Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“What’s what, my sweet?”

“That,” Lucy said, “on the ground.” She picked up a piece of rust, as big as her small hand and very light. Dwight peered at it. As she was trying to hand it to him, it dropped and crumbled.

“It looked so solid, I didn’t check underneath,” Dwight said. “I’ll have some body men come over tomorrow and look at it. I’m sure it’s no problem, just superficial stuff.”

She ran her fingers behind the rocker panel of the door and came up with a handful of flakes.

“I don’t know why you’d want to make it worse,” Dwight said.

The next morning, two men were scooting around on their backs beneath the T-Bird, poking here and there with screwdrivers and squinting at the undercarriage. Lucy, who enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, was still in the kitchen, finishing it. As she ate her cereal, she studied the milk carton, a panel of which made a request for organs. Lucy was aware of a new determination in the world to keep things going. She rinsed her bowl and went outside just as the two men had slipped from beneath the car and were standing up, staring at Dwight. Gouts and clots of rust littered the drive.

“This for your daughter here?” one of them said.

“No,” Dwight said irritably.

“I wouldn’t give this to my daughter.”

“It’s not for anyone like that!” Dwight said.

“Bottom’s just about to go,” the other one said. “Riding along, these plates give, floor falls out, your butt’s on the road. You need new pans at least. Pans are no problem.” He chewed on his thumbnail. “It’s rusted out too where the leaf springs meet the frame. Needs some work, no doubt about that. Somebody’s done a lot of work but it needs a lot more work for sure. Donny, get me the Hemmings out of the truck.”

The other man ambled off and returned with a thick brown catalog.

“Maybe you should trade up,” the first man said. “Get a car with a solid frame.”

Dwight shook his head. “You can’t repair it?”

“Why sure we can repair it!” Donny said. “You can get everything for these cars, all the parts, you got yourself a classic here!” He thumbed through the catalog until he came to a page that offered the services of something called The T-Bird Sanctuary. The Sanctuary seemed to be a wrecking yard. A grainy photograph showed a jumble of cannibalized cars scattered among trees. It was the kind of picture that looked as though it had been taken furtively with a concealed camera.

“I’d trade up,” the other man said. “Lookit over here, this page here, Fifty-seven T-Bird supercharged, torch red, total body-off restoration, nothing left undone, ready to show…”

“Be still, my heart,” Donny said.

“You know if you are going to stick with this car you got,” the other man said, “and I’m not advising you to, you should paint it the original color. This black ain’t original.” He opened the door and pointed at a smudge near the hinges. “See here, powder blue.”

Lucy returned to the house. She stood inside, thinking, looking out at the street. When she had been a little girl walking to school, she had once found an envelope on the street with her name on it, but there hadn’t been anything in the envelope.

“We’re getting another opinion,” Dwight said when he came in. “We’re taking it over to Boris, the best in the business.”

They drove to the edge of town, to where another town began, to a big brown building there. Lucy enjoyed the car. It handled very well, she thought. They hurtled along, even though bigger cars passed them.

Boris was small, bald and stern. The German shepherd that stood beside him seemed remarkably large. His paws were delicately rounded but each was the size of a football. There was room, easily, for another German shepherd inside him, Lucy thought. Boris drove the Thunderbird onto a lift and elevated it. He walked slowly beneath it, his hands on his hips. Not a hair grew from his head. He lowered the car down and said, “Hopeless.” When neither Lucy nor Dwight spoke, he shouted, “Worthless. Useless.” The German shepherd sighed as though he had heard this prognosis many times.

“What about where the leaf springs meet the frame?” Lucy said. The phrase enchanted her.

Boris moved his hands around and then clutched and twisted them together in a pleading fashion.

“How can I make you nice people understand that it is hopeless? What can I say so that you will hear me, so that you will believe me? Do you like ripping up one-hundred-dollar bills? Is this what you want to do with the rest of your life? What kind of masochists are you? It would be wicked of me to give you hope. This car is unrestorable. It is full of rust and rot. Rust is a living thing, it breathes, it eats and it is swallowing up your car. These quarters and rockers have already been replaced, once, twice, who knows how many times. You will replace them again. It is nothing to replace quarters and rockers! How can I save you from your innocence and foolishness and delusions. You take out a bad part, say, you solder in new metal, you line-weld it tight, you replace the whole rear end, say, and what have you accomplished, you have accomplished only a small part of what is necessary, you have accomplished hardly anything! I can see you feel dread and nausea at what I’m saying but it is nothing compared to the dread and nausea you will feel if you continue in this unfortunate project. Stop wasting your thoughts! Rot like this cannot be stayed. This brings us to the question, What is man? with its three subdivisions, What can he know? What ought he do? What may he hope? Questions which concern us all, even you, little lady.”

“What!” Dwight said.

“My suggestion is to drive this car,” Boris said in a calmer tone, “enjoy it, but for the spring and summer only, then dump it, part it out. Otherwise, you’ll be putting in new welds, more and more new welds, but always the collapse will be just ahead of you. Years will pass and then will come the day when there is nothing to weld the weld to, there is no frame, nothing. Once rot, then nothing.” He bowed, then retired to his office.

Driving home, Dwight said, “You never used to hear about rust and rot all the time. It’s new, this rust and rot business. You don’t know what’s around you anymore.”

Lucy knew Dwight was depressed and tried to look concerned, though in truth she didn’t care much about the T-Bird. She was distracted by a tune that was going through her head. It was a song she remembered hearing when she was a little baby, about a tiny ant being at his doorway. She finally told Dwight about it and hummed the tune.

“Do you remember that little song,” she asked.

“Almost,” Dwight said.

“What was that about anyway,” Lucy asked. “The tiny ant didn’t do anything, he was just waiting at his doorway.”

“It was just nonsense stuff you’d sing to a little baby,” Dwight said. He looked at her vaguely and said, “My sweet…”

—

Lucy called up her friend Daisy and told her about the black Thunderbird. She did not mention rot. Daisy was ten years older than Lucy and was one of the last of Dwight’s girlfriends. Daisy had recently had one of her legs amputated. There had been a climbing accident and then she had just let things go on for too long. She was a tall, boyish-looking woman who before the amputation had always worn jeans. Now she slung herself about in skirts, for she found it disturbed people less when she wore a skirt, but when she went to the beach she wore a bathing suit, and she didn’t care if she disturbed people or not because she loved the beach, the water, so still and so heavy, hiding so much.

“I didn’t read in the paper about a dead man just sitting in his car like that,” Daisy said. “Don’t they usually report such things? It’s unusual, isn’t it?”