Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“Your daddy,” Lenore Biddle said one hot morning in Liberty’s childhood, just before she reeled out the door, “highly resembles both William Holden and Father Johnson of St. Luke’s.”

In fact, there was something priestly about Liberty’s father’s ministrations. No matter how discouraged or tired his patients seemed when they entered the little rooms, they always left in high spirits, refreshed and confident, absolved, for the moment, of both care and carious lesions. The walls were blue, the color of peace; the tone of her father’s smock, green. The combination elicited confidence and confession. The need for confession seemed paramount among the men.

“I’ve been thinking, Doc, about time. We spend time as if we had too much time. We complain that the day is long and the night is long and then we complain because our days and nights are gone too soon. I’ve also been thinking about boredom. I have discovered that I am a boring man. It dawned on me yesterday when I walked into my office and realized that all the women I’ve hired look like Linda. Dark, sort of frizzy hair, so-so breasts, sweet personalities. You know my little wife, Linda. Well, it was a humbling realization, Doc, it was a boring realization. I can’t believe I was put on this earth just to be faithful to Linda …”

That was the lawyer. And there was the butcher, the gardener, the boat broker.

“I worry about being locked up. I can feel it, the pressure. Like being buried in mud, or frozen solid in a block of ice, or crushed beneath stones. Do you think I’m going to do something awful …”

There was the man who owned the old hotel, Oversea — where Liberty and her parents dined freely and badly once a week in the deserted dining room — who had the need, under gas, to recite limericks.

“There was a stout lad name of Pizzle,” he’d begin. “Oh, the little girlie’s here. Hi, sweetie,” he’d say to Liberty, who was slumped behind her copy of Jack and Jill .

He’d suck on the gas a moment more and puddle his bib a little. He couldn’t keep himself from continuing. “The best one of all,” he’d say. “There was a young plumber of Leigh …”

He seemed the cheeriest of the patients, but he killed himself one night, laying his head in one of the Oversea’s big dirty ovens.

The women seemed less philosophical. Even when the nitrous oxide took hold, they’d be talking about dinner and movies and what they’d read in the papers.

“D’jall see that article on those Siamese black girls joined at the head? They’re alike in every thought and mood except that one worries about her hair all the time, always fussing at it with brushes and combs and all, and the other one couldn’t care less … Joined at the head , I swear. They try to lead as normal a life as possible, the article says. They want to marry and have babies and they like Italian food and yard sales …”

Eventually, though, all would grow calm. Feet and knuckles would relax, eyes would shine, and mouths would move languidly around pic and pad and paste, as their terrors and concerns were absorbed for a moment in the vastness of the vision of a healthy mouth.

Liberty’s father lost his practice through prescription misuse and income tax fraud, but grateful patients kept the family going. Her father could always get a free haircut; her mother could have a chair reupholstered for next to nothing. Appliances and wine and citrus and quartered beef continued to arrive for months after the suspended sentence. Their house filled up with bad art. The gratitude of a man named Bobby String, who had been cured of trench mouth, knew no bounds. He owned a shop that specialized in Western Wear and Furnishings, and Liberty had a closet full of fringed jackets, chaps, leather vests and boots and belts with brass buckles the size of fists. Her books were clamped together with horse bookends, the shade of her bedside lamp depicted horses grazing and her bath towel hung from a ring gripped in the mouth of a bronze horse’s head. There were horses on her curtains, there were horses on her rug. She had a frightening milk mug where the handle was in the shape of a hysterically rearing horse. Liberty did not ride and actually had no longing for or opinion about horses, but her room resembled a shrine to the symbols and codes of puberty.

Lamon kept his good looks throughout his professional troubles. He kept his smile and his thick head of hair. Liberty’s mother, Lucile, fared less well. She detested being married to a failed man. She spent most of her days clad in silk pajamas, sitting in the breakfast nook. She brooded and let her housekeeping slip. The house became somewhat tacky to the touch. Plants withered. Even cast iron plants, even cacti, began to drop before Lucile’s devastating disregard.

Lamon took up painting. Lucile paced around in her darkening silk pajamas. Liberty concentrated on her homework.

“For special credit, I’m going to make up a country,” Liberty said. “I’m going to have a page on education and a page on religion and a page on weather. I’m going to make up a flag and a language and I’m going to draw the clothes they wear and their methods of transportation. I’m going to—”

“Oh, can’t you relax,” her mother said.

Liberty was an avid student. She loved school, she loved her teachers. She longed to tell her mother that the flowers depicted on her silk pajamas were four-o’clocks. Four-o’clocks had been one of the answers on her science test. Four-o’clocks hinted at the fathomless mysteries of genetics and fate, dominance and happiness. Liberty refrained from mentioning the four-o’clocks.

One evening during the long spring of the family’s disgrace, Liberty went outside to the picnic table and sat down beside her father who was tracing Elihu Vedder’s The Lair of the Sea Serpent out of an art magazine.

“That’s nice, Daddy,” Liberty said.

The painting was a pleasant landscape of sand dunes, beach, water and brilliant sky. Everything was rendered realistically, even the gigantic griseous lizard slithering toward the sea.

Lamon looked at the painting and then at Liberty. He poured bourbon into a tall orange glass that said FLORIDA THE SUNSHINE STATE on it. On the glass, the sun had a face. It had no nose or ears but it had a big smile and eyes with eyelashes.

“You understand life, don’t you Liberty?”

“I don’t think so, Daddy.”

“You understand that lurking in the heart of each pure, pretty day that is given to us is a snaky, malevolent, cold-blooded, creepy, diseased potentiality.” He patted her head, then cleared the picnic table of brushes and paints and set out plates for supper. It was a warm night with thunder, and the grass was long and yellow. Her father lit the charcoal in the grill and made another brown drink in the happy glass. Liberty went into the house to sharpen her pencils for school the next day. On the patio just to the side of the sliding glass doors was a planter in the form of a ceramic burro pulling a cart. The planter was full of leggy geraniums and the tip of the burro’s left ear. When Liberty had been smaller than she was then, she had sat in front of the burro every morning and attempted to feed him grass.

“Mommy,” Liberty called upstairs, “do you want one hot dog or two?”

“Two,” Lucile answered.

“Potato chips or potato salad?”

“Chips,” Lucile said and descended the stairs, smiling grimly. She wore nylons and heels, her good linen suit and the top to her flowered pajamas. A stole of several minks was draped around her shoulders, and she wore gloves.

“Are you going out, Mommy?” Liberty asked, perplexed.

“Yes, I am,” Lucile said, raising her eyebrows, which had been recently and severely tweezed. “I am going out.” Her thin, annoyed face was rouged, and her neck shone with perfume.