by Joy Williams
A buzzer sounded in the beach house. Chester had had the whole house wired. In the week he had owned it, he had put in central air conditioning, replaced all the windows with one-way glass and installed an elaborate infrared alarm system. The buzzer, however, was just a local signal. It stopped. It had been just the door opening, just Chester coming home. Chester activated the total system when they were out or when they were sleeping. The girl thought of invisible frequencies monitoring undisturbed air. The girl found offensive the notion that she could be spared pain, humiliation, or loss by microwaves. She contemplated for a moment the desire Chester had for a complete home security system. There wasn’t anything in the house worth stealing. Chester was protecting space. For a moment, the girl found offensive the touch of Chester’s hand on her hair.
“Why aren’t you dressed?” he asked.
The girl looked at him, and then down at herself, at the thin T-shirt and hibiscus-flowered shorts. I am getting too old to wear this shit, the girl thought. The porch was cooling down fast in the twilight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.
“Why?” the girl said.
Chester sighed. “We’re going out to dinner with the Tynans.”
“I don’t want to go out to dinner with the Tynans,” the girl said.
Chester put his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got to snap out of this,” he said.
“I’m flying,” the girl said. “I have flown.” She thought of the shepherd leaping, the lightness. He had escaped from her. She hadn’t gotten anyplace.
“I’ve been very sympathetic,” Chester said. “I’ve consoled you the best I can.”
“There is no consolation,” the girl said. “There is no recovery. There is no happy ending.”
“We’re the happy ending,” Chester said. “Give us a break.”
The sky was red, the water a dull silver. “I can’t bear to see the Tynans again,” the girl said. “I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.”
“Don’t scream at me, darling. Doesn’t any of that stuff you take ever calm you down? I’m not the dog that you can scream at.”
“What?” the girl said.
Chester sat down on the glider. He put his hand on her knee. “I love you,” he said. “I think you’re wonderful, but I think a little self-knowledge, a little realism is in order here. You would stand and scream at that dog, darling.”
The girl looked at his hand, patting her knee. It seemed an impossibly large, ruddy hand.
“I wasn’t screaming,” she said. The dog had a famous trick. The girl would ask, “Do you love me?” and he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. Everyone had been amazed.
“The night it happened, you looked at the screen and you said you’d kill him when he got back.”
The girl stared at the hand stroking and rubbing her knee. She felt numb. “I never said that.”
“It was a justifiable annoyance, darling. You must have repaired that screen half a dozen times. He was becoming a discipline problem. He was adopting ways that made people feel uncomfortable.”
“Uncomfortable?” the girl said. She stood up. The hand dropped away.
“We cannot change any of this,” Chester said. “God knows if it were in my power, I would. I would do anything for you.”
“You didn’t stay with me that night, you didn’t lie down beside me!” The girl walked in small troubled circles around the room.
“I stayed for hours, darling. But nobody could sleep on that bed. The sheets were always sandy and covered with dog hairs. That’s why I bought a house, for the beds.” Chester smiled and reached out to her. She turned and walked through the house, opening the door, tripping the buzzer. “Oh you’ve got to stop this!” Chester shouted.
When she reached her own house, she went into the bedroom and lay down there. There was a yawning silence all around her, like an enormous hole. Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.
The girl lay on her side, turned, onto her back. She thought of the bougainvillea, of the leaves turning into flowers over the shepherd’s grave. She thought of the shepherd by her bed, against the wall, sleeping quietly, his faith in her at peace.
There was a pop, a small explosion in her head that woke her. She lurched up, gasping, from a dream that the shepherd had died. And for an instant, she hovered between two dreams, twice deceived. She saw herself leaping, only to fall back. The moonlight spilled into the clearing.
“I did love you, didn’t I?” the girl said. She saw herself forever leaping, forever falling back. “And didn’t you love me?”
Train
INSIDE, the Auto-Train was violet. Both little girls were pleased because it was their favorite color. Violet was practically the only thing they agreed on. Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead were both ten years old. They had traveled from Maine to Washington, D.C., by car with Jane’s parents and were now on the train with Jane’s parents and one hundred nine other people and forty-two automobiles on the way to Florida where they lived. It was September. Danica had been with Jane since June. Danica’s mother was getting married again and she had needed the summer months to settle down and have everything nice for Dan when she saw her in September. In August, her mother had written Dan and asked what she could do to make things nice for Dan when she got back. Dan replied that she would like a good wall-hung pencil sharpener and satin sheets. She would like cowboy bread for supper. Dan supposed that she would get none of these things. Her mother hadn’t even asked her what cowboy bread was.
The girls explored the entire train, north to south. They saw everyone but the engineer. Then they sat down in their violet seats. Jane made faces at a cute little toddler holding a cloth rabbit until he started to cry. Dan took out her writing materials and began writing to Jim Anderson. She was writing him a postcard.
“Jim,” she wrote, “I miss you and I will see you any minute. When I see you we will go swimming right away.”
