Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“There’s a kind of light that glows in the bottom of the water in an atomic reactor that exists nowhere else, do you know that?” the boy said to Tom.

“Interesting,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” the boy said, and marked the book he was reading with his pencil.

The motel room is darkly paneled and there is a painting of a moose between the two large beds. The moose is knee-deep in a lake with his head raised. Annie goes into the bathroom and washes her hands and face. It was her idea that Molly go away to school. She wants Molly to be free. She doesn’t want her to be afraid. She fears that she is making her afraid, as she herself is afraid. Annie hears Molly and Tom talking in the other room and then she hears Molly laugh. She raises her fingers to the window frame and feels the cold seeping in. She adjusts the lid to the toilet tank. It shifts slightly. She washes her hands again. She goes into the room and sits on one of the beds.

“What are you laughing about?” she says. She means to be offhand, but her words come out heavily.

“Did you see the size of that girl’s radio in the dorm room we visited?” Molly says, laughing. “It was the biggest radio I’d ever seen. I told Daddy there was a real person lying in it, singing.” Molly giggles. She pulls her turtleneck sweater up to just below her eyes.

Annie laughs, then she thinks she has laughed at something terrible, the idea of someone lying trapped and singing. She raises her hands to her mouth. She had not seen a radio large enough to hold anyone. She saw children in classes, in laboratories in some brightly painted basement. The children were dissecting sheep’s eyes. “Every winter term in biology you’ve got to dissect sheep’s eyes,” their guide said wearily. “The colors are really nice, though.” She saw sacks of laundry tumbled down a stairwell with names stenciled on them. Now she tries not to see a radio large enough to hold anyone singing.

—

At night, Tom drives in his dreams. He dreams of ice, of slick treachery. All night he fiercely holds the wheel and turns in the direction of the skid.

In the morning when he returns the key, the boy has been replaced by an old man with liver spots the size of quarters on his hands. Tom thinks of asking where the boy is, but then realizes he must be in school learning about eerie, deathly light. The bills the old man returns to Tom are soft as cloth.

—

In California, they live in a canyon. Martha’s room is not situated with a glimpse of the ocean like some of the other rooms. It faces a rocky ledge where owls nest. The canyon is cold and full of small birds and bitter-smelling shrubs. The sun moves quickly through it. When the rocks are touched by the sun, they steam. All of Martha’s things remain in her room — the radio, the posters and mirrors and books. It is a “guest” room now, although no one ever refers to it as such. They still call it “Martha’s room.” But it has become a guest room, even though there are never any guests.

—

The rental car is without distinction. It is a four-door sedan with automatic transmission and a poor turning radius. Martha would have been mortified by it. Martha had a boyfriend who, with his brothers, owned a monster truck. The Super Swamper tires were as tall as Martha, and all the driver of an ordinary car would see when it passed by was its colorful undercarriage with its huge shock and suspension coils, its long yellow stabilizers. For hours on a Saturday they would wallow in sloughs and rumble and pitch across stony creek beds, and then they would wash and wax the truck or, as James, the boyfriend, would say, dazzle the hog. The truck’s name was Bear. Tom and Annie didn’t care for James, and they hated and feared Bear. Martha loved Bear. She wore a red and white peaked cap with MONSTER TRUCK stenciled on it. After Martha died, Molly put the cap on once or twice. She thought it would help her feel closer to Martha but it didn’t. The sweatband smelled slightly of shampoo, but it was just a cap.

—

Tom pulls into the frozen field that is the parking lot for the Northwall School. The admissions office is very cold. The receptionist is wearing an old worn chesterfield coat and a scarf. Someone is playing a hesitant and plaintive melody on a piano in one of the nearby rooms. They are shown the woodlot, the cafeteria and the arts department, where people are hammering out their own silver bracelets. They are shown the language department, where a class is doing tarot card readings in French. They pass a room and hear a man’s voice say, “Matter is a sort of blindness.”

While Molly is being interviewed, Tom and Annie walk to the barn. The girls are beautiful in this school. The boys look a little dull. Two boys run past them, both wearing jeans and denim jackets. Their hair is short and their ears are red. They appear to be pretending they’re in a drama that’s being filmed. They dart and feint. One stumbles into a building while the other crouches outside, tossing his head and scowling, throwing an imaginary knife from hand to hand.

Annie tries a door to the barn but it is latched from the inside. She walks around the barn in her high heels. The hem of her coat dangles. She wears gloves on her pale hands. Tom walks beside her with his hands in his pockets. A flock of starlings fly overhead in an oddly tight formation. A hawk flies above them. The hawk will not fall upon them, clenched like this. If one would separate from the flock, then the hawk could fall.

“I don’t know about this ‘matter is a sort of blindness’ place,” Tom says. “It’s not what I had in mind.”

Annie laughs but she’s not paying attention. She wants to get into the huge barn. She tugs at another door. Dirt smears the palms of her gloves. Then, suddenly, the wanting leaves her face.

“Martha would like this school, wouldn’t she?” she says.

“We don’t know,” Tom says. “Please don’t, Annie.”

“I feel that I’ve lived my whole life in one corner of a room,” Annie says. “That’s the problem. It’s just having always been in this one corner. And now I can’t see anything. I don’t even know the room, do you see what I’m saying?”

Tom nods but he doesn’t see the room. The sadness in him has become his blood, his life flowing in him. There’s no room for him.

In the admissions building, Molly sits in a wooden chair facing her interviewer, Miss Plum, who teaches composition and cross-country skiing.

“You asked if I believe in aluminum, ” Molly asks.

“Yes, dear. Uh-huh, I did,” Miss Plum says.

“Well, I suppose I’d have to believe in it,” Molly says.

—

Annie has a large cardboard file that holds compartmentalized information on the schools they’re visiting. The rules and regulations for one school are put together in what is meant to look like an American passport. In the car’s backseat, Molly flips through the book, annoyed.

“You can’t do anything in this place!” she says. “The things on your walls have to be framed and you can only cover sixty percent of the wall space. You can’t wear jeans.” Molly gasps. “And you have to eat breakfast!” Molly tosses the small book onto the floor, on top of the ice scraper. She gazes glumly out the window at an orchard. She is sick of the cold. She is sick of discussing her “interests.” White fields curve by. Her life is out there somewhere, fleeing from her while she is in the backseat of this stupid car. Her life is never going to be hers. She thinks of it raining, back home in the canyon, rain falling upon rain. Her legs itch and her scalp itches. She has never been so bored. She thinks that the worst thing she has done so far in her life was to lie in a hot bath one night, smoking a cigarette and saying I hate God. That was the very worst thing. It’s pathetic. She bangs her knees irritably against the front seat.