Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“Should you be reading that,” Donna asked.

Cynthia wouldn’t talk to her.

Donna found the old lady and gave her the deck of cards.

“I’m so relieved,” the old lady said. “That could have been such a problem, such a problem. Would you do me another favor? Would you get my dog and bring him to me here?”

Donna was enthusiastic about this. “Do you have a dog? Where is he?”

“He’s in my house.”

“Is anyone feeding him?” Donna said. “Does he have water?” She had found her vocation, she was sure of it. She could do this forever. She felt like a long-distance swimmer in that place long-distance swimmers go in their heads when they’re good.

“Nooooooo,” the old woman said. “He doesn’t need water.” She, too, looked delighted. She and Donna beamed at each other. “He’s a good dog, a watchdog.”

“I didn’t see him when I was there,” Donna admitted.

“He wasn’t watching you,” the old lady said.

“What breed of dog is he,” Donna asked.

She suddenly looked concerned. “He’s something you plug in.”

“Oh,” Donna said, disappointed. “I think I did notice him.” He looked like a stereo speaker. She thought they’d been talking more along the lines of Cerberus, the dog that guarded the gates of hell. Those Greeks! It wasn’t that you couldn’t get in, it was that you couldn’t get out. And that honey-cake business…Actually, she had never grasped the honey-cake business.

“He detects intruders up to thirty feet and he barks. He can detect them through glass, brick, wood and cement. The closer they get, the louder and faster he barks. He’s just a little individual but he sounds ferocious. I always liked him better than Safe-T-Man. I got them at the same time.”

“But he’d be barking all the time here,” Donna said. “You have to consider that,” she added.

“He can be quiet,” the woman said. “He can be good.”

“I’ll get him for you then,” Donna said as though she had just made a difficult decision.

As she was leaving Pond House she passed a man dressed all in red yelling into the telephone. There was a pay phone at the very heart of Floor Three and it was always in use. “What were you born with, an ax in your hand?” he shouted.

Donna returned the next day with the old lady’s dog, which she carried in a smart brown and white Bendel shopping bag she’d been saving. She arrived just about the time the group meeting was coming to a close. Lingering near the door, she saw the fat teenagers and Cynthia’s round neat head with its fashionable haircut. A male patient she hadn’t seen before was saying, “Hey, if it looks, walks, talks, smells and feels like the anima, then it is the anima.” Donna thought this very funny and somewhat obscene. “Miss!” someone called to her. “You are not allowed in these meetings!” She went back to Cynthia’s room and sat on her bed. The old woman’s bed was stripped down to the ticking. She sat and looked at it vacantly.

When Cynthia came in, she said, “Donna, that old lady died, honest to god. We were all sitting around after dinner eating our goddamn Jell-O and she just tipped over.”

“I have something she wanted here,” Donna said, raising the bag. “This is hers, it’s from her house.”

“Get rid of it,” Cynthia said. “Listen, act quickly and positively.” She began to cry.

Donna thought her friend’s response somewhat peculiar, but that was probably why she was in Pond House.

As the day wore on, it was disclosed that the woman had no family. There was no one.

“There wouldn’t have been any Festive Chicken either,” Cynthia said, “that’s for sure.” She had her old mouth back on her, Donna noticed.

There was discussion in the room about what had happened. The old lady had been eating the Jell-O. She hadn’t said a word. She’d expressed no dismay.

“She was clueless,” one of the fat girls said.

“Were you two friends before or did that happen here,” Donna asked them.

They looked at her with hatred. “She’s a nut fucker, I think,” one of them said.

They looked so much alike Donna couldn’t be sure which of them had struck her in the hallway. She thought of them as Dum and Dee. She pretended she was a docent leading tours. The neuroses of these two, Dum and Dee, are so normal they’re of little concern to us, she would say, indicating the fat girls. Then she pretended they were her jailers over whom she held indisputable moral sway.

The barking-dog alarm had not worked at the old lady’s house. It was a simple enough thing, with few adjustments that could be made to it; its function would either be realized or it wouldn’t, and it wasn’t. Donna had gone outside into the street and walked slowly back toward the house, avoiding the nestling. Then she had run, waving her arms. There had been no barking at all, only the sound of her own feet on the crushed-rock yard. It had not worked in her own apartment either. It had not even felt warm.

Poor old soul, Donna thought.

Night was flickering at the corners of the hospital. There was the smell of potatoes, the sound of wheels bringing the supper trays. They always made the visitors leave around this time.

“Cynthia,” Donna said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

“Why?” Cynthia said.

At home, Donna pretended she was on a train with no ticket, eluding the conductor as it sped toward some destination on gleaming rails. She made herself a drink. She almost finished it, then freshened it a bit. The phone rang and it was Cynthia. She was delighted it was Cynthia.

“You will not believe this, Donna,” Cynthia said. “You know that new guy, the really annoying one? Well, at dinner he was saying that when women attempt suicide they often don’t succeed, but with men they do it on the first go-round. He said that simple statistic says it all about the difference between men and women. He said that men are doers and that women are deceivers and flirts, and Holly just threw back her chair and—”

“Who’s Holly,” Donna asked.

“My roommate, for god’s sake, the one who hates you. She attacked this guy. She gouged out one of his eyes with a spoon.”

“She gouged it out ?”

“I didn’t think it could be done, but boy, she knew how to do it.”

“I wonder if that could have been me,” Donna said.

“Oh, I think so. It’s bedlam in here.” Cynthia laughed wildly. “I want to leave, Donna, though I don’t feel any better. But I could leave, you know. I could just walk right out of here.”

“Really?” Donna said. She thought, When I get out of here, I’m going to be gone.

“But I think I should feel better. I lack goals. I need goals.”

Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, Cynthia using the phone. Donna preferred sitting quietly with her in Pond House, offering to get her little things she had expressed no desire for, reflecting about Dennis, her married man who hadn’t come by to see her even once. Of course he was probably still annoyed about his car, although he had filed no charges.

Cynthia kept talking, pretty much about her life, the details of which Donna had heard before and which were no more riveting this time. She’d had a difficult time of it, starting in childhood. She had been an intense little thing but was thwarted, thwarted. Donna walked around with the phone to her ear, making another drink, crushing an ant or two that ventured onto the countertop, staring out the window at the dark only to realize that she wasn’t seeing the dark, merely a darkened image of herself and the objects behind her. She sipped her drink and turned toward some picture postcards she’d taped to one of the cupboards. Some of them had been up for years. One was of a city, a cheerless and civilized city similar to the one on the old woman’s playing cards.