by Joy Williams
“What things?” Gen asks.
“We could talk and talk,” Annie says.
“About what?” Gen insists.
“We could discuss why you can’t cut the end off a piece of string,” Annie says.
“Why can’t you?” Gen asks.
“It’s a philosophical question,” Annie says, “we could talk about it forever.”
“We wouldn’t talk,” Gen says.
Her mother looks hurt. She pushes her hair up and off her neck, which makes her look younger and sadder.
“How is your turkey?” Gen asks Katherine. “What does he like to do?”
Katherine tells her that the turkey likes corn and egg shells and bagels and then finds herself telling a long Baba Yaga story. She tells Gen that the turkey reminds her of Baba Yaga, a Russian witch who lived in a house on chicken legs. Whenever anyone came along that Baba Yaga did not want to see, the chicken legs would move the house around so that the visitor couldn’t find the front door.
Gen had never heard of Baba Yaga.
“Do you like fairy tales?” Katherine asks her.
“I like science fiction,” Gen says and wanders from the room, smelling the way Annie would smell if she ever had the opportunity to use her own perfume.
“Have some wine,” Annie urges Katherine, “tell me what you’re thinking.”
“Actually,” Katherine says, “I was thinking about how I used to climb trees so a certain person would think I wasn’t home.”
Annie thinks Katherine is referring to her childhood. “Children are different today,” she sighs. “They’re entirely different from the way we used to be.”
A week before Katherine’s birthday, a long envelope arrives from Travis’s mother. Each year she sends a birthday card to Katherine one week ahead of time. She must have put the date down wrong on her calendar years ago and transferred it incorrectly to each succeeding year. Katherine opens the envelope and there is a birthday card and a long red and white automobile bumper sticker inside. I LOVE MY VOLVO the sticker says. Travis’s mother has a Volvo too, but an old one, a bulbous sedan painted a cheery Coca-Cola red. Katherine doesn’t put the sticker on her car. Actually, Katherine doesn’t love her Volvo. She’s surprised that Travis’s mother doesn’t realize that.
Katherine’s birthday finally arrives. She has given Gen a tape recorder. As for herself, she and Peter decide to drink champagne all day. She would like to forget this birthday in a fashionable manner. Peter borrows a friend’s sailboat and they sail around in the morning drinking champagne. In the afternoon, they return the boat, change their clothes and go to an art opening at a local gallery where there is lots of champagne being served. The artist says that his paintings, which are mathematical and precise, are based on Gestalt principles of illusion. Katherine likes the paintings which give the impression that they have solved something, that something is settled and finished. They don’t remind her of anything. The artist is a fat jolly man dressed in black. His wife is beautiful and a smoker and since smoking is not allowed in the gallery, she stands outside mostly, smoking. Peter is a smoker too and he and the artist’s wife stand outside beneath the palms and smoke and drink champagne. She smokes Gauloises and he smokes Camels. They are the last smokers left in the world. When Katherine walks outside to join them, she finds herself telling the woman how much everything has changed, how only a few years ago there were pileated woodpeckers and tarpon and sea turtles, but there aren’t any more. Peter begins fiddling with a long silk scarf the artist’s wife is wearing. He holds a tasseled end in his hand and runs it through his fingers. He rocks back and forth on his heels and tosses one end of the scarf softly around the woman’s neck. Katherine walks away, down the street to the Volvo. Just as she is putting the key in the ignition, Peter runs up. She puts the car in gear and Peter jumps into the back seat as the car moves off.
“I’m sorry,” he says, “I was being a little ebullient.”
“Ebullient?” Katherine says. “Is that how you pronounce that?”
“Yes,” Peter says. “Honk the horn on your birthday.” He kisses her and climbs into the front seat. “Just honk the horn like you normally would.”
Katherine taps the horn and there is a loud blast which makes her jump in her seat. It’s the sound of an ocean liner.
