Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

I am tall. I have a mole by my lip. When I speak, the mole vanishes. I address myself to the child quite frequently. He is an infant, only a few months old.

I say things like, “What would you like for lunch? A marmalade crepe? A peanut-butter cupcake?”

Naturally, he does not answer. As for myself, I could seldom comply with his agreement. I keep forgetting to buy the ingredients. There was a time when I had everything on hand. I was quite the cook once. Pompano stuffed with pecans. Quiche Lorraine. And curry! I was wonderful with curries. I had such imaginative accompaniments. The whole thing no bigger than a saucer sometimes, yet perfect!

—

We live in the sun here, on the beach, in the south. It is so hot here. I will tell you exactly how hot it is. It is too hot for orange trees. People plant them but they do not bear. I sleep alone now. I will be honest. Sometimes I wake in the night and realize that I have called upon my body. I am repelled but I do not become distraught. I remove my hands firmly. I raise and lower them to either side of the bed. It seems a little self-conscious, a little staged, to bring my hands away like that. But hands, what do they have to do with any of us?

The heat is the worst at night. I go damp with fever here at night, and I dream. Once I dreamed of baking a bat in the oven. I can’t imagine myself dreaming such a thing.

I try to keep the child cool at night. I give him ice to play with. He accepts everything I have to offer. He is always with me. He is in my care.

I knew when Jace had started the baby. It’s true what you’ve heard. A woman knows.

It has always been Jace only. We were children together. We lived in the same house. It was a big house on the water. Jace remembers it precisely. I remember it not as well. There were eleven people in that house and a dog beneath it, tied night and day to the pilings. Eleven of us and always a baby. It doesn’t seem reasonable now when I think of it, but there were always eleven of us and always a baby. The diapers and the tiny clothes, hanging out to dry, for years!

Jace was older than me by a year and a day and I went everywhere with him.

My momma tried to bring me around. She said, “One day you’re going to be a woman. There are ways you’ll have to behave.”

But we were just children. It was a place for children and we were using it up. The sharks would come up the inlet in the morning rains and they’d roll so it would seem the water was boiling. Our breath was wonderful. Everything was wonderful. We would box. Underneath the house, with the dog’s rope tangling around our legs, Jace and I would box, stripped to the waist. Red and yellow seaweed would stream from the rope. The beams above us were soft blue with mold. Even now, I can feel exactly what it felt like to be cool and out of the sun.

Jace’s fists were like flowers.

—

Jace is thin and quick. His jeans are white with my washing. I have always done my part. Wherever we went, I planted. If the soil was muck, I would plant vegetables; if dry, herbs; if sandy, strawberries. We always left before they could be harvested. We were always moving on, down the coast. But we always had bread to eat. I made good crusty bread. I had a sourdough starter that was seventy-one years old.

We have always lived on the water. Jace likes to hear it. We have been on all the kinds of water there are in the South. Once we lived in the swamp. The water there was a creamy pink. Air plants covered the trees like tufts of hair. All the life was in the trees, in the nests swinging from high branches.

I didn’t care for the swamp, although it’s true the sun was no problem there.

In Momma’s house, a lemon tree grew outside the window of the baby’s room. The fruit hung there for color mostly. Sometimes Momma made a soup. The tree was quite lovely and it flourished. It had been planted over the grease trap of the sink. I am always honest when I can be. It was swill that made it grow.

Here there is nothing of interest outside the child’s room. Just the sand and the dunes. The dunes cast no shadow and offer no relief from the sun. A small piece of the gulf is visible and it flickers like glass. It’s as though the water is signaling some message to my child in his crib.

—

We do not wait for Jace to come back. We do not wait for anything. We do not want anything. Jace, on the other hand, wants and wants. There is nothing he would not accept. He has many trades. Once he was a deep-sea diver. He dove for sponges out of Tarpon Springs. He dove every day, all of one spring and all of one summer. There was a red tide that year that drove people almost mad. Your eyes would swell, your throat would burn. Everything was choking. The water was like chewing gum. The birds went inland. All the fish and turtles died. I wouldn’t hear about it. I was always a sensitive woman. Jace would lie in bed, smoking, his brown arms on the white sheets, his pale hair on the pressed pillowcases. Yes, everything was spotless once, and in order.

He said, “The fastest fish can’t swim out of it. Not even the barracuda.”

I wouldn’t hear it. I did not like suffering.

“The bottom was covered with fish,” he said. “I couldn’t see the sponges for the acres of fish.”

I began to cry.

“Everything is all right,” he said. He held me. “No one cares,” he said. “Why are you crying?”

There were other jobs Jace had. He built and drove. He would be gone for a few weeks or a few months and then he would come back. There were some things he didn’t tell me.

—

The beach land here belongs to the Navy. It has belonged to them for many years, though its purpose has been forgotten. There are a few trees near the road, but they have no bark or green branches. I point this out to the child, directing his gaze to the blasted scenery. “The land is unwholesome,” I say. He refuses to agree. I insist, although I am not one for words.

“Horsetail beefwood can’t be tolerated here,” I tell him, “although horsetail beefwood is all the land naturally bears. Now if they had a decorative bent,” I tell him, “they would plant palms, but there are no palms.”

The baby’s head is a white globe beneath my heart. He exhausts me, even though his weight is little more than that of water on my hands. He is a frail child. So many precautions are necessary. My hands grow white from holding him.

I am so relieved that Jace is gone. He has a perfect memory. His mouth was so clean, resting on me, and I was so quiet. But then he’d start talking about Momma’s house.

“Wasn’t life nice then?” he’d say. “And couldn’t we see everything there was to see? And didn’t life just make the finest sense?”

Even without Jace, I sometimes feel uneasy. There is something I feel I have not done.

—

It was the third month I could feel the child best. They move, you know, to face their stars.

—

There is a small town not far from here. I loathe the town and its people. They are watchful country people. The town’s economy is dependent upon the prison. The prison is a good neighbor, they say. It is unobtrusive, quiet. When an execution is necessary, the executioner arrives in a white Cadillac and he is unobtrusive, too, for the Cadillac is an old one and there are a great many white cars here. The cars are white because of the terrible heat. The man in the Cadillac is called the engineer and no one claims to know his name.

The townspeople are all handy. They are all very willing to lend a helping hand. They hire prison boys to work in their yards. You can always tell the prison boys. They look so hungry and serene.

Martha is the only one of the townspeople who talks to me. The rest nod or smile. Martha is a comfy woman with a nice complexion, but her hair is the color of pork. She is always touching my arm, directing my attention to things she believes I might have overlooked, a sale on gin, for example, or frozen whipped puddings.