by Joy Williams
Heather left the bedroom and hurried across the yard to her driveway. Her car stalled several times as she coaxed it across the lawn toward the Dunes’ swimming pool. She opened all the doors to the car, and then the doors to the Dunes’ house. She was rushing all around inside herself. Lu-Lu stared fixedly at her from the lanai.
“Come, Lu-Lu!” Heather cried.
Already her own house looked as if it had been left for good. The nightie dangled on the clothesline. Leave it there, she thought. Ugly nightie with its yearnings. She wondered if Lu-Lu would want dirt for their trip. She found Don’s shovel and threw some earth into the backseat of the car. She didn’t know how she was going to coax Lu-Lu in. She sat on the hood of the car and stared at Lu-Lu. Dusk was growing into dark. How do you beckon to something like this, she wondered; something that can change everything, your life.
The Little Winter
She was in the airport, waiting for her flight to be called, when a woman came to a phone near her chair. The woman stood there, dialing, and after a while began talking in a flat, aggrieved voice. Gloria couldn’t hear everything by any means, but she did hear her say, “If anything happens to this plane, I hope you’ll be satisfied.” The woman spoke monotonously and without mercy. She was tall and disheveled and looked the very picture of someone who recently had ceased to be cherished. Nevertheless, she was still being mollified on the other end. Gloria heard with astounding clarity the part about the plane being repeated several times. The woman then slammed down the receiver and boarded Gloria’s flight, flinging herself down in a first-class seat. Gloria proceeded to the rear and sat quietly, thinking that every person is on the brink of eternity every moment, that the means of leaving this world are innumerable and often inconceivable. She thought in this manner for a while, then ordered a drink.
The plane pushed through the sky and the drink made her think of how, as a child, she had enjoyed chewing on the collars of her dresses. The first drink of the day did not always bring this to mind, but frequently it did. Then she began thinking of the desert she was leaving behind and how much she liked it. Once she had liked the sea and felt she could not live without it, but now she missed it almost not at all.
The plane continued. Gloria ordered another drink, no longer resigned to believing that the woman was going to blow up the plane. Now she began thinking of her plans. She was going to visit Jean, a friend of hers who was having a hard time—a fourth divorce, after all, but Jean had a lot of energy—yet that was only for a day or two. Jean had a child named Gwendal. Gloria hadn’t seen them for years and probably wouldn’t even recognize Gwendal. Then she would just keep moving around until it happened. She was thinking of buying a dog. She’d had a number of dogs but hadn’t had very good luck with them. This was the thing about pets, of course, you knew that something dreadful was going to befall them, that it was not going to end well. Two of her dogs had been hit by cars, one had been epileptic and another was diagnosed early on as having hip dysplasia. Vets had never done very well by Gloria’s dogs, much as doctors weren’t doing very well by Gloria now. She thought frequently about doctors, though she wasn’t going to see them anymore. Under the circumstances, she probably shouldn’t acquire a dog, but she felt she wanted one. Let the dog get stuck for a change, she thought.
At the airport, Gloria rented a car. She decided to drive just outside Jean’s town and check in to a motel. Jean was a talker. A day with Jean would be enough. A day and a night would be too much. Just outside Jean’s town was a monastery where the monks raised dogs. Maybe she would find her dog there tomorrow. She would go over to the monastery early in the morning and spend the rest of the day with Jean. But that was it. Other than that, there wasn’t much of a plan.
The day was cloudy and there was a great deal of traffic. The land falling back from the highway was green and still. It seemed to her a slightly lugubrious landscape, obelisks and cemeteries, thick drooping forests, the evergreens dying from the top down. Of course there was hardly any place to live these days. A winding old road ran parallel to the highway and Gloria turned off and drove along it until she came to a group of cabins. They were white with little porches but the office was in a structure built to resemble a tepee. There was a dilapidated miniature-golf course and a wooden tower from the top of which you could see into three states. But the tower leaned and the handrail curving optimistically upward was splintered and warped, and only five steps from the ground a rusted chain prevented further ascension. Gloria liked places like this.
