by Joy Williams
“Of course not. Of course you don’t. It’s out of the question.”
“Potential autonomy is insufficient to prove,” Jeffrey crooned softly. “Objection!…hypothetical and speculative…”
“You’re going to be a great barrister,” Barbara said, savoring the last of the pitcher of martinis. “Nothing will prevent it from happening, neither the loss of our fortune nor the dignity of our family name.”
“Hey, Lane Fifteen,” a woman yelled. “You gonna bowl? People come here to bowl. Show some respect.” She and her group wore bright orange sateen jackets with Good News Exterminating whorling in thick red thread upon the back.
“We need plates and forks,” Barbara said. “I’ll get them.” But when she returned she bore only another pitcher of martinis.
“Do you ever,” Lola asked, “after a few cocktails see everything as being tiny? Everything exceptionally tiny? Lilliputian even?”
“No,” Barbara said.
“You’re almost afraid to touch anything for fear you’ll crush it, without meaning to.”
“No.”
“Because that’s characteristic of raging alcoholism.”
“Having a drink in a tiny house with tiny things scattered about would be quite disturbing,” Barbara conceded.
“Could we cut the cake now?” Jeffrey asked. Khristen was surprised he directed the question to her. She could not recall a single birthday, not one.
The words hung recklessly in the air. “Yes,” Barbara said. “It’s time. Happy Birthday, darling. I may not have handled everything as well as I could have.”
With her long fingernails, Barbara slit the tape that secured the flaps of the box, closed her eyes and shoved back the lid.
A disturbing scene was disclosed, executed in frosting.
“Daddy’s dead,” Jeffrey said.
Barbara’s eyes flipped open. “I knew the baker wouldn’t do this right! What a goddamn backwater this place is! I described the situation as I had witnessed it in the same way I described it to the police who complimented me at the time on my lucidity and calm. I had certainly made their work easier, they told me. And this baker assured me he grasped the situation. He had been in the armed forces, he told me, and had seen mayhem, he had seen the results of disagreement. He was also sensitive to the subtleties of disclosure, he told me, and yet look at this…he reversed everything! He mixed everything up!”
“I was wondering where you located a baker,” Lola said.
“Who was I speaking to if not a baker!” Barbara demanded.
“Daddy’s not dead?” Jeffrey said.
“Your goddamn father is alive but he’s in big trouble this time.”
“You never liked Daddy,” Jeffrey mused. “You should have obtained a divorce years ago, before I was born even.”
“Could it be someone else’s cake order?” Khristen suggested, although this seemed unlikely. “It’s not very nice, is it? Maybe it tastes better than it looks.”
“Most people around here bake their own cakes when the fancy strikes them which isn’t often,” Lola persisted.
“Is it me who’s dead?” Jeffrey asked.
“Don’t be willfully dense, darling. Give Mother a bit of a break here.”
“I’m merely curious.”
“Don’t be,” his mother snapped. “It’s a characteristic worthless in a lawyer.” She pitched the false fly in the false ice cube into the empty pitcher.
“What I really wanted for my birthday was a mock-up of a jury box in my bedroom,” Jeffrey confided to Khristen. “Perhaps it will be there upon our return.”
“Who would be in the jury box?” Khristen asked.
“I have very few friends. I suppose there wouldn’t be anyone there.”
“You, yo! Lane Fifteen!” the woman bawled.
“That damn baker just copied Saturno on the cake,” Barbara complained.
“Can’t miss that,” Lola agreed. To Khristen she said, “A very famous and disturbing painting by the Spaniard, Goya. I can see why the baker might consider it but in the case of little Jeffrey here and his father and grandfather, the situation is the opposite.”
“You! Loiterers!” the woman called. “No loitering here.”
“One more minute and I’m going to take her personalized bowling ball and cram it down her throat,” Barbara said. She looked alarmingly bright-eyed.
Jeffrey was studying the cake. The background frosting was blue and looked thoroughly toxic. He did not wear glasses but if recalled by others he was a frail little boy in large smudged glasses.
“The painting is actually called Saturn Devouring His Son,” Lola whispered to Khristen, “though it could just as well be his daughter.”
Khristen nodded. It was a helpless, naked human figure. Gender played no part.
“The important thing to know—no, to realize—is that Saturn, whenever and however depicted, represents Time, which, with its ravenous appetite for life, devours all its creations, whether they are beings, things, ideas or sentiments,” Lola said.
How remarkable it was, Khristen thought, to be able to discourse on fine art in a bowling alley where you were not welcome.
“Whoever made this cake did a pretty good job considering the crudity of the decorating caps available now for affixing to the frosting tubes,” Lola continued. “ ’Course we never will know who it was made this cake.”
“It’s seven o’clock, darling,” Barbara said to Jeffrey. “You’ve just left the first decade of your life behind. You’re a little man now.”
“I’m not. I’m a minor. I have years before I’m sui juris. Surely you know that, Mother.”
“A threshold has been passed,” Barbara insisted.
A muscular fellow in a tight T-shirt was approaching them.
“Perhaps we should leave,” murmured Lola. The shirt had a question imprinted upon it. Got Sand? He stood before them, shaking his head.
