State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  When you think of life’s routine … They’d always have to make a remark about Entree Six: Red Snapper, Hush Puppy and Cole Slaw, our luncheon special all for only $1.35. They’d have the same attire—seersucker jacket, black pants, white shirt—and the same amusements in their linty pockets. Comb, nail clip and a roll of Life Savers in assorted flavors. I believe that 98 per cent, if not more, of all Life Savers in America are sold to middle-aged men out to turn a trick. I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.

  Yet I’d attend to them for I’m passing the time while I recover. I’m just taking this opportunity to get better. Yes, we’d go out, these patrons, these consumers, and myself. Down to the race track and a bottle of Mums. Scratching at me beneath the clubhouse table as though I were a flea. Each time they got up they shot their cuffs and grazed me while passing. Father sees all this. He imagines that I’m doing it. I must confess, I used to see him everywhere. On the phone and in my sorority sisters’ heartshaped lockets. On some mornings when the air is very clear, windless muggy mornings when I feel my head earnestly trying to repair itself, I can hear him tracking me. It’s a sound like a hymn. Pale. Full of rectitude. And I’m distressed because I see that even when I cheat, I’m losing.

  But the summer vanished and now it’s the fall. I’m rocking on the swing as though in my dotage, watching the students leave their classes and spill across the lawns, a pretty amoeba washing up the walks, cutting across the grass, which is cut out like cookies in the shape of Greek letters.

  It’s accurate grass, not a single Weed, all the roots and rhizome stacked in the gutters. This whole estate, this college acreage, once belonged to a madman. He had a circus quartered here. You can still see the lions’ paw prints on the concrete rim of the swimming pool, and stranger things still and some not so strange. What acts! Elephants, bears and Siamese twins truly from Siam. Silhouette artists and palmists. A man with a tattooed eye and another with an organ growing directly from his ear. Actually it looked more like an infant’s pacifer, but who would come to see that? They billed it as his organ.

  He’s around still, a soldier of fortune.

  Many of the old performers return. Dwarfs and gorgeous ladies. Noodle Man came back before leaving for Fez forever. Nine feet tall and one hundred and three pounds. He went into the Student Union and had a cup of tea. I missed seeing him, however. Oh yes, they love the returning, even though it breaks their hearts. The place is a tomb. The menagerie is buried everywhere. Even so, all the structures are in gay colors. You can see it glowing beneath the fresh cheap paint that the maintenance men have applied.

  Now I see an aerialist, walking his Doberman bitch. The bitch is in heat, flagging everything in sight. The aerialist is old, bald and handsome. Perhaps he is a juggler, he has a sequined groin. He passes very closely to the house. He has pierced ears but no earrings. The dog pulls him along enthusiastically. She’ll outlast him. I wonder what will become of her.

  There’s quite a mob in the streets now. Boys with bright bandanas like apaches. Girls in tennis skirts. The noon siren on the firehouse begins to blow. Everything is drenched in sun. It’s like a festival! In the air are chemical experiments and kites and tennis balls. And in the middle of it all walks Father. He’s walking slowly, as though for amusement. I’m not startled for I knew he’d come. Redoubtable Father, it’s him all right. Ablepharous Daddy. There’s no need to ask anyone whether my recognition is true. I leave the porch and run up to my room, and come back down again with my camera. No more than half a minute has gone by. I’m not a year old now, no, I haven’t gained a day. I’m just a tiny thought now, rocking in his sperm and then I go back even further than that. I’m nothing but bloodless warmth like the hot yellow beak of a bird.

  He’s looking at the porch, at the still trembling swing. There’s a red claim check tied to his small and battered leather bag. His coat is rumpled. He turns his lidless eye on me.

  Le temps gagne sans tricher. C’est la loi.

  I go to him once more, coyly as a bride.

  6

  In by seven and out by eleven, as the laundress says, and we have to be out of here by noon or we’ll be charged for another day. From the window there is a view of the street. This is the parade route when there are parades, which there is about to be. It is not a fashionable place. It is lodging for those who seek relief and not amusement. It is a way station for those who haven’t traveled for quite some time. It’s in a different class entirely from the motels on the beaches with their Hawaiian bars and their swimming pools. Off to one side of the courtyard is a ping-pong table. Over the door to the office is a sign, WE ENCOURAGE YOUR INSPECTION. Which is curious, for surely, many times over in America, there are those good people who check out before in, but they do not come here. This place is inhabited by men who lay tile, newspaper reporters nightly eating chicken and drinking wine on the tufted bedspread, the boys who bait the hooks on party boats. This is no place for gifted lovers like ourselves.

