Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries)

by Williams, Joy

  “Why, no,” Janice said. “No, I haven’t.”

  “Do it before you die, girl,” Rose said. “There’s nothing like it.”

  Janice nodded.

  “But don’t stick around afterwards. Get your cookies out of there,” Rose advised.

  Janice nodded again. She was beginning to worry somewhat about Richard’s mood when she retrieved him. The van weaved smoldering before them. Janice felt a little queasy watching it. By the time they reached the exit, Janice found that she was gripping the steering wheel tightly. The van turned not into the gas station where Janice had left Richard but into one across the street, where it clattered to a stop.

  “Makes you want a cocktail just looking at that heap, doesn’t it?” Rose said.

  “I’d like to give you fifty dollars, if you don’t mind,” Janice said. “I think you probably need some oil too. Wouldn’t you like some oil? To make it all the way home?”

  “Oh, you could drop a bundle into that thing,” Rose said. “It’s a suckhole.” She accepted the bill slowly from Janice’s fingers. “Thank you,” she said slowly. She seemed absorbed in some involuted ritual. She didn’t respect the money, it was clear, but she respected the person who gave her the money. Was that it? Janice wondered. Why was she giving her so much money anyway? Her own behavior was becoming increasingly suspect.

  Rose got out of the car, stretched and ambled toward her family. Janice drove across the street. The trading post was locked tight. Four spotted dogs with heads the size of gallon buckets regarded her avidly from the car corral.

  “Richard!” she called. The dogs went into an uproar. They raced around the enclosure, baying with the thrill of duty, upsetting their water dishes. Janice drove slowly in circles in the area of the trading post, then pulled out into the street and came to the end of town. The town simply stopped at an enormous Road Runner statue, beyond which were many thousands of acres of grazing land with not a creature grazing. Richard was a wily and annoying adversary, Janice thought. She stopped the car near the statue and got out, taking tiny sips of the superheated air, afraid to breathe too deeply. An elderly couple approached and asked if she would take a picture of them with their camera.

  “Doesn’t it have one of those timers?” Janice said. “Can’t you place it on a rock, set the timer and have it take its own picture?”

  The old couple looked puzzled and began to tremble.

  “OK. Forgive me,” Janice said. “I’m sorry. Give it here.”

  “Be sure to get it all in,” the woman said. “You have to back up.”

  Janice backed up and raised the camera to her eye. They were there.

  “You have to step back some still,” the woman said.

  Janice moved farther back and clipped the side of her shoe against a trash can.

  “That must be why they put that receptacle there,” the woman said.

  “The receptacle marks the spot!” her withered companion shouted.

  “Smile if you want to,” Janice said. “Done. Got it.” She had not taken the picture. She would not. It was a defensible right.

  “Thank you so much,” the old man said.

  “Most kind of you,” the woman said, “once you agreed.”

  Janice returned to the car on her broken heel and drove back through the town, honking her horn frequently. Richard was not only wily and annoying, he could be actually hazardous. His behavior was hazardous, she thought. She circled the pumps of the deserted trading post once again. The big-headed dogs were lying on their stomachs, sharing something fuscous and eviscerated. She drove across the street. Rose and the children were sitting on the ground on a bedsheet. The van was on a lift inside the garage.

  “Are you looking for someone?” Rose asked.

  “No,” Janice said. “I don’t look as though I am, do I?”

  “You look hungry, then, or something,” Rose said.

  “I’m hungry,” Zorro said. “Jesus I am.”

  “Are those horse?” ZoeBella said, pointing at Janice’s shoes.

  Janice was startled to hear her voice, which was soft and solemn. “What?” she said.

  “Your shoes, are they horse?”

  “I don’t know. They’re leather of some sort. That would be awful, I guess, if they were, wouldn’t it?”

  “You seem uncertain,” ZoeBella said quietly.

