Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I wonder where she picked that up,” Lenore said. “I’d like to see her again. I’d like to murder her.”

“I would too,” Helen said. “I really would.”

“No, murder’s too good for that one,” Lenore said. “Murder’s for the elect. I think of murder…sometimes I think I wish someone would murder me. Out of the blue, without warning, for no reason. I wouldn’t believe it was happening. It would be like not dying at all.”

Helen sat in her nightgown. She felt cold. People had written books about death. No one knew what they were talking about, of course.

“Oh, I’m tired of talk,” Lenore said. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m tired of thinking about it. Why do we have to think about it all the time! One of those philosophers said that Death was the Big Thinker. It thinks the instant that was your life, right down to the bottom of it.”

“Which one,” Helen asked.

“Which one what?”

“Which philosopher?”

“I can’t recall,” Lenore said. Sometimes Helen amused her, she really amused her.

Lenore didn’t dream that night. She lay in bed panting. She wasn’t ready but there was nothing left to be done. The day before the girl had washed and dried the bedsheets and before she put them on again she had ironed them. Ironed them! They were just delicious, still delicious. It was the girl who loved to iron. She’d iron anything. What’s-her-name. Lenore got up and moved through the rooms of the house uncertainly. She could hardly keep her balance. Then she went down into the cellar. Her heart was pounding, it felt wet and small in her chest. She looked at the oil gauge on the furnace. It was a little over one-quarter full. She wasn’t going to order any more, she’d just see what happened. She barely had the strength to get back upstairs. She turned on the little lamp that was on the breakfast table and sat in her chair there, waiting for Helen. She saw dog hairs on the floor, gathering together, drifting across the tiles.

Helen felt sick but she would drag herself to school. Her throat was sore. She heated up honey in a pan and sipped it with a spoon.

“I’m going to just stay put today,” Lenore said.

“That’s good, Mom, just take it easy. You’ve been doing too much.” Helen’s forehead shone with sweat. She buttoned up her sweater with trembling fingers.

“Do you have a cold?” her mother said. “Where did you get a cold? Stay home. The nurse who’s coming this afternoon, she can take a look at you and write a prescription. Look at you, you’re sweating. You’ve probably got a fever.” She wanted to weep for her little Helen.

“I have a test today, Mom,” Helen said.

“A test,” Lenore marveled. She laughed. “Take them now but don’t take them later, they don’t do you any good later.”

Helen wiped at her face with a dish towel.

“My god, a dish towel!” Lenore said. “What’s wrong with you? My god, what’s to become of you!”

Startled, Helen dropped the towel. She almost expected to see her face on it. That was what had alarmed her mother so, that Helen had wiped off her own face. Anyone knew better than to do that…She felt faint. She was thinking of the test, of taking it in a few hours. She took a fresh dish towel from a drawer and put it on the rack.

“What if I die today?” Lenore said suddenly. “I want you to be with me. My god, I don’t want to be alone.”

“All this week there are tests,” Helen said.

“Why don’t I wait, then?” Lenore said.

Tears ran down Helen’s cheeks. She stood there stubbornly, looking at her mother.

“You were always able to turn them on and off,” Lenore said, “just like a faucet. Crocodile tears.” But with a moan she clutched her. Then she pulled away. “We have to wash these things,” she said. “We can’t just leave them in the sink.” She seized the smudged glass she’d used to swallow her pills and rinsed it in running water. She held it up to the window and it slipped from her fingers and smashed against the sill. It was dirty and whole, she thought, and now it is clean and broken. This seemed to her profound.

“Don’t touch it!” she screamed. “Leave it for Barbara. Is that her name, Barbara?” Strangers, they were all strangers. “She never knows what to do when she comes.”

“I have to go, Mom,” Helen said.

“You do, of course you do,” her mother said. She patted Helen’s cheeks clumsily. “You’re so hot, you’re sick.”

“I love you,” Helen said.

“I love you too,” Lenore said. Then she watched her walk down the street toward the corner. The day was growing lighter. The mornings kept coming, she didn’t like it.

On the bus, the driver said to Helen, “I lost my mother when I was your age. You’ve just got to hang in there.”

Helen walked toward the rear of the bus and sat down. She shut her eyes. A girl behind her snapped her gum and said, “ ‘Hang in there.’ What an idiot.”

The bus pounded down the snow-packed streets.

The girl with the gum had been the one who told Helen how ashes came back. Her uncle had died and his ashes had come in a red shellacked box. It looked cheap but it had cost fifty-five dollars and there was an envelope taped to the box with his name typed on it beneath a glassine window as though he was being addressed to himself. This girl considered herself to be somewhat of an authority on how these things were handled, for she had also lost a couple of grandparents and knew how these things were done as far south as Boston.

Miriam was living with a man named Jack Dewayne, who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew, and his students adored him. They called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shirts to class. People were mad for Jack in this town. Once, in a grocery store, when Miriam stood gazing into a bin of limes, a woman came up to her and said, “Your Jack is a wonderful, wonderful man.”

“Oh, thanks,” Miriam said.

“My son Ricky disappeared four years ago and some skeletal remains were found at the beginning of this year. Scattered, broken, lots of bones missing, not much to go on, a real jumble. The officials told me they probably weren’t Ricky’s but your Jack told me they were, and with compassion he showed me how he reached that conclusion.” The woman waited. In her cart was a big bag of birdseed and a bottle of vodka. “If it weren’t for Jack, my Ricky’s body would probably be unnamed still,” she said.

“Well, thank you very much,” Miriam said.

She never knew what to say to Jack’s fans. As for them, they didn’t understand Miriam at all. Why her of all people? With his hunger for life, Jack could have chosen better, they felt. Miriam lacked charm, they felt. She was gloomy. Even Jack found her gloomy occasionally.

Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack’s roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why he particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack’s alley, all right.

“Here’s something for you, Jack,” Miriam said. “You’ll appreciate this. Beckett described tears as ‘liquefied brain.’ ”

“God, Miriam,” Jack said. “Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it’s a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”