Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

W hen Liberty returned to her own house, she found it locked. She jiggled the doorknob. They never locked the house, but there it was, locked. Perhaps Landlord had come back. Landlord was, in fact, the landlord’s name, a person whom Liberty had never met, but who by his uncaring absence seemed generous enough. Willie dealt with him. Apparently the understanding was that Landlord might return, and when he did they’d have to find another place.

Webby matter fouled the jalousies. Large moths clung to the darkness beneath the eaves. Looking in the window, she saw that the room was unchanged from the way she and Clem had left it when they had gone to the beach at noon. She pushed at the door once more, then returned to the street to study the house, surprised at how neglected it looked. A rusting hot-water heater, resembling a bomb, stood on the sagging side porch. Firecracker plant spilled out of the cracks in the foundation. The mailbox, which was stationed on a black chain coiling rigidly upward, dangled open, empty.

It had been in just such a mailbox years ago where she had found Clem, a puppy barely alive, his soiled shape filling up dark space. The sun had beat down upon the box then as she looked in, and black insects had shifted in the hinges where it was damp. When she pulled him out, she saw that someone had burnt the pads of his feet, there were burns on his coat, on his soft muzzle. One eye was shut and oozed a clear liquid. She had taken him to a regular doctor because the veterinarian’s offices were farther away. The doctor, who knew her, said she hadn’t found him a moment too soon.

All the doctors knew her there, for she hadn’t been well and doctors knew her. It had been this time of year but in another place, and seven years ago, before she and Willie were actually married. They were living near an abandoned orange grove, and the rotting fruit, on the ground and still hanging in the trees, made the air smell like a sad bar. It was the fall of what was their last year of school, but neither of them was going to school. By the end of that summer, Liberty knew she wasn’t going back. That was over, school, the excitement of making connections, the doors opening in her mind, the babble of voices becoming isolated, subdued, orderly. In science she had been the only one in the class who had seen the connection between the Thermos bottle and rocketry. She had seen the line leading from picnics to atom bombs.

She had a gift, the teachers said. It was as if she’d been given a gift, the teachers said, and she was throwing it away.

She had thrown it away. She took no comfort in connections. She had learned the strange paths love followed and believed only in clamorous uproar, cruel seasons, random acts.

Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go, and the death you might have died belongs to you no longer?

She heard a phone ringing, then it stopped. She went back across the dirt yard to the banyan tree, climbed up the trunk and walked out on a limb wide as a train track. The limb, rather than penetrate the house, had accommodated it nicely by veering up only inches from the bathroom window. Liberty lay on the limb and wiggled the screen out of the rotting wood, then squirmed through the window headfirst. Two lizards darted down the wall.

“Willie,” Liberty called.

At the front door, Clem was standing on two legs like any human being. He dropped softly inside when she pulled the door back. The lock was old and had gummed itself shut. She turned it back and forth. In the kitchen she covered a plate with dog food and set it on the floor for Clem. The plate was a large plastic one that depicted the First Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, with its peculiar steeple atop which a large bronze finger pointed skyward. Clem worked away at the food, exposing the shrubbery, the steps, and the door to the nave. He always saved the revelation of the finger for last.

The phone rang.

“Why did you answer so quickly? What’s wrong?” Liberty’s mother demanded.

“Nothing, nothing,” Liberty said.

“Something’s wrong,” her mother gasped.

“No.”

“I hate it when you pick up the phone on the first ring. When I called your number before, the most peculiar thing happened. I got a tape. Are you hooked up to some answering machine, Liberty?”

Liberty thought of life-support systems. Tubes and pumps. Machines that cleansed.

“No.”

“Where do you get the money for these things, Liberty. Having an answering service … the life you must lead!”

“I have no answering service, Mother. You must have dialed wrong.”

“Now how could I have dialed wrong. Really, the things you infer sometimes. I thought it was a trendy little joke you were making, something you felt was bohemian. The man was talking about friendship, how to make friends with the opposite sex or something. It was so sappy, but the man had a lovely voice. I have often wished your father’s voice was more mellifluous. Sometimes I dial Time and Temperature just to hear the mellifluous voice of a male stranger.” She sighed. “I wanted to ask you a question, dear. Do you remember Peter Marsh?”

“I don’t, no.”

“Oh, Liberty, are you on drugs or something? I sometimes wonder what has happened to your mind . You used to have such a good mind, Liberty. You were always so good with those hard questions like if there are four houses on a street and the Blakes live next to the Browns and the Burtons live next to the—”

“I’ve never heard of Peter Marsh, Mother.”

“Why when you were a child, you even knew the name of Hitler’s dog. I remember how astonished all our friends used to be at your acumen.”

Liberty lowered herself to the floor and put her chin on her knees.

“Peter Marsh used to be one of Daddy’s patients in the long ago,” Liberty’s mother began. “One day he came into the office and he was very quiet. Later, of course, everyone realized how uncharacteristic it was for him to be so quiet. He was a very handsome man and very successful with the ladies. Men liked him too. He was a city commissioner then. He always seemed to be having the best time, but that day he just didn’t smile or say a word and when anyone spoke to him he just shrugged or nodded. Well, finally he sat down in Daddy’s chair and opened his mouth and his teeth were just braided with pubic hairs. The little dental hygienist Daddy had at the time practically screamed her head off.”

“Oh,” Liberty said.

“It was a joke, Liberty. A joke! You’re so stuffy sometimes.”

“Well,” Liberty said.

“The point is,” her mother said, “that Peter Marsh is running for governor. Isn’t it a small world? I hope you and Willie are still involved in the democratic process, Liberty. I think it would be fun for you to go out and vote for someone you know for governor.”

“Umm,” Liberty said.

“Is everything all right?” her mother said coolly. “There isn’t a burglar or anyone there, is there? A burglar just waiting until you complete this call, threatening you? Is Willie helpless somewhere?”

When time permitted, her mother practiced attitudes toward disaster. She studied carefully the written or televised accounts of victims’ responses — in particular the survivors of floods, hurricanes and plane crashes. She attended with grave interest the replies of mothers whose small children had been missing in some National Park for forty-eight hours. Liberty suspected that her mother still cherished the possibility of little Liberty in some alternate world toddling away from the cheerfulness of a family campfire into the wolf-filled gorges and bottomless lakes of a vast forest so that she could react with composure and grace.