Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

  “We’re all so deceived by life, aren’t we,” Sally said. “In many ways, I’ve been thinking, I’ve probably been deceived by my life of love.” She looked at Liberty earnestly. “I was very very happy with JJ, and by being so happy I became blind to my own development. I never had any satellite emotions, like fondness, say. It was a very stable, very inflexible situation. There was just JJ, and upon him I pinned all my hopes for self-fulfillment and satisfaction. I’m not saying he exploited me, but let’s face it, JJ domesticated me and made me a craven woman dependent upon his love. I’m not saying our love wasn’t unique, I’m saying it was sort of suffocating, well, not really suffocating, somewhat suffocating. It was a very deep, very unique love. Do you remember the way he used to talk to me intimately? Well, there’d be no way you could remember that, of course, I get so mixed up these days, I have to talk for two you know, I have to recall all this stuff for two, but JJ used to talk to me all the time in this sort of rapid whisper, this quick nonsense whisper, as though I were a race horse or something, like this high-strung filly or something. This was very important, this fantasy element of our love. It was very important to JJ and I cooperated fully because our love was so great, but I realize now that I was a very unfulfilled person. JJ was real even though he was acting, but I wasn’t real even though I was just going along. I wasn’t self-actualizing. I was just part of JJ, a man who doesn’t even have a proper name.”

  Sally was talking eagerly with a far-off look in her eyes.

  “Such language!” Liberty said. “Have you been speaking with your clergyman?” Clergymen often tried too hard, Liberty felt. They had misplaced God in the wilderness and stumbled into the neon wonderland of serial polygamy guidance.

  “There’s a voice on the phone, actually,” Sally confessed, “and it gives advice. It’s very sensible. It’s general, but it applies to the particular too. I discovered a lot about my own situation, it was incredible. I discovered I wasn’t autonomous. I’ve got to become autonomous now.” Sally took a deep breath. “What if Willie just left you, he didn’t really die, but he died to you, he couldn’t help it, he just left?”

  “He’s left before,” Liberty said. “What I did was wait, I guess.”

  “So the waiting made sense because it finally stopped, but what if it didn’t make sense?”

  “Waiting never makes sense,” Liberty said.

  “We’re all asleep, aren’t we,” Sally said. “Like we’re under a spell and something keeps saying, ‘No need to think about it, nothing’s going to happen, if anything were to happen it’s not going to happen now, anyway, not this minute …’ Who says that anyway?”

  “The Magician in us,” Liberty said. “The Kindly Master.”

  “Ugh,” Sally said. She frowned. After a moment, she said, “You’ve still got that dog. I suppose pets give your life a certain continuity. Maybe I should get a pet. I want to lose some weight too. Fifteen pounds would be about right, I think. JJ liked for me to be an armful. ‘My squeeze’ he’d call me. Can you imagine? He called me his squeeze. What a dear man.” Sally began to cry quietly. “He isn’t able to squeeze me any more.”

  Liberty reached for Sally’s hand and held it. The sky was once again cloudless and very blue. And the Gulf was blue too, but with a greenish cast. Pale schools of mullet moved through it. There were terns and plovers working the shore now, and later in the day the herons would arrive, and later than the herons, close after sunset, the skimmers would appear, flying swiftly and close to the water, shearing the water with their bills …

  “That sky is aloof, isn’t it,” Sally said. “It’s hard to plan on fulfilling yourself under a sky like that.” She patted her eyes dry with the back of Liberty’s hand and stood up. “I’ve got to get back to the Gator. I wish you’d come on by. We’re having a welcome home party for JJ tomorrow night. I wish you weren’t such a stranger. You know what they say about ’gators? They say they’ve got seven emotions and they make a sound for each one of them, but it’s all the same sound.” A peculiar expression slid across Sally’s face. “Just like JJ,” she said. “Oh, god,” she said, “I didn’t say that. Don’t tell me I said that.”

  “Sally,” Liberty said.

  Sally closed her eyes and shook her head, giggling. “I just didn’t say that,” she said. “But you know what, you know that big Cajun? Charlie, right? He’s got such a crush on you. He talks about you all the time.”

  “A crush?”

  “A big crush.”

