Joy Williams - State of Grace

Oh, the dreariness of it all. I already was on hand once and I’ll tell you, the demands start immediately. Mucus in their throats, the cord still dangling from their tummies and baby girls are ovulating. Within a day there’s blood in the swaddling. And it isn’t nature’s first mistake, this premature menstruation. The egg drifts down. Five hundred to go or so. Is there nothing that has not been going on forever?

“Pellicle Pete,” Cords sings from the balcony. She raises her arm from Doreen’s back and waves. I imagine Corinthian going by below, windmilling his arms because he thinks the moving air is good for his skin and sometimes running and sometimes reading while he walks in the thin and eager light of dawning. I can see him now, all of a pattern. Even in full sunlight his form is rakishly checkerboard; even in total blackness, it’s full of shade and innuendo. Sometimes he looks at the girls on the balcony. Most often he doesn’t.

“She thinks she’s so smart, that girl,” he told me, “well I knew what it meant the first time she said it and I bet she had to look it up before she started to use it.”

“Whyn’t you come up?” Cords calls.

And in that part of the morning that was so long ago and in the part that is now, Doreen is clamping a pink hand over her mouth and dropping it to Cords’ knee and saying,

“Why we dasn’t do that. We dasn’t let him into the house, he’s a cullud boy.”

“Gracious,” Cords says, “it’s so.”

“I thought that ee-u-nuchs were always fa-et,” Doreen drawls.

“He’s not a eunuch,” Cords says. “The flesh means nothing to him.”

“And that’s why he’s losing it,” Doreen crows. “Jest like an ol’ snake.”

Cords’ hand floats back to Doreen’s shoulders. Her voice is solemn.

“Have you been dreaming about snakes again?”

“Oh no,” Doreen says, aghast, “I couldn’t do that after what you said. It was just so awful what you said, it scared me out of dreams altogether.”

“Dream of snakes one more time and you’ll wake up deaf and dumb. Dream of swimming and you’ll lose that which was dishonestly gained.”

“I never got anything that wasn’t gotten proper,” Doreen says.

“Dream of machines and you’ll be rendered Pellicle-like.” Cords sighs, snapping her arm away. “No more human intercourse. No more salvation through the flesh.”

Doreen shuffles her eyes from one part of Cords’ face to the other and then down to the street where Corinthian had been walking. Cords was always telling her things she couldn’t make head or tail of. Nevertheless, she felt that she had an instinctive appreciation for just about everything that was offered. “Ha,” she breathed.

“Po’ pure Doreen,” Cords smiles. “You’ll be sacred to us all. It’ll be you the sisters will activate to and not that lady of the rolling eyes in the warped picture frame. Pearls will cascade from your armpits thick as dusting powder and semiprecious stones will rim your box. Catherine,” she twitters, “Cathy baby, we’ve found us a true dee-ciple.”

“Ha,” Doreen says.

“But there’s no reason for you to be down on Corinthian Brown, insulting him and what not.” Doreen blinks but doesn’t object. Thoughts are acts , Cords has told her. Attitude is all . “Because Corinthian Brown is going to help us,” Cords goes on. “He’s got the cat that’s going to make you Queen. You’ve got to be nice to folks, Doreen. You’ve got to treat them right.”

“Oh, I know!” Doreen says, heartfelt.

“Without that leopard, my presentation of you will not be as effective. But Corinthian will come through because our Kate will convince him that he should. Kate will help us out.”

“Never in my life,” I hear myself saying as I lie in my bunk bed, “have I ever been a help to anybody.”

“She’ll do this for us,” Cords says. “It’s such a small thing. She needn’t even consider it a favor.”

“I’ve seen myself sometimes walking in Hollywood,” Doreen exclaims. “I’m wearing those terrific sunglasses that terrific women wear out there, you know those huge sunglasses tinted pale blue? And I’ve got a leopard on a leash. Wouldn’t that be something? I’d bring him everywhere and even when I entertained, like, you know, he’d be in the room.”

“You’ve seen that, have you?” Cord says.

I lie on my bed, fully clothed. Alarm clocks are popping off all around me. The girls are getting up, sniffing themselves, squeezing out the hairs that have incredibly grown out overnight in this loamy clime. Cords and Doreen step in off the balcony. I am not listening to any of them. Is it over? Grady said. The floor empties. Now the girls are all in the kitchen. They eat standing up. I can see them in my head. Splashing water on the instant. There is Beth with bruises on her legs and a short flat haircut. She smells like a chlorinated swimming pool. She applies her nails to her scalp and scratches. Then she nibbles on the scratchings. There is Debbie eating a piece of bread, jogging carefully around the edges with her teeth. It is a perfect circle, becoming smaller and smaller. It is as though she is eating on the moon.

I can see it all, it being what it was I saw before. On the highway, the tourists are stroking through the technicolor morning. They are travelers traveling, making time. One little family in a station wagon sit beneath a cloth deodorizer in the shape of a skunk.

Cute.

It hangs by the neck, absorbing the odors of thighs and caramel corn. The skunk is working like mad, doing everything it was created for, but like the power of evil, it can only last for seven days. The power of good is everlasting . Then it must be replaced. Everyone is stuffed with ham, quaint grits and papaya juice. They are heading for the Last Supper , which is being enacted somewhere in the middle of the state.

See, the little girl is counting Mercedes automobiles. One two, three, a diesel, a 190-SL and an error for it is actually a Rolls-Royce. The small boy has soiled his pants and is changed at seventy miles an hour. It looks funny. Greenish. Curdly whey. The mother is distressed. Before she had children she had never thought about it, but now it seems that she is always examining shit. Is it pasty and odorless or cheesy and foul or slippery and shiny or fat and dull? It seems … to fall into certain patterns. It seems to have a tale to tell. She has found that shit will often supply the answer when all else fails. She even has the suspicion that shit is the lane-end into heaven and so on, the lost key opening and so forth.

She peers at it, slides it around in the diaper. She is alarmed and expectant. In the past, everything has reverted to normal before she can apply the remedy. She joggles the diaper up and down. Her gay young womanhood passes before her eyes. She shows it to her husband.…

Now here is something I really am an observer of because I have arisen myself now and am standing on the balcony. A hint of Doreen’s perfume is there with me. Now I am not supposed to be here, observing on the balcony. One is supposed to do nothing on the third floor except get in and out of bed. For this purpose, there are fourteen bunks arranged against the walls. On the top are the smaller girls and on the bottom, I’ve found, are the ones with problems. In the center of the room is tastefully empty space covered discreetly with a Persian rug. Above each bunk is a window. The girls on the bottom see the sky when they look out and the girls on top see strangler figs. Some of the windows are painted shut and around them the smell is terrific.