Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

My mother finally finished the trench. It was pretty impressive when you think it was all accomplished by her hand. Then she bought some rebar and a cement mixer and in really no time it was all filled in and ready to accept the blocks. But then matters slowed down again. It was June and the heat was beginning to build. She’d be working, covered head to toe and with a hat and welder’s gloves, but gradually she’d only get a few hours in between dawn and dusk. The rest of the time I don’t know what she did — waited in that little adobe for dawn and dusk, I suppose. She didn’t have air-conditioning, just a rattling, inefficient swamp cooler in need of new pads.

“What she’s doing doesn’t sound healthy,” the young widow in the shithole said. “You should take her out to dinner or something. Get her out of there. Insist on it. Or she should take up running. I should take up running, I know. And what kind of a companion is a tortoise going to be? You’re not even supposed to pick them up much, are you?”

“Fish and Wildlife claim they’re very personable,” I said.

“Those people are morons. Didn’t they want to open a hunting season on sandhill cranes?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“You’ve probably never even seen one. But I’m from Colorado, so I have. They’re very elegant and even have this elaborate dance they do. They mate for life. When one’s taken and the other’s left, that’s loneliness — real loneliness.”

She is pretty intense at times but also can be superficial — as with those shoes, which I have the grace not to mention.

Certainly my mother did not need to be taken out to dinner. People aren’t much help to one another under most circumstances, is what I’ve found. I’m reminded of the evening I dropped in at AA and a ruddy-faced woman came up to me and said, “I hear you’ve lost your mother, I’m so sorry.” And I said, “No, it was my father who died.” And she said, “Oh, I’d heard it was your mother.”

And that was it.

—

It was the Fourth of July when I managed to get out to my mother’s house again. The blocks had been cemented in place and were ready to be plastered and my mother had found a gate that she’d installed and painted blue. It swung inside, though, rather than outside, which I found somewhat awkward.

We were in the kitchen of the adobe eating toasted bread and some cold soup my mother had made. I had brought a bottle of wine but my mother, incredibly, did not have a corkscrew. You could barely see the enclosure from the house. It was so strange to me that she wouldn’t want to be closer to it when it was finished and had its occupier, though to be truthful I could not imagine the creature inside very well or the relief that seeing it would provide.

“Mom,” I said.

“I’m good,” my mother said.

Her face was sun-darkened and her thinning hair looked as though it would be crisp to the touch.

“Do you ever think of heaven,” she asked.

“No.”

“Good.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t want you thinking of heaven.”

We never did, did we?

I wished I were twelve again and could ask questions and pretend the answers were what I needed.

“How about divinity,” she asked.

“Gosh no,” I said, “that’s even harder to think about, isn’t it?”

She said the exciting work was about to begin — the preparation of the inner keep.

“Is that what it’s called?” I wondered, and she said that’s only what she called it.

I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete since it was very close to being complete. Grief is dangerous work, I thought again, but when you have overcome it and it passes away, are you not left more bewildered and defenseless than ever?

I didn’t know what she meant by divinity, but that strange word was not mentioned again.

—

“Your mother is trying to contain her grief in a beautiful garden of her own devising,” the young widow said. “Or maybe it’s not grief at all. Maybe it’s something else, early-onset something. I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to simplify your mother’s situation in any way. Or yours. Or even mine, for that matter. You know what grief hates? Analysis or comfort of any kind.”

I believed she was wrong. Grief thrives on comfort. Comfort is the vehicle by which it can go anywhere, inhabit anything. Still, I said, “What does it love then?”

“The ones for which we grieve,” she said. “The lost. Grief knows how to love them because we don’t know how to do it anymore.”

“That’s not true,” I said.

“Take Larry’s shoes, for example. What did I think I was doing? I didn’t know what I was doing.”

“They say there are many ways to grieve,” I said. “There’s not any right way to do it.”

I could not help but speak falsely to her, I don’t know why. She sighed and shook her head. The skin around her mouth was broken out in tiny pimples but her hair was pretty, dark and glossy like a healthy animal’s. She seemed younger than I, impossibly young, and I did not want to discuss such matters with her anymore. She didn’t drink, which made my avoidance of her easier, but I was left with her perception of grief. I began to think of it as something substantial and assured and apart, more competent and attentive than I, and no longer mindful of me and my poor efforts.

I then began to fear that my mother would be denied the very thing she had so inexplicably sought after my father’s death. She would never receive komik’c-ed. The program would have closed down. Even from the little I’d been told, the arrangement seemed unwieldy and misguided. The tortoise had to be microchipped and someone in an official capacity had to check on its health twice a year. There weren’t public funds available for these things.

Instead, it turned out that my mother had not built the home for the as-yet-unrealized tortoise on her land. A real-estate agent came out to see if the adjacent lot would appraise out to make it worthwhile to subdivide and noted the error. The enclosure was well within her client’s property line and had to be removed.

“Appraise out,” my mother said. “Who comes up with these dreadful phrases?”

I agreed that language was becoming uglier the more it was becoming irrelevant to our needs.

My mother took on the task of dismantling everything she had accomplished. She broke up the walls and trucked away the rubble. She even dug out the filled trench. Then she rough-raked the ground and rolled some of the large stones back into place. She left the few flowering shrubs and grasses she had so recently planted, but without protection the birds and animals that are so seldom seen quickly consumed them. Such is their need.

Eventually I moved out of the shithole, though I still go to AA. I’ve even stopped drinking. I would say then that all is continuing here. Is it the same way there?

Ranger Preyman slipped the photograph into the display case. Then he sat down under the ramada and waited for someone to approach it. He was supposed to lead the tour at eleven but he knew from experience that he would not accumulate a group. Gaunt and sweating in his uniform, he looked on the verge of flying apart, and tourists instinctively avoided him. At times he actually sweated blood. Blood vessels close to the surface of his skin ruptured into the exocrine glands. The condition had a name. He was grateful it didn’t often happen. It was the beginning of the rainy season although there had been no rain yet. The crowds of the winter had diminished. A woman on the bench behind him was complaining to her companion about a dog she’d picked up at the pound. He was a beautiful dog, smart and obedient, but he was always looking for someone. He would go up to cars and peer inside. When she took him for a walk, he was always looking, looking. It was getting her down. He didn’t appreciate his new situation, the fact that he had been saved; she was seriously considering taking him back to the pound. Preyman had noticed that people seldom spoke about what they were experiencing at the time. They saved it for later. He’d overheard a man on the boardwalk saying, They’ve built a hotel on the Mount of Olives. I just couldn’t get over that. Here it was Florida, the Everglades, in the park.