The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  Steaks lowed beneath the trees. The bones of fishes banged in their sockets like guns going off. There were the sounds of doors slamming that were like the sounds of traps being sprung.

  She flapped open her eyes to a smooth white ceiling.

  She would never again remember Walker as she had seen him. He had flown out of the wilderness dreary into the night. Into Paradise, her mother would have said.

  God loves you, her mother had said. God loves us all. And He takes us in the end with him to Paradise where we find refuge forever from sin and affliction and doubt.

  Pearl suspected God didn’t love human beings much. She suspected that what He loved most was Nothingness.

  God created everything out of nothing and He takes us back again to feed the nothingness that He loves.

  It was pretty sick of Him, Pearl thought. God wasn’t dead, He was just sick. Very very sick . . .

  This was grief, she guessed. All these terrible things and thoughts rooting around in her head, trying to find a place to stay.

  She saw another man in the brass bed she had shared with Walker . . . the bed with the ornate headboard to which she had raised her arms, her legs in love. A man with a penis half iron and half flesh . . . And forked beautifully like a serpent’s tongue so that he would be able to perform all the acts of love at once . . .

  “No!” Pearl said. A bird with black wings nested in her left eye. With her right eye she saw the hospital room where she knew she was awake.

  She saw Walker looking like Thomas, pulling her down to take her breath away. A dead person who loves you will love you forever and ever . . .

  A nurse in the room was plumping up Pearl’s pillow.

  “Would you like to see your baby now?” she said cheerily. “Are you up to nursing him? He just woke up and he’s howling like a polecat. He won’t take to a bottle at all.”

  “No,” Pearl said. “He’s never had a bottle.”

  Lucky little baby, little Sam. Other children had died in the same crash. Amazing grace. The ways of fate. It’s a blessing we can’t comprehend them.

  Pearl unbuttoned her hospital shirt.

  “Your brother-in-law just arrived,” the nurse said. “You’ll probably be released tomorrow.”

  Pearl bit her lip.

  “Can’t I stay here a little longer?” Pearl said.

  “Modern medicine can’t do a thing for cracked ribs, honey. And your baby, little Sandy . . .”

  “Sam!” Pearl said, worried. “His name is Sam.”

  “Oh, I’m sorry, honey, we got so many of them down there, you know, and they each got a name and I’ve got just one poor brain.”

  “Sam,” Pearl said.

  “Well, little Sam looks as though he’s just got a bad sunburn is all. Nothing worse than that. You don’t want to be taking beds from those that really need them now, do you, honey?” The nurse cranked up the bed and left.

  Pearl sat tensely staring at the door. When Thomas saw her, what would he say to her? You’re loathsome. That’s what he’d say. She was loathsome. She was an idle, stupid woman, no more incremental to his world than a gnat. She wouldn’t blame him at all. She wished she were dead, leading her own life at last, singing the old hymns.

  And the joy we share as we tarry there

  No other has ever knoooooown

  She could see Thomas, talking with the doctors, paying the bill, signing the papers. She could see his eyes behind his dark glasses, black with anger, with rage at her.

  It had now been hardly more than thirty-six hours since she had left the island. And now with all this, with Walker dead, she was going back. And Sam would be raised there, along with the rest. Pearl saw Peter causing a baby chick to rise from his scrambled eggs. She saw Joe kissing a girl with a tongue heavy as a boot. She saw the children running and waiting.

  In the house was an eighteenth-century Goddard-Townsend desk. Someone wanted to buy the desk for a hundred thousand dollars. Someone wanted Thomas to run for governor. But there were scratches and gouges in the desk, made by the children. And Thomas, when angry, could not hold his temper very well. A woman, someone familiar, was smiling at him and saying, “Ahhh, if spit were sperm . . .”

  Shelly was saying, “I don’t know how my own brother, Walker, who was so smart, could have married a woman with a brain so small it would get lost in a cat’s fur . . .”

