by Joy Williams
As the day wore on, it was disclosed that the woman had no family. There was no one.
“There wouldn’t have been any Festive Chicken either,” Cynthia said, “that’s for sure.” She had her old mouth back on her, Donna noticed.
There was discussion in the room about what had happened. The old lady had been eating the Jell-O. She hadn’t said a word. She’d expressed no dismay.
“She was clueless,” one of the fat girls said.
“Were you two friends before or did that happen here,” Donna asked them.
They looked at her with hatred. “She’s a nut fucker, I think,” one of them said.
They looked so much alike Donna couldn’t be sure which of them had struck her in the hallway. She thought of them as Dum and Dee. She pretended she was a docent leading tours. The neuroses of these two, Dum and Dee, are so normal they’re of little concern to us, she would say, indicating the fat girls. Then she pretended they were her jailers over whom she held indisputable moral sway.
The barking-dog alarm had not worked at the old lady’s house. It was a simple enough thing, with few adjustments that could be made to it; its function would either be realized or it wouldn’t, and it wasn’t. Donna had gone outside into the street and walked slowly back toward the house, avoiding the nestling. Then she had run, waving her arms. There had been no barking at all, only the sound of her own feet on the crushed-rock yard. It had not worked in her own apartment either. It had not even felt warm.
Poor old soul, Donna thought.
Night was flickering at the corners of the hospital. There was the smell of potatoes, the sound of wheels bringing the supper trays. They always made the visitors leave around this time.
“Cynthia,” Donna said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”
“Why?” Cynthia said.
At home, Donna pretended she was on a train with no ticket, eluding the conductor as it sped toward some destination on gleaming rails. She made herself a drink. She almost finished it, then freshened it a bit. The phone rang and it was Cynthia. She was delighted it was Cynthia.
“You will not believe this, Donna,” Cynthia said. “You know that new guy, the really annoying one? Well, at dinner he was saying that when women attempt suicide they often don’t succeed, but with men they do it on the first go-round. He said that simple statistic says it all about the difference between men and women. He said that men are doers and that women are deceivers and flirts, and Holly just threw back her chair and—”
“Who’s Holly,” Donna asked.
“My roommate, for god’s sake, the one who hates you. She attacked this guy. She gouged out one of his eyes with a spoon.”
“She gouged it out?”
“I didn’t think it could be done, but boy, she knew how to do it.”
“I wonder if that could have been me,” Donna said.
“Oh, I think so. It’s bedlam in here.” Cynthia laughed wildly. “I want to leave, Donna, though I don’t feel any better. But I could leave, you know. I could just walk right out of here.”
“Really?” Donna said. She thought, When I get out of here, I’m going to be gone.
“But I think I should feel better. I lack goals. I need goals.”
Maybe it wasn’t such a good idea, Cynthia using the phone. Donna preferred sitting quietly with her in Pond House, offering to get her little things she had expressed no desire for, reflecting about Dennis, her married man who hadn’t come by to see her even once. Of course he was probably still annoyed about his car, although he had filed no charges.
Cynthia kept talking, pretty much about her life, the details of which Donna had heard before and which were no more riveting this time. She’d had a difficult time of it, starting in childhood. She had been an intense little thing but was thwarted, thwarted. Donna walked around with the phone to her ear, making another drink, crushing an ant or two that ventured onto the countertop, staring out the window at the dark only to realize that she wasn’t seeing the dark, merely a darkened image of herself and the objects behind her. She sipped her drink and turned toward some picture postcards she’d taped to one of the cupboards. Some of them had been up for years. One was of a city, a cheerless and civilized city similar to the one on the old woman’s playing cards.
Cynthia was saying, “I just can’t accept so much, you know, Donna, and I feel, I really feel this, that my capacity to adapt to what is has been exceeded. I—”
“Cynthia,” Donna said. “We’re all alone in a meaningless world. That’s it. OK?”
