Joy Williams: State of Grace

I look hungrily at the basket of fruit which is, for some reason, in the motel room on the window sill, crowding the Venetian blinds. Father brought it. The sort of thing you give to dim relations or people in sick chambers. Bananas, apples, grapes, pears, oranges, all injected with coloring, lying dumpled in their bed of paper grass.

Also included is a bottle of champagne. Father doesn’t drink himself, but he will open it for me.

We are sitting in Fred’s Sunnyside Motel. Outside, Fred is examining his collection of air plants, which are hanging everywhere.

Father says, “The truth removes the need for freedom.”

“Oh yes, Daddy, I agree.”

“What could you be looking for, darling, to go away from me?”

I’m brief. “I’ll tell you, Daddy, I was looking for love.”

He’s looking at me so kindly, but he’s weary from the long train ride. One eye closes, but the severed one remains and wanders over me with a vague and sleepy touch. If only I knew now what I knew so long ago … And what could one expect from one’s own father’s gazing? It’s the touch of a shadow on the papered walls of the mind. He shakes his head so slowly, I know that I could capture it on film and I fumble for the camera which is all I’ve brought along. Just me and my broken camera for I’ve come into this room ownerless as a newborn babe. I had to brush my teeth with mine own finger, I had to trim my nails on the concrete wall, and I’m sitting here in my underwear, for all my little washables are hanging to dry on the shower rod.

Oh, he looks at me so generously. If I could only get this on film! The development of trysts. One could make a fortune, once the processes were perfected. I have my camera but there’s fungus in the lens — parabolas of muttony fur both hidden and revealed — which comes from living in the damp, too close to the sea. I still carry it about with me, hoping helplessly that it might correct itself. Even the film in it is no good. It’s dated. I was duped. BUY ME FIRST, I’M RIPE. I always do. I have a conscience. I bought it from a failing store, from a failing little man, all blond in the face and the head from his liver, shaking like an aspic as he bagged my purchases. Six rolls and a 35mm used Yashika and all of it useless. The moment I walked out of the store, that film was past its prime and wouldn’t print a buttered muffin. And from what I haven’t heard, this happens all the time.

Next door, a toilet flushes and there’s a giggle and a rustle. We’ve seen them both, from Number 6, two grinning teens, wearing the same outfits, goofy Geminis. What a job in these places, just to keep the plumbing in repair!

Father steps up very close to me. I feel the chill from his frozen eye and he says, “You’ll only do harm here, sweet. This is a terrible town, a town of waste and hate. I saw it immediately. Something is going to go wrong here. I can see the expectation on their faces. Why did you stop here?”

“I was going to go on.”

“You were waiting for me.” Father puts his hand on my hair. “I took care of you. You were such a lovely child. I used to wash and brush your hair. You always asked me to brush your hair. Would you like me to do that now?”

“I was waiting to go on,” I say.

“You come back with me. There’s no place to go on to. It’s all happened. They’re all dead, our little family, all gone.” He strokes my hair. He wraps it around his fist. “We only have one life,” he says tonelessly.

“I haven’t had mine yet.”

“You’re my sweet little girl,” Father says.

I push away from him. My hair runs out between his fingers. My clothes are dripping in the shower. I had hung them up and they were dry but then I’d taken a shower with them hanging on the rod and now they were soaked. I look through the Venetian blinds at Fred. He is an old man, beating on a mourning dove with a garden rake.

“Come over here and sit beside me,” Father says. I do. I lie between the bedspread and the blanket. He takes a brush from his suitcase and begins to brush my hair. “When you were born,” he says, “I brought you phlox in a white china mug.”

“There aren’t any phlox down here,” I tell him. “The climate’s not right for them.”

A clock is ticking on the dresser. It lies face down and works only when it is placed like that. I dropped it myself as a child and it broke in that manner. In Spain, I hear, there’s a place full of old, expensive clocks. A palace and a room in the palace where they bring all the clocks of value that don’t work. The room is zealously guarded. They have guns. They’d kill you if you tried to steal one of those clocks. Father always used to say that keeping time was an affront to God. I am surprised that he has brought this with him.

“What are those flowers outside the door?” he asks.

“Bird of Paradise. Century plants,” I say. It is an erotic desert flush against these rooms. A little joke.

“You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” he says convincingly.

“Oh no, Daddy.”

“Yes. You’re one with the art of harlotry and self-deception. You came all the way down here just to prove that you were common as any of them.”

My head bobs with the pull of the brush. His hands are long and cold, with a tumble of veins visible. He is ageless. Once I was young but I am growing so quickly now … soon I will be of his time and then hardly linger there until I am beyond it.

“Haven’t you,” he says.

“No, not this one.”

“You don’t know anything about love. I’ve tried to teach you but you don’t know. What do you think you can give to a man? Or woman? Your mother was … the only thing your mother gave me was you.”

“There’s nothing I can give, Daddy. I was just hoping that I could take a little. A little warmth for a little while.”

“You’re everything to me,” he says. “You’re everything short of dying.”

“Dying’s not so much,” I say.

“To those that don’t do it. You killed your mother.”

My hair is snapping and curling around his fingers. He raises his hand. It follows him.

“Why of course you did, sweet,” he says. “She died because she had an evil heart, a vicious jealous eye. We’re all weak, I won’t deny it, but it was the Devil himself who gave your mother strength to curse me the way she did. I won’t accuse you of it, really. She died of rage.”

“I think she died by her own hand, Daddy.”

“No, love,” he says, “she died giving birth. She died by God’s own felon’s fist. She was always wanting to have children. Can you imagine, she wanted to start them in accordance with the planets. She wanted someone to avenge her, but your mother got no relief and why should we, darling? No relief and no release.”

Beside me on a little table is my gum from the night before. I put it in my mouth. In moments it’s soft again. Quite usable. With this and a stick I could muster a quarter out of any grate. Were there a grate. Were there a quarter. What would I do with so vast a sum? My thoughts are a child’s thoughts. I am a child, lowered into Daddy’s lap.

My head rocks backward with the brushing. Lips brush my ear anonymously. I cannot see him. I see instead the open bathroom door where my clothes drip wine-red drops onto the concrete block of the shower stall. The dye gathers in unsightly puddling. I have arrived in this place. All my eclectic studying, worthless. All my babbling with the girls, the bleaching of my black-sheep ways. After my year of earnest infidelity, after scooting my body under the chassis of strangers, under the cologne, the Camel and Lavoris flavor of their case, I have been restored to the death that is all mine, to Daddy in this place. After all those strangers …