Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

They heard Mommy’s voice. She was saying, “Now how would you describe the sound it made? An asthmatic squeal is what the bird book said though I wouldn’t describe it like that. It certainly didn’t sound like an asthmatic squeal to me.”

Arleen muttered something in reply. She had apparently come back into the house. It was a three-story nineteenth-century house with fish-scale shingles and wide golden floorboards. It was a wonderful house. Mommy and Daddy almost always had houseguests in the summer. The girls didn’t like it, it was as though Mommy and Daddy didn’t want to be alone with them in these loveliest of months. The houseguests didn’t stay long, usually no more than a week, but no sooner did they depart than others would arrive. The girls found few of them remarkable. There had been one young woman who held their interest for a weekend by drawing in pencil dozens of semi-Gothic, semi-Saracenic buildings, clearly intended to be visions of the starved or the drugged. They watched her closely, thinking her tremendously chic and fraudulent, and were disappointed when she left abruptly, taking, for it was never seen again, one of Mommy’s Hermès beach towels, the one with the Lorraine cross.

Most of the guests never returned, but Father Snow had been invited several times. Priests were freeloaders, in the girls’ opinion, and although Father Snow could give a good performance in the right surroundings — they had observed this at high holidays — he was no exception. They had not encountered Arleen before. At first, certainly, she had not appeared to be a problem. She was shy, deferential and plain. She wore red sneakers, the left one slit, she admitted, to accommodate a bunion. She did have lovely auburn hair. The one story she told concerned her hair. She had lovely hair as a child as well and had worn it in a long braid. She had cut it off one morning and given it to a man she had a crush on, a married man, a post office employee or some such thing. It had not been returned and the man had moved away. The girls loved that story. It was so droll it was practically retarded.

The girls heard Mommy’s voice again and cocked their heads. She was planning the marketing. If Arleen would like to go into town they could get flowers and liquor and food as well and Arleen could give her opinion about a sweater Mommy was considering buying. Daddy said that when you look death in the eye you want to do it as calmly as a stroller looks into a shop window. But Mommy never looked into shop windows like that. She looked into them with excitement and distress. Sometimes what Daddy said didn’t take Mommy into account.

“Girls!” Mommy called.

The girls put aside their constructions and glided into the kitchen, where Mommy was putting away the tea things.

“Arleen said she saw the cats playing with a mockingbird earlier. She said they had snapped its legs clean off.”

“Clean off?” the girls repeated, marveling at the infelicitous phrasing.

Mommy nodded. She was wearing a lovely floral dressing gown and silk slippers just like the girls.

“Those weren’t our cats,” one of the girls said, “our cats are sweet cats, old stay-at-home cats, they play with store-bought toys only,” knowing full well that even this early in the summer the cats had slaughtered no fewer than a dozen songbirds by visible count, that they were efficient and ruthless and that the way in which they so naturally expressed their essential nature was something the girls admired very much.

“Are you aware,” Arleen said, “that domestic cats kill four point four million birds every year in this country alone?”

“Awful,” Mommy said faintly.

“Mommy, Mommy, Mommy, don’t you listen to such dreadful things. Such dreadful things don’t happen in our garden,” the other girl said, hugging her, pretending to hang off her, clutching at her soft waist with her narrow hands, prattling on until Mommy made a smile.

“On a lighter note,” the girls then announced, glaring at Arleen, “we are going to the beach.”

There they spent the remainder of the day, nude and much admired, glistening with frequently applied oil. They talked about Mommy and Daddy. This they did not usually do, preferring to keep them inside themselves in a definite and distinct way, not touching them with words not even inside words, but just holding them inside — trapped, as it were — and aware of them quite clearly without thinking about them, fooling around with them in this fashion.

But Mommy and Daddy were changing. In the girls’ eyes, they seemed to be actually crumbling. This was of concern. Daddy was smoking and drinking more and surrendering himself to bleak pronouncements. He was sometimes gruff with them as though they were not everything to him! And Mommy’s enchantment with life seemed to be waning. They were behaving uncertainly, and it was harder for them to be discriminating. Daddy had wanted to burn like a hot fire, and he had not. Clearly, he had not. Something was hastening toward him, and Mommy too, at once hastening but slowly, cloaked in the minutes and months.

The girls returned home subdued, coming through the garden and passing beneath the rose arbor where the bird’s nest was concealed prettily among the climbing canes. The girls grimaced at it, knowing it contained two rotting eggs, having investigated it some days before. They had not informed Mommy of the nest’s pulpy contents and they never would, of course.

In the kitchen there was a message for them, written in Mommy’s rounded hand on heavy stationery.

Father Snow and Arleen have gone downtown for ice-cream cones. Daddy and I are taking our naps.

The girls skipped upstairs and into Father Snow’s room. There was nothing there but two black round stones on the table by the single bed.

“He doesn’t think that’s him and Donny, does he?”

“How ghastly.”

In Arleen’s room, they immediately went to the suitcase but couldn’t find the journal. The journal was missing again, it was nowhere. Then they found it. But they had been absorbed to such a degree in their search that they scarcely noticed Arleen standing in the doorway. She was a smudgy thing, round-shouldered, carrying a whale-shaped purse, a wretched souvenir of this perfect island.

Then she was gone.

“Well, that was considerate of her.”

“It is our house.”

But just as they opened the book, which had a disgusting pink and rawly fibrous cover, Arleen appeared again and spoke the words as they appeared on the first page.

“ Headaches…Palpitations…Isolated…Guilt… And that’s a sketch of a photograph your mother showed me. It’s you and your parents when you were little girls.”

The girls peered at it, at a loss. The woman had no talent whatsoever. On impulse, they bent forward and sniffed it.

“Your mother thinks of her heart as a speeding car,” Arleen said. “Too big, too fast, out of control, no one at the wheel. And her head too, also speeding…Farther on, there are accounts of some of her dreams.”

“She didn’t tell you her dreams!” The girls didn’t believe it for a moment, that Mommy would tell this troll her dreams.

Arleen gently tugged her journal from their hands, smiled thinly at them, and left.

The girls sat for several moments in a perturbed silence. Later, in their own room, which constituted the entire third floor and was exotic and theatrical, they bathed and dressed and put up their hair. It was now dusk, and the downstairs parlor where they were all to gather for cocktails was filled with a golden light.

The girls tiptoed down the stairs. Daddy was telling Father Snow about a former houseguest who claimed he could get out of his body anytime he wanted to and turn around and look at it. The girls remembered that weekend. They rolled their eyes.