“That’s so easy for you to say!” Cynthia screamed.
There was a loud crack as the connection was broken.
Donna had no recollection who had sent her the postcard or from where. She couldn’t think what had prompted her to display it, either. The city held no allure for her. She had no intention of taking it down and looking at it more closely.
Later, she lay in bed trying to find sleep by recounting the ranks of poker hands. Royal flush, straight flush, four of a kind, full house…A voice kept saying in her head, Out or In. Huh? Which will it be? Then it was dawn. She showered and dressed and hurried to Pond House, where she had coffee in the cafeteria. Her eyes darted around, falling on everything, glittering. There was her coat, hanging on a hook next to her table. The coat suddenly seemed preposterous to her. Honestly, what must she look like in that coat?
Up on Floor Three, Cynthia wasn’t in her room but one fat girl was, her face red and her eyes swollen from crying.
“I just lost my friend,” the fat girl said.
“You’re not Holly, then,” Donna said.
“I wish I was,” the fat girl said. “I wish I was Holly.” She lay there on her bed, crying loudly.
Donna looked out the window at the street below. You couldn’t open the windows. A tree outside was struggling to burst into bloom but had been compromised heavily by the parking area. Big chunks of its bark had been torn away by poorly parked cars. When she was a child, visiting Florida, she’d seen a palm tree burst into flames. It was beautiful! Then rats as long as her downy child’s arm had rushed down the trunk. Later, she learned that it was not unusual for a palm tree to do this on occasion, given the proper circumstances. This tree didn’t want to do anything like that, though. It couldn’t. It struggled along quietly.
She turned from the window and left the room, where the fat girl continued sobbing. She walked down the corridor, humming a little. She pretended she was a virus, wandering without aim through someone’s body. She found Cynthia in the lounge, painting her long and perfect nails.
Cynthia regarded her sourly. “I really wish you wouldn’t visit me anymore,” she said.
A nurse appeared from nowhere like they did. “Who are you visiting?” she said to Donna.
Cynthia looked at her little bottle of nail polish and tightened the cap.
“You have to be visiting someone,” the nurse said.
“She’s not visiting me,” Cynthia muttered.
“What?” the nurse said.
“She’s not visiting me,” Cynthia said loudly.
After some remonstrance, Donna found herself being steered away from Cynthia and down the hallway to the elevator. “That’s it,” the nurse said. “You’ve lost your privileges here.” Donna was alone in the elevator as it went down. On the ground floor some people got on and the elevator went up again. On Floor Three they got off. Donna went back down. She walked through the parking lot to her car.
She would come back tomorrow and avoid Cynthia and the nurse, too. For now, she had to decide which route to take home. It was how they made roads these days; there were five or six ways to get to the same place. On the highway she ran into construction almost immediately. There was always construction. Cans and cones, those bright orange arrows blinking, and she had to merge. She inched over, trying to merge. They wouldn’t let her in! She pushed into the line of cars. Then she realized she was part of a funeral procession. Their lights were on. She was part of a corte
ge, of an anguished throng. Should she turn on her lights to show sympathy, to apologize? She put on her sunglasses. People didn’t turn their lights on in broad daylight just for funerals, though. They turned them on for all sorts of things. Remembering somebody or something. Actually, showing you remembered somebody or something, which was different. People were urged to put them on for safety too. Lights on for Safety. But this was a funeral, no doubt about it.
After what seemed an eternity, the road opened up again and Donna turned the car sharply into the other lane. In moments she had left the procession far behind.
On her own street she parked and walked quickly toward her door. She felt an unpleasant excitement. It was midmorning, and as always the neighborhood was quiet. Who knew what people did here? She never saw anyone on this street.
Then a dog began to bark, quite alarmingly. As she walked on, the rapid cry grew louder, more frantic. It was the poor old soul’s dog, Donna thought, the gray machine, somehow operative again, resuming its purpose. She knew. But it sounded so real, so remarkably real, and the disorder she felt was so remarkably real as well that she hesitated. She could not go forward. Then, she couldn’t go back.
