State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  MARTHA’S COFFEECAKE was in a box tied on a little string to the front doorknob, the man says. His bulk is enormous. “She brought you a nice warm coffeecake this morning while you were still asleep. Did you eat it for breakfast?” Kate had not eaten it. “Yes,” she says.

  Everyone is there. She looks around at them all but their eyes are settled on something on the ground. She looks at the ground too but can see nothing extraordinary. The grave is a mess. The ground is frozen and the hole is ragged. The hole looks more like an act of God than anything men would think of doing with a plan and shovels besides.

  The Reverend is talking about the grave, how deep and insatiable it is, just like the barren womb. It’s never satisfied, he is saying. There are three things that are never satisfied and there are three things that are wonderful and there are three things which disquiet the earth and there are three things that go well. The child agrees, moving her small dark head as he speaks, making everyone want to cry out and rescue her from her false and awful comprehension.

  But the child is thinking a harmless thought. The world’s in her head. They’ve filled up the hole and the dirt on top is soft and black. They’ve trucked it here. The child is thinking about the land behind the gas station where the Hanson twins burn tires. The ground is springy from the rubber … it’s like a trampoline. She is thinking about that is all, how nice it is.

  The service is over. The child runs to her father. She rocks and dreams in her father’s side. In the sea, the buoys ring and the sun slips from the afternoon toward warmer lands. She brings back the dream she has learned. It is delicate and brutal, brief and interminable; she can call it back any time she wishes. It lasts no more than a second, being, at the least, no more than one single shouted and preposterous word and being less word than the witless weight of joy. She stands on one boot on the bluish ice and dreams.

  People try to interrupt her. Women in old furs are kissing and handling her. They make a ring around her and crouch, patting and joggling her, grasping her tightly. The child suffers this for she knows that they are inevitable. She knows that they are Christian and are being saved. When they go home after church on Sunday, they change into white gowns that are like wedding gowns and sit in shadowy living rooms, watching the door, waiting for the kingdom to come.

  It is snowing. Everywhere an apocalyptic absence of light. A dangerous day of God’s. The snow falls and shines in the women’s fur collars. It falls upon the bright flowers banked upon the ground. The child is holding a flower in one unmittened hand. She squeezes it again and again. It feels very odd; it feels very wrong like the soft rubber stomach of a doll. She plans to bring it home and place it in the drawer where she keeps all her treasures.

  The wind howls in from the sea. The congregation would invalidate her dream if they could, but they don’t know all the facts. The child is neat and polite, distant, old-fashioned in her manner. The people are uneasy as they wait and stamp in the snow. Perhaps they are even annoyed, even though the child poses no threat to anything except what they believe to be her own maidenish future.

  The mourners separate and get into their cars. They travel up to the parsonage, meeting no one else on the road. Everyone is among them. They follow the curve of the sea which is high and yellow. It is the aftermath of a weekend storm. A flock of eiders move heavily into the wind and then change course, surrendering. The sky is white and the water is yellow. The birds vanish. It is an ugly day. The child sits beside her father, her hand in his pocket. He has some coins in there and his pipe, the bowl of which is still warm.

  “Look at the ruin on the wrack,” the child says, using her other hand to point at the beach. Her father smiles and the child laughs a little. It is an old joke that she has made up. She can’t keep herself from saying it even though she knows that she has exhausted its possibilities. She looks at her father gratefully for having acknowledged it once again.

  They arrive at the big house. The child follows her father inside. Relatives and congregation troop in behind them. Everyone takes off his boots and places them on newspapers put down by one of the thoughtful. Later that evening, several of the ladies present will insist that their own boots have been taken and strange boots left in their place. They will claim this because they cannot get their feet into these boots. Actually this is not what has happened. Their feet have swollen in the heat of the house. There are fires in several of the fireplaces and the big stove is burning as well. There are breads and cakes baking in it and on top are pots of coffee and soup. The place looks festive with all the lamps shining and the food and the women moving officiously about. The child lingers on the stairway. She feels invisible. She makes a face. Upstairs she hears a noise.

  THE ROCKING CHAIR is rocking in the draft. No one’s in it which means a death. The child thinks of her mother, upstairs, in the month before she died. The child dabbles with the thought that she is still there but it doesn’t really engage her imagination. The woman had been alone in that room for so long. What difference would it make if she was there still? The child sometimes had brought up a few toys and watched her. The woman moved around the bed, smoothing blankets. She moved about the room, breathing wearily, touching her breasts, caressing her stomach. Often, then, the child had seen the baby stretch, the head bubble up, the mother’s stomach bunch and sag grotesquely. She had seen this before. Where had she seen the likes of this before? The shuddering yawn. The reluctant host carrying continence. When? She is a child, not even eight years old.

  She had watched the woman in the room. Everything was bare. The light sockets were empty. The door had been taken off its hinges and was gone. The woman spent hours at the single window that overlooked the field. She pressed her breasts against the icy glass. She pressed her lips against the glass; she gnawed with her nails on the frost, putting down words, things, pictures. From the hall, the child saw them. They made no sense. Perhaps it had been an elaborate code, done in reverse, decipherable only from outside, from the field. Perhaps it had been mirror writing like Da Vinci’s. The child had not investigated. It had been too exciting. She is just a child and she enjoys mystery and secrets and disastrous forebodings.

