by Joy Williams
Oh, the dreariness of it all. I already was on hand once and I’ll tell you, the demands start immediately. Mucus in their throats, the cord still dangling from their tummies and baby girls are ovulating. Within a day there’s blood in the swaddling. And it isn’t nature’s first mistake, this premature menstruation. The egg drifts down. Five hundred to go or so. Is there nothing that has not been going on forever?
23
“Pellicle Pete,” Cords sings from the balcony. She raises her arm from Doreen’s back and waves. I imagine Corinthian going by below, windmilling his arms because he thinks the moving air is good for his skin and sometimes running and sometimes reading while he walks in the thin and eager light of dawning. I can see him now, all of a pattern. Even in full sunlight his form is rakishly checkerboard; even in total blackness, it’s full of shade and innuendo. Sometimes he looks at the girls on the balcony. Most often he doesn’t.
“She thinks she’s so smart, that girl,” he told me, “well I knew what it meant the first time she said it and I bet she had to look it up before she started to use it.”
“Whyn’t you come up?” Cords calls.
And in that part of the morning that was so long ago and in the part that is now, Doreen is clamping a pink hand over her mouth and dropping it to Cords’ knee and saying,
“Why we dasn’t do that. We dasn’t let him into the house, he’s a cullud boy.”
“Gracious,” Cords says, “it’s so.”
“I thought that ee-u-nuchs were always fa-et,” Doreen drawls.
“He’s not a eunuch,” Cords says. “The flesh means nothing to him.”
“And that’s why he’s losing it,” Doreen crows. “Jest like an ol’ snake.”
Cords’ hand floats back to Doreen’s shoulders. Her voice is solemn.
“Have you been dreaming about snakes again?”
“Oh no,” Doreen says, aghast, “I couldn’t do that after what you said. It was just so awful what you said, it scared me out of dreams altogether.”
“Dream of snakes one more time and you’ll wake up deaf and dumb. Dream of swimming and you’ll lose that which was dishonestly gained.”
“I never got anything that wasn’t gotten proper,” Doreen says.
“Dream of machines and you’ll be rendered Pellicle-like.” Cords sighs, snapping her arm away. “No more human intercourse. No more salvation through the flesh.”
Doreen shuffles her eyes from one part of Cords’ face to the other and then down to the street where Corinthian had been walking. Cords was always telling her things she couldn’t make head or tail of. Nevertheless, she felt that she had an instinctive appreciation for just about everything that was offered. “Ha,” she breathed.
“Po’ pure Doreen,” Cords smiles. “You’ll be sacred to us all. It’ll be you the sisters will activate to and not that lady of the rolling eyes in the warped picture frame. Pearls will cascade from your armpits thick as dusting powder and semiprecious stones will rim your box. Catherine,” she twitters, “Cathy baby, we’ve found us a true dee-ciple.”
“Ha,” Doreen says.
“But there’s no reason for you to be down on Corinthian Brown, insulting him and what not.” Doreen blinks but doesn’t object. Thoughts are acts, Cords has told her. Attitude is all. “Because Corinthian Brown is going to help us,” Cords goes on. “He’s got the cat that’s going to make you Queen. You’ve got to be nice to folks, Doreen. You’ve got to treat them right.”
“Oh, I know!” Doreen says, heartfelt.
“Without that leopard, my presentation of you will not be as effective. But Corinthian will come through because our Kate will convince him that he should. Kate will help us out.”
“Never in my life,” I hear myself saying as I lie in my bunk bed, “have I ever been a help to anybody.”
“She’ll do this for us,” Cords says. “It’s such a small thing. She needn’t even consider it a favor.”
“I’ve seen myself sometimes walking in Hollywood,” Doreen exclaims. “I’m wearing those terrific sunglasses that terrific women wear out there, you know those huge sunglasses tinted pale blue? And I’ve got a leopard on a leash. Wouldn’t that be something? I’d bring him everywhere and even when I entertained, like, you know, he’d be in the room.”
