Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

  “Yes,” Liberty said. “Tina was the artist who was living with you last Christmas.”

  The Christmas turkey had crouched before them on the table. There was wine and brandy. There was a sweet potato and banana casserole. There was pecan pie. There was a white mop leaning against a wall, and just outside the window, there was a collapsing septic tank. Willie had been silent and extraordinarily silent that day like someone laid out in a casket. Before they sat down to the meal, they had watched a “Star Trek” rerun on television. The episode concerned a woman named Stella Mudd who was so shrewish that her husband fled into space, creating a colony of androids, including a duplicate of Stella, which could be silenced upon command. Lucile had felt that Lamon had been inordinately amused by the plot and it had put her in a bad humor.

  “Your mother’s tense, very tense,” Tina had whispered to Liberty later, above the soapy dishes. “Very into signs like tent caterpillar shapes or dead wrens at the feeder. There have been these headless wrens lying around by the feeder and it drives her wild. Your mother’s not wrapped very tight, I think.” Tina grinned. “Like her marbles are a little flat on one side.”

  “You’re saying her elevator doesn’t go all the way to the top, like,” Liberty said.

  “Boy, you’re a cold one,” Tina said. “Innocence is not your game, I can see that.”

  Liberty said, “I can even remember the name of Hitler’s dog now, Mother. It was Blondi.”

  “I don’t mean to suggest that you should remember everything,” her mother said. “Only schizophrenics remember everything. Tina isn’t living with us any more. She moved out a month or so ago. She married the largest Negro I have ever seen in my life.”

  “My,” Liberty said.

  “Well, you know Tina. Everything is art to her, her life is her art, but honestly, the size of that man. Sometimes he puts his hands around her head, just playfully, you know, and her head just vanishes. Well, Tina’s gone and Daddy has already got two other students living here. These are boys. They bring home the most peculiar assortment of groceries. I think they must steal them out of people’s cars.” She sighed. “You know when you know you’re really old, Liberty?”

  Liberty looked at a vein tapping in her wrist. Tap. Tap. Tap.

  “I never dreamed I’d just grow old like this,” her mother said.

  “You’re not old.”

  “Forty. I’m forty years of age, Liberty.”

  Liberty knew for a fact that her mother was forty-five.

  “But we have to make the best of things!” her mother said. “You know the woman who got 1.2 million from the jury, the one whose husband died in the plane crash? Pots of people died in that crash, but she got the biggest award. She was in the hospital giving birth to their second child or something right after it happened. Isn’t that always the way? These women always end up in the hospital giving birth right after their husbands die, the same old revolving door story, and the nurse comes in with the fellow’s effects in this little box and there was his watch on one of those elasticized bands. There was this stuff webbed around in the band, it was like his skin, and the nurse said, ‘Why that’s nothing, dearie, it’s just a little fuzz like caught there’ and she rubbed it off with her fingers and dropped it on the floor. The wife got 1.2 million for mental anguish. Now that’s making the best of things …”

  Liberty could hear her mother breathing.

  “Talking to you at times is like addressing a paper plate,” her mother said. “Well, I’ve got to go now. I have to turn the water off under the carrots.”

  After her mother hung up, Liberty kept the receiver to her ear. There was a faint sound, as of waves breaking. She could hear a distant conversation murmuring across the wires. Frequently the conversations of strangers were made quite plain to her. She had heard very clearly, for instance, a woman once describing a monkey-hair jacket she had had in her youth.

  It was beautiful, the woman said. I knew what I was doing. I was ten years ahead of my time.

  The voices that seemed clearest were the ones most lonely and aggrieved, the bitterest, the most amazed. There seemed to be a great dark mournful web of voices that Liberty could swing into as easily, as lightly, as one of its essential threads.

  She returned the phone to its cradle. It instantly rang. When she answered, the communicant on the other end dropped the receiver.

  “Doll,” Charlie said. “Scusi. Phone fell. I had to call you. I have new thinking relevant to our future together. I think we should change Teddy’s name to Reverdy. What do you think? Reverdy, a good Southern name. Do you know what Janiella, that awful woman, calls him sometimes? Odd. She calls him Odd sometimes.”

