by Joy Williams
“David,” Jane says. She looks at his face. It is calm and round, a child’s face.
It is evening. On television, a man dressed as a chef, holding six pies, falls down a flight of stairs. The incident is teaching numbers.
SIX, the screen screams.
“Six,” David says.
Jane and Jackson are drinking whiskey and apple juice. Jane is wondering what they did for David’s last birthday, when he was five. Did they have a little party?
“What did we do on your last birthday, David?” Jane asks.
“We gave him pudding,” Jackson says.
“That’s not true,” Jane says, worried. She looks at David’s face.
SIX TOCKING CLOCKS, the television sings.
“Six,” David says.
Jane’s drink is gone. “May I have another drink?” she asks politely, and then gets up to make it for herself. She knocks the ice cubes out of the tray and smashes them up with a wooden spoon. On the side of the icebox, held in place by magnets, is a fragment from a poem, torn from a book. It says, The dead must fall silent when one sits down to a meal. She wonders why she put it there. Perhaps it was to help her diet.
Jane returns to the couch and David sits beside her. He says, “You say ‘no’ and I say ‘yes.’ ”
“No,” Jane says.
“Yes,” David yells, delighted.
“No.”
“Yes.”
“No.”
“Yes.”
“Yes.”
David stops, confused. Then he giggles. They play this game all the time. Jane is willing to play it with him. It is easy enough to play. Jackson and Jane send David to a fine kindergarten and are always buying him chalk and crayons. Nevertheless, Jane feels unsure with David. It is hard to know how to act when one is with the child, alone.
The dog sits by a dented aluminum dish in the bright kitchen. Jackson is opening a can of dog food.
“Jesus,” he says, “what a sad, stupid dog.”
The dog eats his food stolidly, gagging a little. The fur beneath his tail hangs in dirty beards.
“Jesus,” Jackson says.
Jane goes to the cupboard, wobbling slightly. “I’m going to kill that dog,” she says. “I’m sick of this.” She puts down her drink and takes a can of Dra¯no out of the cupboard. She takes a pound of hamburger that is thawing in a bowl and rubs off the soft pieces onto a plate. She pours Dra¯no over it and mixes it in.
“It is my dog,” Jane says, “and I’m going to get rid of him for you.”
David starts to cry.
“Why don’t you have another drink?” Jackson says to Jane. “You’re so vivacious when you drink.”
David is sobbing. His hands flap in the air. Jackson picks him up. “Stop it,” he says. David wraps his legs around his father’s chest and pees all over him. Their clothing turns dark as though, together, they’d been shot. “Goddamn it,” Jackson shouts. He throws his arms out. He stops holding the child but his son clings to him, then drops to the floor.
Jane grabs Jackson’s shoulder. She whispers in his ear, something so crude, in a tone so unfamiliar, that it can only belong to all the time before them. Jackson does not react to it. He says nothing. He unbuttons his shirt. He takes it off and throws it in the sink. Jane has thrown the dog food there. The shirt floats down to it from his open fist.
Jane kneels and kisses her soiled son. David does not look at her. It is as though, however, he is dreaming of looking at her.
The Wedding
Elizabeth always wanted to read fables to her little girl but the child only wanted to hear the story about the little bird who thought a steam shovel was its mother. They would often argue about this. Elizabeth was sick of the story. She particularly disliked the part where the baby bird said, “You are not my mother, you are a snort, I want to get out of here!” At night, at the child’s bedtime, Sam would often hear them complaining bitterly to each other. He would preheat the broiler for dinner and freshen his drink and go out and sit on the picnic table. In a little while, the screen door would slam and Elizabeth would come out, shaking her head. The child had frustrated her again. The child would not go to sleep. She was upstairs, wandering around, making “cotton candy” in her bone-china bunny mug. “Cotton candy” was Kleenex sogged in water. Sometimes Elizabeth would tell Sam the story that she had prepared for the child. The people in Elizabeth’s fables were always looking for truth or happiness and they were always being given mirrors or lumps of coal. Elizabeth’s stories were inhabited by wolves and cart horses and solipsists.
“Please relax,” Sam would say.
“Sam,” the child called, “have some of my cotton candy. It’s delicious.”
Elizabeth’s child reminded Sam of Hester’s little Pearl even though he knew that her father, far from being the “Prince of the Air,” was a tax accountant. Elizabeth spoke about him occasionally. He had not shared the previous year’s refund with her even though they had filed jointly and half of the year’s income had been hers. The tax accountant told Elizabeth that she didn’t know how to do anything right. Elizabeth, in turn, told her accountant that he was always ejaculating prematurely.
“Sam,” the child called, “why do you have your hand over your heart?”
“That’s my Scotch,” Sam said.
—
Elizabeth was a nervous young woman. She was nervous because she was not married to Sam. This desire to be married again embarrassed her, but she couldn’t help it. Sam was married to someone else. Sam was always married to someone.
Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that blackly reminded the lonely of the darkness. They met at the wedding dinner of the daughter of a mutual friend. Delicious food was served and many peculiar toasts were given. Sam liked Elizabeth’s aura and she liked his too. They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink. At one point, he thought he saw a red rabbit in the floral centerpiece. It’s true, it was Easter week, but he worried about this. They danced again. Sam danced Elizabeth out of the party and into the parking lot. Sam’s car was nondescript and tidy except for a bag of melting groceries.
