Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

I guessed we did.

“All right, Lizzie,” my mother said, “but I have to get something out of the car. I’ll be right back.”

I waited for her in a corner of the lobby. Some children looked at me and I looked back. I had a package of gum cigarettes in my pocket and I extracted one carefully and placed the end in my mouth. I held the elbow of my right arm with my left hand and smoked the cigarette for a long time and then I folded it up in my mouth and I chewed it for a while. My mother had not yet returned when the performance began again. She was having a little drink, I knew, and she was where she went when she drank without me, somewhere in herself. It was not the place where words could take you but another place even. I stood alone in the lobby for a while, looking out into the street. On the sidewalk outside the theater, sand had been scattered and the sand ate through the ice in ugly holes. I saw no one like my mother who passed by. She was wearing a red coat. Once she had said to me, You’ve fallen out of love with me, haven’t you, and I knew she was thinking I was someone else, but this had happened only once.

—

I heard the music from the stage and I finally returned to our seats. There were not as many people in the audience as before. Onstage with the magician was a woman in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes holding a chain saw. The magician demonstrated that the saw was real by cutting up several pieces of wood with it. There was the smell of torn wood for everyone to smell and sawdust on the floor for all to see. Then a table was wheeled out and the lady lay down on it in her bathing suit, which was in two pieces. Her stomach was very white. The magician talked and waved the saw around. I suspected he was planning to cut the woman in half and I was eager to see this. I hadn’t the slightest fear about this at all. I did wonder if he would be able to put her together again or if he would only cut her in half. The magician said that what was about to happen was too dreadful to be seen directly, that he did not want anyone to faint from the sight, so he brought out a small screen and placed it in front of the lady so that we could no longer see her white stomach, although everyone could still see her face and her shoes. The screen seemed unnecessary to me and I would have preferred to have been seated on the other side of it. Several people in the audience screamed. The lady who was about to be sawed in half began to chew on her lip and her face looked worried.

It was then that my mother appeared on the stage. She was crouched over a little, for she didn’t have her balance back from having climbed up there. She looked large and strange in her red coat. The coat, which I knew very well, seemed the strangest thing. Someone screamed again, but more uncertainly. My mother moved toward the magician, smiling and speaking and gesturing with her hands, and the magician said, “No, I can’t of course, you should know better than this, this is a performance, you can’t just appear like this, please sit down…”

My mother said, “But you don’t understand I’m willing, though I know the hazards and it’s not that I believe you, no one would believe you for a moment but you can trust me, that’s right, your faith in me would be perfectly placed because I’m not part of this, that’s why I can be trusted because I don’t know how it’s done…”

Someone near me said, “Is she kidding, that woman, what’s her plan, she comes out of nowhere and wants to be cut in half…”

“Lady,” the magician said, and I thought a dog might appear for I knew a dog named Lady who had a collection of colored balls.

My mother said, “Most of us don’t understand I know and it’s just as well because the things we understand that’s it for them, that’s just the way we are…”

She probably thought she was still in that place in herself, but everything she said were the words coming from her mouth. Her lipstick was gone. Did she think she was in disguise, I wondered.

“But why not,” my mother said, “to go and come back, that’s what we want, that’s why we’re here and why can’t we expect something to be done you can’t expect us every day we get tired of showing up every day you can’t get away with this forever then it was different but you should be thinking about the children…” She moved a little in a crooked fashion, speaking.

“My god,” said a voice, “that woman’s drunk.”

“Sit down, please!” someone said loudly.

My mother started to cry then and she stumbled and pushed her arms out before her as though she were pushing away someone who was trying to hold her, but no one was trying to hold her. The orchestra began to play and people began to clap. The usher ran out onto the stage and took my mother’s hand. All this happened in an instant. He said something to her, he held her hand and she did not resist his holding it, then slowly the two of them moved down the few steps that led to the stage and up the aisle until they stopped beside me for the usher knew I was my mother’s child. I followed them, of course, although in my mind I continued to sit in my seat. Everyone watched us leave. They did not notice that I remained there among them, watching too.

We went directly out of the theater and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher’s arm. The shoulders of his jacket were of cardboard and there was gold braid looped around it. We were being taken away to be murdered, which seemed reasonable to me. The usher’s ears were large and he had a bump on his neck above the collar of his shirt. As we walked he said little soft things to my mother that gradually seemed to be comforting her. I hated him. It was not easy to walk together along the frozen sidewalks of the city. There was a belt on my mother’s coat and I hung on to that as we moved unevenly along.

“Look, I’ve pulled myself through,” he said. “You can pull yourself through.” He was speaking to my mother.

We went into a coffee shop and sat down in a booth. “You can collect yourself in here,” he said. “You can sit here as long as you want and drink coffee and no one will make you leave.” He asked me if I wanted a donut. I would not speak to him. If he addressed me again, I thought, I would bite him. On the wall over the counter were pictures of sandwiches. I did not want to be there and I did not take off either my mittens or my coat. The little usher went up to the counter and brought back coffee for my mother and a donut on a plate for me. “Oh,” my mother said, “what have I done?” and she swung her head from side to side.

“I could tell right away about you,” the usher said. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. It took jumping off a bridge for me and breaking both legs before I got turned around. You don’t want to let it go that far.”

My mother looked at him. “I can’t imagine,” my mother said.

Outside, a child passed by, walking with her sled. She looked behind her often and you could tell she was admiring how the sled followed her so quickly on its runners.

“You’re a mother,” the usher said to my mother, “you’ve got to pull yourself through.”

His kindness made me feel he had tied us up with rope. At last he left us and my mother laid her head down on the table and fell asleep. I had never seen my mother sleeping and I watched her as she must once have watched me, as everyone watches a sleeping thing, not knowing how it would turn out or when. Then slowly I began to eat the donut with my mittened hands. The sour hair of the wool mingled with the tasteless crumbs and this utterly absorbed my attention. I pretended someone was feeding me.

—

As it happened, my mother was not able to pull herself through, but this was later. At the time, it was not so near the end and when my mother woke we found the car and left Portland, my mother saying my name. “Lizzie,” she said. “Lizzie.” I felt as though I must be with her somewhere and that she knew that too, but not in that old blue convertible traveling home in the dark, the soft, stained roof ballooning up as I knew it looked like it was from outside. I got out of it, but it took me years.