“I could have bought one that had eighty-one different sounds,” Peter says. “It was a synthesizer that mixed tone, bass, treble and frequency. You could make zoo sounds, UFO sounds, animal yelps, ambulance and police siren sounds, everything.”
“I love this,” Katherine says, and she does, but she will have to get used to hitting the horn. She never uses the horn. She is not that kind of a driver. She taps the horn again.
“Do you love me?” Peter asks.
“Yes,” Katherine says.
On New Year’s Day, Katherine goes to the house with Peter. He is going to plant four citrus trees and a Jacaranda. Katherine is going to poison the ants. She measures everything carefully and pours the poison through a funnel into the hills.
“There goes their breakfast nook!” Peter calls to her encouragingly. “There goes their fandango room!”
Katherine measures and mixes. She moves from one end of the property to the other, pouring the smoky green liquid into the mounds.
“There goes their ball game,” Peter says. He sets a lemon tree firmly in a hole, taps the earth down around it, sprays the green leaves lightly with a hose. The Jacaranda will grow high above the citrus and losing its leaves in winter, allow the sun to shine through its bare branches and ripen the fruit below. In the springtime, when the citrus is in neither fruit nor flower, the Jacaranda will be in full color. Katherine watches Peter as he works. She tries to remember the last words Travis ever said to her, the very last words. She can’t. She wraps the empty bottle of poison tightly in newspaper and stuffs it in the trash, then runs water from an outside spigot and washes her hands. She goes over to the turkey’s pen. The turkey looks at her with vacant dignity. She feeds it pieces of bread and grass through the wire.
“We’ll have a big party when this is all finished,” Peter says. “We’re going to have a wonderful time in this house.
“In the lot next door, behind a fence, someone starts a chain saw. The turkey shrieks wildly in response. The turkey loves the sound of chain saws, motorcycles and sudden laughter.
“That’s new,” Katherine says, pointing through the trees at the shine of a distant roof. “We were never able to see a house over there before.”
“They’re building too,” Peter says. “They’ve subdivided the land.”
“Everything’s changing,” Katherine says.
“We won’t notice them,” Peter says, “we’ll plant some more trees.” When Katherine doesn’t reply, Peter says, “I know things change now and I do not care. It’s all been changed for me. Let it all change. We’ll be gone before it’s changed too much. I found that if you took a drink it got very much the same as it was always.”
Katherine looks at him.
“Hemingway,” Peter says.
“Yes, let’s have a drink,” Katherine says.
Katherine sits at the kitchen table in the beach shack and writes out invitations for the party Peter’s planned. As she writes addresses on envelopes, she thinks of a T-shirt Travis wore all the time. The T-shirt said THE FAINTING EGG. It had something to do with a vegetarian restaurant where one of their friends worked as a waiter. The shirt was dark blue and had white lettering. She remembers it clearly.
On the table with the invitations is a letter from Travis’s mother, who writes that she has just won a black and white television set in a soft drink contest. “I pried this little plastic liner out of the bottle cap and there it was, a little picture of a TV! The first time in my life I have ever won anything! I am donating it to the church, however, as I already have a nice TV.”
Katherine and Travis’s mother have been keeping in touch now for seven years.
Katherine pu
ts everything down on the invitation except the date which she’ll fill in later. She and Peter do not know the date of the party because the house isn’t finished yet. There have been delays. The weather has been unusually cold and rainy and the carpenter has a lung infection and hasn’t been able to work. But even though the work is not completed, they will have to return to the house. For the last few years, Dewey has rented the beach shack for the month of February to a couple from Canada and they are arriving late tonight. After Katherine finishes the invitations, she will sweep the rooms and go home. She and Peter will live in their unfinished house and in a while it will be finished and they will be there.
Katherine walks out to the beach. It is very cold, the sky is grey, the water white with swells. Freezing temperatures are predicted for the night. Dewey has told her that thirty years ago, there was such a severe freeze that even the mangroves died. Katherine watches the boys surf in their black wet suits. They are waiting for the heavenly shout and the trumpet calls, and while they wait, they surf. Katherine watches them until she begins to shiver. Back in the shack, she calls Peter on the telephone and tells him she’s just finishing up. He doesn’t have to pick her up in the car, she’ll walk home.
