by Joy Williams
“Big goddamn deal,” Darleen said. “My roommate gets two hundred each month from her parents, which they earn by collecting cans and bottles. The Garcias search the streets and alleys thirteen hours a day for cans and bottles. It’s their goddamn job. Fifteen thousand cans pay their rent each month and another six thousand nets their little scholar Isabelle two hundred bucks, and I can inform you that Isabelle—who’s the biggest goddamn fraud I’ve ever met—spends it on fancy underwear. The Garcias are tiny, selfless, worn-out saints walking the earth, I’ve seen ’em, and Isabelle buys lingerie.” She waved the proffered bill away. “What’s gone is gone,” she said, and laughed.
Deke refolded the bill and placed it back in his shirt. “She’s probably referring to an unfortunate erotic crisis I underwent recently. Otherwise, given its more general application, I would say that she doesn’t subscribe to the gone-is-gone theory one bit.”
Darleen scowled at him. “This is not the appropriate moment.”
Deke sniffed loudly, rotated his arms and clasped his hands together. “Cold in here too. Not cozy. Only thing of interest is this old painting. Where’d you get this? Quite out of place. An odd choice, I’d say.”
It was a large oil of beavers and their home on a lake, painted the century before. It was not in a frame but affixed to the wall by nails. Angela looked at it, resting her chin in her hand thoughtfully. The colors of the landscape were deep and lustrous. The water was a fervent, rumpled barren of green, the trees along the curving shore like cloaked messengers. Everything seemed fresh and clean with kind portent, even the sky. God had poured his being in equal measure to all creatures, Angela thought solemnly, to each as much as it could receive. Beavers were peculiar and reclusive, but that was their nature. They were not frivolous beings. They behaved responsibly and gravely and with great fidelity. Here they were involved in the process of constructing their house, carrying branches and twigs and so forth in their jaws and on their great paddle-like tails, though the structure was already large and in Angela’s view extremely accomplished, a mansion, in fact, the floors of which were carpeted with boughs of softest evergreen, the windows curving out over the water like balconies for the enjoyment of the air.
“Mummy stole that painting,” Darleen said.
“Well, good for you!” Deke said. Clearly, Angela had been elevated in his regard.
“Some years ago, Mummy used to be quite the drinker,” Darleen said.
“Is that so!” Deke exclaimed, more delighted still. “Why’d you give it up?”
The painting had been in a roadhouse she once frequented. Sitting and drinking, pretty much alone in that unpopular place, she would watch the painting with all her heart. Slowly her heavy heart would turn light and she would feel it pulling away as though it wasn’t responsible for her anymore, freeing her to slip beneath the glittering skein of water into the lovely clear beaver world of woven light, where everything was wild and orderly and real. A radiant inhuman world of speechless grace. This was where she spent her time when she could. These were delicate moments, however, and further weak cocktails never prolonged them. Further cocktails, actually, no matter how responsibly weak, only propelled her to the infelicitous surface again. The artist, the bastard, had probably trapped and drowned the beavers and thrust rods through their poor bodies to arrange them in life-assuming positions, as Audubon had done with birds, the bastard, and Stubbs had done with horses, the bastard, to make his handsome portraits.
“Your mother isn’t very forthcoming with the details, is she?” Deke said.
“I would wake up weeping,” Angela said. “Tears would be streaming down my face.”
“You quit, and now they don’t anymore,” Deke asked suspiciously.
Angela stared at him.
“Doesn’t seem much to give up the drink for, a few tears. How long’s it been since you’ve cried now?”
“Oh, years,” Angela said.
“And now her heart’s a little ice-filled crack. Isn’t it, Mummy?” Darleen said.
“Why don’t you leave your mother alone for a while,” Deke said. “Look at you. You’re a vicious little being, like one of those thylacines.”
“The Tasmanian wolf is extinct,” Darleen said. “Don’t show off so goddamn much.”
“Their prey was sheeps,” Deke said. “But the sheeps won out in the end. They always do.”