“What is he, mute?” Barbara asked.
“You about through here?” the man inquired. “We got people requesting this lane. This is a desirable lane.”
“What does that mean?” Jeffrey asked.
“It means there’s people want to bowl where you’re not bowling.”
“I’m referring to your shirt, ‘Got sand?’ What does that mean?”
“It means he’s a laborer, Jeffrey,” Barbara said, stifling a hiccup. “All these people here are probably laborers of some sort, working with their hands, leveling and paving or some such goddamned backwater thing.”
“Sand means grit, courage, backbone,” the man said, enraged. “Fools, it means cojones.”
“Cojones!” Barbara exclaimed. “Oh please.” She belched.
“I don’t under…” Jeffrey began.
The man’s annoyed gaze fell on the grimly colorful cake in its snowy box. “God in heaven,” he said, stepping back.
“Jeffrey, honey, we are going to help your mother up. She needs some assistance. Khristen, dear, you bring that cake. We’re leaving right now, mister.”
Khristen rather expected the night to be pleasant after the atmosphere of the bowling alley but there was a seared, sad smell to it, a smell she had familiarized herself with, she guessed, but was still capable of forgetting.
Barbara clung to the door handle of Lola’s car. “Yes, you’re a little man now, Jeffrey. I should tell you about the night you were born sometime.”
“It shall be unlawful for any person to promote, advertise, stage, hold, manage, conduct, participate in, engage in or carry on…” Jeffrey recited sternly. “What…oh no, Mother, thank you, you need not.”
“You were so small and precious. I was afraid to touch you. All your little bones, you know? And hair, you had so much hair…I never wanted another one after you, that’s for sure. I would never, never,
never go through something like that again.”
“Mother?”
“I’ve got a long birth canal. My birth canal’s too long. It was such hell. I barely survived.”
“Mother?”
“Yes, darling.”
“Would it be permissible to throw away the cake?”
“The cake? Certainly. Horrid cake. No help at all.”
“Perhaps the animals in the woods might eat it,” Jeffrey said.
“There aren’t any animals in these woods,” Lola said, “not even those chimps who were brought to be saved. Our native sons have pretty much shot everything out. There was a chimp retreat a few miles from here not that long ago, you know, one of those chimp retirement homes for those who so faithfully served in space shots and non-mutilating experiments and such. The idea was that these aged chimps would have their own fenced-in retreat of a few hundred acres and caring people would provide them with dog kibble and fresh water daily and the chimps would spend their final days climbing trees and drawing pictures in the dirt with sticks and eating apricots. It had the potential of becoming a tourist attraction, one of those offbeat ones some people are keen to discover. Those chimps would gaze at you with such cold resentment—no empathy at all, no gratitude either—and a lot of folks got quite a kick out of that. But some good old boys snuck in one Saturday night and picked off those chimps one by one like they were squirrels, shot them right out of the trees they were living in. They even shot Betty. She was the one used to bathe her baby dolls in the washtub.”
This must be the past, the past, Khristen thought.
“That would be punishable by…” Jeffrey began, but then fell silent.
“Before the eyes can see, they must be incapable of tears,” Khristen said.
“I’ve heard that too and I certainly aspire to it,” Lola said. “But when I heard they murdered Betty, I just bawled.”
* * *
—
Jeffrey’s milestone party could hardly have been considered a success, but he and his mother remained in residence at the motel.
“She might still be trying to explain that cake to him,” Lola said to Khristen. “Plus nobody likes commencing a journey of return in the rain.”
Indeed, rain was pouring off the roof and leaving nasty bubbles in the puddled dirt. It was twisting inside, too, in a slender stream to collapse in a large bucket that had once held chlorine tablets.
AVISO
“They expect it to continue through the weekend with all next week promising to be oppressive,” Lola said.
Big Girl was invisible. Lola said that in all the time she’d been here she had never seen the lake accept a single drop that fell from the sky.
They were in the big building’s lobby, watching the stuff come down. An elderly man was standing before them, just outside the windows, shoeless and shirtless with his arms and head flung back.
“He’s going to drown like a turkey someday doing that,” Lola said. “I don’t allow my bird of paradise out in it and there he is, gulping it down.”
The plant’s sipping water was drawn through cheesecloth, boiled then cooled. The bird of paradise was the one thing Lola coddled and still it did not look healthy.
She dragged the half-full bucket to the window and dashed the contents outside.
She and Khristen stared together at the ugly rain falling and the figure Lola called Hector standing at limp attention in it.
“He’s going to get yaws or worse,” Lola said.
The rain gifted a pink light to the so-called day, a light that irradiated every hair on Lola’s head. Khristen could have counted them and finished with an accurate number and it wouldn’t have taken her long.
Lola opened the door and shouted, “Go inside, fool!”
“It’s filling the aquifers,” the fright that was Hector cried. “It’s filling the aquifers of this land.”
“That stuff’s not filling aquifers and you know it. The aquifers are collapsed.”
Hector shook his head, then his whole self, like a dog, but the rain did not fly off him in pleasant droplets as it would from a dog. It clung grayly like tiny sticky-bodied caterpillars to his skin.