  Miriam was sewing her terrible dark skirts, the skirts that depicted all the fears of the night. “I don’t believe in love anymore,” she was saying, “not since Johnny died.” Miriam loved Johnny and what good had that ever done? Her feeling for her Johnny was curved as a ball, a belly, a noose. There was no beginning to it. No end. Come unbidden. Part pain. Part comfort. That was love. How could that be the way? To love was only to understand death. And Pearl was saying, looking at the skirts, seeing the story of the skier who had caused an avalanche that buried fourteen, and the society painter who painted vulvas, and the woman whose twin had lain inside her for twenty-nine years and would not be born, and other stories, other images which could not be grasped by reason or even madness, collected in those skirts that hung like the robes of priests in the closets of the house Pearl was seeing, and saying that the path illuminated by death is the true path, that it is the knowledge of death which shapes us, which gives us the form by which we shall be known. Which divides us from the animals.

  The nurse was holding Sam out to Pearl. He was a ball of fierce red howling in a receiving blanket.

  Pearl looked at him uncertainly. For two months now she had been feeding him, making faces at him, always checking to see if he was wet. Children had never seemed reasonable to Pearl. They grew up. They vanished without having died.

  She took Sam and put him to her breast.

  “What a yum-yum,” the nurse said. “I’ll leave you two alone now.”

  “You hungry, Sam?” Pearl whispered. “Poor little baby. You’re safe now.”

  She fanned her nipple against his cheek. He reached for her breast with his small hands and began kneading it. His eyes were shut tight. He began fiercely to draw upon the milk.

  “Ow,” Pearl winced.

  She wriggled up higher against the pillows, trying to make herself more comfortable. The baby clung to her, chewing.

  “Oh you’re starved, aren’t you?” Pearl said. She pushed him up, trying to relieve the pain. “Maybe I’ve forgotten how to do this, stupid Pearl can’t do any . . .” She cried out again. There was a spot of blood on her nightshirt, another on the baby’s chin. She held her breath. The baby was making enraged snuffling sounds, his face flat and distorted against her breast. It was very embarrassing. She wanted to tear the baby from her breast. Her breast was bleeding. She slipped her fingers between her nipple and his gums and tried to push him off.

  “You’re ready for hamburger, aren’t you?” Pearl said. She wanted to be calm. She wanted to show her good sense and wit.

  A sharp pain ran jagged from her breast to her groin. She screamed and wrenched the baby’s head from her. She slid off the bed and stared at Sam. He had kicked off the blanket and lay kicking and whimpering, his black, blurred eyes encompassing the room.

  Pearl quickly pushed up the sides of the bed so he wouldn’t roll out. He was quite helpless really. She backed up to the visitor’s chair by the window and sat down. She looked at her breast. It was bruised and dotted with pinpoints of blood. She dabbed at it with a tissue.

  Sam struggled and kicked inside his little sleeping sack. He clutched the edge of the pillow slip in his fist. Pearl stared at him. On the window sill were the remains of her lunch. She picked up a roll and, going back to the bed, opened his fist and closed it around the bread. He pushed it against his mouth and began to eat. When he had eaten about half of it, he fell asleep.

  It seemed quite clear to Pearl that her child had something wrong with him. His face was all right, the little bit of him that showed, that wasn’t encapsulated in soft cotton, in the cuddly devices of infant clot
hes. To the eyes of a stranger, in fact, he might seem a very handsome baby. Strangers recognized only what they were used to recognizing in a baby’s face anyway.

  She unzipped his long shirt.

  “I don’t think you’re the right kind of baby,” Pearl said softly. His skin was loose and rather wrinkled and covered with fine, almost invisible hairs.

  She looked at his small hands, the tiny sharp nails, his smooth face, now calm. His face was like a mask’s, like a small animal’s.

  Perhaps she had never looked at him this carefully before. She felt lightheaded. On the baby’s hand were two small circular birthmarks. Sam had had a birthmark but it hadn’t been there, had it? Hadn’t it been on his chest?

  “I’m having a breakdown is all,” Pearl whispered.

