Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“That’s the freeway, I think,” boyfriend said.

“It sounds OK, though. I mean, if they can make a freeway sound like an ocean, so much the better.”

Toby had never lived in this house. It meant nothing to her. Even if she had lived in it, its sale would have been of minor significance. She didn’t consider a house as a large cradle or nest. For the last several years she had moved around a number of properties her father had bought for back taxes at the courthouse when the owners could not be located; he had busied himself in his retirement by acquiring houses in this fashion. They were all dumps and Toby was in the process of disposing of them in an accelerated manner. She was at present occupying an oddity built decades before that had never been remodeled. Its roofline was angled like wings. The ceilings were crazed and water-stained, an avocado green shag covered the plywood floors, the bathroom wallpaper depicted toreadors and bulls, rather a single toreador and a single bull over and over again. The wood was biscuit-colored and flimsy, the rooms small, the foundation cracked, the malfunctioning kitchen appliances a grotesque shade of ruby. The yard was large. There had once been flower beds, all in ruin now, and a small pond was spanned by a concrete arch from which a concrete fisherperson “fished.” The place was a hoot, though Toby felt it worsened her sinus condition.

This house, though, her parents’ last house, was proper, formal, clean and patient, even though it was unlucky. It was aware that it was unlucky. It had been sold with all furnishings, dishware, linens, even the Oldsmobile in the garage.

“What’s the first thing you’re going to do,” Toby asked.

They looked at her blankly.

“To the house.”

“Oh, tear it down,” boyfriend said. “We really wanted more of a yurt.”

“He’s kidding,” Jennifer said.

“It’s entirely up to you, of course,” Toby said.

“He’s kidding!”

“Maybe we’ll slap some paint on the Olds, though. Coral reef.”

“Pretty, pretty, pretty, ” Jennifer enthused. She carried a child’s lunch box as a purse and from it she pulled a money order made out for the full purchase amount as well as three small cupcakes with orange frosting, which she distributed.

Toby swallowed hers without thinking, then said, “Oh, I…is there something in this?”

“Just a little celebratory weed,” boyfriend said.

“Chink, chink,” Jennifer said, swallowing. She flung her arms wide, almost clipping Toby with the lunch box. “I’m going to plant stuff all around here. My granddad had a wisteria vine and he said that when he went out to look at it, it would lean forward and lay its head on his shoulder, it liked him so much. That thing was huge. Once, when he wasn’t around, I hit it with a croquet mallet. I was pissed at Granddad because he put my favorite sweater in the dryer and ruined it. It was, like, the size of a chinchilla’s sweater.”

“A Chihuahua’s, I think,” boyfriend said.

“Kids today would’ve taken the mallet to Granddad,” Jennifer went on, “but I took it to that vine — oh, did I. It flew away in big green and purple chunks and never came back. I was such a bad girl then, a demon!”

“But then you found Jesus,” boyfriend said.

“You found him?” Toby said. “Where?”

“What he means is Jesus found me, ” Jennifer said kindly, “and I take comfort now in knowing, knowing, that in my granddad’s heaven a wisteria vine grows.”

“That is so unlikely,” Toby said.

“Say?”

“Unlikely,” Toby said. “Doubtful. No way.”

Jennifer removed her sunglasses and looked at Toby coldly.

“Maybe you should leave now,” boyfriend said.

“Certainly,” Toby said. She felt somewhat woozy from the cupcake. “Our transaction is complete,” she said, in a simper she was aware was taking up entirely too much of her face.

“She can still pack a heck of a wallop,” boyfriend warned her.

So had the sale ended on its awkward note.

Still, the cupcake had managed to whisk her in gleeful transit to the convalescent home — a distance of some twenty miles through normally aggravating traffic — before it dumped her without warning behind her mother’s wheelchair on the back of which some impish Staff had affixed the sticker THIS IS NOT AN ABANDONED VEHICLE.

“Look!” Lillian cried. Her heart was beating eagerly, stupefied. “Look!” But she then realized it was no more than water from a lawn sprinkler fanning lightly back and forth across the grass.

“What!” Toby said. “You’re not going to get wet. Are you afraid of getting wet?”

Lillian remembered a green umbrella, furled, in the vestibule when she had been young. She feared umbrellas. “I’m afraid of umbra…umbra…umbrellas,” she said shyly.

“Don’t be foolish,” Toby said.

They found Robert in the reading room, alone at a large table, staring at a book on ancient Egypt. Here was her father, Toby thought. She waited for the next thought but nothing immediately arose.

“Hi, Daddy,” Toby said. She always expected something, but what?

He ignored her and addressed his wife. “Are you aware of this Osiris?”

Lillian studied the highly illustrated page. “Well, that’s not him, the one with the jackal’s head, he doesn’t look like that.”

“She was always the smart one, your mother,” Robert said. “Could always count on her.”

Toby scanned the text. Sibling drowned Osiris. Then chopped up body into fourteen parts and scattered them all over the place, all over Egypt. Someone found everything except for the penis, which had been eaten by fish, then put him back together again and made him king of the underworld.

“They shouldn’t have books like this lying around here,” Toby said. “Here, of all places.”

“Those Egyptians had to worry that their own hearts might testify against them after death,” Robert said. “Isn’t that something? That was one of the things those people had to worry about.”

“They worried that their own hearts would turn them in?”

“That’s right, Mother.”

“Like they were criminals?”

“I don’t understand,” Toby said without curiosity.

Robert looked at her with disapproval, though he had harbored no preference for a son. They’d had Toby when they were quite along in years. She was their wan surprise.

“You’re the one who said there was going to be an accounting,” her mother reminded her.

“I came close to saying that,” Toby admitted, “but I never did.”

They sat silently around the table, the great book of Egypt open before them.

“What are you having for dinner, Daddy? What are they serving?”

“Some sort of meat you can eat with a spoon,” he said moodily, “and orange sherbet. It’s Halloween.”

“She never liked Halloween,” her mother said. “She was never formidable enough for it.”

“Ahh, Mama,” Toby whined.

“What’s the weather out,” her father asked.

“It’s…” Toby couldn’t remember. What difference did it make? The days were mostly bright as blazes, this being Florida.

“We had a good life together, didn’t we, Mother?” Robert said.

This could go either way in Toby’s experience, and she wasn’t about to hold her breath.

“I don’t think so,” Lillian said. She was choosing not to be torrentially affirmative at the moment.

The reply, whatever it was, usually marked the moment when Toby would look at her watch and express dismay at the lateness of the hour. It was just a little sign she had taken to relying on.

“All right, Mama, Daddy, I’m going to leave now. Mama, why don’t you have supper here with Daddy, and Staff can take you back to your own room afterwards.”