by Joy Williams
Someone shrieked in terror. It was the floppy-haired boy; he was yelling, horrified. Anne was confused for an instant. Was Harry dying again? Was Harry all right? The boy was howling, his eyes rolling in his head. The others looked at him dully. One of the girls giggled. “Uh-oh,” she said.
Two of the boys were trying to quiet him. They all looked like Harry, even the boy who was screaming.
“You’d better take him to the emergency room,” Anne said.
“Maybe if he just gets a little air, walks around, gets some air,” another boy said.
“You’d all better go now,” Anne said.
—
It was not yet dawn, still very dark. Anne sat there alone in the bright kitchen in her black dress. There was a run in her stocking. The dinner in the restaurant had cost almost a thousand dollars, and Harry probably wouldn’t even have liked it. She hadn’t liked it. She wanted to behave differently now, for Harry’s sake. He hadn’t been perfect, Harry, he’d been a very troubled boy, a very misunderstood boy, but she had never let him go, never, until now. She knew that he couldn’t be aware of that, that she now had let him go. She knew that between them, from now on, she alone would be the one who realized things. She wasn’t going to deceive herself in that regard. Even so, she knew she wasn’t thinking clearly about this.
After some time, she got up and packed a duffel bag for Africa, exactly as she had done that time before. The bag and its contents could weigh no more than twenty-two pounds. When she was finished, she put it in the hallway by the door. Outside it was still dark, as dark as it had been hours ago, though this scarcely seemed possible.
Perhaps she would go back to Africa.
There was a knock on the door. Anne looked at it, startled, a thick door with locks. Then she opened it. A girl was standing there, not the interplanetary one but another, who had particularly relished the dinner. She had been standing there smoking for a while before she knocked. Several cigarette butts were ground into the high-gloss cerulean of the porch.
“May I come in?” the girl asked.
“Why, no,” Anne said. “No, you may not.”
“Please,” the girl said.
Anne shut the door.
She went into the kitchen and threw the two parts of the saltshaker into the trash. She tossed the small lady’s companion in as well. Harry had once said to her, “Look, this is amazing, I don’t know how this could have happened but I have these spikes in my head. They must have been there for a while, but I swear, I swear to you, I just noticed them. But I got them out! On the left side. But on the right side it’s more difficult because they’re in a sort of helmet, and the helmet is fused to my head, see? Can you help me?”
She had helped him then. She had stroked his hair with her fingers for a long, long time. She had been very careful, very thorough. But that had been a unique situation. Usually, she couldn’t help him.
There was a sound at the door again, a determined knocking. Anne walked to it quickly and opened it. There were several of Harry’s friends there, not just the girl but not all of them either.
“You don’t have to be so rude,” one of them said.
They were angry. They had lost Harry, she thought, and they missed him.
“We loved Harry too, you know,” one of them said. His tie was loose, and his breath was sweet and dry, like sand.
“I want to rest now,” Anne said. “I must get some rest.”
“Rest,” one of them said in a soft, scornful voice. He glanced at the others. They ignored him.
“Tell us another story about Harry,” one of them said. “We didn’t get the first one.”
“Are you frightening me?” Anne said. She smiled. “I mean, are you trying to frighten me?”
“I think Harry saw that thing, but I don’t think he was ever there. Is that what you meant?” one of them said with some effort. He turned and then, as though he were dancing, moved down the steps and knelt on the ground, where he lowered his head and began spitting up quietly.
“Harry will always be us,” one of them said. “You better get used to it. You better get your stories straight.”
“Good night,” Anne said.
“Good night, please,” they said, and Anne shut the door.
She turned off all the lights and sat in the darkness of her house. Before long, as she knew it would, the phone began to ring. It rang and rang, but she didn’t have to answer it. She wouldn’t do it. It would never be that once, again, when she’d learned that Harry died, no matter how much she knew in her heart that the past was but the present in that future to which it belonged.
The Visiting Privilege
Donna came as a visitor in her long black coat. It was spring but still cool, and she never wore light colors, she was no buttercup. She was visiting her friend Cynthia, who was in Pond House for depression. Donna never had a drink before she visited Cynthia. She shunned her habitual excesses and arrived sober and aware, with an exquisite sinking feeling. She thought that Pond House was an unfortunate name, ponds being stagnant, artificial and small. This wasn’t just her opinion. A pond was indeed an artificially confined body of water, she argued, but Cynthia thought Pond was probably the name of the hospital wing’s benefactor. Cynthia had three roommates, a woman in her sixties and two obese teenagers. Donna liked to pretend that the old woman was her mother. Hi, she’d say, you look great today, what a pretty sweatshirt.
