by Joy Williams
No, nothing escapes his notice and he studies, in great detail, everything but me. He is in love with me. I am beyond his code.
Look at the deer, he’d say. We would be soaring in the Jaguar under a cathedral of trees. It would be night. The lights would find everything, but not for me, never for me. Look, he’d say and slow, but they’d be gone. They love cigarettes, he’d say. They’re after the stubs that travelers throw out.
Look, he’d say. Look. He squeezes my shoulders. His tongue darts lightly down my neck. His eyes burned with happiness. He is proud of his wide smooth sex. It is fragrant with soap. He is assured of the sweetness of life. It sings to him.
Look, he’d turn my head gently. An old man drifts down the river in a white wooden boat. He wears a big flat straw hat and three sweaters, buttoned to different levels. He has a deep canvas bag for the fish hanging from his shoulder. He moves regally by. The line flicks lightly through the water flowers, into the deep pockets of the ancient river.
Everything is pleasing. There is a Ferrari. There is a mule. There is a tiny Mennonite girl at a Whopper-Burger. She has been picking fruit. She wears a bonnet and a long brown dress and she smells of citrus. She eats her hamburger with a knife and fork. It takes forever. There is a woman wetting the stones that ring her flower garden. That is the most satisfactory chore, watering the stones. There is a drumfish, pounding on the water each night. We go out in the boat. The fish rises beside us. It sounds like a gigantic frog. He follows the boat, he nudges it. It is a magical fish, an enchanted fish that will grant your wish. Grady wishes for nothing. I always wish that he had taken me that night after the movie house and never looked for me again. We were silent. More so than I’d ever been with the strangers. I thought that I would never see him again. We drove, we drank, we stopped. We drove again. He lay me down gently in the darkness beneath some sweet smelling pines. His hands trembled. We drove by water, I could smell it. We heard the chuck-will’s-widow. We went back through the town. Tomorrow, he said. I was startled. Tomorrow, he said. Tomorrow, next week. But I was so weary, so lost. I did nothing to prevent him from saying … it’s true I wasn’t paying attention. My mind was going home with Daddy …
Just hours before, Daddy had boarded the train. Behind the coach he’d entered was a snow-white refrigerator car bearing orange juice for the rickety North. He was the only one departing. I was the only one left behind. Now, once this station had been one of the busiest in the state. There were huge crowds coming to see the circus. And an elephant was killed right here on these tracks though there is no plaque, for it was not Jumbo who was killed in Ontario but another elephant.
But there are no crowds at the station any more. It was early but the heat was rising. You could smell the fertilizer they’d packed around the sidewalk lily plantings. The town was dirty and had a milky cast. The street was trashy from the parade of the day before and as we waited, Daddy and me, the work crews were making their way toward us slowly, cleaning up, the prisoners of the county in their gray trousers and shirts with the wide blue stripe down the side. Daddy was holding my hand in his. My hand was empty. Or rather, I was not holding his hand in mine. He brought it to his lips but did not kiss it. I could see our image in the locked windows of the station. I was in a position to notice this. Come with me, he’d said. There’s nothing here for you to leave behind, he’d said. Come with me while it’s still that way … the image of my hand moved back. The train wound through buildings and appeared abruptly and then wound through buildings and departed abruptly as well. The train didn’t even come to a full stop. Daddy glided on. The train sank dreamily away. The crews came sweeping and bagging up the street, nice boys, fresh faces, up for stealing copper wire or beating on their women’s fellows.
“Yo,” the captain said to me. He smacked his shotgun against his thigh. The boys phalanged by, leaving everything pretty behind them. I could hear birds beginning their day. The street lights went off simultaneously and the morning became a healthier color. Opposite me, the proprietor of a U-Rent-It-All put out his wares on the sidewalk. Mowers and beds and automatic nailers and hoists. And then he brought out an aluminum ladder that he would rent you too and he climped up on it and put a new combination of letters in place on his glass marquee, a new message on his fresh new day. RENT YOUR CONVALESCENT NEEDS. His little boy came out and voiced some easily accomplished desire in a piping screech and the man descended, folded up the ladder and leaned it against the storefront.
