Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I must have thrown the bolt,” Genevieve said. “It’s best to lock your house in the winter, you know. It’s the kids mostly. They get bored. Stevie was a robber once or twice, I’m sure.” She put down her glass, took her coat from the closet and went out. Sarah heard Martha say, “That’s Mommy’s friend.”

Tommy stood in the doorway and stared at Sarah. “Why was she here? Why did you lock the door?”

Sarah imagined seeing herself naked. She said, “There are robbers.”

Tommy said, “If you don’t feel safe here, we’ll move. I’ve been looking at a wonderful place about twenty miles from here, on a cove. It only needs a little work. It will give us more room. There’s a barn, some fence. Martha could have a horse.”

Sarah looked at him with an intent, halted expression, as though she were listening to a dialogue no one present was engaged in. Finally, she said, “There are robbers. Everything has changed.”

When I was very small, my father said, “Lizzie, I want to tell you something about your grandfather. Just before he died, he was alive. Fifteen minutes before.”

I had never known my grandfather. This was the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard about him.

Still, I said, No.

“No!” my father said. “What do you mean, ‘No.’ ” He laughed.

I shook my head.

“All right,” my father said, “it was one minute before. I thought you were too little to know such things, but I see you’re not. It was even less than a minute. It was one moment before.”

“Oh, stop teasing her,” my mother said to my father.

“He’s just teasing you, Lizzie,” my mother said.

—

In warm weather once we drove up into the mountains, my mother, my father and I, and stayed for several days at a resort lodge on a lake. In the afternoons, horse races took place in the lodge. The horses were blocks of wood with numbers painted on them, moved from one end of the room to the other by ladies in ball gowns. There was a long pier that led out into the lake and at the end of the pier was a nightclub that had a twenty-foot-tall champagne glass on the roof. At night, someone would pull a switch and neon bubbles would spring out from the lit glass into the black air. I very much wanted such a glass on the roof of our own house and I wanted to be the one who, every night, would turn on the switch. My mother always said about this, “We’ll see.”

I saw an odd thing once, there in the mountains. I saw my father pretending to be lame. This was in the midst of strangers in the gift shop of the lodge. The shop sold hand-carved canes, among many other things, and when I came in to buy bubble gum in the shape of cigarettes, to which I was devoted, I saw my father hobbling painfully down the aisle, leaning heavily on a dully gleaming yellow cane, his shoulders hunched, one leg turned out at a curious angle. My handsome, healthy father, his face drawn in dreams. He looked at me. And then he looked away as though he did not know me.

My mother was a drinker. Because my father left us, I assumed he was not a drinker, but this may not have been the case. My mother loved me and was always kind to me. We spent a great deal of time together, my mother and I. This was before I knew how to read. I suspected there was a trick to reading, but I did not know the trick. Written words were something between me and a place I could not go. My mother went back and forth to that place all the time, but couldn’t explain to me exactly what it was like there. I imagined it to be a different place.

As a very young child, my mother had seen the magician Houdini. Houdini had made an elephant disappear. He had also made an orange tree grow from a seed right on the stage. Bright oranges hung from the tree and he had picked them and thrown them out into the audience. People could eat the oranges or take them home, whatever they wanted.

“How did he make the elephant disappear,” I asked.

“He disappeared in a puff of smoke,” my mother said. “Houdini said that even the elephant didn’t know how it was done.”

“Was it a baby elephant,” I asked.

My mother sipped her drink. She said that Houdini was more than a magician, he was an escape artist. She said that he could escape from handcuffs and chains and ropes.

“They put him in straitjackets and locked him in trunks and threw him in swimming pools and rivers and oceans and he escaped,” my mother said. “He escaped from water-filled vaults. He escaped from coffins.”

I said that I wanted to see Houdini.

“Oh, Houdini’s dead, Lizzie,” my mother said. “He died a long time ago. A man punched him in the stomach three times and he died.”

Dead. I asked if he couldn’t get out of being dead.

“He met his match there,” my mother said.

She said that he turned a bowl of flowers into a pony who cantered around the stage.

“He sawed a lady in half too, Lizzie.” Oh, how I wanted to be that lady, sawed in half and then made whole again!

My mother spoke happily, laughing. We sat at the kitchen table and my mother was drinking from a small glass that rested snugly in her hand. It was my favorite glass too but she never let me drink from it. There were all kinds of glasses in our cupboard but this was the one we both liked. This was in Maine. Outside, in the yard, was our car, which was an old blue convertible.

“Was there blood,” I asked.

“No, Lizzie, no. He was a magician!”

“Did she cry, that lady,” I wanted to know.

“I don’t think so,” my mother said. “Maybe he hypnotized her first.”

It was winter. My father had never ridden in the blue convertible, which my mother had bought after he had gone. The car was old then, and was rusted here and there. Beneath the rubber mat on my side, the passenger side, part of the floor had rusted through completely. When we went anywhere in the car, I would sometimes lift up the mat so I could see the road rushing past beneath us and feel the cold round air as it came up through the hole. I would pretend that the coldness was trying to speak to me, in the same way that words written down tried to speak. The air wanted to tell me something, but I didn’t care about it, that’s what I thought. Outside, the car stood in the snow.

I had a dream about the car. My mother and I were alone together as we always were, linked in our hopeless and uncomprehending love of each other, and we were driving to a house. It seemed to be our destination but we arrived only to move on. We drove again, always returning to the house, which we would circle and leave, only to arrive at it again. As we drove, the inside of the car grew hair. The hair was gray and it grew and grew. I never told my mother about this dream just as I had never told her about my father leaning on the cane. I was a secretive person. In that way, I was like my mother.

I wanted to know more about Houdini. “Was Houdini in love,” I asked. “Did he love someone?”

“Bess,” my mother said. “He loved his wife, Bess.”

I went and got a glass and poured some ginger ale in it and I sipped my ginger ale as slowly as I had seen my mother sip her drink many, many times. Even then, I had the gestures down. I sat opposite her, very still and quiet, pretending.

But then I wanted to know if there was magic in the way he loved her. Could he make her disappear. Could he make both of them disappear, was the way I put my question.

“No one knew anything about Bess except that Houdini loved her,” my mother said. “He never turned their love into loneliness, which would have been beneath him of course.”

We ate our supper and after supper my mother would have another little bit to drink. Then she would read articles from the newspaper aloud to me.