“That is real messy writing,” Jane said. “It’s all scrunched together. If you were writing to anyone other than a dog, they wouldn’t be able to read it at all.”
Dan printed her name on the bottom of the card and embellished it all with X’s and O’s.
“Your writing to Jim Anderson is dumb in about twelve different ways. He’s a golden retriever, for Godssakes.”
Dan looked at her friend mildly. She was used to Jane yelling at her and expressing disgust and impatience. Jane had once lived in Manhattan. She had developed certain attitudes. Jane was a treasure from the city of New York currently on loan to the state of Florida where her father, for the last two years, had been engaged in running down a perfectly good investment in a marina and dinner theater. Jane liked to wear scarves tied around her head. She claimed to enjoy grapes and brown sugar and sour cream for dessert more than ice cream and cookies. She liked artichokes. She adored artichokes. She adored the part in the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker Suite where the Dew Drops and the candied Petals of Roses dance to the “Waltz of the Flowers.” Jane had seen the Nutcracker four times, for Godssakes.
Dan and Jane and Jane’s mother and father had all lived with Jane’s grandmother in her big house in Maine all summer. The girls hadn’t seen that much of the Muirheads. The Muirheads were always “cruising.” They were always “gunk-holing,” as they called it. Whatever that was, Jane said, for Godssakes. Jane’s grandmother had a house on the ocean and knew how to make pizza and candy and sail a canoe. She called pizza ‘za. She sang hymns in the shower. She sewed sequins on their jeans and made them say grace before dinner. After they said grace, Jane’s grandmother would ask forgiveness for things done and left undone. She would, upon request, lie down and chat with them at night before they went to sleep. Jane was crazy about her grandmother and was quite a nice person in her presence. One night, at the end of summer, Jane had had a dream in which men dressed in black
suits and white bathing caps had broken into her grandmother’s house and taken all her possessions and put them in the road. In Jane’s dream, rain fell on all her grandmother’s things. Jane woke up weeping. Dan had wept too. Jane and Dan were friends.
The train had not yet left the station even though it was two hours past the posted departure time. An announcement had just been made that said that a two-hour delay was built into the train’s schedule.
“They make up the time at night,” Jane said. She plucked the postcard from Dan’s hand. “This is a good one,” she said. “I think you’re sending it to Jim Anderson just so you can save it yourself.” She read aloud, “This is a photograph of the Phantom Dream Car crashing through a wall of burning television sets before a cheering crowd at the Cow Palace in San Francisco.”
At the beginning of summer, Dan’s mother had given her one hundred dollars, four packages of new underwear and three dozen stamped postcards. Most of the cards were plain but there were a few with odd pictures on them. Dan’s mother wanted to hear from her twice weekly throughout the summer. She had married a man named Jake, who was a carpenter. Jake had already built Dan three bookcases. This seemed to be the extent of what he knew how to do for Dan.
“I only have three left now,” Dan said, “but when I get home, I’m going to start my own collection.”
“I’ve been through that phase,” Jane said. “It’s just a phase. I don’t think you’re much of a correspondent. You wrote, ‘I got sunburn. Love, Dan’ … ‘I bought a green Frisbee. Love, Dan’ … ‘Mrs. Muirhead has swimmer’s ear. Love, Dan’ … ‘Mr. Muirhead went water-skiing and cracked his rib. Love, Dan’ … When you write to people you should have something to say.”
Dan didn’t reply. She had been Jane’s companion for a long time, and was wearying of what Jane’s mother called her “effervescence.”
Jane slapped Dan on the back and hollered, “Danica Anderson, for Godssakes! What is a clod like yourself doing on this fabulous journey!”
Together, as the train began to move, the girls made their way to the Starlight Lounge in Car 7 where Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead told them they would be enjoying cocktails. They hesitated in the car where the train’s magician was with his audience, watching him while he did the magic silks trick, the cut and restored handkerchief trick, the enchanted salt shaker trick, and the dissolving quarter trick. The audience, primarily retirees, screamed with pleasure.
“I don’t mind the tricks,” Jane whispered to Dan, “but the junk that gets said drives me crazy.”
The magician was a young man with a long spotted face. He did a lot of card forcing. Again and again, he called the card that people chose from a shuffled deck. Each time that the magician was successful, the audience participant yelled and smiled and in general acted thrilled. Jane and Dan passed on through.
“You don’t really choose,” Jane said. “He just makes you think you choose. He does it all with his pinky.” She pushed Dan forward into the Starlight Lounge where Mrs. Muirhead was on a banquette staring out the window at a shed and an unkempt bush which was sliding slowly past. She was drinking a martini. Mr. Muirhead was several tables away talking to a young man wearing jeans and a yellow jacket. Jane did not sit down. “Mummy,” she said, “can I have your olive?”
“Of course not,” Mrs. Muirhead said, “it’s soaked in gin.”
Jane, Dan in tow, went to her father’s table. “Daddy,” Jane demanded, “why aren’t you sitting with Mummy? Are you and Mummy having a fight?”