“You’ve seen that, have you?” Cord says.
24
I lie on my bed, fully clothed. Alarm clocks are popping off all around me. The girls are getting up, sniffing themselves, squeezing out the hairs that have incredibly grown out overnight in this loamy clime. Cords and Doreen step in off the balcony. I am not listening to any of them. Is it over? Grady said. The floor empties. Now the girls are all in the kitchen. They eat standing up. I can see them in my head. Splashing water on the instant. There is Beth with bruises on her legs and a short flat haircut. She smells like a chlorinated swimming pool. She applies her nails to her scalp and scratches. Then she nibbles on the scratchings. There is Debbie eating a piece of bread, jogging carefully around the edges with her teeth. It is a perfect circle, becoming smaller and smaller. It is as though she is eating on the moon.
I can see it all, it being what it was I saw before. On the highway, the tourists are stroking through the technicolor morning. They are travelers traveling, making time. One little family in a station wagon sit beneath a cloth deodorizer in the shape of a skunk.
Cute.
It hangs by the neck, absorbing the odors of thighs and caramel corn. The skunk is working like mad, doing everything it was created for, but like the power of evil, it can only last for seven days. The power of good is everlasting. Then it must be replaced. Everyone is stuffed with ham, quaint grits and papaya juice. They are heading for the Last Supper, which is being enacted somewhere in the middle of the state.
See, the little girl is counting Mercedes automobiles. One two, three, a diesel, a 190-SL and an error for it is actually a Rolls-Royce. The small boy has soiled his pants and is changed at seventy miles an hour. It looks funny. Greenish. Curdly whey. The mother is distressed. Before she had children she had never thought about it, but now it seems that she is always examining shit. Is it pasty and odorless or cheesy and foul or slippery and shiny or fat and dull? It seems … to fall into certain patterns. It seems to have a tale to tell. She has found that shit will often supply the answer when all else fails. She even has the suspicion that shit is the lane-end into heaven and so on, the lost key opening and so forth.
She peers at it, slides it around in the diaper. She is alarmed and expectant. In the past, everything has reverted to normal before she can apply the remedy. She joggles the diaper up and down. Her gay young womanhood passes before her eyes. She shows it to her husband.…
Now here is something I really am an observer of because I have arisen myself now and am standing on the balcony. A hint of Doreen’s perfume is there with me. Now I am not supposed to be here, observing on the balcony. One is supposed to do nothing on the third floor except get in and out of bed. For this purpose, there are fourteen bunks arranged against the walls. On the top are the smaller girls and on the bottom, I’ve found, are the ones with problems. In the center of the room is tastefully empty space covered discreetly with a Persian rug. Above each bunk is a window. The girls on the bottom see the sky when they look out and the girls on top see strangler figs. Some of the windows are painted shut and around them the smell is terrific.
I am on the balcony, looking at the morning through the strangler fig and stinking cedar, and watching the highway over them.
They were all tourists, Father said, excluding myself.
There is a caravan of Airstream trailers, heading north. They have been in town for their annual powwow. Each year they meet in a field just outside of town and for three days they cook hamburgers and play volleyball. Then they drive off. Freddie and Gussie from Stillwater. On the road, making soup of turtles and small warm things, grinding up pollen and seeds. They identify themselves to everyone. Jack and Cherry Lane from Portland
, Maine. To all the relicts sickly eating straw in the roadside zoos, to the babies playing on the fallen privy door, to the waitresses biting ketchup off their hands in Dew Drop Inns … The Fergusons, Donald and Shirley.
Hullo, hullo.
25
I believe that our modest home, Grady’s and mine, was an Airstream. It wasn’t in Grady’s style but there it was, and it was his. We spent the days of our married life therein, his sperm warping the floor boards and my cooking blackening the walls. It was perfectly concealed in the woods. I can’t understand how it ever came to be in there and it was obvious that in order to get it out, several large trees would have to be chopped. It would be most reasonable to assume that the trailer was there before the woods were, which is absurd. Just another mystery like the boat in the bottle or the one in Revelation sitting on a throne and looking like a jasper and a sardine stone. So much mystery but no surprises. I can’t understand it.