  Leo came up to them, wiping his greasy hands on his pants. Stripes of grease ran down his chest and there was oil in his hair. “We got a little problem here but it can be fixed,” he said. “Man here’s going to let me use his tools. Why don’t you women and children get something to eat,” he said expansively. “Sit in a nice air-conditioned restaurant and get something nice to eat.”

  Rose was particular about the restaurant. She wanted it dark, with booths, no salad bar, no view of the outside. They got into Janice’s car and drove up the street again. Zorro was sent into several establishments to determine their suitability. He had put on a T-shirt that said BAN LEG-HOLD TRAPS. A number of birds and animals crippled and quite conceivably dead were arranged colorfully around a frightful black iron trap.

  “He loves that shirt, but I don’t think he gets it,” Rose confided to Janice.

  “You should bury that shirt, with Zorro in it,” ZoeBella said quietly.

  Janice continued to scan the street for Richard. She saw no one who even remotely resembled him, not that she would have settled for that, of course.

  “You sure you’re not looking for someone?” Rose asked.

  “Not at all,” Janice said. “I’m just trying to be aware of my surroundings.”

  ZoeBella leaned over the front seat and said softly, “I think that policeman behind us wants you to pull over.”

  “Yes!” Zorro said. “There go the misery lights!”

  Janice was told by the officer that she had drifted through a stop sign. He very much resembled the officer she and Richard had encountered at breakfast. While he was writing out the ticket, which was for two hundred dollars, Rose asked him which eating establishment he would recommend, and he recommended the one they were parked in front of.

  “This kind of event calls for a cocktail,” Rose said to Janice. “It always does.”

  Inside, Janice felt disoriented. ZoeBella placed her small hand in Janice’s and led her to a booth. They sat holding hands opposite Zorro, whose T-shirt featured prominently in the darkness. Janice ordered a double gin with ice and Rose specified an imported bottled beer, then ordered turkey plates for everyone.

  “Turkey plate’s always the best,” she said.

  ZoeBella did not release Janice’s hand even after the food arrived. The children ate as though starved.

  “Do you believe in God?” ZoeBella murmured.

  Janice was trying to locate a hair which had found its way onto her tongue.

  Rose said, “When I was ZoeBella’s age, every time I thought of God I saw him as something in a black Speedo bathing suit and I saw myself sitting on his lap, but this perception was drummed out of me. Just drummed out. Now whenever the name comes up I don’t think anything.”

  “I think of God as a magician,” ZoeBella whispered, looking closely at Janice. “A rich magician who has a great many sheep who he hypnotizes so he won’t have to pay for shepherds or fences to keep them from running away. The sheep know that eventually the magician wants to kill them because he wants their flesh and their skin. So first the magician hypnotizes them into thinking that they’re immortal and that no harm is being done to them when they get skinned, that on the contrary it will be very good for them and even pleasant. Then he hypnotizes them into thinking that the magician is their good master who loves them. Then he hypnotizes them into thinking that they’re not sheep at all. And after all this, they never run away but quietly wait until the magician requires their flesh and their skin.”

  ZoeBella’s skin was very pale and her eyes were large and blue. “Goodness,” Janice said, perturbed. Only a piece of bread was going to find
this hair, she decided. She pushed one into her mouth.

  Zorro said, “I think of God—”

  His mother yanked his arm sharply. “We don’t want to hear that again,” she said.

  Zorro collected everyone’s forks and put them in the pocket of his shorts.

  “We always need forks,” Rose explained to Janice. “I don’t know what happens to them at our house.”

  The children ordered large butterscotch sundaes and polished them off within minutes. ZoeBella ate delicately but with lightning speed. She had released Janice’s hand to better wield the long spoon, but when she finished she tucked her hand in Janice’s once again.

  “I hope I’m at school tomorrow,” she said in her almost inaudible voice. “If I’m not at school tomorrow I don’t know what I’ll do.” She arranged her face in an expression of horror.

