Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

Purple, monogrammed towels hung from hooks. Liberty got out of the tub and patted herself dry with one of them. She was tanned and high-waisted. Pale hair curled from her armpits. At her throat was a soft scar that looked like a rosebud. She put on a man’s black bathrobe, rolled up the long sleeves, cinched the belt tight. She imagined Mr. Maxwell standing in this robe, breathing heavily, looking around his house at his things in it.

“Poor Chip hasn’t been able to cope very well with Mrs. Maxwell’s maiming,” Turnupseed had told Willie. “For twenty-five years she was his little singing bird, you know what I’m saying, and then she had that operation and she became his cheerful mutilated wife. She doesn’t have a morbid bone in her body, but Chip proved to be more delicate. I found him once on the beach at midnight, the drunkest man I’ve ever seen, crying and trying to stab himself with a spoon.”

“Turnupseed’s heart is going to break when he finds out what we are,” Liberty said.

“Friends are what we are,” Willie said.

Liberty went downstairs and sat alone in the living room, which was arranged for conversation. Clem lay in the kitchen, the same color as the refrigerator, his legs straight up in the air. In the living room was a fireplace containing a screen that, if plugged in, would project a fire burning. Liberty did not want the illusion of a fire burning. Liberty loved Willie. She believed in love and knew that every day was judgment day. It didn’t seem to be enough anymore. If someone loved you, Willie said, you became other than what you knew yourself to be. He did not want to become that other one. Willie was becoming a little occult in his attitudes. His thoughts included Liberty less and less, his coordinates were elsewhere, his possibilities without her becoming more actualized. This was marriage.

“Why don’t you and Willie have a baby?” Liberty’s mother demanded frequently when she phoned them at home. “What are you waiting for! If you had a baby I’d come and take care of it for you. I saw a cute little quilt for its crib the other day in town. I do wish you’d have a baby, Liberty, I’d like to have someone to eat ice cream with. Your father can’t eat ice cream, as you know. He swells up. They have some very exotic flavors these days like Hula Pie. I don’t think it would be wise to start the baby right off on Hula Pie, though. I think something simpler would be in order, like French Vanilla. How soon would it be, do you think, before the baby could have a little cup of French Vanilla ice cream?”

Liberty looked out the windows at the sunset colors rushing, funneling, toward the horizon. It was a good sunset. When it was over, she curled up on the couch and turned on the television. On the screen there was a picture of a plate with a large steak and a plump baked potato on it. The potato got up and a little slit appeared in it, which was apparently its mouth, and it apparently began talking. Liberty turned up the sound. It was a commercial for potatoes, and the potato was complaining that everyone says steak and potatoes instead of the other way around. It nestled down against the steak again after making its point. The piece of meat didn’t say anything.

Willie and Liberty went to a party given by the Edgecups of the Crab Key Association. Turnupseed had reminded them to go. He was surprised that the Maxwells hadn’t told them about it. The house was pink, and shuttered in the Bermuda fashion. Everything was pink. The phones were pink, the statuary and chaise longues. The balloons bobbing in the swimming pool were pink. The punch was pink.

The hostess greeted them with ardor. She was standing beside a gentleman wearing bathing trunks which were imprinted with flying beach umbrellas.

“You two are just cute as buttons,” she said. “Are you related?”

“We’re brother and sister,” Willie said.

“That’s adorable,” she said. “I had a brother once but he was …” she fluttered her fingers “… one of those. Very into the Greek tradition. He stole away all my boyfriends.” She looked down at Clem, who stood beside them chewing on an ice cube. “What,” she asked, “is that supposed to represent?”

“It’s a dog,” the gentleman suggested. “A pet would be my guess.”

“It certainly has peculiar eyes,” the hostess said. “My, I wouldn’t want to look at them every day. They sure remind me of something, though.” A memory knocked, then tramped muddily through her otherwise fastidious memory rooms. “Goodness,” she said excitedly. “I haven’t been this broody in years!.. Have you tried the pears stuffed with Gorgonzola? I want everyone to promise me they’ll try them.” She wandered off.

“What’s your line of work, son?” the gentleman asked Willie. He was drinking a martini from a jar. He would unscrew the cap of the jar, take a sip and screw the lid back on again. After each sip, his jaws would go slack, giving him a meaty look.

Willie shrugged.

The man nodded. “I don’t believe in work either,” he said, and laughed. “It’s my money that believes in it.” His laugh had bubbles and clots in it. He probed delicately at one of the beach umbrellas tipped at the crotch of his bathing trunks.

“I’ve saved a few people recently,” Willie said. “If you call that work. It’s what’s been coming up recently.”

“What are you, one of those Witnesses? Sneak up to a place with those little booklets, trying to make a man change his ways? A stranger comes up to my door, I greet him bare-ass, dick out, pistol ready.” He narrowed his eyes.

“I’m not doing what you think,” Willie said. “This wasn’t your redemption stuff. This was minor. Material stuff. Isolated events. Drowning. Shock.”

It was true. Willie had been saving people, though he knew it didn’t have the feel of a calling.

The first person Willie had saved was a young man struck by lightning on the beach. It was late in the afternoon of a stormy day, and they were watching the surfers enjoy the high, troubled Gulf. The sky was the color of plums and the water pale, and the surfers were dark on their bright boards. The boy had been hurled out of the water and thrown twenty feet through the air onto the beach by the force of the charge. His chest had been badly burned. The burns were delicate and intricate like the web of a spider. Willie had administered cardiopulmonary resuscitation. The young man’s name was Carl. He was small and blond and looked ferocious even when he was unconscious. A few days later his parents had come over to the house with a box of chocolate-covered cherries. The parents were old and grateful. They had had Carl very late in life. They said he was a wild boy whom they had never understood. They thought he had a death wish. They were old and Carl was young. They couldn’t understand his hurry.

While they were at the house, Carl’s father, Big Carl, who was an automobile mechanic, gave their truck a tune-up. Carl’s mother found a tick the size of an acorn under Clem’s chin and disposed of it without fuss in the toilet. She confided to Liberty that Carl had once called her a bugger and made her cry. She never cried about anything, she said, except her little Carl.

Willie had saved two people next, an elderly couple in a Mercedes who had taken a wrong turn and driven briskly down a boat ramp into eight feet of water. Willie had been there to pull open the door. His hand had first rested on a man’s bearded face, and for an instant, Willie said, he thought he was going to get bitten. The old woman wore a low-cut evening gown which showed off her Pacemaker to good advantage. The three of them stood dripping on the ramp, staring at the fuchsia pom-pom on the Mercedes antenna, all that was visible on the surface of the bay. They had been going to the opera.