And the letters there you know, the portable letters there so ominous and … took me home again. Yes, I was home, waiting for Daddy. It would take him two days and three nights to return but I was there already. Years ago. I am a darling toddler assisting him with the slate letters on the church bulletin board. I choose from a sturdy box that still smells faintly of apples. A remarkable box. It can make any word that anyone can think of. It is limited only by me. I slide the letters along the rusting runners, following Daddy’s directions. He is my only consideration. It is summer, it is spring. Daddy and I seduce the mornings. I weigh forty-one pounds. Fifty-seven. The earth shimmers with the yearnings of God. Daddy guides my hand. I LAID ME DOWN AND SLEPT I AWAKED. My thoughts were his thoughts. Psalms, I would say. Yes, darling. It is raining. It is a day of high cool sun fading my hair. Song of Solomons, I say, Genesis. Yes, sweet, he would say. Life’s simple as it seems for we love but once, darling. The rest is dissolution.
I walk across the street and into the rental place. Something clicks as I cross the threshold. Something’s counting me. The little boy sits on a rental hide-a-bed. What time is it? I ask. His mouth is full of jelly. Ten till, he says eventually. That’s wonderful, I exclaim. And what’s your name? Rutt, he says peacefully after a long pause. The proprietor emerges. Ambrose, he says, what does this lady want. The time, I intercede. He jerks his head in the direction of a big wall clock. Feast your eyes, he says. I go out onto the street again. I walk a little. I buy some coffee. For lunch I buy some wine. I know the time. I spent the day in darkness. And at the end of it, I met my Grady. But as I say, I wasn’t paying attention.
Look, he said to me then, I’d like for you to stay with me awhile. I have a place. He talks to me in darkness. My hips rub on grass. I have everything for you, he says, or I can get is tomorrow. Tomorrow. Next month.
Grady.
I did not demur. I entered his life. Coma calling. Now Grady sits on the riverbank. The fire sparkles. He gives my belly one more caress. It’s sculpted and heavy as a wooden pear.
“Come to school with me today and at noon we’ll go to the beach,” he says. “We’ll swim. We’ll buy some bread and cheese. We’ll swim and eat and sleep.”
“At noon. Juste milieu. When the sun is up.”
“And so am I,” he says.
The fire burns. So do all of God’s children.
13
Grady enjoys going to classes. He wants to make a fine life for us. He works very hard. There is going to be the baby. He sees other babies. He sees a fantastic tree house on his beloved river. He will design it himself. He will build it himself. Inside it will be leather and wicker and aluminum and wood. We will have pet otters that will bring us fish. We will have lime and lemon and grapefruit and orange trees and ladybugs to eat the aphids. We will have a telescope and study the stars. We will have an herb garden. We will have a Land Rover and a De Tomaso Mangusta. We will live in our fantastic house. Then we will travel. We will get a motor sailer. Go to Greece. The Pacific. Go everywhere. Then we will return. Our children will be loving and handsome. The orchids will grow on the trees. Everything will always grow around us beautifully. We will always be in love.
Of course this is in the future.
I tell him, “Love, love, I have no future.” I say this. I say, “When they were casting the Weird of my life, that third sister was out on an apéritif.”
Naturally, he does not agree. There is the future of this day, for instance. I’ve promised him I’ll go to school today and I’v
e dressed and I have. We are in town, going to school, but first we stop in a hardware store, for he has to buy a tool or two, for his Jaguar, for his class. I wander off to the seed bins. They’re lovely. St. Augustine, Argentine bahia, centipede, zoysia, Tiflawn bermuda. I plunge my hands into the bins. It’s wonderful. I worm my hands around, up to my elbows. Tiny slippery busy beads. A clerk comes up. He points to a sign. “They’ll have to be baked now,” he says angrily. “You’ve contaminated them.” Insulted, I buy fifteen pounds. I turn out my pockets. I give him every cent. “A good choice,” he says, handing me a sack. “Low maintenance. Will survive total neglect.” Grady’s at my side. He’s bought a picnic basket. He puts my sack inside it.
“It’s pasture grass,” he tells me as we leave.