Dan was astonished at this question. Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead fought continuously and as bitterly as vipers. Their arguments were baroque, stately, and although frequently extraordinary, never enlightening. At breakfast, they would be quarreling over an incident at a cocktail party the night before or a dumb remark made fifteen years ago. At dinner, they would be howling over the fate, which they called by many names, which had given them one another. Forgiveness, charity and cooperation were qualities unknown to them. They were opponents pur sang. Dan was sure that one morning, Jane would be called from her classroom and told as gently as possible by Mr. Mooney, the school principal, that her parents had splattered one another’s brains all over the lanai.
Mr. Muirhead looked at the children sorrowfully and touched Jane’s cheek.
“I am not sitting with your mother because I am sitting with this young man here. We are having a fascinating conversation.”
“Why are you always talking to young men?” Jane asked.
“Jane, honey,” Mr. Muirhead said, “I will answer that.” He took a swallow of his drink and sighed. He leaned forward and said earnestly, “I talk to so many young men because your mother won’t let me talk to young women.” He remained hunched over, patting Jane’s cheek for a moment, and then leaned back.
The young man extracted a cigarette from his jacket and hesitated. Mr. Muirhead gave him a book of matches. “He does automobile illustrations,” Mr. Muirhead said.
The young man nodded. “Belly bands. Pearls and flakes. Flames. All custom work.”
Mr. Muirhead smiled. He seemed happier now. Mr. Muirhead loved conversations. He loved “to bring people out.” Dan supposed that Jane had picked up this pleasant trait from her father and distorted it in some perversely personal way.
“I bet you have a Trans Am yourself,” Jane said.
“You are so-o-o right,” the young man said. “It’s ice-blue. You like ice-blue? Maybe you’re too young.” He extended his hand showing a large gaudy stone in a setting that seemed to be gold. “Same color as this ring,” he said.
Dan nodded. She could still be impressed by adults. Their mysterious, unreliable images still had the power to attract and confound her, but Jane was clearly not interested in the young man. She demanded much of life. She had very high standards when she wanted to. Mr. Muirhead ordered the girls ginger ales and the young man and himself another round of drinks. Sometimes the train, in the mysterious way of trains, would stop, or even reverse, and they would pass unfamiliar scenes once more. The same green pasture filled with slanty light, the same row of clapboard houses, each with the shades of their windows drawn against the heat, the same boats on their trailers, waiting on dry land. The moon was rising beneath a spectacular lightning and thunder storm. People around them were commenting on it. Close to the train, a sheen of dark birds flew low across a dirt road.
“Birds are only flying reptiles, I’m sure you’re all aware,” Jane said suddenly.
“Oh my God, what a horrible thought!” Mr. Muirhead said. His face had become a little slack and his hair had become somewhat disarranged.
“It’s true, it’s true,” Jane sang. “Sad but true.”
“You mean like lizards and snakes?” the young man asked. He snorted and shook his head.
“Glorified reptiles, certainly,” Mr. Muirhead said, recovering a bit of his sense of time and place.
Dan suddenly felt lonely. It was not homesickness, although she would have given anything at that moment to be poking around in her little aluminum boat with Jim Anderson. But she wouldn’t be living any longer in the place she thought of as “home.” The town was the same but the place was different. The house where she had been a little tiny baby and had lived her whole life belonged to someone else now. Over the summer, her mother and Jake had bought another house which Jake was going to fix up.
“Reptiles have scales,” the young man said, “or else they are long and slimy.”
Dan felt like bawling. She could feel the back of her eyes swelling up like cupcakes. She was surrounded by strangers saying crazy things. Even her own mother often said crazy things in a reasonable way that made Dan know she was a stranger too. Dan’s mother told Dan everything. Her mother told her she wouldn’t have to worry about having brothers or sisters. Her mother discussed the particular nature of the problem with her. Half the things Dan’s mother told her, Dan didn’t want to know. There would be no brothers and sisters. There would be Dan and her mother and Jake, sittin
g around the house together, caring deeply for one another, sharing a nice life together, not making any mistakes.
Dan excused herself and started toward the lavatory on the level below. Mrs. Muirhead called to her as she approached and handed her a folded piece of paper. “Would you be kind enough to give this to Mr. Muirhead?” she asked. Dan returned to Mr. Muirhead and gave him the note and then went down to the lavatory. She sat on the little toilet as the train rocked along and cried.
After a while, she heard Jane’s voice saying, “I hear you in there, Danica Anderson. What’s the matter with you?”
Dan didn’t say anything.
“I know it’s you,” Jane said. “I can see your stupid shoes and your stupid socks.”
Dan blew her nose, pushed the button on the toilet and said, “What did the note say?”
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “Daddy ate it”
“He ate it!” Dan exclaimed. She opened the door of the stall and went to the sink. She washed her hands and splashed her face with water. She giggled. “He really ate it?”