by Joy Williams
I did not believe this was the case. She herself said the bear had been shot.
“The bear escaped,” my mother said. “It says so right here,” and she ran her finger along a line of words. “It ran back into the woods to its home.” She stood up and came around the table and kissed me. She smelled then like the glass that was always in the sink in the morning, and the smell reminds me still of daring and deception, hopes and little lies.
I shut my eyes and felt I could not hear my mother. I saw the bear holding the pocketbook, walking through the woods with it, feeling fine and different and pretty too, then stopping to find something in it, wanting something, moving its big paw through the pocketbook’s small things.
“Lizzie,” my mother called to me. My mother did not know where I was, which alarmed me. I opened my eyes.
“Don’t cry, Lizzie,” my mother said. She looked as though she were about to cry too. This was how it often was at night, late in the kitchen, with my mother.
My mother returned to the newspaper and began to turn the pages. She called my attention to the drawing of a man holding a hat with stars sprinkling out of it. It was an advertisement for a magician who would be performing not far away. We decided we would see him. My mother knew just the seats she wanted for us, good seats, on the aisle, close to the stage. We might be called up on the stage, she said, to be part of the performance. Magicians often used people from the audience, particularly children. I might even be given a rabbit.
I wanted a rabbit.
I put my hands on the table and I could see the rabbit between them. He was solid white in the front and solid black in the back as though he were made up of two rabbits. There are rabbits like that. I saw him there, before me on the table, a nice rabbit.
My mother went to the phone and ordered two tickets, and not many days after that, we were in our car driving to Portland for the matinee performance. I very much liked the word matinee. Matinee, matinee, I said. There was a broad hump on the floor between our seats and it was here where my mother put her little glass, the glass often full, never, it seemed, more than half empty. We chatted together and I thought we must have appeared interesting to others as we passed by in our convertible in winter. My mother spoke about happiness. She told me that the happiness that comes out of nowhere, out of nothing, is the very best kind. We paid no attention to the coldness, which was speaking in the way that it had, but enjoyed the sun beating through the windshield on our pale hands.
My mother said that Houdini had black eyes and that white doves flew from his fingertips. She said that he escaped from a block of ice.
“Did he look like my father, Houdini,” I asked. “Did he have a mustache.”
“Your father didn’t have a mustache,” my mother said, laughing. “Oh, I wish I could be more like you.”
Later, she said, “Maybe he didn’t escape from a block of ice, I’m not sure about that. Maybe he wanted to, but he never did.”
We stopped for lunch somewhere, a dark little restaurant along the road. My mother had cocktails and I myself drank something cold and sweet. The restaurant was not very nice. It smelled of smoke and dampness as though once it had burned down, and it was so noisy that I could not hear my mother very well. My mother looked like a woman in a bar, pretty and disturbed, hunched forward saying, Who do you think I look like, will you remember me? She was saying all manner of things. We lingered there, and then my mother asked the time of someone and seemed surprised. My mother was always surprised by time. Outside, there were woods of green fir trees, whose lowest branches swept the ground, and as we were getting back into the car, I believed I saw something moving far back in the darkness of the woods beyond the slick, snowy square of the parking lot. It was the bear, I thought. Hurry, hurry, I thought. The hunter is playing with his children. He is making them something to play in as my father had once made a small playhouse for me. He is not the hunter yet. But in my heart I knew the bear was gone and the shape was just the shadow of something else in the afternoon.
My mother drove very fast but the performance had already begun when we arrived. My mother’s face was damp and her good blouse had a spot on it. She went into the ladies’ room and when she returned the spot was larger, but it was water now and not what it had been before. The usher assured us that we had not missed much. The usher said that the magician was not very good, that he talked and talked, he told a lot of jokes and then when you were bored and distracted, something would happen, something would have changed. The usher smiled at my mother. He seemed to like her, even know her in some way. He was a small man, like an old boy, balding. I did not care for him. He led us to our seats, but there were people sitting in them and there was a small disturbance as the strangers rearranged themselves. We were both expectant, my mother and I, and we watched the magician intently. My mother’s lips were parted, and her eyes were bright. On the stage were a group of children about my age, each with a hand on a small cage the magician was holding. In the cage was a tiny bird. The magician would ask the children to jostle the cage occasionally and the bird would flutter against the bars so that everyone would see it was a real thing with bones and breath and feelings too. Each child announced that they had a firm grip on the bars. Then the magician put a cloth over the cage, gave a quick tug and both cage and bird vanished. I was not surprised. It seemed just the kind of thing that was going to happen. I decided to withhold my applause when I saw that my mother’s hands too were in her lap. There were several more tricks of the magician’s invention, certainly nothing I would have asked him to do. Large constructions of many parts and colors were wheeled onto the stage. There were doors everywhere that the magician opened and slammed shut. Things came and went, all to the accompaniment of loud music. I was confused and grew hot. My mother too moved restlessly in the next seat. Then there was an intermission and we returned to the lobby.
“This man is a far, far cry from the great Houdini,” my mother said.
“What were his intentions, exactly,” I asked.
