Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

I’ve had a comfortable life. I’ve not been troubled or found myself an outcast or disadvantaged in any way. This too was the case with my mother and father. Lives such as ours are no longer in vogue. Since I’ve lived in the shithole, however, I’ve found that another’s perception of me can sometimes be unexpected. For example, the other night I was looking at some jewelry in an unsecured case at Hacienda del Sol, waiting for my friends to arrive so we could start drinking overpriced tamarind margaritas, and this hostess stalks up to me and says, “Can I help you”…in other words, You look beyond suspicious, what are you even doing here…

She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had accumulated a record of not saving anyone and had lost her position as an emergency responder.

“Do I know you,” I asked. Or maybe it was “Have I seen you before?” because I had never known her, even if she’d been the one to feel my father’s last breath leave his body. She threw me a dismissive look and returned to her station to greet and seat a party of four, whom she’d evidently been expecting as they had planned ahead and made a reservation.

My point is that however fortunate your life or — considering the myriad grotesque ways one can depart from it — your death, it’s usually strangers who have their hands on you at the end and usher you down the darkened aisle. Or rather that was one of my reflections as I waited for my friends with whom I would commence a night of serious drinking.

—

So my mother is out there alone, in what I swear is one of the darkest parts of the mountain, with only a rarely-in-residence survivalist for a neighbor, and she is erecting a three-hundred-square-foot protective enclosure for a reptile that isn’t even endangered, though my mother claims it should be.

I don’t go out there much to visit, not nearly as often as I should, I suppose, but I’m aware that the work is proceeding slowly. My mother is insisting on doing everything herself. The most strenuous part is digging the trench, which Fish and Wildlife guidelines mandate should be fourteen inches deep. The trench is then to be filled with cement and a wall no less than three feet tall built on top of it. All this is to prevent the tortoise from escaping, for this is to be an adopted tortoise, one that has been displaced by development and should not be allowed to return to a no longer hospitable environment. At the same time, everything within the enclosure should mimic its natural situation. There should be flowering trees and grasses, a water source and the beginnings of burrow excavations, facing both north and south, that the tortoise can complete.

The site my mother had chosen was several hundred yards from the adobe. Wouldn’t it be easier, I asked, if she just enclosed an area using one of the house’s walls? Then she wouldn’t have to dig so much, it would be more of a garden, and she could bring out a table and chairs, have her coffee out there in the morning, maybe have a little fire pit for the evening — no, not a fire pit, certainly, what was I thinking? But possibly her aim should be the creation of a pleasant and meditative place that she could utilize for herself as well as for this yet unacquired tortoise.

Actually, I think a space for meditation is the last thing my mother needs. I don’t even know why I mentioned it. She didn’t respond to my suggestion anyway. She simply said she wasn’t doing this for herself.

The earth on the mountain is volcanic and poor. Some of the stones my mother dislodges are as big as medicine balls. She uses some sort of levering tool. Still, it’s dangerous work, as every part of the grieving process is if it’s done correctly. Don’t think I don’t realize what my mother’s up to.

“If you injure yourself your independent aging days might as well be over,” I said. She laughed, which I hoped she would. “Where did you come across that dreadful phrase,” she asked. “Someone in the shithole,” I answered, and she laughed again. “Why are you punishing yourself,” she said, “by living in that place?”

One of my acquaintances here is a widow too, but she’s only ten years older than I am. Her husband died in one of those stupid head-on wrecks blamed by the surviving driver on the setting sun. It blinded me! She kept his shoes. People would visit her and there would be his running shoes in the bathroom, his boots by the couch, and if he’d been old enough for slippers they would have certainly been by the bed. They’d been in the home they had before she moved here, now sort of on display, she told me, sort of stagy. Everyone who saw them was moved to tears and she kept them out longer than she should have, she realized that. Then one day she just threw them away — they were too beat-up to give to charity — and she got rid of a lot of other things as well and moved into the shithole.

We can’t keep pets here. It’s one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don’t feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the university because he’d received a bad assessment, killing his instructor and two fellow students before killing himself. There was no mention of what happened to the dog afterward, not a single mention. Information about the dog is unavailable to this day. I sometimes think of this guy who wanted to be certified as a nurse, and not only what was he thinking when he set off that morning to murder those people but what was he thinking leaving the dog behind with its dog toys and dog dishes and dog bed? What did he think was going to happen?

Tortoises spend half their life in burrows, from October into April. Should you see a tortoise outside its burrow in the winter months it’s not well and veterinary assistance should be sought.

“So,” I say to my mother, “have you met this tortoise?”

She said she hadn’t, but had filled out all the paperwork and was on a list. She’d be contacted when the enclosure was complete.

“So you don’t know how old it is or whether it’s a he or a she or whether it’s a special-needs tortoise with a malformed shell or a missing leg.”

“I don’t,” my mother said.

“I would think that after going through all of this, all the womanhours and expense, you’d want a perfect tortoise.”

“Well,” my mother said, “maybe I’ll get one.”

My mother used to be much more talkative. There used to be a lot more going on, more being said, lots of cheerful filler. Maybe that’s why I go to AA as much as I do because at least people are telling stories, pathetic and predictable as they may be, and all manner of reassurances and promises are being made. When I go into my mother’s little house now, I don’t recognize much. There seems to be very little remaining of the life I had known, been cocooned in, you might say. I should have emerged from it in glorious certitude by now.

Often I think, and it is with a certain dismay, that I will age out of the shithole one day, for it is a young crowd who reside here briefly and then move on. The ones who stay don’t remain in touch with those who leave. What would we speak of with one another? When someone vacates, the manager comes in, paints the walls, sands the floors and cleans the windows. New tenants arrive quickly — it’s cheap, practically free! It’s convenient! We’re not crazy about them at first but we gradually enfold them. No point in playing favorites here. We’re all pretty much the same.