  “How can she call him Odd?” Liberty asked.

  “ ‘Odd’, she says. ‘Put that chicken pot pie in the microwave for three minutes.’ She says, ‘Odd, pick up your feet for godssakes.’ Things along that line.”

  “I hate that woman,” Liberty said. “You have no taste.”

  “I have no odor. Sterile men have no odor. We’re like vodka. Didn’t you know that? That’s why we’re in such demand.”

  Everything was very quiet. Then she heard ice tinkling in a glass as Charlie swallowed.

  “I didn’t know that,” she said.

  “Liberty, Liberty, Liberty,” Charlie said.

  Liberty imagined being with Charlie—two lovers in a melting embrace floating in a glass of whiskey on a sponged Formica table in an unfamiliar town.

  “I have been a drunk for fourteen years,” Charlie said. “That’s seven years twice. I have spent this day in the contemplation of this crucial number, for it’s widely known that every seven years one’s nature changes. There are seven changes of personality in each of us whether our life be long or short. There are seven faces we will eventually show. There are seven attachments that must be broken. Yet seven, too, is the number of perfection. If one does not change, one remains perfected. Completed and therefore solved. Indeed, considered finished and so—”

  Their connection was abruptly interrupted by a piercing whine, followed by a hum, followed by silence. Liberty replaced the receiver and pressed her hand against her ear. She sometimes had a grim vision of herself being this ear alone, a large and pale organ attuned only to complaint, bewilderment and sorrow—the antennaed hairs rough and sturdy as swamp grass, its intricate whorls pink and cute as a nest of rat pups—her true self teetering beneath it.

  She looked at the phone, a black, horrid, hunkering thing. It rang.

  “I hate being disconnected like that,” Charlie said. “It brings to mind The Big Disconnect, you know? They’re teaching Death to little children now in the schools. They have to write essays on How I Would Feel If I Had to Die at Midnight and they have to write it neatly. Neatness still counts.”

  Liberty wrapped the phone cord around her arm. “Death’s always been in vogue,” she said.

  “How’s the kid’s egg?” Charlie asked. “Is he still carrying it around? What a cute kid! He and you and me could really make it. I’m telling you our time to change has come. I’m talking life! By my calculations you have been married to this Willie person for seven years. Clem, your holy hound, is seven as well, am I right? And so is Reverdy.”

  “Why does everyone want to change Teddy’s name,” Liberty said. “Reverdy, the Phantom, Odd …”

  “We give many names to the things that matter most,” Charlie said. “Like, as you know, the Eskimos and snow.”

  “Duane wants to dye Teddy’s hair a different color so he won’t remind him of his wife.”

  “Watch out! He’ll do it. He’s a very sincere man. I met him just the other night at a party they gave. I had to keep my distance from Janiella but I chatted up the other ladies. Turquoise, teal and aqua are the big colors for the upcoming season, I told them. Mauve is out. Peach is still holding its own. White and bleached woods are very big. Country French is still in style, but Scandinavian never caught on. Beds are being emphasized, Euro-modernist is in.
Then I chatted up Duane for a while. We drank. We spoke fornication, weaponry, engines, you know, boy talk. I know my business, I told him. If you want to sell a house, you’ve got to have a house that’s happening. Anecdotes, I told him. The buyer loves anecdotes. If a house has character, you can add another five grand to the sale price. We drank. Well, something clicked. He went into the bedroom, took his twelve gauge from the closet, strode over to the pool, wherein there were people, I might add, and took a bead on this little rubber frog that was drifting around in it. The little frog trails chlorine from its bottom, you know. Nice little frog with a happy smile, his rubber legs crossed and his rubber eyes happy? Well, Duane blasted that poor little froggy to smithereens.”

  “That’s how it happened?” Liberty said faintly. “The crack in the pool?”

