The Changeling

by Joy Williams

  Swimming was probably good for one’s system or one’s tone or whatever, but in any case it was a maniacally healthful habit that Pearl didn’t indulge in, preferring personally to be a bit under the weather. For she had long been ignoring her appearance and cultivating her ill health, her flesh seeming quite useless to her now, being touched by no hands other than her own for so long now.

  She had begun actually to take an intoxication in the wonder of her sickly body, the bony chest, the tanned but sickly face.

  The pool was a considerable distance from the house, cupped naturally in the meadow as though it had been there forever. And indeed, it seemed unclear when exactly the pool had been constructed. Little Jesse, who as far as Pearl knew, spent his every waking moment paddling around in the water, would tirelessly ask the same question of everyone, year in and year out:

  “Were you here when they dug the hole?”

  “No,” Pearl said.

  It seemed simple enough. But no one else ever gave the child a straight answer. Sometimes they’d tell him they were and sometimes they’d tell him they weren’t. Sometimes they’d tell him that trucks and tractors bigger that the biggest toy, all shiny and red and stinking of rubber came in, and sometimes they’d tell him that Miriam dug it out with a slotted spoon. And sometimes they’d tell him that the Devil made it, just as the Devil made them all, the Devil liking to make things even more than God.

  The children would tease Jesse about being born in the water.

  “Your mama peed in the pool and out came you,” they’d sing.

  Jesse didn’t seem to mind their teasing. Perhaps he didn’t even hear it. Perhaps he heard, as fish do, by echo, and the voices of the children were no more to him than familiar reverberations in a friendly sea.

  “Your mama loved the water more than she did a man. Your mama . . .”

  No one knew who Jesse’s mother was actually. Thomas had brought him from a Boston adoption agency. Thomas had been touched by his ugliness. Jesse was a curious little child with a huge barrel chest and skin that seemed puckerish and a watery blue. Even when he was dressed properly and eating with them in the formal dining room, he looked wet. His favorite pastime was holding his breath. Pearl didn’t know much more about him. She knew only from what she observed, which she found untrustworthy, and from what the children told her.

  No one except the children ever told her anything and their theories were garbled, to say the least. There were so many children. Pearl felt it necessary to take into consideration, however, the fact that they grew rapidly and often wore different clothes so that there were undoubtedly not as many as there appeared.

  There were just twelve of them. That was all. Not that that wasn’t enough. Many of the ones Pearl had first known here were gone now. Grown, they would go to the mainland to live and get jobs or go to school. Thomas was very generous. He paid for everything. The absent ones sent letters and remained devoted to him, but they were never encouraged to come back. Thomas’s “family” remained prepubescent. So now Joe was the oldest here, and baby Angie the youngest. She had a withered leg. She had lovely blond curls and fat little cheeks and a poor withered leg. She went everywhere with the others though, carried along high on their shoulders, peeping and chortling to herself.

  Pearl liked the pool. The bottom had been painted a very dark blue so that it looked as natural and bottomless as the sea. Anchored to its tiled lip was an iron bird. A work of art. Really worth quite a deal of money. There were a lot of objects around the place that looked valuable, even to Pearl’s careless eye. The children crawled all over the thing, threw their bath towels on it, ate their lunch inside it. Pearl sometimes wished that she were smaller and could crawl around inside it too. She liked the twisted battered orbs that were its eyes, its empty iron spaces, the worm-eaten wood that made its legs and beak.

  Pearl didn’t swim but she liked to drink her cold white wine in the sunshine. Each morning she would empty half a dozen ice cube trays into a battered scotch cooler and work a half gallon of wine down among them and carry her burden out into the beginning day.

  In the summer she limited herself to wine during the day for she thought that it enabled her to cope better with the children. Even so, she did not cope very well, although she did prefer conversations with them to bouts with the adults. Children were like drunkards really, determined to talk at great length and with great incoherence. Pearl more or less understood them in that regard.

  Pearl let Tracker’s little brother, Timmy, uncork her wine for her. He took away the cork for his gun.

  “Pearl, Pearl, swim with us!” the children cried.

