Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“There was a pelican over there just before you came,” Liberty said, pointing at the little pool. The pump whirred secretively, behind the fleshy, drooping lilies. “Somebody had hurt it.” She tossed her head in dismay.

“Uhh,” Mercury said. “You seen one of them. I heard about them. Some fisherman doing it, correct? This heat makes people mean. Days like this, they’re false days. It’s best to let them go right on by.”

“I went over to it thinking I could help it, but it flew off. I had some idea about fixing it somehow.”

“Naw,” Mercury said. “You try to fix a wild, hurt thing like that and what happens is, the same thing happens. You take them home and keep them warm and feed them things and you look at them and they look at you and in three days they die. You wouldn’t happen to have some ice for the ice tea I bought, would you?”

They went inside the house, to the kitchen. Liberty cracked apart the ice from the trays and dropped them into Mercury’s jar.

“Do you like that soft, mushy ice they give you sometimes in a cup that gets all colored up with what you’re drinking?” Mercury asked.

“No,” Liberty said. The coldness of the house made the bones around her eyes ache.

“Neither do I,” Mercury said. “So,” she said, “I’d best get started. I don’t want the lady to see too many of them dead leaves.” Mercury had put too much fertilizer around the trees near the swimming pool and the leaves were dropping. They floated, green and gold, on the surface of the pool and cluttered the trap. “I should have rinsed down into the roots more,” Mercury said.

“They’ll come back.”

“Sure they will!” Mercury agreed. She unfolded her long self from the chair she’d been sitting on and went outside. Heat clawed its way into the kitchen before the door swung shut. The heat had a force and a sound to it that summer, a smell and even a language to it — a dry and erratic click like a foreign tribe speaking, the sound of parched leaves and hot air stirring and clicking, the sound an animal’s untrimmed nails would make tapping and clicking on some polished floor.

Liberty went down the hall to Willie’s room. The bed was neatly made, the sheets pulled tight without a crease. Above it was the only decoration in the room, a poster of the planet Saturn and its mysterious rings. Willie had bought it the year before when their class had visited a planetarium. Liberty remembered how trapped she had felt there, in the darkness, beneath the expanding dome. The days had hurried by in the planetarium. Celestial bodies rose, moved toward the west, set. The heavens turned round and round. Sunrises followed one another more and more rapidly. Liberty had clenched the armrests, feeling she was going to be spun away. Then the sky had become dense black. In the place of stars, question marks appeared. “This,” a voice had said, “is the Universe as we know it.”

Liberty lay on the bed and looked at the poster. Saturn was cold and gloomy and peaceful. For a moment or two she lay composed, her mind blank. Then she thought, this is the way Willie feels alone here, everything quiet and still and far away, and then she wasn’t peaceful anymore for her mind had started to run, trying to capture what it was that Willie felt when he was feeling nothing. It wasn’t her own voice she heard but just the mind’s running in a rapid cold and clotted circle like Saturn’s rings.

She was fifteen and she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby.

They hadn’t done it all the time. There was the first time, but then they grew cautious and there were other times but not always. There were good days and bad days, safe and dangerous ones, even as Mercury had attested, false days and true. But now there were just days that multiplied.

Liberty got up and smoothed the sheets tight again. She sniffed the pillowcase, which smelled of Willie, a soft palmy smell like a lake, then went back to her own room where she took off her clothes and put on her bathing suit. The suit was a faded one from the summer before that had lost its shape and begun to nubble. She felt childish and obscure in it and for a while picked abstractly at the beaded material, rolling the balls in her fingers and dropping them into the wastebasket on top of the calendar that she — sick of seeing the numbered days — had discarded there that morning. The calendar was one from church — there were several scattered throughout the house — and above the days that month was the Red Sea being parted, a picture that Liberty had come to dislike intensely. It was a quite ordinary interpretation. The blessed marched between towering but submissive walls of water behind which the creatures of the sea gazed forth, in wonder, with troubled, babylike faces, innocent and isolated.

She walked around her room. It was a pretty room, cheerful. The one window was filled with the view of the garden and it caught her eye once more, like a nail catching the sleeve of a blouse, but the garden was empty except for the massed colors of its flowers trembling in the heat. She was the only one at home. Calvin and Doris and Willie, too, were down at the church with other volunteers, painting the nave. She had been with them, but the fumes from the paint had made her sick. Honey, get away from that can and put your head way back, a lady had said. She was one of Doris’s friends. Her hair was in a bun and she had a dagger of dried paint on her cheek. Liberty had put her head way back and had seen the single fan in the vertex of the church, its paddles beating in a blur, whirling silently far above her, like a bat. And that had comforted her a little, for it was a familiar thing and something she had thought long ago for a time to be a bat before she knew it was a fan.

She had felt sick and she had come home. She would be all right. Everyone would be all right, she thought. Her life would be different. Very different, that was all. And that was fine. That’s what life was, the whole purpose of it was not to be left behind. And she and Willie and the baby would all three just go ahead and not be left behind, and it would be different, which was fine. She would be happy and stoical about it. Could one be happy and stoical at once?

Sweat crawled through her hair. She went out to the swimming pool.

“Ah,” Mercury said, “I been waiting on you for some company here.” She had tied herself up top and bottom in two big handkerchiefs, the knots riding like rabbit ears on her bony hips. The two girls went to the edge of the pool and fell flat out in.

“This water warm as buns,” Mercury screamed. They paddled around, Mercury kicking the water like a can before she stepped back out. “This is not the refeshment I imagined at all,” she fretted. “How’s it doing you?”

“It’s doing me all right,” Liberty said.

Mercury drew on her clothes, shook the corn rows of her hair. Liberty lay floating on her back, watching her through her spread out feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mercury said, “hold on, day after tomorrow.”

“Bye then,” Liberty said.

“Bye.”

Liberty swam back and forth the length of the pool, first rapidly, then doggedly. Then she swam leisurely, as though she had all the time in the world, back and forth.

They had all come home by early suppertime, spattered with paint in an earthly camouflage of divine works. Liberty begged off supper by saying she still felt too hot to eat. She wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the canvas of the diving board, watching Willie and his parents moving about in the kitchen and settling around the table, bowing their heads momentarily in prayer over the fruit cup. The table was covered with layers of old clean cloths, for Doris and Calvin did not believe in throwing things away. When a person dropped his arm on that table, it would just about bounce off the padding.