Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Cynthia was saying, “I just can’t accept so much, you know, Donna, and I feel, I really feel this, that my capacity to adapt to what is has been exceeded. I—”

“Cynthia,” Donna said. “We’re all alone in a meaningless world. That’s it. OK?”

“That’s so easy for you to say!” Cynthia screamed.

There was a loud crack as the connection was broken.

Donna had no recollection who had sent her the postcard or from where. She couldn’t think what had prompted her to display it, either. The city held no allure for her. She had no intention of taking it down and looking at it more closely.

Later, she lay in bed trying to find sleep by recounting the ranks of poker hands. Royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind, full house…A voice kept saying in her head, Out or In. Huh? Which will it be? Then it was dawn. She showered and dressed and hurried to Pond House, where she had coffee in the cafeteria. Her eyes darted around, falling on everything, glittering. There was her coat, hanging on a hook next to her table. The coat suddenly seemed preposterous to her. Honestly, what must she look like in that coat?

Up on Floor Three, Cynthia wasn’t in her room but one fat girl was, her face red and her eyes swollen from crying.

“I just lost my friend,” the fat girl said.

“You’re not Holly, then,” Donna said.

“I wish I was,” the fat girl said. “I wish I was Holly.” She lay there on her bed, crying loudly.

Donna looked out the window at the street below. You couldn’t open the windows. A tree outside was struggling to burst into bloom but had been compromised heavily by the parking area. Big chunks of its bark had been torn away by poorly parked cars. When she was a child, visiting Florida, she’d seen a palm tree burst into flames. It was beautiful! Then rats as long as her downy child’s arm had rushed down the trunk. Later, she learned that it was not unusual for a palm tree to do this on occasion, given the proper circumstances. This tree didn’t want to do anything like that, though. It couldn’t. It struggled along quietly.

She turned from the window and left the room, where the fat girl continued sobbing. She walked down the corridor, humming a little. She pretended she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone’s body. She found Cynthia in the lounge, painting her long and perfect nails.

Cynthia regarded her sourly. “I really wish you wouldn’t visit me anymore,” she said.

A nurse appeared from nowhere like they did. “Who are you visiting?” she said to Donna.

Cynthia looked at her little bottle of nail polish and tightened the cap.

“You have to be visiting someone,” the nurse said.

“She’s not visiting me,” Cynthia muttered.

“What?” the nurse said.

“She’s not visiting me,” Cynthia said loudly.

After some remonstrance, Donna found herself being steered away from Cynthia and down the hallway to the elevator. “That’s it,” the nurse said. “You’ve lost your privileges here.” Donna was alone in the elevator as it went down. On the ground floor some people got on and the elevator went up again. On Floor Three they got off. Donna went back down. She walked through the parking lot to her car.

She would come back tomorrow and avoid Cynthia and the nurse, too. For now, she had to decide which route to take home. It was how they made roads these days; there were five or six ways to get to the same place. On the highway she ran into construction almost immediately. There was always construction. Cans and cones, those bright orange arrows blinking, and she had to merge. She inched over, trying to merge. They wouldn’t let her in! She pushed into the line of cars. Then she realized she was part of a funeral procession. Their lights were on. She was part of a cortege, of an anguished throng. Should she turn on her lights to show sympathy, to apologize? She put on her sunglasses. People didn’t turn their lights on in broad daylight just for funerals, though. They turned them on for all sorts of things. Remembering somebody or something. Actually, showing you remembered somebody or something, which was different. People were urged to put them on for safety too. Lights on for Safety . But this was a funeral, no doubt about it.

After what seemed an eternity, the road opened up again and Donna turned the car sharply into the other lane. In moments she had left the procession far behind.

On her own street she parked and walked quickly toward her door. She felt an unpleasant excitement. It was midmorning, and as always the neighborhood was quiet. Who knew what people did here? She never saw anyone on this street.

Then a dog began to bark, quite alarmingly. As she walked on, the rapid cry grew louder, more frantic. It was the poor old soul’s dog, Donna thought, the gray machine, somehow operative again, resuming its purpose. She knew . But it sounded so real, so remarkably real, and the disorder she felt was so remarkably real as well that she hesitated. She could not go forward. Then, she couldn’t go back.

Walter got the silk pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, the other white — an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom that they made Tim cry. They were large and had to be removed with a backhoe, which did not please the landlord, who didn’t get anything, although he didn’t have to return the last month’s deposit either. Lucretia got the Manhattan glasses. They were delicate, with a scroll of flowers etched just beneath the rim. There were four of them. Andrew got the wristwatch. Betsy got the barbells. Jack got a fairly useless silver bowl. Angus got the photo basket. Louise got the dog.

Louise would have preferred anything to the dog, right down to the barbells. Nothing at all would have pleased her even more. It was believed that the animal had been witness to the suicide. The dog had either seen the enactment or come into the room shortly afterward. He might have been in the kitchen eating his chow or he might have been sitting on the porch, taking in the entire performance. He was a quiet, medium-size dog. He wasn’t the kind who would have run for help. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have attempted to prevent the removal of the body from the house.

Louise took the dog immediately to a kennel and boarded it. She couldn’t imagine why she, of all people, had been given the dog. But in the note Elliot had left he had clearly stated, And to Louise my dog, Broom . The worst of it was that none of them remembered Elliot’s having a dog. They had never seen it before, but now suddenly there was a dog in the picture.

“He said he was thinking of getting a dog sometime,” Jack said.

“But wouldn’t he have said ‘I got a dog’? He never said that,” Dianne said.

“He must have just gotten it. Maybe he got it the day before. Or even that morning, maybe,” Angus said.

This alarmed Louise.

“I’m sure he never thought you’d keep it,” Lucretia said.

This alarmed her even more.

“Oh, I don’t know!” Lucretia said. “I just wanted to make you feel better.”

Louise was racking up expenses at the kennel. The dog weighed under thirty-five pounds but that still meant fourteen dollars a day. If he had weighed between fifty and a hundred, it would have been twenty dollars, and after that it went up again. Louise didn’t have all that much money. She worked at a florist’s and sometimes at an auto-glass tinting establishment, cutting and ironing on the darkest film allowable by law, which at twenty percent was less than most people wanted but all they were going to get. Her own car had confetti glitter on the rear window. It was like fireworks going off in the darkness of her glass.