  “He had misinterpreted my remarks a little. He thinks in terms of ballads. Everyone thought it was fairly amusing once they realized they hadn’t been maimed. After that event, we were all given a hamburger, another drink and a tour of the garage. Included in the garage tour was the freezer tour. There’s a big white humming mother out there filled with neatly wrapped packages that Duane made out of various Bambis he’s bagged. Chillness, obscurity, disarray, extremis. The mind stirs with no thought of future life when it contemplates that thing, let me tell you. Did I ever tell you what my mother keeps in her freezer? It’s not her underwear. She keeps her underwear in the refrigerator, in the crisper bin. What she keeps in the freezer is the fruitcake my grandmother was bringing over to the house on Christmas Day when she was run over by a motorcycle. That fruitcake has been in the freezer for five years. It’s wrapped in green paper and has a red string around it.”

  “You’ve never told me that before,” Liberty said. “I’ve never repeated myself to you, have I?” Charlie said, shocked.

  “You told me that your grandmother died from plucking a wild hair.”

  “That was my other granny,” Charlie said. “Everybody has two grannies. You think you know my limits, don’t you. You believe you sense my deficiencies. You think I’m the sort of fellow who would lie about his grannies. You think I’m the kind of fellow content to maintain intimacies with a beautiful woman by the fluctuation of a magnetic field, that is, the telephone. You think language is just the human medium after all, and I’m employing it because basically I’m shallow. This human business has gotten a little out of hand you think. Drinkers can’t be lovers, you think. Oh the bleak, gnawing, crushing painful things you think! Your silence is a little black garden. You know everything there by heart.”

  Liberty said nothing. She listened to his voice, which seemed to be blowing to her from across some blank expanse of water.

  “Silence is Liberty’s little hidey-hole,” Charlie said.

  She heard more liquid being poured into a glass.

  “C’mon, talk to me,” Charlie said. “With practice our language will grow to accommodate the event of you and me and Reverdy.”

  “Charlie,” Liberty said. “Where are you calling from?”

  “Where am I calling from? I am calling from home, specifically from Room 303 of the Paradise Hotel on the corner of Coconut and Main. Every time I wake up in this room, I think I’m a case of mistaken identity. Do you see Room 303? The linoleum floor painted red, the single window scraped by palm fronds, the hostile eye of the TV, the ant cakes in the corner, the bureau, the bed, the bottle, me?”

  “I see it.”

  “Room 303 is where I don’t want to be, and I have been in Room 303 for years.”

  “You have plenty of money,” Liberty said. “You could move out tomorrow.”

  “That palm is suffering from palm leaf skeletonizer. Have you heard of that disease? I’m sure this palm has got it. Everything’s got something these days. A guy told me his car has arthritis … I do have money. After I saw you at breakfast I made another three grand in commissions. A young couple buying their dream house, deciding in my hearing where to put the Bokharas, the highboy, their marital bed, the baby’s nine-foot toy giraffe. They stood beside the caged pool and I could see their heads practically glowing with visions of pool sex, fulfillment, happiness, dreams of God knows what. It was so depressing. Stop! I wanted to scream at them. Your destiny is one of chaos. You will find only disappointment behind these walls, beneath this roof. Your desires are petty, irrational, unattainable. Your infant will grow to detest you. Your husband will be unfaithful. Your wife will scream at you with her bathrobe open. Intimacies will only occur between you when incited by parties, alcohol or aberrant fantasies. You must change your life! Become wanderers. Possess nothing. Confront your solitude. Go forth into the world.”

  Liberty held her breath, then slowly exhaled.

  “This wouldn’t be us, of course,” Charlie said.

  “Charlie.”

  “You love me!” Charlie cried.

  “I love Willie.”

  “Love takes time, I’m willing to admit. Certain kinds of love. But I know you’ll be able to find a place for me in your love, and when you do, we’ll just move right into it … the hound, Reverdy, you and me. You’ve got to get the kid out of his daddy’s house, Liberty. Duane’s nuts. When I was speaking with him the other night, he said, ‘Charlie, buddy, if I ever found out that a man was messing with my Janiella, I’d tear out both their hearts. I’d tear off their hands and roast them and eat them, the palms of the hands being the only thing worth having off a human being.’ ”

  “You’re the one who’d best get out of Teddy’s daddy’s house,” Liberty said lightly. But she was frightened. She heard Charlie crunching ice with his teeth.