Substance
Walter got the silk pajamas clearly worn. Dianne got the candlesticks. Tim got the two lilac bushes, one French purple, the other white—an alarming gift, lilacs being so evocative of the depth and dumbness of death’s kingdom that they made Tim cry. They were large and had to be removed with a backhoe, which did not please the landlord, who didn’t get anything, although he didn’t have to return the last month’s deposit either. Lucretia got the Manhattan glasses. They were delicate, with a scroll of flowers etched just beneath the rim. There were four of them. Andrew got the wristwatch. Betsy got the barbells. Jack got a fairly useless silver bowl. Angus got the photo basket. Louise got the dog.
Louise would have preferred anything to the dog, right down to the barbells. Nothing at all would have pleased her even more. It was believed that the animal had been witness to the suicide. The dog had either seen the enactment or come into the room shortly afterward. He might have been in the kitchen eating his chow or he might have been sitting on the porch, taking in the entire performance. He was a quiet, medium-size dog. He wasn’t the kind who would have run for help. He wasn’t one of those dogs who would have attempted to prevent the removal of the body from the house.
Louise took the dog immediately to a kennel and boarded it. She couldn’t imagine why she, of all people, had been given the dog. But in the note Elliot had left he had clearly stated, And to Louise my dog, Broom. The worst of it was that none of them remembered Elliot’s having a dog. They had never seen it before, but now suddenly there was a dog in the picture.
“He said he was thinking of getting a dog sometime,” Jack said.
“But wouldn’t he have said ‘I got a dog’? He never said that,” Dianne said.
“He must have just gotten it. Maybe he got it the day before. Or even that morning, maybe,” Angus said.
This alarmed Louise.
“I’m sure he never thought you’d keep it,” Lucretia said.
This alarmed her even more.
“Oh, I don’t know!” Lucretia said. “I just wanted to make you feel better.”
Louise was racking up expenses at the kennel. The dog weighed under thirty-five pounds but that still meant fourteen dollars a day. If he had weighed between fifty and a hundred, it would have been twenty dollars, and after that it went up again. Louise didn’t have all that much money. She worked at a florist’s and sometimes at an auto-glass tinting establishment, cutting and ironing on the darkest film allowable by law, which at twenty percent was less than most people wanted but all they were going to get. Her own car had confetti glitter on the rear window. It was like fireworks going off in the darkness of her glass.
She was sitting alone in a bar one evening after work worrying about the money it was costing to board the dog, who had been at the kennel for a week and a half. Louise had her friends, of course, and she saw them practically constantly, but sometimes she liked to be alone. Occasionally, she even took trips by herself, accompanied only by strangers, cruises or camping trips to difficult places where she was invariably lonely and misunderstood. These trips reminded her of last evenings, one of those that occur over and over in one’s life, and she thought of them as good training. She had learned a lot from them. More than enough by now, probably.
In the bar was a long fish tank that served as a wall separating it from the restaurant beyond. Louise had never been in this place before and would not select it again. She didn’t like to look at the fish, one of which was trailing a cloud of mucus behind it. In the restaurant beyond the fish she saw an older man deep in conversation with a party or parties outside her vision. He had moist, closely cut hair and a Band-Aid high up on his temple. A line of blood extended several inches down from the Band-Aid. Louise became engrossed in watching him chatting and smiling and sawing away at his steak or whatever it was. But she looked away for a moment and when she looked back the blood was gone. He must have wiped it off with a napkin, perhaps dipped in his water glass. Someone in the party he was with was fond of him or even possibly more than fond and told him about the blood. That was Louise’s first thought, though it had certainly taken them long enough to mention it.
The next morning she went to the kennel. A girl brought the dog out. It had yellowish wavy fur.
“Is that the right one?” Louise asked. The girl looked at her expressionlessly and cracked her gum. “It’s really not mine,” Louise explained. “It belongs to a friend.”
