by Joy Williams
Which is odd because communicating is not a skill I naturally or unnaturally possess. I’d prefer to think of myself as a witness, but honestly, I doubt I’m even that.
The apartment I moved into is a shithole but convenient. Bars, restaurants, automobile services galore and a Trader Joe’s where you can buy pizzas fast-frozen in Italy and coconut water from Thailand, not that they’re unusual anymore, it’s what’s come to be expected. The apartment complex is clean, inexpensive and devoid of character. We tenants just refer to it as a shithole because it’s so soul-sucking. We don’t really believe our souls are being destroyed of course because we feel we have more power over our situation than that. The facility has a good view of sunsets in the summer when they’re not at their most legendary and it’s too hot to sit outside and view them anyway.
Shortly after my father died and I moved into the shithole without even my Prelude to remind me of loftier, simpler and more beautiful emotions, my mother sold our house in the foothills and moved into a run-down adobe on thirty acres of land in the mountains. Is there any kind of adobe other than run-down? I think not.
After a while she began to speak frequently of a neighbor, Willie, and his water-harvesting system. He had a twenty-six-thousand-gallon belowground cistern and got all his water from roof runoff during our infrequent but intense rains. I feared Willie might be a transitional figure in my mother’s life but he turned out to be an old man in a wheelchair with an old wife so cheerful she must have been on a serious drug regimen. They did have an ingenious water-collection system and I was given a tour of all the tanks and tubes and purifiers and washers and chambers that provided them with such good water and made them happy. They also kept bees and had an obese cat. The cat, or rather its alarming weight, seemed out of character for their way of life but I didn’t mention it. Instead, I asked them if his name was spelled with an ew or an ou. They found this wildly amusing and later told my mother they’d liked me very much. That and a dollar fifty will get me an organic peach, I said. I don’t know why my mother’s enthusiasm for them irritated me so much. Soon they were gone, however, both carried off by some pulmonary infection that people get from mouse pee. A man my mother described as a survivalist later moved into their house and I was told little about him other than he didn’t seem to know how to keep the system going and ended up digging a well.
It was Lewis with an ew that kept bringing diseased rodents into the house, is my suspicion.
From the time I was ambulatory until I was fourteen and refused to participate, every year on my birthday my father would video me going around an immense organ-pipe cactus in the city’s botanical garden. The cactus is practically under lock and key now. It could never survive elsewhere, certainly. Some miscreant would shoot it full of arrows or smack holes in it with a golf club.
My father would splice the frames and speed them up so I would start off on my circuit, disappear for a moment and emerge a year older, again and again a year older, taller and less remarkable. I began as a skipping and smiling creature and gradually emerged as a slouching and scowling one. Still, my parents appeared unaware of the little film’s existential horror. My mother claims that she no longer has it, that it no longer exists, and I have chosen to believe her.
On the other hand I find it difficult to believe that my father no longer exists. He lives in something I do not recognize. Or no longer recognize and never will again. There are philosophers who maintain we are not our thoughts and that we should disassociate ourselves from them at every opportunity. But without this thought, I would have no experience of the world and even less knowledge of my heart.
I’ve had a comfortable life. I’ve not been troubled or found myself an outcast or disadvantaged in any way. This too was the case with my mother and father. Lives such as ours are no longer in vogue. Since I’ve lived in the shithole, however, I’ve found that another’s perception of me can sometimes be unexpected. For example, the other night I was looking at some jewelry in an unsecured case at Hacienda del Sol, waiting for my friends to arrive so we could start drinking overpriced tamarind margaritas, and this hostess stalks up to me and says, “Can I help you”…in other words, You look beyond suspicious, what are you even doing here…
She appeared a somewhat older version of one of the paramedics who arrived at the house the night my father died, though it was unlikely that anyone would go from being a paramedic to being an employee at a resort that had seen better days and was, in fact, in foreclosure. Though perhaps she had accumulated a record of not saving anyone and had lost her position as an emergency responder.