“It’s too cold,” Peter says.
“No, I want to.”
“I’ll warm you up when you get home,” Peter says.
Katherine sweeps the shack carefully. She scours the sinks and takes all the silverware out of the tray and checks it to make sure it’s clean. The sun goes down, filling the rooms with red light. When she finally leaves, it’s dark. She walks north along the beach for a mile until she reaches a small parcel of land that hasn’t been developed yet and is still in cedars and cabbage palms. She passes through this to the harrowing three-lane road that bisects the key, crosses the road and enters their neighborhood, a Venetian labyrinth of streets which hum with the sounds of sprinkler systems and pool filters.
In their lot, Peter has covered the newly planted citrus with plastic sheeting to protect them from the cold. He has covered the elephant ears, the Dieffenbachia, the arecas. Katherine makes her way past the enshrouded plants to the house which is ablaze with lights, virtually held aloft and secure in space by thousands of watts. The house is huge, all angles and pitch, bleached wood and glass. Katherine puts the bag of invitations she has been carrying down on the ground, and chews on her nails which smell of Comet. She knows she is worrying about something that has already happened, something in the past which she should resist worrying about. She stands outside in the cold dark and looks into the house at Peter who is making himself a drink. She watches him as he fills a second glass with ice. It is a plastic insulated glass with a felt pelican roosting between the walls of the vacuum seal. It is Katherine’s glass, the one she has indicated a preference for. Peter’s glass has a piece of knotted rope. There is a fire burning in the new limestone fireplace and Peter stands before it looking at it while Katherine looks into the room, at Peter. Furniture is pushed against the walls and lumber and rolls of screening are stacked in a corner. Some of the furniture is covered with sheets to protect it from dust.
Peter walks through the lighted rooms toward Katherine but doesn’t see her. He goes to the telephone and she can tell by the numbers he dials that he is calling the beach house. They both wait while the phone rings and rings. Katherine moves even further from the house and crouches by the turkey pen which Peter has covered with a piece of plastic which doesn’t quite reach to the ground. She remembers how she used to hide from Travis long ago, and wonders when it was exactly when all her dreams and attitudes about herself were reduced to the pervasive memory of a dead boy. She knows she will go into the house soon and be with Peter, on this, the coldest night in many years, but for the moment she waits outside, in the dark. Beside her, in the pen, only the turkey’s foolish legs are visible, its impossible feet being hidden in straw.
Traveling to Pridesup
OTILLA cooked up the water for her morning tea and opened a carton of ricotta cheese. She ate standing up, dipping cookies in and out of the cheese, walking around the enormous kitchen in tight figure eights as though she were in a gymkhana. She was eighty-one years old and childishly ravenous and hopeful with a long pigtail and a friendly unreasonable nature.
She lived with her sisters in a big house in the middle of the state of Florida. There were three of them, all older and wiser. They were educated in Northern schools and came back with queer ideas. Lavinia, the eldest, returned after four years, with a rock, off of a mountain, out of some forest. It was covered with lichen and green like a plum. Lavinia put it to the north of the seedlings on the shadowy side of the house. She tore up the grass and burnt out the salamanders and the ants and raked the sand out all around the rock in a pattern like a machine would make. The sisters watched the rock on and off for forty years until one morning when they were all out in their Mercedes automobile, taking the air, a sinkhole opened up and took the rock and half the garage down thirty-seven feet. It didn’t seem to matter to Lavinia, who had cared for the thing. Growing rocks, she said, was supposed to bring one serenity and put one on terms with oneself and she had become serene so she didn’t care. Otilla believed that such an idea could only come from a foreign religion, but she could only guess at this as no one ever told her anything except her father, and he had died long ago from drink. He was handsome and rich, having made his money in railways and grapefruit. Otilla was his darling. She still had the tumbler he was drinking rum from when he died. None of father’s girls had ever married, and Otilla, who was thought to be a little slow, had not even gone off to school.
