Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“My goodness,” she said, “what a strange story. A hunter shot a bear who was carrying a woman’s pocketbook in its mouth.”

“Oh, oh,” I cried. I looked at the newspaper and struck it with my fingers. My mother read on, a little oblivious to me. The woman had lost her purse years before on a camping trip. Everything was still inside it, her wallet and her compact and her keys.

“Oh,” I cried. I thought this was terrible. I was frightened, thinking of my mother’s pocketbook, how she always carried it always, and the poor bear too.

“Why did the bear want to carry a pocketbook,” I asked.

My mother looked up from the words in the newspaper. It was as though she had come back into the room I was in.

“Why, Lizzie,” she said.

“The poor bear,” I said.

“Oh, the bear is all right,” my mother said. “The bear got away.”

I did not believe this was the case. She herself said the bear had been shot.

“The bear escaped,” my mother said. “It says so right here,” and she ran her finger along a line of words. “It ran back into the woods to its home.” She stood up and came around the table and kissed me. She smelled then like the glass that was always in the sink in the morning, and the smell reminds me still of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.

I shut my eyes and felt I could not hear my mother. I saw the bear holding the pocketbook, walking through the woods with it, feeling fine and different and pretty too, then stopping to find something in it, wanting something, moving its big paw through the pocketbook’s small things.

“Lizzie,” my mother called to me. My mother did not know where I was, which alarmed me. I opened my eyes.

“Don’t cry, Lizzie,” my mother said. She looked as though she were about to cry too. This was how it often was at night, late in the kitchen, with my mother.

My mother returned to the newspaper and began to turn the pages. She called my attention to the drawing of a man holding a hat with stars sprinkling out of it. It was an advertisement for a magician who would be performing not far away. We decided we would see him. My mother knew just the seats she wanted for us, good seats, on the aisle, close to the stage. We might be called up on the stage, she said, to be part of the performance. Magicians often used people from the audience, particularly children. I might even be given a rabbit.

I wanted a rabbit.

I put my hands on the table and I could see the rabbit between them. He was solid white in the front and solid black in the back as though he were made up of two rabbits. There are rabbits like that. I saw him there, before me on the table, a nice rabbit.

My mother went to the phone and ordered two tickets, and not many days after that, we were in our car driving to Portland for the matinee performance. I very much liked the word matinee. Matinee, matinee, I said. There was a broad hump on the floor between our seats and it was here where my mother put her little glass, the glass often full, never, it seemed, more than half empty. We chatted together and I thought we must have appeared interesting to others as we passed by in our convertible in winter. My mother spoke about happiness. She told me that the happiness that comes out of nowhere, out of nothing, is the very best kind. We paid no attention to the coldness, which was speaking in the way that it had, but enjoyed the sun beating through the windshield on our pale hands.

My mother said that Houdini had black eyes and that white doves flew from his fingertips. She said that he escaped from a block of ice.

“Did he look like my father, Houdini,” I asked. “Did he have a mustache.”

“Your father didn’t have a mustache,” my mother said, laughing. “Oh, I wish I could be more like you.”

Later, she said, “Maybe he didn’t escape from a block of ice, I’m not sure about that. Maybe he wanted to, but he never did.”

We stopped for lunch somewhere, a dark little restaurant along the road. My mother had cocktails and I myself drank something cold and sweet. The restaurant was not very nice. It smelled of smoke and dampness as though once it had burned down, and it was so noisy that I could not hear my mother very well. My mother looked like a woman in a bar, pretty and disturbed, hunched forward saying, Who do you think I look like, will you remember me? She was saying all manner of things. We lingered there, and then my mother asked the time of someone and seemed surprised. My mother was always surprised by time. Outside, there were woods of green fir trees, whose lowest branches swept the ground, and as we were getting back into the car, I believed I saw something moving far back in the darkness of the woods beyond the slick, snowy square of the parking lot. It was the bear, I thought. Hurry, hurry, I thought. The hunter is playing with his children. He is making them something to play in as my father had once made a small playhouse for me. He is not the hunter yet. But in my heart I knew the bear was gone and the shape was just the shadow of something else in the afternoon.

My mother drove very fast but the performance had already begun when we arrived. My mother’s face was damp and her good blouse had a spot on it. She went into the ladies’ room and when she returned the spot was larger, but it was water now and not what it had been before. The usher assured us that we had not missed much. The usher said that the magician was not very good, that he talked and talked, he told a lot of jokes and then when you were bored and distracted, something would happen, something would have changed. The usher smiled at my mother. He seemed to like her, even know her in some way. He was a small man, like an old boy, balding. I did not care for him. He led us to our seats, but there were people sitting in them and there was a small disturbance as the strangers rearranged themselves. We were both expectant, my mother and I, and we watched the magician intently. My mother’s lips were parted, and her eyes were bright. On the stage were a group of children about my age, each with a hand on a small cage the magician was holding. In the cage was a tiny bird. The magician would ask the children to jostle the cage occasionally and the bird would flutter against the bars so that everyone would see it was a real thing with bones and breath and feelings too. Each child announced that they had a firm grip on the bars. Then the magician put a cloth over the cage, gave a quick tug and both cage and bird vanished. I was not surprised. It seemed just the kind of thing that was going to happen. I decided to withhold my applause when I saw that my mother’s hands too were in her lap. There were several more tricks of the magician’s invention, certainly nothing I would have asked him to do. Large constructions of many parts and colors were wheeled onto the stage. There were doors everywhere that the magician opened and slammed shut. Things came and went, all to the accompaniment of loud music. I was confused and grew hot. My mother too moved restlessly in the next seat. Then there was an intermission and we returned to the lobby.

“This man is a far, far cry from the great Houdini,” my mother said.

“What were his intentions, exactly,” I asked.

He had taken a watch from a man in the audience and smashed it for all to see with a hammer. Then the watch, unharmed, had reappeared behind the man’s ear.

“A happy memory can be a very misleading thing,” my mother said. “Would you like to go home?”

I really did not want to leave. I wanted to see it through. I held the glossy program in my hand and turned the pages. I stared hard at the print beneath the pictures and imagined all sorts of promises being made.

“Yes, we want to see how it’s done, don’t we, you and I,” my mother said. “We want to get to the bottom of it.”