Donna had been visiting Cynthia for about a week now. She could scarcely imagine what she had done with herself before Cynthia had the grace to get herself committed to Pond House. She liked everything about it but particularly sitting in Cynthia’s room, speaking quietly with her while the others listened. They didn’t even pretend not to listen, the others. Sometimes she and Cynthia would stroll down to the lounge and get a snack from the fridge. In the lounge, goofy helium balloons in the shapes of objects or food but with human features were tied to the furniture with ribbon. They bobbed there opposite the nurses’ station, and people would bat them as they passed by. Cynthia thought the balloons would be deeply disturbing to anyone who was already disturbed, yet in fact everyone considered them amusing. None of the people at Pond House were supposed to be seriously ill, at least on Floor Three. On Floor Four it was another matter. But here they were supposed to be sort of ruefully aware of their situations, and were encouraged to believe that they could possibly be helped. Cynthia had come here because she had picked up the habit of committing destructive and selfish acts, the most recent being the torching of her boyfriend’s car, a black Corvette. The boyfriend was married but Cynthia strongly suspected he was gay. He drove her crazy. “He’s a taker and not a giver, Donna,” she told Donna earnestly.
She said she was so discouraged that everything seemed vaguely yellow to her, that she saw everything through a veil of yellow.
“That was in an article I read,” Donna said excitedly. “The yellow part.”
“You know, Donna,” Cynthia said, “you’re part of my problem.”
When Cynthia got like this, Donna would excuse herself and go away for a while. Or she would go back to the room and talk with the old woman. She got a kick out of being extraordinarily friendly to her. Once she brought her gum, another time a jar of night cream. She ignored the obese teenagers, but one afternoon one of them deliberately bumped into her as she walked down the hall. The girl’s flesh was hard and she smelled of coconut. She thrust her face close to Donna’s. Her pores were large and clean and Donna could see the contacts resting on the corneas of her eyes.
“I’m passionate, intense and filled with private reverie, and so is my friend,” the girl said, “so don’t slime us like you do.” Then she punched Donna viciously on the arm. Donna felt like crying but she was only a visitor. She didn’t have to come here so frequently; she was really coming here too much, sometimes two and three times a day.
There were group meetings twice a week and Donna always tried to be present for these, although she was not perm
itted to attend them. Sometimes, however, if she stood just outside the door, the nurses and psychologists didn’t notice her right away. Cynthia and the fat teenagers and the old lady and a half dozen others would sit around a large table and say anything they wanted to.
—
“I dreamed that I threw up a fox,” one of the fat girls said. Really, Donna couldn’t tell them apart.
“I shit something that looked like an onion once,” a man said. “It just kept coming out of me. I pulled it out of myself with my own hands. I thought it was the Devil, but it was a worm. A gift from Central America.”
“That is so disgusting,” the other fat girl said, “That is the most—”
“Hey!” the man said. “Get yourself a life, woman.”
The worm thing caused the old lady to request to be excused. Donna walked back to the room with her, and they sat down on her bed.
“Feel my heart,” the old lady said. “It’s pounding. I wasn’t brought up that way.”
The old lady liked to play cards, and she and Donna often used an old soiled deck that had pictures of colorful fish on it. Donna pretended she was in the cabin of a boat on a short, safe trip to a lovely island. The old woman was a mysterious opponent, not at all what she seemed. Donna had, in fact, been told by the nurses that she was considerably more impaired than she appeared to be. Beyond the window of the cabin were high waves, pursuing and accompanying them. The waves were an essential part of the world the boat required, but they bore malice toward the boat, that much was obvious.
“What kind of fish are these,” Donna asked.
“These are reef residents,” the old lady said.
They played a variation of Spit in the Ocean. Donna had had no idea that there were so many variations of this humble game.
The two fat girls came in and lay down on their beds. The old lady was really opening up to Donna. She was telling her about her husband and her little house.
“After my husband died, I was afraid someone might come in and…” She passed her finger across her throat. “I bought one of those men. Safe-T-Man II, the New Generation. You know, the ones that look as though they’re six feet tall but can be folded up and put in a little tote bag? I put him in the car or I put him in my husband’s easy chair right in front of the window. He had all kinds of clothes. He had a leather coat. He had a baseball cap.”
“Where is he now,” Donna asked.
“He’s in his little tote bag. Actually, he frightened me a little, Safe-T-Man. I think I ordered him too dark or something. I never did get used to him.”
“That’s racist,” one of the fat girls said.
“Yeah, what a racist remark,” the other one said.
“I bet he wonders what happened to me,” the old lady said. “I bet my car does too. One minute you’re on the open road, one excitement after another, the next you’re in a dark garage. I’m not afraid of dying, but I don’t want to die old.”
She was quite old already, of course, but the fat girls did not challenge her on this. Cynthia came into the room, eating a piece of fruit, a nectarine or something.
“The first thing I’m going to do when I get out of here is go home and make Festive Chicken,” the old woman said. “I hope you’ll all be my guests for dinner.”
The fat girls and Cynthia stared at her.
“I’d love to,” Donna said. “What is Festive Chicken? Can I bring anything? Wine? A salad?”
“It requires toothpicks,” the old woman said. “You bake it with toothpicks but then you take the toothpicks out.”
“It sounds wonderful,” Donna said.
Cynthia rolled her eyes. “Would you give it a rest,” she said to Donna.
“I’m tired now,” the old woman said sweetly. “I’m tired of playing cards.” She put the cards back in the box but it didn’t have reef residents on it. It had a picture of a drab, many-spired European city, the very opposite of a reef resident.
