by Joy Williams
She is becoming exasperated waiting for the bus. She peers up the hot street. She does not like this part of town. It is almost in the area called Frenchtown, the colored section. Opposite her is a fruitcake factory where a northern lady was abandoned by her husband two years before. He, a gentleman in a white Oldsmobile, went to park the car and never returned. People said that the lady had stayed in and outside the factory for three days, being raped casually by roving bands of youths, and then finally and alone, had taken the train back to Forty Fort, Pennsylvania.
The smell of sugar and candied fruit hangs in the air. The housemother shifts her weight. She has to go to the bathroom. In the fruitcake factory is a machine like a printing press, pushing out loaves. Farther up the street is a bar called Daddy Meaning’s. Music drifts toward her from a record player.
My mother often told me
Angels bonded your life away
She said.
Inside, men are sitting on stools, staring at a jar full of eggs.
No one walks in the street. The housemother goes over the tragedy again in her mind. She is thinking how she will relate it in a letter to her best friend, a blue-haired widow who lives in a condominium in Sun City. Last night, before the Serenade, before poor Doreen went out to wow the boys, the housemother had begun her weekly letter. She was having a difficult time. There was not much to relate. She told her friend that she had in the act caught the cook stealing a box of graham crackers and a 100-watt bulb. She told her about the new novel she was reading, a warm and tender love story (but with some dirty words) that will touch your heart. She has difficulty reading because of her eyes. Many words are not clear. She thinks she may be misinterpreting some of them.
At last she sees the bus approach. In the last few seconds that she waits, she falls. She has broken her hip. But it is not when she falls that she breaks the bone, it is while she still stands. The hip has simply worn out. It’s tired, out of calcium and out of luck. They will tell the housemother this later in the nursing home. They will reassure her that it is not an exceptional occurrence.
46
I KNOW THY WORKS THAT THOU ART NEITHER COLD NOR HOT: I WOULD THOU WERT COLD OR HOT.
I met my love in a movie theatre. A silent film. Dim interminable images. It seemed as though I had been there for hours in a plushy seat leaking out its dreadful contents. Every place I put my hand it would come away with something on it. Thread or foam or gum rubber or whatever.
It was directly after Father left. A hot day. Imagine Father coming down by train in all that heat in his black wool suit, black blouse, black hat. With only a tiny tab of white at the throat to throw the costume into relief. It was soiled. Nodules of hair low on his neck. His hair was sweetly island ragged, like a boy’s, and he smelled like a boy too as he introduced himself to me. SO THEN BECAUSE THOU ART LUKEWARM AND NEITHER COLD NOR HOT, I WILL SPEW THEE OUT OF MY MOUTH.
Grady’s dead. In the operating theatre. Men in lime smocks and a few wine vests watching from the balcony. A few women too. And I swear I saw several taking notes.
Grady’s dead. They gave me the word but not until after it had happened. I expected as much from them. I expected no better.
47
Any changes in the information on the birth certificate must be made within six weeks, they’ll tell you. These corrections will be made for a fee of five dollars per correction. After six weeks, corrections will not be made.
They have released us from the hospital, the baby and me. The day is hot and still. The sky is full of rain. Every afternoon now it rains punctually at four. There is a sale on white whiskey. There is a sale on hams. There is a dead egret lying in the gutter. A man walks past us with his little girl.
“It must of been sick or it wouldn’t have come into town,” the man tells her. “It must of been sick or it wouldn’t have been hit.” This seems to comfort the little girl. She doesn’t look at it.
The first warm drops of rain fall. A guilt beyond memory. A threat that is not fulfilled by the rain. I walk into a department store, into Infants Wear. I buy a back pack, six little shirts, three dozen diapers, four little gowns. Nothing else is necessary. The baby is so weightless on my hip. It is as though someone has bandaged the crook of my arm.
We leave the store and walk through the rain to the grocery. I take a cart. We orbit through the aisles. Behind the delicatessen counter is a man in a white apron, packing potato salad into a plastic bowl.
“They got that nigger,” he says to his customer.
“Thank God,” the customer says.
The man in the apron bends over the counter and looks at us. “Why if that ain’t the cutest child I’ve ever seen,” he says. “Lookit all that hair.”
I wheel the cart back through the aisles. I have forgotten something. We travel past the same foods and bottles and boxes again and again. I have forgotton something irrevocable. I put a jar of peanut butter in my cart, a loaf of raisin bread. I have a great desire for ice cream. I must have ice cream. But I have no place to go. It will melt before I get there. My forgetfulness! The cart wobbles. The wheels will not turn. I abandon the cart and get another one. Blame must be placed. One of us has made a mistake. I put in another jar of peanut butter, another loaf of bread. The wrapper is torn. There is a small scissure in the crust. I continue shopping. There is bubbling in the canned fruit. There is movement in the yellow corn meal. There is sugar on the flour and glass on the cream pies.
