Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Barbara’s daughter had been dubbed the End of the Dream murderer by the media, for that was what the girl said in the course of her serial rampage.

“It’s only her who knows if she said it,” Barbara argued. “Her saying she said it doesn’t make it so. She was always that kind of kid, saying all kinds of crap and expecting you to believe her.”

“Was she Buddhist,” Leslie asked.

“Jesus no,” Barbara said. “She didn’t even do yoga. She didn’t do nothing until she did.”

“You can be a murderer without being a liar,” the eldest mother said.

None of the mothers had pets. The children had all had pets of one kind or another and homes had to be found for them. There were hundreds of people out there who keenly wanted murderers’ pets and by their very ambition and craving were utterly inappropriate as adopters. Sometimes these pets’ stories ended badly too.

“It takes sixty-three days to make a dog,” the eldest mother said. “Two hundred and seventy days to make a human being, give or take a few.”

The mothers were atypical in that each had brought forth only one child. In their day, two had been the norm. Now three was the new two, whereas one was the old zero.

“People had more interesting thoughts before mass inoculations,” Barbara maintained. “More generous and less damaging thoughts.”

“Who knows what’s in all the inoculations they give the little babies,” Francine said. “Oh, they tell you, but still you don’t know. How could you?”

“Minds used to move like rivers but they don’t want our minds moving like that,” Emily said. “They want to channelize our thinking, and some people can’t tolerate their minds being dammed. They noticed it right away, whereas others never do, and they can’t tolerate it.”

“Damned,” Leslie murmured.

“Exactly,” Francine said.

Francine’s boy had claimed that the family he’d slaughtered would have killed hundreds of people if they’d been left to prosper.

“You mean because they were into making pharmaceuticals or beer?” Barbara asked.

“I’m not defending him, but it could very well have been true.”

“Genuine thinking is rare,” the eldest mother said.

“I saw a sculpture of the river god once,” Leslie said. “It was the most frightening work of art I’ve ever witnessed. Someone blew it up, I heard. It was just too frightening.”

Emily looked at the bottle she was drinking water from. “How can it be pure if it’s enhanced?” she said to no one in particular.

Pam then commenced to tell a story about gods. It was rendered fairly incoherent in her telling but it concerned a group of lost Greek sailors on a fishing boat who happened upon a desolate island where they found an old man in a hut attended by a bedraggled, almost featherless though immense bird and a large old hairless goat whose nipples were nonetheless rosy and whose udders were full of milk.

Yuck, thought Emily.

“It turns out,” said Pam, “to make a long story short, that the decrepit old man was Jupiter, whose reign as supreme ruler of the universe was long past. The goat was his old nurse, Amalthea, who had once suckled him, and the bird was the fearsome eagle who once carried in its claws the god’s devastating thunderbolts. When Jupiter heard from the sailors that any temples that remained were in ruins and then realized that all he remembered had disappeared, he began to sob and the eagle screamed and the old goat bleated, all in the most terrible anguish. The sailors were so frightened that they fled back to their boat. Among the crew was a learned Russian professor of philosophy, and he was the one who told them the old guy was Jupiter and—”

“There just happened to be a learned Russian professor of philosophy on this fishing boat?” Emily said.

“That’s a melancholy story,” Leslie said. “I’m not sure why.”

“Birds are sad,” Francine said. “Remember when Penny was here and she tried to establish a sanctuary for unwanted parrots and the town shut her down? They said there was no permitting process for such a thing. Penny said those birds cried when they were taken off her property. They knew. They knew their last chance had come and gone.”

The mothers were silent.

Then Barbara said, “Well, I don’t know why you told that story about the old god, but the nice thing about it was that he wasn’t alone at the end.”

“What about the one we got now,” Emily asked.

“The one what?”

“The god we got now. Do you think somebody in the future will be telling a story about finding him exiled to some desolate island and crying when he learns that everything he had fashioned and understood has vanished and that he is subject to the same miserable destiny as any created thing?”

“Probably,” someone finally said.

“I feel uneasy even thinking about the river god,” Leslie said. “But it’s gone now, I’ve heard, blown up. They’re not even calling it an act of vandalism.”

“If we lived in Palestine,” Pam said, “and my boy had done there what he’d done here, the Israeli people would have blown up my home.” She imagined herself being allowed to take from it whatever she could carry, though, but maybe not.

One of the mothers said that was called collective punishment.

“They might as well have blown up my home,” Barbara said. “I’ve never had one. I butterfly around and always have.”

She was living in a motel out on the highway that was next to a burned-out gas station and a knife outlet. The management of the motel was doing its part for the environment by changing the sheets and towels only after repeated requests, a notion picked up from the pieties of the better chains. Barbara was getting by with a debit card she’d found behind the bed. It was in the original paper sleeve with the PIN written on it. Some poor devil with shaky handwriting was out in the world not realizing his account was being discreetly drained.

The eldest mother made every effort to flex her arthritic hands and modestly succeeded. She couldn’t lift a finger to save herself even if that was all it took, which it never was. She felt the darkness closing in without exactly seeing it. This was not unusual. Life was like a mirror that didn’t know what it was reflecting. For the mirror, reflections didn’t even exist. Whenever she saw a mirror where she didn’t expect it, she thought: Poor old woman, how sad she looks.

“I had just said to the waitress that what I’d like was a nice cup of coffee,” one of the mothers was remembering, “when the police came in. I had to go with them and tell them what I knew. Of course I knew nothing. He had never presented his dark plan to me. I sometimes feel he committed that crime in another state of existence.”

“We don’t live in the same time as our children, if that’s what you mean,” Pam ventured graciously.

“But here we are,” Leslie said. “It doesn’t seem right, does it, and what are we supposed to do now? What shall we do?”

Bathed in tender moonlight, everything looked lethal, the weeds in their beds, the bottled water, the ladder on its side, the painted nails of the mothers’ feet in sandals.

“Have any of you performed community service,” Emily asked, and then blushed at their silence. Clearly what had been done by the offspring of those in the garden was beyond the salve of community service.

“When I first got here,” one of the mothers said, “I would take electric bills out of people’s mailboxes and pay them.”

“Did anyone ever make themselves available for comment,” Barbara asked. “I instinctively knew not to make myself available. And they respect that. Even the persistent ones give up after a while.”