by Joy Williams
She laughed.
“Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, you think going away is just a feverish fancy of mine, but it’s not. Why would I want to deceive us? We have to begin. What I’m going to do is give up drinking. This is my last drink. This one right here, this luminous lovely, unlike all the others and more precious because it is the last …”
Liberty heard the sound of breaking glass.
“Oh no, oh shit, I dropped it,” Charlie cried. They both clung to the phone in silence. Then there was a click. Charlie had hung up.
Clem gazed at her from the floor, his forepaws curled beneath him. Liberty’s hands were sweating. It was quiet. Someone could break into this house, and it would be like herself breaking into the house of another. It would be someone just like herself. What is it that you want? she would ask the intruder.
When the phone rang again, she stared at it. There was something wrong with it, surely.
“I’ve been on a very pretty inlet,” the voice began, “the tide comes in, goes slack, pours back out. Very peaceful there.”
“Willie,” Liberty said.
“One sinks gently from nothingness to nothingness. No bubbles.”
“You’ve been gone for days,” Liberty said.
“It always amazes me. There’s nobody out here.”
“There’s nobody out there, I thought that’s what we always said.”
“We have our parts, don’t we,” Willie said. “Our lines.”
“Please come back. I’m missing you.”
“Come to me,” Willie said. “I called earlier, but the line was busy. Who was that?”
“Charlie.”
“Charlie is a tragic figure, but dimly, only dimly so. Have you been seeing him?”
“No.” Liberty looked at some daisies she had cut and put in a glass.
“He believes that everything’s meant to be forgotten,” Willie said.
Liberty watched the daisies. There had been daisies in such a glass for years and years, everywhere.
“Come to me tomorrow,” Willie said. “Walk to the end of Buttonwood Beach. Go down around six in the morning. That’s when the Gulf is going to be pouring back through the Pass. Jump in, and it will sweep you about a quarter mile down Long Key to a yellow house. I’ll meet you there.”
“Jump in? There’s a bridge to Long Key.”
“But it’s almost twenty miles from you. Jumping in is the way. I’ve checked the tides. You’ll drift.”
“Jump in, then drift,” Liberty said. “It sounds like what we’ve been doing all right.”
“That’s what we’re doing,” Willie said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
Liberty went into the bathroom and turned the water on in the shower. She undressed, then hesitated. She looked at the pitted handles and the silver water with its sulfur smell falling from the corroded head like thousands of needles. The water swept a small brown spider from a spotted tile. She turned the water off. Charlie had a point about showers.
In the bedroom, a voice from the radio was singing
Won’t that room of mine be a lonely place to be
After I been holding you so close to me
And won’t that old stairway be a little hard to climb
To a lonely room to wait for another place, another time.
The paddles of an overhead fan threw shadows on the wall. On the bureau was a framed picture of her and Willie, taken years before, when they were children. They did not stand close to one another. They had left plenty of room for something between them.
She wanted to take Teddy out of his daddy’s house, but she was weak, she could not be trusted. She was weak, a drifter. If she took him with her, he’d be a drifter too. A baby drifter.
She set the alarm clock, darkened the room and lay down on the bed. She heard Clem drop his weight to the floor. She tried to bring to mind her ladder, but this night it was not there, the smooth, furled, endless rungs, each of which she created, then searchingly found, down into sleep. This night it was the stairway of the song, now ended, a stairway rising crookedly upward, empty, but full of voices.
II
It is living and ceasing to live
that are imaginary solutions.
Existence is elsewhere.
—André Breton
1
The voices went on and on. This was years ago. Liberty’s father, Lamon, had once been a successful dentist. He was popular because he administered gas when he cleaned teeth and he used his prescription pad in an imaginative manner. Every afternoon after school, Liberty hurried to his office to observe his patients under the influence of nitrous oxide. Her mother thought she was there reading the magazines.
Liberty’s father was handsome and carefree, prone to minimalize the importance of the waning of love and the passage of time. His patients adored him.
