Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Mr. Muirhead smiled. He seemed happier now. Mr. Muirhead loved conversations. He loved “to bring people out.” Dan supposed that Jane had picked up this pleasant trait from her father and distorted it in some perversely personal way.

“I bet you have a Trans Am yourself,” Jane said.

“You are so-o-o right,” the young man said. He extended his hand, showing a large gaudy stone in a setting that seemed to be gold. “Same color as this ring,” he said.

Dan could still be impressed by adults. Their mysterious, unreliable images still had the power to attract and confound her, but Jane was clearly not interested in the young man. She demanded much of life. She had very high standards when she wanted to. Mr. Muirhead ordered the girls ginger ales and the young man and himself another round of drinks. Sometimes the train mysteriously would stop and even reverse, so they would pass unfamiliar scenes once more. The same green pasture filled with slanty light, the same row of clapboard houses, each with the shades of their windows drawn against the heat, the same boats on their trailers, waiting on dry land. The moon was rising beneath a spectacular lightning and thunder storm. People around them were commenting on it. Close to the train, a sheen of dark birds flew low across a dirt road.

“Birds are only flying reptiles, I’m sure you’re all aware,” Jane said suddenly.

“What a horrible thought!” Mr. Muirhead said. His face had become a little slack, and his hair somewhat disarranged.

“It’s true, it’s true,” Jane sang. “Sad but true.”

“You mean like lizards and snakes,” the young man asked. He snorted and shook his head.

“ Glorified reptiles, certainly,” Mr. Muirhead said, recovering a bit of his sense of time and place.

Dan suddenly felt lonely. It was not homesickness, although she would have given anything at that moment to be poking around in her little aluminum boat with Jim Anderson. But she wouldn’t be living any longer in the place she thought of as home. The town was the same but the place was different. The house where she had been a little tiny baby and had lived her whole life belonged to someone else now. Over the summer, her mother and Jake had bought another house that he was going to fix up.

“Reptiles have scales,” the young man said, “or else they’re long and slimy.”

Dan felt like bawling. She could feel the backs of her eyes swelling up like cupcakes. She was surrounded by strangers saying crazy things. Even her own mother often said crazy things in a reasonable way that made Dan know she was a stranger too. Dan’s mother told Dan everything. Her mother told her she wouldn’t have to worry about having brothers or sisters. Her mother discussed the particular nature of the problem with her. Half the things she told her, Dan didn’t want to know. There would be no brothers and sisters. There would be Dan and her mother and Jake, sitting around the house together, caring deeply for one another, sharing a nice life together, not making any mistakes.

Dan excused herself and started toward the lavatory on the level below. Mrs. Muirhead called to her as she approached and handed her a folded piece of paper. “Would you be kind enough to give this to Mr. Muirhead,” she asked. Dan returned to Mr. Muirhead and gave him the note and then went down to the lavatory. She sat on the little toilet and cried as the train rocked along.

After a while, she heard Jane’s voice saying, “I hear you in there, Danica Anderson. What’s the matter with you?”

Dan didn’t say anything.

“I know it’s you,” Jane said.

Dan blew her nose, pushed the button on the toilet and said, “What did the note say?”

“I don’t know,” Jane said. “Daddy ate it.”

“He ate it!” Dan exclaimed. She opened the door of the stall and went to the sink. She washed her hands and splashed her face with water. She giggled. “He really ate it?”

“Everybody is looped in that Starlight Lounge,” Jane said, then patted her hair with a hairbrush. Jane’s hair was full of tangles and she never brushed hard enough to get them out. She looked at Dan by looking in the mirror. “Why were you crying?”

“I was thinking about your grandma,” Dan said. “She said that one year she left the Christmas tree up until Easter.”

“Why were you thinking about my grandma!” Jane yelled.

“I was thinking about her singing,” Dan said, startled. “I like her singing.”

In her head, Dan could hear Jane’s grandmother singing about Death’s dark waters and sinking souls, about Mercy Seats and the Great Physician. She could hear the voice rising and falling through the thin walls of the Maine house, borne past the dark screens and into the night.

“I don’t want you thinking about my grandma,” Jane said, pinching Dan’s arm.

Dan tried not to think of Jane’s grandma. Once, she had seen her fall coming out of the water. The beach was stony. The stones were round and smooth and slippery. Jane’s grandmother had skinned her arm.

The girls went into the corridor and saw Mrs. Muirhead standing there. Mrs. Muirhead was deeply tanned. She had put her hair up in a twist and a wad of cotton was noticeable in her left ear. The three of them stood together, bouncing and nudging against one another with the motion of the train.

“My ear is killing me,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I think there’s something they’re not telling me. It crackles and snaps in there. It’s like a bird breaking seeds in there.” She touched the bone between cheekbone and ear. “I think that doctor I was seeing should lose his license. He was handsome and competent, certainly, but on my last visit he was vacuuming my ear and his secretary came in to ask him a question and she put her hand on his neck. She stroked his neck, his secretary! While I was sitting there having my ear vacuumed!” Mrs. Muirhead’s cheeks were flushed.

The three of them gazed out the window. The train must have been clipping along, but things outside, although gone in an instant, seemed to be moving slowly. Beneath a streetlight, a man was kicking his pickup truck.

“I dislike trains,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I find them depressing.”

“It’s the oxygen deprivation,” Jane said, “coming from having to share the air with all these people.”

“You’re such a snob, dear.” Mrs. Muirhead sighed.

“We’re going to supper now,” Jane said.

“Supper,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “Ugh.”

The children left her looking out the window, a disconsolate, pretty woman wearing a green dress with a line of frogs dancing around it.

The dining car was almost full. The windows reflected the eaters. The countryside was dim and the train pushed through it.

Jane steered them to a table where a man and woman silently labored over their meal.

“My name is Crystal,” Jane offered, “and this is my twin sister, Clara.”

“Clara!” Dan exclaimed. Jane was always inventing drab names for her.

“We were triplets,” Jane went on, “but the other died at birth. Cord got all twisted around his neck or something.”

The woman looked at Jane and smiled.

“What is your line of work?” Jane persisted brightly.

There was silence. The woman kept smiling, then the man said, “I don’t do anything, I don’t have to do anything. I was injured in a peacetime accident and they brought me to the base hospital and worked on reviving me for forty-five minutes. Then they gave up. They thought I was dead. Four hours later, I woke up in the mortuary. The Army gives me a good pension.” He pushed his chair away from the table and left.

Dan looked after him, astonished, a cold roll raised halfway to her mouth. “Was your husband really dead for all that while,” she asked.