“Sheeps,” Darleen snickered.
“A vicious little being you are,” Deke repeated mildly. He regarded the painting once more. “I got a friend knew a guy who lived with a beaver in the Adirondacks. Every time my friend would go visit him, that beaver would be there with its own big beaver house made of sticks and such right against this guy’s cabin. He’d rescued this beaver and they had a really good relationship. You broke bread with my friend’s friend and you’d break bread with that beaver.”
“Mummy, when do you plan on serving supper?” Darleen said. “She never has food in this house,” she said to Deke.
“She’s got a number of vegetables ready to go. Vegetables are good for you,” he said without much conviction.
At dinner, Angela felt impelled to ask him about his circumstances.
“This is what I got to say to that remark. I don’t know if you read much, but there’s a story by Anton Chekhov called ‘Gooseberries.’ And in this story one of the characters says in conversation that there should be a man with a hammer reminding every happy, contented individual that they’re not going to be happy forever. This man with a hammer should be banging on the door of the happy individual’s house or something to that effect.”
“You think you’re the man with the hammer?” Angela said.
Deke smiled at her modestly.
“Mummy is certainly not happy,” Darlene said.
“If I recall that story correctly,” Angela said, “the point being made about the man with the hammer is that there is no such person.” Angela had attended boarding school herself. She remembered almost everything she had been alerted to then and very little afterward.
“You’re so negative, Mummy. You dispute anything anyone has to say.” Darleen crouched over the table with her fist wrapped around a fork, not eating.
“The man with the hammer that I recall is in another story, not by Chekhov at all. In ‘A Mother’s Tale’ the circumstances couldn’t be more—”
“Don’t be tiresome, Mummy,” Darleen said.
“Why don’t you leave your mother alone, the poor woman,” Deke said. “This is an ordinary woman here. Where’s the challenge? Why do you hate her so much? Your hate’s misplaced, I’d say.”
“Why do I hate Mummy?”
“Not at all clear. Whoa, though, whoa, I got a question for Angela. You ever confess under questioning from this child that you had considered, if only for an instant when she was but the size of a thumb inside you, not having this particular one at all, maybe a later one?”
“No,” Angela said.
Deke nodded. “That’s nice,” he said. He picked at his potato. “This is a little overcooked,” he said.
“I just want to check on something,” Darleen said. She disappeared into what had been her bedroom. It had ugly wallpaper in a dense tweedy pattern that would make anyone feel as though they were trapped under a basket. Darleen had selected it at the age of eight. Angela didn’t use the room for storage. Technically, it was still Darleen’s bedroom.
“Dinner was OK, actually OK,” Deke said pleasantly. “Glad you didn’t go the fowl route. You ever had goose? There’s this wealthy woman in town and she’s got this perturberance about nuisance geese. They’re Canada geese but they’re not from Canada, she says, and she’s got the town to agree to capture and slaughter them and feed them to the poor. If you have any influence, would you tell that old girl we don’t like those geese? The flavor is off. They’re golf-course geese and full of insecticides and effluent and such.”
“Betty Bishop!” Angela exclaimed. “Why, I just broke her wrist!”
/>
“Good for—” Deke began, then stopped.
“It was an accident, but what a coincidence!”
“I guess you wouldn’t have the influence I seek, then,” Deke said, sniffing. “You ever get the air ducts in this place cleaned? Should be cleaned annually. Dust, fungi, bacteria—you’re cohabiting with continually recirculating pollutants here.”
Darleen returned. “Where’s my little fish?” she demanded.
“Well, it, oh goodness, it’s been years,” Angela said.
“Is that my fish’s bowl in the kitchen filled with pennies and shit?”
“I saw that,” Deke said. “Clearly a fishbowl, now much reduced in circumstances.”
“I had a little fish throughout my childhood,” Darleen explained to him. “I said ‘Good morning’ to it in the morning and ‘Good night’ to it at night.”
Deke stretched out his long, black-wrapped legs.
