Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“Donne, of course.”

“ ‘If God could be seen and known in hell, hell in an instant would be heaven.’ That’s Donne.”

“ ‘Miserable riddle,’ ” Liberty said, “ ‘when the same worm must be my mother and my sister and my self.’ Donne.”

“Let’s drop the seventeenth century,” Charlie said. “Too much morbid imagery. Too much sensual asceticism. Turn the light off and I’ll turn the light off. There. It’s dark. Now let’s diffuse the dark into little pinpoints of light, tiny brief explosions of light with words of love. Seriously, when can I see you?”

“You can’t.”

“I will,” Charlie said. “I will see you. Has your old man returned?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Where does he go? Where do you go? I saw in the paper that two kids had been saved from a burning house in the Panhandle by an unidentified man. Do you think Willie traveled up there to do that? Could that have been our Willie? He saved the children. I think he even saved the aged collie. Do you know if Willie gives blood?”

“I don’t think he’s ever given blood.”

“Too minor probably. There’ll always be blood, right? I think he’ll be donating his living organs soon, important living organs. Then he’ll open the zoos and prisons. I have a theory. I think Willie saves people as a kind of joke.”

“That would be terrible,” Liberty said.

“Really. A joke. Willie thinks abstractly. He thinks in opposition to his brain. Actually, Willie doesn’t give a shit. Now myself, I think concretely. Your past is irredeemable, but it’s not over yet. Here’s what I want to tell you. I went out and bought us a car with the money I just made, a finny old Caddy, big enough to hold us all, the means by which we will make good our escape. Blinding chrome everywhere, my favorite color. And the trunk! Wait until you see the size of the trunk! I’ve begun filling it with stuff for us. Butterfingers, hot sauce, Chuckles, hominy, potted meats. When we’re ready to go, I’ll fill the cooler with limesickles for the kid.”

“All this is impossible, Charlie,” Liberty said.

“We’ll have to start out by car. It’s only reasonable. Then we’ll determine other means of travel. The kid doesn’t like limesickles, I’ll fill it with Creamsicles.”

“He likes the ice cream with the polar bears on them, actually,” Liberty said. “He collects the wrappers.” But he wouldn’t need the wrappers if they went away, she thought. They’d leave all that behind.

“All right!” Charlie said.

“Those polar bears kind of depress me, really,” Liberty said. “I imagine the real thing. And then I see the real thing far from its ice floe home, lying flat, jaws agape, on the floor of a Dallas mansion.”

“Liberty, you mustn’t allow yourself to be brought down by an ice cream sandwich.”

She laughed.

“Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, you think going away is just a feverish fancy of mine, but it’s not. Why would I want to deceive us? We have to begin. What I’m going to do is give up drinking. This is my last drink. This one right here, this luminous lovely, unlike all the others and more precious because it is the last …”

Liberty heard the sound of breaking glass.

“Oh no, oh shit, I dropped it,” Charlie cried. They both clung to the phone in silence. Then there was a click. Charlie had hung up.

Clem gazed at her from the floor, his forepaws curled beneath him. Liberty’s hands were sweating. It was quiet. Someone could break into this house, and it would be like herself breaking into the house of another. It would be someone just like herself. What is it that you want? she would ask the intruder.

When the phone rang again, she stared at it. There was something wrong with it, surely.

“I’ve been on a very pretty inlet,” the voice began, “the tide comes in, goes slack, pours back out. Very peaceful there.”

“Willie,” Liberty said.

“One sinks gently from nothingness to nothingness. No bubbles.”

“You’ve been gone for days,” Liberty said.

“It always amazes me. There’s nobody out here.”

“There’s nobody out there , I thought that’s what we always said.”

“We have our parts, don’t we,” Willie said. “Our lines.”

“Please come back. I’m missing you.”

“Come to me,” Willie said. “I called earlier, but the line was busy. Who was that?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie is a tragic figure, but dimly, only dimly so. Have you been seeing him?”

“No.” Liberty looked at some daisies she had cut and put in a glass.

“He believes that everything’s meant to be forgotten,” Willie said.

Liberty watched the daisies. There had been daisies in such a glass for years and years, everywhere.

“Come to me tomorrow,” Willie said. “Walk to the end of Buttonwood Beach. Go down around six in the morning. That’s when the Gulf is going to be pouring back through the Pass. Jump in, and it will sweep you about a quarter mile down Long Key to a yellow house. I’ll meet you there.”

“Jump in? There’s a bridge to Long Key.”

“But it’s almost twenty miles from you. Jumping in is the way. I’ve checked the tides. You’ll drift.”

“Jump in, then drift,” Liberty said. “It sounds like what we’ve been doing all right.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Willie said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Liberty went into the bathroom and turned the water on in the shower. She undressed, then hesitated. She looked at the pitted handles and the silver water with its sulfur smell falling from the corroded head like thousands of needles. The water swept a small brown spider from a spotted tile. She turned the water off. Charlie had a point about showers.

In the bedroom, a voice from the radio was singing

Won’t that room of mine be a lonely place to be

After I been holding you so close to me

And won’t that old stairway be a little hard to climb

To a lonely room to wait for another place, another time .

The paddles of an overhead fan threw shadows on the wall. On the bureau was a framed picture of her and Willie, taken years before, when they were children. They did not stand close to one another. They had left plenty of room for something between them.

She wanted to take Teddy out of his daddy’s house, but she was weak, she could not be trusted. She was weak, a drifter. If she took him with her, he’d be a drifter too. A baby drifter.

She set the alarm clock, darkened the room and lay down on the bed. She heard Clem drop his weight to the floor. She tried to bring to mind her ladder, but this night it was not there, the smooth, furled, endless rungs, each of which she created, then searchingly found, down into sleep. This night it was the stairway of the song, now ended, a stairway rising crookedly upward, empty, but full of voices.

T he voices went on and on. This was years ago. Liberty’s father, Lamon, had once been a successful dentist. He was popular because he administered gas when he cleaned teeth and he used his prescription pad in an imaginative manner. Every afternoon after school, Liberty hurried to his office to observe his patients under the influence of nitrous oxide. Her mother thought she was there reading the magazines.

Liberty’s father was handsome and carefree, prone to minimalize the importance of the waning of love and the passage of time. His patients adored him.