In the tepee, a woman in a housedress stood behind a pink Formica counter. A glass hummingbird coated with greasy dust hung in one window. Gloria could smell meat loaf cooking. The woman had red cheeks and white hair, and she greeted Gloria extravagantly, but as soon as Gloria paid for her cabin the woman became morose. She gazed at Gloria glumly, as though perceiving her as one who had already walked off with the blankets, the lamp and the painting of the waterfall.
The key Gloria had been given did not work. It fit into the lock and turned, but did not do the job of opening the door. She walked back to the office and a small dog with short legs and a fluffy tail fell into step beside her. Back in the tepee, Gloria said, “I can’t seem to make this key work.” The smell of the meat loaf was now clangorous. The woman was old, but she came around the counter fast.
The dog was standing in the middle of the turnabout in front of the cabins.
“Is that your dog,” Gloria asked.
“I’ve never seen it before,” the woman said. “It sure is not,” she added. “Go home!” she shrieked at the dog. She turned the key in the lock of Gloria’s cabin and then gave the door a sharp kick with her sneaker. The door flew open. She stomped back to the office. “Go home!” she screamed again at the dog.
Gloria made herself an iceless drink in a paper cup and called Jean.
“I can’t wait to see you,” Jean said. “How are you?”
“I’m all right,” Gloria said.
“Tell me.”
“Really,” Gloria said.
“I can’t wait to see you,” Jean said. “I’ve had the most god-awful time. I know it’s silly.”
“How is Gwendal doing?”
“She never liked Chuckie anyway. She’s Luke’s, you know. But she’s not a bit like Luke. You know Gwendal.”
Gloria barely remembered the child, who would be almost ten by now. She sipped from the paper cup and looked through the screen at the dog, who was gazing over the ruined golf course to the valley beyond.
“I don’t know how I manage to pick them,” Jean was saying. She was talking about the last one.
“I’ll be there by lunch tomorrow,” Gloria said.
“Not until then! Well, we’ll bring some lunch over to Bill’s and eat with him. You haven’t met him, have you? I want you to meet him.”
Bill was Jean’s first ex-husband. She had just bought a house in the town where two of her old ex-husbands and her new ex-husband lived. Gloria knew she had quite a day cut out for herself tomorrow. Jean gave her directions and Gloria hung up and made herself a fresh drink in the paper cup. She stood out on the porch. Dark clouds had massed over the mountains. Traffic thundered invisibly past in the distance, beyond the trees. In the town in the valley below, there were tiny hard lights in the enlarging darkness. The light, which had changed, was disappearing, but there was still a lot of it. That’s the way it was with light. If you were out in it while it was going you could still see enough for longer.
She woke midmorning with a terrible headache. She was not supposed to drink but what difference did it make, really. It didn’t make any difference. She took her pills. Sometimes she thought it had been useless for her to grow older. She was now forty. She lay in the musty cabin. Everything seemed perfectly clear. Then it seemed equivocal again. She dressed and went to the office, where she paid for another night. The woman took the money and looked at Gloria worriedly as though she were already saying good-bye to the welcome mat she had just
bought, and that old willow chair with the cushion.
It began to rain. The road to the monastery was gravel and wound up the side of a mountain. There were orchards, fields of young corn…the rain fell on it all in a fury. Gloria drove slowly, barely able to make out the road. She imagined it snowing out there, not rain but snow, filling everything up. She imagined thinking it was dark now but still snowing—a line like that, as in a story. A line like that was lovely, she thought. When she was small they had lived in a place where the little winter came first. That’s what everyone called it. There was “the little winter,” then there were pleasant days, sometimes weeks. Then the big winter came. She was on the monastery’s grounds now and there were wooden buildings with turreted roofs and minarets. Someone had planted birches. She parked by a sign that said INFORMATION/GIFT SHOP and dashed from the car to the door. She was laughing and shaking the water from her hair as she entered.
