Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

“Just the light,” she said. “I don’t like that rosy light.”

“It’s pretty,” Willie said.

“It’s lurid,” Liberty said fretfully. “Oh, I don’t care about the light,” she said. She pushed the pillow up behind her back and studied the hem of the white sheet. A hole in it had been mended with a circle of bright cloth.

“Are you frightened?” Willie asked.

“No.”

“Remember the planetarium, how frightened you were?”

“You said it was all done with machines.”

“You can’t remember the way you were, always frightened.”

“I’m not frightened now.”

“You’re not making this up?” Willie said. “You’re not just trying to make yourself up in another way?”

Liberty shook her head. “It’s a baby.”

“What’s it feel like?”

“Like me, but a moving away from me too. It’s nice.”

“It’s got gills still, and a tail.”

“Not anymore.”

“I’ve heard you can feel their fingernails scratching inside you.”

“No, no, not yet.”

“Like this,” Willie said. He slowly moved his hand toward her face and drew a long nail lightly down her cheek.

“Don’t,” Liberty said.

He put his hands to his own face and drew the nails heavily down. She saw red lines obediently follow the gesture across his skin.

“Your nails are too long,” she said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”

He picked a paper punch from her desk and made a perfect moon in his thumbnail, then moved it, punching circles in the nails of each hand.

“That’s gruesome,” Liberty said.

“It doesn’t hurt.” He gathered the cuttings in his palm and closed his hand over them.

“You know what the worst thing is?” he asked. “The worst thing is to lead another’s life.”

“You mean the baby? The baby’s not going to be leading my life.”

“There’ll be three of us,” Willie said. “Before, there’s just been one of us, you and me.”

“We can do anything still.”

“You’re making plans. You’re making agreements. You make too many agreements with the world, Liberty. Something’s trying to murder you and you’re helping it choose the time and the place.”

“It’s not a murderer,” she said. “What are you saying? I’m not going to hurt this baby, it’s what’s happened to us now.”

“Happened to us,” he said. He shook the full moons of his nails into the wastebasket. That’s filling up, Liberty thought, filling up quite sensibly. “I want myself and you,” Willie was saying. “Not children. I don’t want this circular stuff.”

“Circular stuff,” Liberty said. “Circular stuff.” She was astonished.

“You want to become your own mother, instead of your own self.”

“I certainly don’t want to become my mother,” Liberty said. She tried to smile. His words were a net of abstraction, falling, settling. “You’re just scared is all,” she said miserably.

“We can’t just let things happen,” he said. “I’m not scared.” He wandered around the room, touching things, books and jars, with his strange fingers. He sat down beside her on the bed and pulled the sheet from her breasts, ran his hands across her ribs and belly. “We’re so beautiful,” he said.

“Ugh,” Liberty said, “those hands. You’re not as beautiful as you used to be.”

“Look at us, we’re beautiful. Haven’t we made up everything perfectly so far?”

“Well,” she said, “I guess not, no. There were a few things we didn’t learn when we should have, I guess.”

“You can’t learn everything.”

“Sure you can. You can share with anything too, love anything. And that’s what you’ve got to learn.”

“You can’t learn love, you can’t learn death.”

“Sure you can,” Liberty said. It was as though words were a bridge and the bridge had abruptly broken and she was falling. She touched Willie’s shoulder — the sensation was that real — to keep herself from falling.

“You’re the one who’s scared,” Willie said. “You shouldn’t be scared.” She clung to his white shirt, which was falling with her in her eyes. “If I died, would you follow me?” Willie asked.

“How could I follow you. I wouldn’t know you.” She was falling, there was no sense to it. “I don’t know any dead people,” she said. It seemed to her a failing, even somewhat disrespectful.

“We’ve used each other up here,” Willie said.

“No,” Liberty said faintly.

When they had been younger still, Willie’s mother had told them about death, and she made it sound so exciting they had wondered aloud if it was as much fun to keep on living. And Doris had said, Why of course it was. You had to get the living over with first. The important thing was to let God use you up every day. It you struggled against Him and didn’t allow Him to use you up, then the next day couldn’t be used up either, nor the day after that and you’d always be left with less than a whole life to get rid of.

“You still think it’s an amazing thing to be able to die,” Liberty said. “There are things that are a lot harder, almost everything.” She tore the scarf from the shade, but his face appeared the same to her, bony and known, a hungry face which seemed to crave nothing.

“I’m free,” he said, “and you’re free, but now, not later. I’ve always wanted it this way, and haven’t you really? And Mama’s God won’t have a single part to play in this, that God she thinks she knows so well.” He lay down beside her, cupping her face in his hands. His breath was sweet. “I’ve never believed in anything,” he said, “except you and me.”

They talked each other through that night so that in the morning they were slick, brand-new twins at last, sliding out of the same dark and purling womb of incoherent happiness. They talked their way out of that night right into the dawn where the world pulled back in golden halves like a peach does from a pit, disclosing the pit’s dark and ragged heart.

“You know what I’ve had all these years?” Willie said. “Your Daddy’s pills. He gave them to my Daddy when he was working on his teeth, for the pain, but you know Daddy, he wouldn’t reduce by a twinge the discomfort he felt was his to bear, and you know too that things never strike him as being suspicious, only people, and so he kept them. Mama moved them around so much she’d forgotten where they were by the time I had them. There are a lot of them, but there’s still probably not enough. And they’re old, so they’re not as strong either.”

“We want them strong,” Liberty said.

He showed them to her. There were black capsules with slim red bands. There were pink capsules full of scarlet grains. There were plump pills that looked like matrons in pancake make-up, and there were skinny, reckless ones that looked fast as race cars. A silent instrumental orchestra of pills, each containing its own dreams and intentions. A circus of pills, each containing its bears and tigers, its glittering globes and toothful acrobats. There were Miltowns and Equanils, Serax and Tranxene. All the pills had real names and then they had other names, like everything else. The other names, the names they had in Blossum, were Christmas Trees and Bluebirds, Rainbows and Green Dragons. The other names, like everything’s other name, suggested more light, more air, something furious and beautiful.

The new day brought a sky that was a cloudless ashen blue and soon the air began to click once more with the heat, with the clicking secretive language of heat.

Willie went off early to Blossum. Liberty tried to talk to the baby. The baby, she thought, knew nothing, but understood a lot, but the baby wasn’t listening to her. The baby wasn’t going to have anything more to do with her. The baby had picked the wrong person all right! Liberty tried to explain things to the baby as Willie had been explaining things to her, but this did not intrigue the baby. Liberty thought that the love she had for the baby was natural and instinctive and that the love she had for Willie was more intentional. Deliberate love was supposed to be more profound because it committed the soul, even though to Liberty such commitment had the rotting color of eternity tinging its boundlessness. And that was where they were headed, right into those rotting, blue and black colors. She tried to tell the baby that, personally, she felt that the other love, which she had wholly for the baby, was what was going to see them through, but the baby wouldn’t listen. What the baby understood was that it had climbed into the wrong spaceship.