I release the cart. Something terrible has been happening. Someone is responsible.
What have they done with my Grady? I ask this now but I did not ask it then. I had just been released, you understand. I inspire innuendo, if not slander, I know. But the door closed behind me and the tumult, before it did, only served to stupefy me. The paperwork, the bills that must be satisfied, the statements that must be signed. And I wanted to ask. It was up to me to contact the proper authority, I know, but the context of their conversation precluded it. There seemed no way it could be brought up. And it was not simply a question of transition or tact. I have difficulty in keeping up my end of a doctor’s dialogue. There seemed no way it could be phrased in a meaningful fashion. And then the door closed shut behind me and they watched me from the air-conditioned inside until, I suppose, I was out of their sight.
Lost. The heat followed me in a small traveling stream of silence. The baby’s eyes were squeezed against the sun. Her diaper stayed dry for hours and hours. Gone. In what parasitic place.
I did not ask a soul. And the accident was not mentioned. I never saw his friends after the accident. Even if I had seen them, the Fern Fellow and his wife, they probably would not have referred to our absence at dinner that night. They would have been hurt and insulted at our failure to show up. The man is particularly sensitive to slight. He would have put our unused glasses and plates back in the cupboard without a word. Larger servings for themselves would have salvaged the evening nicely.
I did not ask and no one spoke of Grady. Nothing on the radio. I gave them a day. I confess I expected some report, if only a line. The first night there was nothing. The second evening, I caught my Answer Man, my Action Line chum saying,
“The zone of life, the area which not only all that live and breathe and move inhabit but in which all vegetation is contained is a mere twelve miles.”
I turned it off, feeling a bit mollified. One has to learn to deal with the unspoken. As it turned out it was the only information offered. The newspaper was indecipherable as always. Something about a traffic light erection. Something about children milkeholics. Our own story was lost in overset I suppose, but I should have inquired further.
Thrown back upon myself, upon my own devices, I went to his room. 17. It was empty as I feared. I lay on the bed for a moment with the baby, although I was not tired. When I got up, I smoothed the sheets. I do not mind criticism but it seemed important that I leave the room at least the way I found it the last time.
They released me in three days. I
might have mentioned it. Another holy number, fixed as any race. Its implications arose immediately. Father would have noted it. The three that bear record in heaven and the three that bear witness on earth. I could go on and on. The angel flying through the middle of heaven said, “Woe, woe, woe, to the inhabiters of earth”—and three angels were yet to sound their trumpets and by these three, fire, smoke and brimstone, was the third part of men killed, and those not yet killed failed to repent of three things, their sorceries, fornications and thefts. And three unclean spirits came out of the mouth of the dragon, and the dragon and the beast and the false prophet constitute three.
Oh, I could have gone on and on but the door closed behind me. And I realized I had failed to ask where they put my Grady. In what terrible cold ground, his sunny arms.
48
I have left something behind. I have lost something and cannot find it. I am in a grocery. I clutch my stomach but the baby is in my arms. My hunger leaves me forever. The meat bleeds into the freezing coils. Body hair falls from the endive.
Everyone smiles at me as I start to leave. They smile at the baby. I am calm, for the baby has pinned my hands fast to her round chest. I pass the delicatessen. There are other customers now but the mangier is the same. He throws corned beef onto a scale.
“It’s just as well he won’t be seeing court,” he says. “It’s just as well for him it was done quick rather than long.”
“More mercy shown to him than to that lovely girl.”
There’s a woman there so short her head hardly musters past the onion buns. “Onct lovely,” she corrects.
“That’s right,” the man in the apron says. “They have got to take the skin off the tops of her legs and put it on her face.” He looks at me. “That sure is a cute new baby,” he says, “fresh out of the oven.”
Lost. The blood is pounding in my head. So thirsty. And they’ve shot all the poor beasts, I’ll learn as well. Carriers of disease. Torn the place down. Nothing to it. Dry wood termites. Seven minutes with two sledge hammers. The air has to turn no corners out at Bryant’s any more.
The rain has stopped and hasn’t left a trace upon the town. The heat is smothering. I walk outside and right away into a liquor store. Men are sitting at tables drinking blend. I buy two quarts of gin.
“Barfield must have been practicing because he only fired but three times.” The rhythm of the man’s words is soothing and confident. The sweat dries upon my lip.
“He only fired but three times,” he croons. “The first shot got the nigger in the knee but he kept running right toward Terry worse than a mad dog. And the second shot got him in the other leg and then he went screaming and foaming and then he started crawling toward Terry and the third shot got him right in the rig and that was that.”
The bartender coughs, jerking his head at me. The men shuffle and cough.
“You want anything else?” the bartender asks.
“Where can I buy a train ticket?” Milk is drying in dark circles on my blouse. In dream, the baby jumps a little in my arms.
