State of Grace

by Joy Williams

  The answer is the time taken for the fall of the dashpot to clear the piston is four seconds and what is the question? The answer is when the end of the pin is approximately inches below the face of the block and what is the question?

  Grady, Grady.

  “These young fellows are the salt of the earth,” the housemother is saying. “My husband was an auxiliary highway patrolman and he knew them well. He always told me they were the salt of the earth. It was his life being in the Auxiliary. He was in the Legion too but that meant nothing to him. He only stayed in the Legion so he could be a member of the Auxiliary. Every Monday night and every Thursday night for fourteen years. They had uniforms just like the deputies but a little lighter, just a bit of a different shade. And that’s how I like to recall him best. Going out of the house in the dignity and responsibility of that uniform every Monday and every Thursday night.”

  Her dog is between us, trying to bark at the crowd. The housemother swings forward and raps him on the head. He sits down and then lies down, resembling a rag.

  All along the street, the girls from the various sorority houses are dancing and singing. Rented spotlights play across them, slide up the rococo buildings and empty themselves in the stars. In the South, there are men that rent these spotlights, big ones and little ones, surplus from wars and airstrips and stadiums. They carry them on flatbed trailers attached to ’62 white Cadillacs. These men can always be reached. In the South, there are always men available in white Volkswagen buses who will give you a blood pressure reading for twenty-five cents. These men are always present, though not obviously so, soliciting your desires.

  The housemother and I sit on opposite ends of the swing. She is a tub and I am a stick, yet I hold my own end of the swing down. It is the baby that is accomplishing that. I imagine the baby inside me feeling long and tight and smooth as an ear of corn although actually I feel no such thing. I am detached, unanxious. I watch the men on the back of their white Cadillacs pan the spotlights past the sly faces of the crowd and rest inquisitionally on Corinthian Brown.

  “They’re showmen those people,” the housemother says irritably. “They’ve always got to get into the act. There’s not a bit of reason for him to get into the act.”

  Corinthian stands implacably in his T-shirt and work pants. The light picks up the hectic disorder of the hollows of his face and his face seems to be galloping toward some terrible realization that his body hasn’t reacted to yet, but he is motionless in the light. And the leopard beside him, as always, is motionless, although its tail is flickering in the air, showy as flame, but that movement does not alleviate the stillness as much as it reinforces it.

  “Once I went on a tour of Beautiful Homes,” the housemother says. “I can’t imagine now why I ever bothered. I’ll never do it again. The silliness of those people with beautiful homes! Two of them had big china animals just the size of that one there sitting on the lanais. Strictly ornamental. You couldn’t use them for a single blessed thing. Never in my life have I ever had anything strictly ornamental.”

  The sisters are singing. They are in a semicircle, facing the street, their backs to the porch, in rows of two, the fatter girls in the rear, a tier of flesh mostly, sparkling like fryers in a skillet. The crowd increases. There are a few whistles, an inflexionless yapping sound of children. The spotlight fades and is put out. I can hear, it seems, its rattle as it cools.

  “There’s too much money and waste,” the housemother says. “Do you know what I do? I put a little pan under the air conditioner outside my room and it catches the condensation from the machine and I use that water to water my ivy. It takes a little thought but I think anything like that makes one a better person.”

  With the spotlight out, the torches are visible, tall inventions of bamboo, and palm fronds and jars of gasoline. There are smatterings of fire and light everywhere now and the crowd is silent because they are impressed. They are impressed because this is all free and yet stagey and professional. Better than New Orleans they think. They are in the darkness and they are so silent, it’s as though the street is empty. They arc being courted and they are being entertained. Their opinion is being sought. And it is better than New Orleans and it is better than Miami. They feel their presence here tonight strongly. They are speechless with their worth.

  And then Doreen becomes visible in her scant outfit of fake tatters, her long hair swimming to her thighs, and there is still no sound from the crowd. She is bony and beautiful and a little foolish. Her face in the cast from the torches changes from being pretty to not being at all pretty to being clownish. It changes so rapidly. She starts to walk, very pale and absorbed and ephemeral, and the effect is winsome and lustful and lost on us. The crowd, me. The housemother says,

  “I don’t believe anyone’s at their best when they’re nine-tenth’s naked.”

  Doreen walks, her face, out of the light, aged and predisposed. The leopard beside her has its muzzle almost on the ground. The motion is fluid with a hasty hesitancy. Doreen walks. She looks gorgeous and sulky. Her legs rise up pure white and impossible to her manufactured little loin rag. She turns. She starts back to Corinthian. The sisters bleat,

  “Doreen’s the Queen

  Who’ll make you scream

  With wantin’ to get to know her.”

  The cramp begins again and I shift myself on the swing. The housemother gives me a sharp look. The cramp moves up and encircles each breast, like a lover might, like Grady might with his warm hands. Think of mind teasers, they’ll tell you. Think of the ingenuities of language and rhyme. Cords has made everything rhyme. Her song is a fortune cookie, a penny horoscope. Think of a rhyme, they’ll tell you, for step or mouth or silver or window. Think of things that are diversive or exceptions to the rule.