  She knelt on the floor and threw up in a bedpan. Then she sat back down in the chair by the window. Outside, the air quivered with the warmth of the sun. What would she do when the night came? How would she bear the night?

  “You’re not my baby,” she said. “You belong to someone else.” She pressed her fingers against her lips. “No, no, no,” she said. She wanted to hold the baby and rock him in her arms but she was afraid to. There seemed to be a great pressure on her head from the four corners of the room.

  “I’m having a breakdown is all,” she muttered again.

  An old woman stood on the room’s threshold. Her chin rested, quivering, on her chest. Her skinny arms in the loose bathrobe were outstretched. She made a strange, whining noise.

  She moved off when the nurse appeared.

  “Nobody ever stays in their bed around here,” the nurse said. “I think we should strap you all down.” It was a different nurse, one with a round, mannish face, and a very pink, gorgeously repugnant nose.

  “Who was that?” Pearl demanded. “She was about to come in here!”

  “Probably wanted to steal something from you,” the nurse said blithely. “They’d rather thieve than watch television. Television’s gotten too dirty for them.”

  It was just an old woman, Pearl thought. Florida was full of them. Florida had more old women than it did grapefruit.

  The nurse was looking at Sam.

  “I couldn’t feed him,” Pearl said. “He has to be weaned, I have no milk.”

  “All right, all right,” the nurse said. “I don’t know why you’d choose to have him hanging off you anyway. I find it almost offensive, to be frank. Down here you see them suckling in laundromats, at the movies, everywhere.”

  She picked up the baby and started out. Sam yawned. Perfectly placed on either side in the upper gums were tiny triangular teeth.

  The nurse sighed. “God help us,” she said. “He’s starting early. The things I’ve seen coming in and going out of this place. It makes me believe what I read. Have you read those things, about mankind’s physiognomy? We’re going to be taller and balder with bigger heads and smaller eyes and no jaws to speak of. It’s pollution, they say. It’s the Cubans as far as I’m concerned. God, I’m getting sick of the Cubans. I just bless God I’m not going to be around in fifty years. I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes for anything, having a child in this day and age.”

  She left with the baby. Pearl sat stunned, once more alone. After a while she got up and picked up the bedpan. She went out into the hall to the bathroom to rinse it out. There were people a lot worse off than she was, certainly, lying about in every room. She went into the bathroom. She wanted to take a shower, to soak away the pain she felt, but she’d been told not to get her rib bandages wet. She looked longingly at the cold white of the curtainless stalls. She suddenly had the peculiar sensation that there was someone behind her wanting to get by, but she turned and there was no one. It was like a movement that had no counterpart in life flowing into the empty space around her. A vivid energy struggling to become a form. A starving shadow. Pearl pressed her forehead against the white tiles. She felt as though she were spinning.

  She pushed herself away from the wall and started back down the corridor. She couldn’t seem to find her room. The one she thought was hers was occupied by another old woman in a brown, mottled bathrobe. Pearl walked to the end of the corridor, bewildered. She decided to go down to the nursery on the floor below and look at the babies. It seemed a brilliant idea to her. Things would have a chance to straighten themselves out. She went down a short flight of thick green steps. On the landing was a Dr. Pepper bottle and a paperback novel with a lurid cover. The man on the cover did not look at all like Walker. Pearl remembered being kissed but it seemed a very long time ago. Walker’s mouth was warm and smooth. It was the gold in his teeth.

  She went down a few more steps and pushed open the door. There was a sweet, vaguely punishing smell. The walls were bright landscapes populated by cheerful animals engaged in human endeavors. Part of the wall, beneath the nurses’ station, was sketched in but not painted yet. It was filled with ghostly rabbits. Oh, to be a child, Pearl thought, one with the magic and unutterable images. Childhood is a wonderful moment, a wonderful moment. One sees things differently there. She walked down the floor, a smile fixed upon her face. There, beyond the nursery window, were the babies. A nurse was rinsing the mattress of an empty crib with a wet cloth. The babies were sleeping, ten or so of them, hunkered bottoms-up in identical white smocks. Some of them were as bald as Sam and some of them were as red as he was. Pearl looked at them for a while and then turned away. She walked back toward the staircase door, passing several more rabbits, a burro, and the White Queen. The White Queen had howled before she’d been pinched, wasn’t that it? Her memory worked forward as well as backward. Pearl stopped at a water cooler and drew a paper cone from the dispenser. Turning the spigot created a turbulence within the glass. The water surged and slapped against the sides and Pearl saw her fragmented, wavering face. She felt wretched, scarcely human herself. Perhaps the human race had yet to be born. Perhaps it was all a deception by the government. It hadn’t happened yet. This life was nothing but the womb.