“Do I know you,” I asked. Or maybe it was “Have I seen you before?” because I had never known her, even if she’d been the one to feel my father’s last breath leave his body. She threw me a dismissive look and returned to her station to greet and seat a party of four, whom she’d evidently been expecting as they had planned ahead and made a reservation.
My point is that however fortunate your life or—considering the myriad grotesque ways one can depart from it—your death, it’s usually strangers who have their hands on you at the end and usher you down the darkened aisle. Or rather that was one of my reflections as I waited for my friends with whom I would commence a night of serious drinking.
—
So my mother is out there alone, in what I swear is one of the darkest parts of the mountain, with only a rarely-in-residence survivalist for a neighbor, and she is erecting a three-hundred-square-foot protective enclosure for a reptile that isn’t even endangered, though my mother claims it should be.
I don’t go out there much to visit, not nearly as often as I should, I suppose, but I’m aware that the work is proceeding slowly. My mother is insisting on doing everything herself. The most strenuous part is digging the trench, which Fish and Wildlife guidelines mandate should be fourteen inches deep. The trench is then to be filled with cement and a wall no less than three feet tall built on top of it. All this is to prevent the tortoise from escaping, for this is to be an adopted tortoise, one that has been displaced by development and should not be allowed to return to a no longer hospitable environment. At the same time, everything within the enclosure should mimic its natural situation. There should be flowering trees and grasses, a water source and the beginnings of burrow excavations, facing both north and south, that the tortoise can complete.
The site my mother had chosen was several hundred yards from the adobe. Wouldn’t it be easier, I asked, if she just enclosed an area using one of the house’s walls? Then she wouldn’t have to dig so much, it would be more of a garden, and she could bring out a table and chairs, have her coffee out there in the morning, maybe have a little fire pit for the evening—no, not a fire pit, certainly, what was I thinking? But possibly her aim should be the creation of a pleasant and meditative place that she could utilize for herself as well as for this yet unacquired tortoise.
Actually, I think a space for meditation is the last thing my mother needs. I don’t even know why I mentioned it. She didn’t respond to my suggestion anyway. She simply said she wasn’t doing this for herself.
The earth on the mountain is volcanic and poor. Some of the stones my mother dislodges are as big as medicine balls. She uses some sort of levering tool. Still, it’s dangerous work, as every part of the grieving process is if it’s done correctly. Don’t think I don’t realize what my mother’s up to.
“If you injure yourself your independent aging days might as well be over,” I said. She laughed, which I hoped she would. “Where did you come across that dreadful phrase,” she asked. “Someone in the shithole,” I answered, and she laughed again. “Why are you punishing yourself,” she said, “by living in that place?”
One of my acquaintances here is a widow too, but she’s only ten years older than I am. Her husband died in one of those stupid head-on wrecks blamed by the surviving driver on the setting sun. It blinded me! She kept his shoes. People would visit her and there would be his running shoes
in the bathroom, his boots by the couch, and if he’d been old enough for slippers they would have certainly been by the bed. They’d been in the home they had before she moved here, now sort of on display, she told me, sort of stagy. Everyone who saw them was moved to tears and she kept them out longer than she should have, she realized that. Then one day she just threw them away—they were too beat-up to give to charity—and she got rid of a lot of other things as well and moved into the shithole.
We can’t keep pets here. It’s one of the rules and is strictly enforced. No one cares. I mean no one tries to smuggle a pet in. They don’t feel the lease violates their rights. Several years ago there was a tenant with a Great Dane who went off one morning and shot up his nursing class at the university because he’d received a bad assessment, killing his instructor and two fellow students before killing himself. There was no mention of what happened to the dog afterward, not a single mention. Information about the dog is unavailable to this day. I sometimes think of this guy who wanted to be certified as a nurse, and not only what was he thinking when he set off that morning to murder those people but what was he thinking leaving the dog behind with its dog toys and dog dishes and dog bed? What did he think was going to happen?