  All the lights are orange to keep away the insects. Father doesn’t unpack his suitcase. He draws things out of it secretively. I never had a secret of my own. They were all Father’s and he kept them for both of us.

  Where is Grady? I am not acquainted with him yet. He is down in Artifact I, on the campus, studying. Soon he will want to love me. His hands will grip my waist, his lips move across my stomach.…

  Pardon me, I am so inept at identity. Why is this girl here? Was she a foundling? Had she been ill? She sat on the edge of the bed. Father stood by the coin TV. Was he a visitor? Was she? The veins in her eye pits were white, her cuticles colorless. She’d been sick. Not blood enough to even hemorrhage. Presuppurative puberty. Spreading decline like a citrus tree. Would take years to run its course.

  And Father says, “You come on home where you belong and stop this crazy dreaming. You’re from me and of me.”

  “Yes, Daddy,” I say, “you know me better than God himself.”

  “I do,” Father says. “You’re my pretty darling dreaming girl and I was with you at your hour of birth and know all about you.” And he looks at me so sadly disappointed, with a bleak cheer and a meek look. He brushes his long fingers against my cheek, removing, he intimates by gesture, a bit of sleep from my eyelashes. “What’s your liberty worth, bringing us both to sorrow?”

  I look hungrily at the basket of fruit which is, for some reason, in the motel room on the window sill, crowding the Venetian blinds. Father brought it. The sort of thing you give to dim relations or people in sick chambers. Bananas, apples, grapes, pears, oranges, all injected with coloring, lying dumpled in their bed of paper grass.

  Also included is a bottle of champagne. Father doesn’t drink himself, but he will open it for me.

  We are sitting in Fred’s Sunnyside Motel. Outside, Fred is examining his collection of air plants, which are hanging everywhere.

  Father says, “The truth removes the need for freedom.”

  “Oh yes, Daddy, I agree.”

  “What could you be looking for, darling, to go away from me?”

  I’m brief. “I’ll tell you, Daddy, I was looking for love.”

  He’s looking at me so kindly, but he’s weary from the long train ride. One eye closes, but the severed one remains and wanders over me with a vague and sleepy touch. If only I knew now what I knew so long ago … And what could one expect from one’s own father’s gazing? It’s the touch of a shadow on the papered walls of the mind. He shakes his head so slowly, I know that I could capture it on film and I fumble for the camera which is all I’ve brought along. Just me and my broken camera for I’ve come into this room ownerless as a newborn babe. I had to brush my teeth with mine own finger, I had to trim my nails on the concrete wall, and I’m sitting here in my underwear, for all my little washables are hanging to dry on the shower rod.

  Oh, he looks at me so generously. If I could only get this on film! The development of trysts. One could make a fortune,
once the processes were perfected. I have my camera but there’s fungus in the lens—parabolas of muttony fur both hidden and revealed—which comes from living in the damp, too close to the sea. I still carry it about with me, hoping helplessly that it might correct itself. Even the film in it is no good. It’s dated. I was duped. BUY ME FIRST, I’M RIPE. I always do. I have a conscience. I bought it from a failing store, from a failing little man, all blond in the face and the head from his liver, shaking like an aspic as he bagged my purchases. Six rolls and a 35mm used Yashika and all of it useless. The moment I walked out of the store, that film was past its prime and wouldn’t print a buttered muffin. And from what I haven’t heard, this happens all the time.

  Next door, a toilet flushes and there’s a giggle and a rustle. We’ve seen them both, from Number 6, two grinning teens, wearing the same outfits, goofy Geminis. What a job in these places, just to keep the plumbing in repair!

  Father steps up very close to me. I feel the chill from his frozen eye and he says, “You’ll only do harm here, sweet. This is a terrible town, a town of waste and hate. I saw it immediately. Something is going to go wrong here. I can see the expectation on their faces. Why did you stop here?”

  “I was going to go on.”

  “You were waiting for me.” Father puts his hand on my hair. “I took care of you. You were such a lovely child. I used to wash and brush your hair. You always asked me to brush your hair. Would you like me to do that now?”

  “I was waiting to go on,” I say.