“Let’s make a pasture!” I am so enthusiastic. Where will we plant it? Who will come to watch it grow? I imagine already friendly beasts following us down the street, birds and bees and grazing things. But I become weary. My feet lag. What a responsibility, this grass! What a burden! I have poisoned it. The man said so. I am so destructive. My hands are hatchets. Daddy had told me this. He’d said, AND WHERE THE SLAIN ARE THERE IS SHE. Job. He’d said, It’s happened and it’s ahead of you, forever and ever.
We enter the college grounds.
I sit down beneath a banyan tree though I only want to be back in the trailer or sitting in the Jaguar, at rest, resting. Grady kisses me good-by and enters the chemistry building. He turns before he opens the door, his hair all smacked askew with water, heartbreaking as a grebe, and waves at me. I wave back, grateful for his familiarity. He drops from sight into forestry and mathematics.
He has a theory for the animals, with which by equation the earth can be saved.
I have a malapropism or two.
The leaves on this tree are long as baseball bats. Many of the roots haven’t rooted yet but stick out stiff as wires, at eye-level, from the trunk. Everything’s so colorful and fecund. A bellowing order and thoughtful rhyme. Noah’s Ark. A path for every foot to trod. A trot for any taste. Students move heartily by with the faces of winning contestants. Everyone’s a winner here! The South is Cracker-Jax!
“Hello!” they cry. I blink.
“Hiyew,” a girl says cutely as a comic book. “Why we haven’t seen you for quite some time. My boyfriend’s sleeping in your bed.”
“O.K.!” I cry cheerfully. I am speaking too loudly. I know this girl. Debbie Dow. Before I’d gone off with Father five months ago and then immediately with Grady, five months ago, I had known this girl. A sister. With a pin and a barrette of hammered silver weighing down her head.
“Those your sheets?” the girl asks. “Or are they from the service? Better get yourself some new sheets when you come back. Are you coming back? Jean’s wearing your clothes. Half of them are in her closet now.”
Her teeth do not grow out of the gums but are perched there as though in afterthought. Other than this, the girl’s face is wealthy.
So many questions, so much news. “OK.!” I cry joyously.
“Those sheets certainly have had their lives,” the girl says. “Those pussycat sheets.”
I know this girl. I’ve seen her squatting for the soap. Rump bumpy as an ugly lemon. I know the boy as well. A baseball player on a scholarship. A pitcher with big ears. What’s all this talk about boys and beds? A whore is a deep ditch and a strange woman is a narrow pit. A youth’s a rictus and an aging man is ruinous. There’s no turnpike to love. Just snares and snaffles. I want to go back, back. But to what?
I will tell this girl instead. I will whisper in her ear’s veranda. The girl’s head tips expensively, from the barrette. She speaks first.
“There’s been some mail for you. One or two letters. I saw them just the other day but they were gone this morning. I suppose you picked them up?”
The girl seems to be shouting at me. From a distance. I look down at the ground, expecting to see a cheeping creek separating us, an unfordable crinkle in the earth. It’s almost there. There’s a plastic straw on the ground. I pick it up and put it in the new picnic basket. A straw’s as good as a cup. One never knows what the day will bring.
“Was that your daddy I saw you with? Down for Homecoming? Down for the water show?”
“Oh, but that was a long time ago,” I shout.
“Yes, but that was the last time I saw you,” the girl says confidently. “Why wasn’t that the Homecoming though? With our float winning and all? What a time Cloyd and I had! We fell asleep and the tide just about took us out.”
I think of replies. I discard them all.
“We had champagne in the House after the parade,” Debbie persists. “Why weren’t you there?”
“That certainly would have been the time to be there,” I agree.
“You bet!” squeals Debbie.
“We saw the parade,” I say.
“You and your daddy?”
“Pardon me?” I say.
“I find older men sort of frantic myself,” dimpled Deb confides.
“What a parade!” I exclaim.
Thousands and thousands of tissues stuffed into chicken wire.
“Better than the Rose Bowl,” Debbie ventures.
All that paper! Three thousand trees vanish from Big Cypress Swamp.
“The Toilet Bowl!”
