was before in just a little while. She wished that she would have known that that was the way it was going to be so she could have said that. For, a few hours later when her sister was lying dead on the road, that skirt looked brand-new. It hadn’t even been mussed or dirtied by the fall from the door. And neither had her sister. She had flown soft as a butterfly into that giant tree and the sound, when she struck, was not loud, as one might expect but a low, poor, redeemless sound, like that of the dying gull. Nevertheless they heard it, Kate and her father, for they were not far behind and their windows were down and the air was still. And it was true as well that they saw it, what there was of it to see. For the moment passed so swiftly and then the girl was dead even though it was only her hand that seemed damaged at first glance. The mother, in her confusion, had backed the car over it. It lay bloodlessly hidden beneath the patched tire. It was the fact that she had crushed her daughter’s hand that seemed to affect the mother most. And it was the sight of the spotless skirt that Kate would remember. And it was the Reverend who took the gum from the young girl’s mouth and smoothed the collar of her blouse. Death brings order, does it not? There is nothing too small to rest in peace?

Kate was brought back to the car to wait. There was a bag of pretzels there and she began to eat them. She wanted never to eat another pretzel again in her life, so she ate them all, to finish them up. Once her mother came to her and she seemed to have a calm, almost studious expression, an aesthetic air, but beyond suffering any more and without light. And she looked at the child, her daughter, the last, left. It couldn’t have been long, no more than a moment, for there was so much confusion around them, noise, unfamiliar voices and the more generous sounds of a summer holiday, the humming of birds and insects unseen and the bright whistling of the car ferry as it moved out of the bay. They had missed it. The four of them had missed going back forever. And all these sounds and strangers were imposing upon them, insisting that something be done or said, so it could have been no more than a moment that the mother was able to look at her living child with such hatred and such intimacy.

Kate’s sunburnt lips smarted with the crude salt. Her fingers continued to rummage dreamily through the empty bag of pretzels and her mother stayed her hand before it could rise once again, spasmodically, to her lips. “I wish it had been you,” her mother said softly, almost musically. “You listen to me now. I’ve said this to the others and they pretend they haven’t heard. I wish with all my heart that it had been you.” She moved her face closer to Kate’s. The child noticed the extraordinary thickness of her mother’s lashes. They were tangled and some were turned inward, brushing the balls of the eyes.

Why doesn’t it hurt? Kate thought. Where is Daddy? When will he drive us to the boat? Her mother was stroking her limp hand. Kate’s face was expressionless. She knew what the woman said could have no bearing on her life because the woman was mad. She had lost her mind while Kate was watching. Her mother’s mind had lodged itself in the obscure mechanisms at the core of the Wooden Horses. Kate had seen it all except for that which had brought about the exorcism. She had turned away only for an instant and when she looked again, everything had been accomplished. She had looked again and her father was walking toward her, looking arrogant and exasperated, and the mother was walking toward her too but slowly, so slowly, her hands pressed to her temples, and from her head, Kate saw the black, corrupt and weightless blossom of her knowledge fall.