  The cramp is gone and I feel nothing. I see Father. It is summer. He brings a baby down to the sea. He sprinkles water across its sleeping eyes. The sea is opalescent with its fathomless order and law. They watch it, the baby, blind and cautious and still, and Father. Little flowers grow between the higher rocks. The littlest flowers I’ve ever seen.

  Doreen has almost reached Corinthian. A small spot comes on again and floods her prematurely. She is handing the rope to Corinthian. We all observe the deus ex machina. The error is corrected. The light goes out. Doreen is in shadow and suggestive once more. The crowd’s breathing becomes obvious. They are aroused on all the levels of their loneliness. And now the leopard rises, moves leisurely in a tall and searing spiral and attaches himself to Doreen’s shoulder. It is as though the animal is whispering some absolute secret in her ear and the beautiful girl is receptive to it. It is as though the beautiful girl bends a little to hear it, sagging against that singular coat.

  Doreen screams. It seems frivolous. She screams and screams. The leopard leaps away into the darkness. The chaos is fixed and rigid. Ruttkin unholsters his gun but there is nothing to shoot at. Everyone is moving and shouting now. Doreen’s thin scream is the current beneath it all. I sit on the swing and raise my hand to my throat. I don’t feel anything. The night offered nothing to my eyes. It took nothing from me.

  39

  They put me in a white room in a white bed with high sides on it so that I cannot climb out. Nonetheless, when the nurse leaves, I climb out. There is a curtain in the room and a toilet behind it and I sit on that. I think that if only I can go to the bathroom that will be the end of the terrible seizure in my bowels and then I can get on with having the baby. I cannot do anything. Nevertheless, I feel much better. I climb back into the bed.

  An adult female consumes seven hundred pounds of dry food in one year. No one ever tells you that there comes a moment when you have to pass it all.

  I am in a seersucker nightshirt with little blue flowers on it. A prerogative of the ward. I have another contraction. Another moment gone. Something I could reflect upon now if I cared to. I think about it in a way. I think that they do not put nightshirts with blue flowers on patients who are crit
ically ill. Once she cut her lip while shaving her legs. Once she fell while getting out of her underwear. Now how can a girl like Doreen be all cut up and better off dead?

  The nurse comes back into the room. She has white hair and a white uniform and she puts her white face very close to my own as she puts her fingers up my vagina. She steps back, wiping her hand on a tissue. “Cervix has dilated this far,” she says, holding up three fingers.

  “How wide does it have to be?” I ask, though having her dawdle there is the last thing I want. I want only for her to leave quickly so that I can sit on the toilet again.

  “Seven wide,” she says. “One hour.”

  It was said that one of my cousins was born in a chamber pot. It didn’t seem to matter. It was one of the few stories that Father ever told me and therefore I cannot comment on its meaning. I would say, however, that it was just a story that didn’t matter much.

  40

  I am a funambulist, the act, at last, proceeding without interval. They’ve placed an enormous clock on the wall for encouragement of a sort, the only kind there is. Time passes. And they have nothing else to offer, no matter what they claim.

  “I can see the head now,” the nurse says. “Half an hour.”

  My eyes are open and I am thinking of Little Red Riding Hood. Or rather not of her, that postiche pudendum, but of the wolf. They snipped his stomach open to get her out and then they filled him with stones and sewed him back up again. And when he got up, he died. Now that is very Freudian and shows the limitations and protractions of life.

  “That was a good pain,” the nurse tells me.

  “I only want the bad ones,” I say.

  41

  There are a great many lights in the delivery room but they are not doing much to dispel the darkness. Everyone here is masked against it, protected and shielded in beautiful popsicle green. I am left to see nothing but am urged to breathe freely. The smells here are unsuitable but quite obvious—erasures, mimeograph ink, chalk shavings. There is loss, there is banishment. The world in this room is skewered with a crumbling stick. The world in this room holds no promise or danger and the only hope of my own is for expungement. At last I may be punished.…

  The nurse bends over me, smelling like a pressing board and pushes away the spots that rise and fall before my eyes.

  “No, I still can’t play tennis,” the doctor says. “I haven’t been able to play for about two months. I have spurs on both heels and it’s just about wrecked our marriage. Air conditioning and concrete floors is what does it. Murder on your feet.”

  A few minutes later, the nurse says, “Isn’t it wonderful to work with Teflon? I mean for those arterial repairs? I just love it.”

  The doctor says, “They served cold duck with dinner. Would you imagine that, please? Cold duck?”

  A few minutes later, the doctor puts the baby on my belly while he cuts the cord. The child has navy-blue eyes like a foal but does not look at us, having no interest in anyone here.

  The doctor’s mask does not move. I cannot see his mouth making the words but I can hear the words,

  “It’s a girl,” he says.

  She is a success.

  42

  I want to tell you something. It’s not much. The fight for consummation isn’t much.

  The girl in the bed beside me says, “I lost my baby.”

  “I’m sorry,” I say.

  “I think this is a heck of a place to put me, seeing that I lost my baby. In the maternity ward. I would say that was one heck of a place.”

  “There was probably a mistake,” I say. I am sorry but I do not want to hear about it. Nevertheless, I continue to look in her direction, a gesture that connotes interest. I do not exist. I have had a child. It is the seal set on my own nullity.