  “You come back with me. There’s no place to go on to. It’s all happened. They’re all dead, our little family, all gone.” He strokes my hair. He wraps it around his fist. “We only have one life,” he says tonelessly.

  “I haven’t had mine yet.”

  “You’re my sweet little girl,” Father says.

  I push away from him. My hair runs out between his fingers. My clothes are dripping in the shower. I had hung them up and they were dry but then I’d taken a shower with them hanging on the rod and now they were soaked. I look through the Venetian blinds at Fred. He is an old man, beating on a mourning dove with a garden rake.

  “Come over here and sit beside me,” Father says. I do. I lie between the bedspread and the blanket. He takes a brush from his suitcase and begins to brush my hair. “When you were born,” he says, “I brought you phlox in a white china mug.”

  “There aren’t any phlox down here,” I tell him. “The climate’s not right for them.”

  A clock is ticking on the dresser. It lies face down and works only when it is placed like that. I dropped it myself as a child and it broke in that manner. In Spain, I hear, there’s a place full of old, expensive clocks. A palace and a room in the palace where they bring all the clocks of value that don’t work. The room is zealously guarded. They have guns. They’d kill you if you tried to steal one of those clocks. Father always used to say that keeping time was an affront to God. I am surprised that he has brought this with him.

  “What are those flowers outside the door?” he asks.

  “Bird of Paradise. Century plants,” I say. It is an erotic desert flush against these rooms. A little joke.

  “You’ve been here before, haven’t you,” he says convincingly.

  “Oh no, Daddy.”

  “Yes. You’re one with the art of harlotry and self-deception. You came all the way down here just to prove that you were common as any of them.”

  My head bobs with the pull of the brush. His hands are long and cold, with a tumble of veins visible. He is ageless. Once I was young but I am growing so quickly now … soon I will be of his time and then hardly linger there until I am beyond it.

  “Haven’t you,” he says.

  “No, not this one.”

  “You don’t know anything about love. I’ve tried to teach you but you don’t know. What do you think you can give to a man? Or woman? Your mother was … the only thing your mother gave me was you.”

  “There’s nothing I can give, Daddy. I was just hoping that I could take a little. A little warmth for a little while.”

  “You’re everything to me,” he says. “You’re everything short of dying.”

  “Dying’s not so much,” I say.

  “To those that don’t do it. You killed your mother.”

  My hair is snapping and curling around his fingers. He raises his hand. It follows him.

  “Why of course you did, sweet,” he says. “She died because she had an evil heart, a vicious jealous eye. We’re all weak, I won’t deny it, but it was the Devil himself who gave your mother strength to curse me the way she did. I won’t accuse you of it, really. She died of rage.”

  “I think she died by her own hand, Daddy.”

  “No, love,” he says, “she died giving birth. She died by God’s own felon’s fist. She was always wanting to have children. Can you imagine, she wanted to start them in accordance with the planets. She wanted someone to avenge her, but your mother got no relief and why should we, darling? No relief and no release.”

  Beside me on a little table is my gum from the night before. I put it in my mouth. In moments it’s soft again. Quite usable. With this and a stick I could muster a quarter out of any grate. Were there a grate. Were there a quarter. What would I do with so vast a sum? My thoughts are a child’s thoughts. I am a child, lowered into Daddy’s lap.

  My head rocks backward with the brushing. Lips brush my ear anonymously. I cannot see him. I see instead the open bathroom door where my clothes drip wine-red drops onto the concrete block of the shower stall. The dye gathers in unsightly puddling. I have arrived in this place. All my eclectic studying, worthless. All my babbling with the girls, the bleaching of my black-sheep ways. After my year of earnest infidelity, after scooting my body under the chassis of strangers, under the cologne, the Camel and Lavoris flavor of their case, I have been restored to the death that is all mine, to Daddy in this place. After all those strangers …

  All those men. Bloodless little charmer aren’t you, they’d say. Yes, I’m deep as the Styx. Think you’re for special occasions don’t you, they’d go on. By any means deliver me from special occasions. I must say they never took me to a place like Fred’s. The bedposts did not have the taste of Pine-Sol. Nonetheless, how did it go? they’d ask. They’d kiss with all embellishments. I thought for a moment you’d chipped my tooth, I said, but I was mistaken. It was fortifying, thank you. It was peachy. Never did they offer compensation as far as I could see. Now once a boy had given me a silk tassel of his hair. It was blue. I counted the strands. Thirty-one. I wanted no mistake. The next time there were twenty-nine. I showed the curl to Daddy. He lost it though he wasn’t angry. He simply lost it. The wind swept it onto the rocks. You mustn’t mention this to anyone, the blue-haired boy had said. I’ll send you a can of syrup from the store, he had said. You can make all the Coca-Cola you want. We didn’t do anything but play but you mustn’t mention any of it …

