Jincy Willett - Winner of the National Book Award

“I haven’t seen the husband yet,” Abigail said. “She guards him like that dog.”

“Lassie?”

“Greek dog.”

“Cerberus.”

“And resembles it in a way.”

“Does she actually have three heads, or just a canine appearance?”

“She just resembles it….” Abigail went blank then and sighed, with that bone-weary expression that always overtakes her when she is confronted by the need to articulate a complex thought. Abigail has complex thoughts; she just can’t be bothered setting them in order.

“Spiritually,” I said.

“Yeah. Actually she resembles a sheep. She’s got woolly hair, dirty gray, or ash, and lots of it, close to her head.”

“Does she have a shiny black nose?”

“She smiles all the time. I’ll hand her the return receipt to sign and she’ll give me this big smile, like she’s just won the Publishers Clearing House. She always wears these heavy, dark dresses, like the old Italian women. She smells dusty. She can’t be more than ten years older than us.”

“Dowdy,” I said. “Faculty wife.”

“This one makes faculty wives look like…” Abigail shrugged and waited for me to tell her. I don’t even believe in ESP and I’ve been doing her thinking for her all her life.

“Coco Chanel.” Abigail pouted and shook her head. She actually makes me anxious to please her at times like this. I did her math homework for four years. “Elizabeth Taylor. Twiggy. Jesus, I don’t know.”

“European,” said petulant Abigail. “Old…”

“-Fashioned? -World? Old World dowdy? You mean, striving for some phony cultural effect?” Abby shrugged. “Striving for a certain timelessness. Is that it? No, that’s not it.”

“She’s dusty, musty. Like a book.”

This did the trick. “Striving for a historical quality… she could be Tolstoy’s mother, Dickens’s wife…”

“Yeah.”

“She is woman. She stays in the murk, in the shadows, with the great artist in the foreground, and when he needs a woman , in the abstract, she shoots out into the footlights like a funhouse gorilla.” How do I do that? Exhausted, I poured myself a drink.

“I wonder what he does,” she said, “when he wants a woman in the concrete.” Abigail is never impressed when I read her mind, never grateful for the brute work of it. At such times I exist merely to straighten out her thoughts, like the President’s speechwriter. “Anyway, she always gives me this lightbulb smile and draws me out. Everything I say is delightful, don’t you know. She drips. And the thing is, she’s really fascinated with me, you can tell. All the time she draws me out you can see her learning . She makes me feel…”

Sigh. “Exotic. Endangered, like a dodo. Self-conscious? Surely not that!”

“Prepped,” said Abigail.

“Prepped?”

“Yeah. What nurses do to you before an operation.” She saw my ignorance and grinned, yawning. She loves to twit me; as we age, this is harder for her to do. I grow entropically, unwillingly, corrupt. “They shave you, Dorcas,” she said, wiggling her eyebrows. “Down there. Bald as the capital dome.”

“She makes you feel like that ?”

“She makes me feel like that,” said my sister, who is just lazy and a slob. Who is nobody’s fool.

So we were both betting that Hilda was a lesbian. But then came the day that she reached out, smiling loonily, and took my sister’s hand, gently, with a magical hush, as though finally getting up the nerve to pet a wild deer (“I almost popped her one”) and led her to her husband’s study. “I’m sorry,” Hilda kept saying, “I’m so bad at these things, but Guy has been aching to meet you .” Abigail wrenched away. “So that’s it!” she said, and stalked out the door, leaving her mail sack in the hallway. God knows my sister is no stranger to perversion and orgiastic pursuit, but she was genuinely shocked by this. “I wonder why,” she said, that night.

I set to work. “Because you had her down as a lesbian and she turned into a pimp. You’re shocked at your own lack of perspicacity.”

“Nah.”

“Because… you were being treated like a thing.”

“I like being treated like a thing.”

“Nothing degrades you, does it?”

“Yes! She degraded me.” For a second she looked almost upset. “The thing about being treated like a thing is…”

I snorted at her and folded my arms. There are limits.

She brightened then. “She treated me like an idea ! That’s it. She treated me like an idea. Can you imagine the nerve?”

My sister outraged was a fabulous sight. If my camera had been handy I would have caught it for posterity. “Why, Abigail, I do believe you’ve got scruples.”

“Nah. I always sit like this,” she said absently, not attending to her own joke. With her heels side by side and her toes turned out, her plump ankles stretched and loose, her plumper knees hanging wide. She really does always sit like that. I asked her why once. Taking the air, she said.

When she went back to the DeVilbisses’ the next morning to retrieve her mail sack, they both opened the door before she could ring the bell, and went into what she later described to me as a vaudeville routine.

“We’re sorry,” cried Hilda.

“I’m sorry,” said the great man, in what Abigail described as a cognac voice, whatever that means. “We’ve behaved abysmally.”

“God knows what you must think of us.”

“Please don’t blame my wife.”

“Please don’t blame my husband.”

“Gimme my mail sack,” said Abigail.

“I only last night realized,” said Hilda, a hideous purple blush climbing up her neck, “what you must have imagined we wanted from you.”

“She vomited,” offered the great man. He spoke with such genuine pride that Abigail was taken aback, wondering whether what he so admired was his wife’s sensitivity or “her actual puke.”

“Let’s have it, people. What exactly did you want from me?” Abigail was already beginning to be mollified. She has always been unable to hold on to a bad temper. She lives in a hospitable world. And Guy fascinated her right off, because she couldn’t categorize him, or, to be more accurate, his perversion. He’s some brand-new kind of pervert, she thought.

“Do come in,” he said, “and let us fix you tea.”

He had the saddest, most limpid, liquid eyes, fixed on Abigail and her alone of all the objects in the world. His body was hairless, white, defenseless. She thought his skin would have no temperature to the touch, like a corpse in a heated room. If human beings really were evolving constantly, further and further from their animal origins, then Guy was the latest prototype. He looked fetal. There was, she told me, correctly, something sketchy about his physical presence, something merely humanoid, as though he had been incarnated at the last minute, out of grudging necessity. Only his mouth gave away his kinship with the rest of us. If she stared at that self-indulgent bee-stung mouth she could imagine him “shitting and pissing and almost fucking. I can see him,” she told me that night, “sitting in a chair in a corner of someone’s bedroom, staring. Not touching. Never touching. He’s disgusting,” she said, “but sort of wonderful, too. He takes you in with that stare. He makes you feel like anything you did would be wonderful, as long as he could watch.”

“And write about it later,” I said. Abigail smiled.

DeVilbiss led Abigail inside, one plump weightless hand on her shoulder, guiding her into his study, with Hilda trailing behind. There he made a great show of debating with Hilda about which of them would fix the tea. His wife won, arguing that it would make her feel so much better to do something for Abigail, to atone. Guy shook his head at his wife’s retreating black back and said, when she had closed the door behind herself, “She still cannot quite break herself of the old oppressed ways. She takes comfort in brute servitude.” Abigail could see he was really put out with his wife for making the tea. “I got the feeling,” she said, “that there would be hell to pay for it later.”