  Janice couldn’t imagine a child like ZoeBella thriving at school, but she squeezed the child’s sticky hand. The magician and the sheep had caused her to feel a little unwell and considerably undirected, though she now knew what she would do. She would take Rose and the children to their home. She was sure that the situation with Leo and the van had not improved and she was eager to finish what she had begun. Otherwise, in what way would she be able to think about it? She wouldn’t be able to think about it. They lived in a town that was not exactly on the way to Santa Fe, but she could still make it to Santa Fe before dark if they left immediately. Richard had made reservations at a hotel there. There would possibly be a message waiting, or even Richard himself. If there wasn’t, if he wasn’t, then when she arrived she would be the message. One’s life after all is the message, isn’t it, the way one lives one’s life, the good one carries out?

  “I can see you’re thinking,” ZoeBella said in a quiet, disappointed voice.

  Back at the garage, Leo was agreeable to Janice’s idea. “I believe I’m going to be here for days,” he said. He kissed the children and shook Janice’s hand. In the car again, Janice remarked that Leo seemed like a good man.

  “He’s all right,” Rose said. “Whenever he gets drunk he threatens to kill the kids’ rabbits, but he hasn’t done it yet.”

  They drove in silence for a while. When they got to their home, Janice was not going to go inside. She would be invited, but under no circumstance would she go inside. She didn’t want to go so far as to enter that home even in her thoughts. She would leave them at their own threshold and be gone.

  “What’s your credit card look like?” Zorro asked. “Is it black with a mountain on it and an eagle and a big orange sun? Because if it is, you left it back there by the cash register. I saw it when I got the toothpicks.”

  “Zorro sees credit cards everywhere,” Rose said. “I’ve told him never never pick them up. He’s got a shrewd eye, and I want him to have a shrewd eye, but my feeling is that he could go from shrewd to dishonest real quick.”

  “I’m not going back,” Janice said.

  No one contested this. They were on a narrow blacktop road streaking urgently through the desert. There were a few scattered adobes framed by enormous prickly pear cactus, their red fruits glowing in the late-afternoon light. A man was riding a horse bareback in a field.

  “There is a horse,” ZoeBella said reverently.

  Then Zorro saw the snake on the edge of the asphalt.

  “Lookitim!” he screamed. “Lookit the size of that sucker! He’s a miracle, you can’t just pass him by!”

  He grabbed the wheel and turned it toward the snake, but Janice wrenched it back and slammed on the brakes. The car shot off the road, not quite clearing a stony wash, and with a snapping of axles it crumpled against a patch pocket of wild-flowers—primrose and sand verbena and, as ZoeBella pointed out quietly later, sacred datura, a plant of which every part was poisonous.

  “Is everyone all right?” Rose said. “All in one piece? That’s the important thing, nothing else matters.”

  “I just wanted that snake so bad,” Zorro said.

  “He’s always after his dad to hit things for him,” Rose said. “You’re in somebody else’s vehicle, Zorro! You are a guest in another person’s car!”

  They got out of the car with difficulty and looked at it. It was clearly a total wreck. The key had snapped off in the ignition, so Janice couldn’t even unlock the trunk to retrieve her suitcase.

  ZoeBella touched Janice’s hand. “I’m glad you didn’t run over the snake,” she whispered.

  “I have a terrible headache,” Janice said.

  “You bumped your head pretty bad,” Rose agreed. “I saw a motel back there. Why don’t we get a room and declare this day over.”

  There was only one room available at the motel, and there was a lone, large bed which pretty much filled it. The other rooms were unoccupied, according to the Indian girl in the office, but each possessed a unique incapacity disqualifying it from use. A clogged drain, a charred carpet, a cracked toilet, a staved-in door. Fleas.

  Zorro soared from the door to the bed and began bouncing on it. “Skinny Puppy enters the ring!” he shouted. He crouched and weaved, jabbing the air. Rose swatted him away.

  “You lie down,” she instructed Janice. “I’ll take the kids over to the cafe so you can rest. They’ve got cocktails, I noticed. Do you want me to bring you back a cocktail?”

