State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  “Yes,” Father says. “A bottle of gin and a bottle of lime juice. Water biscuits, paté and a good Brie.” He closes the door. “Do you find those young men attractive?” He walks out to the balcony.

  “I was watching the porpoises.” I point to the water. Between the long sandbar and the shore, shadows move in a complex rhythm. Two rise, rolling their wise sweet heads.

  “I wish I had been a very young man for you. I wish you had known me then.”

  “I have known you always, Daddy,” I say dully.

  “Why don’t you go for a swim? The water looks so inviting. I’ll watch you from here. When you were small, I would watch you enjoying yourself and it gave me great pleasure. The water looks so refreshing.”

  “I don’t have a bathing suit.” One of the bocce players paws at the beach with his foot like a horse. He throws the dark ball beautifully and it lands dead in the sand.

  “You go for a swim and when you come back our refreshments will be here. The towels here are extraordinary. Did you notice them? Like rugs. Do you remember the poor towels we had at home? Your mother was always mending them. And the sheets as well. Tiny stitches. Starbursts of thread. Roses and faces of colored thread. You made up a story for each one and you would tell them to me. But these towels look brand new. And so white. No stories there.”

  I go out of the room and down the stairs into the lobby. The clerk is standing beside his desk, bouncing on the balls of his feet. The bird is sleeping, folded up on its purple talons. I walk onto the beach, past the young men. Two are standing close together. One is standing farther away, measuring distances with a cloth ruler. I hear a voice, speaking in perfect, musical English.

  “John, I saw a muscle of yours on that last shot that I swear I have never seen before.”

  I walk into the water and continue until the sandbar. I walk over the sandbar and instantly into water up to my neck. My clothes expire. I turn and face the hotel but do not try to find Daddy on the balcony. I stand there for a while. The nice porpoises have vanished. I wallow back to shore. The young men never glance at me. I take a turn around the desk.

  “We prefer that swimmers use the service elevator at the rear,” the clerk says. I go to the rear. The elevator obediently exposes itself.

  “Hey,” the clerk says. He has a borrowed, uneasy face as though he chose it off the television. “This bird can shit seven feet flat across the room.”

  I return to Daddy. Our snack is laid out nicely. Daddy is fixing the drinks.

  “That’s fine,” he says, “that’s fine. I want you to have a good time.” He calls for someone to pick up my clothes for cleaning and pressing. He rubs me dry and wraps me in one of the sumptuous towels.

  “You certainly have developed a way about you, Daddy,” I say.

  “I want everything to be pleasant for you, darling. I can control it all if you allow me to.” He hands me a drink, expertly prepared, gorgeous with crushed ice.

  “Drinketh damage,” he says, smiling. His jaw twitches. His jaw is clenched. He wears a handsome, expensive jersey. His face and thin arms are hard and white like marble. “It’s pleasant here but not for us. You can see that, darling. The sun is bright with malice.”

  We sit on the balcony. The sun sprawls scarlet across the Gulf. The sea birds are going home. The plovers, the pelicans, sanderlings, terns and ibis stream across the sky. He slips his hand inside the towel. It falls from my shoulders. A breeze swims across me and stops.

  “This is not my favorite time of day,” I say. “Speaking only for myself, I prefer dawn. Birds drop their eggs at dawn. It is generally more a time of hope and promise.”

  “All the promises have been kept,” Daddy says.

  10

  I am swinging in the dreadful hammock of a dream. Whatever woke me has stopped but it will come back again if I am still. It is the sound of birds, beyond the board and metal, in the woods. And my foot aches terribly. In the dark, I reach beneath the blanket and touch it. It is hot and spavined, the toes spread out in a cramp. For some reason, the baby needs something that is in that foot. The baby makes strange demands. It is stronger than I am. I am being housed by it. I am being fashioned in the nights that will bring it to term. And it is I who feel the exhaustion of journey. Not it. What would it know? It is myself who lives in darkness, slowly becoming aware, and it is the child who moves resplendent in the sunlight, beyond restitution in the sunlight.

