Joy Williams: State of Grace

“We have so much to talk about,” he says. “Up home, the herbs from your mother’s garden are still growing. The mint is particularly strong. I think that even now, my shoes smell of mint.” He does not look at his shoes. “Who gave you that camera?”

“I bought it myself.”

“You must come back with me, sweet. I’ll absorb the harm you’d bring to others.”

“I never hurt anything,” I beg. “I would take the moths out of the house in my hands, remember? I was a simple child.” The room seems all the darker since he shut the door on the street. Everything is black. He is in black as he sits beside me once again. I can almost smell the chemicals, hear a hose draining in the soapstone basin. Where my clothes had been, there are now curling photographs, still wet, dangling from wooden pins. Everything has been recorded.

“How can you forget, darling?” he says. “Why should you ever want to forget?”

I protest, don’t I? “Daddy, let me be. There’s no one I can hurt.” I want a new clear picture so badly I could cry but there is no light in this dingy room. All the pictures there are going to be have been taken.

… When I was a child, I also had a camera which I had sent away for and which came directly to me. What a thrill when Mr. Bolt the postman stepped off his red white and blue bicycle and waded through the damaged daisies to our door. I was a darling dangerous child then with my little crazes and habits. Oh, she adores her father, Mother would say as I scampered down the street in his shadow. And only the obtuse would fail to detect the note of sadness there though perhaps I erred on hearing an entire symphony. But what if I should have fallen from Father’s silhouette? The sunshine was a pit to me. And even though it was a game, my mouth would fill with drool, my chest would ache as though I’d dropped my heart if Father strode away from me. Daddy’s little girl, Mother would say, though it was just words that she was using. As Father would use the holy writ and I, my too literal love, and poor sister her sweet adjustment. Oh poor sister, she never heard the coded humming of the world …

Yes, the day of the postman. The sea was all white and furious that morning from a storm the day before and was beating up the rocks and filling the air with a fine spray … I accepted the package reverently. It was almost consumed in Mr. Bolt’s huge hands. His fingernails were tan and thick as hoofs, shiny and smooth but at the same time a bit maimed, as though they’d all been crushed. His thumbnail leapt into an orbit all its own, his one significant feature. It was half again as long as his thumb. A lovely ocher and shiny as a writing slate. Perhaps there was something engraved thereon. And doubtless from the Scripture, I WILL MAKE THEE A TERROR AND THOU SHALT BE NO MORE? It’s really not for me to say. Etched with a pin? A reminder of something that hadn’t happened yet. For why else such a coarse and local epidermis? But then, perhaps it was he who had the hidden vice. Perhaps he worked with crayons or played the guitar. Of his face, nothing remains today. Just the impossible hand bringing me my plastic camera from Battle Creek, Michigan. And down by the water, on a folding chair beneath the salt blasted pines, sat Daddy.

Mother was absent then and sister was gone. Just me and Daddy, like it was and like it would be in a little while, forever.

And I am running in my hand-me-down dress, a dress that contained far more incident than myself, having belonged to two town girls and then sister before being passed on to me. A drunk exposed himself when it was worn by little Lola Roebuck. We had the longest winter in fifty-seven years when it adorned Jackie Fucillo’s ratty frame. And I am running with my new possession which is shooting out cartoon images on cardboard the size of a movie ticket.

The moment was mine, I knew, because I grew up all intuition and no curiosity. There’s not a curious bone in my body. Like clockwork, I grew up with an innate sense of the proper order of things. I left it to the others to discover their egotistical sexuality. They were programed for impulse but lacked true desire. I recall my own schoolmates professing to enjoy the dopey pleasures of the Tip-O-Whirl in the bleached grassless playground of kindergarten as they wrapped their little thighs around the banana seats. I was not affronted by such behavior. How could I be? I was up to Jeremiah in my insatiable quest for order. THE HEART IS DECEITFUL ABOVE ALL THINGS AND DESPERATELY WICKED: WHO CAN KNOW IT?

But I was a child and I was running and I’ve never been prettier than I was that day as I ran so sincerely thrilled, on my long white legs, to Daddy. The world reflected me, the symptom and the disease, as I ran so childishly simple toward him. The sea smoked with its foam and the sunlight fell bone white on his head as he sat beside the leaping water, all rumpled and harangued as he always seemed when he was by himself, wrestling with the Lord. “Daddy!” I said, “Let me take your picture.” And of course it is so innocent. An incorruptible request. He shields his lame eye from the wind with a piece of scarf, for it couldn’t help itself that eye, it lay open continually, gaping at the world. It has never rested but has only watched, tireless and constant, blazing and cerulean, thick like a muscle.

“Daddy,” I cried so adorably.

And he kissed me then, didn’t he, he drew me to him as guilelessly as he does now in Fred’s Sunnyside?

Everyone that has ever loved has loved this way.

There is no other way.

Father and I are eating in Woolworth’s. I am in my new clothes. There is still tissue paper in one of the sleeves. I pull it out.

“We are not going to return to Fred’s. We are going to a beach-front hotel. This is our first vacation,” Daddy says. “I am not a worldly man, as you know, but I want you to enjoy yourself. We’ll take a small vacation every year if you’d like. You look very nice. I remember that you often wore that color. Your mother dressed you in that color because she said it did so much for you. That was her term, but she was quite right. You look lovely.”

“Thank you,” I say. We are eating a turkey plate. The cranberries come in a microscopic fluted paper cup. They taste like peas. It is not Thanksgiving but it seems that the meal is a return to that sacred gala occasion of home — a perversion of it, a transubstantiation. Father blesses the food, then he gets up and puts the plate on a tray of dirty dishes. He is gaunt and elegant. The hollows of his cheeks had thrilled me.

“In the year when you were gone from me, there were frequent periods when I went without eating for days simply because it did not occur to me.”

“Speaking for myself,” I say, my mouth full of fowl, “I am hungry all the time.”

“You have a very slim and attractive figure.”

“Thank you,” I say.

Someone knocks my arm and launches my fork against my molar. It’s very crowded. We’re crammed like mullet in a net. Beside us is a couple with a baby. The baby has a I SLEPT ON HOLMES BEACH FLORIDA T-shirt on and is waving his legs, firing off his legs as though he’d like to be rid of them. He farts. It’s long and bubbling, very satisfactory. The baby crosses his eyes. All motion ceases. The first sound in the universe and this baby has made it. “For chrissakes,” the father says, “get him away from the butter.” The young mother does nothing. She picks up a french fry and puts it in her mouth.

“You know what I want,” she says. “You know what I really want?” The father pushes the seat board away from him, to the very end of the table. The baby regards us all furrily and falls asleep, mustard on his knee. “I want one of them deluxe facial beauty mist saunas and one of them O’Nite cases. You owe it to me at least for what you’ve done.”