  The girl looks at me bleakly. “They said I had lost him yesterday night.”

  “I mean it was probably a mistake that they put you in here.” The pads in this ward are double size. There are four gross of them in a box beneath my bed. They expect me to bleed a great deal.

  “They make mistakes in this hospital all the time,” the girl says animatedly. “I had a friend and he came into Emergency with a broken leg and they set the wrong one.”

  “I’ve heard that,” I say. You always hear that.

  “I had a friend and he had one good eye and one bad eye and he had to have an operation to have the bad one removed and they removed the other one instead.”

  “Which one?” I say.

  She raises her bed until she is almost perpendicular. “What’s your baby’s name?”

  “I don’t know yet.” I am aware that I don’t bleed much.

  “Well, now that’s a funny thing because we couldn’t decide on a name for our baby either. Nothing goes with Apple. I mean my name is Jane Apple and my husband’s name is Wendall Apple and neither of those seemed to fit and nothing seems to fit. So we never did come up with a name. So it doesn’t seem as bad, although it is of course.”

  “What?” I say. Outside, there is a laurel tree which they have pruned devastatingly so that its branches will not rub against the window.

  “Just as bad.”

  “The babies are coming!” a nurse cries vigorously. “The babies are coming!”

  I rise dumbly from my bed and go to the sink to wash my hands. I return, dumbly. The girl pulls the curtain between the two beds and lights a cigarette.

  They wheel the train of babies down. They distribute them. Later they are collected and returned to the nursery. Then there is dinner. Then it is night. At some time in the following hours, a figure invariably appears at the doors and says, “Anything for discomfort?” No one, to my knowledge, has ever replied one way or the other.

  43

  The baby is brought to me shortly before midnight. She is bitter, outraged. A core of willful heat. Her head is damp. She cries without moving, without hope of satisfaction.

  “Why is her hair wet?” I ask.

  “It’s not wet. She’s just been crying, that’s all.”

  The baby and I lie and watch the butchered laurel tree. The baby nurses, frets, sighs. We hear ambulances arriving, doors slamming shut. Once, I think we can hear a nighthawk. It is probably not a nighthawk, but the sound of a part of the air folding shut resembles one. The baby is a strange companion in the night, fixed and exciting and untroubled.

  There’s always the danger of falling asleep, they’ll tell you. In nursing, one should always assume a slightly uncomfortable position, they’ll say.

  We lie and watch the laurel. Figures try to rise up between the branches but I drive them away. Somewhere in this town now, there is an animal that hunts incessantly. I tell the baby this. She is dispassionate. There are some objects that are notable by their absence from the trees. There is nothing that can be done to dispatch them. Little wombless, I say to the baby, but I cannot finish. There is no finishing.

  Is it over, Grady’s breathing asks.

  No, I am always answering.

  The baby smells like bread. They take her away, down the dark hall. I can’t think of anything right to do, Grady had said, his words rising with the engine’s singing. The driving lamps swam against the curve ahead. There is nothing that’s right that’s left to me. I touched his hand. His hand was on the shift knob, closed against me. And then his eyes closed too. But I could see myself already beyond the curve and walking. Walking away and on the road back. Even then.

  44

  I turn on the radio. A woman is saying,

  “I hope you will not think me vulgar.”

  “Not at all,” “Action Line” says. He sounds a little halting, exhausted. He sounds a little querulous himself.

  “My husband can only become sexually excited if he feels that some part of his body is missing.”

  “Yes,” “Action Line” says.

  “A finger or an eye or a leg. I have to pretend it’s not there.”

  “Yes,” “Action Line” says. “Nature is one vast mirag
e of infinite delusion.”

  45

  The day after the tragedy, the housemother is standing on a street corner, waiting for the bus. Everyone is talking about Doreen. The town, or at least that part of it which deals with the college, is shocked. The feeling is that there must be some mistake. The entire incident is outlandish and certainly will mark the end of electing queens.

  The housemother has had a fascinating day in town, talking to salesgirls and waitresses about it. She has had tea in six different restaurants and is exhausted. She is uncomfortable. She stands at the bus stop in brown low shoes, brown support hose, brown skirt and brown nylon blouse. She waits like an enormous brownie.

  She cannot get over the fact that this has happened to one of her girls. She never expects anything to happen to them. Those that have graduated and gone north write and tell her that they have husbands and babies and live in carriage houses in Connecticut. She wonders what a carriage house is and why anybody would want to live in one. It seems a nigger could do better than that.

  Her chin begins to move up and down. It has been doing that recently. Sometimes her entire face moves back and forth as though she is halfheartedly refusing something. When she realizes that her head is shuffling around like this on her neck, she immediately acknowledges it and turns the action into something she wants to do.

  Waiting at the bus stop, the housemother sadly shakes her head. Of all her girls, Doreen seemed most eligible for a happy future. The housemother is becoming depressed. She thinks of the inaccuracy of life, of the folly and injustice of it. She thinks of the greediness of people, their rudeness and lust. All those people in Miami and Mexico and New York City, healthy and wealthy and doing sick things.