Joy Williams - State of Grace

Yes, I’m going into my second year. Like the alcoholic, I’ll age myself through abstinence. I’ve even learned a harmless thing or two. In the summer, I worked in the dirtiest little Dairi-Whip in the South. The practices that went on there! My God. I left to become a cocktail waitress in one of the town’s finest restaurants. Where even more terrible things occurred. Why, I’ve heard them pissing in the Rhine wine. Jizz in the béchamel. Running sores in the cherry flan. I let it all ride. Who am I to bubble the globe of the ordinary life? My only concern was that Father would enter and demand to be served. He sent his surrogates, I know, but never himself. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this, they’d say. Actually, I’ve never seen a man who resembles him in any way, but if Father’s the Shepherd, then we’re all his willing lambs.

You’ve a nice face, dear, they’d say. You bring to mind a girl I loved once and lost, and what are you doing after this place closes and you’ve washed your lovely hands?

When you think of life’s routine … They’d always have to make a remark about Entree Six: Red Snapper, Hush Puppy and Cole Slaw, our luncheon special all for only $1.35. They’d have the same attire — seersucker jacket, black pants, white shirt — and the same amusements in their linty pockets. Comb, nail clip and a roll of Life Savers in assorted flavors. I believe that 98 per cent, if not more, of all Life Savers in America are sold to middle-aged men out to turn a trick. I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.

Yet I’d attend to them for I’m passing the time while I recover. I’m just taking this opportunity to get better. Yes, we’d go out, these patrons, these consumers, and myself. Down to the race track and a bottle of Mums. Scratching at me beneath the clubhouse table as though I were a flea. Each time they got up they shot their cuffs and grazed me while passing. Father sees all this. He imagines that I’m doing it. I must confess, I used to see him everywhere. On the phone and in my sorority sisters’ heartshaped lockets. On some mornings when the air is very clear, windless muggy mornings when I feel my head earnestly trying to repair itself, I can hear him tracking me. It’s a sound like a hymn. Pale. Full of rectitude. And I’m distressed because I see that even when I cheat, I’m losing.

But the summer vanished and now it’s the fall. I’m rocking on the swing as though in my dotage, watching the students leave their classes and spill across the lawns, a pretty amoeba washing up the walks, cutting across the grass, which is cut out like cookies in the shape of Greek letters.

It’s accurate grass, not a single Weed, all the roots and rhizome stacked in the gutters. This whole estate, this college acreage, once belonged to a madman. He had a circus quartered here. You can still see the lions’ paw prints on the concrete rim of the swimming pool, and stranger things still and some not so strange. What acts! Elephants, bears and Siamese twins truly from Siam. Silhouette artists and palmists. A man with a tattooed eye and another with an organ growing directly from his ear. Actually it looked more like an infant’s pacifer, but who would come to see that? They billed it as his organ.

He’s around still, a soldier of fortune.

Many of the old performers return. Dwarfs and gorgeous ladies. Noodle Man came back before leaving for Fez forever. Nine feet tall and one hundred and three pounds. He went into the Student Union and had a cup of tea. I missed seeing him, however. Oh yes, they love the returning, even though it breaks their hearts. The place is a tomb. The menagerie is buried everywhere. Even so, all the structures are in gay colors. You can see it glowing beneath the fresh cheap paint that the maintenance men have applied.

Now I see an aerialist, walking his Doberman bitch. The bitch is in heat, flagging everything in sight. The aerialist is old, bald and handsome. Perhaps he is a juggler, he has a sequined groin. He passes very closely to the house. He has pierced ears but no earrings. The dog pulls him along enthusiastically. She’ll outlast him. I wonder what will become of her.

There’s quite a mob in the streets now. Boys with bright bandanas like apaches. Girls in tennis skirts. The noon siren on the firehouse begins to blow. Everything is drenched in sun. It’s like a festival! In the air are chemical experiments and kites and tennis balls. And in the middle of it all walks Father. He’s walking slowly, as though for amusement. I’m not startled for I knew he’d come. Redoubtable Father, it’s him all right. Ablepharous Daddy. There’s no need to ask anyone whether my recognition is true. I leave the porch and run up to my room, and come back down again with my camera. No more than half a minute has gone by. I’m not a year old now, no, I haven’t gained a day. I’m just a tiny thought now, rocking in his sperm and then I go back even further than that. I’m nothing but bloodless warmth like the hot yellow beak of a bird.

He’s looking at the porch, at the still trembling swing. There’s a red claim check tied to his small and battered leather bag. His coat is rumpled. He turns his lidless eye on me.

Le temps gagne sans tricher. C’est la loi .

I go to him once more, coyly as a bride.

In by seven and out by eleven, as the laundress says, and we have to be out of here by noon or we’ll be charged for another day. From the window there is a view of the street. This is the parade route when there are parades, which there is about to be. It is not a fashionable place. It is lodging for those who seek relief and not amusement. It is a way station for those who haven’t traveled for quite some time. It’s in a different class entirely from the motels on the beaches with their Hawaiian bars and their swimming pools. Off to one side of the courtyard is a ping-pong table. Over the door to the office is a sign, WE ENCOURAGE YOUR INSPECTION. Which is curious, for surely, many times over in America, there are those good people who check out before in, but they do not come here. This place is inhabited by men who lay tile, newspaper reporters nightly eating chicken and drinking wine on the tufted bedspread, the boys who bait the hooks on party boats. This is no place for gifted lovers like ourselves.

All the lights are orange to keep away the insects. Father doesn’t unpack his suitcase. He draws things out of it secretively. I never had a secret of my own. They were all Father’s and he kept them for both of us.

Where is Grady? I am not acquainted with him yet. He is down in Artifact I, on the campus, studying. Soon he will want to love me. His hands will grip my waist, his lips move across my stomach.…

Pardon me, I am so inept at identity. Why is this girl here? Was she a foundling? Had she been ill? She sat on the edge of the bed. Father stood by the coin TV. Was he a visitor? Was she? The veins in her eye pits were white, her cuticles colorless. She’d been sick. Not blood enough to even hemorrhage. Presuppurative puberty. Spreading decline like a citrus tree. Would take years to run its course.

And Father says, “You come on home where you belong and stop this crazy dreaming. You’re from me and of me.”

“Yes, Daddy,” I say, “you know me better than God himself.”

“I do,” Father says. “You’re my pretty darling dreaming girl and I was with you at your hour of birth and know all about you.” And he looks at me so sadly disappointed, with a bleak cheer and a meek look. He brushes his long fingers against my cheek, removing, he intimates by gesture, a bit of sleep from my eyelashes. “What’s your liberty worth, bringing us both to sorrow?”