Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“Mommy,” Liberty said.

“Some of us weren’t meant to be mothers, Liberty. But as far as I can gather, Doris Stone is a fine mother. She plants flowers from seeds — something that’s always impressed me — and she knows how to sew. These are good signs. Of course, I’ll call you every week, and after Daddy and I get settled, we can make other arrangements, but I know you’d prefer staying behind for now with your school and your friends.”

Liberty sat in the kitchen, which she had sat in more or less off and on since she was a baby, and felt it becoming increasingly unfamiliar. The improbability and injustice of her parents’ plan did not really occur to her. She arranged her books and papers in neat stacks, then examined the contents of her purse, a cheap and cherished zippered bag, which pictured a pink, sequined flamingo. In her purse was a snapshot of her mother and father taken at some cocktail party where they appeared somewhat flushed. There was also a pyramidical folded paper predictor, several shiny pennies minted the year of her birth, and one gummy quarter.

“I don’t have any money,” Liberty said.

“Oh, you don’t need any money!” her mother said. “From what Daddy told me, he absolutely recreated Calvin Stone’s mouth — made it better than new!”

Liberty did not receive calls every week from her mother. During the first year, her parents telephoned half a dozen times. Her father’s vague and cheerful tone was much as she remembered it being with his patients, while her mother related with breathless excitement her volunteer work for the Forestry Service. Liberty listened, holding her own phone in her own little room in the Stones’ house.

“The Florida black panther is, as I’m sure you know, Liberty, almost extinct, and my job is to go into the wild, deep into his habitat, and find out more about him or her, as the case may be. I find out more about him by finding his feces. Yes, that’s right. Yes, it is difficult. It takes a good eye. And I examine his feces and I find the hairs and little things of whatever he’s been eating and I analyze the hairs and whatever to determine his diet. And do you know what his feces tell me? Everything speaks to us, Liberty, remember that. His feces tell me that he eats rabbits and deer and armadillos.”

Liberty imparted this information at the Stones’ dinner table. It was received with respect. Conversation was encouraged at meals as well as any insight into God’s sometimes troubling ways. For some time, the subject discussed was Doris Stone’s daily struggle, through prayer, against a growing lack of confidence in her pastor who had cited wisdom from the cartoon character Charlie Brown in eighteen of his last twenty sermons.

Both Calvin and Doris Stone had always wanted a daughter and they were thrilled with Liberty’s presence in their moody home. Willie was a puzzle to them, as mysterious as a Communist. Calvin brought Liberty barrettes and comic books, taught her how to drive and how to fillet a fish. He wanted to teach her how to stuff an owl, something he had learned as a boy, but Liberty didn’t want to know. He taught her to dance by letting her stand on his feet, and he gave her a silver dollar for each of her years on earth. He taught her how to swim underwater with her eyes open. Whereas, once Liberty had stopped off at the dentist’s office on her way back from school, she now stopped off at the bank. They discussed the vile William Tecumseh Sherman and played a game of their invention called Beg-A-Loan in which Liberty would plead for large sums of money that would be used to put trees back together after they had been chopped down, or toward the invention of a new animal. At the bank, Liberty counted and added. She stuffed pennies into paper tubes and wrapped white bands around stacks of bills. Liberty was good and Calvin loved her. He was a simple man and he loved goodness. Choices had never been difficult for him to make.

Doris was kind to Liberty and told her many things. She told her that the way to prevent God’s anger was to be angry with oneself, and she advised her never to stumble over that which was behind her. Doris wasn’t a chatterer, but she told Liberty about menstruation and the idiosyncrasies of the Four Evangelists. She taught her calligraphy and stain removal and how to trim a rose bush.

The Stones lived in a development of two-acre tracts called Pelican Estates. The door knocker on each house was in the form of a pelican. Doris Stone had been drawn to this particular development because of the pelican motif. Pelicans were the bird of Christ, Doris Stone said, the bird of resurrection. The iconical pelican, as Doris had explained to Liberty, returns to its nest to find its young dead. Slashing its breast with its beak in grief, it draws blood which brings the young back to life. Pelican Estates had been built by the Abcoda Corporation, a fertilizer and insecticide giant, which had recently gotten into construction. Abcoda had no more connection with the bird of Christ than a tennis ball, but Doris lived her life by religious clue and inference, and it was Pelican Estates where inference had led her.

Each night Doris would come into Liberty’s little white room, set out her blouse and jumper and socks for the next day, smooth the bedsheets, plump up the pillows, remind her to keep God as a judge in her heart, and kiss her good night. She would then go down the hall to her son’s austere room where she would often find him, not in bed at all, but lying on an empty bookshelf, as cool and as still as a reptile, “just thinking” he would tell her. She would remind him that his evening thoughts should be an image of the day of judgment. She would urge him to recall the conversations and events and errors of the day and see if he could do better tomorrow. Then she would kiss her Willie and go downstairs where she would set out the breakfast things. This habit of Mrs. Stone’s always dismayed Liberty. Coming down in the middle of the night for a glass of water, Liberty would see the table set with its bowls and plates, its juice glasses and bottles of syrup. The kitchen would be dim and empty, clean and slightly humming, like a tomb in which comfy familiarities had been placed to accompany the dead into the unknown. Seeing clothing set out for the morrow or a table set out for a future meal would, years later, still fill Liberty with melancholy. But for Doris Stone, it was just another in the small acts of faith that enabled her to inch her way through the days.

After establishing, as far as she was able, the probability of a tomorrow that would proceed much in the way of the known today, Doris would make her own night preparations and slip into bed beside her husband. “Calvin,” she would say, “now, it’s too quiet outside to snore tonight. It’s a lovely, quiet night.” Calvin, half-asleep, would mutter, “I’m not as hard-hearted as people think,” in his mind already in the morning, in the bank, weighing and calculating, counting. The house would slowly grow still as each in their manner counted their own way into sleep.

Doris counts the foundations of the wall of the city of God. The first foundation is of jasper, the second, sapphire, the third a quartz of the palest blue, the fourth emerald, the fifth — the fifth she can never recall — the sixth and seventh are strange ones too, although sometimes they come to her, the eighth, beryl … and she sleeps. Below them all the table is set. Liberty lies with her cheek on the crisp pillowcase and counts. She counts the number of children she will have, their names and talents. And Willie counts too, counts something, perhaps the days ahead, the houses and voices and faces in them, their boredoms and luxuries and terrors …