Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  “I knew you would not believe it,” Eduardo said.

  “I must see her. I will pay for the plumber. You must return as usual next week, every day, with Stephanie.”

  “I’m not asking for money. Sometimes you misunderstand me. But I must work digging a swimming pool for a month so that I can pay the plumber.” He spoke stubbornly, as though spellbound.

  “I will give you the money you need now. Please pay attention to what I am saying.”

  He nodded. “You’re bleeding,” he said.

  Stephanie ran to Lilly and hugged her legs.

  “Hello, dear,” Lilly said, “my little dear.”

  The child giggled and clutched her. “I want to read, I want to color, I want to make those little cupcakes with the coconut.”

  “Stephanie, we must … Listen to me,” Lilly said. “I want to ask you something.”

  “Sí,” Stephanie said solemnly.

  “The dress I gave you, why do you never wear it?” How shameful of me, Lilly thought, but I don’t know how to begin. I am proceeding but I don’t know how to begin. The child is slipping into the dark and no one knows, that dreadful Eduardo certainly doesn’t know. He is concerned only with the cost to him! she thought with disgust. The cost of a plumber! While this child was slipping unconscious into the dark.

  “My mama gave it to my sister. She said it was too big for me.”

  “And do you think it is too big?” Lilly said quietly, purposelessly.

  “I’m sorry that the dress is not mine,” Stephanie said.

  “Do you know what it means to be sorry?” Lilly said in the same lazy, idle tone.

  Stephanie patted Lilly’s hands with her own small ones. “Could we color? Do you still have the crayons?”

  “Do you want to draw?”

  “No, color. There is a book you let me color in.” She looked at Lilly worriedly. “Have you forgotten?”

  They kept Stephanie’s books and playthings in a bureau with a locking drawer. The key was on a ribbon on top of the bureau. The child liked the ceremony of unlocking the drawer. She liked the embroidered corners of the napkins they put on a pewter tray when they had lemonade.

  “I have my own hamaca now,” Stephanie said. “I do not have to sleep with my sister.”

  Danny walked past and smiled at them.

  “What else has happened at your house?” Lilly asked. “You know I have not seen you for a long while. Have you been sick?”

  “I am strong,” Stephanie said, placing the books on a table and arranging the crayons in a pleasing fan shape. “I am never sick. Sometimes Mama is.” She turned the pages of the coloring book. “That one is smudged,” she said critically. “That was when I was a baby.”

  “Not so many weeks ago,” Lilly said. “Why don’t you color this page?”

  “Gatito,” Stephanie said. “The kitten.”

  She set to work while Lilly watched her raptly. She was learning ignorance, Lilly marveled. She had begun to be false, false to herself and others. Lilly would not allow this, she would not. This was the child of whom Barbara had said, “Why, she thinks you hung the moon!” She had a responsibility to this child.

  “Is that your kitten?” Lilly asked.

  “Sí.” Stephanie was humming to herself. “He is black. He has white ears. He likes cupcakes.” She selected another crayon. “I don’t know. I don’t really have a kitten. I have a hamaca.”

  “Stephanie,” Lilly said. She grasped the child’s hands and held them fast. She felt them softly crumpling in her own. “You must not pretend this did not happen.”

  Night. It was nothing if not reliable. Again, a single massed figure. A threat made material, followed by the ritual of crying out, the lamp rocking on the table as she fumbled for the switch, the little dog Amiga limping away, fearing her …

  Instead, Lilly only gripped the sheets and, turning, pressed her face against the wall. Her eyes were wet. If it wasn’t a dream, she reasoned, she wouldn’t even feel it.

  It was time for a drink in the garden. She didn’t drink wine because the sulfites were considered to be bad for her condition. She had a tequila over ice. She nibbled an almond. Eduardo sat comfortably with them, drinking from a bottle of Squirt.

  “We’re celebrating,” Danny said. “Eduardo has bought a car—a VW one year younger than Eduardo.”

  “It is the first car in my family,” Eduardo said gravely, without looking at Lilly. “No one in my family has ever had a car.”

