Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  “I’d love to,” Donna said. “What is Festive Chicken? Can I bring anything? Wine? A salad?”

  “It requires toothpicks,” the old woman said. “You bake it with toothpicks but then you take the toothpicks out.”

  “It sounds wonderful,” Donna said.

  Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Would you give it a rest,” she said to Donna.

  “I’m tired now,” the old woman said sweetly. “I’m tired of playing cards.” She put the cards back in the box but it didn’t have reef residents on it. It had a picture of a drab, many-spired European city, the very opposite of a reef resident.

  “These don’t belong in this box!” she cried. “It’s the first time I’ve noticed this. Would you go to my house and bring back the other deck of cards?” she asked Donna.

  “Sure,” Donna said.

  “My house is a little strange,” the old woman said.

  “What do you mean?”

  “I bet it is,” one of the fat girls said.

  “I love my little house,” the old woman said anxiously. “I want to get back to it as soon as I can.”

  She gave Donna the address and a key from her pocket-book. That evening, when visiting hours were over, Donna drove to the house, which was boxy and tidy with a crushed-rock yard and a dead nestling in the driveway. The house didn’t seem that strange to Donna. One would be desperate to get out of it, certainly. There were lots of things that were meant to be plugged into wall outlets but none of them were plugged in. She found the cards almost immediately, in the kitchen. There were the colorful fish on the cover of the box and the deck inside had the image of the foreign city. Idly, she opened the refrigerator, which was full of ketchup, nothing but bottles of ketchup, each one partially used. Donna had an urge to top the bottles up from others, to reduce the unseemly number, but with not much effort she resisted this.

  On the way back to her apartment she stopped at a restaurant and had several drinks in the bar. The bartender’s name was Lucy. She had just come back from a vacation. She had spent forty-five minutes swimming with dolphins. The dolphin that had persisted in keeping Lucy company had an immense boner.

  “He kept gliding past me, gliding past,” Lucy said, moving her hand through the air. “I kept worrying about the little kids. They’re always bringing in these little kids who have only weeks to live due to one thing or another. I would think it would be pretty undesirable for them to experience a dolphin with a boner.”

  “But the dolphins know better than that, don’t they?” Donna said.

  “It’s not all that relaxing to swim with them, actually,” the bartender said. “They like some people better than others, and the ones that get ignored feel like shit. You know, out of the Gaia loop.”

  People in the restaurant kept requesting exotic drinks that Lucy had to look up in her Bartender’s Bible. After a while, Donna went home.

  The next afternoon she swept into Pond House in her long black coat bearing a bunch of daffodils as a gift in general.

  Cynthia was in the lounge in a big chintz slipcovered chair reading Anna Karenina.

  “Should you be reading that?” Donna asked.

  Cynthia wouldn’t talk to her.

  Donna found the old lady and gave her the deck of cards.

  “I’m so relieved,” the old lady said. “That could have been such a problem, such a problem. Would you do me another favor? Would you get my dog and bring him to me here?”

  Donna was enthusiastic about this. “Do you have a dog? Where is he?”

  “He’s in my house.”

  “Is anyone feeding him?” Donna said. “Does he have water?” She had found her vocation, she was sure of it. She could do this forever. She felt like a long-distance swimmer in that place long-distance swimmers go in their heads when they’re good.

  “Nooooooo,” the old woman said. “He doesn’t need water.” She, too, looked delighted. She and Donna beamed at each other. “He’s a good dog, a watchdog.”

  “I didn’t see him when I was there,” Donna admitted.

  “He wasn’t watching you,” the old lady said.

  “What breed of dog is he?” Donna asked.

  She suddenly looked concerned. “He’s something you plug in.”

  “Oh,” Donna said, disappointed. “I think I did notice him.” He looked like a stereo speaker. She thought they’d been talking more along the lines of Cerberus, the dog that guarded the gates of hell. Those Greeks! It wasn’t that you couldn’t get in, it was that you couldn’t get out. And that honey-cake business … Actually, she had never grasped the honey-cake business.

