Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Mommy will pick you up,” Morris says. “She has a class this afternoon so she might be a little late. Just stay inside until she comes.”

Morris kisses her on the cheek. He treats her like a child. He treats Marge like a mother, her mother.

Marge is thirty-five but still a student. She takes courses in art history and film at one of the city’s universities, the same university where Morris teaches petroleum science. Years ago when Marge had first been a student, before she met Morris or Pammy was born, she had been in Spain, in a museum studying a Goya, and a piece of the painting had fallen at her feet. She had quickly placed it in her pocket and now has it on her bureau in a small glass box. It is a wedge of greenish violet paint, as large as a thumbnail. It is from one of Goya’s nudes.

Pammy gets out of the car and goes into the health spa. There is no equipment here except for the tanning beds, twelve of them in eight small rooms. Pammy has never had to share a room with anyone. If asked to, she would probably say no, hoping this wouldn’t hurt the other person’s feelings. The receptionist is an old, vigorous woman behind a scratched metal desk, wearing a black jumpsuit and feather earrings. Behind her are shelves of powders and pills in squat brown bottles with names like DYNAMIC STAMINA BUILDER and DYNAMIC SUPER STRESS-END and LIVER CONCENTRATE ENERGIZER.

The receptionist’s name is Aurora. Pammy thinks the name is magnificent and is surprised that it belongs to such an old woman. Aurora leads her to one of the rooms at the rear of the building. The room has a mirror, a sink, a small stool, a white rotating fan and the bed, a long bronze coffin-like apparatus with a lid. Pammy is always startled when she sees the bed with its frosted ultraviolet tubes, its black vinyl headrest. In the next room, someone coughs. Pammy imagines people lying in all the rooms, wrapped in white light, lying quietly as though they were being rested for a long, long journey. Aurora takes a spray bottle of disinfectant and a scrap of toweling from the counter above the sink and cleans the surface of the bed. She twists the timer and the light leaps out.

“There you are, honey,” Aurora says. She pats Pammy on the shoulder and leaves.

Pammy pushes off her sandals and undresses quickly. She leaves her clothes in a heap, her sweatshirt on top of the pile. Her sweatshirt is white with a transfer of a skater on the back. The skater is a man wearing a helmet and kneepads, side-surfing and goofy-footed. She lies down and with her left hand pulls the lid to within a foot of the bed’s cool surface. She can see the closed door and the heap of clothing and her feet. Pammy considers her feet to be her ugliest feature. They are skinny and the toes are too far apart. She and Wanda had painted their toes the same color, but Wanda’s feet were pretty and hers were not. Pammy thought her feet looked like they belonged to a dead person and there wasn’t anything she could do about them. She closes her eyes.

Wanda, who reads a lot, told Pammy that tuberculosis was a romantic disease, one suffered only by artists and poets and “highly sensitive individuals.”

“Oh, yeah,” her stepfather had said. “Tuberculosis has mucho cachet.”

Wanda’s stepfather is always joking, Pammy thinks. She feels Wanda’s parents are pleasant enough but she’s always a little uncomfortable around them. Wanda wasn’t the first child they adopted. There had been another baby, but it was learned that the baby’s background had been misrepresented. Or perhaps it had been a boring baby. In any case the baby had been returned and they got Wanda. Pammy doesn’t think Wanda’s parents are very steadfast. She is surprised that they don’t make Wanda nervous.

The tanning bed is warm but not uncomfortably so. Pammy lies with her arms straight by her sides, palms down. She hears voices in the hall and footsteps. When she first began coming to the health spa, she was afraid that someone would open the door to the room she was in by mistake. She imagined exactly what it would be like. She would see the door open abruptly out of the corner of her eye, then someone would say “Sorry” and the door would close again. But this had not happened. The voices pass by.

Pammy thinks of Snow White lying in her glass coffin. The queen had deceived her how many times? Three? She had been in disguise, but still. And then Snow White had choked on an apple. In the restaurants she sometimes goes to with her parents there are posters on the walls that show a person choking and another person trying to save him.

Snow White lay in a glass coffin, not naked of course but in a gown, watched over by dwarfs. But surely they had not been real dwarfs. That was just a word that had been given to them.

When Pammy had told Morris that tuberculosis was a romantic disease, he said, “There’s nothing romantic about it. Besides, you don’t have it.”

It seems to be a fact that she both has and doesn’t have tuberculosis. Pammy had been given the tuberculin skin test along with her classmates when she began school in the fall and within forty-eight hours had a large swelling on her arm.

“Now that you’ve come in contact with it, you don’t have to worry about getting it,” the pediatrician had said in his office, smiling.

“You mean the infection constitutes immunity,” Marge said.

“Not exactly,” the pediatrician said, shaking his head, still smiling.

Her lungs are clear. She is not ill but has an illness. The germs are in her body but in a resting state, still alive though rendered powerless. Outwardly, she is the same, but within, a great drama has taken place and Pammy feels herself in possession of a bright, secret and unspeakable knowledge.

She knows other things too, things that would break her parents’ hearts, common, ugly, easy things. She knows a girl in school who stole money from her mother’s purse and bought a personal massager. She knows another girl whose brother likes to wear her clothes. She knows a boy who threw a can of motor oil at his father and knocked him unconscious.

Pammy stretches. Her head tingles. Her body is about a foot and a half off the floor and appears almost gray in the glare from the tubes. She has heard of pills you could take to acquire a tan. Just take two pills a day and after twenty days you’d have a wonderful tan that could be maintained by continuing to take the pills. You ordered them from Canada. It was some kind of food-coloring substance. How gross, Pammy thinks. When she had been little she bought a quarter of an acre of land in Canada by mail for fifty cents. That was two years ago.

Pammy hears voices from the room next to hers, coming through the thin wall. A woman talking rapidly says, “Pete went up to Detroit two days ago to visit his brother who’s dying up there in the hospital. Cancer. The brother’s always been a nasty type, very unpleasant. Younger than Pete and always mean. Tried to commit suicide twice. Then he learns he has cancer and decides he doesn’t want to die. Carries on and on. Is miserable to everyone. Puts the whole family through hell, but nothing can be done about it, he’s dying of cancer. So Pete goes up to see him his last days in the hospital and you know what happens? Pete’s wallet gets stolen. Right out of a dying man’s room. Five hundred dollars in cash and all our credit cards. That was yesterday. What a day.”

Another woman says, “If it’s not one thing, it’s something else.”

Pammy coughs. She doesn’t want to hear other people’s voices. It is as though they are throwing away junk, the way some people use words, as though one word were as good as another.

“Things happen so abruptly anymore,” the woman says. “You know what I mean?”

Pammy does not listen and does not open her eyes for if she did she would see this odd bright room with her clothes in a heap and herself lying motionless and naked. She does not open her eyes because she prefers imagining that she is levitating on a stage in a coil of pure energy. If one thought purely enough, one could create one’s own truth. That’s how people accomplished astral travel, walked over burning coals, cured warts. There was a girl in Pammy’s class at school, Bonnie Black, a small owlish-looking girl who was a Christian Scientist. She raised rabbits and showed them at fairs, and was always wearing the ribbons they had won to school, pinned to her blouse. She had warts all over both hands, but one day Pammy noticed that the warts were gone and Bonnie Black told her they’d disappeared after she clearly realized that in her true being as God’s reflection, she couldn’t have warts.