Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“I want to confess something,” Andrew said. “I tossed that watch.” He had crammed it into an overflowing Goodwill bin in the parking lot of a shopping mall. He described the experience of pushing the watch into an open-throated, softly bulging sack as an extremely unpleasant one. Everyone knew the Goodwill bin and its mute congregation of displaced things, some too large to have been slipped inside, all those things waiting to be revisited in this life, waiting to be used again.

That evening everyone drank too much and later dreamed vivid dreams. The twins dreamed they were in the middle of a highway, trying to cross, trying to cross. Angus dreamed he was in a coffee shop where a kindly but inefficient waitress who looked like his mother was directing him to a table that wasn’t there. Lucretia dreamed she was carving Kindertotenlieder as sung by Kathleen Ferrier out of a block of wood with a chain saw. That’s quite good, someone was saying. It’s only a copy, Lucretia demurred. Walter dreamed he was kneeling at the communion rail in the silk pajamas. The cup was coming toward him but had become a thermometer to be placed beneath the tongues of the devout, and by the time it reached him it was a dipstick from a car’s engine that a mechanic was wiping with a filthy cloth.

Louise had had the dog for five months now. When she realized how much time had passed, she thought: Seven more months to go. In seven months we’ll know more.

Someone was putting a house up behind Louise’s house. The yard had been bladed and most of the trees taken down. The banal framework of a house stood there. When Louise gave a party, everyone was shocked at the change.

“I thought that yard went with this house,” Jack said.

“Well, I guess not,” Louise said.

“All those little birdhouses are gone,” Lucretia said. “People put them inside now, you know, as a decorative accent. They paint them in these already fading, flaking colors and put them around.”

“They’re safer inside,” Angus said.

“That thing is going to be huge, Louise,” Betsy said. “It’s going to loom over you.”

They talked for a while about what she could plant to block it out.

“Nothing will grow in time,” Betsy said.

“In time for what?” Walter said.

“Everything takes so long to grow. My god, Louise,” Betsy said, “you’d better just move.”

“Louise,” the twins said, “if you die are you going to leave us anything?” They were sitting on the sofa eating pretzels. Outside, the wind was blowing hard but there were no trees anymore to indicate this with their tossing branches. A door blew open, though, banging.

Louise was going to move. She didn’t want that house going up behind her. Within a week, she had found another place. Walter and Lucretia helped her move. He had a truck and they transferred all the furniture in one trip. They transferred Broom too, with his dog bed and his dish for water and his dish for food. Then Louise packed her car with what remained, right up to the roof. Even so, she had thrown away a lot of things. She was simplifying and purifying her life, keeping only her nicest, most singular things. Louise swept the old house clean, glad to be leaving. She looked with satisfaction at the empty rooms, the stark windows and their newly ugly vistas. She slammed the door and headed for her car but it wasn’t where she’d left it. She stared at the place where the car had been. But it had vanished, been stolen, and everything was gone. The sun was bright, still shining on the place where it had been.

It was Betsy’s turn to have a party. They told theft stories — they all had them — and tried to cheer Louise up. She had already bought another car with the insurance money. It wasn’t as appealing but she liked it in a different way. She liked it because she didn’t like it that much, wasn’t as girlishly pleased with it as she had been with the other one.

“You can get all new clothes,” Lucretia said. “You can go on a spree. That favorite dress of yours had a spot on it anyway, kind of on the back.”

“It did not,” Louise said. “I got that spot out. I loved that dress.”

“I bet you can’t even remember everything you packed in the car,” Jack said.

“My pearls,” Louise said sadly.

“Christmas is coming,” Angus said. But he always said that, as if he were going to buy everyone wonderful gifts, only ones of their most perfect desiring. But all he bought was champagne and cookies that they would drink and eat.

“My grandmother’s silver tea service.”

“Louise, you know you never used that and never would even once in your life,” Lucretia said. “It didn’t have a place.”

“But it’s gone,” Louise said. It was gone, of course, but there was something else, something worse. She had made all these choices. She had discarded this and retained that and it hadn’t mattered.

“Things are ephemeral,” Daisy said.

“And an illusion,” Wilbur said.

“Well, which is it?” Jack demanded, annoyed.

Everyone was a little embarrassed. Seldom did anyone respond to the twins.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Jack said. “I sold that crazy bowl of Elliot’s to an antique store.”

None of them could think about Elliot without being thwarted by the mystery of the things he’d given them. His behavior had been inexplicable. It was all inexplicable.

“Oh, I can’t think about it anymore!” Louise cried. They were all drinking margaritas out of silly glasses.

“How is Broom,” Andrew asked delicately.

“Oh, I’ve rather gotten used to Broom,” Louise said.

Lucretia looked at her unhappily. Louise had lost her sparkle, Lucretia thought.

Louise settled quickly into her new house. It was bigger than the other one, and more ordinary. Broom didn’t know which room to disappear into. He had tried them all and couldn’t decide. He would try the most unlikely places. Sometimes she would come across him on the fifth step of a narrow back staircase. What an odd place to be! Wherever he was he looked uncomfortable. Still, she was sure Elliot would not have wanted her to surrender the animal so easily. Of course she would never know Elliot’s thoughts. She herself could only think — and she was sure she was like many others in this regard, it was her connection with others, really — that life would have been far different under other circumstances, and yet here it wasn’t, after all.

They had been told about it by a police officer eating a tamale at a cafe near the Arizona — New Mexico border.

“I just went out there in all that white sand and got me a dune and went up on it and looked and looked and just let it sink in, and I never saw anything like it, never felt anything like it. I think I could stay out there in that white sand for a real long time and I don’t know exactly why.”

“It doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do too often,” Richard said. The policeman frowned. Then he ignored them.

Back in the car, Janice wanted to go there immediately. They were having a look at the Southwest on their way to Santa Fe. They were both wearing khaki suits, and Richard had a hand-painted tie he had paid a great deal of money for around his neck.

They drove to the White Sands National Monument, paid the admission and went in. The park ranger said, “We invite you to get out of your car and explore a bit, climb a dune for a better view of the endless sea of sand all around you.”

They drove slowly along a loop road. Everything was white and orderly. It was as if the dunes had a sense of mission.

“Do you want to get out?” Richard said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

Janice felt that she was still capable of awe and transfiguration and was uncomfortable when, together with Richard, she felt not much of anything. She was distracted by the knowledge that they were on a loop road. She studied the dunes without hope. As they were leaving, they saw something small and translucent, like a lizard, stagger beneath their wheels, and they both remarked on that.