  “He detects intruders up to thirty feet and he barks. He can detect them through glass, brick, wood and cement. The closer they get, the louder and faster he barks. He’s just a little individual but he sounds ferocious. I always liked him better than Safe-T-Man. I got them at the same time.”

  “But he’d be barking all the time here,” Donna said. “You have to consider that,” she added.

  “He can be quiet,” the woman said. “He can be good.”

  “I’ll get him for you then,” Donna said as though she had just made a difficult decision.

  As she was leaving Pond House she passed a man dressed all in red yelling into the telephone. There was a pay phone at the very heart of Floor Three and it was always in use. “What were you born with, an ax in your hand?” he shouted. “You’re so destructive.”

  Donna returned the next day with the old lady’s dog, which she carried in a smart brown and white Bendel’s shopping bag she’d been saving. She arrived just about the time the group meeting was coming to a close. Lingering near the door, she saw the fat teenagers and Cynthia’s round neat head with its fashionable haircut. A male patient she had not seen before was saying, “Hey, if it looks, walks, talks, smells and feels like the anima, then it is the anima.” Donna thought this very funny and somewhat obscene. “Miss!” someone called to her. “You are not allowed in these meetings!” She went back to Cynthia’s room and sat on her bed. The old woman’s bed was stripped down to the ticking. She sat and looked at it vacantly.

  When Cynthia came in, she said, “Donna, that old lady died, honest to God. We were all sitting around after dinner eating our goddamn Jell-O and she just tipped over.”

  “I have something she wanted here,” Donna said, raising the bag. “This is hers, it’s from her house.”

  “Get rid of it,” Cynthia said. “Listen, act quickly and positively.” She began to cry.

  Donna thought her friend’s response somewhat peculiar, but that was probably why she was in Pond House.

  As the day wore on, it was disclosed that the woman had no family. There was no one.

  “There wouldn’t have been any Festive Chicken either,” Cynthia said, “that’s for sure.” She had her old mouth back on her, Donna noticed.

  There was discussion in the room about what had happened. The old lady had been eating the Jell-O. She hadn’t said a word. She’d expressed no dismay.

  “She was clueless,” one of the fat girls said.

  “Were you friends before you came here or did you become friends here?” Donna asked them.

  They looked at her with hatred. “She’s a nut fucker, I think,” one of them said.

  They looked so much alike Donna couldn’t be sure which of them had struck her in the hallway. She thought of them as Dum and Dee. She pretended she was a docent leading tours. The neuroses of these two, Dum and Dee, are so normal they’re of little concern to us, she would say, indicating the fat girls. Then she pretended they were her jailers over whom she held indisputable moral sway.

  The barking-dog alarm had not worked at the old lady’s house. It was a simple enough thing, with few adjustments that could be made to it; its function would either be realized or it wouldn’t, and it wasn’t. Donna had gone outside into the street and walked slowly back toward the house, avoiding the nestling. Then she had run, waving her arms. There had been no barking at all, only th
e sound of her own feet on the crushed-rock yard. It had not worked in her own apartment either. It had not even felt warm.

  Poor old soul, Donna thought.

  Night was flickering at the corners of the hospital. There was the smell of potatoes, the sound of wheels bringing the supper trays. They always made the visitors leave around this time.

  “Cynthia,” Donna said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

  “Why?” Cynthia said.

  At home, Donna pretended she was on a train with no ticket, eluding the conductor as it sped toward some destination on gleaming rails. She made herself a drink. She almost finished it, then freshened it a bit. The phone rang and it was Cynthia. She was delighted it was Cynthia.

  “You will not believe this, Donna,” Cynthia said. “You know that new guy, the really annoying one? Well, at dinner he was saying that when women attempt suicide they often don’t succeed, but with men they do it on the first go-round. He said that simple statistic says it all about the difference between men and women. He said that men are doers and that women are deceivers and flirts, and Holly just threw back her chair and—”

  “Who’s Holly?” Donna asked.