  The child is my dream of life. I harbor its progress and am victim to its whims. Gestating is like being witness to a crime. And I am furtive, I must admit. We all look furtive. My suggestion is to confess to everything. Once, on the street here, shortly after I arrived, the FBI spotted me in a laundromat. I thought the manager was giving me the eye because his machine was acting oddly. Clanging and banging and taxiing around its filthy slot. I tried to ignore his mean and greedy eye. He thought the reward was his. I maintained my poise by reading an agricultural bulletin that was available for patrons. The article I was engrossed in concerned the rat

  Eat—hide—gnaw—scatter filth—start fires—gnaw—eat—breed–hide! THAT’S THE LIFE OF A RAT!

  And then these fellows slipped around me, crisp as pudding. Smith their names were, and Smith. When Smith showed me his card, he exposed the weighted exercise belt around his middle. Smith, on the other hand, was not a vain man. He conducted the questioning. “Howdjew find Jessup the last time you was there,” he said. “They sure changed that town some.”

  “Jessup?” I say.

  “You let your hair grow out,” he said. “I gotta say it ain’t becoming. But a girl like you. I can’t imagine you traveling alone. Where’d your boy friend be? The boy what done the carving? I’m sure a little thing like yourself wouldn’t have done that carving.”

  “Sheeit,” Smith said, “I bet a little girl like you can’t be aware even of the enormity of her crime.”

  Unfortunately, something or other had run in SOAK. My clothes were the color of gasoline.

  “Whyn’t we just check up on your little niceties here,” Smith said. “Blood’s harder’n tar to get off your clothes.”

  Smith tugs a bit at his crotch. “We might add that your boy’s caught now. It was him that told us where you was. He’s up there in Tampa spilling the beans and he don’t give a pig’s piss for you at this point.”

  “Wrong girl,” I say. And of course I was. They wandered away. The manager said that he wasn’t responsible for clothes left in the machine and if I didn’t get them away he wouldn’t be responsible. Of course I knew what Smith had been referring to. A dreadful story. Chopped up someone’s lover and sent him to Coconut Grove in a casserole dish.

  But that was when I first arrived. I am sought after, accosted, but never found. Is that not how you find it?

  In any case, now I am here rubbing my foot, twisting my toes and wearing a spotted nightie. I can see nothing in the room, but outside the birds are singing and so it must be morning. Or perhaps it is the afternoon of the day before for I can’t place falling asleep. I can make out shadows in the room. There’s a small window over an easy chair but it is stuffed across with webs, hives, cocoons and silky sacks. There is also a large X taped on the window with adhesive as though the window were condemned. Almost no light enters, but there is enough, for the moment, for me to see Grady in the easy chair, sitting with both feet on the floor, his knees apart. I like seeing him there and perhaps the knowledge of Grady being there is what woke me. The first time we met, I woke up and he was there. Most people that later one discovers are significant to one’s living are met through glimpse and carelessness, through stumbling brush and grope. They expose themselves gradually in serial form. Not so with Grady, my groom. He rose beyond reproach in the stink of the old movie house, his voice in my ear an overcurrent to the thud and pound of repair within the walls (for they were renovating the old movie house, redesigning it for a more sophisticated and lucid audience) and his hand on my shoulder was strong …

  I
want to have him love me. The fact that he does already troubles both of us. I prop the pillow behind my back and begin a conversation. The room is close. I’ve spilled some scent and it’s in the carpet. I open my lips and the words enter my furred mouth.

  I begin to tell him a story. Many times I have talked but I have never finished what I wanted to say. To be frank, I have never begun what I wanted to say. I have discussed something else. But now it is as though my whole life has fashioned itself for this moment which is, of course, true. It is as though my whole life is dependent upon the reply to this moment, upon the recognition of it, its application and success. When I complete not telling this story, my life will begin.

