Joy Williams: State of Grace

The morning’s almost behind us and loss is the less to notice. A group of 4-H children are sitting on a bench outside a supermarket, drinking chocolate milk. One of the little girls raised the steer that brought top price at the county fair. They have just returned from a packing plant. One of the children says, “There was your old Scoobie-Doo hanging there.” “There he was.” The little girl giggles.

Noon is opening to your touch. Two ladies in Day-glo housedresses are driven into the Garden of Repose by a small man whose smooth head is barely visible over the car’s seat. The Garden has no headstones or vain statuary. It is a deep and grassy reprieve on Main Street, dotted with handsome trees. The car stops. Its occupants scan the impressive acreage. The women get slowly out. One holds a piece of paper but its information seems useless. The traffic files by on the street. The living are kept at bay from the dead by a hedge of oleander. It is highly toxic but attractive. Children have been poisoned by carrying the flowers around in their mouths at play. It makes an efficient hedge. Behind it there is almost silence. The women wobble on their high-heeled shoes. One sings a few words of an old gospel hymn:

“But none of the ransomed ever knew

How deep were the waters crossed,

Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through

Ere he found his sheep that was lost.”

She coughs. They are Baptists come with a pot of geraniums for a distant relation. An attendant floats by, seated on a purring motor. They extend the paper to him. He studies it and turns around in the seat of his mower, pointing in the direction of a tree that’s been pruned to a profile of an agonized prayer. The women wobble off and place their plant on the ground. Its color is lost in the brilliance of the grass.

Be grateful that everyone’s accounted for. Intentions are being pursued although nothing is being presently instigated. Everything began a long time ago.

… Imagine the happiness of voyaging there to spend our lives together . That’s not mine. I’m doing my lessons. Translating. Poorly, but pretty all the same. Actually, I’m considered quite good at this re-rendering, a talent that grows in direct proportion to one’s life. You can imagine how troubled I was to discover, and only recently, that Father’s scripture is based on consonants, the vowels in the original Hebrew not being clearly indicated. It’s clear the problem there , although in itself, it explains almost everything. To love to our hearts content, to love and die in the land which is the image of you . My ear, however, is terrible. As is my tongue. In France, I would sound cretinous. I would be misunderstood. My simplest request would be denied through fear and puzzlement.

You know the old joke — a gentleman goes into a store and wants to buy une capote noire out of respect for his recently departed wife. Oh, they still laugh at that one, you bet. I first heard it at the age of nine, a little darling with a bottle of valve oil and a coloring book in her trumpet case, the only girl in the band. We were playing patriotic songs and the story was rendered interminably at the time by the Exalted Ruler of Sebago Lake Lodge of Elks, B.P.O.E. No. 614. It was not intended for our ears of course. Even if it was, how could we have understood it? I’m just recollecting the moment is all.

I played second and almost never had the melody. The boy who played first later blew off his lap on the Fourth of July.

Aimer à loisir . Lovely, isn’t it. I’m dawdling on the porch swing of the sorority house. A sister lies folded messily on the other end, reading a volume on necessary proteins and table settings. She has pimples on her upended thighs but her face is as smooth as a waxed car bonnet. Under her blouse, she has rigged a complex padded harness to her bra so that the sweat won’t show. The sun’s like lemon juice, splashed across the sky. It’s so prevalent, it’s really nowhere to be seen.

The sister is eating maraschino cherries from a jar. I have told her many times that they’ll be the end of her. They’re our only words with one another. I tell her that because of them, someday, someone will sadly have to cut it all out — sphincter, kidney and ovaries. Inside, she’ll be all smushy like a pear. She disagrees. She likes them because they have no pits. The porch is littered with ants and stems.

I’m having difficulty ton souvenir en moi luit comme un otensoir . I close the book and idly watch the avenue that winds up into the college buildings. I am content here, warm and dopey from the sun. Inside the house, the fans are turned on and small balls of dust and hair float out the open door. The light pours through the leaves of the orange trees. The mail is delivered. The housemother appears, collects the letters and sorts them. She turns her head carefully and then swivels her shoulders around after it. It is as though she had bones webbed in her throat. I get no mail. No one knows where I am. The housemother has received a tiny box of detergent and a Corn Flakes coupon. She’s enormous. Which brings to mind, “Inside every fat man is a thin man trying to get out” … which I’ve never understood. Not only that, I would go so far as to say that it isn’t even true. It’s not a question of getting out at all. One’s true nature must be considered. It’s a question of performing one’s role.

The housemother’s dog is eating ants. She pries him away with her foot and they re-enter the house side by side. Her dress is as big as a bedsheet. As Father said, it is not we who live but the god who lives within us . The housemother and her skinny god retire.

I swing on the swing. I’m a little bored but that’s acceptable enough. It’s my second season here. I’m a fugitive, you might say. A vacationer from the future. I’m taking time off and may never take it on again. I’m getting my strength back and don’t want to discuss it. I’m in an awkward position, you see. The first thought I had as a child was not an enlightened one, thus all my subsequent thoughts have been untrue. I’m doing very well now though, thank you. I’m getting back my sense of reality. In the sorority house, the girls wash one another’s hair and play cards. Bridge, which is supposed to be good for the mind. We have parties and dances and so on, and we have meetings in the cellar which are conducted according to parliamentary procedure. Our colors are maroon and white, our pin an inverted triangle, a sliver of diamond at each tip — moral, social, intellectual, good deeds, femininity, order — a plastic pubis, respected by none. Our motto is

THAT WE MAY BE PURE ENOUGH FOR HIM

All the sisters fuck like bunnies.

They work out after supper, splashing and panting. Trying to find themselves. I’ve tripped across them many a night, practicing. A rolling eye, a shaking wrist, a tapping foot … It’s enough to scare the pure yell out of you, the earnestness with which they go about it.

They tried once to bring a boy in, to service us all. The first of every month, along with the bills and the grocery order. A pleasant enough boy, though his nostrils were overlarge. The hairs blew like wheat as he’d come down for a kiss. Distracting. And there was a whistling noise, a sound like plumbing. I don’t know. The sisters complained and soon ceased to use him altogether. It just didn’t work out. These girls have to be in love, after all. They kept him on but he grew surly. This was before my time. Now he’s gone. And we’re back to the old mitt and hiss.

I’ve been away for a year and a day, just like in the fairy tales. That first month, the heat was marvelous. I was fainting constantly. My soul cringed before it, my heart sweated and shrunk in my chest. I became all matter, lush and blameless, turning into the sun. I had been the perfect child — motherless — and now I was the ideal young woman. All tanned meat, carefree and compliant. Yet I find myself performing as he would want me to, though I hardly ever dwell on Father any more. I use the doggerel, of course, which can’t be helped. But he is so constant! His pursuit in my head and my heart stops only long enough to show me that it is going on still.