State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  “It happened all at once,” his wife agreed. “It seems there’s always one to give you a start.”

  Kate is looking for her father.

  “Eternity is forever the glimpse of extirpation in the eye of …”

  “Kate,” an elderly woman grasps her arm weakly. Her touch does not even spill the soup. It is vegetable, homemade. The thick pasta letters tack heavily through the red and green. An M floats up in three-dimension. “Kate,” the old woman repeats. Her hand slips to the child’s thumb and waggles it forgetfully. “We have a parakeet, you know. We wish you’d come over and see him. What a little fellow! He’ll be your friend. He’ll take a seed from your lips.”

  The thought makes Kate feel sickish. Her eyes rise from the soup, knock against the woman’s smile which is peculiar, her narrow teeth seeming to alternate with another substance entirely, like grout between tile, and settles on the mirror reflecting the food-burdened table. She sees the pink jellied packing of a ham tremble as the woman who looks like her mother sets down a dish of pickles. The sound that it makes as it comes in contact with the platter comes across the room much too late. THLOK.

  “Ahhhh,” someone says. “It was a beautiful, beautiful service.”

  In the eye of what the child wondered. Ex tir pation in the eye of who?

  “He’ll cheer you up,” the old woman was saying. “The best medicine. We got him after they did that operation on John. They hung those bags on him and we both thought we’d die of shame but that budgie’s brought us around. He’s made us smile again.”

  The people move in a line around the table, gathering food, choosing and chewing, eating being styptic, a check on the world. It reminded the child of the way they had filed past the coffin. The old woman selects a stumpy piece of celery and spectacularly fits the entire thing in her mouth. Kate slips away but is apprehended almost immediately by a short sad man. Perhaps he has had a little too much to drink but Kate thinks he smells very good. He smells of bread rising. He smells of the water bottled behind the peg they put in the lobster’s claw. Kate has forty-one such pegs in a leather marble bag. She has eaten forty-one lobsters in her life. It seems impossible. Someone must have assisted her. Nevertheless she has the pegs. She has enjoyed them all but her enjoyment is tainted with uncertainty. They are no longer moving through the sea.

  “Eat,” the man says morosely. “Eat, now.” He detains her with one hand while, with the other, he fills a plate for her. The hand wrapped around the child’s fingers is cold. It is like a piece of gear. It is nothing personal. It belongs to his job, to his big white boat, to the sea. Somewhere Kate has put down her cup of soup. She sees it close beside her on the tablecloth. She picks it up. Underneath it is a part of a fingernail. Someone’s nervousness. She puts the cup over it again. The man forks food rapidly on a plate. Ham, meat loaf, macaroni, chutney, carrots, fried tomatoes, potato chips, rolls, orange cheese, white butter. The plate is jumbled high with food. There is a ball of stuffing on the very top but there is nothing visible that has been stuffed. There is no turkey. No duck. Suddenly the child’s throat aches uncontrollably. She wants to cry. There is stuffing but no turkey. It is a ball of dirt on top of everything.

  She sees her father and hurries over to him. The ache in her throat stops. She sits close to him, resting her head against his arm.

  “Whose eyes, Daddy? Whose eyes were you talking about?”

  “What, sweet?” His hair is an early and unearthly white. The child had always remembered it being very white and beautiful, folding gently back across the tops of his ears to lie thick and low upon his neck. His fingers were long, the nails slightly dusky, like a woman’s.

  “You were talking about eyes. They were very important.”

  “Your eyes are the only ones that are important.” He kisses the top of her head. “It’s only what you see that matters to me.…”

  Jewel, the man who passed the plate on Sunday, said kindly. “You have beautiful eyes, Kate. Dark hair, blue eyes. You’re going to be beautiful, Kate.”