Elizabeth loved his kisses. On the other hand, when Sam saw Elizabeth’s brightly flowered scanty panties, he thought he’d faint with happiness. He was a sentimentalist.
“I love you,” Elizabeth thought she heard him say.
Sam swore that he heard Elizabeth say, “Life is an eccentric privilege.”
This worried him but not in time.
—
They began going out together. Elizabeth promised to always take the babysitter home. At first, Elizabeth and Sam attempted to do vile and imaginative things to each other. This culminated one afternoon when Sam spooned a mound of tiramisu between Elizabeth’s legs. At first, of course, Elizabeth was nervous. Then she stopped being nervous and began watching Sam’s sweating, good-looking shoulders with real apprehension. Simultaneously, they both gave up. This seemed a good sign. The battle is always between the pleasure principle and the reality principle, is it not? Imagination is not what it’s cracked up to be. Sam decided to forget the petty, bourgeois rite of eating food out of another’s orifices for a while. He decided to just love Elizabeth instead.
—
“Did you know that Charles Dickens wanted to marry little Red Riding Hood?”
“What!” Sam exclaimed, appalled.
“Well, as a child he wanted to marry her,” Elizabeth said.
“Oh,” Sam said, relieved.
—
Elizabeth had a house and her little girl. Sam had a house and a car and a Noank sloop. The houses were thirteen hundred miles apart. They spent the winter in Elizabeth’s house in the South and they drove up to Sam’s house for the summer. The trip took two and a half days. They had done it twice now. It seemed about the same each time. They bought peaches and cigarettes and fireworks. The child would often sit on the floor in the front seat and talk into the air
-conditioning vent.
“Emergency,” she’d say. “Come in, please.”
—
On the most recent trip, Sam had called his lawyer from a Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike. The lawyer told him that Sam’s divorce had become final that morning. This had been Sam’s third marriage. He and Annie had seemed very compatible. They tended to each other realistically, with affection and common sense. Then Annie decided to go back to school. She became interested in animal behaviorism. Books accumulated. She was never at home. She was always on field trips, in thickets or on beaches, or visiting some ornithologist in Barnstable.
“Annie, Annie,” Sam had pleaded. “Let’s have some people over for drinks. Let’s prune the apple tree. Let’s bake the orange cake you always made for my birthday.”
“I have never made an orange cake in my life,” Annie said.
“Annie,” Sam said, “don’t they have courses in seventeenth-century romantic verse or something?”
“You drink too much,” Annie said. “You get quarrelsome every night at nine. Your behavior patterns are severely limited.”
Sam clutched his head with his hands.
“Plus you are reducing my ability to respond to meaningful occurrences, Sam.”
Sam poured himself another Scotch. He lit a cigarette. He applied a mustache with a piece of picnic charcoal.
“I am Captain Blood,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”
“When Errol Flynn died, he had the body of a man of ninety,” Annie said. “His brain was unrealistic from alcohol.”
She had already packed the toast rack and the pewter and rolled up the Oriental rug.
“I am just taking this one Wanda Landowska recording,” she said. “That’s all I’m taking in the way of records.”
Sam, with his charcoal mustache, sat very straight at his end of the table.
“The variations in our life have ceased to be significant,” Annie said.
—
Sam’s house was on a hill overlooking a cove. The cove was turning into a saltwater marsh. Sam liked marshes but he thought he had bought property on a deepwater cove where he could take his boat in and out. He wished that he were not involved in witnessing his cove turning into a marsh. When he had first bought the place, he was so excited about everything that he had a big dinner party at which he served soupe de poisson using only the fish he had caught himself from the cove. He could not, it seems, keep himself from doing this each year. Each year, the soupe de poisson did not seem as nice as it had the year before. About a year before Annie left him, she suggested that they should probably stop having that particular dinner party.
—
When Sam returned to the table in the Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike after learning about his divorce, Elizabeth didn’t look at him.
“I have been practicing different expressions, none of which seem appropriate,” Elizabeth said.
“Well,” Sam said.
“I might as well be honest,” Elizabeth said.
Sam looked at his toast. He did not feel lean and young and unencumbered.
“In the following sentence, the same word is used in each of the missing spaces, but pronounced differently.” Elizabeth’s head was bowed. She was reading off the place mat. “Don’t look at yours now, Sam,” she said, “the answer’s on it.” She slid his place mat off the table, accidentally spilling coffee on his cuff. “A prominent _____ and man came into a restaurant at the height of the rush hour. The waitress was _____ to serve him immediately as she had _____.”
Sam looked at her. She smiled. He looked at the child. The child’s eyes were closed and she was hmming. Sam paid the bill. The child went to the bathroom. An hour later, just before the Tappan Zee Bridge, Sam said, “Notable.”
“What?” Elizabeth said.
“Notable. That’s the word that belongs in all three spaces.”
“You looked,” Elizabeth said.
“Goddamn it,” Sam yelled. “I did not look!”