“For years and years I had this little fish,” Darleen said. “But it wasn’t the same fish! I’d pretend I hadn’t noticed there was something awfully wrong with fishie sometimes before I went to school, and she would pretend she hadn’t slipped the deceased down the drain and run out and bought another one before my return.”
“Oh, I knew you knew,” Angela said.
“If it had been the same fish, you two would have lacked the means to communicate with each other at all,” Deke suggested.
“Mummy, I want to be serious now. Do you know why I’m here? I’m here because Daddy Bruce requested that I come. That’s why I’m here.”
For an instant, Angela had no idea who Daddy Bruce was. Then her heart pitched about quite wildly. Darleen had neglected to put her eyes in full deployment and she gazed at her mother with alarming sincerity.
“I was studying one night. I’d been up for hours and hours. It was very late and he just appeared, in my mind, not corporeally, and he said, ‘Honey, this is Daddy Bruce. I don’t want you cutting yourself off from your mom and me anymore. Your mom’s a painful thing to apprehend but you’ve got to try. She’s living her life like a clock does, just counting the hours. You can take a clock from room to room, from place to place, but all it does is count the hours.’ ”
“He never talked like that!” Angela exclaimed. “He was just a boy!”
“Well, that’s what happens pretty quick,” Deke said. “They all get to sounding the same. It’s characteristic of death’s drear uniformity. Most difficult to be pluralistic when you’re dead.”
“He said he never loved you and he’s sorry about that now.”
Angela’s heart was pounding hard and insistently, distracting her a little, making a great obtrusive show of itself. Be aware of me, it was pounding, be aware.
“He said if he had to do it all over, he still wouldn’t love you and you still wouldn’t know it.”
“It don’t seem as if this Bruce is giving Angela much of a second chance here,” Deke said.
“Daddy Bruce wanted to assure you that—”
“Tell him not to worry about it,” Angela said. There were worse things, she supposed, than being told you had never been loved by a dead man.
Deke giggled. “What else he have to say? Did he suggest you were studying too hard?”
“He would hardly have bothered to come all the way from the other world to tell me that,” Darleen said.
“I suspect there’s only one thing to know about that other world,” Deke opined. “You don’t go to it when you’re dead. That other world exists only when you’re in this one.”
“Yes, that’s right,” Angela said. She took a deep, uncertain breath.
“That might be correct,” Darleen said, gnawing on her hands again. “The dead are part of our community, just like those in prison.”
“Ever visit the prison gift shop?” Deke said. “Can’t be more than ten miles from here. They sell cutting boards, boot scrapers, consoles for entertainment centers. The ladies knit those toilet-seat covers, toaster covers. Nice things. Reasonable. They won’t let the real bad ones contribute anything, though. They want to sell products, not freak collector items. It’s like that tree used to be outside the First Congregational Church. That big old copper beech they cut down because they said it was a suicide magnet? Wouldn’t use the wood for nothing either, and that was good wood. Threw it in the landfill. Tree was implicated in only four deaths. Drew in two unhappy couples was all. Wouldn’t think they’d rip out a three-hundred-year-old tree for that, but down it went. And now they’ve got a little sapling there no bigger around than a baseball bat.”
Angela dismayed herself by laughing.
“That’s right,” Deke giggled. “If a young person gets it in his mind now passing that spot, he’s got to wait.”
“I should have suspected you two would get along,” Darleen said sourly.
“You sick?” Deke asked Angela. “Is that why you don’t care so much? Some undiagnosed cancer?”
“She’s never been sick a day in her life,” Darleen said. “She has the constitution of a horse.”
“Horses are actually quite delicate,” Deke said. “Lots can go wrong with a horse, naturally, and then you can make additional things go wrong, should you wish, if it’s in your interests.”
“Deke worked a few summers in Saratoga,” Darleen said. She suddenly looked weary.
