Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

She sat for some time in the car alone, then went into the kitchen, where Dwight stood, drinking water. It was a gray day, with a gray careless light falling everywhere.

“I had the tiniest feeling in there that the point being made was that something has robbed this world of its promise,” Lucy said. She did not have a sentimental nature.

Dwight was holding a glass of water, frowning a little at it. Water poured into the sink and down the drain, part of the same water he was drinking. On the counter was a television set and on the screen men were wheeling two stretchers out of a house and across a lawn and on each stretcher was a long still thing covered in a green cloth. The house was a cement-block house with two metal chairs on the porch with little cushions on them, and under the roof’s overhang a basket of flowers swung.

“Is this the only channel we ever get?” Lucy said. She turned the water faucet off.

“It’s the news, Lucy.”

“I’ve seen this news a hundred times before. It’s always this kind of news.”

“This is the Sun Belt, Lucy.”

That he kept saying her name began to irritate her. “Well, Dwight,” she said. “Dwight, Dwight, Dwight.”

Dwight looked at her mildly and went back to the living room. Lucy trailed after him. They both looked at the car and Lucy said to it, “I’d like an emerald ring. I’d like a baby boy.”

“You don’t ask it for things, Lucy,” Dwight said.

“I’d like a Porsche Carrera,” Lucy said to it.

“Are you crazy or what!” Dwight demanded.

“I would like a little baby,” she mused.

“You were a little baby once,” Dwight said.

“Well, I know that.”

“So isn’t that enough?”

She looked at him uneasily, then said, “Do you know what I used to like that you did? You’d say, ‘That’s my wife’s favorite color…’ or ‘That’s just what my wife says…’ ” Dwight gazed at her from his big, inky eyes. “And of course your wife was me!” she exclaimed. “I always thought that was kind of sexy.”

“We’re not talking sex anymore, Lucy,” he said. She blushed.

Dwight got into the Thunderbird and rested his hands on the wheel. She saw his fingers pressing against the horn rim but it made no sound.

“I don’t think this car should be in the house,” Lucy said, still fiercely blushing.

“It’s a place where I can think, Lucy.”

“But it’s in the middle of the living room! It takes up practically the whole living room!”

“A man’s got to think, Lucy. A man’s got to prepare for things.”

“Where did you think before we got married?” she said crossly.

“All over, Lucy. I thought of you everywhere. You were part of everything.”

Lucy did not want to be part of everything. She did not want to be part of another woman’s kissing, for example. She did not want to be part of Daisy’s leg, which she was certain, in their time, had played its part and been something Dwight had paid attention to. She did not want to be part of a great many things that she could mention.

“I don’t want to be part of everything,” she said.

“Life is different from when I was young and you were a little baby,” Dwight said.

“I never did want to be part of everything,” she said excitedly.

Dwight worked his shoulders back into the seat and stared out the window.

“Maybe the man who had this car before died of a broken heart, did you ever think of that?” Lucy said. When he said nothing, she said, “I don’t want to start waiting on you again, Dwight.” Her face had cooled off now.

“You wait the way you have to,” Dwight said. “You’ve got to know what you want while you’re waiting.” He patted the seat beside him and smiled at her. It wasn’t just a question of moving this used-up thing out again, she knew that. Time wasn’t moving sideways in the manner it had always seemed to her to move but was climbing upward, then falling back, then lurching in a circle like some poisoned, damaged thing. Eventually, she sat down next to him. She looked through the glass at the other glass, then past that.

“It’s raining,” Lucy said.

There was a light rain falling, a warm spring rain. As she watched, it fell more quickly. It was silverish, but as it fell faster it appeared less and less like rain and she could almost hear it rattling as it struck the street.

Annie and Tom and Molly are looking at boarding schools. Molly is the applicant, fourteen years old. Annie and Tom are the mom and dad. This is how they are referred to by the admissions directors. “Now if Mom and Dad would just make themselves comfortable while we steal Molly away for a moment…” Molly is stolen away and Tom and Annie drink coffee. There are cookies on a plate. Colored slides are flashed on a screen showing children earnestly learning and growing and caring through the seasons. These things have been captured. Rather, it’s clear that’s what they’re getting at. The children’s faces blur in Tom’s mind. And all those autumn leaves. All those laboratories and playing fields and bell towers.

It is winter and there is snow on the ground. They have flown in from California and rented a car. Their plan is to see seven New England boarding schools in five days. Icicles hang from the admissions building. Tom gazes at them. They are lovely and refractive. They are formed and then they vanish. Tom looks away.

Annie is sitting on the other side of the room, puzzling over a mathematics problem. There are sheets of problems all over the waiting room. These are to keep parents and kids on their toes as they wait. The cold, algebraic problems are presented in little stories. Five times as many girls as boys are taking music lessons or trees are growing at different rates or ladies in a bridge club are lying about their ages. The characters and situations are invented only to be exiled to measurement. Watching Annie search for solutions makes Tom’s heart ache. He remembers a class he took once himself, almost twenty years ago, a class in myth. In mythical stories, it seems, there were two ways to disaster. One of them was to answer an unanswerable question. The other was to fail to answer an answerable question.

Down a corridor there are several shut doors and behind one is Molly. Molly is their living child. Tom and Annie’s other child, Martha, has been dead a year. Martha was one year older than Molly. Now they’re the same age. Martha choked to death in her room on a piece of bread. It was early in the morning and she was getting ready for school. The radio was playing and two disc jockeys called the Breakfast Flakes chattered away between songs.

—

The weather is bad, the roads are slippery. From the backseat, Molly says, “He asked what my favorite ice cream was and I said, ‘Quarterback Crunch.’ Then he asked who was President of the United States when the school was founded and I said, ‘No one.’ Wasn’t that good?”

“I hate trick questions,” Annie says.

“Did you like the school,” Tom asks.

“Yeah,” Molly says.

“What did you like best about it?”

“I liked how our guide — you know, Peter — just walked right across the street that goes through the campus and the cars just stopped. You and Mom were kind of hanging back, looking both ways and all, but Peter and I just trucked right across.”

Molly was chewing gum that smelled like oranges.

“Peter was cute,” Molly says.

—

Tom and Annie and Molly sit around a small table in their motel room. Snow accumulates beyond the room’s walls. They are nowhere. The brochure that the school sent them states that the school is located thirty-five miles from Boston. Nowhere! They are all exhausted and merely sit there regarding their beverages. The television set is chained to the wall. This is indicative, Tom thinks, of considerable suspicion on the part of the management. There was also a four-dollar deposit on the room key. The management, when Tom checked in, was in the person of a child about Molly’s age, a boy eating from a bag of potato chips and doing his homework.