Joy Williams: Breaking and Entering

The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Truth was not a guarantee made to the paper’s readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror — the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.

A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen in love with the wrong babies and now they didn’t want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.

Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children’s voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.

Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way — West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing — time for the thing, they’d say, let’s do the thing — became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.

The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children’s voices.

Liberty and Willie had not been in this town long, six months, she knew two children well, Teddy and Little Dot. In a way they were her children in this town.

Tee, Little Dot called Liberty. There was always a scrape on her cheek or a cut on her arm, for she hurt herself often and was unaware of it. Her eyes were deeply set and dark. “Tee,” Little Dot called, something glittering on her wrist, something shining that she loved, something cheap, bright and useless that Liberty had bought her from a gum machine. Little Dot had been brain-damaged from birth, for her parents had been heavy dopers, now reformed. Her mother, Rosie, had been junking up so long she hardly knew she was pregnant, and when she finally acknowledged that she was, she was twenty-three weeks along. The doctor said they probably had just enough time to slip in the saline, and that it was just as well since Rosie was so toxic that the baby would probably be a very unhealthy one. As Rosie lay on the table and the doctor was preparing to do the abortion, Little Dot slipped out. She just pushed her own way out, bawling, a little bigger than a lady’s hand. “She’s a keeper,” the doctor said. “Can’t do anything about this one now.” And no one could. Little Dot lived in world of her own, in mindscapes no one could know.

It had been Liberty’s first night in town and she had been walking with Clem on the beach when she first met Little Dot. The child was all alone, a broken rope around her waist.

“I like to pee on the sand and look at the stars,” Little Dot said.

“Well, we all like to do that,” Liberty said.

She wore a dog tag with her name and address stamped on it, and Liberty took her home. It was just across the beach in a rundown shopping center where her parents, Roger and Rosie had a pottery shop called Oh! They lived in their shop and in a van that was parked out front. Behind the shop was a kiln and a tepee, where Little Dot slept.

“Oh,” Rosie said, “you must think we’re awful tying a little kid up, but it’s a long rope and you can feel how light it is and if we don’t, at night she just goes over to that beach. My baby’s just mesmerized by that beach, aren’t you baby? You’re my little turtle, aren’t you? Rosie’s little turtle. You just love those bright lights.”

Rosie’s eyes filled with tears but then she drew them back somehow, they didn’t fall.

Liberty sees Little Dot all the time now. She takes her to the supermarket and to water-ski shows and roller-rinks. She buys her crayons and Big Gulps. But Little Dot hurts herself more and more. She goes for days without speaking. Little Dot is her own small keeper, and she is alone with an aloneness so heavy that her self can hardly bear its weight. Liberty is not like a mother to her, Liberty knows that. She may even be adding to the terrible weight. Sometimes Liberty thinks that each moment she spends with Little Dot is like a stone she gives the child, a small stone added to other stones.

It is Teddy to whom Liberty seems like a mother. “You could be my mother,” Teddy often says to Liberty. They both have brown eyes and are allergic to tomatoes. Liberty could easily be his mother, Teddy reasons, because he needs one and they like each other. His own mother is in California where she is in love with another woman, and Teddy lives with his father, Duane, his father’s four restored Mustangs and his father’s latest girlfriend, Janiella. They live in a modest cement-block house with an extensive attached garage on the same street along the same narrow river where Willie and Liberty live. Liberty first saw Teddy high in the banyan tree in their yard the day after they had moved into the house. She had wanted to rent the place because of the banyan tree, a tree of such magnificence that it had extinguished all vegetative life in its vicinity. The banyan was awesome with its many cement gray trunks and its pink pendent aerial roots. It was so beautiful it looked as though it belonged in heaven or hell, but certainly not on this earth in a seedy, failed subdivision in the state of Florida.

Teddy had played in the tree for years.

“There are twenty-eight places to sit or lie on in that tree,” Teddy told Liberty. He was too old now to play in the tree, he said, but he used it as a place to think. He would crawl around and think, or sit and think. Teddy is seven. Liberty sees him mostly at night, almost nightly, for Duane and Janiella like to go out. They like to get drunk, dance, and drive around.

“Put this pony to bed at nine,” Duane would say, instructing Liberty in Teddy’s care, slapping his little boy on the back with such enthusiasm that the child would spin sideways.