The girl’s face is smooth and silly and kind. I am so exhausted now with all this conversation. I want to lie down and put my mouth on the grass. It is a beautiful day. Grady was right. Blue pours through the trees. And it is so still. I wear my bathing suit beneath my clothes. They are wrinkled and old, clothes that Daddy bought me, things I wore years ago when I was with him, walking across the brown crisp ground in the springtime. I try to blink my eyes. Someone’s rolled a stone across them. Why is this girl talking to me? Why does anyone ever begin anything when none of it can ever end?
“It’s really mostly crepe,” Debbie is saying. Of course she does not care for weird stringy me. But she is a sister and the sisters are bound in the solemn ceremony of Omega Omega Omega, linked one to one by their knowledge of the secrets of Catherine who was not only a virgin and perfect in every way but also had her paps burnt away and her head smote off.
Debbie is being gracious. She is exercising her southern self—that is, she does not see rag-tag unpleasant me. She sees no object specifically. She works utterly on a set of principles.
The stone rolls back across my eyes. I open them and then I close them firmly. I would like a glass full of gin and cold orange juice and a few drops of Angostura bitters and I would like to be under the sun on the beach, getting hot and clean. The thought of gin makes me sick but I persist in its conjuring. My stomach turns for I am really afraid. My stomach is no longer my own. It is the baby that my thought of gin repels. I think of Sweet Tit Sue. I am deliberate in restoring her. She didn’t touch me. She smelled of shade and wild tarragon growing. She wouldn’t touch me. She stood with her arms crossed over her enormous chest. There were plants everywhere, growing in red dirt out of potato chip cans. You’re Grady’s girl, she said. I’m not about to do anything to mess him up. If you’re messing him up it’s best he be shut of you, she said. She wouldn’t put her hand on me. Where did he touch you, Mother had said. She was weeping, she had lost her mind. Was it here? Here? Something flew from her mouth and dropped wetly on my knee. Mother was crying. God. She shook me. A bubble of sickness rose in my throat. I knows that good boy Grady, Sweet Sue said. It’s him I’ll do the favors to. You come back here with Grady if you want. The baby was twisting and clawing inside of me. His fear took up the oxygen. Her cabin has one room. Someone drops an egg—a brown one with a tiny fluff of feather stuck to it. It falls and falls. It’s not for me, I said. I don’t care what happens to me. I sat down on a corner of her beautiful brass bed. Sue made a small rude sound. The sheets smelled of onions. She made me go away. Tell me, Mother had said. Tell me what he did.
“I must be off,” Debbie is saying. “See you round like a
donut.”
The swollen banyan bloats out around me. I sniff my absent repulsive and wonderful gin. One can feel only so sick after all and I am not really sick. If anyone ever leaves this world alive it will be me, or someone like me, a woman and a lover, bearing a bad beginning in my womb. Kate fecit. When will the bottom be? What joy, the bottom of the pit. BUT HE BEING FULL OF COMPASSION DESTROYED THEM NOT … FOR HE REMEMBERED THAT THEY WERE BUT … words, words. I must only be silent as Daddy said. I must not tell. And what is the pain of this moment? I am a young thing gripping a picnic basket, waiting for my man. All is sequence and little is substance …
“Hullo, Kate.” The voice is too familiar. I would know it anywhere, as though I had never had to relate it to a form. “Come back, have you? Had an adventure?” Cords stands over me as though it was she who laid me low. Doreen stands behind her, a pretty little doll with glassy eyes. Cords has bitten her nails down to stubs and wears gloves, trying to break the habit. They are black vinyl gloves and their presence, so close to me seems apocalyptic. A BAD ANGEL. AN ANGEL OF DEATH.
“Well, Cords,” I say, “you’re cutting an impressive shape this morning.”
Doreen looks empty-headedly down. Her hair swings around her hips. She passes her hand across her neck in a precise gesture of languor. She smiles at me. Then she smiles more anxiously at Cords.
Cords says, “You definitely look peaked. Think a picnic lunch will really perk you up? Picnics aren’t for you, Kate. They’re for those with lighter hearts.”
“I am waiting for someone,” I say.
“So are we all,” Cords sighs, “but you do it so drably. You’ve dropped out of our sights for months and now that you’re back, you’re the same.”
“More of the same,” I correct her wittily. Oh, Grady, I cannot right myself.