  “We looked at eight before Eduardo decided,” Danny said.

  “You did all the paperwork,” Eduardo said. “It was difficult paperwork.”

  “But it was you who made such a good down payment with your savings.” Danny said to Lilly, “I told him we’d help him out with the rest.”

  “I will be working harder but that is only right,” Eduardo said submissively.

  “I can hardly see you working any harder than you do,” Danny said.

  “My first errand in my beautiful car was to take Stephanie home. We stopped for ice cream.”

  “She was terribly upset about something yesterday,” Danny said. “What was that all about?”

  Eduardo grimaced and squeezed his belly. “Stomachache.”

  “She’s a sweet little girl,” Danny said.

  “Then I drove back in my fantastic car,” Eduardo said. “That is when I bought the tequila. My gift.”

  “It’s very smooth,” Danny said.

  Eduardo grinned. He was happy about the car. He was going to take good care of it.

  CHARITY

  THEY HAD BEEN told about it ecstatically by a police officer eating a tamale at a cafe near the Arizona/New Mexico border.

  “I just went out there in all that white sand and got me a dune and went up on it and looked and looked and just let it sink in, and I never saw anything like it, never felt anything like it. I think I could stay out there in that white sand for a real long time and I don’t know exactly why.”

  “It doesn’t sound like something you’d want to do too often,” Richard said. The policeman frowned. Then he ignored them.

  Back in the car, Janice wanted to go there immediately. They were having a look at the Southwest on their way to Santa Fe. They were both wearing khaki suits, and Richard had a hand-painted tie he had paid a great deal of money for around his neck.

  They drove to the White Sands National Monument, paid the admission and went in. The park ranger said, “We invite you to get out of your car and explore a bit, climb a dune for a better view of the endless sea of sand all around you.”

  They drove slowly along a loop road. Everything was white and orderly. It was as if the dunes had a sense of mission. Here and there, people were fervently throwing themselves down them and laughing.

  “Do you want to get out?” Richard said. “I’ll wait in the car.”

  Janice felt that she was still capable of awe and transfiguration and was uncomfortable when, together with Richard, she felt not much of anything. She was distracted with the knowledge that they were on a loop road. She studied the dunes without hope. As they were leaving, they saw something small and translucent, like a lizard, stagger beneath their wheels, and they both remarked on that.

  “I don’t know what that policeman was talking about,” Richard said.

  “He was trying to express something spiritual.”

  “Don’t you get tired of that out here? Everything’s sacred and mysterious and for the initiated only. Even the cops are after illumination. It wears me out, to be quite honest.”

  She wished she had gotten out of the car. She hadn’t even gotten out of the car. She was wearing high heels. “Let’s go back,” she said. “Let’s try it again.”

  “Janice,” Richard said.

  After some miles he said, “I forgot to take a leak back there.”

  “Really!” she exclaimed.

  “I’m going to pull into this rest stop.”

  “To take a leak! How good!” she said. Sh
e fixed an enthralled expression upon him.

  Outside, the heat was breathtaking and the desert had a slightly lavender cast. People were standing under a ramada, speaking loudly about family members who smoked like chimneys and lived into their nineties. Farther away, someone was calling to a small dog. “Peaches,” they called, “you come here this instant.” The dog seemed sincere in its unfamiliarity with the name Peaches. This was clearly a name the dog felt did not indicate its true nature, and it was not going to respond to it.

  The road led past the toilets and ramadas through a portion of landscape where every form of plant life was explained with signs, then back out onto the highway. Janice walked along it toward a group of vending machines. She loved vending-machine coffee. She felt it had an unusual taste and wasn’t for everyone. While waiting for the cardboard cup to sling itself down and fill with the uncanny liquid, she noticed a chalky purple van parked nearby. Two beautiful children stood beside it with their arms folded, looking around as though they had a certain amount of authority. They were rather dirty and were lanky and blond and striking. A man and woman were rummaging around inside the open van. Both the man and the boy were barefoot and shirtless. The woman, who had long, careless hair, said something to the girl, who climbed inside just as the man triumphantly produced what appeared to be an empty pizza box. Janice could hardly take her eyes off them. She finished the coffee, which was now cold and tasted even more peculiar, and returned to Richard and their rental car, which had a small scratch on the hood that she had taken great pains to point out to the agency so that they would not be held responsible for it. The grille had collected a number of butterflies. Without speaking, she got in and shut the door. She’d like to tell Richard how much she refrained from saying to him, but actually she refrained from saying very little.