  It was August, in the morning. The grass was yellow. Pearl’s body shone with lotions and sweat.

  “I won’t swim,” Pearl said languorously. “I’m not even willing to float.” She laughed as they giggled at her.

  “Pearl, Pearl!” the children called tirelessly. Through many seasons now, their voices had crooned to her, smoothly flying, silently and sweetly hunting her.

  “Tell us a secret, Pearl.”

  She shook her head. “I have no secrets from you,” she said.

  Trip’s lips brushed her ear. “Your chest looks funny, Pearl.”

  She opened her eyes. On her chest she felt something plump and moist. She looked at it rigidly. Just a fungus of some sort. Ripped from an oak. She flung it into the pool and closed her eyes again.

  “Ugh,” she said, “you and your games.”

  Trip had a birthmark on his face that Pearl did not like to notice. It was not disfiguring. It was more insulting than anything. He was perfectly capable of concealing it with make-up. Pearl knew that for a fact as sometimes it wasn’t there on his cheekbone at all and he was just an ordinary good-looking boy. With a face appropriate to childhood, for isn’t the face of childhood essentially the same everywhere? But Trip preferred to embellish the mark more than conceal it. It was about the size of a fifty cent piece and a brilliant raspberry color. It lent itself well to experimentation. Usually it appeared as a fox’s head but sometimes its suggestions were more sexual. He was a walking ink blot. He was a rascal. He had always been a rascal. Years ago, the first year Pearl had been here, when they had sent him to Morgansport to school for the first time, he hadn’t lasted out the day. Such an alert, smart child, charming in his new wool suit and his new sneakers and his brushed, bright hair. And he’d urinated over the other children’s colors in art class. And he’d bitten the teacher who scolded him at nap time. He hadn’t been in school since. Someone should have spanked him at the time, Pearl thought. They all needed to be spanked.

  Pearl would never lay a hand on any of the children herself. Instead, she had developed a trick to take herself out of their range. True, the trick was unreliable, but when it worked it was wonderful. She concentrated, she rose in her mind, she moved of a distance. Her body would lie there, surrounded by the laughing children, but she would be gone. Beyond irritation or fright or boredom or knowing. Having knowledge without knowing, her thoughts far away, her body there, but in darkness, stroked by the whispers of summer. Her other self above. Coldly, cleanly empty of herself. Another thing. Miles up, miles out, needing nothing, gliding.

  Every living thing suffers transfiguration. Yes, until the creation of Eve, Adam had fondled beasts.

  “Come into the water now, Pearl,” another child said.

  “Oh I can’t,” she said smiling, “I’d drown.” She smiled and smiled. She had risen like a saint, a stigmata of spilled wine upon her palms, leaving her body behind for them to worry as they wished.

  She could sometimes will herself to be away for a long while. Sometimes, when she came back, she was not where she had been before. She was in a nightgown, in bed, her hair brushed out upon a pillow. She was at the supper table, dressed demurely in a dress that Thomas had ordered from a catalogue.

  And Thomas would say in his unctuous, sexless voice, “You shouldn’t spend so much time with the children. You should rest more.�
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  When she and Thomas spoke to one another, it was principally about her health. He had not made life difficult for her here. He had never called her “loathsome.” He took care of her actually. She lived in his house, ate his food, drank up his liquor. He was her guardian, her host. Even so, it was quite obvious to the children that there was pain between the two, and dislike. As with everything, they shaped this understanding to purposes that they approved of. There was nothing that the children would allow to pass without interpretation.

  “Pearl,” Thomas would say, “the children have their own rules. Their world is their own. You shouldn’t try to enter their world.”

  “But I prefer their lives to ours,” she would say.

  Pearl always felt humiliated with Thomas. She didn’t like to discuss the children’s lives with him. Nevertheless, it was the case that Thomas had not made things difficult for her. He had not attempted to “take” Sam away from her. Sam was growing up in his own fashion. Things had settled down. Things were possibly even better. When Pearl approached Sam now, he did not strike out at her as he had when he was a baby. When he was a baby, Pearl had been covered with bruises. She could not hold him. He would not allow it.