  The men were never so poetic. Never a hank of hair. Just a piece of their bone. Oh, later they offered food, it’s true. They were always starving afterward. Steak! they’d cry. Oh, steak and beer and hash-brown potatoes! One mentioned blintzes but he didn’t mean it. You’d think a man who mentioned blintzes would be an honorable person but he was simply idealistic. Besides his ideas of a gracious life, he had in his pocket the broken part to a piece of his wife’s washing machine. Bolts Breach Blintzes. One of Life’s Drab Laws. If I treated you supper, he was reduced to say, I’d have to break a fifty-dollar bill to buy the speed nut for the washer. And when a bill is broken it’s shot as far as I’m concerned. Same time tomorrow?? At the sign of the sleepy bear with his nightshirt and candle?? I’m so afraid not, I’d said. Tomorrow it’s my turn to close the windows and take in the flag in case of possible showers.

  But this was the exception. Oh meat! my night companions would shout. Onions and gravy! A man must satisfy stomach and sex and for the time being the last is a happy fellow. So gracious. The time b
eing what, I’d said. You’re peculiar, they’d tell me gravely, but you’re not as bad as some. My wife irons my underwear, for instance, but she’d be the last to know what’s in there. What about the soul, I’d say then. I want satisfaction for my soul. The what?, they’d say. What a live one. Come off of it, you’re peculiar, but I’ll try to be of assistance, you just tell me where it is. We have to get into a state of grace, I’d speak not quite hysterically but with a nervous edge, I’d speak honestly for I was not selfish. I wanted to arrive there. What matter did it make who the driver was or what the vehicle. Why sure, they’d say, having their little joke, it’s just west of Corpus Christi, but you’re confused, you’re a mixed-up girl not knowing her geography, it’s right here inside you and we’ve been through there before. They’d push their hands inside my panties. They’d put their own scrubbed knuckles on top. And what’s a funny girl like you doing asking for more.…

  Father, I am far from home.

  “Your mother …,” Daddy is saying.

  My voice rattles. I begin again. “We haven’t spoken of Mother for eleven years.”

  “But, darling, she’s beside us. She ages with us. Can’t you bring her to mind?”

  My clothes will never dry. How can we leave this place? If we should open the door, we would simply find this room again. A bed and a man in black brushing a young girl’s hair. And in that room there’d be no door. Just a bed and a man in black brushing his broken lover’s hair. I put my hand behind me. Trompe l’oeil. Daddy’s face. Never had I seen him take her in his arms.

  “She’s passed the years with us. No, death never saves us, darling. It would be unnatural for it to save us.” His voice is halting, the voice of a fortuneteller, groping.

  I reach for a pear. I swallow my gum. The clothes are still dripping mercilessly. Water enough to irrigate a steer. Why did I ever shower after the night? Once my hands were stained with blueberries. Once my hands were brown and wound round with the long pattern of reins. Mother had always bathed me, locking the door. She scoured me, so small and unrepentant. You are a sick and dangerous little animal, she had said. The tub kept filling. The water ran onto the floor, over her slippers. I joggled beneath the washcloth, the clear water turning brown. You should be treated like an animal, put in a stall, in a barn like your filthy horses … Strange impassive child. My skin pink with her rubbing. My riding clothes lying in a sour heap. I was so innocent with my pure and perfect love but Mother was weeping. The water dimpled with her tears. You know what you’re doing, she had said. It’s hideous, unspeakable. She plucked me from the water. She wept and wept, smelling of linen. Then she scoured the tub, down on her hands and knees. Again and again, after sister died, the door was locked, the water drawn. Mother had washed me so many times, so long ago, why would I shower here? I woke up here. Daddy was watching me sleep. And I remember. It was the first evening of the day that Daddy came to get me. We were celebrants. Daddy had found his little girl again and he’s begun to bring me home. The champagne was opened. The cork flew into the ceiling. It flew into the rotting roof of the sad motel, and the soft roof split, just enough for an eye to see it, to hold the ball of an eye, and my protection from the starless night sifted down around us.