Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“You want to send me far enough away,” she says to her parents. “I mean, it’s the other side of the dumb continent. Maybe I don’t even want to do this,” she says.

She looks at the thick sky holding back snow. She doesn’t hate God anymore. She doesn’t even think about God. Anybody who would let a kid choke on a piece of bread…

—

The next school has chapel four times a week and an indoor hockey rink. In the chapel, two fir trees are held in wooden boxes. Wires attached to the ceiling hold them upright. It is several weeks before Christmas.

“When are you going to decorate them,” Molly asks Shirley, her guide. Shirley is handsome and rather horrible. The soles of her rubber boots are a bright, horrible orange. She looks at Molly.

“We don’t decorate the trees in the chapel,” she says.

Molly looks at the tree stumps bolted into the wooden boxes. Beads of sap pearl golden on the bark.

“This is a very old chapel,” Shirley says. “See those pillars? They look like marble, but they’re just pine, painted to look like marble.” She isn’t being friendly, she’s just saying what she knows. They walk out of the chapel, Shirley soundlessly, on her horrible orange soles.

“Do you play hockey,” she asks.

“No,” Molly says.

“Why not?”

“I like my teeth,” Molly says.

“You do ?” Shirley says in mock amazement. “Just kidding,” she says. “I’m going to show you the hockey rink anyway. It’s new. It’s a big deal.”

Molly sees Tom and Annie standing some distance away beneath a large tree draped with many strings of extinguished lights. Her mother’s back is to her, but Tom sees her and waves.

Molly follows Shirley into the still, odd air of the hockey rink. No one is on the ice. The air seems distant, used up. On one wall is a big painting of a boy in a hockey uniform. He is in a graceful, easy posture, skating alone on bluish ice toward the viewer, smiling. He isn’t wearing a helmet. He has brown hair and wide golden eyes. Molly reads the plaque beneath the painting. His name is Jimmy Watkins and he had died six years before at the age of seventeen. His parents had built the rink and dedicated it to him.

Molly takes a deep breath. “My sister, Martha, knew him,” she says.

“Oh yeah?” Shirley says with interest. “Did your sister go here?”

“Yes,” Molly says. She frowns a little as she lies. Martha and Jimmy Watkins of course know each other. They know everything but they have secrets too.

The air is not like real air in here. Neither does the cold seem real. She looks at Jimmy Watkins, bigger than life, skating toward them on his black skates. It is not a very good painting. Molly thinks that those who love Jimmy Watkins must be disappointed in it.

“They were very good friends,” Molly says.

“How come you didn’t tell me before that your sister went here?”

Molly shrugs. She feels happy, happier than she has in a long time. She has brought Martha back from the dead and put her in school. She has given her a room, friends, things she must do. It can go on and on. She has given her a kind of life, a place in death. She has freed her.

“Did she date him or what,” Shirley asks.

“It wasn’t like that,” Molly says. “It was better than that.”

She doesn’t want to go much further, not with this girl whom she dislikes, but she goes a little further.

“Martha knew Jimmy better than anybody,” Molly says.

She thinks of Martha and Jimmy Watkins being together, telling each other secrets. They will like each other. They are seventeen and fourteen, living in the single moment that they have been gone.

—

Molly is with her parents in the car again on a winding road, going through the mountains. Tonight they will stay in an inn that Annie has read about and tomorrow they will visit the last school. Several large rocks, crusted with dirty ice, have slid onto the road. They are ringed with red cones and traffic moves slowly around them. The late low sun fiercely strikes the windshield.

“Bear could handle those rocks,” Molly says. “Bear would go right over them.”

“Oh, that truck,” Annie says.

“That truck is an ecological criminal,” Tom says.

“Big Bad Bear,” Molly says.

Annie shakes her head and sighs. Bear is innocent. Bear is only a machine, gleaming in a dark garage.

Molly can’t see her parents’ faces. She can’t remember how they looked when she was little. She wants to ask them about Martha. She wants to ask them if they are sending her so far away so they can imagine that Martha is just far away too. But she knows she will never ask such a question. There are secrets now. The dead have their secrets and the living have their secrets with the dead. This is the way it must be.

—

Molly has her things. and she sets them up each night in the room she’s in. She lays a little scarf across the bureau first, and then her things on top of it. Painted combs for her hair, a little dish for her rings. They are the only guests at the inn, an old rambling structure on a lake. In a few days, the owner will be closing it down for the winter. It’s too cold for such an old place in the winter, the owner says. He had planned to keep it open for skating on the lake when he first bought it and had even remodeled part of the cellar as a skate room. There is a bar down there, a wooden floor and shelves of old skates in all sizes. Window glass runs the length of one wall just above ground level and there are spotlights that illuminate a portion of the lake. But winter isn’t the season here. The pipes are too old and there aren’t enough guests.

“Is this the deepest lake in the state,” Annie asks. “I read that somewhere, didn’t I?” She has her guidebooks, which she examines each night. Everywhere she goes, she buys books.

“No,” the inn’s owner says. “It’s not the deepest, but it’s deep. You should take a look at that ice. It’s beautiful ice.”

He is a young man, balding, hopelessly proud of his ice. He lingers with them, having given them thick towels and new bars of soap. He offers them soup for supper, fresh baked bread and pie. He offers them his smooth, frozen lake.

“Do you want to skate,” Tom asks his wife and daughter. Molly shakes her head.

“No,” Annie says. She takes a bottle of Scotch from her suitcase. “Are there any glasses,” she asks the man.

“I’m sorry,” the man says, startled. “They’re all down in the skate room, on the bar.” He gives a slight nod and walks away.

Tom goes down into the cellar for the glasses. The skates, their runners bright, are jumbled on the shelves. The frozen lake glitters in the window. He pushes open the door and there it is, the ice. He steps out onto it. Annie, in their room, waits without taking off her coat. Tom takes a few quick steps and then slides. He is wearing a suit and tie, his good shoes. It is a windy night and the trees clatter with the wind and the old inn’s sign creaks on its chains. Tom slides across the ice, his hands pushed out, then he holds his hands behind his back, going back and forth in the space where the light is cast. There is no skill without the skates, he knows, and probably no grace without them either, but it is enough to be here under the black sky, cold and light and moving. He wants to be out here. He wants to be out here with Annie.

From a window, Molly sees her father on the ice. After a moment, she sees her mother moving toward him, not skating but slipping forward, making her way. She sees their heavy awkward shapes embrace.

Molly sees them, already remembering it.

Heather was sitting with the Dunes, Don and Debbie, beside their swimming pool. The Dunes were old. Heather, who lived next door in a little rented house, was young and desperate. They were all suntanned and drinking gin and grapefruit juice, trying to do their best by the prolifically fruiting tree in the Dunes’ backyard. The grapefruits were organic, and pink inside. They shone prettily by the hundreds between leaves curled and bumpy and spotted from spider mite and aphid infestation.