  Embarrassed, she picks an object from her plate and vaguely puts it in her mouth. It is creamy and tastes terrible. She tries to swallow it but it lingers on her tongue. Like the communion bread, she cannot digest it. She has helped her father cut up the latter on Sunday mornings. Tiny, crustless cubes. It is simple grocery fare, slightly stale. Should it not be in the shape of a man? Should it not have the outline of defeat? The suspension of the world must be strong. The child can achieve all worlds but this one. She swallows miserably through the service. Her mother used to give her a mint. She cannot swallow fast enough. There is a limit. The pulp of the bread cube remains behind, girding her teeth, numbing her. Now, this night, she picks up her napkin and grimly excises the thing that is its artifact. It is a struggle. It resists. She knows she has not been altogether successful. She remembers her mother saying, Chew chew chew, you can’t be too cautious. It is a sauced tiny onion. No one has noticed. She looks at her father. He is not eating anything. She shoves the plate quickly and disgustedly beneath her chair.

  Kate’s eyes. She is bewildered. Glimpse of ex tri cation in my eyes. “I think I’ll go feed Race now,” she says.

  She makes her way through the mourners, wriggling past their legs. A man’s voice rises thinly in the air … “dress up britches like a small hotel …” The people were bumping together and breaking apart. They swung around Kate as she walked to the kitchen. “I read in a magazine where two chinchillas will make you a wealthy man. Two of them. Can raise thousands of dollars of them right in your own bedroom.” The voice was happy with an innocent greed. The child plunges through them. Once, her head is caught for a strange moment between two woolen hips. “Ahhhh, little darling.” Faces lower and low. She is hugged and petted. Kate suddenly feels like a bride. Her fingers smell of gardenias. Her mother had told her sister about blood. Kate had overheard it. She, Kate, will never bleed. This is her wedding day.

  A BRIDE IN THE KITCHEN, opening a can of dog food. She picks up a knife and a sack of meal. One door of the kitchen leads outside. She opens this and tramps through the snow around the back of the house to the bulkhead that leads into the cellar. The sky rests on top of her head. Everything is still. The snowflakes falling are very tired and small. Months ago, after the first big freeze, Kate had seen the great geese flying past the moon every night. She had heard their honking, though they were miles high. Now everything is still. The ice is thick on the metal fastenings of the bulkhead doors. If she puts her tongue to them, she’ll be mute forever. They have the power of witches. When the doors give, there is a pleasant thump as the snow slides to the ground and she steps into a warm darkness. She holds the sack in front of her to feel the walls. She guides herself by the beat of the dog’s tail upon her legs. She turns on the light. Race writhes happily before her, picking up a ball, a shoe, a coat hanger, reeling around and around.

  “You’re nutty,” she says, putting down the food. Then she freezes, turns slowly around, gritting her teeth and staring ferociously. Race’s mouth flaps shut. He crouches, putting his muzzle between his paws, waving his haunches in the air. “Argggggghhhh,” Kate growls, ponderously raising her arms, curling her fingers into claws. “Brrrrrhharrr.” She stalks toward him, hung with sudden menace and ghastly intent, then shifts her direction slightly and begins to close in on him from the side. The dog’s eyes hang fast to the place where she had been but his flanks tense, his tail swings back and forth with a lazy delirium.

  The child inches toward him, wheezing and babbling, and the dog’s brandy eyes flickered sly and eager now as he tried to keep her in his sight. He leaps, swiveling in mid-air, facing her directly again, his head cocked to one side, his hindquarters swinging artfully. He wraps his forepaws around her, panting and whimpering with delight, and Kate now rubs his head, digs softly at the bone above his eyes, the cartilaginous buckle of his beloved skull.

  “What’s your opinion, Race? What do you say?” He sits politely before the di
sh as she mashes the meal and the canned meat together. Then he drops his head and nudges the food, trying to eat around the meal. Kate walks to the bulkhead steps. Race has a piece of meat bulging in his cheek and when he sees her leaving, he stops chewing. “You be a good boy now.” She waves. “I’ll see you in the morning.” He opens his mouth and the meat falls drearily into the dish. His gaze is hurt and accusing. He walks swiftly to the blanket and curls up upon it.

  Kate circles the house and enters the front door. Once again, the stairwell to the second floor is before her. Her feet are wet. She has ruined her shoes. She hears someone moving about. A light goes on. It is a bare light bulb, hanging from the ceiling. It bounces a little from the pull that awakened it. Her cousin stands beneath it. She smiles up at him. While she is smiling, the bulb blows out with a slight whistle.