“I knew this would happen,” Elizabeth said. “I knew it was going to be like this.”
—
It is a very hot night. Elizabeth has poison ivy on her wrists. Her wrists are covered with calamine lotion. She has put Saran Wrap over the lotion and secured it with a rubber band. Sam is in love. He smells the wonderfully clean, sun-and-linen smell of Elizabeth and her calamine lotion.
Elizabeth is going to tell a fairy story to the child. Sam tries to convince her that fables are sanctimonious and dully realistic.
“Tell her any one except the ‘Frog King,’ ” Sam whispers.
“Why can’t I tell her that one?” Elizabeth says. She is worried.
“The toad stands for male sexuality,” Sam whispers.
“Oh, Sam,” she says, “that’s so superficial. That’s a very superficial analysis of the animal-bridegroom stories.”
Sam growls, biting her softly on the collarbone.
“Oh, Sam,” she says.
—
Sam’s first wife was very pretty. She had the flattest stomach he had ever seen and very black, very straight hair. He adored her. He was faithful to her. He wrote both their names on the flyleaves of all his books. They went to Europe. They went to Mexico. In Mexico they lived in a grand room in a simple hotel opposite a square. The trees in the square were pruned in the shape of perfect boxes. Each night, hundreds of birds would come home to the trees. Beside the hotel was the shop of a man who made coffins. So many of the coffins seemed small, for children. Sam’s wife grew depressed. She lay in bed for most of the day. She pretended she was dying. She wanted Sam to make love to her and pretend that she was dying. She wanted a baby. She was all mixed up.
Sam suggested that it was the ions in the Mexican air that made her depressed. He kept loving her but it became more and more difficult for them both. She continued to retreat into a landscape of chaos and warring feelings.
Her depression became general. They had been married for almost six years but they were still only twenty-four years old. Often they would go to amusement parks. They liked the bumper cars best. The last time they had gone to the amusement park, Sam had broken his wife’s hand when he crashed head-on into her bumper car. They could probably have gotten over the incident had they not been so bitterly miserable at the time.
—
In the middle of the night, the child rushes down the hall and into Elizabeth and Sam’s bedroom.
“Sam,” the child cries, “the baseball game! I’m missing the baseball game.”
“There is no baseball game,” Sam says.
“What’s the matter? What’s happening!” Elizabeth cries.
“Yes, yes,” the child wails. “I’m late, I’m missing it.”
“Oh, what is it!” Elizabeth cries.
“She’s having an anxiety attack,” Sam says.
The child puts her thumb in her mouth and then takes it out again.
“She’s too young for anxiety attacks,” Elizabeth says. “It’s only a dream.” She takes the child back to her room. When she comes back, Sam is sitting up against the pillows, drinking a glass of Scotch.
“Why do you have your hand over your heart?” Elizabeth asks.
“I think it’s because it hurts,” Sam says.
—
Elizabeth is trying to stuff another fable into the child. She is determined this time. Sam has just returned from setting the mooring for his sailboat. He is sprawled in a hot bath, listening to the radio.
Elizabeth says, “There were two men wrecked on a desert island and one of them pretended he was home while the other admitted—”
“Oh, Mummy,” the child says.
“I know that one,” Sam says from the tub. “They both died.”
“This is not a primitive story,” Elizabeth says. “Colorless, anticlimactic endings are typical only of primitive stories.”
Sam pulls his knees up and slides his head underneath the water. The water is really blue. Elizabeth had dyed c
urtains in the tub and stained the porcelain. Blue is Elizabeth’s favorite color. Slowly, Sam’s house is turning blue. Sam pulls the plug and gets out of the tub. He towels himself off. He puts on a shirt, a tie and a white summer suit. He laces up his sneakers. He slicks back his soaking hair. He goes into the child’s room. The lights are out. Elizabeth and the child are looking at each other in the dark. There are fireflies in the room.
“They come in on her clothes,” Elizabeth says.
“Will you marry me?” Sam asks.
“I’d love to,” she says.
—
Sam calls his friends up, beginning with Peter, his oldest friend.
“I am getting married,” Sam says.
There is a pause, then Peter finally says, “Once more the boat departs.”
It is harder to get married than one would think. Sam has forgotten this. For example, what is the tone that should be established for the party? Elizabeth’s mother believes that a wedding cake is very necessary. Elizabeth is embarrassed about this.
“I can’t think about that, Mother,” she says. She puts her mother and the child in charge of the wedding cake. At the child’s suggestion, it has a jam center and a sailboat on it.
Elizabeth and Sam decide to get married at the home of a justice of the peace. Her name is Mrs. Custer. Then they will come back to their own house for a party. They invite a lot of people to the party.
“I have taken out obey,” Mrs. Custer says, “but I have left in love and cherish. Some people object to the obey.”
“That’s all right,” Sam says.
“I could start now,” Mrs. Custer says. “But my husband will be coming home soon. If we wait a few moments, he will be here and then he won’t interrupt the ceremony.”
“That’s all right,” Sam says.
They stand around. Sam whispers to Elizabeth, “I should pay this woman a little something, but I left my wallet at home.”
“That’s all right,” Elizabeth says.