  “I think I’ll just lie down,” Janice said.

  “Don’t do anything until you’ve rested a bit,” Rose said.

  “Don’t look in the mirror or anything,” ZoeBella urged her softly.

  “You look white as a sheet,” Rose said. “Maybe we should stay with you just until you get your color back.”

  “I don’t feel at all well,” Janice said. She crept across the bed and lay on her back. She didn’t want to close her eyes.

  “Scootch over just a little bit,” Rose said, “more to the middle so we can all fit.”

  They all lay on the bed. After a few moments someone began to snore. Janice wouldn’t want to bet her last fifty it wasn’t her.

  ACK

  WE WERE VISITING friends of mine on Nantucket. Over the years they’ve become more solitary. They’re quite a bit older than we are, lean, intelligent and carelessly stylish. They drink too much. And I drink too much when I visit them. Sometimes we’d just eat cereal for supper; other times we’d be subjected to an entire stuffed fish and afterwards a tray of Grape-Nut pudding. Their house is old and uncomfortable, with a small yard, dark with hydrangeas in August. This was August. I told my wife not to expect dinner from my erratic friends, Betty and Bruce. We would have a few drinks, then return to the inn where we were staying and have a late supper. Only one other guest was expected this evening, a local woman who had ten daughters.

  “What an awful lot,” my wife said.

  “I’m sure we’ll hear about them,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” Bruce said, struggling to open an institutional-size jar of mayonnaise that had been set on a weathered picnic table in the yard.

  “She’s unlikely to talk about much else with that many,” my wife said. “Are any of them strange?”

  “One’s dead, I believe,” our host said, still struggling with the jar. “‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might…’” he said, addressing his own exertions.

  “Let me give that a try,” I said, but Bruce had finally broken the plastic seal.

  “I meant strange as in intellectually or emotionally or physically challenged,” my wife said. She had already decided to dislike this poor mother.

  Bruce dipped a slice of wilted carrot into the jar. “I really like mayonnaise; do you, Paula? I can’t remember.”

  “Bruce, you know very well it’s Pauline,” Betty said.

  “I’m addicted to mayonnaise, practically,” Bruce said.

  My wife smiled and shook her head. If she had resolved to become relaxed in that moment it would be a great relief, for Bruce had been kind to me and there was no need for tension between them. Pauline prefers to be
in control of our life and our friendships. She’s a handsome woman, canny and direct, never unreasonable. I suppose some might find her cold but I am in thrall to her because I had almost been crushed by life. I had some rough years before Pauline, years I only just managed to live through. I might as well have been stumbling about in one of those great whiteouts that occur in the far north where it is impossible to distinguish between a small object nearby and a large object a long way off. In whiteouts there is no certainty and every instinct is betrayed—even the birds fly into the ground, believing it to be air, and perish. I strained to see and could not, and torn by strange sorrows and shames, I twice attempted suicide. But then a calm overtook me, as though my mind had taken pity on me and called off the hopeless search I had undertaken. I was thirty-two then. I met Pauline the following year and she accepted me, broken and wearied as I was, with an assurance that further strengthened me. We have a lovely home outside Washington. She wants a child, which I am resisting.

  We were all smiling at the mayonnaise jar as though it were one of the sweet night’s treasures when a bell jangled on a rusted chain wrapped around the garden gate. We had likewise engaged the same bell an hour before. A woman appeared, thinner than I expected, almost gaunt, and shabbily dressed. She seemed a typical wellborn island eccentric, and looked at us boldly and disinterestedly … It was difficult to determine her age and thus impossible to guess at the ages of her many daughters. My first impression was that none of them had accompanied her.

  “Starky! Have a drink, my girl!” Bruce said in greeting.

  She embraced him, resting her cheek for a moment in his hair, which was long and reached the collar of his checkered shirt. She breathed in the smell of his hair much as I had and found it, I could imagine, sour but strangely satisfying. She then turned to Betty and kissed, as I had, her soft warm cheek.