The dog crouched miserably on the floor in the backseat of Louise’s car. It didn’t even lie down.
“You’re going to get sick down there,” Louise said. The dog was clearly not habituated to riding in cars, and had no sense of the happiness it could bring.
After a week, she had discerned no habits. The dog didn’t seem morose, merely withdrawn. She began calling it Broom with a certain amount of reluctance.
Every other week, there would be a party at one of their houses, though it wasn’t Louise’s turn just yet. Rent was cheap, so they all lived in these big ruined houses. She went over to Jack’s and everyone was already there, drinking gimlets and looking at a rat Jack had caught beneath the sink on one of his glue traps.
“I’m not going to use these things again,” Jack said. “They’re depressing.”
“I use them,” Walter said, “but I never get any rats.”
“You’re not putting them in the right places,” Jack said.
The rat watched them in a sort of theatrical manner.
One of the twins, Wilbur, got up and opened a window. He picked up the trap and sailed it with its rat accompanist into the street to fall amid the passing traffic.
“I usually take it down to the Dumpster,” Jack said.
Wilbur and his twin, Daisy, were the only ones who said they remembered Broom. They said he hadn’t eaten from a bowl but off a Columbia University dinner plate. But in their far-out nods Wilbur and Daisy could picture almost anything. They spent most of their time lovingly shooting each other up. They had not been acknowledged in the note as gift recipients, although of course they didn’t care. They insisted that matters would not have taken such a dreary turn had they been able to introduce Elliot to the great Heroisch, the potent, powerful, large and appealing Heroisch. The twins were so innocent they got on everyone’s nerves. They loved throwing up on junk. A joy develops, they’d say, a real joy. It’s not like throwing up at all.
They all had their big, quietly rotting houses, even the twins. Louise had a solarium in hers that leaked badly. In the rear was an overgrown yard with a birdhouse nailed to each tree. Some trees had more than one. The previous tenants must have been demented, Louise thought. How could they imagine that birds want to live like that?
At Jack’s they drank, but lightly except for Dianne, who was drinking far too much recently. She’d said
, “I began to wonder if it was worthwhile to undertake what I was doing at the moment. Pick a moment, any moment. I began to wonder. If I only had today and not tomorrow, would it be worthwhile to undertake what I was doing at the moment? I addressed myself to that very worthwhile question and I had to admit, well, no.”
But no one tried to interfere with Dianne. They were getting over the death of their friend Elliot—each in his or her own way, was the understanding.
“It takes four full seasons to get over a death,” Angus said. “Spring and summer, winter and fall.”
“Fall and winter,” Andrew said.
Everyone was annoyed with Angus because he had taken all the photos out of the flat woven basket where they’d always been kept and arranged them in albums, ordered by years or occasions. This pleased no one. It wasn’t the same. The effect was different. Everything had looked like a gala before. Now none of it did.
They talked about the things Elliot had given them. They could not understand what he had been attempting to say. All his other possessions had been trucked away and stored. A brother was supposed to come for them. He was sick or lived in Turkey or some goddamn place, who cared. In any case, he hadn’t shown up here yet.
Louise didn’t think it was right that she had been given something alive. None of the others had. She made this point frequently but no one had an explanation for it.
The twins had been reading Pablo Neruda and had come across the line Death also goes through the world dressed as a broom, but they weren’t going to tell Louise that. Dressed didn’t seem right anyway, maybe it was the translation. But Neruda was a giant among pygmies, his mind impeccable. They were going to keep their mouths shut.
More than a month passed. Louise was working full-time in the florist’s shop. She liked working there, at the long cutting table, wearing an apricot-colored smock among the unnatural blooms. A woman came in one day just before closing. She wanted to send a dozen roses to a young veterinarian assistant.
“My dog bit her when she tried to lift him for an X-ray,” the woman said. “I’m so embarrassed.”