  “A gin crush,” Liberty said.

  “Don’t be that stranger now, you come on by,” Sally said. She kissed Liberty briskly on the cheek. “Good-bye baby beach!” she said to the beach.

  Teddy ran up from the water, holding a shell in his hand. “I found a murex!” he said. “It doesn’t live around here. Somebody must have bought it in a store and then come here and dropped it. It lives in the Mediterranean. And look what I’ve got too, I got these from the trash. Will they count?”

  She looked at the ice-cream wrappers. Five wrinkled bears.

  “They’ll count.” She smoothed them out on her knee. “What do you think the word crush means, honey?”

  “Conquer and destroy.”

  “Conquer and destroy,” Liberty said. “Maybe you should drop that war course.”

  Outside Teddy’s house, Duane was gazing under the hood of a matte black ’69 Shelby Cobra Mach 1. There was reverence in his eyes as he contemplated the gleaming air cleaner with its crinkle finish and polished aluminum hi-lite fins. Teddy touched a brilliantly twinkling radiator cap with his fingers. His father nudged him back a bit.

  “You’re sandy, son,” he said. “Take a shower and then you can look.” He took a clean rag from his pocket and flicked it across the grille.

  “You shining up the engine again, Daddy?”

  “Boy, son, you sure are sandy,” Duane said. He glanced quickly at Teddy. He wished his boy were sturdy—even, perhaps, a little wild and nasty, with a face of his own.

  “We’ve been to the beach.”

  “Nah,” he said. “Nah you haven’t. Impossible.” Duane’s eyes were focused a little above Teddy and beyond. He cuffed the child’s shoulder playfully.

  “Yes we have, we have!” Teddy said excitedly. “See, Liberty’s sandy too. And Clem! We’re all sandy!”

  “Nah, you haven’t been to the beach,” Duane said, feinting a jab at Teddy’s chest.

  “We have, we have!” Teddy shrieked.

  “Okay, son, enough play for now.” Duane slammed the hood shut and crouched beside one of the Shelby’s mag wheels. He had just mounted four new tires—Pro Trac 60’s. He had longed for those big meats for a long time and now he possessed them. The big meats thrilled him, but he knew he was not as happy as he should have been. Duane sighed. His little boy with his narrow mouth and black wild hair looked exactly like his bitch-lezzie wife, Jean-Ann, and it made his heart sink anymore just to look at him. Duane loved his son, but whenever he showed him any affection, he now felt weird, even wicked. He had gone to a drive-in movie with Janiella a few nights ago to neck and eat fried chicken and they had seen a horror film about giant, soulless pods taking over the living, except that in this one instance the transformation was incomplete and a dog ended up having the head, the face, of a man on it. It was a grotesque sight and it had planted itself firmly in Duane’s mind. On the surface of things he was a fortunate man. Jean-Ann didn’t want a nickel from him, only a divorce and the freedom to live her own, ghastly life. He had four cherry cars and an intelligent, worldly-wise girlfriend who really liked to get it on. But all was not well beneath the surface of things. His little boy depressed him. Teddy was like a knocking in his Dad’s life’s engine.

  Janiella came up behind him and blew on his neck. She was wearing high-heeled sandals, short shorts and two handkerchiefs tied around her breasts.

  “I was thinking,” Duane mused, “maybe we could dye Teddy’s hair.”

  “What?” Liberty said.

/>   “That’s some idea,” Janiella said.

  Duane turned around and nodded. “Dye his hair. Bleach it from one of those little packages women use.”

  Janiella giggled.

  “That stuff could turn his black hair white,” Duane said.

  “It will come out orangey, believe me,” Janiella said.

  “I don’t mean white like that dog of yours,” Duane said to Liberty. “I mean a light blond like. He wouldn’t be so partial to Jean-Ann in his looks that way.”

  Teddy and the two women stared at him. Duane’s cars, sleek as rats, crouched around them.

  Duane raised the thumb and index fingers of his hands and boxed Teddy’s head in the square they made. He squinted, shrinking the square.

  “Getting rid of the hair would help,” Duane said. He dropped his hands and regarded Teddy thoughtfully. “If his jaws were a little fuller that would help too.”