  As they passed the van, the man raised the scrap of box on which was now printed in crayon PLEASE: NEED GAS MONEY.

  The colon in this plea touched Janice deeply. “Richard,” she said, “we must give that family some money.”

  The man held the sign close to his chest, just above an appendectomy scar, as the children looked stonily into space.

  “Richard!” she said.

  “Oh, please, Janice,” he said. “Honestly.”

  “Go back,” she said.

  They had reached the highway, and Richard accelerated. “Why do you always want to go back. We’re not going back. Why don’t you do things the first time?”

  She gasped at the unfairness of this remark. She considered rearing back and hammering at the windshield with her high-heeled shoes. “I want to give that poor family some gas money,” she said.

  “Someone will give them money.”

  “But I want it to be us!”

  Richard drove faster.

  “Look,” she said reasonably, “you drink a lot, Richard, you know you do. And what if you were in the hospital and you needed a new liver and the doctor finally came in and he said, ‘I have good news, the hospital has found a liver for you.’ Wouldn’t you be grateful?”

  “I would,” Richard said thoughtfully.

  “Someone would have given you a second chance.”

  “It would be a dead person,” Richard said, still thoughtful. “It would have to have been.”

  “I wish I were driving,” she said.

  “Well, you’re not.”

  Janice moaned. “I hate you,” she said. “I do.”

  “Let’s just get to Santa Fe,” Richard said. “It’s a civilized town. It will have a civilizing effect on us.”

  “That tie makes you look stupid,” she said.

  “I know,” he said. He wrenched the knot free, rolled down the window and threw the tie out.

  “What are you doing!” Janice cried. The tie was of genuine cellulose acetate and had been painted in the forties. It depicted a Plains Indian brave standing before a pueblo. That the scene was incorrect, that it had been conceived in utter ignorance, made it more expensive and, they were told, more valuable in the long run. But now there was no long run. The tie was toast. She shifted in her seat and stared breathlessly into the distance ahead. She thought of the little family with grave compassion.

  “I’m afraid I have to stop again. For gas,” he said.

  He was pitiless, she thought. A moral aborigine. She hugged herself.

  They rolled off an exit into a town that stretched a single block deep for miles along the highway and pulled into a gas station mocked up to look like a trading post, with a corral beside it filled with old, big-finned cars. Richard got out and pumped gas. Then he cleaned the windshield, grinning at her through the glass.

  She did not know him, she thought. She was really no more acquainted with who he was than she was familiar with the cold dark-matter theory, say, or the origination of the universe.

  He tapped on the glass. “Want to come inside?” he said. “Shot glasses, velvet paintings, lacquered scorpions?”

  He was a snob, she thought.

  He sighed and walked away, patting the breast pocket of his jacket for his wallet. Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off in a great rattle and shriek of sand. She was back at the rest stop in fifteen minutes. The children had climbed the van’s ladder and were lying on the roof. The woman was nowhere visible. The man was still rigidly holding the sign. Janice pulled up beside him.

  “How you doing?” he said. He had bright, pale eyes.

  “I want to give you twenty dollars,” Janice said. She opened her purse and was disturbed to find she had only two fifty-dollar bills.

  “Rose!” the man yelled, lowering the sign. He had a long, smooth torso, except for the appendectomy scar.

  The woman emerged from the van and regarded Janice coolly.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “I saw your sign,” Janice said, confused.

  The children rose languidly from the roof and looked down at her.

