Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“They wouldn’t be able to take it off,” Edith said. “There’d be no way.” There was a pale vein on her temple, curving like a piece of string. “We didn’t believe what you told us, you know,” she said. “There was this kid, his name was Alex, and he had a boat. And he said he took this girl water-skiing who he didn’t like, and they were water-skiing in this little cove where swans were and he steered her right in the middle of the swans and she just creamed them, but he wasn’t telling the truth. He’s such a loser.”

“Which one’s Alex,” Bomber asked.

“Oh, he’s around,” Edith said.

They were silent as the passengers from the ferry eddied around them. They watched the two boys playing catch, the younger one darting from side to side, never looking backward to calculate the space, his eyes only on the softly slowly falling ball released from his brother’s hand.

“That’s nice, isn’t it?” Edith said. “That little kid is so trusting it’s kind of holy, but if his trust were misplaced it would really be holy.”

Bomber wanted to touch the vein, the pimple, the shock of dark, waxed hair, but he stood motionless, slouched in his clothes. “Yeah,” he said.

“Like, you know, if he fell in,” Edith said.

—

One Sunday, May went to church. It was a denomination that, as she gratefully knew, would bury anyone. She sat in a pew behind three young women and studied their pretty blond hair, their necks and their collars and their zippers. One of the girls scratched her neck. A few minutes later, she scratched it again. May bent forward and saw a small tick crawling on the girl. She carefully picked it off with her fingers. She did it with such stealth that the girl didn’t even know that May had touched her. May pinched the tick vigorously between her fingernails for some time and then dropped it to the floor, where it vanished from her sight.

After the service, there was a coffee hour. May joined a group around a table that was dotted with plates of muffins, bright cookies and glazed cakes. When the conversation lagged, she said, “I’ve just returned from Morocco.”

“How exotic!” a woman exclaimed. “Did you see the Casbah?” The group turned toward May and looked at her attentively.

“There are many casbahs,” May said. “I had tea under a tent on the edge of the Sahara. The children in Morocco all want aspirin. ‘Boom-boom la tête,’ they say, ‘boom-boom la tête.’ Their little hands are dry as paper. It’s the lack of humidity, I suppose.”

“You didn’t go there by yourself, did you,” a woman asked. She panted as she spoke.

“I went alone, yes,” May said.

The group hummed appreciatively. May was holding a tiny blueberry muffin in her hand. She couldn’t remember picking it up. It sat cupped in the palm of her hand, the paper around it looking like the muffin itself. May had been fooled by such muffins in public places in the past. She returned it to the table.

“I saw the blue men,” May said.

The group looked at her, smiling. They were taller than she and their heads were tilted toward her.

“Most tourists don’t see them,” May said. “They roam the deserts. Their camels are pale beige, almost white, and the men riding them are blue. They wear deep blue floating robes and blue turbans. Their skin is even stained blue where the dye has rubbed off.”

“Are they wanderers,” someone asked. “What’s their purpose?”

May was startled. She felt as though the person were regarding her with suspicion.

“They’re part of the mystery,” she said. “To see them is to see part of the mystery.”

“It must have been a sight,” someone offered.

“Oh yes,” May said, “it was.”

After some moments, the group dispersed and May left the church and walked home through the town. She liked the town, which was cut off from other places. People came here only if they wanted to. You couldn’t find this place by accident. The town seemed to be a place to visit and most people didn’t stay on. There were some, of course, who had stayed on. May liked the clear light of the town and the trees rounded by the wind. She liked the trucks and the Jeeps with the dogs riding in them. When the trucks were parked, the dogs would stare solemnly down at the pavement as though something there was astounding.

May felt elated, almost feverish. She had taken up lying rather late in life, but with enthusiasm. Bomber didn’t seem to notice, even though he had, in May’s opinion, a hurtful obsession with the truth. When May got back to her house, she changed from her good dress into her gardening dress. She looked at herself in the mirror. I’m in charge of this person, she thought. “You’d better watch out,” she said to the person in the mirror.

—

Bomber’s friends don’t drink or smoke or eat meat. They are bony and wild. In the winter, a psychiatrist comes into their classrooms and says, You think that suicide is an escape and not a permanent departure, but the truth is that it is a permanent departure. They know that! Their eyes water with boredom. Their mothers used to lie to them when they were little about dead things, but they know better now. It’s stupid to wait for the dead to do anything new. But one of their classmates had killed himself, so the psychiatrist would come back every winter.

“They planted a tree,” Edith said, “you know, in this kid’s memory at school, and what this kid had done was to hang himself from a tree.” She rolled her eyes. “I mean, this school. You’re not going to believe this school.”

Edith and Bomber sat on opposite sides of May’s parlor, which was filling with twilight. Edith wore a pair of men’s boxer shorts, lace-up boots and a lurid Hawaiian shirt. “This is a nice house,” Edith said. “It smells nice. I see your granny coming out of the Kittens sometimes. She’s cute.”

“A thing I used to remember about my dad,” Bomber said, “was that he gave me a tepee once when I was little and he pitched it in the middle of the living room. I slept in it every night for weeks, right in the middle of the living room. It was great. But it actually wasn’t my dad who had done that at all, it was my gramma.”

“Your granny is so cute,” Edith said. “I know I’d like her. Do you know Bobby?”

“Which one’s Bobby,” Bomber asked.

“He’s the skinny one with the tooth that overlaps a little. He’s the sort of person I used to like. What he does is he fishes. There’s not a fish he can’t catch.”

“I can’t do that,” Bomber said.

“Oh, you don’t have to do anything like that now,” Edith said.

—

The last things May had brought her son were a dark suit and a white shirt. They told her she could if she wished, and she had. She had brought him many things in the two years before he died — candy and cigarettes, books on all subjects — and lastly she had brought these things. She had bought the shirt new and then washed it at home several times so it was soft and then she had driven over to that place. It was a cool, misty morning and the air smelled of chemicals from the mills miles away. Dew glittered on the wires and on the grasses and the fronds of palms. She sat opposite him in the tall, narrow, familiar room, its high windows webby with steel, and he had opened the box with the shirt in it. Together they had looked at it. Together, mutely, they had bent their heads over it and stared. Their eyes had fallen into it as though it were a hole. They watched the shirt and it seemed to shift and shrink as though to accommodate itself to some ghastly and impossible interstice of time and purpose.

“What a shirt,” her child said.

“Give it back,” May whispered. She was terribly frightened. She had obliged some lunatic sense of decorum, and dread — the dread that lay beyond the fear of death — seized her.