  “You’re crazy, Duane,” Janiella said appreciatively.

  “How tall you believe my boy’s going to get? Jean-Ann was one tall drink of water.” Duane looked at Teddy reproachfully.

  “Jean-Ann,” Janiella said. She nibbled on Duane’s neck.

  “Jean-Ann, Jean-Ann. You’ve seen better heads on mule dicks, right!” Duane laughed and pinched her buttocks.

  Teddy was blushing. His narrow chest was mottled with red. “That’s the way they are,” he said to Liberty. “I’m going to go inside now.”

  In a slash pine, a crow perched on a branch. Smaller, frantic, brighter birds darted and swooped at it, calling. There was a nest somewhere. Everywhere, in the day’s last, lingering light, liaisons and arrangements were being made. It’s the dry season and somewhere, in the middle of the state, a pine tree blows up. Farther north, an elderly man with Alzheimer’s lives contentedly with his dead wife for three days while to the south a couple wearing scuba gear get married underwater. A teenage boy kills himself so he can donate his heart to his sick girlfriend while a homosexual whose lover has just left him goes into Woolworth’s and buys two gerbils. Love comes and goes, pitching its mansion. And on the circular track of days, it appears that Dread is gaining on Devotion every second.

  6

  When Liberty returned to her own house, she found it locked. She jiggled the doorknob. They never locked the house, but there it was, locked. Perhaps Landlord had come back. Landlord was, in fact, the landlord’s name, a person whom Liberty had never met, but who by his uncaring absence seemed generous enough. Willie dealt with him. Apparently the understanding was that Landlord might return, and when he did they’d have to find another place.

  Webby matter fouled the jalousies. Large moths clung to the darkness beneath the eaves. Looking in the window, she saw that the room was unchanged from the way she and Clem had left it when they had gone to the beach at noon. She pushed at the door once more, then returned to the street to study the house, surprised at how neglected it looked. A rusting hot-water heater, resembling a bomb, stood on the sagging side porch. Firecracker plant spilled out of the cracks in the foundation. The mailbox, which was stationed on a black chain coiling rigidly upward, dangled open, empty.

  It had been in just such a mailbox years ago where she had found Clem, a puppy barely alive, his soiled shape filling up dark space. The sun had beat down upon the box then as she looked in, and black insects had shifted in the hinges where it was damp. When she pulled him out, she saw that someone had burnt the pads of his feet, there were burns on his coat, on his soft muzzle. One eye was shut and oozed a clear liquid. She had taken him to a regular doctor because the veterinarian’s offices were farther away. The doctor, who knew her, said she hadn’t found him a moment too soon.

  All the doctors knew her there, for she hadn’t been well and doctors knew her. It had been this time of year but in another place, and seven years ago, before she and Willie were actually married. They were living near an abandoned orange grove, and the rotting fruit, on the ground and still hanging in the trees, made the air smell like a sad bar. It was the fall of what was their last year of school, but neither of them was going to school. By the end of that summer, Liberty knew she wasn’t going back. That was over, school, the excitement of making connections, the doors opening in her mind, the babble of voices becoming isolated, subdued, orderly. In science she had been the only one in the class who had seen the connection between the Thermos bottle and rocketry. She had seen the line leading from picnics to atom bombs.

  She had a gift, the teachers said. It was as if she’d been given a gift, the teachers said, and she was throwing it away.

  She had thrown it away. She took no comfort in connections. She had learned the strange paths love followed and believed only in clamorous uproar, cruel seasons, random acts.

  Where do you go when there’s nowhere to go, and the death you might have died belongs to you no longer?

  She heard a phone ringing, then it stopped. She went back across the dirt yard to the banyan tree, climbed up the trunk and walked out on a limb wide as a train track. The limb, rather than penetrate the house, had accommodated it nicely by veering up only inches from the bathroom window. Liberty lay on the limb and wiggled the screen out of the rotting wood, then squirmed through the window headfirst. Two lizards darted down the wall.

  “Willie,” Liberty called.