I have to get back to the trailer. Grady would expect me to. All my things are there, my picnic basket and wine glass, my card
Hi! I’m Rh negative
What are you?
But Grady is not there. It is difficult for me to keep this in the front of my mind. He is in Room 17, Section C. The exploded view, that’s what I saw, just as he used to show me in the Jaguar manual. The servo unit, exploded view, the worm-shaft end float adjustment and bearing pre-load exploded view. Just as it was in the diagram, the car flew into all its parts. And it was I who was running. It was Grady who was sitting still. One of us was running. Relativity is not reasonable! Part of the car was driven into Grady’s side. A pin or a bolt. Part of the Jaguar is missing in my Grady’s side, beside the lung. And there are slivers of metal in his head and jaw. Shavings peppered shining in his blond head. They’ve excised all that was visible; now only the missing remains and they won’t touch it. It is over, Grady’s breathing said as I ran and I had to say not yet.
I will not go back to the trailer. If I had been taken there immediately by Ruttkin … but it would have been difficult. It was night then. Never had I left the woods except with Grady. Never had I come back to them except with him. I don’t think I could have found the trailer by myself. It was his life there, you see, that he took for a time with me. Only the stupor was mine.
And Sweet Tit Sue may be there now. That is a very real consideration and one I could not face. She may have repossessed it. She may have left her own little cabin recently hacked out of the woods, introduced out of nowhere by five pastel concrete squares and taken the trailer again, found our bill of sale in the Rimbaud, you know the part, it went we-wandered impatienttofindtheplaceandtheformula, that was where it was when we drove away last night, found the bill of sale and held it under moving water and taken the trailer again. Wherever she will be, I could not face her again, having done so once. My manner excites disgust, I know.…
I did not have the smallest difficulty in finding Sue’s cabin. In relationship to the trailer, its location was clear. I knew where it was and I found it. Five decorative steps leading up from nothing and dogs lying beneath the porch but not barking and chickens pecking in the brush. I found it myself. I never got lost. A little less than two miles down that river but with no view.
I set out one morning the instant Grady left. If Sue started right away, I felt that I could be back at the trailer before he returned. I took a fall, I would have told him. I think I’ve hurt myself. I didn’t care if she did it well. Badly, I would have preferred. I ran through the woods. The cedars were dropping their sweet berries. Grady was on the highway. Until recently, suicides were always buried on the highways. They were not allowed respectable graves. This was not my thought as I ran through the woods, but the fact remained. Until recently.
Please, I had said to her. Sue had a child of her own, a boy eating rice and cookies as I talked. I don’t know what you’re wanting, she’d said clearly, each word a soft explosion. They told me she wouldn’t do it in her own place. They had told me that you had to name the place and she would come there and do it. They had told me that she took it away. We don’t know where, they told me but you should just see how green her garden grows. I ran through the woods. EVERY SECRET THING SHALL GOD HAVE JUDGED.
I was told you could help me, I had said. How green her garden grew. The boy finished eating and went into the little cleared yard, picking up the eggs the hens had laid. Sue was making a brine, throwing salt into the water. I was still running with the momentum of reaching the cabin. I had had a plan and the plan seemed perfect but I could not think on it for long. If I could lose the baby, would there still be something in me that would tell, that would talk on and on in punishment?
You are nothing but trouble, she had said. I could see the first time you were nothing but hard times.
Then give me something I had said.
Suicides were buried on the highways and nothing stopped for them.
You can just take a lot of anything that’s handy, she had said. It probably won’t make no difference but you just keep eating on a quantity of something and get sick and keep eating a quantity more. She shrugged. Sugar, she called to the boy, You bring Momma an egg here for her brine. You got it all wrong from somewheres, she had told me, I ain’t never done it, not even once. I haven’t never stopped a baby.