The situation was that there were no dogs available, or rather that the brother whose duty was the dogs, who knew about the dogs, was away and would not return until tomorrow. She could come back tomorrow. The monk who told her this had a beard and wore a soiled apron. His interest in her questions did not seem intense. He had appeared from a back room, a room that seemed part smokehouse, part kitchen. This was the monk who smoked chickens, hams and cheese. There was always cheese in this life. The monastery had a substantial mail-order business; the monks smoked things, the nuns made cheesecakes. He seemed slightly impatient with Gloria. He had given up a great deal, no doubt, in order to be here. The gift shop was crowded with half-price icons and dog beds. In a corner there was a refrigerated case filled with the nuns’ cheesecakes. Gloria looked in there, at the stacks of white boxes.
“The Deluxe is a standard favorite,” the monk said. “The Kahlúa is encased in a chocolate cookie-crumb crust, the rich liqueur from the sunny Caribbean blending naturally with the nuns’ original recipe.” The monk droned on as if at matins. “The Chocolate is a must for chocolate fanciers. The Chocolate Amaretto is considered by the nuns to be their pièce de résistance.”
Gloria bought the Chocolate Amaretto and left. How gloomy, she thought. The experience had seemed vaguely familiar, as though she had surrendered passively to it in the past. She supposed it was a belief in appearances. She put the cheesecake in the car and walked around the grounds. It was raining less heavily now, but even so her hair was plastered to her skull. She passed the chapel and then turned back and went inside. She picked up a candlestick and jammed it into her coat pocket. This place made her mad. Then she took the candlestick out and set it on the floor. Outside, she wandered around hearing nothing but the highway, which was humming like something in her head. She finally found the kennels and opened the door and went in. This is how she thought it would be, nothing closed to her at all. There were four dogs, all young ones, maybe three months old, German shepherds. She watched them for a while. It would be easy to take one, she thought. She could just do it.
She drove back down the mountain into town, where she pulled into a shopping center that had a liquor store. She bought gin and some wine for Jean, then drove down to Jean’s house in the valley. She felt tired. There was something pounding behind her eyes. Jean’s house was a dirty peach color with a bush in front. Everything was pounding, the house, even the grass. Then the pounding stopped.
—
“Oh my god,” Jean exclaimed. “You’ve brought the pièce de résistance!” Apparently everyone was familiar with the nuns’ cheesecakes. Jean and Gloria hugged each other. “You look good,” Jean said. “They got it all, thank god, right? The things that happen anymore…there aren’t even names for half of what happens, I swear. You know my second husband, Andy, the one who died? He went in and never came out again and he just submitted to it, but no one could ever figure out what it was. It was something complicated and obscure and the only thing they knew was that he was dying from it. It might’ve been some insect that bit him. But the worst thing—well, not the worst thing, but the thing I remember because it had to do with me, which is bad of me, I suppose, but that’s just human nature. The worst thing was what happened just before he died. He was very fussy. Everything had to be just so.”
“This is Andy,” Gloria said.
“Andy,” Jean agreed. “He had an excellent vocabulary and was very precise. How I got involved with him I’ll never know. But he was my husband and I was devastated. I lived at the hospital, week after week. He liked me to read to him. I was there that afternoon and I had adjusted the shade and plumped the pillows and I was reading to him. And there he was, quietly slipping away right then, I guess, looking back on it. I was reading and I got to this part about someone being the master of a highly circumscribed universe and he opened his eyes and said, Circumscribed. What, darling? I said. And he said, Circumscribed, not circumcised…you said circumcised. And I said, I’m sure I didn’t, darling, and he gave me this long look and then he gave a big sigh and died. Isn’t that awful?”
Gloria giggled, then shook her head.
Jean’s eyes darted around the room, which was in high disorder. Peeling wallpaper, cracked linoleum. Cardboard boxes everywhere. Shards of glass had been swept into one corner and a broken croquet mallet propped one window open. “So what do you think of this place?” Jean said.
“It’s some place,” Gloria said.