He had taken a watch from a man in the audience and smashed it for all to see with a hammer. Then the watch, unharmed, had reappeared behind the man’s ear.
“A happy memory can be a very misleading thing,” my mother said. “Would you like to go home?”
I really did not want to leave. I wanted to see it through. I held the glossy program in my hand and turned the pages. I stared hard at the print beneath the pictures and imagined all sorts of promises being made.
“Yes, we want to see how it’s done, don’t we, you and I,” my mother said. “We want to get to the bottom of it.”
I guessed we did.
“All right, Lizzie,” my mother said, “but I have to get something out of the car. I’ll be right back.”
I waited for her in a corner of the lobby. Some children looked at me and I looked back. I had a package of gum cigarettes in my pocket and I extracted one carefully and placed the end in my mouth. I held the elbow of my right arm with my left hand and smoked the cigarette for a long time and then I folded it up in my mouth and I chewed it for a while. My mother had not yet returned when the performance began again. She was having a little drink, I knew, and she was where she went when she drank without me, somewhere in herself. It was not the place where words could take you but another place even. I stood alone in the lobby for a while, looking out into the street. On the sidewalk outside the theater, sand had been scattered and the sand ate through the ice in ugly holes. I saw no one like my mother who passed by. She was wearing a red coat. Once she had said to me, You’ve fallen out of love with me, haven’t you, and I knew she was thinking I was someone else, but this had happened only once.
—
I heard the music from the stage and I finally returned to our seats. There were not as many people in the audience as before. Onstage with the magician was a woman in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes holding a chain saw. The magician demonstrated that the saw was real by cutting up several pieces
of wood with it. There was the smell of torn wood for everyone to smell and sawdust on the floor for all to see. Then a table was wheeled out and the lady lay down on it in her bathing suit, which was in two pieces. Her stomach was very white. The magician talked and waved the saw around. I suspected he was planning to cut the woman in half and I was eager to see this. I hadn’t the slightest fear about this at all. I did wonder if he would be able to put her together again or if he would only cut her in half. The magician said that what was about to happen was too dreadful to be seen directly, that he did not want anyone to faint from the sight, so he brought out a small screen and placed it in front of the lady so that we could no longer see her white stomach, although everyone could still see her face and her shoes. The screen seemed unnecessary to me and I would have preferred to have been seated on the other side of it. Several people in the audience screamed. The lady who was about to be sawed in half began to chew on her lip and her face looked worried.
It was then that my mother appeared on the stage. She was crouched over a little, for she didn’t have her balance back from having climbed up there. She looked large and strange in her red coat. The coat, which I knew very well, seemed the strangest thing. Someone screamed again, but more uncertainly. My mother moved toward the magician, smiling and speaking and gesturing with her hands, and the magician said, “No, I can’t of course, you should know better than this, this is a performance, you can’t just appear like this, please sit down…”
My mother said, “But you don’t understand I’m willing, though I know the hazards and it’s not that I believe you, no one would believe you for a moment but you can trust me, that’s right, your faith in me would be perfectly placed because I’m not part of this, that’s why I can be trusted because I don’t know how it’s done…”
Someone near me said, “Is she kidding, that woman, what’s her plan, she comes out of nowhere and wants to be cut in half…”
“Lady,” the magician said, and I thought a dog might appear for I knew a dog named Lady who had a collection of colored balls.
My mother said, “Most of us don’t understand I know and it’s just as well because the things we understand that’s it for them, that’s just the way we are…”
She probably thought she was still in that place in herself, but everything she said were the words coming from her mouth. Her lipstick was gone. Did she think she was in disguise, I wondered.
“But why not,” my mother said, “to go and come back, that’s what we want, that’s why we’re here and why can’t we expect something to be done you can’t expect us every day we get tired of showing up every day you can’t get away with this forever then it was different but you should be thinking about the children…” She moved a little in a crooked fashion, speaking.
“My god,” said a voice, “that woman’s drunk.”
“Sit down, please!” someone said loudly.
My mother started to cry then and she stumbled and pushed her arms out before her as though she were pushing away someone who was trying to hold her, but no one was trying to hold her. The orchestra began to play and people began to clap. The usher ran out onto the stage and took my mother’s hand. All this happened in an instant. He said something to her, he held her hand and she did not resist his holding it, then slowly the two of them moved down the few steps that led to the stage and up the aisle until they stopped beside me for the usher knew I was my mother’s child. I followed them, of course, although in my mind I continued to sit in my seat. Everyone watched us leave. They did not notice that I remained there among them, watching too.
We went directly out of the theater and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher’s arm. The shoulders of his jacket were of cardboard and there was gold braid looped around it. We were being taken away to be murdered, which seemed reasonable to me. The usher’s ears were large and he had a bump on his neck above the collar of his shirt. As we walked he said little soft things to my mother that gradually seemed to be comforting her. I hated him. It was not easy to walk together along the frozen sidewalks of the city. There was a belt on my mother’s coat and I hung on to that as we moved unevenly along.
