Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“You might could use a sweet or two,” she says. “Fill you out.”

Her face is big and friendly and her hands seem clean and dry. She is always talking to me. She talks about her daughter, who hasn’t lived with her for many years. The daughter lives in a special home in the next state. Martha says, “She had a bad fever and she stopped being good.”

Martha’s hand on my shoulder feels like a nurse’s hand, intimate and officious. She invites me to her home and I accept, over and over again. She is inviting me in for tea and conversation and I am always opening the door to her home. I am forever entering her rooms, walking endlessly across the shiny wooden floors.

“I don’t want to be rich,” Martha says. “I want only enough to have a friend over for a piece of pie or a highball. And I would like a frost-free refrigerator. Even in the winter, I have to defrost ours once a week. I have to take everything out and then spread the newspapers and get the bowl and sponge and then I have to put everything back.”

“Yes,” I say.

Martha’s hands are moving among the cheap teacups. “It seems a little senseless,” she says.

There are small table fans in the house, stirring the air. The rooms smell of drain cleaner and mold and mildew preventives. When the fans part the curtains to the west, an empty horse stall and a riding ring are visible. Martha crowns my tea with rum, like a friend.

“This is a fine town,” Martha says. “Everyone looks out for his neighbor. Even the prison boys are good boys, most of them up just for stealing copper wire or beating on their women’s fellows.”

I hold the child tight. You know a mother’s fears. He is fascinated by the chopping blades of the little fans, by the roach tablets behind the sofa cushions. Outside, as well, he puts his hands to everything.

“I imagine the wicked arrive at that prison only occasionally,” I say.

“Hardly ever,” Martha agrees.

—

I am trying to explain to you. I am always inside this woman’s house. I am always speaking reasonably with this Martha. I am so tired and so sad and I am lying on a bed drinking tea. It is not Martha’s bed. It is, I suppose, a bed for her guests. I am lying on a bedspread that is covered by a large embroidered peacock. Underneath the bed is a single medium-size mixing bowl. In the light socket is a night-light in the shape of a rose. I feel wonderful in this room in many ways. I feel like a column of air. I would like to audition for something. I am so clean inside.

“My husband worries about you,” Martha says. She takes the cup away. “We are all good people here,” she says. “We all lead good lives.”

“What does your husband do, then?” I say. I smile because I do not want her to think I am confused. Actually, I’ve met the man. He placed his long hands on my stomach, on my thighs.

“We are not unsubtle here,” Martha says, tapping her chest.

I met the man and when I met him in this house he was putting in new pine boards over the cement floors. When I arrived, he stopped, but that was what he was doing. He had a gun that shot nails into the concrete. Each nail cost a quarter. The expense distressed Martha and she mentioned it in my hearing. Men resume things, you know. He went back to it. As I lay on the bed, I could hear the gun being fired and I awoke quickly, frightened the noise might awaken the child. You know a mother’s presumptions. There was the smell of sawdust and smoke from the nail gun.

“I wouldn’t have thought we’d have to worry about you,” Martha says unhappily.

—

When I returned from Martha’s house the first time, I passed a farmer traveling on the beach road in his rusty car. Strapped to the roof was a sandhill crane, one wing raised, pumped full of air and sailing in the moonlight. They kill these birds for their meat. The meat, they say, tastes just like chicken. I have found that almost everything tastes like chicken.

—

There is a garage not far from town where Jace used to buy gas. I stopped there once. There was a large wire meshed cage outside, by the pumps. A sign on it said BABY FLORIDA RATTLERS. Inside were dozens of blue and pink baby rattles on a dirt floor. It gave me a headache. The deception. The largeness of the cage.

—

At night I take the child and walk over the beach to the water’s edge, where it is cool. The child is at peace here, beside the water, and it is here, most likely, where Jace will find us when he comes back. When Jace comes back it will be at night. He always comes in on the heat, at night.

“Darling,” I can hear him say, “even as a little boy, I was all there ever was for you.”

I can see it quite clearly. I will be on the shoreline, nursing, and Jace will come back in on the heat, all careless and easy, and “Darling,” he’ll shout into the wind, into the white roil of water behind us. “Darling, darling,” Jace will shout, “where you been, little girl?”

It was a dark night in August. Sarah and Tommy were going to their third party that night, the party where they would actually sit down to dinner. They were driving down Mixtuxet Avenue, a long black street of trees that led out of the village, away from the shore and the coastal homes into the country. Tommy had been drinking only soda that night. Every other weekend, Tommy wouldn’t drink. He did it, he said, because he could.

Sarah was telling a long story as she drove. She kept asking Tommy if she had told it to him before, but he was noncommittal. When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah talked and talked. She was telling him a terrible story that she had read in the newspaper about an alligator at a jungle-farm attraction in Florida. The alligator had eaten a child who’d crawled into its pen. The alligator’s name was Cookie. Its owner shot it immediately. The owner was sad about everything — the child, the parents’ grief, Cookie. He was quoted in the paper as saying that shooting Cookie was not an act of revenge.

When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah felt cold. She was shivering in the car. There were goose pimples on her tanned, thin arms. Tommy sat beside her smoking, saying nothing.

There had been words between them earlier. The parties here had an undercurrent of sexuality. Sarah could almost hear it, flowing around them all, carrying them all along. In the car, on the night of the accident, Sarah was at that point in the evening when she felt guilty. She wanted to make things better, make things nice. She had gone through her elated stage, her jealous stage, her stubbornly resigned stage and now she felt guilty. Had they talked about divorce that night, or had that been before, on other evenings? There was a flavor she remembered in their talks about divorce, a scent. It was hot, as Italy had been hot when they were there. Dust, bread, sun, a burning at the back of the throat from too much drinking.

But no, they hadn’t been talking about divorce that night. The parties had been crowded. Sarah had hardly seen Tommy. Then, on her way to the bathroom, she had seen him sitting with a girl on a bed in one of the back rooms. He was telling the girl about condors, about hunting for condors in small, light planes.

“Oh, but you didn’t hurt them, did you,” the girl asked. She was someone’s daughter, a little overweight but with beautiful skin and large green eyes.

“Oh no,” Tommy assured her, “we weren’t hunting to hurt.”

Condors. Sarah looked at them sitting on the bed. When they noticed her, the girl blushed. Tommy smiled. Sarah imagined what she looked like, standing in the doorway.

That had been at the Steadmans’. The first party was at the Perrys’. The Perrys never served food. Sarah had two or three drinks there. The bar was set up beneath the grape arbor and everyone stood outside. It had still been light at the Perrys’ but at the Steadmans’ it was dark and people drank inside. Everyone spoke about the end of summer as though it were a bewildering and unnatural event.