Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

No, we were never afraid of him. Afraid of Jared?

The girls were searching Arleen’s room and had just come upon her journal. The girls were thirty-one and thirty-two. Arleen was of a dowdy unspecific age, their parents’ houseguest. She had arrived with the family’s city pastor, an Episcopal priest, who had been in a depression for a number of months because his lover had died. The priest spent most of his time in the garden wearing only a bright red banana sling, his flabby body turning a magnificent somber brown. The girls were certain their parents regretted inviting him, for he was not at all amusing, the way he frequently could be, in the pulpit.

Arleen was presently occupied with washing her long hair in the shower down the hall. It had taken the girls many clandestine visits to her room to find anything of interest. The journal was in the zippered pocket of her open suitcase.

“I know I looked here before.”

“She must move it around.”

“Should we start at the beginning or with the last entry? That would be last night, I suppose.”

“That was the Owl Walk. She went on the Owl Walk with Mommy and came back and said, so seriously, ‘No owls.’ ”

The girls found that hysterical.

The sound of water on the curtain ceased and the girls hurried downstairs. They made tea and curled up on the sofa with their cats. There were two cats living and two cats dead. The dead cats were Roland and Georgia O’Keeffe, their cremains in elaborate colorful urns on the mantelpiece. The ceramic feet on Roland’s urn were rabbits, the ones on Georgia O’Keeffe’s, mice. The urns had been conceived and created by the girls.

“Good morning, Arleen,” they said together when she appeared, her hair wadded wetly on her back. She peered at them and smiled shyly. The back of her blouse was soaked because of the sack of hair. She wore khaki shorts. They were the weird kind to which leggings could be buttoned to create a pair of trousers.

“I was hoping,” Arleen said, “that the kitty litter box could be taken out of the bathroom?”

The girls and the cats stared at her.

“It smells,” Arleen said.

“It smells ?” the girls said.

There was silence. “I took a lovely long walk early this morning,” Arleen said. “I bicycled out to the moors and then I walked. It began to rain, quite hard, and then it suddenly stopped and was beautiful.”

The girls mimed extreme wonder at this remarkable experience.

“It reminded me of something I read once about the English moors and the month of April,” Arleen said. “April, who laughs her girlish laughter and a moment after weeps her girlish tears is apt to be a mature hysteric on the moors.” She looked at them, smiling quickly, then dipped her head. She had a big ragged part in her hair that made the girls almost dizzy.

“April is far behind us, Arleen,” one of the girls said. “It’s June now. You’ve been here almost two weeks.”

Arleen nodded. “It’s been very good for Father Snow.”

“What is your home like,” the other asked. They’d found one couldn’t be too obvious with Arleen.

“It has stairs,” Arleen mused. “Very steep stairs. Sometimes I don’t go out, because coming back there would be the stairs, and often when I am out, I don’t return because of the stairs. Otherwise it’s quite adequate.”

“Are you fearful of crime?” the girls said. They widened their eyes.

“No,” Arleen said. She had very much the manner of someone waiting to be dismissed. The girls loved it. They spooned honey into their tea.

“Did you have a nice birthday, Arleen?” one asked.

It had been announced several evenings before by Father Snow that it was Arleen’s birthday. The girls had remarked that birthdays were more or less an idiotic American institution regarded with some wonder by the rest of the world. Arleen had blushed. The girls had said that they did not sanction birthdays but that they adored Christmas. Last year they had given Mommy and Daddy adagio dance lessons and a needlepoint book, the pages depicting scenes from their life together — Mommy and Daddy and the girls.

No one had given Arleen anything on her birthday but she and Father Snow had taken the opportunity to present their house present — a silver-plated cocktail shaker engraved with Mommy’s and Daddy’s initials.

“We were looking for something suitable but not insufferably dull,” Father Snow said.

“No, no, you shouldn’t have,” Mommy said.

“We have ten of those!” one of the girls said, and they rushed to haul them out of the pantry, even the dented and tarnished ones. The cocktail shaker had proved to be a most popular house present over the years.

“I had a lovely birthday,” Arleen said. She looked at her wrist and scratched it. “Is Father Snow outside?”

The girls pointed toward the garden. They had long pale shapely arms.

Arleen nodded vaguely and turned to leave, stumbling a bit on the sill.

Between themselves, the girls referred to Father Snow as Father Ice, an irony that gave them satisfaction, for his fat sorrow elicited considerable indignation in them. Where was his faith? He didn’t have the faith to fill a banana sling. Where was his calm demeanor? It had fled from him. He was the furthest thing from ice they could imagine, the furthest from their admiration of ice, the lacy sheaths, the glare, the brilliance and hardness of ice. There had never been enough of it in their lives. A little, but not much.

Cuddling and kissing the living cats, the girls walked to the kitchen window and looked out into the garden. Arleen was on the ground at Father Ice’s feet, her head flung back, drying her hair. Father Ice was talking with his eyes shut, tears streaming down his cheeks.

What a pair! the girls thought. They kissed the cats’ stomachs. Father Ice’s mouth was flapping away. His lover, a gaunt young man named Donny, had cooked for Father Ice and pressed his vestments. Father Ice had broken down at dinner the previous night over a plate of barbecued butterflied lamb, recalling, it could only be assumed, the manner in which Donny had once prepared this dish. He had just recovered from having broken down an hour earlier at cocktails.

The girls, through the glass, watched Arleen closely.

“She’s in love with him, can you believe it? That is not just friendship.”

“That kind of love is so safe.”

The girls had never been in love. They did not plan on marrying. They would go to the dance clubs and perch on stools, in their little red dresses, their little black ones and white ones, darling and provocative tight little dresses, and they would toss their hair and laugh as they gazed into each other’s eyes. There were always men around. Men were drawn to them but one would not be courted without the other, even for amusement — they would not be separated. They were like Siamese twins. They were not Siamese twins, of course, they weren’t twins at all, nor were they even born on the same day a year apart, which was why they didn’t care for birthdays. Men did not mind the fact that they would not be separated. It excited them agreeably, in fact. They didn’t believe they didn’t stand a chance in the long run.

The girls dropped the cats and moved away from the window, retiring to the large glassed-in porch on the south side of the house to work on their constructions. These were attractive assemblages, neither morbid nor violent nor sexually repressed as was so common with these objects, but tasteful, cold and peculiar. One of the several young men who were fascinated by the girls made the beautiful partitioned boxes in which selections were placed. One of them contained a snip of lace from Mommy’s wedding dress. They hadn’t asked her for it, but she hadn’t recognized it when she saw it either. There were many things of that nature in the boxes.