“Everyone says I shouldn’t have. It needs some work, I know, but I found this wonderful man, or he found me. He came up to the door and looked at all this and I said, Can you help me? Do you do work like this? And he nodded and said, I puttah. Isn’t that wonderful! I puttah…”
Gloria looked at the sagging floor and the windows loose in their frames. The mantel was blackened by smoke and grooved with cigarette burns. It was clear that the previous occupants had led lives of grinding boredom here and with little composure. He’d better start puttahing soon, Gloria thought. “Don’t marry him,” she said, and laughed.
“Oh, I know you think I marry everybody,” Jean said, “but I don’t. There have only been four. The last one, and I mean the last, was the worst. What a rodent Chuckie was. No, he’s more like a big predator, a crow or a weasel or something. Cruel, lazy, deceitful.” Jean shuddered. “The best thing about him was his hair.” Jean was frequently undone by hair. “He has great hair. He wears it in a sort of fifties full flattop.”
Gloria felt hollow and happy. Nothing mattered much. “You actually bought this place?” she said.
“Oh, it’s crazy,” Jean said, “but Gwendal and I needed a home. I’ve heard that faux is the new trend. I’m going to do it all faux when I get organized. Do you want to see the upstairs? Gwendal’s room is upstairs. Hers is the neatest.”
They went up the stairs to a room where a fat girl sat on a bed writing in a book.
“I’m doing my autobiography,” Gwendal said, “but I think I’m going to change my approach.” She turned to Gloria. “Would you like to be my biographer?”
Jean said, “Say hello to Gloria. You remember Gloria.”
Gloria gave the girl a hug. Gwendal smelled good and had small pale eyes. The room wasn’t clean at all, but there was very little in it. Gloria supposed it was the neatest. Conversation lagged.
“Let’s go out and sit on the lawn,” Jean suggested.
“I don’t want to,” Gwendal said.
The two women went downstairs. Gloria needed to use the bathroom but Jean said she had to go outside as the plumbing wasn’t all it should be at the moment. There was a steep brushy bank behind the house and Gloria crouched there. The day was clear and warm now. At the bottom of the bank, a flat stream moved laboriously around vine-covered trees. The mud glistened in the sun. Blackberries grew in the brush. This place had a lot of candor, Gloria thought.
Jean had laid a blanket on the grass and was sitting there, eating a wedge of cheesecake from a plastic plate. Gloria decided on a drink over cake.
“We’ll go to Bill’s house for lunch,”
Jean said. “Then we’ll go to Fred’s house for a swim.” Fred was an old husband too. Gwendal’s father was the only one who wasn’t around. He lived in Las Vegas. Andy wasn’t around either, of course.
Gwendal came out of the house into the sloppy yard. She stopped in the middle of a rhubarb patch, exclaiming silently and waving her arms.
Jean sighed. “It’s hard being a single mother.”
“You haven’t been single for long,” Gloria said.
Jean laughed loudly at this. “Poor Gwendal,” she said. “I love her dearly.”
“A lovely child,” Gloria murmured.
“I just wish she wouldn’t make up so much stuff sometimes.”
“She’s young,” Gloria said, finishing her drink. Really, she hardly knew what she was saying. “What is she doing?” she asked Jean.
Gwendal leapt quietly around in the rhubarb.
“Whatever it is, it needs to be translated,” Jean said. “Gwendal needs a good translator.”
“She’s pretending something or other,” Gloria offered, thinking she would very much like another drink.
“I’m going to put on a fresh dress for visiting Bill,” Jean said. “Do you want to change?”
Gloria shook her head. She was watching Gwendal. When Jean went into the house, the girl trotted over to the blanket. “Why don’t you kidnap me,” she said.
“Why don’t you kidnap me?” Gloria said, laughing. What an odd kid, she thought. “I don’t want to kidnap you,” she said.
“I’d like to see your house,” Gwendal said.
“I don’t have a house. I live in an apartment.”
“Apartments aren’t interesting,” Gwendal said. “Dump it. We could get a van. The kind with the ladder that goes up the back. We could get a wheel cover that says MESS WITH THE BEST, LOSE LIKE THE REST.”
There was something truly terrifying about girls on the verge of puberty, Gloria thought. She laughed.
“You drink too much,” Gwendal said. “You’re always drinking something.”