  “We have to travel seventy miles to our home and get these children in school tomorrow,” Rose said formally. “What we do, what our policy is, is we drive to the nearest gas station and at that point you give us the amount you’ve decided on. That way you’ll be assured that we’re using it for gas and gas only.”

  Janice was grateful for the rules they had worked out.

  “People will give you money at a rest stop whereas they wouldn’t at a gas station,” the man said. “It’s just human nature. They’re more at peace with themselves in rest stops.”

  “You can leave dogs and cats at rest stops and someone will pick them up,” the boy said. “We left a couple of dogs here a couple weeks ago and they’re gone now. Someone picked them up, gave them a good home.”

  Introductions were made. The man’s name was Leo. The children were Zorro and ZoeBella. Janice identified herself too.

  “Skinny Puppy’s my gang name,” Zorro said, “but use it at your peril.”

  “Gang name my ass,” Leo said. “He doesn’t know anything about gangs. He signed a lowrider last week. Practically got us killed.”

  “I didn’t know I was signing,” Zorro said. “I just had my hand out the window.”

  “Bastard about run us off the highway,” Leo said.

  Janice realized that she was gazing at them openly, a little stupidly. She suggested that they drive to the gas station so they could all be on their way.

  “Can I go with you?” Rose asked. “I would like to feel like a human being, if only for a few miles.”

  “Lemme too!” Zorro cried. He opened the back door of Janice’s car, tumbled over the front seat and snuggled against her. “Mnnnn, you smell fine,” he said.

  “I don’t know where he picks that shit up from,” Rose muttered. “Certainly not from his father. Get out of that vehicle now!” she screamed.

  The child flipped backward over the seat and out the door and jumped into the van. ZoeBella, who had not uttered a word, climbed in beside him.

  Janice invited Rose to ride with her to
the gas station, which Leo seemed to be familiar with. She felt blessed with social responsibility. She was doing well. It would be over soon, and she would be able to look back on this in the future. Richard had only one mental key and it didn’t open all locks, she had always felt this about Richard. And she had lots of mental keys, she thought gratefully, and that’s why she was moving so freely through a world that welcomed her.

  Leo started the van with difficulty. Blue smoke poured from the tailpipe.

  “That doesn’t look good,” Janice noted.

  “Rings, seals, valves, you name it,” Rose said.

  The van gained the highway and wobbled off ahead of them. Smoke appeared to be rising from the wheels as well. The sky was cloudless and sharply blue, and the smoke floundered upward into it.

  “Some people like the sky out here,” Rose volunteered, “but I prefer the sky over New York City. Now that’s sky. The big buildings push it back so it’s way, way overhead. It looks wilder that way.”

  Janice agreed, thinking that this was a highly original remark. She felt splendid about herself. She looked at Rose warmly.

  “That Zorro smudged your seat,” Rose said, regarding a dusty footprint on the car’s upholstery.

  Janice waved this concern away. “Such beautiful children,” she said. “And such unusual names.”

  “God knows I didn’t want to call him Zorro, but his father insisted. Those two aren’t from the same stock. ZoeBella’s dad Warren was blind. I hope that you, like many others, aren’t under the misperception that blind people are good people. It just isn’t so. Blind people don’t feel that they have to interact with others at all. They contribute nothing to a conversation. He had a wonderful dog, though, Mountain. Mountain came to Lamaze class with us. Lamaze encourages you to focus on something other than birth and I focused on Mountain week after week, but when it was finally time to have ZoeBella they wouldn’t let Mountain into the delivery room. A violation of infection-control procedures, they said. Well, I freaked, and I think the whole thing messed up ZoeBella too. Here I went the whole pregnancy with no cigarettes or liquor and then they won’t let the goddamn dog into the delivery room. It was a very, very difficult birth and Warren, the bastard, was no help at all. But we sued the hospital for not letting us have Mountain in there, and they settled out of court. Warren was long gone by then, but that money did us for four years, Leo and Zorro too. What an inspiration that was. I wish I could come up with another one that good. Have you ever fucked a blind man?”