Otilla ate a deviled egg and some ice cream and drank another cup of tea. She wore sneakers and a brand new dress that still had the cardboard pinned beneath the collar. The dress had come in the mail the day before along with a plastic soap dish and three rubber pedal pads for the Mercedes. The sisters ordered everything through catalogs and seldom went to town. Upstairs, Otilla could hear them moving about.
“Louisa,” Marjorie said, “this soap dish works beautifully.”
Otilla moved to a wicker chair by the window and sat on her long pigtail. She turned off the light and turned on the fan. It was just after sunrise, the lakes all along the Ridge were smoking with heat. She could see bass shaking the surface of the water and she felt a brief and eager joy at the sight—at the morning and the mist running off the lakes and the birds rising up from the shaggy orange trees. The joy didn’t come often any more and it didn’t last long and when it passed it seemed more a part of dying than delight. She didn’t dwell on this however. For the most part, she found that as long as one commenced to get up in the morning and move one’s bowels, everything else moved along without confusing variation.
From the window, she could also see the mailbox. The flag was up and there was a package swinging from it. She couldn’t understand why the mailman hadn’t put the package inside. It was a large sturdy mailbox and would hold anything.
She got up and walked quickly outside, hoping that Lavinia wouldn’t see her, as Lavinia preferred picking up the mail herself. She passed the black Mercedes. The garage had never been rebuilt and the car had been parked for years between two oak trees. There was a quilt over the hood. Every night, Lavinia would pull a wire out of the distributor and bring it into the house. The next morning she would put the wire back in again, warm up the Mercedes and drive it twice around the circular driveway and then down a slope one hundred yards to the mailbox. They only received things that they ordered. The Mercedes was fifteen years old and had eleven thousand miles on it. Lavinia kept the car up. She was clever at it.
“This vehicle will run forever because I’ve taken good care of it,” she’d say.
Otilla stood beside the mailbox looking north up the road and then south. She had good eyesight but there wasn’t a thing to be seen. Hanging in a feed bag off the mailbox was a sleeping baby. It wore a little yellow T-shirt with a rabbit on it. The rabbit appeared to be
playing a fiddle. The baby had black hair and big ears and was making small grunts and whistles in its sleep. Otilla wiped her hands on the bodice of her dress and picked the baby out of the sack. It smelled faintly of ashes and fruit.
Inside the house, the three sisters, Lavinia, Louisa and Marjorie were setting out the breakfast things. They were ninety-two, ninety and eighty-seven respectively. They were in excellent color and health and didn’t look much over seventy. Each morning they’d set up the table as though they were expecting the Governor himself—good silver, best china, egg cups and bun cozy.
They settled themselves. The fan was painted with blue rustproof paint and turned right on around itself like an owl. The soft-boiled eggs wobbled when the breeze ran by them.
“Going to be a hot one,” Lavinia said.
The younger sisters nodded yes, chewing on their toast.
“The summer’s just begun and it appears it’s never going to end,” Lavinia said.
The sisters shook their heads yes. The sky was getting brighter and brighter. The three of them, along with Otilla, had lived together forever. They weren’t looking at the sky or the empty groves which they had seen before. The light was changing very fast, progressing visibly over the table top. It fell on the butter.
“They’ve been tampering with the atmosphere,” Lavinia said. “They don’t have the sense to leave things alone.” Lavinia was a strong-willed, impatient woman. She thought about what she had just said and threw her spoon down irritably at the truth of it. Lavinia was no longer serene about anything. That presumption had been for her youth, when she had time. Now everything was pesky to her and a hindrance.
“Good morning,” Otilla said. She walked to the wicker chair and sat down. The baby lay in her arms, short and squat like a loaf of bread.
Lavinia’s eyes didn’t change, nor her mouth nor the set of her jaw. Outside some mockingbirds were ranting. The day had gotten so bright it was as if someone had just shot it off in her face.