Joy Williams - State of Grace

But I was a simple child. One incident is very clear. I was swimming with Daddy, splashing in the shallows while he watched, and little fish swam into my hair and caught there, you know, in my tangled hair, for Father did not always brush my hair, and the little fish had died by the time that we discovered them. It’s very clear. It seems I was unconsolable.

But I was tired, so tired. It seems I could hardly keep my eyes open. All night, I would walk through the rooms. And I would hear the sounds of living, those unmistakable sounds of growing, you know, as all things do, toward their death. Obscure, obscene sounds. None of it ever spoke to me. They told me I would walk through the rooms the way that Mother used to. It surprises me now. What did we think was possible? What chance of finding anything that was ours? I’d never do it now, I’ll tell you. I wasn’t much of a child, to be truthful, even then.

There was nothing in the house then as I walked. Daddy had taken it all away. They tell me Daddy wanted to encourage no bad memories. But isn’t that the hope of the smallest of us … to become another’s memory? But, regardless, everything was nothing in those rooms. So much broken and so little repaired … The snow, as I’ve said, would fall in on us while we danced, melting on our faces …

And things were always out of my hands. I have always been grateful for that.

The dream is always the same.

A woman is riding sidesaddle. There is no space involved, no scenery. Just a woman in a long black gown and sweet old-fashioned beribboned hat riding a galloping horse. She is holding a baby in one arm and there is a dog running beside them. It is quite apparent that the dog is going to leap upon the child and eat it. I always imagine that if I could successfully preclude this intimation, I could alter everything. The dog jumps upon the infant and eats it. Or rather, he rests on the woman’s lap and tears busily at the blanket in which the infant is held. Everyone seems calm about this. That is, the woman seems calm and I, who dream the woman.

It never varies. If I were not so knowledgeable about what was going to happen, the next scene would not result. It is obviously Dream Number Fifty-Eight with its natural sequel Forty. A hand extends a bunch of balloons to a figure whose face is turned away from me. The figure reaches for the bright balloons but fails to grasp them. They float up and out of the dream’s framework. No one dares to follow them with their eyes, least of all me.

It is obviously my non-viable dream. Although it always wakes me up, it brings me calm. Not any satisfaction and not my approbation but a calm. Certainly a calm of sorts.

I turn on the radio. Someone has changed the station.

“… a good man

Preaching in the bottom-land”

I garrote the song with a twist, but cannot find my chum, my crush, my sweetness, my answer action man. I twiddle with the dial for hours. I cannot pick him up. At last I hear an old man’s voice. A very old man. He is polishing stones in his rock tumbler. He refuses to turn it off while speaking. That is why the transmission is so bad.

“Yes,” “Action Line” says. “In answer to your question. The differences between rising every morning at 6 and at 8 in the course of 40 years amounts to 29,200 hours or 3 years, 121 days and 16 hours which are equal to 8 hours a day for 10 years. So that rising at 6 will be the equivalent to adding 10 years to your life.”

He seems a little repulsed at the thought.

I am lying on my bed. They’ve taken away the sheets to be washed. It doesn’t bother me. They expect me to become excited about that! They’re welcome to everything. It’s just my little radio I care to retain … it is looped ingeniously among the bedsprings. It’s all I have now. I was never much for having things. I was never very good at it.

Sometimes my answer action man comes to me after signing off. He is a dwarf with a vast soft head. Quite horrible.

I can’t make love now, I tell him.

Yes, he says.

I’m going to have a baby.

I understand, he says.

Now I know this is bad, his coming to see me like that, perching at the foot of my bed. He, and the fellows off the bottles, all the smiling men … It’s bad but it could be worse. They could stay longer. I could really insist that I had seen them. It’s bad all right, their being there, but it could be worse.

The sleeping room is empty except for Doreen and Cords who are lying on a bottom bunk several rows away from me. They are not doing much, just lying there, talking low. All the other sisters are down in the cellar, in the activation room, imparting the secrets of Catherine, our virgin patron lady, to nine pledges. They are all sitting on board and block benches in that stinking windowless hole, grasping hands, waist to waist, sculpted toe to pumiced heel, all in white and unadorned, listening to a sister who has an undisclosed, undiagnosed fungus and is not at her best this evening. Her runny voice swims up the fresh air ducts to me.

“… Catherine is said of catha , that is All, and ruina , that is falling, for all the edifice of the devil fell all from her. For the edifice of pride fell from her by the humility that she had and the edifice of fleshly desire fell from her by her virginity, and worldly desire fell from her by her despising of all worldly things. Or Catherine might be said to be like a little chain , for she made a chain of good works by which she mounted into heaven, and that chain or ladder had four steps which are innocence of work, cleanness of body, despising of vanity and saying of truth.…

“Yeh, yeh, yeh,” says Cords.

“Ha,” says Doreen. She is rubbing Tanfastic on her aureolas.

“Why aren’t you down in the activation room?” Cords says to me.

“You should be there too,” I retort wittily.

Sometimes my Answer Action man comes to me before signing on. He is never still. He has the high metabolism and temperature of a bird.

I can’t do it now, I tell him.

You needn’t make excuses to me , he says.

I’m seven months, twelve days along.

I understand, he says.

Two fat bronze palmetto bugs waddle across the mattress and over my ankles.

Your group should pledge hedgehogs instead of girls, he says. They love cockroaches and can be taught to answer to their names.

Whatever their names might be, I say.

Cords is speaking to me. “You look terrible. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”

“What you should do,” Doreen murmurs, “is make yourself a nice milk shake and put some yeast into it.”

“I’m fine,” I say.

“You’re terrific,” Cords says. “We’re going to have to call someone in to pour you off that bed and into a Mason jar.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re wasting away,” Cords insists. “You’re getting to be all conscience. Isn’t she just one skinny conscience, Doreen?”

“Uh-huh,” Doreen says.

“You’d really better put some weight on. Go down and spoon some jelly or something.”

“Ha,” Doreen says. She tosses her beautiful hair. It falls across Cords’ arm.

I lie on the bed and watch them. The sister’s voice rises up through the duct. The fungus is rising in her throat like blood, I would imagine.

“We here tonight have a responsibility to our womanhood,” she is saying.

Forty or so milky southern bosoms swell with pride and purpose, I would imagine.

“When is she going to get to the part about the wheel?” I say to no one in particular.

“She’s never going to get to the part about the wheel,” Cords replies. “It’s been dropped.”