Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Who?” Tommy said.

“They do it a couple times a year to see if there’s as many different kinds and as many as before. That’s how they count things. That’s their attitude. They act as though they care about stuff, but they don’t. They’re just pretending.”

Tommy told her that his father didn’t want her to come over to the house, that he wasn’t supposed to talk to her anymore.

“The Dad’s back, is he,” Audrey said. “What it is is that he thinks he can start over. That’s pathetic.”

“What are we going to do?” Tommy said.

“You shouldn’t listen to him,” Audrey said. “Why are you listening to him? We’re the last generation, there’s something else we’re listening to.”

They were silent for a while, listening. The other children had gone inside.

“What is it,” Tommy asked.

“You’ll recognize it when you hear it. Something will happen, something unusual that we were always prepared for. The Dad’s life has already taken a turn for the worse, it’s obvious. It’s like he’s a stranger now, walking down the wrong road. Do you see what I mean? Or it’s his life that’s like the stranger, standing real still. A stranger standing alongside a dark road, waiting for him to pass.”

It appeared his father was able to keep Audrey away. Tommy wouldn’t have thought it was possible. He knew his father was powerless, but Audrey wasn’t coming around. Walter moved through the house in his dark, oiled boots, fixing things. He painted the kitchen, restacked the woodpile. He replaced the pipe above the ceiling in Tommy’s room. It had long been accepted that this could not be done, but now it was and it did not leak. The bucket was used now to take ashes from the woodstove. Walter, Jr., had a job in the gym he worked out in. He had long, hard muscles, a distracted air. He worried about girls, about money. He wanted an apartment of his own, in town.

Tommy lived alone with his father. “Talk to me, Son,” Walter said. “I love you.”

Tommy said nothing. His father disgusted him a little. He was trying to start over. It was pathetic.

Tommy only saw Audrey on school days, at recess. He waited by the fence for her in the vitreous, intractable light of the southern afternoon.

“I had a boy tell me once my nipples were like bowls of Wheaties,” Audrey said.

“When?” Tommy said. “No.”

“That’s a simile. Similes are a crock. There’s no more time for similes. There used to be that kind of time, but no more. You shouldn’t see what you’re seeing thinking it looks like something else. They haven’t left us with much but the things that are left should be seen as they are.”

Some days she did not come by. Then he would see her waiting at the fence, or she would appear suddenly while he was waiting there. But then days passed, more days than there had been before.

Days with Walter saying, “We need each other, Son. We’re not over this yet. We have to help each other. I need your help.”

It was suppertime. They were sitting at a table over the last of a meal Walter had put together.

“I want Audrey back,” Tommy said.

“Audrey?” Walter looked surprised. “Walter, Jr., heard about what happened to Audrey. She made her bed, as they say, now she’s got to lie in it.” He looked at Tommy, then looked away, dismayed.

“Who wants you?” Tommy said. “Nobody.”

Walter rubbed his head with his hands. He looked around the room, at some milk that Tommy had spilled on the floor. The house was empty except for them. There were no animals around, nothing. It was all beyond what was possible, he knew.

In the night, Tommy heard his father moving around, bumping into things, moaning. A glass fell. He heard it breaking for what seemed a long time. The air in the house felt close, sour. He pushed open his bedroom window and felt the air fluttering warmly against his skin. Down along the river, the water popped and smacked against the muddy bank. It was close to the season when he and Audrey could go to the tower where all the birds were. He could feel it in the air. Audrey would come for him from wherever she was, from wherever they had made her go, and they would go to the tower and find the little warbler bird. Then they would know that it still existed because they had found it dead there. He and Audrey would be the ones who would find it. They were the last generation, the ones who would see everything for the last time. That’s what the last generation does.

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol, which of course did nothing at all, but word of it got out and when she came back to school her locker had been broken into and was jammed full of Tylenol. Like, you moron. Under the circumstances, it was amazing that Helen thought of suicide at all. It was seriously not cool. You only made a fool of yourself. And the parents of these people were mocked too. They were considered to be suicide-enhancing, evil and weak, and they were ignored and barely tolerated. This was a small town. Helen didn’t want to make life any harder on her mother than it already was.

Her mother was dying and she wanted to die at home, which Helen could understand, she understood it perfectly, she’d say, but actually she understood it less well than that and it had become clear it wasn’t even what needed to be understood. Nothing needed to be understood.

There was a little brass bell on her mother’s bedside table. It was the same little brass bell that had been placed at Helen’s command when she had been a little girl, sick with some harmless little kid’s illness. She had just to reach out her hand and ring the bell and her mother would come or even her father. Her mother never used the bell now and kept it there as sort of a joke, actually. Her mother was not utterly confined to bed. She moved around a bit at night and placed herself, or was placed by others, in other rooms during the day. Occasionally one of the women who had been hired to care for her would even take her for a drive, out to see the icicles or go to the bank window. Her mother’s name was Lenore and sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong, urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.

This had been going on for a while. In the summer Lenore had been diagnosed and condemned but she kept bouncing back, as the doctors put it, until recently. The daisies that bloomed in the fall down by the storm-split elm had come and gone, even the little kids at Halloween. Thanksgiving had passed without comment and it would be Christmas soon. Lenore was ignoring it. The boxes of balls and lights were in the cellar, buried deep. Helen had made the horrible mistake of asking her what she wanted for Christmas one night and Lenore had said, “Are you stupid?” Then she said, “Oh, I don’t mean to be so impatient, it’s the medicine, my voice doesn’t even sound right. Does my voice sound right? Get me something you’ll want later. A piece of jewelry or something. Do you want the money for it?” She meant this sincerely.

At the beginning they had talked eagerly like equals. This was more important than a wedding, this preparation. They even laughed like girls remembering things together. They remembered when Helen was a little girl before the divorce and they were all driving somewhere and Helen’s father was stopped for speeding and Lenore wanted her picture taken with the policeman and Helen had taken it. “Wasn’t that mean!” Lenore said to Helen.