  “My roommate, for godssakes, the one who hates you. She attacked this guy. She gouged out one of his eyes with a spoon.”

  “She gouged it out?”

  “I didn’t think it could be done, but boy, she knew how to do it.”

  “I wonder if that could have been me,” Donna said.

  “Oh, I think so. It’s bedlam in here.” Cynthia laughed wildly. “I want to leave, Donna, but I don’t feel better. But I could leave, you know. I could just walk right out of here.”

  “Really?” Donna said. She thought, When I get out of here, I’m going to be gone.

  “But I think I should feel better. I lack goals. I need goals.”

  Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, Cynthia using the phone. Donna preferred sitting quietly with her in Pond House, offering to get her little things she had expressed no desire for, reflecting about Dennis, her married man who had not come by to see her once. Of course he was probably still annoyed about his car, although he had filed no charges.

  Cynthia kept talking, pretty much about her life, the details of which Donna had heard before and which were no more riveting this time. She’d had a difficult time of it, starting in childhood. She had been an intense little thing but was thwarted, thwarted. Donna walked around with the phone to her ear, making another drink, crushing an ant or two that ventured onto the countertop, staring out the window at the dark only to realize that she wasn’t seeing the dark, merely a darkened image of herself and the objects behind her. She sipped her drink and turned toward some picture postcards she’d taped to one of the cupboards. Some of them had been up for years. One was of a city, a cheerless and civilized city similar to the one on the old woman’s playing cards.

  Cynthia was saying, “I just can’t accept so much, you know, Donna, and I feel, I really feel this, that my capacity to adapt to what is has been exceeded. I—”

  “Cynthia,” Donna said. “We’re all alone in a meaningless world. That’s it. OK?”

  “That’s so easy for you to say!” Cynthia screamed.

  There was a loud crack as the connection was broken.

  Donna had no recollection who had sent her the postcard or from where. She couldn’t think what had prompted her to display it, either. The city held no allure for her. She had no intention of taking it down and looking at it more closely.

  Later, she lay in bed trying to find sleep by recounting the rank of poker hands. Royal Flush, Straight Flush, Four of a Kind, Full House … A voice kept saying in her head, Out or In. Huh? Which will it be? Then it was dawn. She had not slept but she felt alert, glassy even. She showered and dressed and hurried to Pond House, where she had coffee in the cafeteria. Her eyes darted about, falling on everything, glittering. There was her coat, hanging on a hook next to her table. The coat seemed preposterous to her suddenly. Honestly, what must she look like in that coat?

  Up on Floor Three, Cynthia wasn’t in her room but one fat girl was, her face red and her eyes swollen from crying.

  “I just lost my friend,” the fat girl said.

  “You’re not Holly then,” Donna said.

  “I wish I was,” the fat girl said. “I wish I was Holly.” She lay on her bed, crying loudly.

  Donna looked out the window at the street below. You couldn’t open the windows. A tree outside was struggling to burst into bloom but had been compromised heavily by the parking area. Big chunks of its bark had been torn away by poorly parked cars. When she was a child, visiting Florida, she’d seen a palm tree burst into flames. It was beautiful! Then rats as long as her downy child’s arm had rushed down the trunk. Later, she learned that it was not unusual for a palm tree to do this on occasion, given the proper circumstances. This tree didn’t want to do anything like that, though. It couldn’t. It struggled along quietly.

  She turned from the window and left the room where the fat girl continued sobbing. She walked down the corridor, humming a little. She pretended she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone’s body. She found Cynthia in the lounge, painting her long and perfect nails.

  Cynthia regarded her sourly. “I really wish you wouldn’t visit me anymore,” she said.

  A nurse appeared from nowhere like they did, a new one. “Who are you visiting?” she said to Donna.

  Cynthia looked at her little bottle of nail polish and tightened the cap.

  “You have to be visiting someone,” the nurse said.

  “She’s not visiting me,” Cynthia muttered.

  “What?” the nurse said.

  “She’s not visiting me,” Cynthia said loudly.