  On the rim of the field is a snake fence. The field was always empty, one couldn’t even see the wind move across it, but once, one morning very early, the child, again standing in the hall, saw tracks curving deeply across the snow there, as though something hungry but harmless had closed its jaws over the land. The day’s ice storm obliterated them and they were never there again.

  The child had imagined the woman behaving as though she were a prisoner in the house, suffering terribly and devising fruitless plans for escape. But how could this be? The woman was only her mother and she had planned to have a baby. She was merely “lying in.” Naturally this has never been a prison house. It is a home. Like any other. There are cookies in the kitchen, for instance. In a china crock poorly rendered as a bear. There are little maxims scattered throughout: HANG IT HERE AND LET ME HOLD YOUR TEABAG and there is a spice and herb chart and a welcome mat and other homely objects, patent leather bags and night cream and paregoric and mayonnaise and seed bells for the birds.

  The woman had always been free to go. Yet in that month, she never left that room which she had chosen for herself, except at night. They, the child and the father, had suspected this long before it became apparent in one terrible incident. She used her house then when she thought that they were sleeping. They would hear the toilet being flushed or note that some of the food was missing. They would never hear her actually. Only the sounds of her ablutions. Secretive. Functions. In the old house were many sounds. All of them could not be heeded. At night she wandered. That had been their conclusion. She did the small housewifely chores she felt were imperative. It had no doubt been relaxing for her. And respecting her whims, they had let her be and not confronted her with themselves. But they had never been certain that she rose when they retired until the night they heard the scream. It was in the kitche
n. She had been ironing and there had been an accident. She didn’t get enough sleep, she confessed. She was becoming absent-minded. By the time the Reverend reached her, she was quite in control of herself. She’d put a stick of butter on it. She had also picked up the iron from the floor. She worried about the burn in one of the tiles there more than she bemoaned the burn on her face. It had taken in a good part of her right cheek and chin. White as a flounder. The child had never seen anything so white. It went beyond sickness. It was the deep trauma of the flesh.

  “I know butter doesn’t do it, but it’s all that was here.” She moved placidly, curiously out of step with her pain. She put the ironing board back in the closet and went down on her hands and knees to rub at the blackened spot on the floor. She had been dressed up. A gray suit with a little velvet collar, a silk scarf around her throat, a gay hat fastened to her hair with pins. But her hair was combed queerly, slicked down forward and flat, ending in greasy rolls. The zipper on her skirt was broken. Her nylons were torn.

  She rubbed at the floor, chiding herself gently. “How silly of me. How ridiculous. I was just pressing a few things. That basket is just full of things. The lid can’t even fit. And they go back for years and years.” She patted the floor one final time in commiseration. “The ones on the very bottom look like doll clothes. Little gowns. Tiny slips. I didn’t want to move them for fear they’d break, but on top of them all the other things, in strata, you know, in histories. I had forgotten them and they’re still quite good. If I just put them in order again I’m sure there’s life in them still.” She rose awkwardly. She still held the butter in one fist. It rose grayly with her, accompanied her as she moved to the big wicker hamper.

  The iron had cut into the corner of her mouth as well. A few days later it would be black—a slim, fried shoestring of fat. “I used to imagine Kate and I doing little things together,” she said abruptly, “you know, gardening, making cookies, Christmas candies. No, no,” she said, although no one had interrupted her, “I had always wanted her to be happy. And kind. I wanted us to do little things together. Like in the stories.”

  “What stories?” the Reverend had asked, and his voice had been melancholy, surprisingly mild, gently respectful. His back was to her and to Kate as well. The night had been very still. They had heard the rocks rolling in the surf below, clopping like horses’ hoofs. The child had crept to the stairs, had waited on the third step. She decided to run through one of her Bible quizzes. Thinking of puzzles, the Reverend had told her, is always permissible.

  A was a monarch who reigned in the East

  B was a Chaldee who made a great feast C was veracious when others told lies

  D was a woman heroic and wise

  “The stories,” crooned the woman’s voice. “But that wasn’t her way, was it? Now her sister. Her sister used to say on a bright sunny day, she would smile up at me and say, ‘Mommy, what a good drying day!’ ” There had been silence. The child moved up another three steps.

  V was a castoff and never restored

  Z was a ruin with sorrow deplored.

  “I was ironing,” the woman had said, “and my cheek itched. I forgot I was holding the iron. I reached up to scratch it. How else could such a thing have happened?”

  The child had gone back to bed.

  THE DAMAGED TILE had been replaced. There was a box of extra ones in the barn. It was brighter than the surrounding ones, but the pattern was the same. From then until the night she died, nothing of the sort had been repeated. She had stayed exclusively in the room upstairs. Nothing was done in the house except what they, the father and the child, did. Nothing was said except by them. The woman took no further interest in the household.

