Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

In the tepee, a woman in a housedress stood behind a pink Formica counter. A glass hummingbird coated with greasy dust hung in one window. Gloria could smell meat loaf cooking. The woman had red cheeks and white hair, and she greeted Gloria extravagantly, but as soon as Gloria paid for her cabin the woman became morose. She gazed at Gloria glumly, as though perceiving her as one who had already walked off with the blankets, the lamp and the painting of the waterfall.

The key Gloria had been given did not work. It fit into the lock and turned, but did not do the job of opening the door. She walked back to the office and a small dog with short legs and a fluffy tail fell into step beside her. Back in the tepee, Gloria said, “I can’t seem to make this key work.” The smell of the meat loaf was now clangorous. The woman was old, but she came around the counter fast.

The dog was standing in the middle of the turnabout in front of the cabins.

“Is that your dog,” Gloria asked.

“I’ve never seen it before,” the woman said. “It sure is not,” she added. “Go home!” she shrieked at the dog. She turned the key in the lock of Gloria’s cabin and then gave the door a sharp kick with her sneaker. The door flew open. She stomped back to the office. “Go home!” she screamed again at the dog.

Gloria made herself an iceless drink in a paper cup and called Jean.

“I can’t wait to see you,” Jean said. “How are you?”

“I’m all right,” Gloria said.

“Tell me.”

“Really,” Gloria said.

“I can’t wait to see you,” Jean said. “I’ve had the most god-awful time. I know it’s silly.”

“How is Gwendal doing?”

“She never liked Chuckie anyway. She’s Luke’s, you know. But she’s not a bit like Luke. You know Gwendal.”

Gloria barely remembered the child, who would be almost ten by now. She sipped from the paper cup and looked through the screen at the dog, who was gazing over the ruined golf course to the valley beyond.

“I don’t know how I manage to pick them,” Jean was saying. She was talking about the last one.

“I’ll be there by lunch tomorrow,” Gloria said.

“Not until then! Well, we’ll bring some lunch over to Bill’s and eat with him. You haven’t met him, have you? I want you to meet him.”

Bill was Jean’s first ex-husband. She had just bought a house in the town where two of her old ex-husbands and her new ex-husband lived. Gloria knew she had quite a day cut out for herself tomorrow. Jean gave her directions and Gloria hung up and made herself a fresh drink in the paper cup. She stood out on the porch. Dark clouds had massed over the mountains. Traffic thundered invisibly past in the distance, beyond the trees. In the town in the valley below, there were tiny hard lights in the enlarging darkness. The light, which had changed, was disappearing, but there was still a lot of it. That’s the way it was with light. If you were out in it while it was going you could still see enough for longer.

She woke midmorning with a terrible headache. She was not supposed to drink but what difference did it make, really. It didn’t make any difference. She took her pills. Sometimes she thought it had been useless for her to grow older. She was now forty. She lay in the musty cabin. Everything seemed perfectly clear. Then it seemed equivocal again. She dressed and went to the office, where she paid for another night. The woman took the money and looked at Gloria worriedly as though she were already saying good-bye to the welcome mat she had just bought, and that old willow chair with the cushion.

It began to rain. The road to the monastery was gravel and wound up the side of a mountain. There were orchards, fields of young corn…the rain fell on it all in a fury. Gloria drove slowly, barely able to make out the road. She imagined it snowing out there, not rain but snow, filling everything up. She imagined thinking it was dark now but still snowing— a line like that, as in a story. A line like that was lovely, she thought. When she was small they had lived in a place where the little winter came first. That’s what everyone called it. There was “the little winter,” then there were pleasant days, sometimes weeks. Then the big winter came. She was on the monastery’s grounds now and there were wooden buildings with turreted roofs and minarets. Someone had planted birches. She parked by a sign that said INFORMATION/GIFT SHOP and dashed from the car to the door. She was laughing and shaking the water from her hair as she entered.

The situation was that there were no dogs available, or rather that the brother whose duty was the dogs, who knew about the dogs, was away and would not return until tomorrow. She could come back tomorrow. The monk who told her this had a beard and wore a soiled apron. His interest in her questions did not seem intense. He had appeared from a back room, a room that seemed part smokehouse, part kitchen. This was the monk who smoked chickens, hams and cheese. There was always cheese in this life. The monastery had a substantial mail-order business; the monks smoked things, the nuns made cheesecakes. He seemed slightly impatient with Gloria. He had given up a great deal, no doubt, in order to be here. The gift shop was crowded with half-price icons and dog beds. In a corner there was a refrigerated case filled with the nuns’ cheesecakes. Gloria looked in there, at the stacks of white boxes.

“The Deluxe is a standard favorite,” the monk said. “The Kahlúa is encased in a chocolate cookie-crumb crust, the rich liqueur from the sunny Caribbean blending naturally with the nuns’ original recipe.” The monk droned on as if at matins. “The Chocolate is a must for chocolate fanciers. The Chocolate Amaretto is considered by the nuns to be their pièce de résistance.”

Gloria bought the Chocolate Amaretto and left. How gloomy, she thought. The experience had seemed vaguely familiar, as though she had surrendered passively to it in the past. She supposed it was a belief in appearances. She put the cheesecake in the car and walked around the grounds. It was raining less heavily now, but even so her hair was plastered to her skull. She passed the chapel and then turned back and went inside. She picked up a candlestick and jammed it into her coat pocket. This place made her mad. Then she took the candlestick out and set it on the floor. Outside, she wandered around hearing nothing but the highway, which was humming like something in her head. She finally found the kennels and opened the door and went in. This is how she thought it would be, nothing closed to her at all. There were four dogs, all young ones, maybe three months old, German shepherds. She watched them for a while. It would be easy to take one, she thought. She could just do it.

She drove back down the mountain into town, where she pulled into a shopping center that had a liquor store. She bought gin and some wine for Jean, then drove down to Jean’s house in the valley. She felt tired. There was something pounding behind her eyes. Jean’s house was a dirty peach color with a bush in front. Everything was pounding, the house, even the grass. Then the pounding stopped.

—

“Oh my god,” Jean exclaimed. “You’ve brought the pièce de résistance!” Apparently everyone was familiar with the nuns’ cheesecakes. Jean and Gloria hugged each other. “You look good,” Jean said. “They got it all, thank god, right? The things that happen anymore…there aren’t even names for half of what happens, I swear. You know my second husband, Andy, the one who died? He went in and never came out again and he just submitted to it, but no one could ever figure out what it was. It was something complicated and obscure and the only thing they knew was that he was dying from it. It might’ve been some insect that bit him. But the worst thing — well, not the worst thing, but the thing I remember because it had to do with me, which is bad of me, I suppose, but that’s just human nature. The worst thing was what happened just before he died. He was very fussy. Everything had to be just so.”