Joy Williams - Breaking and Entering

Once a day, Miss Tweedie came to see Liberty. Miss Melanie Tweedie had been employed to help her. You almost died, dear, and at times you feel you did die. That’s a very common feeling, it’s been well documented. In times of war when a man survives and the buddy right next to him does not. That’s where most of our documentation comes from. Or from multiple car crashes or tornadoes . The word buddy sounded strange on Miss Tweedie’s lips. But in your case, dear, no one died. That little thing, bless it, wasn’t anything you must think died .

Liberty sat on a bed in a seersucker bathrobe and stared at the nubs of the cloth. She counted the nubs on one sleeve and then the other. The numbers never came out the same. The nubs of the seersucker gave the appearance of something missing. You are preceiving your life, which you really look upon as your nondeath, as a spectator Miss Tweedie said. Oh, it’s possible to know so much today .

There was, of course, a doctor. He told Liberty that there was a chemical substance similar to morphine produced naturally in the brain when death was near, when the other systems began to fail. Everything , the doctor said, can be explained eventually . The doctor’s son had won a jingle contest sponsored by a cereal company and the whole family was going to Hollywood for a week. Doctors can’t afford to take things too seriously , the doctor said. Miss Tweedie was short and the doctor tall. They came to her each day like the hands of a clock.

Then on that day Liberty was to be released, it was Willie who came to her. Miss Tweedie helped her pack her things in a brown paper grocery bag. The bag had a hurricane-tracking map on it, for it was the season. The sky was gray with big hot rain clouds massing. It was the fall now. Willie had been outside and she had been inside all this time and no one thought it was unusual.

She stood outside the hospital with him, looking backward at the windows of Five North. There were holes for windows there, but there was no glass. There were louvers, and behind the louvers, concrete block.

“Where have you been?” she asked him.

“I haven’t been home,” Willie said. “They won’t let us live there anymore. I’ve been living in Blossum in a trailer.”

“Are we going there?” she asked. She shaded her eyes with her hand against the stolid light. She felt that she had a job to do, that she had just been hired for this job. She had to live out each day, one after another, until her days were gone.

He shook his head. “We’ll go outside town.” He wore jeans, a jacket without a shirt and a beautiful and incongruous pair of wing tips from a thrift shop. She knew they were a dead man’s shoes.

“I still trust you,” Liberty said.

“We missed, didn’t we.”

“Part of us didn’t,” she said.

“My father gave us money. It will last us a while.”

Liberty remembered Beg-A-Loan. She remembered a drawer in Doris’s kitchen filled with clean dishtowels, the smell of her embrace like fresh biscuits. Everything had been in order there, loving and illusionary. “Are your mother and father all right?” She tugged at her hair, a habit she had picked up in Five North. Broken strands of it fell through her fingers.

“No,” Willie said, “they’re not all right.”

“They’ve shut the door, have they?” she said, pulling her hair.

“Old-fashioned banishment,” he said. “The result of too much Bible study.”

“My parents don’t even know anything about this, I guess.”

“I don’t think so,” Willie said. He took an envelope out of his pants pocket. “We have to get a car. I know where we’re going to live.”

“All right.”

A school bus went by with younger children on it.

There was money in the envelope and a tape. “They sent us this too,” Willie said. “I haven’t listened to it.”

“I can imagine,” Liberty said.

“Hurt and sadness,” Willie said. “Fear and panic. Regret.”

“I don’t want to hear it.”

“We could go over to Tape Ape and listen to it.”

Across the street from the hospital was a record store called Tape Ape. Beside it was a florist, then a bakery, then a bar. Liberty and Willie had often gone into the record store after school and played records in the cubicles there. She had forgotten about it. They had gone there all the time. A lot of the kids from school did. She tried to remember if she had any friends at school, if she had ever done anything with these friends, like listen to a record in a booth at Tape Ape, wondering whether to buy it or not. She thought she probably hadn’t. She had gone there with Willie. She held the bag with her things in it against her stomach. She couldn’t get the thought out of her mind that she had been hired for the job of accomplishing this day and the day after. The thought picked away across her mind like a buzzard on a highway, its ragged wings raised, its frightful head daintily moving. Across the street in the bakery, cardboard cakes filled the window in tiers. There were birthday cakes and wedding cakes, samples of what could be done.

Liberty looped the tape out with her fingers, then bit it in two. She wound the tape round and round her finger and dropped the plastic casing into the street.

“We don’t want this song,” she said. “We don’t want this to be our sad song.” But she knew that it was, that even unheard it would be their song.

Willie watched her somberly. He was large and young and almost grown, and in his youngness he seemed larger than a man. He frowned a little, full of what seemed manly reserve and self-control. Or perhaps he simply felt nothing. The girl with him had a fallow look. She appeared a little irresponsible, her hair was wild, her face drawn, although she did not look close to tears. Her heart, big as a baby’s head, beat on. It was going to beat on.

They stood, two suicides, blinking at one another in the day’s ashy light.

D own the beach came a rider on a gray and golden horse. The rider passed.

“You poor children,” Poe sighed. “You’ve given up lust, love, even life in order to remain together.”

“She’s forgiven me,” Willie said. “She didn’t mention that.”

“Forgiveness,” Poe said. She shrugged, dismissing it, then pushed herself away from the table and stood up. Her arms swung wide from her powerfully sloping shoulders. “Love,” she said. “It hounds us every day of our lives, baying at us with its hound voice. It follows us and runs before us and beside us, it doesn’t leave us in peace for a minute, but at the hour of our greatest need, our death, it lies curled meek as rags in some dark corner.” She sighed. “Well, that’s a sad, sad story and now that you’ve told it, there’s nothing left for you but to stay here, with me. It happened a long time ago, but that was when you entered your life, dear. And that entrance allowed you to go so far and no farther. You won’t go any farther.”

Willie’s eyes were blank. He seemed to accept this.

Liberty reached down and pushed Clem’s legs out of the T-shirt. She worked it over his head and dropped it on the rug. It had a chemical smell, a burnt smell, like hurt earth, hurt air. She pressed her wet eyes against his coat.

“He’s such a comfort, isn’t he,” Poe said. “Are you familiar with the works of Melville? There was a man who knew a great deal about whiteness, its quality of absence, ‘its dumb blankness, full of meaning’ ….”

Liberty stroked Clem’s coat and glanced at Willie. His eyes were half-shut now. The eyes are drawers, she thought, smoothly sliding drawers that open and close, filled with things that are put in, taken out.