Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Then the next place he’d told the manager she was sitting on her brains.

“I like Amy,” he says. “I was the one who found her, remember?”

Backing right down like he always did.

—

Sometimes Mother wants to make something special for dinner, like a soup. She asks me to go to Safeway and get a can of coconut milk and some cilantro. I can’t imagine a worse-sounding soup but if she’s willing to make dinner, I’ll eat it. I’m not about to make dinner. So Amy and I drive over to the Safeway. The Brownies are out front at a little table selling cookies. They’ve always got somebody out front selling something, even original oil paintings. Sometimes even politicians set up shop there. So I bought a box of cookies. You’d have to be some sort of wicked not to buy cookies when confronted by a little Brownie. Of course I can’t find the damn coconut milk and I’m wandering around until some kid says, “Can I help you, sir?” and then ushers me smugly to the proper shelf. I’m going through the checkout and the checker says, “Do you need any help out with this, sir?”

All the way back to the truck, I mutter, “Do you need any help out with this, sir, do you need any help out with this, sir?”

They’re all automatons.

—

He took a poetry class at the community college. “That’s lovely,” I say. “It’s quite beyond lovely,” I say, sarcastic.

“We’re studying Rimbaud,” he says. “He was French, too, like your watchmaker, the one who made the duck. Isn’t that interesting?”

“Why is that interesting?” I say.

“Listen to this,” he says. He opens up this little paperback book and he’s highlighted these lines in blue Magic Marker. He says, “For I is someone else. If brass wakes up a trumpet, it isn’t to blame. To me this is evident: I give a stroke of the bow: the symphony begins to stir in the depths.”

“That ain’t even grammatical,” I say.

“For I is someone else,” he says somberly. “If brass wakes up a trumpet it isn’t to blame.” Then he smirks at me. He’s been working on this smirk.

“Now that’s the translation,” he says. “But for class I’m going to translate the translation.”

“Somebody should translate you,” I say.

“No one’s going to be able to translate me,” he says.

—

He said some old woman came in to tutor them sometimes and she smelled like laundry.

“Laundry,” I said. “Clean laundry, I hope.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he said.

“You shouldn’t need tutoring now, should you? You’re in college, community college, you’ve been going there for years.”

“She’s one of those do-gooders. I told her about Rimbaud and she said he was the first modernist.”

“What the hell’s that mean?”

“The beginning of the way we are? He was a savage dreamer, Rimbaud.”

And he delivers that smirk.

“Daddy,” he says, “you don’t think I can do anything.”

“I’m not going to engage you on that one,” I say. “You’ll make your mark or you won’t.”

“What you’re wanting to do is stop time,” he says, “and that’s dangerous.”

“I don’t want to stop time,” I say. “Time don’t stop because I’m working on a broken watch.”

But he looks at me as though he thinks it does. “I see things in parts, too,” he says.

“Don’t you need to be wearing a cleaner shirt?”

“Do you think I do?”

“That one’s filthy. I’ve been looking at it for days.”

“Are you thinking other stuff when you think that?”

“God almighty,” I say. “Just go put on a fresh T-shirt.”

“When I think something it rethinks it for me,” he says.

—

“We’ve got to be tolerant,” Mother says to me. “You’re not a tolerant man and that hurts, that shows.”

“Tolerant,” I say. I don’t know when I got into the habit of repeating a single word. Just picking it out of her conversation.

“He might be neuroatypical, that’s what Tom says.”

They all annoy the hell out of me over at P & R but Tom takes the cake. He’s so fat I don’t know how he can tie his goddamn shoes.

“Tom says neurodiversity might be more crucial for the human race than biodiversity.”

“Tom’s handling too much weed killer,” I say. “He’s not a friend of the earth.” Which reminds me of something the boy lobbed at us the other night about Albert Einstein’s last words. He’s staring off to the side of us as we’re sitting in what he loves to refer to emphatically as the living room and he says, “Albert Einstein’s last words were: Is the earth friendly? ”

I say, “I doubt that.”

“Yeah, yeah, yeah,” he says. “It’s true. I think of what I’m going to have for last words sometimes.”

“Let’s hear ’em,” I say.

“It’s not going to be a question.”

“I can’t imagine your last words being a question,” I say.

He glances up at me and decides to be pleased. Usually he won’t look right at a person. He says eye contact is counterproductive to comprehension and communication. He’s got any number of ways to justify himself, that’s for sure.

Mother continues to go on about Tom and Jimmy and Christina and their theories about the boy, whom they’ve never met but think they know from her going on and on about him, I guess. She’s got quite a little socializing network going on for her down at the park. She had a chance to work over at Sweetwater, the marsh they’ve built out by the sewer treatment plant. She would have made more money but said she’d be lonely with new people. She didn’t want to leave her friends. She don’t like change.

“Neurotypical,” I say. “Kindly tell me what the hell TomTom’s talking about.” I call him that because two normal-size men could fit in his bulk.

“Neuro- a -typical,” she says.

“Oh, goodness, pardon me,” I say. “And why exactly are you discussing our family with those dipshits? Our family is no concern of theirs. TomTom’s living with one of those women that looks like a man, isn’t he? Let him worry about the atypicality of that.”

“She’s sweet,” Mother says. “And anyway, Tom wasn’t saying anything bad about him. He was just trying to make me feel better. I told my friends about them not letting him back in those classes he was taking.”

“I don’t want you talking to them about the boy,” I say. “And I want to remind you, you’re the one who wanted one, not me. Just one, you said. One and done.”

—

“You’re the low-hanging fruit,” he says to me and Mother. She just purses her lips and pushes her fork around a serving of store-bought pie.

“And I suppose you’re not,” I say. “You’re the high-hanging fruit.”

You’ve just got to find him hilarious sometimes.

“They’ve used up what’s easy, like you. They’ve just used you up. But now they’re going to have to deal with the likes of me. And there’s no formula.”

“The likes of you,” I say.

He stands up so fast he knocks his glass of milk off the table. But then he catches it. It was flying laterally for an instant and damn if he didn’t catch it. But then he storms out of the house and Mother tears up. Then the phone rings and it’s one of those robo-calls you can’t shut off until they’ve said their piece.

—

It was around eleven in the morning. A beautiful desert day. You forget how pretty the sky can still be. Mother was over at the park fixing a sprinkler system for the fortieth time. I think they break them deliberate so they’ll have something to do. I’m in my shop thinking like I frequently do that the third cup of coffee tastes funny and then all hell breaks loose. People banging on the door and screaming and shouting and I even hear a helicopter overhead. And I say, “Stay, Amy, stay, stay,” and walk out of the garage and there’s law officers out there screaming, “sumabitch, sumabitch” and “the congresswoman” and “sumabitch” again, even the women, all of them in uniform and with guns, and I think whatever I was thinking a minute ago is the last peaceful thought I will ever have. Though sometimes now I try to pretend he’s still in the house, in his room with the door closed. I pretend he’s still living with us and eating with us and getting by with us. But of course he’s not and he isn’t.