  “You must resist the children’s ways, Pearl,” Thomas would say. “You must make the effort. You’re far too impressionable, you know. You allow them to take up too much of your time.”

  “I am on guard,” Pearl would say.

  She knew that the children were not what they seemed. She knew that many of the things that visited her in the long wasted hours of the day were not children at all. They were phantoms, aspects only of her fatuous, remorseful and destructive self.

  Once Pearl had wanted death but since she had come back to the island she realized that death was a hopeless resolution at best. The soul separated from the body at last, yet still retaining memories and having hungers. That’s the way she saw it. Yes. And what would be the use of it—to be dead yet still to have the hungers—the different hungers for love.

  “Come in, Pearl, come into the water! We’ll save you if you drown.” She felt the small fingers laced in hers. She saw the children’s soft hands with square pink nails, each nail holding a lovely crescent moon, a bit of the world reflected. Their wet heads dripped upon her breasts. There was a smell of dust, flowers, warm skin.

  Jane was poking at an anthill by the side of the pool. She licked an ant off her finger and swallowed it.

  “Please don’t do that,” Pearl said. “You’ll get sick.”

  “They taste all right,” Jane said. She was a stocky, tanned child, with small closely set eyes.

  “Pearl, why do bees hum? Do you know, Pearl?” Timmy put his face up close to hers.

  The sun held them all. Pearl didn’t mind the daytime. It was dusk that made her unhappy here. The rest of the time she got by. But dusk was difficult for her. At dusk she switched to gin. Her marrying hour. The hour between the dog and the wolf. It sometimes seemed that dusk came to the island several times a day. Brought in by storms and fog. The change was in the fog. The Devil.

  Pearl’s mother had once told her that she must never be embarrassed to tell another that she had seen the Devil.

  “Luther saw the Devil, Pearl, and Luther was a wonderful man. And he saw him in the bathroom. The Devil is everywhere, Pearl, and you must never be afraid to say you’ve seen him.”

  Her mother, bless her soul, was a little simple-minded, but in the long run it was all a matter of phrasing.

  The children crept upon Pearl’s lap and wrapped their arms around her neck.

  “Don’t cry, Pearl,” they said, battering her with their soft wizard’s paws. “It’s a riddle.”

  Sometimes she felt that she had received innumerable and indescribable injuries from them.

  “Look,” Ashbel said. He was holding out a jar with two mantises in it. He had left his mudworks to do his share in pestering her. Ashbel was always building something. His little structures were scattered all over the island. Not far from the pool was his latest creation, a hummock of wood, grass and cardboard, which, he claimed, had three rooms. He would be a great architect, Pearl thought. Perhaps when he grows up he can build me a house just outside of heaven.

  He smiled at her. But she did not want to look. What would she see? She looked instead toward the sea, her eyes catching on a shape, brown in the bright green of the bank sliding into the sea. It resembled an animal, big as a man, but on its side, heaving, its legs moving erratically, its muzzle snapping at the air. But it was nothing. A pile of mown grass that the boys hadn’t taken to the flower bed yet. Nothing. A rotten dingy that the children played in. Nothing.

  “Yes, look, Pearl,” his twin, Franny, said, turning Pearl’s face back to the jar with her hands. The children were so physical. Pearl felt unnatural in their embrace.

  Ashbel flung the insects apart with a jiggle of his wrist. “It’s a mommy and a daddy. It’s a husband and a wife.”

  Pearl looked at the jar. The male mantis was scrambling up the glass side toward the lid, trying frantically to escape.

  “Why did you want a baby, Pearl? Why did you want Sam?”

  “Out of pride,” Pearl said. “Women have babies out of pride,” wondering if this might not be true.

  “Joe says it takes between 2.9 and 3.2 seconds to make a baby, is that true Pearl?” Ashbel patted her hand with his, trying to get her attention.

  “When little babies begin they have tails between their legs and gills in their necks, don’t they, Pearl?” Franny said.

