Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“It is not!” Gloria said hotly. They were bickering like an old married couple.

“This isn’t working out,” Gloria said. “This is crazy. We should call your mother.”

“I’ll give you a few more days, but it’s true,” Gwendal said. “I thought this would be a more mystical experience. I thought you’d tell me something. You don’t even know about makeup. I bet you don’t even know how to check the oil in that car. I’ve never seen you check the oil.”

“I know how to check the oil,” Gloria said.

“How about an electrical problem? Would you know how to fix an electrical problem?”

“No!” Gloria yelled.

Gwendal was quiet. She stared at her fat knees.

“I’m going to take a bath,” Gloria said.

She went into the bathroom and shut the door. The tile was turquoise and the stopper to the tub hung on a chain. This was the Motel Lark, she thought. She dropped the rubber stopper in the drain and ran the water. A few tiles were missing and the wall showed a gray, failed adhesive. She wanted to say something but even that wasn’t it. She didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to realize something she couldn’t say. She heard a voice, it must have been Gwendal’s, in the bedroom. Gloria lay down in the tub. The water wasn’t as warm as she expected. Your silence is no deterrent to me, Gloria, the voice said. She reached for the hot-water faucet but it ran in cold. If she let it run, it might get warm, she thought. That’s what they say. Or again, that might be it.

Pammy is in an unpleasant Texas city, the city where she was born, in the month of her twelfth birthday. It is cold and cloudy. Soon it will rain. The rain will wash the film of ash off the car she is traveling in, volcanic ash that has drifted across the Gulf of Mexico all the way from the Yucatán. Pammy is a stocky blue-eyed blonde, a daughter being taken in her father’s car to her tanning lesson.

This is her father’s joke. She is being taken to a tanning session, twenty-five minutes long. She had requested this for her birthday, ten tanning sessions in a health spa. She had also asked for and received new wheels for her skates. They are purple Rannallis. She had dyed her stoppers to match although the stoppers were a duller, cruder purple. Pammy wants to be a speed skater but worries that she doesn’t have the personality for it. “You’ve gotta have gravel in your gut to be in speed,” her coach said. Pammy has mastered the duck walk but still doesn’t have a good, smooth crossover, and sometimes she fears that she never will.

Pammy and her father, Morris, are following a truck that is carrying a jumble of television sets. There is a twenty-four-inch console facing them on the open tailgate, restrained by rope, with a bullet hole in the exact center of the screen.

Morris drinks coffee from a plastic-lidded cup that fits into a bracket mounted just beneath the car’s radio. Pammy has a friend, Wanda, whose stepfather has the same kind of plastic cup in his car, but he drinks bourbon and water from his. Wanda had been adopted when she was two months old. Pammy is relieved that neither her father nor Marge, her mother, drinks. Sometimes they have wine. On her birthday, even Pammy had wine with dinner. Marge and Morris seldom argue and she is grateful for this. This morning, however, she had seen them quarrel. Once again, her mother had borrowed her father’s hairbrush and left long, brown hairs in it. Her father had brushed them out with a comb over the clean kitchen sink. Her father had left a nest of brown hair in the white sink.

In the car, the radio is playing a song called “Tainted Love,” a song Morris likes to refer to as “Rancid Love.” The radio plays constantly when Pammy and her father drive anywhere. Morris is a good driver. He enjoys driving still, after years and years of it. Pammy looks forward to learning how to drive now, but after a few years, who knows? She can’t imagine it being that enjoyable after a while. Her father is skillful here, on the freeways and streets, and on the terrifying, wide two-lane highways and narrow mountain roads in Mexico, and even on the rutted, soiled beaches of the Gulf Coast. One weekend, earlier that spring, Morris had rented a Jeep in Corpus Christi and he and Pammy and Marge had driven the length of Padre Island. They sped across the sand, the only people for miles and miles. There was plastic everywhere.

“You will see a lot of plastic,” the man who rented them the Jeep said, “but it is plastic from all over the world.”

Morris had given Pammy a driving lesson in the Jeep. He taught her how to shift smoothly, how to synchronize acceleration with the depression and release of the clutch. “There’s a way to do things right,” Morris told her, and when he said this she was filled with a sort of fear. They were just words, she knew, words that anybody could use, but behind words were always things, sometimes things you could never tell anyone, certainly no one you loved, frightening things that weren’t even true.

“I’m sick of being behind this truck,” Morris says. The screen of the injured television looks like dirty water. Morris pulls to the curb beside a Japanese market. Pammy stares into the market, where shoppers wait in line at a cash register. Many of the women wear scarves on their heads. In school, in social studies class, she is reading eyewitness accounts of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She reads about young girls running from their melting city, their hair burned off, their burned skin in loose folds, crying, “Stupid Americans.” Morris sips his coffee, then turns the car back onto the street now free from fatally wounded television sets.

Pammy gazes at the backs of her hands, which are tan but not, she feels, quite tan enough. They are a dusky peach color. This will be her fifth tanning lesson. In the health spa, there are ten colored photographs on the wall showing a woman in a bikini, a pale woman being transformed into a tanned woman. In the last photograph she has plucked the bikini slightly away from her hip bone to expose a sliver of white skin and she is smiling down at the sliver.

Pammy tans well. Without a tan, her face seems grainy and uneven for she has freckles and rather large pores. Tanning draws her together, completes her. She has had all kinds of tans — golden tans, pool tans, even a Florida tan that looked yellow back in Texas. She had brought all her friends the same present from Florida — small plywood crates filled with tiny oranges that were actually chewing gum. The finest tan Pammy has ever had, however, was in Mexico six months ago. She went there with her parents for two weeks and had gotten the truly remarkable tan and also tuberculosis. This has caused some tension between Morris and Marge as it had been Morris’s idea to swim at the spas in the mountains rather than in the pools at the more established hotels. It was believed that Pammy had become infected at one particular public spa just outside the small dusty town where they had gone to buy tiles, tiles of a dusky orange with blue rays flowing from the center that are now in the kitchen of their home, where each morning Pammy drinks her juice and takes three hundred milligrams of isoniazid.

“Here we are,” Morris says. The health spa is in a small, concrete-block building with white columns, salvaged from the wrecking of a mansion, adorning the front. Along the street there are gift shops, palmists and an exterminating company. This was not the company that had tented Wanda’s house for termites. That had been another company. When Pammy was in Mexico getting tuberculosis, Wanda and her parents had gone to San Antonio for a week while their house was being tented. When they returned, they’d found a dead robber in the living room, with the things he was stealing piled neatly nearby. He had died from inhaling the deadly gas used by the exterminators.