Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

There was nothing left of Christmas but the cold that slouched and pressed against the people. Their blood was full of it. And their eyes and the food that they ate. The people walked the streets wearing woolen masks as though they were gangsters, or deformed. Old ladies died of breaks and foolish wounds in houses where no one came, and fish froze in the quiet of their rivers.

The cold didn’t invent anything like the summer has a habit of doing and it didn’t disclose anything like the spring. It lay powerfully encamped — waiting, altering one’s ambitions, encouraging ends. The cold made for an ache, a restlessness and an irritation, and thinking that fell in odd and unemployable directions.

Judy Cushman and Julep Lee were the best of friends. Each knew things that the other did not, and each had a different manner of going after the things that she wanted. Each loved the handsome chemistry teacher of the high school. Love had different beginnings but always the same end. Someone was going to get hurt. Julep was too discreet to admit this for she tried not to think of shabby things.

They were fourteen and the only thing that was familiar to them was the town and the way they spent their lives there, which they hated.

They slept a great deal and always talked about the same things and made brownies and popcorn and drank Coca-Cola. Julep always made a great show of drinking Coca-Cola because she claimed that her father had given her three shares of stock in it the day she was born. Judy would laugh about this whenever she thought to. “On the day I was born,” she’d say, “I received the gifts of beauty and luck.”

Their schoolbooks lay open and unread, littered with crumbs and nail trimmings. Every night that didn’t bring a blizzard, they would spy on the chemistry teacher, for they were fourteen and could only infrequently distinguish what they did from what they merely dreamed about.

The chemistry teacher had enormous trembling eyes like a deer and a name in your mouth sweet as a candy bar. DEBEVOISE. He was tall and languid and unmarried and handsome. He lived alone in a single rented room on the second floor of a large house on the coast. The house was the last one on a street that abruptly became a field of pines and stones. Every night the girls would come to the field and, crouching in a hollow, watch him through a pair of cheap binoculars. For a month they had been watching him move woodenly around the small room and still they did not know what it was they wanted to happen. The walls of the room were painted white and he sat at a white desk with his shirtsleeves rolled down to his wrists. The only thing that was on the desk was a tiny television set with a screen the size of a book. He watched it and drank from a glass. Sometimes he would run his own hands through his own dark hair.

Judy Cushman and Julep Lee felt that loving him was a success in itself.

But still they had no idea what they waited for in the snow. The rocks dug into their skinny shanks. Their ears went deaf with the cold. At times, Judy thought that she wanted him to bring a woman up there. Or perhaps do something embarrassing or dirty all by himself. But she was not sure about this.

As for Julep, she seldom said things that she had not already said once long before, so there was no way of knowing what she thought.

—

Julep was the thinnest human being in town, all angles and bruises and fierce joinings. Even her lips were hard and spare and bloodless as bone. Her hair was such a pale, parched blond that it looked white and her brows and lashes were the same color, although her eyes, under heavy round lids that worked slowly as a doll’s, were brown.

Her parents had moved from the South to the North when she was four years old, and she had lived on the same bitter and benumbed coast ever since. She steered her way through each new day incredulously, as though she had been kidnapped and sent to some grim prison yard in another world. She couldn’t employ the cold to any advantage so she dreamed of heat, of a sun fierce enough to melt the monstrous town and set her free. She talked about the sun as though it were a personal friend of hers, waiting in the next room for her to get ready and go out with it.

Julep was a Baptist, a clarinetist in the band, a forward on the six-girl basketball team that was famous throughout the state, undefeated, unthreatened, unsmiling. She had scabs on her knees, a blue silk uniform in her locker, fingernails split and ragged from the gritty leather ball. Julep was an innocent.

—

Judy Cushman too was an innocent, but had a tendency to see things in a greedy, rutting way. Judy was tiny and tough and wore a garter belt. Almost every one of her eyebrow hairs was plucked from her head and her hair was stacked over a foot high, for her older sister was a hairdresser who taught her half of everything she knew.

Judy was full and sleek and a favorite with the boys and she would tell Julep things that Julep almost died hearing. She would say, “Last night Tommy Saloma exposed himself to my eyes only in the rumpus room of his house,” and Julep would almost faint. She would say, “Billy Colter touched my breast in the library,” and Julep would gasp and hold her head at an unnaturally high angle for she felt that if she didn’t, everything inside her would stream terribly from her mouth, everything she was made of, falling out of her onto the floor in front of them.

Judy always told her friend the most awful things she could think of, true or false, and made promises that she would not keep and insulted and disappointed and teased her as much as possible. Julep allowed this and was always deeply affected and bewildered by this, which flattered Judy enormously. This pleasure compensated for the fact that Julep had white hair that Judy would have given anything in the world to have. It annoyed her that her friend had such strange and devastating hair and didn’t know how to cut or curl it properly.

After school, they would often go to Julep’s house. They usually went there rather than to Judy’s because Julep’s room was bigger. Judy’s room was just a closet with a bright lightbulb and a studio bed and the smell of underwear.

—

“Look now,” Judy said, peeling off a strip of Scotch tape from her bangs, “we’ve got to broaden our conversational base. Why don’t we talk about men or movies? Or even mixed drinks?”

Julep said, “We don’t know anything about those things.” She looked at the worn black Bible on her bedside table. She had read there that the sun would someday become black as a sackcloth of hair and the moon would turn red as blood. This was because of the evil in people, and Julep worried that this would happen to the sun before she had a chance to get back to where it was again.

“You don’t know anything is all.” Judy plucked at her sweater and smiled the bittersweet smile she found so crushing on the lips of the girl models of the fashion magazines. Her new breasts rose and fell eerily beneath her sweater.

“I know that someday you’re gonna poke someone’s eye out with those things,” Julep said, pointing at her friend’s chest. “If I were you, I’d be worried sick.”

Judy yawned. Julep stared out the window. The sun was still up but nowhere in sight. The air was blue and the snow falling through it was blue, and the trees were as black as though they had been burned.

“I’m leaving,” Judy said abruptly, then swept out of Julep’s bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen.

Julep rubbed at the frost forming inside the windowpane with a thin yellowish nail that was bleeding beneath the quick. She felt her head sweating. If she pressed her hands to it, it would pop like a too-heavy tick on a dog. If hell were hot then heaven must be freezing cold. She backed away from the window and thudded down the stairs.