Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

“I love you, Mother.”

“Thank you, dear, but you’re as different from your sister as a rainy day is from a sunny one. It’s astonishing that you both came out of the same womb.”

“But I guess we did,” Liberty said.

“Honestly, dear, I’m the one who knows that! You know what Daddy used to say? Daddy used to say he’d just like to crawl up in my womb and live there. Only come out when he felt like it.”

Liberty was silent. The house was silent. In the moonstruck yard, the banyan directed a new pink-nosed root around its humped and twisting elders into a slender, mold-filled crack.

“Have I offended you, again?” her mother said. “When did you get to be such a prude! I’m not allowed to make references to my husband of many, many years and your own father?”

“I’m just a little tired, I guess,” Liberty said. “All this news has tired me.”

“News is tiring,” her mother agreed. “They executed someone last night at the prison and reading about that really wore me out. This man had done everything heinous there was to do — kidnapped, murdered, raped, dismembered, everything. Then for his last meal, he orders all this food. He orders lobster and chicken-fried steak and dirty rice and french fries and peanut butter cups, and then he doesn’t eat it. Not only doesn’t he eat it, he refuses to eat it. Isn’t that the last straw! Good riddance to that one, I say.”

“What does sister look like?”

“You should call her ‘Liberty,’ dear. After all, that’s her name.”

“That’s difficult for me to do, Mother. Just at this moment.”

“That’s such a peculiar question, anyway, what does it matter what she looks like? What’s important is the lost has been found. The burden of my indiscretion has been lifted. I’ve felt remorse about this for years, it wasn’t just when I told you about it. You know how sometimes some little thing will just keep nagging at you? Well, that’s the way the abandonment of my child was with me all these years. And it took its toll, let me tell you. Recently, I had taken up spitting. I let all my hobbies go and just went around expectorating all the time. That was my body’s way of censuring me for my past. But now that she’s back, I feel that there’s a tall glass in me filled with clear, cool water.”

“I’m very glad for you, Mother,” Liberty said.

“I realize that I’ve encouraged some misconceptions, and we should probably straighten them out slowly. I’ve been lavishing all my attention on you for years, and now I have to spread it out a little more evenly. Did we ever frost a cake together?”

“I don’t think so,” Liberty said.

“Well, I was going to use that as an analogy, but I guess I can’t.” Lucille paused. “Darn,” she said. “You know, I get this voice on the telephone at times when I’m dialing you. His name is Mr. Bobby. He doesn’t live with you or anything, does he? Are you taking in roomers? No? Well, you must know him somehow or else why would I be getting him on the phone all the time? Mr. Bobby makes the most wonderful use of metaphors, doesn’t he? I live in such a prosaic world with your father. Life with your father is life in a starved universe, but Mr. Bobby sees everything in terms of something else. I have a feeling he’s blind. The blind are a certain kind of people, just like the deaf and the sick and the dead, and Mr. Bobby has that certain something. Don’t you agree? Are you sure we never frosted a cake together? I don’t know how you can be so sure …”

Liberty had shut her eyes and was rubbing them gently. Small faces howled soundlessly behind her lids. They loomed out of the darkness, then fell back, into it.

“What are you going to do now?” her mother asked.

Liberty’s eyes flew open. All of the windows of the house were raised and the leaves of the banyan, large as men’s hands in the moonlight, were pressed against the screens. For an instant, she felt as if she and her mother had been carrying on some other conversation.

“Mother,” Liberty said, “what if I came up to see you again, would that be all right?” She wanted her mother to be well, to be free. Tears filled her eyes.

“Why would you do that! Don’t come up here! Can’t you leave me alone!”

Liberty heard her father saying, “Oh stop, Lucile. Can’t you stop … please, please, please stop.”

“When I stop that will be that,” her mother said. “I’ll stop like a clock.”

“Please, please, please,…” her father said.

“Are you there?” her mother said.

“Yes,” Liberty said. “I am. Yes.”

“A taxi brought her here, a blue taxi. It seemed so natural to me, that blue taxi coming up to the house. And my first instinct when she got out was to get in and be taken back to where she had come from. Do you understand me?”

“Yes,” Liberty said. “You could have gotten in. I’m glad you didn’t get in.”

“I let it leave. It left empty. It was a lovely color, a robin’s egg blue. I pray it won’t come back, but I’ve been expecting it for so long, I’m afraid I’ll imagine it now coming back. I may not be calling you for a while. I have to work some things out with myself and with Liberty, but I must do it in solitude.”

“She loves you, Mother.”

“Yes, she loves me. I can feel it. She loves me without even knowing me. Just like Mr. Bobby. Mr. Bobby loves me too, and I’ve never told him word one about myself. You don’t talk to Mr. Bobby, you know. No, you’re quiet as a little bunny in a meadow. You listen. Have you ever heard him on the Seven Sorrows? I think he’s better on the Sorrows than he is on the Sins. The Sins are a little old-fashioned, don’t you think? They’ve been around too long. Mr. Bobby doesn’t pay much attention to them, he says they’re so easily replaced by their opposite, that all it takes is a little dignity and self-reliance and self-control, but the Sorrows! They’re more modern, and Mr. Bobby warms right up to the Sorrows. I’m working on Regret now, trying to turn it into Rejoice. Your father, of course, goes on his merry way, oblivious to my efforts, which he thinks can be maintained twenty-four hours a day without a bit of stratagem. Don’t I sound better to you?”

“You sound a little better now, Mother.”

“It’s hard rejoicing all by yourself. You have Willie. You have that big animal, whatever he is. You’re not alone.”

“Daddy …”

“Liberty, you have this habit, this most annoying habit of persisting in the belief that life with your father is conducted to the tinkle of spoons on ice cream plates, that our only worries are fire ant mounds on the croquet court.”

“Could I speak with Daddy for just a moment?”

“Do you know why your father married me? He married me for my headlights. He couldn’t get enough of them.”

“Headlights?”

“My shakers, my knockers. That was the level he was working on.” She did not sound displeased. “You’ve always thought Daddy had sense. The man’s never had a grain of sense.”

Liberty stretched out on the sofa and pushed a cushion behind her head. Beneath the cushion on a scrap of paper was a doodle. This was the doodle of the determined worm crawling over a razor blade.

“Now I hope you’ll take care of yourself,” her mother said. “I’m not going to call anymore. I have to sort this all out. I’m afraid you’re the cause of my depression, dear. I probably shouldn’t even think of you for a while. When you think of me, I wish you’d think of me with this look of ineffable joy on my face because that’s the look I’m working on. I’m hoping that that look will percolate down to become the real me. I will become a sorrowless woman, who knows, maybe even the sorrowless woman, and then we’ll talk again.”