Joy Williams - State of Grace

“It disturbs me,” she says, “it disturbs me so. These men never put the containers back in the same place twice. Sometimes I can’t find the lids and sometimes I can’t find one of the cans. Sometimes there’s still garbage in the bottom. They won’t scrape it out and all they need is a stick. There are plenty of sticks around here. They wouldn’t take yard trimmings away if you begged them. Well, today I told them. If you don’t tell them, they think you’re not noticing and all the easier for them. Well, I spoke to them. I was up early this morning and I came out as they were banging around and raving at each other and I said, ‘I give to the NAACP, I send out their stickers on the backs of all my envelopes and I just want you to know that I am a member of that organization and I would think that a great many of the girls in this house are members too.’ So we’ll see. We’ll see what happens now. Miss Jenson down at Sigma Kappa says she puts a quarter on the cans each collection day and she never has a bit of a problem but I told her, I said, ‘That sounds to me like someone has bullied someone proper.’ I don’t know what kind of a budget some of those women have to work with but our budget here certainly doesn’t allow me to throw quarters away like that and I don’t think you girls would approve of me throwing away your quarters like that.”

She looks at me and realizes that I’m the one she does not care for. “Aren’t you going to get dressed and sing in the Serenade with the others?” she asks sharply.

“No,” I say.

“I suppose I should say, ‘Aren’t you going to get undressed and sing in the Serenade.’ ” Her head shakes heavily.

“No. I have a cramp.”

“You always have a cramp,” she says, chuckling. “You always look as though you have a cramp. You haven’t ever understood the idea behind sisterhood. Generosity of time and talent. Co-operation.”

She climbs the back steps into the house and just before she opens the screen door she says, inspired, and without turning around, “You are a cramp!”

I go over to the garage and look through the dirty panes at Corinthian. He sees me and raises his chin. I unbolt the door and go inside. I latch the door from within. Just a little hook and eye. The leopard is much smaller than he appears in Bryant’s. His paws, however, are the size of buckets. His flanks rise and drop imperceptibly. Around his neck is a light strong rope that’s been wound with purple velvet that the girls bought.

“I’m sorry I didn’t come out to get you,” I say to Corinthian.

He rubs softly at a bloom of scale on his jaw. He is so slim and peeling down to nothing. A suffering novitiate. “Did you forget?” he asks.

“I remembered when you were almost here, I guess.” It is not so bad that I forgot to get him. He is here and isn’t that the point? I sit beside him on the floor and open the box of cereal. Count Chocula. Some gruesome kiddy fare. The leopard shuts his eyes, deep in an animal music.

“That girl Cords came out in a van for us. She is a menace on the roadway. She doesn’t know her left from her right.”

“That’s Cords,” I say. “It’s a persistent mannerism.”

“It’s just in the last few minutes that he’s calmed down.”

Curiously, the leopard does not seem out of place here. He has made a jungle of the close air. A terror grips me.

“I’m sorry!” I say, panic-stricken. “I’m sorry!”

Corinthian stares at me wonderingly.

“I am a very easy driver,” I say more quietly. “I am very sorry that I didn’t come out to get you.” The terror fades. None of this is out of place. I have arranged this for Corinthian so that he can earn seventy-five dollars. He has brought the leopard down here and that is half the money and bringing the animal back is the other half and in the middle is just one minute and a half where Doreen holds onto the purple rope and walks the leopard between the singing sisters and the crowd.

None of this is the point. There is nothing in Father’s house any more. There is nothing to reconcile any more. We are all somewhere. Even the baby and Grady are not nowhere and that is not the point.

I have arranged this for Corinthian so that he can make seventy-five dollars. I have tried to be a friend and I have tried to be a lover and I have disobeyed Father who always had the point.

“I will take you back as soon as it’s over,” I say.

“I am never going to do the likes of this again,” he says. “I have taken away any little bit of peace this animal has made for himself and I feel bad. I can see that this all is beneath him when it wasn’t at all beneath me and I feel bad.”

“I’ll take you back as soon as it’s over,” I repeat helplessly.

“I certainly would appreciate that as we are not about to get into any mode of transportation at all with that girl again.”

The light has stopped struggling through the windowpanes. It’s dusk. The leopard’s eyes are open in the darkening garage, glittering and isolated. His eyes are furnished by the coming night. With the night, he opens his huge floating eyes.

Corinthian and I sit and chew Count Chocula. I know I am not supposed to be eating anything. I am supposed to be lying down with my feet elevated and not eating anything. If I wish I may fill my head with numbers or conundrums. If I wish I may keep my mind occupied that way. There is a twinge deep between my thighs. Not of pain. It is nothing. Just a ripple. It stops. Corinthian doesn’t eat any more than a handful but I eat and eat. I weigh one hundred and seven pounds. That is not enough. I have been feeding something outside myself all this time. Some famished object took its form outside me long ago. I look at my arm. It’s a stick. My legs are sticks. I do not look at my stomach. I am so forgetful I want to starve to death. I remember between swallows.

Corinthian’s hands tap the rope nervously. He shrugs his shoulders sorrowfully, thinking to himself.

“If he were free,” he says aloud, nodding toward the leopard, “he’d be hunting incessantly.” He says the word with astonishment. “Incessantly.”

The animal’s eyes are fixed and emphatic, watching the fading light.

I tell Corinthian to put the leopard in the van as soon as Doreen has finished her walk with it. I will get the keys from Cords and meet Corinthian there and drive him and the leopard back. We will be there before Bryant returns from Miami where he has gone to buy a monkey. Bryant would not know that Corinthian had taken away the leopard until after he returned and everything was over and successful.

“I certainly hope that it is not a mandrill that he brings back,” Corinthian says.

“I certainly hope not,” I say.

“He wants to bring back something curious and ferocious so that people will feel it would be dull of them to stay away.”

I feel the twinge again. It is hardly anything. A hesitation is all, like the skipping of a heartbeat. Think of riddles, they’ll tell you. Think of the curiosities of numbers, of ellipses and enigmas. A concern with riddles, Father told me, is permissible. The oldest riddle on record is in the Bible.

Yes, Daddy. Judges 14:14.

That’s right, darling. It is summer. I am on his shoulders. He walks along the beach and into the frigid water. I am squealing with the cold. My hands beat upon his neck. I slip off. I start to drown.

“Perhaps we can take the long way back there,” Corinthian is saying. “I haven’t seen much of this town by car. Actually I haven’t seen a bit of it by car. All the time I spend sitting in those automobiles … Now if only they’d been moving, what places I’d have been.”

I agree to his suggestion greedily. I am an easy driver and will drive till the gas runs out.