Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

Willie lay on the bed and Liberty felt that she should move toward him, smile or burst into tears, put her tongue in his mouth, cover him with her wounded body, perform the blind rituals of women. She turned toward him, but her eye caught instead a white sculpted head on a bureau. It had zippers for eyes, two rectangular drawers for a mouth. It was a jewel box, she supposed.

“What’s this, do you think?” Willie said. He had opened the drawer of a table and was holding what appeared to be a flashlight. It was black and cylindrical, with a checkered pattern on the handle. It had a lens, but looked oddly malignant, as though it had been manufactured not for the purposes of light at all.

“It almost looks like a weapon,” Liberty said, “but it’s so small.” She touched a button on it and wafers of light struck and fluttered across the red walls.

“Anything can be a weapon,” Willie said. “In the house I was in on that very pretty inlet, there was a water pistol filled with ammonia in every room. Fear. There’s so much fear.”

Liberty put the object on the table. She sat down beside Willie and put her head in his lap. He stroked her hair. She parted her lips and pressed them against the khaki cloth of his groin.

He desired what she was still not. The weight and warmth she touched had nothing to do with desire for her. Charlie had told her that he once got an erection from contemplating an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Red. He told her that the moment, which had not been fleeting, had appalled him.

“What?” Liberty said.

“You were right,” Willie said. “There is someone in this house.”

Liberty sat up quickly and turned. A tall, muscular woman stood looking at them. She wore a bikini with a wide leather belt around her narrow waist. Weights hung from the buckle of the belt. Her features were fine, even aristocratic, but her face was deeply pock-marked, and the pulse in her neck quivered and jumped. She was old. The long muscles in her thighs bunched as she moved around the bed toward the table and picked up the cylinder lying there.

“You don’t know how this works?” she said. She seemed amused. She held it downward in the palm of her hand. “You cock your hand like this, as though you were playing with a child and making shadow images of a duck on the wall.” She tilted her head, inches from Willie.

Liberty thought of Teddy with a quick dismay, as though she had misplaced him, as though he were in her charge in this house but that she had forgotten where. Little Dot was already gone. She had allowed her to be gone, like a part of herself, twice gone.

“Then just flick your hand toward your target …”—The lower end of the cylinder flew out and hammered Willie on the arm. He grunted and turned pale—“… catch it as it reaches its fullest extension and snap it back to striking position again.” She snapped the thing several times in the air. “Little cobra-like flicks, see.”

There were a dozen small bleeding lacerations on Willie’s arm.

A telephone rang somewhere in the house. “Well, answer it,” the woman said to Liberty.

Liberty walked from the room in the direction of the ringing. She couldn’t see the phone. She felt faint and believed she was going to fall before she reached the ringing. On the beach she saw Clem, amusing himself by rolling rocks about with his nose.

The phone was covered with a wicker basket stacked with books. The World Was My Garden was stamped on the spine of one of the books.

She pulled the phone from beneath the basket.

“Yes,” she said.

It was the police. The police were selling chances on a bass boat. The bass boat would benefit bad boys who the police were trying to rehabilitate by sending them to camp. Liberty had heard about the camp. The bad boys cleared brush, made trails and learned how to put their thoughts down on paper. They took apart four-cylinder engines and put them back together again. The bad boys liked doing all these things but what they really enjoyed doing was catching armadillos and cutting off their front feet for luck. The police didn’t tell her that but Liberty knew it as a fact.

“I don’t believe I’ll take a chance today,” Liberty said, speaking in such a way, she hoped, as to leave the future open.

W illie came into the room, followed by the old woman. She was tanned and balding. She was oiled up, her hair was short, gray, and grew in tufts. She squatted down and looked upward at them as though to view them better, gazing at them as though they were forlorn, barely sentient creatures in a hutch. Thick, crisscrossing bands of muscle moved in her legs. Her face was gaunt and cruelly scarred, and her breasts were as high and round as a girl’s.

Liberty covered the phone once again with the basket. She performed this simple task soundlessly. It calmed her somewhat.

“Who was it?” the woman asked.

“Actually, it was the police,” Liberty said.

“I hope you told them everything was under control.”

“They were just selling chances,” Liberty said. “On a boat.”

“A boat!” she exclaimed. “How interesting! A boat to sail away in.”

Clem had appeared at the glass door. The woman looked at him with delight and let him in.

“This,” she said, pointing her bare, slender foot at him, “is a disguise, correct?” She smiled at Clem.

“The disguise of a repressed idea,” Willie said. He was still pale. He held his arm behind his back as though it embarrassed him.

“I understand,” the woman said. “He probably knows too much to have an actual personality. I like him very much.” She unbuckled the weighted belt from around her waist and laid it on the floor. “What were you planning on taking?” she asked Willie.

“Nothing.”

She looked at Liberty. “Why don’t you sit down, dear.”

Liberty sat down.

“Is this your husband?”

Liberty nodded.

“I’ve marked him now, dear, you know. He’ll never forget me.”

“These marks,” Willie said, looking at his arm, “will last a week at the most.”

She turned her back on them and flexed her muscles.

“You’re really ripped,” Willie said. “Your definition is spectacular.”

“Why, thank you,” the woman said. “That’s true. I’m peaking today. I like to peak each year on my birthday. It takes about four months. I stick with a basic split system routine. Monday, chest and back; Tuesday, shoulders and biceps; Wednesdays, legs and triceps. I train each body part twice a week. At first I was consuming thirty-five hundred calories a day but I gradually decreased that to four hundred. I also lightened the weights on some of my lifts. For example, I’ve been doing only two hundred pounds in the squat recently.”

“Today is your birthday?” Liberty asked. She felt disturbingly like the woman’s birthday gift, delivered.

“Yes it is. I am seventy-five years of age today.” She hit a pose, one leg flexed, hands clasped, smiling. Then she bent over and picked Clem up in her arms. She held him for a moment, then put him down again.

“He really is extraordinary,” she said. “I can lift twice my body weight, but no more. Of course, he’s not twice my body weight. He weighs around one forty, I would imagine.” She picked Clem up again and walked around the room with him. She thrust her arms out straight and held him close against the wall for a moment. It was an unnerving sight.

“He’s very close to being the shade of the walls, isn’t he, and the shade of the walls is exactly the color of the inside of Rothko’s forearm. That’s the color he always wanted as the backdrop for his paintings, you know. Pale ivory with a slight, yellowish cast, the color of Cellutex.” She pursed her lips. “It was the crook of the arm where he slashed himself, severing the brachial artery on February twenty-fourth, 1970.”