“A sick horse is a dead horse, pretty much,” Deke said. “I’m going to uncork that other bottle now.” From the kitchen, Angela heard him excoriating the rust on the gas jets, the lime buildup around the sink fixtures, the poorly applied adhesive wallpaper meant to suggest crazed Italian tiles. Goblet once again brimming, he did not resume his place at the table but walked over to the painting. “I can see why you felt you had to have this,” he said. “At first it appears to be realistically coherent and pleasantly decorative, but the viewer shortly becomes aware of a sense of melancholy, of disturbing presentiment.”
Angela wondered if it was possible to desire a drink any more than she did at this moment. It couldn’t be.
“You clearly got an affinity with unknowing, unprepared creatures,” Deke went on.
“Deke used to be an art critic,” Darleen said.
He waved one hand dismissively. “Just for the prison newsletter.”
“Yeah, Deke attended prison for two years,” Darleen said.
“I began my thesis there,” Deke said. “ ‘Others: Do They Exist?’ But I never completed it. I was a couple of hundred pages into it when I had to admit to myself that it wasn’t genuine breakthrough thinking.”
Angela rose to her feet suddenly and tried to embrace Darleen. The girl was all stubborn bone. Her clothes smelled musty, and a stinging chemical odor rose from her spiky hair. She pulled away easily from Angela’s grasp.
“Whoa, whoa, whoa there,” Deke said.
Darleen laughed. “Daddy Bruce better get here quick. Wake you up.”
“I have to…I have to…”
They looked at her.
“It’s late and I have to go to work tomorrow,” she said, ashamed.
“You said you’d take the day off!” Darleen cried.
“Take the day off, it don’t fit when you put it on again,” Deke said. “Attention here, I’m taking the fishbowl and going out for more wine. Liquor store has one of those change machines. Those things are fun, you ever seen one work?”
“Don’t leave!” Angela and Darleen exclaimed together.
“At a dangerously low level,” he said, raising the bottle.
No one could argue that it was otherwise.
“Just stay a little while longer,” Darleen said.
Deke pursed his lips and pressed his hands to his leather shirt. “I might commence to pace,” he said. He grimly poured himself the last of the wine.
“There was a strange thing that happened the other night,” Angela began. “I was on a boat, the ferry that goes to the islands. There’d been the most remarkable coincidence—”
“A coincidence
is something that’s going to happen and does,” Deke said. “You got a fondness for the word, I notice.”
“Oh, Mummy is so seldom precise,” Darleen said. “When I was small, she would tell me I had my father’s eyes. Then one day I finally said, ‘I do not have his eyes. He was not an organ donor to my knowledge. A little frigging precision in language would be welcome,’ I said.”
Deke looked at her impatiently, then stood as though yanked up by a rope. “You girls hold off on the Daddy Bruce business until I get back. That’s dangerous business. You don’t want to go too far with that without an impartial yet expert observer present.”
He left without further farewell bearing the fishbowl, the door shutting softly behind him.
Angela laughed. “I think we disappointed him.”
The room felt stifling. She opened a window, beyond which was a storm window, a so-called combination window, adaptable to the seasons. She fumbled with the aluminum catches and pushed it up. The cold clutched her, then darted past. She turned and looked at her daughter. “I love you,” she said.
“Mummy, Mummy.” Darleen sighed. Then, tolerantly, “The new headmaster has a white cockatoo that likes to be rocked like a baby.”
“Do tell me about it, please,” Angela said.
“Stupid bird,” Darleen said cheerfully.
—
Several years later, Angela was dying in the town’s hospital, in a room where many before her had passed. She had known none of them, but this room they had in common, and the old business engaged in there. Darleen had been summoned but would not arrive in time. Angela was fifty-five years old. She had not gotten out as early as she might have, certainly, but now she had firmly grasped death’s tether.
“Passed that little sapling tree on the way here,” Deke said. “Still being permitted to grow in the churchyard. Too new yet to cast a shadow, but it had better mind its manners, no?”
Angela wanted to laugh, even now. What a night that had been!
“Most enjoyable evening,” Deke agreed.
The new little nurse said, “It sounded like, ‘Did you bring the hammer?’ ”