“Right here,” he says. “I can sell you one right here to get on the train. And then when you get on you buy another ticket for wherever it is you want to go.”
“How much is it now?” I say.
“Fifty cents,” he says. “You only need one. A baby in your arms don’t need a ticket.”
“I suspected it,” I say.
49
The quickening train speeds past the junk yard. Pressed back against my seat, a Jaguar is in my range for just a moment, a Jaguar traveling toward me from the very edge of Glick’s boundaries, from the very corner of the world, through the flowers and the sparrows, its doors peeled off, its trunk and hood indecently flung open, caroming sideways. Broken. Gone.
My head rests on a clean white napkin. The baby is nursing. Fifteen minutes on the left. I shift her to the right. Ten minutes. She falls asleep.
Her cheekbones. Her cheekbones are Grady’s, I think sometimes. But I’ve left that all behind me, the bringing up of things that were. I won’t bring them up again, I assure you. Grady and Corinthian and Mother and baby and sister and others over the years that I haven’t kept up with.
People go, you know. It’s only you that remains. That’s the way it will be. That’s certain at least.
It takes years to learn to be still.
At another time, for instance, you might have expected something to fly up from that wrecked Jaguar as we passed. Butterflies perhaps. Or insects. But there was nothing. Nothing.
I run my fingers along the ridges of the baby’s cheeks which are high and hard. She opens her eyes, her deep and perfect eyes that don’t believe in anything.
A man in a uniform comes down the aisle of the car, an employee, asking me my destination. At another time this might have led to something. But I am still now. I am collected and the baby’s head is cool upon my breast. I feel cool all over from the baby’s head, and I tell him. While he is punching out the tickets, I say, “I’m going home.” I smile. I take money from my pocket. I am a young mother going home. A satchel beside me filled with simple necessities. Clean and cool, my hair combed nicely, my little baby with a yellow ribbon on her wrist. I am calm and neat. The baby is powdered and her diaper is tight and white and dry. I am responsible. A good risk.
“Well, that sure is nice,” the man says. “That’s what’s so satisfying about working on the railroad. You take so many people home.”
“It must be very rewarding,” I say.
“It sure is,” he says. He goes to the only other people in the car, a man and woman sitting several seats away. They buy a ticket for a place a hundred or so miles up the line. The woman has a bag full of hamburgers. She has a long and nervous and aggressive face. The man is handsome, with a generous suffering mouth. One can tell immediately that something is wrong between them. Something empty, long familiar to them. The woman takes a small bite from her hamburger, looks savagely at the bun, takes another bite. She pushes the mutilated hamburger into the man’s hand and turns away from him, watching the fields and the muckland soar by. The man eats the food slowly, looking straight ahead. He is facing me. I can hear his dry swallowing. I can see his eyes. Just before he finishes it, his wife opens the bag and takes out another hamburger. She begins to eat it, but becomes bored again, annoyed, punitive. She hands it to him to finish. The process is repeated again and again. Tears begin to roll down the man’s face.
I know that nothing is expected of me in this situation. I am well groomed, sitting straight, holding my baby, going home. There was a time when I would have offered myself to this man. But now I see the impropriety of it. I see that it’s just a dream. To know that it is all dream! To know that one has become free not to enter into it at last!
50
… And I am in Father’s house at last, all the journeying behind me, all the times the others paid for. Just before I arrived, my Answer man was there, but the words were gone, as I knew they’d have to be, and his head, wide as the night sky, became the night sky at last, as I knew it would.
One more thing. When I arrived at the house with Father at the window, I found something, some small mammal on the lawn. Recently dead. I was relieved. If I had arrived sooner it might have still been hopelessly surviving, in need of action, of some sort, on my part. One cannot simply put an injured thing in the shade of a bush if convenient or turn its head to face its nest if ascertained. One cannot simply do that. I am grateful that the choice continues to be not mine. Some would call it luck, I suppose. I would not.
Father has the baby now. He is downstairs with her and I am upstairs, resting. I can hear him speaking with her. At another time, I might have thought the sound was only wind. But here there is no wind. It is a still summer night. Even the sea is silent.
I lie on the bed. I banish each thought softly. There are no more memories to resist. There is only the baby. I think of her with abandon but then more and more carefully. I remove everything but the fac
t of her. She is outside with Father, swimming in his arms. I let that go. I let almost everything go. I concentrate upon something deep within her, deep within all that remains after I have let everything go. I am left with almost nothing, but I enter it. I enter it.
What peace.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joy Williams’s short stories have appeared in such publications as Esquire, The Paris Review, and The New Yorker. State of Grace was nominated for the National Book Award in 1974. She is the author of two other novels, The Changeling and Breaking and Entering, as well as two short-story collections, Taking Care and Escapes. She lives in Florida and in Arizona.