Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Angela wondered if it was possible to desire a drink any more than she did at this moment. It couldn’t be.

“You clearly got an affinity with unknowing, unprepared creatures,” Deke went on.

“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.

He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”

“Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,” Darleen said.

“I began my thesis there,” Deke said. “ ‘Others: Do They Exist?’ But I never completed it. I was a couple of hundred pages into it when I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t genuine breakthrough thinking.”

Angela rose to her feet suddenly and tried to embrace Darleen. The girl was all stubborn bone. Her clothes smelled musty, and a stinging chemical odor rose from her spiky hair. She pulled away easily from Angela’s grasp.

“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Deke said.

Darleen laughed. “Daddy Bruce better get here quick. Wake you up.”

“I have to…I have to…”

They looked at her.

“It’s late and I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said, ashamed.

“You said you’d take the day off!” Darleen cried.

“Take the day off, it don’t fit when you put it on again,” Deke said. “Attention here, I’m taking the fishbowl and going out for more wine. Liquor store has one of those change machines. Those things are fun, you ever seen one work?”

“Don’t leave!” Angela and Darleen exclaimed together.

“At a dangerously low level,” he said, raising the bottle.

No one could argue that it was otherwise.

“Just stay a little while longer,” Darleen said.

Deke pursed his lips and pressed his hands to his leather shirt. “I might commence to pace,” he said. He grimly poured himself the last of the wine.

“There was a strange thing that happened the other night,” Angela began. “I was on a boat, the ferry that goes to the islands. There’d been the most remarkable coincidence—”

“A coincidence is something that’s going to happen and does,” Deke said. “You got a fondness for the word, I notice.”

“Oh, Mummy is so seldom precise,” Darleen said. “When I was small, she would tell me I had my father’s eyes. Then one day I finally said, ‘I do not have his eyes. He was not an organ donor to my knowledge. A little frigging precision in language would be welcome,’ I said.”

Deke looked at her impatiently, then stood as though yanked up by a rope. “You girls hold off on the Daddy Bruce business until I get back. That’s dangerous business. You don’t want to go too far with that without an impartial yet expert observer present.”

He left without further farewell bearing the fishbowl, the door shutting softly behind him.

Angela laughed. “I think we disappointed him.”

The room felt stifling. She opened a window, beyond which was a storm window, a so-called combination window, adaptable to the seasons. She fumbled with the aluminum catches and pushed it up. The cold clutched her, then darted past. She turned and looked at her daughter. “I love you,” she said.

“Mummy, Mummy.” Darleen sighed. Then, tolerantly, “The new headmaster has a white cockatoo that likes to be rocked like a baby.”

“Do tell me about it, please,” Angela said.

“Stupid bird,” Darleen said cheerfully.

—

Several years later, Angela was dying in the town’s hospital, in a room where many before her had passed. She had known none of them, but this room they had in common, and the old business engaged in there. Darleen had been summoned but would not arrive in time. Angela was fifty-five years old. She had not gotten out as early as she might have, certainly, but now she had firmly grasped death’s tether.

“Passed that little sapling tree on the way here,” Deke said. “Still being permitted to grow in the churchyard. Too new yet to cast a shadow, but it had better mind its manners, no?”

Angela wanted to laugh, even now. What a night that had been!

“Most enjoyable evening,” Deke agreed.

The new little nurse said, “It sounded like, ‘Did you bring the hammer?’ ”

The other nurse said, “You’ll wear yourself out trying to make sense of no sense.” She didn’t care for this one. She was awfully eager and still being evaluated. It was quite possible that ultimately she wouldn’t get the job.

It was the parents! When would the parents stop coming? They’d been coming for months, since Christmas, since before Christmas, since the Burning of the Devil festivities on the seventh. June’s mother and her second husband had arrived, missing Howard’s parents by only a few days, for they had come down specifically for his twenty-second birthday. Caroline’s father had come down for Valentine’s Day with his new wife and their fairly new infant to show her to Caroline, as though she cared. Abby’s parents were still in town, having arrived for Semana Santa — Holy Week, which was now just past — and James’s parents would be showing up any day now from Roatán, off Honduras, where they had been diving. And each set of parents had a new child with them. There was Emily and Morgan and Parker and Bailey and Henry, not one of them over the age of six. It was a phenomenon.

The parents were generous when they visited. June’s mother’s new husband chartered a plane and flew them all to Tikal. They climbed Pyramid IV and watched the sunrise, even baby Morgan in her tiny safari ensemble. And even though June’s mother’s new husband had rented rooms for them at the Jungle Lodge, one night they’d slept out among the ruins in hammocks. Everyone knew this was the desired, anecdotal thing to do, sleeping out among the ruins beneath the bats during a full moon, which it happened to be that night. June’s mother and her new husband had expensive cameras and they took pictures of everything, they were delighted with everything. They were already planning on returning to Antigua in July for the Parade of the Heads to see the gigantes and the cabezudos weaving down the streets beneath the fireworks and whistling rockets.

When Howard’s parents came, the father, a prominent throat specialist, rented horses for everyone and they had ridden to one of the lakes for a picnic. Even baby Bailey made the trip, wrapped in his mother’s arms with one tiny hand clinging to the pommel. The whole group of them, eight in all, trotting like a cavalry through the poor little towns on these big-assed horses, leaving behind piles of green-flecked dung. Where had they gotten such healthy horses? It was embarrassing. “ Buenos días!” Howard’s parents said to anything that moved. It was amazing they hadn’t been stoned.

Caroline’s father appeared with darling Emily, a redhead, and his lively new redheaded wife, who wore a ring in her navel and was only two years older than Caroline. There had actually been something of an incident when everyone had been invited for lunch in the garden of the Hotel Antigua. There were some hummingbirds in the hibiscus bush near them, green and purple ones, the size of mice. One veered toward Emily in her high chair, no doubt encouraged by the feathery brilliance of her hair, and her attentive mother smacked it sharply with a guidebook she was holding. The bird spun to the ground in a buzzing heap.

They all shrank back from it a little.

“Gee, Penny,” Caroline said.

“It was coming right at the baby,” Penny said. “It almost flew into her.”

“Hummers can be exceptionally aggressive,” Howard said, smirking.

“Maybe it’s just stunned,” June said. “Maybe if we put it under a bush.”

James took a linen napkin from the table and placed it over the bird, which was still whirring like a windup toy. Darling Emily bounced in the high chair and clapped her hands. She wore a sweet little dress embroidered with ducks. James walked beyond the table and was about to lay the hummingbird down.