“Your daddy,” Lenore Biddle said one hot morning in Liberty’s childhood, just before she reeled out the door, “highly resembles both William Holden and Father Johnson of St. Luke’s.”
In fact, there was something priestly about Liberty’s father’s ministrations. No matter how discouraged or tired his patients seemed when they entered the little rooms, they always left in high spirits, refreshed and confident, absolved, for the moment, of both care and carious lesions. The walls were blue, the color of peace; the tone of her father’s smock, green. The combination elicited confidence and confession. The need for confession seemed paramount among the men.
“I’ve been thinking, Doc, about time. We spend time as if we had too much time. We complain that the day is long and the night is long and then we complain because our days and nights are gone too soon. I’ve also been thinking about boredom. I have discovered that I am a boring man. It dawned on me yesterday when I walked into my office and realized that all the women I’ve hired look like Linda. Dark, sort of frizzy hair, so-so breasts, sweet personalities. You know my little wife, Linda. Well, it was a humbling realization, Doc, it was a boring realization. I can’t believe I was put on this earth just to be faithful to Linda …”
That was the lawyer. And there was the butcher, the gardener, the boat broker.
“I worry about being locked up. I can feel it, the pressure. Like being buried in mud, or frozen solid in a block of ice, or crushed beneath stones. Do you think I’m going to do something awful …”
There was the man who owned the old hotel, Oversea—where Liberty and her parents dined freely and badly once a week in the deserted dining room—who had the need, under gas, to recite limericks.
“There was a stout lad name of Pizzle,” he’d begin. “Oh, the little girlie’s here. Hi, sweetie,” he’d say to Liberty, who was slumped behind her copy of Jack and Jill.
He’d suck on the gas a moment more and puddle his bib a little. He couldn’t keep himself from continuing. “The best one of all,” he’d say. “There was a young plumber of Leigh …”
He seemed the cheeriest of the patients, but he killed himself one night, laying his head in one of the Oversea’s big dirty ovens.
The women seemed less philosophical. Even when the nitrous oxide took hold, they’d be talking about dinner and movies and what they’d read in the papers.
“D’jall see that article on those Siamese black girls joined at the head? They’re alike in every thought and mood except that one worries about her hair all the time, always fussing at it with brushes and combs and all, and the other one couldn’t care less … Joined at the head, I swear. They try to lead as normal a life as possible, the article says. They want to marry and have babies and they like Italian food and yard sales …”
Eventually, though, all would grow calm. Feet and knuckles would relax, eyes would shine, and mouths would move languidly around pic and pad and paste, as their terrors and concerns were absorbed for a moment in the vastness of the vision of a healthy mouth.
Liberty’s father lost his practice through prescription misuse and income tax fraud, but grateful patients kept the family going
. Her father could always get a free haircut; her mother could have a chair reupholstered for next to nothing. Appliances and wine and citrus and quartered beef continued to arrive for months after the suspended sentence. Their house filled up with bad art. The gratitude of a man named Bobby String, who had been cured of trench mouth, knew no bounds. He owned a shop that specialized in Western Wear and Furnishings, and Liberty had a closet full of fringed jackets, chaps, leather vests and boots and belts with brass buckles the size of fists. Her books were clamped together with horse bookends, the shade of her bedside lamp depicted horses grazing and her bath towel hung from a ring gripped in the mouth of a bronze horse’s head. There were horses on her curtains, there were horses on her rug. She had a frightening milk mug where the handle was in the shape of a hysterically rearing horse. Liberty did not ride and actually had no longing for or opinion about horses, but her room resembled a shrine to the symbols and codes of puberty.
Lamon kept his good looks throughout his professional troubles. He kept his smile and his thick head of hair. Liberty’s mother, Lucile, fared less well. She detested being married to a failed man. She spent most of her days clad in silk pajamas, sitting in the breakfast nook. She brooded and let her housekeeping slip. The house became somewhat tacky to the touch. Plants withered. Even cast iron plants, even cacti, began to drop before Lucile’s devastating disregard.
