Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

“You bumped your head pretty bad,” Rose agreed. “I saw a motel back there. Why don’t we get a room and declare this day over.”

There was only one room available at the motel, and there was a lone, large bed, which pretty much filled it. The other rooms were unoccupied, according to the Indian girl in the office, but each possessed a unique incapacity disqualifying it from use. A clogged drain, a charred carpet, a cracked toilet, a staved-in door. Fleas.

Zorro soared from the door to the bed and began bouncing on it. “Skinny Puppy enters the ring!” he shouted. He crouched and weaved, jabbing the air. Rose swatted him away.

“You lie down,” she instructed Janice. “I’ll take the kids over to the cafe so you can rest. They’ve got cocktails, I noticed. Do you want me to bring you back a cocktail?”

“I think I’ll just lie down,” Janice said.

“Don’t do anything until you’ve rested a bit,” Rose said.

“Don’t look in the mirror or anything,” ZoeBella urged her softly.

“You look white as a sheet,” Rose said. “Maybe we should stay with you just until you get your color back.”

“I don’t feel at all well,” Janice said. She crept across the bed and lay on her back. She didn’t want to close her eyes.

“Scooch over just a little bit,” Rose said, “more to the middle so we can all fit.”

They all lay on the bed. After a few moments someone began to snore. Janice wouldn’t want to bet her last fifty that it wasn’t her.

My mother began going to gun classes in February. She quit the yoga. As I understand it, yoga is concentration. You choose an object of attention and you concentrate on it. It might be, but need not be, the deity. This is how it was explained to me. The deity is different now than it used to be; it can be anything, pretty much anything at all. But even so, my mother let the yoga go and went on to what was called a.38—a little black gun with a long barrel — at a pistol range in the city. Classes were Tuesday and Thursday evenings from five to seven. That was an hour and a half of class and half an hour of shooting time. I would go with her and afterward we would go to the Arizona Inn and have tea and share a club sandwich. Then we would go home, which was just as we had left it. The dogs were there and the sugar machine was in the corner. We left it out because we had to use it twice a day. I knew how to read it and clean it. My mother and I both had diabetes and that is not something you can be cured of, not ever. In another corner was the Christmas tree. We liked to keep it up, although we had agreed not to replace any of the bulbs that burned out. At the same time we were not waiting until every bulb went dark before we took the tree down, either. We were going to be flexible about it, not superstitious. My grandmother had twelve orange-juice glasses. A gypsy told her fortune and said she’d live until the last of the twelve glasses broke. The gypsy had no way of knowing that my grandmother had twelve orange-juice glasses! When I knew my grandmother, she had seven left. She had four left when she died. The longest my mother and I ever left the tree up was Easter once when it came early.

This is Tucson, Arizona, a high desert valley. Around us are mountains, and one mountain is so high there is snow in the winter. People drive up and make snowmen and put them in the backs of their trucks and on the hoods of their cars and drive back down again, seeing how long they will last. My mother and I have done that, made a little snowman and put him on the hood of the car. There are animals up there that don’t know that the animals below them in the desert even exist. They might as well be in different galaxies. The mountain is 9,157 feet tall, and 6,768 feet above the city. Numbers interest me and have since the second grade. My father weighed 100 pounds when he died. Each foot of a saguaro cactus weighs 100 pounds, and that’s mostly water. My father weighed no more than one cactus foot. I weigh 68 pounds, my mother weighs 116, the dogs weigh 80 each. I do my mother’s checkbook. Each month, according to the bank, I am accurate to the penny.

The man who taught the class and owned the firing range was called the Marksman. He called his business the Pistol Institute. There were five people attending the class in addition to my mother, three women and two men. They did not speak to one another or exchange names because no one wanted to make friends. My mother had had a friend in yoga class, Suzanne. She was disturbed that my mother had dropped the yoga and was going to the institute, and she said she was going to throw the I Ching and find out what it was, exactly, my mother thought she was doing. If she did, we never heard the results.

My mother was not the kind of person who lived each day by objecting to it, day after day. She was not. And I do not mean to suggest that the sugar machine was as large as the Christmas tree. It’s about the size of my father’s wallet, which my mother now uses as her own.

When my father died, my mother felt that it was important that I not suffer a failure to recover from his death and she took me to a psychiatrist. I was supposed to have twenty-five minutes a week with the psychiatrist, but I was never in his office for more than twenty. Once he used some of that time to tell me he was dyslexic and that the beauty of words meant nothing to him, nothing, though he appreciated and even enjoyed their meanings. I told him one of our dogs is epileptic and I had read that in the first moments of an epileptic attack some people felt such happiness that they would be willing to give up their life to keep it, and he said he doubted that a dog would want to give up its life for happiness. I told him dead people are very disappointed when you visit them and they discover you’re still flesh and blood, but that they’re not angry, only sad. He dismissed this completely, without commenting on it or even making a note. I suppose he’s used to people trying things out on him.

My mother did not confide in me but I felt that she was unhappy that February. We stopped the ritual of giving each other our needles in the morning before breakfast. I now gave myself my injections and she her own. I missed the other way, but she had changed the policy and that was that. She still kissed me good morning and good night and took the dogs for long walks in the desert and fed the wild birds. I told her I’d read that you shouldn’t feed the birds in winter, that it fattened up the wrong kind of bird. The good birds left and came back, left and came back, but the bad ones stayed and were strengthened by the habits of people like my mother. I told her this to be unpleasant because I missed the needles together, but it didn’t matter. She said she didn’t care. She had changed her policy about the needles, not the birds.

The Pistol Institute was in a shopping mall where all the other buildings were empty and for lease. It had glass all across the front and you could look right into it, at the little round tables where people sat and watched the shooters and at the long display case where the guns were waiting for someone to know them, to want them. When you were inside you couldn’t see out, because the glass was dark. It seemed to me the reverse of what it should be, but it was the Marksman’s place so it was his decision. Off to the right as you entered was the classroom and over its door was the sign BE AWARE OF WHO CAN DO UNTO YOU. No one asked what this meant, to my knowledge, and I wasn’t about to ask. I did not ask questions. I had started off doing this deliberately sometime before but by now I did it naturally. Off to the left behind a wall of clear glass was the firing range. The shooters wore ear protectors and stood at an angle in little compartments firing at targets on wires that could be brought up close or sent farther away by pressing a button. The target showed the torso of a man with large square shoulders and a large square head. In the left-hand corner of the target was a box in which the same figure was much reduced. This was the area you wanted to hit when you were good. It wasn’t tedious to watch the shooters, but it wasn’t that interesting either. I preferred to sit as close as possible to the closed door of the classroom and listen to the Marksman address the class.