Her boy came in, holding an egg gracefully in each hand, between thumb and forefinger. She took one and eased it into the pan. She added more salt until the egg floated up. The boy was holding the remaining egg carefully enough but he somehow stuck his thumbnail into the shell. Blood swelled up over his finger as though he’d been sliced and he dropped it, the thing spreading dismally outward on the floor all broken up and scattered, all its colored jellies and beads trembling in a small and violet pool.
Ahhh, Sugar, Sue had said. One of the dogs came in to lap it up. I stepped off the last orangey steppingstone back into the woods and was back in the trailer by eleven o’clock. Hours still, before Grady would return. I had several drinks but nothing in excess. Whenever I closed my eyes, I could see the baby floundering out of the womb. I didn’t close my eyes for several days that I can recall and when I did at last, I could see the curve in the road flaunting my Grady. It was not my thought that it was a curve at the time. It was just the shape my dreams took thereafter until now.
26
Here, it is quarter past noon. All the clocks say this, more or less, on the third floor. The sisters have eaten lunch and are all coming back up here for song practice. I hear their babble as they tramp up the stairs. I realize quite clearly that I am, at present, in the sorority, in my bunk bed. Soon, I will get up and go to Grady who is in Room 17, Section C. I realize this, nevertheless, something untoward happens, my head whirrs and it is Grady touching my shoulder, waking me up. I am so happy. I shudder with relief. It is Grady, saying,
“Miss, the movie’s over.”
And it is. Everything’s shut off. Kinugasa’s Crossways, I think it was, or more likely, something with Tom Mix. There was a chase and an open air setting. Something was resolved. I see the screen for the first time and am annoyed to note that things I believed to have been imperfections in the film were, in fact, freckles and streaks upon the screen.
“They’re closing up.”
He says. It’s true. They’re locking all the doors. Someone has pulled a sheet over the concessions. I’m sore all over. I have a cramp. And he must help me up the aisle for I’m hobbling. My leg is still asleep. They won’t be showing another picture for hours and there’s nothing to do except go off with Grady. He’s barefoot but his feet are remarkably clean. He takes me to his car which is moored directly beyond the door shimmering like a yacht in the heat. We drive to a liquor store. It’s almost night but everything is still hot to the touch. Grady takes off his sunglasses and exposes to me two dim rims around his eyes.
He leaves but returns immediately with a bottle of gin, a bag of ice cubes and two paper cups. We sit in the liquor store parking lot and drink. I
request some bubbly water. It’s filling up. Men and women, single women, men and men. We’re all sitting in our allotted slots, watching each other and drinking. It’s very pleasant. Four carpenters drink pints of peppermint schnapps. A tanned lady, very pretty, an older lady, refined, drinks brandy. Potato chips fall out of her mouth. Someone kisses me. It’s an awkward moment, but we have another glass of gin. I can remember it all. Every detail. It gets dark. The sky was a patched-up tent. The lot is lit indirectly from the liquor store on one side and a nursery on the other. A green growing thing for everyone and something for every place, for sand, muck, marl and rocky soil. A sprinkler works its whippety way across the plants and dribbles water across the hood of our car. Beside us, a few children in the back of a truck protect their candy bars from the spray.
Yes, it’s very nice. There were three children. Three candy bars. I could tell by the wrappers that they were Zeros.
The last time my very best friend saw me, she said.
I’m fine I’m fine but where is the grapefruit you promised to send.
?, and this was in a dream. Things that I have loved have vanished into acts I can only accept. Someone lays his tongue between my breasts. I am falling, falling, and kiss the belted hip of the man I love, but everything is controlled for I know how it goes. We are not to rely on what we can do to insure our acceptance with God. We are to accept God’s acceptance of us. There are boundaries within which the worst can work. And I’m working. Yes, I was made to work, if nothing else.
I’m in a controlled fall for how far can an orgasm take you? My chum on the airwaves said only to me,