Lamon took up painting. Lucile paced around in her darkening silk pajamas. Liberty concentrated on her homework.
“For special credit, I’m going to make up a country,” Liberty said. “I’m going to have a page on education and a page on religion and a page on weather. I’m going to make up a flag and a language and I’m going to draw the clothes they wear and their methods of transportation. I’m going to—”
“Oh, can’t you relax,” her mother said.
Liberty was an avid student. She loved school, she loved her teachers. She longed to tell her mother that the flowers depicted on her silk pajamas were four-o’clocks. Four-o’clocks had been one of the answers on her science test. Four-o’clocks hinted at the fathomless mysteries of genetics and fate, dominance and happiness. Liberty refrained from mentioning the four-o’clocks.
One evening during the long spring of the family’s disgrace, Liberty went outside to the picnic table and sat down beside her father who was tracing Elihu Vedder’s The Lair of the Sea Serpent out of an art magazine.
“That’s nice, Daddy,” Liberty said.
The painting was a pleasant landscape of sand dunes, beach, water and brilliant sky. Everything was rendered realistically, even the gigantic griseous lizard slithering toward the sea.
Lamon looked at the painting and then at Liberty. He poured bourbon into a tall orange glass that said FLORIDA THE SUNSHINE STATE on it. On the glass, the sun had a face. It had no nose or ears but it had a big smile and eyes with eyelashes.
“You understand life, don’t you Liberty?”
“I don’t think so, Daddy.”
“You understand that lurking in the heart of each pure, pretty day that is given to us is a snaky, malevolent, cold-blooded, creepy, diseased potentiality.” He patted her head, then cleared the picnic table of brushes and paints and set out plates for supper. It was a warm night with thunder, and the grass was long and yellow. Her father lit the charcoal in the grill and made another brown drink in the happy glass. Liberty went into the house to sharpen her pencils for school the next day. On the patio just to the side of the sliding glass doors was a planter in the form of a ceramic burro pulling a cart. The planter was full of leggy geraniums and the tip of the burro’s left ear. When Liberty had been smaller than she was then, she had sat in front of the burro every morning and attempted to feed him grass.
“Mommy,” Liberty called upstairs, “do you want one hot dog or two?”
“Two,” Lucile answered.
“Potato chips or potato salad?”
“Chips,” Lucile said and descended the stairs, smiling grimly. She wore nylons and heels, her good linen suit and the top to her flowered pajamas. A stole of several minks was draped around her shoulders, and she wore gloves.
“Are you going out, Mommy?” Liberty asked, perplexed.
“Yes, I am,” Lucile said, raising her eyebrows, which had been recently and severely tweezed. “I am going out.” Her thin, annoyed face was rouged, and her neck shone with perfume.
Well, if she is, she is, Liberty thought.
She followed her mother outside and the three of them sat down at the picnic table. Lucile pressed her gloved fingers together and gave a long, rambling, conversational grace that was equal parts prayer, complaint and nostalgia. She complimented God on certain things, expressing her appreciation of night-blooming flowers, the color violet and the vision of the world offered through snorkeling. She recalled Liberty’s birth and her craving, after its accomplishment, for a coffee malted. She remembered a vacation she and Lamon had taken to Mexico in the days when they had money.
“I thought I would have adventures,” her mother said. “I thought I would have experiences and make memories. But all I met there was Mr. Hepatitis. Your father took me all the way to Mexico to meet Mr. Hepatitis.”
This recollection seemed to stop her. She said “Amen,” nodded, opened her eyes, adjusted her mink, and began to eat her hot dogs. She ate ravenously. Ketchup dotted her gloves. The light dimmed and they finished their meal. A child in a house nearby began practicing the trumpet.
“I think we need a change,” Lucile said. She stood up. There were moth holes on the sleeve of her jacket and bun crumbs on her lap.