  In the jar, one of the mantises was missing a leg and an eye. The creature was so graceful and such a pretty color but one of its eyes was dangling from its stalk and hanging like a bloody button.

  “Ashbel,” Pearl said. “I’m afraid your pets are quarreling or something.”

  “They’re making love,” the child said. “I let them do that.”

  “Your mother should cut your hair, Ashbel,” Pearl said. The boy had beautiful, glossy thick hair, but really it was too long. He swept it back from his cheeks. It always seemed to Pearl that Ashbel was grinning at her. He had two wonderfully new, white front teeth, slightly protuberant. Miriam should probably take him to a dentist as well.

  Franny didn’t resemble her twin. Her teeth looked almost gray. Perhaps she ate erasers or drank tea. Other than that, she was very pretty.

  “Mother wouldn’t notice about Ashbel’s hair,” Franny said. “Mother doesn’t notice us from one day to the next.” She tipped her head to one side, allowing her own shorter hair to fall against Pearl’s cheek. “You’re nicer than Mother,” she said.

  Children were quite disturbing really. It was difficult to think about children for long. They were all fickle little nihilists and one was forever being forced to protect oneself from their murderousness.

  Pearl was distressed at her surly thoughts and straightened in her chair.

  “I think your mother is very nice,” Pearl said. “She has her work is all.”

  “Yes, she does,” Franny agreed.

  Miriam’s skirts were taking up more and more of her time. People sent her material from everywhere. Each scrap had a meaning, each thread a karmic force. Pearl sympathized with her. No wonder she hadn’t the time for the twins. Her mind was reeling with causality. She had the career of her food and the making of her cosmic skirts. Relating to her children wouldn’t assist her much. And hadn’t she related her heart out to her first-born? And hadn’t that been to her confusion and sorrow? Buried beneath the rosemary now with a bag of marbles and a silver bunny cup. Perhaps, in her heart, Miriam felt the twins to be a little tasteless. Redundant. They were old enough not to have to depend upon a mother’s enthusiasm for them. They could swim and knew the rules of the woods. They could make their own breakfast. They knew where the milk was and the extra blankets for the cold and the lamps for the dark.

  “She is a very interesting woman,” Pearl said.

  “But she is not much fun to talk to
,” Franny said.

  She lay her cheek against Pearl’s head. “Your hair smells good,” Franny said.

  “I put a little honey in the shampoo,” Pearl said. Children were friendly but they were decadent. And they kept changing the topics of conversations. Pearl tensed her shoulders and Franny raised her head, giggling.

  “Our mother is no fun to talk to because every time you show her something you’ve done for the first time or tell her about something that’s happened to you for the first time she just looks into one of her goddamned skirts and tells you that it’s someone else’s story.” Franny said this loudly into Pearl’s hair.

  “Goddamn is not a nice word,” Pearl said.

  “All she ever talks about is the stuff in those skirts. She’ll say, ‘This piece of lace came from the baptismal gown of Remedios Borges, a young Spanish girl of the nineteenth century who died before she was ten and whose feces paintings were well received by the avant-garde aristocracy of Milan.’”

  “Feces painting?” Pearl said faintly.

  “The one I did,” said Ashbel, “was of a house and a tree and a sun with spokes.

  “I remember that,” Franny said, wrinkling her nose. She was now at the stage where she was very hygienic. She was always washing her hands.

  “I’m afraid you children are tiring me,” Pearl said. Some of them were curled at her feet, stroking her ankles. She saw one urinating into a bush and another staring at her with the curious dispassionate waiting of a wild thing. Such children these with their condor eyes! Pearl felt her heart sink as she watched them.

  Her eyes, averted now from the children, fell upon Ashbel’s jar, where the male mantis was now disappearing at a disorienting rate. It was trying to mate with the female and it was actually succeeding although it now lacked both legs and a head. Where is the twins’ father? Pearl thought in a panic.

  “Where is your father?” she demanded.

  “Oh, Pearl,” Franny said, “you know he ran away.”

  “He started out after Miriam one day with a hatchet, thinking he was pruning a vine, and then he ran away,” Peter volunteered.