Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

Liberty hung up. The room’s light was now gray and Clem glowed whitely in it. A particularly inappropriate image crept open in her mind like a waxy cereus bloom. Little groups of Hindus sitting around a dying man or woman or child on the riverbank, waiting for death to come, chatting, eating, behaving in fact as though life were a picnic.

She poured dog food from a sack onto the ice cream and set it out for Clem. The phone rang. “I just want you to know,” her mother said, “that I’m leaving your father.”

“Don’t pay any attention to this, Liberty,” her father said on an extension. “As you must know by now, she says once a month that she’s going to leave me. Once a month for twenty-nine years. Even in the good years when we had friends and ate well and laughed, she’d still say it.”

Liberty’s mother and father were both over five hundred miles away. The miracle of modern communication made them seem as close to Liberty as the kitchen sink.

“Once,” her father said, “why it couldn’t have been more than a month ago, she threw her wedding ring out into the pecan grove and it took a week and a half to find it. Once she tore up every single photograph in which we appeared together. Often, she gathers up all her clothes, goes down to the Winn-Dixie for cartons, or worse, goes into Savannah and buys costly luggage, boxes the books and the French copper, makes a big bitch of a stew which is supposed to last me the rest of my days and cleans the whole damn place with ammonia.”

“It’s obviously a cry for help, wouldn’t you say, Liberty?” her mother said.

“I don’t know why you’d want to call Liberty up and pester her. She has her own life.”

“I am a victim of neglect,” her mother said. “Excuse me, everything’s just dandy here. I made pork chops last night for dinner.”

“Damn good pork chops too,” her father said. “So, Liberty, how’s your own life. How’s that Willie treating you?”

“Fine,” Liberty said.

“Never could get anything out of Liberty,” her mother said.

“You’re getting to be old married folks yourselves,” her father said. “What is it now, going on almost seven years?”

“That’s right,” Liberty said.

“She’s a girl who keeps her own witness, that’s a fact,” her mother said.

“I want you to be happy, dear,” her father said.

“Thank you,” Liberty said.

“But what is it you two do exactly all the time with no babies or jobs or whatever? I’m just curious, understand.”

“They adore one another,” Liberty’s mother said. “ ‘Adore’ is not in Daddy’s vocabulary but what Daddy is trying to say is that a grandson might give meaning and significance to the fact that Daddy ever drew breath.”

“That’s not what I’m trying to say at all,” her father said.

“They’re keeping their options open,” Liberty’s mother said to her father. “They live in a more complex time.” Her mother began to sob. “Keep your options open, Liberty! Never give anything up!”

“We’d better be signing off now,” her father said.

Liberty replaced the phone in its cradle and it instantly rang.

“Is that tree still outside your house?” Teddy asked. “Because I’m sure it was here last night. It was waving its arms outside my window, then it plodded away on its white roots. It goes anywhere it feels like going, I think, that tree.”

“Trees aren’t like people,” Liberty said. “They can’t move around.” Her reasonableness, she felt, bordered on the insincere.

“I forgot to tell you. I’m taking a human sexuality course, and you know what I have to do all this week?”

“Oh, honey, why are you taking a human sexuality course? Don’t do anything.”

“I have to carry an egg around all week.”

“An egg?”

“I have to pretend it’s a baby and take care of it.”

“Honey,” Liberty said, “what time is it?”

“Nineteen minutes of six. My clock woke me up.”

Janiella had bought Teddy a clock. It was wired to his bed sheets. When Teddy first began to wet his bed, shortly after her arrival months before, Janiella had long discussions with him about the need to accept responsibility for his own bladder. When Teddy continued to refuse responsibility, Janiella began smacking him with a Wiffle bat every time she had to change the sheets. Then she decided on an alarm that would awaken him every three hours throughout the night, as well as every time the bed pad grew damp.

Janiella had standards. She was not without physical imperfection herself, her personal flaw being diabetes, but she did not allow her disability to get her down. She liked to party. Her preference was for a good time. Her preference was also that Teddy spend as much time as possible away from the house. When Teddy was not wired up in the darkness, he was out somewhere, taking instruction in something. Home at night, he wets the bed. All the alarm has managed to do so far is to increase the number of Teddy’s dreams. He is always dreaming when he wakes. Most recently, he dreams that he steals the single candy bar Janiella keeps in the house in the event she has an attack and has to have sugar. He dreams of Janiella crawling through the house, not being able to find her Payday.

“Janiella and Daddy are still asleep, but Janiella left the list for the day on my desk. I have woodworking, then I have a karate lesson, then I have a flute lesson. That’s at the other end of town. In the afternoon, I have sea scouts.”

Teddy traveled many many miles when he was not in school, practically from one end of the county to the other, in an increasingly extended maze of renaissance pursuits of Janiella’s devising.

“I have to change the sheets now, Liberty. I have to wash them and dry them and put them on the bed again. Bye-bye.”

Liberty went back to bed. When she heard the phone ringing again, she pulled the pillow over her head. After a few moments, she heard Willie saying to her, “That was Charlie. He wants us to have breakfast with him.”

Willie and Liberty could never refuse Charlie when he wanted to eat. Charlie was an alcoholic who seldom ate. The last time they had the pleasure of Charlie’s company at table was in a Chinese restaurant where Charlie had eaten eight kernels of rice in the course of an hour. Late in the evening, he had taken a bite out of the glass his gin was gone from.

Willie and Liberty got into their truck and drove to a restaurant nearby called The Blue Gate. Clem sat on the seat between them. From the back, he could pass for another person with long, pale hair, sitting there. At the restaurant, they all got out and Clem lay down beneath an orange tree growing in the dirt parking lot. The Blue Gate was a Mennonite restaurant in a community of cottages with living petunia crosses growing on the lawn.

Inside, Charlie was waiting for them at a table by the pie display. He wore a rumpled suit a size too large for him and a clean shirt. His hair was combed wetly back, his face was swollen and his hands shook. Nevertheless, he seemed in excellent spirits.

“Been too long, man,” Charlie said to Willie, shaking his hand. “Hi, doll,” he said to Liberty. “Where you two been lately? I never see you at the Gator.”

“Ahh, the Gator,” Willie said. “Doesn’t that bar depress you? JJ depresses me.”

“JJ’s all right,” Charlie said. “He’s a real good listener since his stroke.”

Willie shrugged. “Brings me down. I should be ashamed, of course.”

“I love the ol’ Gator,” Charlie said. “I had a great night. Saw some movies, went to some parties, met the dawn at the Gator. Man, I love The Thing . You ever see The Thing? ‘Tell the world! Watch the skies! Everywhere! Watch the skies!’ ” He dug into his pocket and pulled out a wad of money. “I’ve been celebrating,” he said. “One sale.” Charlie was a real estate agent, the most successful agent at Ace Realty in a decade. Buyers seemed mesmerized by Charlie. His appearance before them made them desperate to purchase terra firma. “Two acres of land on a golf course to a Canadian couple. They smelled like cooking gas for some reason. They laid their dreams out right in front of me. They wanted an opulent staircase and a sauna. They wanted a special room for the missus’s collection of dolls. They wanted a special room for the mister’s aqua leather sofa. Your Charlie found them just the place. They wept with joy.” He began to tear absent-mindedly at one of the bills in his hand.