  TWO COUSINS are sitting on a bed. The house is noisy and upstairs it is cold. The oldest is a boy and he is fourteen. The child is a girl, seven and one-quarter years old as she says, and her mother has just been buried a few hours before. The boy has very dark blue hair like someone in a comic book and is smoking a cigarette.

  “I bet you’re not supposed to do that,” Kate says. “I bet your daddy would give you what for if he saw that.” She goes to her desk and takes out a small plastic basketball that splits in two. She opens it and brushes the ashes out of his hand where he has tapped them. “You’re smelling up my room but that’s all right. I like it. I don’t care.”

  “You’re wet,” the boy says. “You’ve been running around with no coat and you’re going to get pneumonia.” After he says this, he wishes that he hadn’t. He does not want his little cousin, whom he is meeting for the first time, to think she is going to get sick and die. He is a nervous, worried boy, softly handsome. His parents run a small drugstore in the next state. It’s all they have. The entire family works there, the boy coming in after school. It is necessary that they like and respect their patrons, who steal lipstick and aspirin and knock over their Coca-Cola glasses. The boy is never allowed to do anything. He imagines himself far away, even now, in a foreign capital, in a night club. He’s read in old magazines that there are rooms of degenerate art in Europe, houses where evil and sexual things are displayed. He’d like to get into one of those rooms. Just once. But they were closed down, before he was born. He is dying to go to one of those rooms where songs by a man named Weill are played. At the same time, he realizes that his information is dated. He would do anything if someone could tell him where to find a room of degenerate art.

  “I’ll never get pneumonia,” the girl says. “I’ll probably never ever get sick. There are some people who never get sick and others who never get well.”

  The boy draws and draws on his cigarette until there is an ash almost two inches long. He dumps it into the plastic basketball. “Where’d you get this?”

  “There was chocolate in it. Little chocolate basketballs wrapped in foil. I ate them all.”

  “I’m sorry about your mother,” he says quickly. “It’s very sad and I’m sorry.”

  The child scratches her throat and looks out the window. “Well,” she says, “you certainly didn’t have anything to do with it. You don’t even live around here.” She wonders how long people will be talking about this. She sighs.

  “No,” he says, surprised.

  “Your hair is beautiful. I wish I had blue hair. It’s the color that a storm is, did you know that?”

  “I wash it a lot,” the boy says. The child is sitting on the edge of the bed, her bare legs swinging beneath her short dark dress. She swings them faster and faster. The hem of the dress is wet and wrinkled.

  “Well, it’s very nice. It’s unusual.” The child enjoys being here with her cousin. She is glad that everyone is downstairs and that no one knows where she is or is bothering her. She likes having him sit on her bed, smoking and looking around at all her things. When her father comes up, perhaps they will all have a cup of cocoa together. She wants to be a good conversationalist. “Do you ski?” she asks politely.

  “I ski pretty well.” The child’s face is provocative and he feels harried. He feels that something is being expected of him. He lights another cigarette.

  “I have a sled,” the child says vaguely, “but I have never skied. Daddy doesn’t ski.”

  The boy is perplexed. He tries to keep himself very still but it is as though he has something live and hasty buttoned up within his clothes. He wonders if he will get meningitis or cancer or become deranged because of his thoughts and his constant manipulation of himself.

  “I want to show you something,” the child says. “I want to show you my things.” She goes to her desk and removes an entire drawer, setting it between them on the bed.

  “Look. I have seventy-six wilderness cards from Shredded Wheat. All different. I have a hundred Dixie-cup tops with the pictures of movie stars. All different. I have the pictures of eight football players that can only be seen through a special red magnifying glass. Four of them are members of the Crimson Tide, a name which I think is very pretty. The Crimson Tide is all I care about. I’d give the other four cards away.”

  In the upper corner of one of the Wilderness cards is a deer. On the bottom is an Indian. When one is moving through unknown country, the card instructs, it is wise to make small signs which will guide you back yet which will not inform possible enemies of your presence. Break the branch of a certain tree. Move a rock slightly so that moss will be visible. Make marks in streams. Beware of marked paths.

