Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“An egg,” Helen asked. “Do you want an egg this morning?”

“You should get your hair cut today,” Lenore said. “Go to the beauty parlor.”

“Oh, Mom, it’s all right.”

“Get it trimmed or something. It needs something.”

“But nobody will be here with you,” Helen said. “You’ll be home by yourself.”

“Go after school. I can take care of myself for an hour. Something wouldn’t happen in an hour, do you think?” Lenore felt sly saying this. Then she said, “I want you to look pretty, to feel good about yourself.”

“I really hate those places,” Helen said.

“Can’t you do anything for me!” Lenore said.

Helen got off the bus at a shopping mall on the way back from school. “I don’t have a reservation,” she told the woman at the desk.

“You mean an appointment,” the woman said. “You don’t have an appointment.”

She was taken immediately to a chair in front of a long mirror. The women in the chairs beside her were all looking into the mirror while their hairdressers stared into it too and cut their hair. Everyone was chatting and relaxed, but Helen didn’t know how to do this, even this, this simple thing.

Sometimes Helen dreamed that she was her own daughter. She was free, self-absorbed, unfamiliar. Helen took up very little of her thoughts. But she could not pretend this.

She looked at the woman beside her, who had long wet hair and was smoking a cigarette. Above her shoe was a black parole anklet.

“These things don’t work at all,” the woman said. “I could take the damn thing off but I think it’s kind of stylish. Often I do take the damn thing off and it’s in one place and I’m in another. Quite another.”

“What did you do?” Helen asked.

“I didn’t do anything!” the woman bawled. Then she laughed. She dropped her cigarette in the cup of coffee she was holding.

The washing, the cutting, the drying, all this took a long time. Her hairdresser was an Asian named Mickey. “How old do you think I am,” Mickey asked.

“Twenty,” Helen said. She did not look at her, or herself, in the mirror. She kept her eyes slightly unfocused, the way a dog would.

“I’m thirty-five,” Mickey said delightedly. “I am one-eighteenth Ainu. Do you know anything about the Ainu?”

Helen knew it wasn’t necessary to reply to this. Someone several chairs away said in disbelief, “She’s naming the baby what ?”

“The Ainu are an aboriginal people of north Japan. Up until a little while ago they used to kill a bear in a sacred ritual each year. The anthropologists were wild about this ritual and were disappointed when they quit, but here goes, I will share it with you. At the end of each winter they’d catch a bear cub and give it to a woman to nurse. Wow, that’s something! After it was weaned, it was given wonderful food and petted and played with. It was caged, but in all other respects it was treated as an honored guest. But the day always came when the leader of the village would come and tell the bear sorrowfully that it must be killed though they loved it dearly. This was this long oration, this part. Then everyone dragged the bear from its cage with ropes, tied it to a stake, shot it with blunt arrows that merely tortured it, then scissored its neck between two poles where it slowly strangled, after which they skinned it, decapitated it and offered the severed head some of its own flesh. What do you think, do you think they knew what they were doing?”

“Was there something more to it than that?” Helen said. “Did something come after that?” She really was a serious girl. Her head burned from the hair dryer Mickey was wielding dramatically.

“These are my people!” Mickey said, ignoring her. “You’ve come a long way, baby! Maine or Bust!” She sounded bitter. She turned off the dryer, removed Helen’s smock and with a little brush whisked her shoulders. “Ask for Mickey another time,” she said. “That’s me. Happy Holidays.”

Helen paid and walked out into the cold. The cold felt delicious on her head. “An honored guest,” she said aloud. To live was like being an honored guest. The thought was outside her, large and calm. Then you were no longer an honored guest. The thought turned away from her and faded.

Her mother was watching television with the sound off when Helen got home. “That’s a nice haircut,” her mother said. “Now don’t touch it, don’t pull at it like that for god’s sake. It’s pretty. You’re pretty.”

It was a ghastly haircut, really. Helen’s large ears seemed to float, no longer quite attached to her head. Lenore gazed quietly at her.

“Mom,” Helen said, “do you know there’s a patron saint of television?”

Lenore thought this was hysterical.

“It’s true,” Helen said. “St. Clare.”

Lenore wondered how long it would take for Helen’s hair to grow back.

Later they were eating ice cream. They were both in their nightgowns. Helen was reading a Russian novel. She loved Russian novels. Everyone was so emotional, so tormented. They clutched their heads, they fainted, they swooned, they galloped around. The snow. Russian snow had made Maine snow puny to Helen, meaningless.

“This ice cream tastes bad,” her mother said. “It tastes like bleach or something.” Some foul odor crept up her throat. Helen continued to read. Anyway, what were they doing eating ice cream in the middle of winter? Lenore wondered. It was laziness. Something was creeping quietly all through her. She’d like to jump out of her skin, she really would.

“You now,” she said, “I believe that if Jesus walked into this house this minute, you wouldn’t even raise your eyes.”

Helen bit her lip and reluctantly put down the book. “Oh, Mom,” she said.

“And maybe you’d be right. I bet he’d lack charisma. I’d bet my last dollar on it. The only reason he was charismatic before was that those people lived in a prerational time.”

“Jesus isn’t going to walk in here, Mom, come on,” Helen said.

“Well, something is, something big. You’d better be ready for it.” She was angry. “You’ve got the harder road,” she said finally. “You’ve got to behave in a way you won’t be afraid to remember, but you know what my road is? My road is the new road.”

Like everyone, Lenore had a dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked. There were billions upon billions of people, after all, it wasn’t out of the question.

“The new road?” Helen asked.

“Oh, there’s nothing new about it,” Lenore said, annoyed. She stroked her face with her hands. She shouldn’t be doing this to Helen, her little Helen. But Helen was so docile. She wasn’t fighting this! You had to fight.

“Go back to what you were doing,” Lenore said. “You were reading, you were concentrating. I wish I could concentrate. My mind just goes from one thing to another. Do you know what I was thinking of, did I ever tell you this? When I was still well, before I went to the doctor? I was in a department store looking at a coat and I must have stepped in front of this woman who was looking at coats too. I had no idea…and she just started to stare at me. I was very aware of it but I ignored it for a long time, I even moved away. But she followed me, still staring. Until I finally looked at her. She still stared but now she was looking through me, through me, and she began talking to someone, resuming some conversation with whoever was with her, and all the while she was staring at me to show how insignificant I was, how utterly insignificant…” Lenore leaned toward Helen but then drew back, dizzy. “And I felt cursed. I felt as though she’d cursed me.”

“What a weirdo,” Helen said.