Joy Williams - The Visiting Privilege - New and Collected Stories

Jones’s grandchild is eight days old. Jones and his wife have not been sent a picture of the baby and although they have spoken with their daughter several times on the telephone they do not have a very good idea of what the child looks like. It seems very difficult to describe a new baby. Jones has seen quite a few new babies in his years of serving a congregation and he has held them and gazed into their eyes. These experiences, however, cannot help him picture this child, his only grandchild, this harmonious and sweet thought that he carries green and graceful in his mind.

Jones and his wife had no idea that their daughter was going to have a baby. They had seen her six months ago and she had mentioned nothing about a baby. Several days after the birth, her husband had called them with the news.

Jones lies awake in the night, troubled by this. His wife twists restlessly beside him. She has been having great difficulty sleeping lately. Sleep is full of impossible chores, unending labors. She is so tired but her body cannot find any rest. She feels cold. She gets up and goes into the bathroom and runs hot water over her hands. She pats her cheeks with the hot water. While she is in the bathroom, Jones goes down to the kitchen and boils water for two cups of tea. He makes up a tray of tea and lemon peel and peanut butter cookies. He and his wife sit in bed and sip the tea. She does not feel so cold now. She feels better. They talk about the baby. Their daughter has told them that she has a nice mouth and pale brown hair.

“Pale brown,” Jones says enthusiastically.

His wife wants very much to travel down and see the baby even though the trip is more than a thousand miles. She wants to leave as soon as possible, the next day. She is insistent about this.

—

Jones walks with his daughter in the woods behind her small house. She is pointing out the various species of bromeliads that flourish there. The study of bromeliads is his daughter’s most recent enthusiasm. She is a thin, hasty, troubling girl with exact and joyless passions. She lopes silently ahead of Jones through the dappled lemon-smelling woods. The trees twist upward. Only the tops of them are green. She is wearing a faded brief bikini, and there are bruises on her legs and splashes of paint on the bikini. There is a cast to the flesh, a slender delicate mossy line on her flat stomach, extending down from the navel. It is a wistful, insubstantial line.

The baby is napping back in the little cypress cottage that Jones’s daughter and her husband are renting. Jones’s wife is napping too. Earlier that morning Jones had gone to the supermarket and bought food for his wife that was rich in iron. Perhaps she is tired because of an iron deficiency. Jones had gone through the aisles, pushing a cart. There was an arrangement in front of the handle that could be pushed back into a seat, two spaces through which a child could put his legs. Many children were in the store, transported in these carts. Some of them smiled at Jones with their small prim teeth. Jones had bought eggs, green vegetables, liver, molasses and nuts. When he returned, his wife had wanted nothing. She sat in her slip on a cot in the baby’s room.

Jones fanned his face with a road map. “I’d like to treat us all to a strawberry soda later,” he said.

“Oh, that would be very refreshing,” his wife replied. “That would be very nice, but right now I think I’d just like to watch the baby while she sleeps.” She had moved her lips in a gesture for Jones.

Jones had kissed her forehead and gone outside. His daughter is walking there, padding through the rich mulch of oak leaves with her bare feet.

“Neoregelia spectabilis,” his daughter says. “Aechmea fulgens.” There are hundreds of bromeliads, some growing in the crotches of trees, others clinging epiphytically to one another, massed across the ground. His daughter identifies them all. “Hohenbergia stellata,” she says. They are thick glossy plants with extraordinary flowers. Their rosettes of leaves are filled with water.

“Perhaps Mother should drink some of this,” she says, waggling her finger in the cups of a heavily clustered bromeliad. The water is brown and acrid. Jones stares at his daughter. She shrugs. “They call it tea,” she says. Her face is remote and bony. “I don’t know,” she says, and begins gnawing on her nails.

The sunlight falls down through the branches of the cedars and the live oaks as though through measured slats in a greenhouse.

“Bromeliads are fascinating,” she says. “They live on nothing. Just the air and the wind. The rain brings dust and bird excrement to feed them. Leaves from trees fall into their cups and break down into nutrients. They must be one of God’s favorites. One doesn’t have to do anything for them. They require no care whatsoever.”

Jones was saddened by her words.

Jones’s daughter is preparing dinner. She darts from kitchen to porch, nursing the baby as she lays out the silverware. The cottage is dark and hot. Everyone is very hot. The dog drinks continually from a large bowl set on the floor. Jones fills it when it is empty and the dog continues to drink. Jones stands in the kitchen, by the refrigerator, filling a glass with ice cubes. His daughter is at the stove, stirring the white sauce with a whisk. The baby has fallen asleep, her cheek riding on her mother’s tanned breast, her mouth a lacy bubble of milk. Jones would like to hug them both, his daughter and her child. He does. The baby wakens with a squeak.

“Daddy,” Jones’s daughter says. She hunches her shoulders. Her lower lip is split and burned by the sun. She has brushed her brown hair straight back from her forehead and a rim of skin just below the hairline is burned raw too. Jones stands beside her.

“It’s too hot in the kitchen, Daddy, please,” she says.

Jones walks to the porch with the glass of ice and gives it to his wife. She has a craving for ice. She chews it most of the day. “What is it that my body wants?” she asks, her teeth grinding the ice.

Jones’s son-in-law arrives with a bottle of gin and makes everyone a gin and tonic with fresh limes from a tree that is visible from the house. The tree is in fruit and blossom at the same time.

“Isn’t that peculiar?” Jones remarks.

“It’s wonderful!” his wife says. “I understand that. It’s beautiful!”

For a moment, Jones fears that she will cry.

—

Jones’s daughter has prepared a very nice meal. The sun has vanished, leaving the sky cerise. Jones’s wife wears a gay yellow silk blouse. It is the shade of the tropical south, of the summer sundown, a color that brings no light. They all prepare to sit down. Jones’s son-in-law looks concernedly at his hands.

“Excuse me,” he says, “I must wash my hands.” He is blond, affable. He recognizes everyone in some way. There is in him a polite and not too inaccurate recognition of everything. He is a somnolent, affectionate young man.

Jones and his wife and daughter sit down at the table.

“Every time he has to take a leak, he gives me that crap about his hands,” Jones’s daughter says. “Every time. It drives me crazy.”

Her hands knock angrily against the plates. Her husband returns. She won’t look at his face. Her eyes are fixed somewhere on his chest. She thrusts her face forward as though she is going to fall against his chest.

Jones’s wife says, “I hope you take photographs of the baby. There can never be enough pictures. When one looks back, there are hardly any pictures at all.”

—

The night before Jones and his wife are to return home, he wakes abruptly from a sound sleep. He hastily puts on his bathrobe and moves through the strange room. He senses that he has fallen into this room, into, even, his life. He feels very much the weight of this moment, which seems without resolution. He is in the present, perfectly reconciled to the future but cut off from the past. It is the present that Jones has fallen into.