  “An annal of crime,” I say and curl up within my stained nightgown, comforting myself as though it is I who am being told the tale rather than being the taleteller. There is a glass of cold coffee on the floor. I hear it fall as the bed, on its casters, grinds against it. The child redistributes itself, opening and closing itself like a butterfly. I say,

  “In the French mountains in the sixteenth century, an eleven-year-old girl was married and some years later the wedding was consummated and she had a baby boy. She was very much in love …” I stop and inquire about the hound, whether there are any indications that it’s returned. I fall asleep but in no time I am up, pummeling my foot. I mention a party we went to at the home of one of Grady’s friends. There were twenty people there, the same little band that are always present at the parties we attend. Expecting little from these gatherings, it nevertheless gives us no pleasure when our suspicions continually prove correct. Some of the people are students at the college but they do not recognize me for I’ve removed my sorority pin. All that remain are two tiny holes on the right side of every blouse. They don’t know that I am pregnant and they don’t know that I am married to Grady. At one of the parties, a man fell against me and knocked me flat. I had hoped that something might come of it, that the baby would be expelled. Nothing came of it except that now the man comes to me at every party and speaks to me earnestly. He wears tight jerseys with alligators on them. Tiny alligators like jewels. At the party most recently, he came to me in the kitchen where I was drinking gin and eating from a shallow dish of hamburger relish. He was an older man from the college, possibly even an instructor. He had sweat on his hairline, above his lip. He embraced me and I turned rigid. A camouflage. I became part of the sink and tiles. He pressed his mouth against me and wedged the plastic glass of martini between. Beyond his head, on rough drawing paper, I saw crayon renditions of a child’s moon, house and railroad train. I pushed him fretfully away. He was the host. He pushed me back, slightly.

  “Well, kiss my coccyx,” he said. He left with dignity, his ass high up his back, like many basketball players I have seen, playing in their prime.

  I tell Grady this and slump down in the bed again, turning on my side. The sheet’s pulled back and I rest my cheek on mattress ticking. My mouth moves against a small cloth tag attached with a safety pin. Contents Unknown. Well.

  At the window, tiny dots of light shine through the mess. A spider pushes a leaf out of its web. Grady’s told her that there’s something in a spider’s web that mends a cut. Something in the spinning juice. If I should smash one of my limbs through this window, there’d be nothing that wasn’t fine. Damage and repair would be simultaneous. The healing is working out there before any wound that needs it. This is the way it’s always been, I suppose, but never, before Grady, has it been true for me.

  I move raptly on the bed. I am an impediment to our lives together. I want to tell him. The moments pass. None of them are correct. The baby goes about its mysterious business. It has formed eyebrows, a lung, certainly a sex. I want to tell him. I will say, “Perhaps the baby isn’t yours.” That is nothing. He suspects this, I know, and yet he has said nothing. My womb is a disease, a benign tumor. I despise my womanliness which carries its sickness about with it, inherent and innate, as though it were success. How can a man know such dyscrasia? I move back against the pillows. The light is so bad that it obscures my speech.

  If I begin the story and do not finish it or if I begin it and do not tell it properly in the way it happened, in the time and the place and the circumstance, in the correct sequence of results, will it not then persist like a drowned man, going on to haunt the sea?

  I am trapped within this monstrous child. Each day I become precisely less what the unborn has become. If I tell Grady, will I release myself like a virus upon his loving world? The child is not Grady’s. That is nothing. That will cause no conclusion. He assumes responsibility after the movie house, not before. I know this. His pride lies in acceptance, renewal and life.

  I am shivering for now I am fully awake and it is cold here. I reach down and turn the dial of our small electric heater. Its red grille and smell and clatter give the impression of warmth. I am only a nest and so cold. The child rocks in its sunlight, warm and breathing in its egg.

  “I almost died the other day,” I say.

  “That’s ridiculous,” Grady says.

  “No, I had some bullets in my pocket and I forgot about them and I was baking chicken and the oven was very hot. I was working around the oven and the bullets were in my pocket.”