“He’s courting pneumonia or some other pulmonary event,” Lola said. “That’s what they used to call the old person’s friend, pneumonia. Some friend. Like having a three-hundred-pound officer of the law sitting on your chest advising you that it’s not in your best interests to draw that next breath.”
Hector waded toward them across a hard pan remarkably resistant to percolation and sidled into the room, his skin mottled like an unripe strawberry.
“You’d better rub yourself down with vinegar or the itching’s going to be terrible.”
“Which came first in your opinion, Lola, the rabid rain or the birdless dawn?” Hector stared at Khristen.
“All I know is that the rain changed her nature some fourteen months ago,” Lola said.
“Fourteen is a marvelous number! One philosopher even goes so far as to say that it is impossible for fourteen minutes to pass. Something about it corresponding to infinity. Oh, I used to study these things! This philosopher was greatly influenced by an earlier philosopher he had misunderstood completely. This is how all great discoveries arise, through misunderstanding. Could you locate that vinegar for me? Do you really think vinegar would help?”
“I know it’s here or certainly was,” Lola said.
“I just wanted to take a simple pleasure of feeling falling rain,” Hector said. He looked about to cry.
“Rain’s not rain if it’s not falling,” Lola said mildly.
He squinted at Khristen. “Who is she,” he demanded of Lola. “She’s like someone.”
“You go on now, Hector, take this towel.” She extended a beach towel, faded almost to transparency, a skeletal palm and ghostly coconuts.
“Oh, I like this one,” he said, draping it with a flourish around his bones.
After he left, Lola threw the contents of another brimming bucket outside. The stuff hit the ground as limply as a body might. Khristen almost expected it to coalesce into something like an eel and swing jerkily out of sight.
“I remember when it fell so pretty, sparkling, and the smell, with no exaggeration, was divine.” Lola sighed. “The Institute’s winding down. Just the dotty ones are left or those whose abilities have greatly diminished. Scarlett was supposed to shiv an herbicide representative but is dragging her heels, Tom had planned on going to a trophy-hunting convention and poisoning all there including the children with their tyke-sized AK-47’s but he’s been beset with sudden blindness and will have to find another way to implement. No one wants to leave anymore. They’re worrying about what comes next again.”
“I won’t stay,” Khristen assured her.
“Oh I’m not referring to you, dear. This is no determinant for you. I’ve always believed that there are seven epochs in each person’s life. They proceed like seasons. There’s spring, late spring, early summer, summer, fall and winter.” She grinned at Khristen. “That’s just six, you’re about to say. Winter counts twice as well, but I think you’ve blown right through the winter phases. So much has to be recalibrated. There’s a thirteenth constellation now so even the zodiac has to be reconsidered. Ophiuchus. That’s the new one. No one wants to be born under it.”
There was a metal rack for postcards in the office which Khristen nudged into motion.
“No one wants to get through to this place either. It’s because they don’t believe in absolution, and you know why? Because absolution for what has been done is impossible. I used to try to recruit, it’s true, make the place more thrivey but no more. If circumstances bring a person to comprehension they’ll find the gate.”
“I don’t remember a gate,” Khristen said.
“It swings out and it swings in
though it can scarcely be called a gate anymore, it’s in such darkened disrepair, resulting in the errancy, I’m sure, of little Jeffrey and his mother. But whenever mistakes like that happen, I try to present the illusion as best I can and in the most discreet manner. I steer them away to the motel. Show them the beach and the wickets, the balls and the tackle. Show them the gaming gallery and the pool and the wrought-iron tables where they can enjoy their toast. Show them where the clean linens are kept. Yet, you know, even with all the effort expended upon those who aren’t even supposed to be here, I’ve heard more than once I’m so bored I could die…”
Suddenly she broke off. “How is your room?” she inquired. “What room did I give you again?”
“Room Five. Opposite Honey, Heart of Gold.”
Khristen had not yet seen Honey, nor anyone else in the immense, listing building. Yet it only appeared deserted, Lola had told her. There were more than a dozen in residence, possibly fourteen—that perfect and impossible number—but Lola was so bad with figures it was anyone’s guess. One resident had left not long before Khristen’s arrival with the intention of blowing himself up in the middle of one of those thousand-acre truck and bulldozer dealerships that were so popular. And he had succeeded in blowing himself up, causing some cosmetic damage to a few of the machines but the days were long past when an event like that would give anyone pause, to say nothing of bestirring greater consciousness. She compared his burning to a gummy bear on fire, one of those candies. It had meant no more than that, Death having lost her bump.
“Oh yes. How is Room Five?”
Khristen admitted she couldn’t remember it. It had been just the night before after all. But to describe it she would have to imagine it now and what if she hurt Lola’s feelings? She liked Lola so much. She would like to lay her head on her speckled breast, on her warm and tragic bosom.
She gently pushed at the revolving rack again. “Do you have any other cards I could put in here? You’re all out except for the dining room.” She supposed the more interesting ones had been selected long before.
“I’ve been all out save for the dining room for some while,” Lola said.