Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“That’s affecting,” Liberty said. “It really is.”

“I think the stress of that moment triggered my diabetes, but being able to pinpoint those two incidents from my early life was a real breakthrough for me.” Janiella snapped the fingers of her right hand. “Mother,” she said. “Father.” She snapped the fingers of her left. “I’ve felt completely in control ever since I’ve framed the perfume and Spritzer’s hole. I do what I want. I say what I want. I don’t finish what I begin if I don’t want. I just begin and begin.”

“You’ve got the keys to the candy shop,” Liberty said.

Janiella looked at her uncertainly. “You’re a little strange. Where have you been? Have you ever been anywhere?”

Liberty said nothing.

Janiella looked at Clem. “That dog would be pretty if his eyes weren’t so weird. Can he see out of those things? They look like ice cubes or something.”

“I’ll just wait for Teddy in his room,” Liberty said.

Teddy’s room was at the rear of the house and overlooked a small patio and swimming pool. Hoses had drained the pool and a man stood in it, studying a long, undulating crack in the tile. The man took a lollipop from his shirt and put it in his mouth. He shook his head at the crack. The lollipop did not make him forget the cigarette that he craved. He sucked in his stomach. He sensed there was someone in the room at his back, and he wondered if there was a naked woman standing in it, or a woman wearing just panties maybe, studying him. He didn’t look, in case there wasn’t.

Liberty dropped the tattered bamboo shade.

Teddy’s room was low-ceilinged and narrow. The walls were stained a muddy color, and there was a red rug on the floor. Half the ceiling was covered with the silver bears from Klondike Bar ice cream wrappers. Liberty took two wrappers from her pocket, found a paste pot in the desk and pressed two more bears upon the ceiling.

Teddy had begun collecting the wrappers after his mother had gone away. When she disappeared, he had first become deeply interested in cartography. He made elaborate maps and memorized airplane routes and bus schedules. He learned wilderness techniques and how to read a compass, determined to track his mother down. Then Duane had taken him aside for a little talk. He told Teddy that his mom had become a freak, that she had grown whiskers, and that he should hope that she never came back. If she came back, he should fight against her as though he were fighting against the forces of evil for his very life. Duane had told him (and he told him, he said, reluctantly) that if his mom came back it would likely be for no other purpose than to cut his little pecker off, put it on a key chain and present it to her girlfriend.

“Remember at the county fair last year, son, do you remember that tent we went into?”

“The Ambassadors from Mars were in that tent, Daddy.”

“Well, yeah, they was, but remember what was in there too was that individual who bit off hens’ heads.”

“I couldn’t see that too well, Daddy.”

“Well, that individual hates chickens like the way your momma hates us men now,” Duane said. “So forget momma, son. Be on your guard, but put her right out of your mind.”

Not long after Duane’s metaphorical chat, Teddy began breathing oddly and wetting the bed and waking in the night with terrible dreams of something gaunt and bearded, like the person he had almost seen in the tent, chuckling and tearing at him, snipping off his fingertips with its teeth and pulling his toes out with its teeth in the same way he had been taught by Liberty to get the meat out of an artichoke leaf. In the night he imagined his mother calling to him … Teddeee … Teddeee … a pale stretched-out skinny sound … calling and laughing and groaning to him.

He decided he needed a little magical protection, something he could devise for himself, so he began collecting the silvery paper bears. The phalanx of bears would protect him when he slept, when he could not be on guard. Their thick cold coats would muffle the sounds of chuckling and tearing and calling. They had already caused the dreams to change their nature, and he felt that when he had gathered enough of the bears, when the ceiling was complete, the terrible dreams would stop.

The bears marched glittering across the ceiling. Teddy was getting there, Liberty thought. He was almost there.

Teddy rushed into the room. “Liberty!” he said. “Do you know that during the Second World War, the Americans were going to use bat bombs against Japan? They were going to tie little cylinders filled with napalm to the bats’ chests and drop thousands of them from airplanes. They would be in hibernation, but as they fell from the planes they’d wake out of hibernation and then they’d go into buildings and houses and after a few hours they’d blow up.”

“Where did you hear that?”

“I’m taking a course at the junior college called Oddities of War.” He took the egg out of his pocket and examined it. “Still with us,” he said. “You know, it’s hard to take care of an egg. A baby’s easier to watch than an egg, isn’t it, Liberty? It’s so much bigger. It would be hard to lose a baby. Some of the girls in my class have lost their eggs already. They think it’s a stupid assignment. Liberty, do you know that at that party Daddy and Janiella had, our pool got broken? Daddy broke it. He was just fooling around, Janiella said.”

“Let’s get out of here right away,” Liberty suggested.

“Yes!” Teddy said.

They waited at the end of the street for the bus. When the bus came, Clem leapt nimbly up the steps and settled himself on a seat beneath an advertisement for roach poison. Roaches were entering a Roach Motel, carrying little suitcases, little tennis racquets. They were wearing sunglasses and smiling.

The bus driver wore mirrored sunglasses, and there were comb marks in his hair. The big wheel moved smoothly through his hands. The bus driver loved his wheel. He would have taken it home at night with him if he could.

The only other passengers on the bus were three elderly women comparing the scenic designs on their bank checks. One had kittens, one had seashells, one had an old man and a small boy raking leaves together.

“The leaves are nice, but they don’t represent very well life in the South, what do you think?” the woman in the middle of the group said.

“Well, I’m from Cleveland,” the woman with the autumnal checks said. “I think it captures the nostalgia of a simpler time very nicely.”

“Oh, look at that dog ,” the woman holding the seashell checks said.

One of her friends looked at Clem and frowned. “White dogs are so difficult to keep clean,” she said. “They show every speck of dirt. I had a white poodle once.” She placed her hand against her heart and rolled her eyes.

“I think Ethel has made the best choice,” the woman in the middle said, looking moodily at her own yellow kitten checks. “These shells are so refreshing. I can almost feel the ocean spray just looking at them.”

The three women stared at Clem. They began talking about their dead husbands.

“When Ernest passed away I was there by his side in the hospital and there was a napkin under his juice glass and I went out of the hospital with it,” Ethel said. “I left the room immediately with the napkin in my purse. It had sleigh bells printed on it because it was the holiday season.”

“Do you still have it?” the woman with the kitten checks said. She was a little embarrassed. She looked at her wrist-watch.

“I do,” Ethel whispered.

The woman from Cleveland gave a little grunt. “After my Harold died,” she said, “I found the most disturbing items at the bottom of his sock drawer.”