“Look, I’ve pulled myself through,” he said. “You can pull yourself through.” He was speaking to my mother.
We went into a coffee shop and sat down in a booth. “You can collect yourself in here,” he said. “You can sit here as long as you want and drink coffee and no one will make you leave.” He asked me if I wanted a donut. I would not speak to him. If he addressed me again, I thought, I would bite him. On the wall over the counter were pictures of sandwiches. I did not want to be there and I did not take off either my mittens or my coat. The little usher went up to the counter and brought back coffee for my mother and a donut on a plate for me. “Oh,” my mother said, “what have I done?” and she swung her head from side to side.
“I could tell right away about you,” the usher said. “You’ve got to pull yourself together. It took jumping off a bridge for me and breaking both legs before I got turned around. You don’t want to let it go that far.”
My mother looked at him. “I can’t imagine,” my mother said.
Outside, a child passed by, walking with her sled. She looked behind her often and you could tell she was admiring how the sled followed her so quickly on its runners.
“You’re a mother,” the usher said to my mother, “you’ve got to pull yourself through.”
His kindness made me feel he had tied us up with rope. At last he left us and my mother laid her head down on the table and fell asleep. I had never seen my mother sleeping and I watched her as she must once have watched me, as everyone watches a sleeping thing, not knowing how it would turn out or when. Then slowly I began to eat the donut with my mittened hands. The sour hair of the wool mingled with the tasteless crumbs and this utterly absorbed my attention. I pretended someone was feeding me.
—
As it happened, my mother was not able to pull herself through, but this was later. At the time, it was not so near the end and when my mother woke we found the car and left Portland, my mother saying my name. “Lizzie,” she said. “Lizzie.” I felt as though I must be with her somewhere and that she knew that too, but not in that old blue convertible traveling home in the dark, the soft, stained roof ballooning up as I knew it looked like it was from outside. I got out of it, but it took me years.
Rot
Lucy was watching the street when an old Ford Thunderbird turned in to their driveway. She had never seen the car before and her husband, Dwight, was driving it. One of Dwight’s old girlfriends leapt from the passenger seat and ran toward the house. Her name was Caroline, she had curly hair and big white teeth, more than seemed normal, and Lucy liked her the least of all of Dwight’s old girlfriends.
“I was the horn,” Caroline said. “That car doesn’t have one so I was it. I’d yell out the window, ‘Watch out!’ ”
“Were you the brakes too or just the horn,” Lucy asked.
“It has brakes,” Caroline said, showing her startling teeth. She went into the living room and said, “Hello, rug.” She always spoke to the rug lying there. The rug was from Mexico with birds of different colors flying across it. All of the birds had long, white eyes. Dwight and Caroline had brought the rug back from the Yucatán when they had gone snorkeling there years before. Some of the coves were so popular that the fish could scarcely be seen for all the suntan oil floating in the water. At Garrafón in Isla Mujeres, Dwight told Lucy, he had raised his head and seen a hundred people bobbing facedown over the rocks of the reef and a clean white tampon bobbing there among them. Caroline had said at the time, “It’s disgusting, but it’s obviously some joke.”
Caroline muttered little things to the rug, showing off, Lucy thought, although she wasn’t speaking Spanish to it, she didn’t know Spanish. Lucy looked out the window at Dwight sitting in the Thunderbird. It was old with new paint, black, with a white top and portholes and skirts. He lo
oked a little big for it. He got out abruptly and ran to the house as though through rain, but there was no rain. It was a still day in spring, just before Easter, with an odious weight to the air. Recently, when they had been coming inside, synthetic stuff from Easter baskets had been traveling in with them, the fake nesting matter, the pastel and crinkly stuff of Easter baskets. Lucy couldn’t imagine where they kept picking it up from, but no festive detritus came in this time.
Dwight gave her a hard, wandering kiss on the mouth. Lately, it was as though he were trying out kisses, trying to adjust them.
“You’ll tell me all about this, I guess,” Lucy said.
“Lucy,” Dwight said solemnly.
Caroline joined them and said, “I’ve got to be off. I don’t know the time, but I bet I can guess it to within a minute. I can do that,” she assured Lucy. Caroline closed her eyes. Her teeth seemed still to be looking out at them, however. “Five-ten,” she said after a while. Lucy looked at the clock on the wall, which showed ten minutes past five. She shrugged.
“That car is some cute,” Caroline said, giving Dwight a little squeeze. “Isn’t it some cute?” she said to Lucy. “Your Dwight’s been tracking this car for days.”
“I bought it from the next of kin,” Dwight said.
Lucy looked at him impassively. She was not a girl who was quick to alarm.
“I was down at the Aquarium last week looking at the fish,” Dwight began.
“Oh, that Aquarium,” Lucy said.
The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children. He had not been considered viewable so off he went. The Aquarium offended Lucy. “I like fish,” Dwight had told Lucy when she asked why he spent so much of his free time at the Aquarium. “Men like fish.”
“And when I came out into the parking lot, next to our car was this little Thunderbird and there was a dead man sitting behind the wheel.”