“These don’t belong in this box!” she cried. “It’s the first time I’ve noticed this. Would you go to my house and bring back the other deck of cards?” she asked Donna.
“Sure,” Donna said.
“My house is a little strange,” the old woman said.
“What do you mean?”
“I bet it is,” one of the fat girls said.
“I love my little house,” the old woman said anxiously. “I want to get back to it as soon as I can.”
She gave Donna the address and a key from her pocketbook. That evening, when visiting hours were over, Donna drove to the house, which was boxy and tidy with a crushed-rock yard and a dead nestling in the driveway. The house didn’t seem that strange to Donna. One would be desperate to get out of it, certainly. There were lots of things that were meant to be plugged into wall outlets but none of them were. She found the cards almost immediately, in the kitchen. There were the colorful fish on the cover of the box and the deck inside had the image of the foreign city. Idly, she opened the refrigerator, which was full of ketchup, nothing but bottles of ketchup, each one partially used. Donna had an urge to top off some bottles from others, to reduce the unseemly number, but with not much effort she resisted this.
On the drive back to her apartment she stopped at a restaurant and had several drinks in the bar. The bartender’s name was Lucy. She had just returned from a vacation. She had spent forty-five minutes swimming with dolphins. The dolphin that had persisted in keeping Lucy company had had an immense boner.
“He kept gliding past me, gliding past,” Lucy said, moving her hand through the air. “I kept worrying about the little kids. They’re always bringing in these little kids who have only weeks to live due to one thing or another. I would think it would be pretty undesirable for them to experience a dolphin with a boner.”
“But the dolphins know better than that, don’t they?” Donna said.
“It’s not all that relaxing to swim with them, actually,” the bartender said. “They like some people better than others, and the ones that get ignored feel like shit. You know, out of the Gaia loop.”
People in the restaurant kept requesting exotic drinks that Lucy had to look up in her Bartender’s Bible. After a while, Donna went home.
The next afternoon she swept into Pond House in her long black coat bearing a bunch of daffodils as a gift in general.
Cynthia was in the lounge in a big chintz slipcovered chair reading Anna Karenina.
“Should you be reading that,” Donna asked.
Cynthia wouldn’t talk to her.
Donna found the old lady and gave her the deck of cards.
“I’m so relieved,” the old lady said. “That could have been such a problem, such a problem. Would you do me another favor? Would you get my dog and bring him to me here?”
Donna was enthusiastic about this. “Do you have a dog? Where is he?”
“He’s in my house.”
“Is anyone feeding him?” Donna said. “Does he have water?” She had found her vocation, she was sure of it. She could do this forever. She felt like a long-distance swimmer in that place long-distance swimmers go in their heads when they’re good.
“Nooooooo,” the old woman said. “He doesn’t need water.” She, too, looked delighted. She and Donna beamed at each other. “He’s a good dog, a watchdog.”
“I didn’t see him when I was there,” Donna admitted.
“He wasn’t watching you,” the old lady said.
“What breed of dog is he,” Donna asked.
She suddenly looked concerned. “He’s something you plug in.”
“Oh,” Donna said, disappointed. “I think I did notice him.” He looked like a stereo speaker. She thought they’d been talking more along the lines of Cerberus, the dog that guarded the gates of hell. Those Greeks! It wasn’t that you couldn’t get in, it was that you couldn’t get out. And that honey-cake business…Actually, she had never grasped the honey-cake business.
“He detects intruders up to thirty feet and he barks.
He can detect them through glass, brick, wood and cement. The closer they get, the louder and faster he barks. He’s just a little individual but he sounds ferocious. I always liked him better than Safe-T-Man. I got them at the same time.”
“But he’d be barking all the time here,” Donna said. “You have to consider that,” she added.
“He can be quiet,” the woman said. “He can be good.”
“I’ll get him for you then,” Donna said as though she had just made a difficult decision.
As she was leaving Pond House she passed a man dressed all in red yelling into the telephone. There was a pay phone at the very heart of Floor Three and it was always in use. “What were you born with, an ax in your hand?” he shouted.
Donna returned the next day with the old lady’s dog, which she carried in a smart brown and white Bendel shopping bag she’d been saving. She arrived just about the time the group meeting was coming to a close. Lingering near the door, she saw the fat teenagers and Cynthia’s round neat head with its fashionable haircut. A male patient she hadn’t seen before was saying, “Hey, if it looks, walks, talks, smells and feels like the anima, then it is the anima.” Donna thought this very funny and somewhat obscene. “Miss!” someone called to her. “You are not allowed in these meetings!” She went back to Cynthia’s room and sat on her bed. The old woman’s bed was stripped down to the ticking. She sat and looked at it vacantly.
When Cynthia came in, she said, “Donna, that old lady died, honest to god. We were all sitting around after dinner eating our goddamn Jell-O and she just tipped over.”
“I have something she wanted here,” Donna said, raising the bag. “This is hers, it’s from her house.”
“Get rid of it,” Cynthia said. “Listen, act quickly and positively.” She began to cry.
Donna thought her friend’s response somewhat peculiar, but that was probably why she was in Pond House.