  Pearl limped through the door again and up the stairs. Someone had taken the paperback. The room Pearl believed to be hers was empty now. She entered it with relief, closed the door behind her and lay down upon the bed. A clock on the wall said three o’clock. It seemed to Pearl that clocks always said three o’clock. Once someone had shown her a photograph of a child lying in a coffin. Pearl closed her eyes. Serious drinkers were drinking at a drinkers’ party. There were toasts. Here’s to them that shoot and miss, someone said. Everyone drank to that. We have dishonored the unknown, someone said. We have annihilated the spirit. Everyone drank.

  Pearl looked at the clock again. It still said three o’clock. The time Christ died on the cross. Time for something to come around again. We have taken matters too much in our own hands. Pearl crossed her arms tightly across her breasts. When would they bring the baby back up to her? When would they tell her she had to leave with him? She and Thomas and the baby would go out into the heat, an unholy trinity of souls.

  She had wanted Sam to be a simple child, her child. Not like the others with their peculiar scraps of knowledge, their dazzling shows of temperament. The others even with their many charms seemed like deadly little flowers to Pearl, budding Satans, quoting Dante before they lost their baby teeth, their days one interlocking game with rules Pearl couldn’t begin to comprehend.

  Pearl’s eyes moved from the clock to the old woman looking into the room again. She was tall and gaunt and dressed in brown and faded clothes that seemed for all their drabness nevertheless miraculous. The old woman raised her arm and it was as though a bird had raised its wing and Pearl saw the pinions of the wing, the way each feather miraculously blended into another, the way each midnight heartless line in tapering thrust was more excellent, a thousand times more excellent than the most sincere aspirations of her soul.

  It was the old woman from the plane, looking for her child, wanting him back.

  “He’s not here now,” Pearl said.

  Pea
rl was tired of living in this world. Things turned out badly in this world. Even if one had no desires and made few decisions, one’s shadow fell in the paths of others and their shadows fell all over you.

  Pearl groped for a hairbrush on the nightstand. She began brushing her hair. Her hair was matted and she brushed out several gray hairs she hadn’t noticed the day before. They were wrinkly as wires. Pearl’s eyes started crying. She had a baby. She had to stop being so self-conscious.

  But there was something peculiar about the baby. He was like an animal. She had a baby now that wasn’t hers.

  The old woman had entered the room. Her eyes bored into Pearl’s mind and Pearl kept seeing the eyes and the old woman beyond them in her mind. Pearl stopped brushing her hair and tried to fix the old woman’s position in the room so that she could call the nurse and have her removed. But her position could not be fixed. The old woman was moving, searching around the room, flying around in Pearl’s mind.

  Pearl dropped the brush and gripped her breasts and her eyes and her head in one complex and despairing gesture.

  Maybe it wasn’t an old woman at all, neither from the plane nor anywhere else. Maybe it was just death. Death coming around to tell Pearl she’d messed up again.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  After the crash, Pearl went into what could only be considered a decline. The young girl had become a dissipated woman, calm and acquiescent enough, but possessed of a grim, perplexed attitude and somewhat confusing in her speech. She spent most of her time either in her room or in a lawn chair by the pool, lacking the energy or interest to do anything else.

  This was where the children gathered. The adults did not use the pool. Lincoln used the sauna for relaxation. Shelly did not swim. Miriam and Thomas were strong, old-fashioned swimmers who preferred the ocean.