Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I retained a spokesperson but it was a big mistake,” Pam said. “Did anyone come up with an extenuating circumstance in the sentencing phase?”

The mothers shook their heads.

“Well,” Francine said, “Allen called 911 when his girlfriend cut off her fingers and toes, though admittedly anyone would have sought emergency assistance. But it certainly might have affected him, seeing his girlfriend of only a few months cut off her fingers and toes.”

“What did she think they were?” Emily wondered. “That she’d want to get rid of them.”

“Did you say minutes,” Barbara asked. “That’s like—”

“Months,” Francine told her. “A girlfriend of a few months.”

“I thought you said he was a sociopath.”

“He was a sociopath, a harmless sociopath at the time. He didn’t care for society or crowds. He didn’t like traffic, bars, sitting on planes. Then he found a girlfriend. I had great hopes for her but it turned out she was nuttier than he was.”

“In her fashion,” Emily said.

“One human family,” the eldest mother said. “That’s what we are. That’s what we’ve got to remember. This is Thyself. It should always be spoken of any creature to keep us in mind of the similarity of their inmost being with ours.”

“This is Thyself,” Pam repeated. She made fists of her hands and struck her breasts softly.

Emily thought of the several minutes she had spent yesterday looking out her window at the neighbor’s cat taking a dump. It didn’t cover up its deposit after it finished, just shook itself and walked away. It was a large white cat with a shining red sore on its head. The neighbor said she was allowing the matter of the sore to run its course. The cat still had a good appetite.

“I live beside a woman who lost a boy in the war, and she lords it over me something awful,” Leslie said. “She’s a police dispatcher, and when I smile at her in greeting she hisses at me, actually hisses. She planted a cherry tree, I guess for the boy, and it got the gall. It’s a few years old now and it’s got this enormous gall. I know it must be breaking her heart. I want to tell her that some galls can be beneficial. They return nitrogen to the soil, which is good. Or in other ways they can be beneficial to man.”

“You know a lot, Leslie,” Pam said, “but I don’t think this would give that woman any peace, coming from you.”

“It would be suicide to speak like that,” one of the mothers said.

“We must behave here as though we didn’t exist,” the eldest mother said.

“Didn’t exist?” said Barbara. “But we do.”

“What I like about our group is that it isn’t a support group,” Francine said. “I couldn’t handle a support group. I would consider it suspect in the extreme.”

They all agreed that any kind of support group for the mothers of celebrity killers would be in poor taste.

“Ours is a delicate situation,” the eldest mother said. She requested that someone, it didn’t matter who, light the candles.

Leslie said, “My first thought in the morning and my last thought at night is: We are going to be asked to leave.”

“I’ve still got the Popsicle-stick box he made as a kid,” Francine said. “I keep the kitchen sponge in it.”

“That can’t be sanitary,” Emily noted.

“I threw away the handprint. You know how they make plaster-of-paris casts of little kids’ hands for Mother’s Day in kindergarten and mount them on blocks of wood?”

“That would be worth something on eBay,” Barbara said. “People are such creeps.”

“What have we been discussing tonight, actually,” Leslie asked. “If I had to guess, I’d say we’ve been talking about God.”

“That’s a stretch,” Barbara said.

“I’d say that saying that is making a pretty safe bet,” Francine said. “It’s sort of vague. Not to hurt your feelings, Leslie.”

“OK,” Leslie said.

“It’s like each time we meet, you think we should have a subject or something. It’s not as though we’re going down a stairwell, one step at a time, putting what’s happened behind us, one step at a time.”

“OK, OK,” Leslie said.

The candles would not light as the cups they were in had filled with the rainwater of days past. “We should be going anyway,” one of the mothers said. Candles always discomfited this one. Vigils, sex, dinner, prayer…they had too many uses.

“I wish I had dropped him as an infant out of his snuggle sack on the rocks,” Barbara said loudly.

Emily had heard her voice this absolutely useless sentiment before. It was always a sure sign that the evening was winding down.

“We’ve settled nothing,” the eldest mother said. “We cannot make amends for the sins of our children. We gave birth to mayhem and therefore history. Oh, ladies, oh, my friends, we have resolved nothing and the earth is no more beautiful.”

She struggled to her feet and was helped inside. Her old knees creaked like doors. She always liked to end these evenings on an uncompromising note. Of course it was all just whistling in the dark, but sometimes she would conclude by saying that despite their clumsy grief and all the lost and puzzling years that still lay ahead of them, the earth was no less beautiful.

They were in a bar far from home when she realized he was falling to pieces. That’s what she’d thought: Why, he’s falling to pieces. The place was called Gary’s.

“Honey,” he said. He took the napkin from his lap and dipped it in his gin. He leaned toward her and started wiping her face, gently at first but then harder. “Oh, honey,” he said in alarm. His tie rested in his Mignon Gary as he was pressed forward. He was overweight and pale but his hair was dark and he wore elegant two-toned shoes. Before this, he had whispered something unintelligible to her. No one watched them. Sweat ran down his face. His drink toppled over and fell on them both.

She was wearing a green dress and the next day she left it behind in the hotel along with the clothes he had been wearing, the tan suit and the tie and the two-toned shoes. The clothes had let them down. The following night they were in a different hotel. It was near the coast and their room had a balcony from which they could see the distant ocean. They knew how to drink. They sought out the slippery places that tempted one to have a drink. Every place was a slippery place.

Denise and Steadman watched the moon rising. Denise played the game she did with herself. She transferred all her own convulsive, compulsive associations to Steadman. She gave them all to him. This was not as difficult as it might once have been because all her thoughts concerned Steadman anyway. Though her mind became smooth and flat and borderless, she wasn’t thinking anything so she never felt lost. It was quiet until a deeper silence began to unfold, but she was still all right. Then the silence became like a giant hand mutely offered. When she sensed the giant hand, she got up quickly. That giant hand was always too much for her. She went into the other room and made more drinks. They took suites whenever possible. The gin seemed to need a room of its own. She came back out to the balcony.

“Let’s drink this and go get something to eat,” she said.

They found themselves in the dining room of the hotel. It was claustrophobic and the service was poor. They sat on a cracked red leather banquette under a mirror. On a shelf between them and the mirror was a pair of limp rubber gloves. Denise didn’t bring them to Steadman’s attention. She reasoned that they had been left behind by some maintenance person. They gazed at a table of seven who were telling loud stories about traffic accidents they had witnessed. They seemed to be trying to top one another.