  “Everything’s cyclic,” Charlie said. “The desire to live is cyclic. Why don’t you tell me I give good phone? Come on, talk to me. Silence indicates a considerable nada. You’ve been associating with that dog of yours too much. Heavy nada there. Not that I don’t think he’s great. But the eye with which one sees nada is the eye with which one sees one. You know?”

  “I’m a silent married woman,” Liberty said.

  “I have the television set on here in my room,” Charlie said. “It’s a game show. Husbands can apparently win fabulous prizes by scaling a gigantic greased washboard. The husbands’ wives are at the top of the washboard urging them on. Whoops. None of the husbands seem to be making it.”

  “I have to go, Charlie.”

  “No, wait, I’ll change the channel. Uh-oh. Wow, that’s disgusting … heart just popped right out. When is all this supposed to be taking place? In the long, long ago. In the days of sorcerers and the bicameral mind … what’s this!…”

  “Charlie—”

  “No, wait, I’ll turn it off. There, it’s off. Do you want me to read to you? I used to like to read these tawdry doomsday books, the kind with virulent bacilli and climatic melt where millions die, there is sex and savagery and man’s inherent dignity never comes up?… But I’ve changed my habits. It’s all part of my alteration process. I’m working my way through seventeenth-century verse and prose now. Andrew Marvell, Sir Thomas Browne, Sir John Suckling.”

  “Donne, of course.”

  “ ‘If God could be seen and known in hell, hell in an instant would be heaven.’ That’s Donne.”

  “ ‘Miserable riddle,’ ” Liberty said, “ ‘when the same worm must be my mother and my sister and my self.’ Donne.”

  “Let’s drop the seventeenth century,” Charlie said. “Too much morbid imagery. Too much sensual asceticism. Turn the light off and I’ll turn the light off. There. It’s dark. Now let’s diffuse the dark into little pinpoints of light, tiny brief explosions of light with words of love. Seriously, when can I see you?”

  “You can’t.”

  “I will,” Charlie said. “I will see you. Has your old man returned?”

  “No,” Liberty said.

  “Where does he go? Where do you go? I saw in the paper that two kids had been saved from a burning house in the Panhandle by an unidentified man. Do you think Willie travele
d up there to do that? Could that have been our Willie? He saved the children. I think he even saved the aged collie. Do you know if Willie gives blood?”

  “I don’t think he’s ever given blood.”

  “Too minor probably. There’ll always be blood, right? I think he’ll be donating his living organs soon, important living organs. Then he’ll open the zoos and prisons. I have a theory. I think Willie saves people as a kind of joke.”

  “That would be terrible,” Liberty said.

  “Really. A joke. Willie thinks abstractly. He thinks in opposition to his brain. Actually, Willie doesn’t give a shit. Now myself, I think concretely. Your past is irredeemable, but it’s not over yet. Here’s what I want to tell you. I went out and bought us a car with the money I just made, a finny old Caddy, big enough to hold us all, the means by which we will make good our escape. Blinding chrome everywhere, my favorite color. And the trunk! Wait until you see the size of the trunk! I’ve begun filling it with stuff for us. Butterfingers, hot sauce, Chuckles, hominy, potted meats. When we’re ready to go, I’ll fill the cooler with limesickles for the kid.”

  “All this is impossible, Charlie,” Liberty said.

  “We’ll have to start out by car. It’s only reasonable. Then we’ll determine other means of travel. The kid doesn’t like limesickles, I’ll fill it with Creamsicles.”

  “He likes the ice cream with the polar bears on them, actually,” Liberty said. “He collects the wrappers.” But he wouldn’t need the wrappers if they went away, she thought. They’d leave all that behind.

  “All right!” Charlie said.

  “Those polar bears kind of depress me, really,” Liberty said. “I imagine the real thing. And then I see the real thing far from its ice floe home, lying flat, jaws agape, on the floor of a Dallas mansion.”

  “Liberty, you mustn’t allow yourself to be brought down by an ice cream sandwich.”