Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

The next day Harry had distinguished himself further by exclaiming over a marabou stork, and someone in the group told him that marabous were gruesome things, scavengers, “morbidity distilled,” in the words of this fussy little person, and certainly nothing to get excited about when there were hundreds of beautiful and strange creatures in Africa that one could enjoy and identify and point out to the others. Imagine, Anne said, going to an immense new continent and being corrected as to one’s feelings, one’s perceptions, in such a strange place. And it was not as though everything was known. Take the wild dogs, for example. Attitudes had changed utterly about the worth of wild dogs…

Abruptly, she stopped. She had been silent much of the evening and felt that this outburst had not gone over particularly well. Harry’s friends were making margaritas. One of them had gone out and just returned with more tequila. They were watching her uncomfortably, as though they felt she should fluff up her stories on Harry a bit.

Finally one of them said, “I didn’t know Harry had been to Africa.”

This surprised her. The trip to Africa hadn’t been a triumph, exactly, but it hadn’t been a disaster either and could very well have been worse. They had been gone a month, and this was very recently. But it didn’t matter. She would probably never see these children again.

They sat around the large kitchen. They were becoming more and more strange to her. She wondered what they were all waiting for. One of them was trying to find salt. Was there no salt? He opened a cupboard and peered inside, bringing out a novelty set, a plastic couple, Amish or something; she supposed the man was pepper, the woman salt. They were all watching him as he turned the things over and shook them against his cupped hand. Anne never cooked, never used anything in this kitchen, she and Harry ate out, so these things were barely familiar to her. Then, with what was really quite a normal gesture, the boy unscrewed the head off the little woman and poured the salt inside onto a saucer.

Someone shrieked in terror. It was the floppy-haired boy; he was yelling, horrified. Anne was confused for an instant. Was Harry dying again? Was Harry all right? The boy was howling, his eyes rolling in his head. The others looked at him dully. One of the girls giggled. “Uh-oh,” she said.

Two of the boys were trying to quiet him. They all looked like Harry, even the boy who was screaming.

“You’d better take him to the emergency room,” Anne said.

“Maybe if he just gets a little air, walks around, gets some air,” another boy said.

“You’d all better go now,” Anne said.

—

It was not yet dawn, still very dark. Anne sat there alone in the bright kitchen in her black dress. There was a run in her stocking. The dinner in the restaurant had cost almost a thousand dollars, and Harry probably wouldn’t even have liked it. She hadn’t liked it. She wanted to behave differently now, for Harry’s sake. He hadn’t been perfect, Harry, he’d been a very troubled boy, a very misunderstood boy, but she had never let him go, never, until now. She knew that he couldn’t be aware of that, that she now had let him go. She knew that between them, from now on, she alone would be the one who realized things. She wasn’t going to deceive herself in that regard. Even so, she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly about this.

After some time, she got up and packed a duffel bag for Africa, exactly as she had done that time before. The bag and its contents could weigh no more than twenty-two pounds. When she was finished, she put it in the hallway by the door. Outside it was still dark, as dark as it had been hours ago, though this scarcely seemed possible.

Perhaps she would go back to Africa.

There was a knock on the door. Anne looked at it, startled, a thick door with locks. Then she opened it. A girl was standing there, not the interplanetary one but another, who had particularly relished the dinner. She had been standing there smoking for a while before she knocked. Several cigarette butts were ground into the high-gloss cerulean of the porch.

“May I come in?” the girl asked.

“Why, no,” Anne said. “No, you may not.”

“Please,” the girl said.

Anne shut the door.

She went into the kitchen and threw the two parts of the saltshaker into the trash. She tossed the small lady’s companion in as well. Harry had once said to her, “Look, this is amazing, I don’t know how this could have happened but I have these spikes in my head. They must have been there for a while, but I swear, I swear to you, I just noticed them. But I got them out! On the left side. But on the right side it’s more difficult because they’re in a sort of helmet, and the helmet is fused to my head, see? Can you help me?”

She had helped him then. She had stroked his hair with her fingers for a long, long time. She had been very careful, very thorough. But that had been a unique situation. Usually, she couldn’t help him.

There was a sound at the door again, a determined knocking. Anne walked to it quickly and opened it. There were several of Harry’s friends there, not just the girl but not all of them either.

“You don’t have to be so rude,” one of them said.

They were angry. They had lost Harry, she thought, and they missed him.

“We loved Harry too, you know,” one of them said. His tie was loose, and his breath was sweet and dry, like sand.

“I want to rest now,” Anne said. “I must get some rest.”

“Rest,” one of them said in a soft, scornful voice. He glanced at the others. They ignored him.

“Tell us another story about Harry,” one of them said. “We didn’t get the first one.”

“Are you frightening me?” Anne said. She smiled. “I mean, are you trying to frighten me?”

“I think Harry saw that thing, but I don’t think he was ever there. Is that what you meant?” one of them said with some effort. He turned and then, as though he were dancing, moved down the steps and knelt on the ground, where he lowered his head and began spitting up quietly.

“Harry will always be us,” one of them said. “You better get used to it. You better get your stories straight.”

“Good night,” Anne said.

“Good night, please, ” they said, and Anne shut the door.

She turned off all the lights and sat in the darkness of her house. Before long, as she knew it would, the phone began to ring. It rang and rang, but she didn’t have to answer it. She wouldn’t do it. It would never be that once, again, when she’d learned that Harry died, no matter how much she knew in her heart that the past was but the present in that future to which it belonged.

Donna came as a visitor in her long black coat. It was spring but still cool, and she never wore light colors, she was no buttercup. She was visiting her friend Cynthia, who was in Pond House for depression. Donna never had a drink before she visited Cynthia. She shunned her habitual excesses and arrived sober and aware, with an exquisite sinking feeling. She thought that Pond House was an unfortunate name, ponds being stagnant, artificial and small. This wasn’t just her opinion. A pond was indeed an artificially confined body of water, she argued, but Cynthia thought Pond was probably the name of the hospital wing’s benefactor. Cynthia had three roommates, a woman in her sixties and two obese teenagers. Donna liked to pretend that the old woman was her mother. Hi, she’d say, you look great today, what a pretty sweatshirt.

Donna had been visiting Cynthia for about a week now. She could scarcely imagine what she had done with herself before Cynthia had the grace to get herself committed to Pond House. She liked everything about it but particularly sitting in Cynthia’s room, speaking quietly with her while the others listened. They didn’t even pretend not to listen, the others. Sometimes she and Cynthia would stroll down to the lounge and get a snack from the fridge. In the lounge, goofy helium balloons in the shapes of objects or food but with human features were tied to the furniture with ribbon. They bobbed there opposite the nurses’ station, and people would bat them as they passed by. Cynthia thought the balloons would be deeply disturbing to anyone who was already disturbed, yet in fact everyone considered them amusing. None of the people at Pond House were supposed to be seriously ill, at least on Floor Three. On Floor Four it was another matter. But here they were supposed to be sort of ruefully aware of their situations, and were encouraged to believe that they could possibly be helped. Cynthia had come here because she had picked up the habit of committing destructive and selfish acts, the most recent being the torching of her boyfriend’s car, a black Corvette. The boyfriend was married but Cynthia strongly suspected he was gay. He drove her crazy. “He’s a taker and not a giver, Donna,” she told Donna earnestly.