  There were flowers and dirt in an envelope, a bridle bit, a photo of his uncle, her father, as a young man, cut out precisely, like a paper doll. There was a piece of flannel shirt, a magnetic plastic lady in a bathtub. It was a new currency, giving access to a ruined land. There was a cast-iron colt, his hoof broken off.

  “You can’t fix them,” the child sighs. “It’s gone forever. It’s like a real horse when he breaks his leg.” She picks up a common pin. “This is supposed to be lucky. I found it honestly, on the ground. Lots of people pick up pins in department stores where they’re all over the place. They go into dressing rooms where there are hundreds of pins. If you believe in pins I’ll give it to you and it will probably bring you luck. It can’t bring me luck because I don’t believe in it. Believing in pins would mix up the whole religion.”

  The boy accepts the pin and sticks it in the lapel of his suit. In six more years, he will be heavy in the face and hips. It runs in the family. His mother is the dead woman’s sister. In six years he will be perfectly synchronized with his life. At this moment, he does not realize this, but it will happen. Now he thinks of himself as a French gangster. He blows smoke out between his teeth in a fragile stream.

  The child replaces the drawer in the desk. “There is one more thing,” she whispers. “There is the greatest thing.”

  THE DOOR BENEATH HER BED has been there forever and only her father knows about it. Often, in the day, in a certain white and winter light, it glows like bronze, it shines for the child like the bell of an old cornet. It lies flush against the floor, the latch on that side having been removed or never existing; the latch and lock that is visible massive and cold to the touch, even on the warmest day. There’s not a scratch on it. It’s never been scraped with a key.

  The child believes that her life is behind the door. She believes that the door will become lighter as she grows until just before she dies it will have no more weight or substance to it than a scrap of paper. She’ll be able to fall right through it. She watches it every day and it never changes.

  “Look,” she says, and takes her cousin’s hand. He kneels, pressing his cheek against the wide floor boards, his ink-black dungaree-blue, thick and damming hair spilling across the child’s foot. He looks beneath the bed. He is vicious, innocent, ordinary. The child’s breath sprinkles on his neck. He bats his eyelids furiously. His whole face twitches and jumps.

  “What’s the matter?” the child asks worriedly. Perhaps she is n
ot supposed to show the door to anyone. Perhaps she shouldn’t because it will give them fits. She takes tiny inconclusive steps to and fro and tugs on her hands. Her cousin looks like a picture she had seen once in a book about the Civil War. She begins to pat his hair.

  The boy’s eyes fly open and he stands up and sits on the bed again.

  “I thought you were ill,” the little girl says.

  “There’s a door under your bed,” he says tentatively. The child looks at him without speaking, not knowing quite what to think of his response. “Whose door?” he asks. “Where does it belong?”

  “It belongs under there. It was never any place else.”

  “Knock, knock,” he says. The child is silent. “What’s behind it? Lash La Rue? Milky Ways?”

  “It’s me,” she says at last. “It’s Katey that’s behind that door.” She pulls the bedspread back into place.

  “Don’t you think you’d better get her out?” The boy cannot imagine what he is talking about. He moves his mouth in the shape of a smile but his dry lips snag on his teeth.

  The child begins to chew on her braids.

  The parsonage is on the coast. On three sides is a large dead yard, empty even of the smallest bush. The front of the house faces a cliff of shining rock and purple weeds and then there is the sea. Everything is very still. Snow falls. Downstairs, the mourners mutter softly to each other. There is a clink of silverware, the sound of water running.

  Outside, an engine coughs and dies. It turns over again, catches, hums, drops into gear. The tires thud softly across the snow. The boy says,

  “I have something nice to show you too. It’s something special. Do you want to see it?”

  “Yes.” The child’s wrists are extraordinarily narrow, the bones huge and painful. It is as though there are two rocks jammed beneath the skin. “Sure,” she says.

  He leans back slightly and unzips his fly, working his penis out of his clammy shorts without yet exposing it. He takes his cousin’s hand and presses it down. The child has curled her fingers and they knock uncertainly around his crotch and then open and grip. She does not look at him but instead concentrates upon her hand, sunk into his trousers, curved around something soft and feverish.