  After some remonstrance, Donna found herself being steered away from Cynthia and down the hallway to the elevator. “That’s it,” the nurse said. “You’ve lost your privileges here.” Donna was alone in the elevator as it went down. On the ground floor some people got on and the elevator went up again. On Floor Three they got off. Donna went back down. She walked through the parking lot to her car.

  She would come back tomorrow and avoid Cynthia and the nurse, too. For now, she had to decide which route to take home. It was how they made roads these days; there were five or six ways to get to the same place. On the highway she ran into construction almost immediately. There was always construction. Cans and cones, those bright orange arrows blinking, and she had to merge. She inched over, trying to merge. They wouldn’t let her in! She pushed her way in. Then she realized she was part of a funeral procession. Their lights were on. She was part of a cortège, of an anguished throng. Should she turn on her lights to show sympathy, to apologize? She put on her sunglasses. People didn’t turn their lights on in broad daylight just for funerals, though. They turned them on for all sorts of things. Remembering somebody or something. Actually, showing you remembered somebody or something, which was different. People were urged to put them on for safety too. Lights on for Safety. But this was a funeral, no doubt about it.

  After what seemed an eternity, the road opened up again and Donna turned the car sharply into the other lane. In quick moments she had left the procession far behind.

  On her own street she parked and walked quickly toward her door. She felt an unpleasant excitement. It was midmorning, and as always the neighborhood was quiet. Who knew what people did here? She never saw anyone on this street.

  Then a dog began to bark, quite alarmingly. As she walked on, the rapid cry grew louder, more frantic. It was the poor old soul’s dog, Donna thought, the gray machine, somehow operative again, resuming its purpose. She knew. But it sounded so real, so remarkably real, and the disorder she felt was so remarkably real as well that she hesitated. She could not go forward. Then, she couldn’t go back.

  SUBSTANCE

  WALTER GOT THE SILK pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, the other white—an
alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom that they made Tim cry. They were large and had to be removed with a backhoe, which did not please the landlord, who didn’t get anything, although he didn’t have to return the last month’s deposit either. Lucretia got the Manhattan glasses. They were delicate, with a scroll of flowers etched just beneath the rim. There were four of them. Andrew got the wristwatch. Betsy got the barbells. Jack got a fairly useless silver bowl. Angus got the photo basket whose contents he kindly shared. Louise got the dog.

  Louise would have preferred anything to the dog, right down to the barbells. Nothing would have pleased her even more. It was believed that the animal had been witness to the suicide. The dog had either seen the enactment or come into the room shortly afterwards. He might have been in the kitchen eating his chow or he might have been sitting on the porch, taking in the entire performance. He was a quiet, medium-size dog. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have run for help. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have attempted to prevent the removal of the body from the house.

  Louise took the dog immediately to a kennel and boarded it. She couldn’t imagine why she, of all people, had been given the dog. But in the note Elliot had left he had clearly stated, And to Louise my dog, Broom. The worst of it was that none of them remembered Elliot’s having a dog. They had never seen it before, but now suddenly there was a dog in the picture.

  “He said he was thinking of getting a dog sometime,” Jack said.

  “But wouldn’t he have said ‘I got a dog’? He never said that,” Dianne said.

  “He must have just gotten it. Maybe he got it the day before. Or even that morning, maybe,” Angus said.

  This alarmed Louise.

  “I’m sure he never thought you’d keep it,” Lucretia said.

  This alarmed her even more.

  “Oh, I don’t know!” Lucretia said. “I just wanted to make you feel better.”

  Louise was racking up expenses at the kennel. The dog weighed under thirty-five pounds but that still meant eleven dollars a day. If he had weighed between fifty and a hundred, it would have been fourteen dollars, and after that it went up again. Louise didn’t have all that much money. She worked at a florist’s and sometimes at an auto-glass tinting establishment, cutting and ironing on the darkest film allowable by law, which at twenty percent was less than most people wanted but all they were going to get. Her own car had confetti glitter on the rear window. It was like fireworks going off in the darkness of her glass.