  “That’s ridiculous,” he says, “they never would have gone off.”

  I get out of bed and limp toward him on my aching foot. Grady does not sit in the chair at all. It is his jeans, his sweater scattered realistically in the chair. I pull on his jeans, retaining the nightgown over them, and limp into the kitchen, skirting the dog’s dish. I heat a pan of water, making some coffee with part of it and using the rest to soak my foot. The dog hasn’t been at the trailer for days. He sits a mile away, at the juncture of an overgrown logging rut and the blacktop that goes into town. He sits beneath an enormous tree. When we slow the car for him, he regards us pleasantly enough but he does not get into the car, nor does he look after us as we drive away. The hound is waiting for his owner to come pick him up because he is a good redbone. And good redbones are trained to return to where they were released and to stay there forever.

  I miss the dog. Only yesterday or so, I walked to the blacktop and brought him some food—fatty ribs and mash that we feed the ducks. He sits in the shade beneath the tree. In front of him is a deep ditch that catches and holds the afternoon rains. He had been very happy at seeing me and he’d eaten the food like a fellow of means and leisure and he had taken time out to watch me as I sat watching him. But he didn’t follow me home. And I know he never is about to. He has his own fidelities and they don’t include us.

  I dry my foot, and go outside. Grady has built a fire in an old washtub and is sitting before it, throwing straw and dead branches on it from time to time. Beside him are four ducks, rearranging themselves continually on a patch of straw. They are dull barnyard ducks of unstable numbers for some wander off across the river and are eaten. At times, I collect their down which is bleakly sensual and useless in quantity. They set up a terrific racket as I approach and fly off into short trees.

  It’s cold and the fire burns cleanly in the air, without smoke. Sometimes, sharks come up this river by mistake. I lumber toward Grady, awkward as a cub, bumping against him remotely, an unburnt branch on a cant from the fire, snagging my nightgown. Some things cannot be forgiven. Grady is not the one to forgive.

  I crouch behind him and put my arms around his chest. Grady stirs the fire and the flames snapping in the weak sunshine are blond as his eyes. “How are you two this morning?” he asks.

  “We’re fine,” I decide to say. “We’re coming along nicely.”

  He shares a piece of bread with me. I take it and push it into the shape of a pony. Just as I crimp its mane, it trots away.

  11

  Don’t look, Father says.

  I struggle for effect but my intention never lay in looking.

  12

  I say to the ducks, “Weather cold enough for you?” My life is prudent, recessive and
dark. Every day is Christmas Eve. I talk to the animals but they do not talk to me.

  “It’s going to warm up,” Grady replies instead “Move up twenty more degrees by noon.”

  Noon. The threat of another pretty day with my Grady. He speaks with joy of little things. He tosses his head and laughs.

  “Cold’s what makes the orange orange,” I say positively. I can learn anything.

  Grady’s hands are warm from the fire. He turns. He unzips the jeans I am wearing and rubs his hands across my stomach. “Little fish,” he says.

  I smile. For a moment there are just the two of us. For a moment, this is the way it is going to be. Daddy dies with our happiness. The baby dies. Poor baby. Rather he curls up like a flower, he goes back into his impossible night.

  We are smiling. This was before the accident. Before he was corrupted and our life together lost. He did not want to touch upon my past. He did not want to know if my favors had been freely given. He was not interested in the life I had before him. Instead, he tried to take me with him, through each day. He used time masterfully. It minded his whims. He spent it conscientiously, for both of us. We never returned to the movies after we met. I dislike movies, he told me that very night. Everything takes so long, he told me. He wasted nothing. Nothing was spent on him without ample reimbursement. I see him as a little boy watching fireworks. Oh, they are stunning, grand. He approves of each one. He gives all his blessing. He does not allow a single one to bloom and fire without his breath of praise. He never allows his attention to wander. He sees through to the finish. I see him as a little boy, very grave, tireless in his respect.