  At the front door, Clem was standing on two legs like any human being. He dropped softly inside when she pulled the door back. The lock was old and had gummed itself shut. She turned it back and forth. In the kitchen she covered a plate with dog food and set it on the floor for Clem. The plate was a large plastic one that depicted the First Presbyterian Church in Port Gibson, Mississippi, with its peculiar steeple atop which a large bronze finger pointed skyward. Clem worked away at the food, exposing the shrubbery, the steps, and the door to the nave. He always saved the revelation of the finger for last.

  The phone rang.

  “Why did you answer so quickly? What’s wrong?” Liberty’s mother demanded.

  “Nothing, nothing,” Liberty said.

  “Something’s wrong,” her mother gasped.

  “No.”

  “I hate it when you pick up the phone on the first ring. When I called your number before, the most peculiar thing happened. I got a tape. Are you hooked up to some answering machine, Liberty?”

  Liberty thought of life-support systems. Tubes and pumps. Machines that cleansed.

  “No.”

  “Where do you get the money for these things, Liberty. Having an answering service … the life you must lead!”

  “I have no answering service, Mother. You must have dialed wrong.”

  “Now how could I have dialed wrong. Really, the things you infer sometimes. I thought it was a trendy little joke you were making, something you felt was bohemian. The man was talking about friendship, how to make friends with the opposite sex or something. It was so sappy, but the man had a lovely voice. I have often wished your father’s voice was more mellifluous. Sometimes I dial Time and Temperature just to hear the mellifluous voice of a male stranger.” She sighed. “I wanted to ask you a question, dear. Do you remember Peter Marsh?”

  “I don’t, no.”

  “Oh, Liberty, are you on drugs or something? I sometimes wonder what has happened to your mind. You used to have such a good mind, Liberty. You were always so good with those hard questions like if there are four houses on a street and the Blakes live next to the Browns and the Burtons live next to the—”

  “I’ve never heard of Peter Marsh, Mother.”

  “Why when you were a child, you even knew the name of Hitler’s dog. I remember how astonished all our friends used to be at your acumen.”

  Liberty lowered herself to the floor and put her chin on her knees.

  “Peter Marsh used to be one of Daddy’s patients in the long ago,” Liberty’s mother began. “One day he came into the office and he was very quiet. Later, of course, everyone realized how uncharacteristic it was for him to be so quiet. He w
as a very handsome man and very successful with the ladies. Men liked him too. He was a city commissioner then. He always seemed to be having the best time, but that day he just didn’t smile or say a word and when anyone spoke to him he just shrugged or nodded. Well, finally he sat down in Daddy’s chair and opened his mouth and his teeth were just braided with pubic hairs. The little dental hygienist Daddy had at the time practically screamed her head off.”

  “Oh,” Liberty said.

  “It was a joke, Liberty. A joke! You’re so stuffy sometimes.”

  “Well,” Liberty said.

  “The point is,” her mother said, “that Peter Marsh is running for governor. Isn’t it a small world? I hope you and Willie are still involved in the democratic process, Liberty. I think it would be fun for you to go out and vote for someone you know for governor.”

  “Umm,” Liberty said.

  “Is everything all right?” her mother said coolly. “There isn’t a burglar or anyone there, is there? A burglar just waiting until you complete this call, threatening you? Is Willie helpless somewhere?”

  When time permitted, her mother practiced attitudes toward disaster. She studied carefully the written or televised accounts of victims’ responses—in particular the survivors of floods, hurricanes and plane crashes. She attended with grave interest the replies of mothers whose small children had been missing in some National Park for forty-eight hours. Liberty suspected that her mother still cherished the possibility of little Liberty in some alternate world toddling away from the cheerfulness of a family campfire into the wolf-filled gorges and bottomless lakes of a vast forest so that she could react with composure and grace.

  “No, Mother, no, no. A burglar.” Liberty made a laughing sound. “How’s Daddy?”

  There was an affronted, momentary silence. “How do you envision my life, Liberty? Really, I’m curious. You used to be such a sensitive girl. You act as though my life was the sound of laughter carried by a breeze over a green lawn. You act as though my life took place on a sunlit balcony someplace. Daddy’s the same as ever. When I met Daddy I had twenty-two cavities and filling them was the last thing that man has ever done for me. Do you remember Tina Terrance?”