Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“Can you imagine if you came across one of those little boxes by accident,” Rosie said. “Yechhh.”

“Peru!” Teddy said. “Did you go to Peru? Did you see the ground markings of Nazca?”

“Yeah,” Roger said, startled.

“They’re lines on the desert,” Teddy said, thrilled with explanation. “When you see them up close, they don’t look like anything, just a lot of white furrows in the brown ground, but when you get up real high you see that they’re big figures, mostly birds. The Indians made them. Archaeologists think that the Indians were trying to signal to something up in the sky.”

“Nazca makes me sad,” Rosie said sadly. “Those poor people waiting for someone to come to them for all those years and nothing ever came.”

“We’re all waiting for something,” Willie said.

“Yeah, isn’t that strange,” Rosie said.

“I know a lot about Nazca,” Teddy said. “I took a course last month in gods.”

“Gee,” Rosie said. “A course in gods. I’d love to take that course.”

“The woman who gave it left town,” Teddy said.

“We’re going to leave town for a few days too,” Roger said. “The cockatoos in the kiln haven’t laid yet. Rosie thinks we’re making them nervous.”

“A few days?” Liberty stroked Little Dot’s hair which was sticky and fine. She should have brushed it out in the hotel. The pink barrette she had bought looked forlorn clamped above the child’s ear. She should have done something. What should she have done?

“Maybe a few weeks,” Roger was saying softly. “Maybe even longer.”

“We’re going to look for a place for Little Dot,” Rosie whispered. “We’ve heard there are these places. They know what they’re doing there. They can handle it.”

“Who is ‘they’?” Willie asked.

“We’re not ‘they,’ ” Rosie said.

“I can handle it,” Liberty said. “I’ll watch her.”

“You’re not ‘they,’ Liberty. None of us are ‘they.’ ”

Liberty knelt down quickly and embraced Little Dot. “Goodbye, honey,” she said. Little Dot opened her mouth, which smelled of chocolate. Her thumb moved about blindly, then found her mouth. She was the thumb and the little girl sucking the thumb too.

“Don’t do that, baby,” Rosie said.

Good-bye, good-bye, everyone said.

Little Dot did not hold onto the fifty-dollar bill. She gave it to Rosie who donated it to a large charitable organization. The large charitable organization funneled it into a drug rehabilitation clinic. It was taken from the clinic’s account to purchase a toaster oven for the office staff. The owner of the appliance store where the toaster oven was purchased blew it at the track one muggy matinee on a dog named Bat Mister. The bill then commenced a round of payment for lingerie, biopsy results and brake linings. It suffered a life that the most lurid of imaginations could not conjure. It penetrated deep into the repulsive nature of banality. It traveled and was suckered more than once. It knew bright lights and dark pockets. It knew admissions to pornographic films. It bought ten pairs of Mexican boxing shoes, a cheap cashmere sweater and a down payment for a trip never realized. It went off like an orphan, wailing. The flashly coincidences it disclosed were made routine by repetition. It never looked life straight in the eye. Not once. And it never returned.

T he next morning, the phone rang before daybreak. Clem woke with a grunt. Liberty stumbled naked into the kitchen.

“Hello, Mother,” she said.

“I have been trying to reach you for a week, Liberty. Where on earth have you been? I want to explain some of the incidents in my life to you, dear.”

Her mother’s voice was clear and determined.

“Everything is all right, Mother. I love you. Daddy loves you.”

“I had a terrible dream about penguins just a few moments ago, Liberty.”

“Penguins are nice, Mother. They don’t do anyone any harm.”

“There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were all standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little costumes.”

“That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful.”

“They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand.”

“You’re all right, Mother. It was just a dream and it’s gone now. It’s left you and I think I’ve got it.” Liberty scratched Clem’s hard skull.

“I have to tell you something. I had another child, a child before you, a child before Daddy. She was two years old. I lost her, Liberty. I lost her on purpose.”

“What?” Liberty said.

“Yes.”

“Oh Mother, I don’t want to know this.”

“Can you remember yourself as a child, Liberty? You used to limp for no reason and sprinkle water on your forehead to give the appearance of fevers. You used to squeeze the skin beneath your eyes to make bruises.”

“Mother, I didn’t.”

“You were a gloomy child, sweetie. You were always asking me gloomy riddles like, What would happen if a girl was tied up in a rug and thrown off the roof? What would happen if you put a girl in the refrigerator alongside the milk and the cheese?”

“None of this is true,” Liberty said uncertainly. She opened the freezer and took out an ice cream bar. She unwrapped it, rinsed the paper and set it aside, put the ice cream in Clem’s bowl to soften.

“It’s almost Thanksgiving, Liberty. What are you and Willie going to do for Thanksgiving? I think it would be nice if you had turkey and made oyster stuffing and cranberry sauce. It broke my heart when you said you ate yellowtail last year. I don’t think you can do things like that. Life doesn’t go on forever, you know. Your sister was born on Thanksgiving Day. She weighed almost nine pounds.”

Liberty was getting confused. The fluorescent light in the kitchen dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. She turned it off.

“I fell so in love with Daddy, I just couldn’t think,” Liberty’s mother said. “He was so free and handsome and I just wanted to be with him and have a love that would defy the humdrum. He didn’t know anything about Brouilly. I had kept Brouilly a secret from him.”

“Brouilly?” Liberty asked, not without interest. “That was my sister’s name?”

“It’s a wine. A very nice wine. She was cute as the dickens. I was living in New York, and when I fell in love with Daddy I drove Brouilly eighty-seven miles into the state of Connecticut, enrolled her in an Episcopalian day-care center under an assumed name, and left her forever. Daddy and I sailed for Europe the next day. Love, I thought it was. For the love of your father, I abandoned my firstborn. Time has a way, Liberty, of thumping a person right back into the basement.”

“You’ve never mentioned this before, Mother.”

“Do you know what I miss a lot,” her mother went on. “Playing Ping-Pong in the cellar. I haven’t always lived in this cellarless state, you know … Your father is saying ‘don’t start trouble, don’t start trouble …’ I chose the Episcopalians because they are aristocrats. Do you know, for instance, that they are thinner than any other religious group?”

“I don’t know what to say, Mother. Do you want to try and find her?”

“What could I possibly do for her now, Liberty? She probably races Lasers and has dinner parties for twenty-five or something. Her husband probably has tax havens all over the place.”

“Who was her father?” Liberty asked.

“He made crêpes,” her mother said vaguely. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”