  “We mustn’t expect too much from your mother any more,” the Reverend had told the child. “We mustn’t tire her or question what she’s doing. Think of the changes in her body, Kate. Hormones and the will of God. That’s our life, Kate.”

  The child had played in the hallway, outside the woman’s unpleasant room. She would play absorbedly for a while and then announce, “Mother, I won.” And then she would say calmly, for the truth of it had never troubled her, “It doesn’t mean anything because I’m the only one playing.”

  The woman had not replied. Her mind had long since stopped on the blank threshold of that door. Her mind no longer dealt with the child. It was over, over, in the past. But where before had been this loneliness? When the exile? Why had mere words corrupted her instinct for love?

  The child had played in the hallway. An only child, amusing herself—her head full of fantastic things. When her dog plodded up the stairs and stepped across her, intent on visitation, functioning in some gentle memory of a contented time, the child had reproved him severely. “No, no, Race, don’t go in there.” Of course it had been just a child’s frivolity, but the woman had not replied. Deep in her musing, she had carried on in her singular fashion. Her time had been divided into three parts, like a banal clover. There had been the smoothing of the bed, the idleness at the window and last and basically, the devout involvement with her burgeoning self. For daily, the child had seen her, tending to her body, cleaning it, carefully sounding and examining it. She gave her limbs brisk slaps and pinches, moved her trembling hands and mouth over her skin, scouring herself like a bird. She had become her own physician, her own lover. The child had watched the foaming tub of her belly shiver, had watched the woman’s hands become delicate, swift, precise. The child had watched, unstartled. Always it had been the same. The difference was only in degree. The woman had traveled miles in that room. Centuries. Reaching her debacle, she had also attained herself.

  Her face had been on the way to healing itself, in its own manner. The injured part glowed dusky under the sliding white cast of the sun. Like a map. Like the state of … Virginia. The child had lingered on the doorsill, tracing out astonishing creatures for play. The only thing that could kill a skoffin, she was sure she had heard her father say, was the sight of another skoffin. The woman had given little cries. Her shanks were skinny, her shoulders gaunt. Her mouth had opened into a crooked O. Her teeth lay across it like tiny fishes waiting to be hatched. The child had heard of this. Fishes born in their mothers’ mouths, fleeing back there when in danger. The woman’s mouth had closed with a moist sea sound. She had writhed briefly, she had straightened. Like a thick weed floating in the valley of the surf, her stomach plump and vulnerable as a seaweed’s pod. The child had often thought at that point, for there had always been that point in the day at the edge of her mother’s room, just before she, the child, would leave, the child had often thought that if she crept into the room, softly, so that the woman would not become aware of it, like an Indian, like a thief, clever and soundless as a hawk or a shark, that if she slipped into the room and embraced her, lightly, lightly and unbeknownst to the woman, if she encircled her waist with her own small arms as best she could and squeezed suddenly and very hard, the swollen stomach would pop like a blister of bladder wrack, it would crack like the grim Atlantic and all would be delivered and dispelled. The baby would rush to the floor in a flood. There would be a briny, shiny smell, and then the ceiling of the room and then the roof of the house would topple away leaving in the dull day, and then the winter sun, with its evaporating qualities, with its own mysteries, would drink up every drop.

  But the child never entered the room. Not even cleverly. Not even in stealth. She went outside. She skated a little. She returned, she asked her father for a candy. The woman and the room were forgotten for a while. After all, what could be done? She was a prisoner in waiting, and quite mad.

  THE LONG BLUE LIPS, the wave of what had been, draw back. The child is at the bottom of the stairs. There is no one in the room any more. She has no mother. She is in a house of mourners. They are all eating but someone comes out of their number and she feels her coat being taken off. She sits down and her boots are unbuckled and then they are gone too. She has loafers on, a white penny in each one. An older gi
rl in school had approached her one recess. A penny means you’re single and you’re looking, the girl had said. And a white penny means you’re a poor dope because they’re from Canada and not worth a thing.

  Kate doesn’t care. How can it matter? All of her dreams are satisfied. The perils of childhood mean nothing to her. She studies her loafers, but someone guides her gently to her feet and into the kitchen. Someone ladles soup into a bowl for her. “Give the child more than that,” Megan Jones orders. Kate looks up. She shudders. The room vanishes. Only the looming woman remains. An infant hangs from her hip, the tiny feet webbed like a wind-bird’s, moving, making up time. Four o’clock, five o’clock, six o’clock, seven. Then six o’clock, five o’clock, four. Her mother shakes it but it goes on unperturbed through the bottom of its days. It is her mother, lovingly nourishing her, making sure she gets enough to eat. Kate’s hands flail into the soup. She puts it down quickly and her mother disappears. There is simply a neighbor there, smiling and only slightly known, a dish towel bobbing at her side. “Megan!” a voice scolds, “you’ve filled it too high. Here you are, God love you.” An arm comes out of the voice and pours out a bit of the soup into a cup with a handle. A cracker is dropped into it and bobs merrily. The child walks uncertainly into the dining room, searching for her father.

  “D’you notice how much Megan Jones resembles the poor Mrs.,” the civil servant, Bolt whispered.