“Please, darling,” Lamon said. “I’m drunk and unhappy and I’m sure I won’t be able to react as swiftly as I would like.”
Her mother walked in her mink through the warm grass into the garage from which she emerged a moment later with a red six-gallon gas can.
“Oh please, Lucile, please, please, please.” Daddy lay his head on the picnic table.
“Do you have any matches, Lamon?” Lucile asked smiling.
“No, darling, I don’t.” His head was pressed against the picnic table as though glued. “I used them all up lighting the charcoal. There are no matches here or anywhere in the world.”
“Things come to an end,” Lucile said. “You have made us pariahs in this town. There is nothing in this town anymore for us but pity.”
“I bet you haven’t taken your pill,” Lamon said.
“Liberty’s teachers give her A’s out of pity,” Lucile mused.
“Please take your pill, darling, and you’ll go to those nice movies. You know that you enjoy that, darling. It will be like going to a pleasant movie.” Lamon sat up and tipped the ice from his empty glass into his mouth. Lucile turned abruptly and tottered toward the house, tipped toward the weight of the gas can in her right hand.
“Just remember that I love you, Lamon,” she yelled without looking back. “I love you, I love you, I love you!” The sounds of the trumpet ceased. Dogs began to bark. She went into the house.
Liberty hurried in after her. The gas can sat on a wicker love seat at one end of the living room and her mother sat in a chair at the other, smoking a cigarette.
“Mommy,” Liberty said. “What’s the matter? What are you going to do?”
“Do you know about the Buddhists, Liberty?”
“They meditate.”
“What else?”
Liberty chewed strenuously on her thumbnail. “They believe that there’s something other than existence.”
Her mother sighed. “What do they do to themselves sometimes, Liberty?”
“I don’t know,” Liberty said.
“You’ve never understood me,” her mother said.
Liberty, nine years old, bowed her head.
Lucile stubbed out her cigarette and twisted the little scowling minks from her shoulders with a strangling motion that, Liberty thought, must have terminated any illusion of life they might have had left.
“What the
Buddhists do upon occasion is immolate themselves, Liberty.” She looked at Liberty expectantly, then sighed. “You’re too young to understand love,” she said.
Things seemed better the following day. The gas can was back in the garage where it belonged, beside the lawnmower. When Liberty returned from school, her father was standing in the backyard at an easel facing a blooming poinciana tree. Liberty approached the canvas, expecting to see a likeness.
“Daddy,” she said after a moment. “That’s a lot of teeth.”
“Fred Huxley’s mouth from memory,” her father said with satisfaction. “I’ve never seen such a mess before or since. He was playing catch with his son and the ball hit him smack in the mouth.”
Liberty wandered into the house and into the kitchen where she went to the refrigerator and took out a bottle of 7-Up. Her mother stood washing dishes in the sink. She wore a pair of dazzling white shorts and a clean, blue shirt. Her hair was washed and neatly braided. She seemed happy and relaxed.
“Honeybunch,” Lucile said, “did Daddy tell you? We’re moving. Daddy’s going to get a job teaching in a little college up in the north of the state.”
“What’s he going to teach?” Liberty said. She looked at the girl in the bathing suit and cap on the dark green bottle, preparing to dive. YOU LIKE IT IT LIKES YOU the bottle said.
“Art, I think.” Her mother sniffed loudly. “It’s not much of a college.”
Liberty looked through the window at her father painting landscapes of teeth and gums from memory. “I don’t want to move,” Liberty said. “I’d miss school. I’d miss my teachers.”
“Now, honeybunch,” her mother said.
“I’d miss my friends.” Liberty clutched her knapsack and her bottle of 7-Up and widened her eyes to keep from crying. The thought of going off into some strange place with her parents terrified her.
“Well, actually, we thought you’d feel that way,” her mother said. “So Daddy spoke with Calvin Stone who apparently is very grateful for all the root canal work that Daddy did for him. Very grateful. And Mr. Stone said that you could live with his family.”