Tortoises spend half their life in burrows, from October into April. Should you see a tortoise outside its burrow in the winter months it’s not well and veterinary assistance should be sought.
“So,” I say to my mother, “have you met this tortoise?”
She said she hadn’t, but had filled out all the paperwork and was on a list. She’d be contacted when the enclosure was complete.
“So you don’t know how old it is or whether it’s a he or a she or whether it’s a special-needs tortoise with a malformed shell or a missing leg.”
“I don’t,” my mother said.
“I would think that after going through all of this, all the womanhours and expense, you’d want a perfect tortoise.”
“Well,” my mother said, “maybe I’ll get one.”
My mother used to be much more talkative. There used to be a lot more going on, more being said, lots of cheerful filler. Maybe that’s why I go to AA as much as I do because at least people are telling stories, pathetic and predictable as they may be, and all manner of reassurances and promises are being made. When I go into my mother’s little house now, I don’t recognize much. There seems to be very little remaining of the life I had known, been cocooned in, you might say. I should have emerged from it in glorious certitude by now.
Often I think, and it is with a certain dismay, that I will age out of the shithole one day, for it is a young crowd who reside here briefly and then move on. The ones who stay don’t remain in touch with those who leave. What would we speak of with one another? When someone vacates, the manager comes in, paints the walls, sands the floors and cleans the windows. New tenants arrive quickly—it’s cheap, practically free! It’s convenient! We’re not crazy about them at first but we gradually enfold them. No point in playing favorites here. We’re all pretty much the same.
My mother finally finished the trench. It was pretty impressive when you think it was all accomplished by her hand. Then she bought some rebar and a cement mixer and in really no time it was all filled in and ready to accept the blocks. But then matters slowed down again. It was June and the heat was beginning to build. She’d be working, covered head to toe and with a hat and welder’s gloves, but gradually she’d only get a few hours in between dawn and dusk. The rest of the time I don’t know what she did—waited in that little adobe for dawn and dusk, I suppose. She didn’t have air-conditioning, just a rattling, inefficient swamp cooler in need of new pads.
“What she’s doing doesn’t sound healthy,” the young widow in the shithole said. “You should take her out to dinner or something. Get her out of there. Insist on it. Or she should take up running. I should take up running, I know. And what kind of a companion is a tortoise going to be? You’re not even supposed to pick them up much, are you?”
“Fish and Wildlife claim they’re very personable,” I said.
“Those people are morons. Didn’t they want to open a hunting season on sandhill cranes?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You’ve probably never even seen one. But I’m from Colorado, so I have. They’re very elegant and even have this elaborate dance they do. They mate for life. When one’s taken and the other’s left, that’s loneliness—real loneliness.”
She is pretty intense at times but also can be superficial—as with those shoes, which I have the grace not to mention.
Certainly my mother did not need to be taken out to dinner. People aren’t much help to one another under most circumstances, is what I’ve found. I’m reminded of the evening I dropped in at AA and a ruddy-faced woman came up to me and said, “I hear you’ve lost your mother, I’m so sorry.” And I said, “No, it was my father who died.” And she said, “Oh, I’d heard it was your mother.”
And that was it.
—
It was the Fourth of July when I managed to get out to my mother’s house again. The blocks had been cemented in place and were ready to be plastered and my mother had found a gate that she’d installed and painted blue. It swung inside, though, rather than outside, which I found somewhat awkward.
We were in the kitchen of the adobe eating toasted bread and some cold soup my mother had made. I had brought a bottle of wine but my mother, incredibly, did not have a corkscrew. You could barely see the enclosure from the house. It was so strange to me that she wouldn’t want to be closer to it when it was finished and had its occupier, though to be truthful I could not imagine the creature inside very well or the relief that seeing it would provide.
“Mom,” I said.
“I’m good,” my mother said.
Her face was sun-darkened and her thinning hair looked as though it would be crisp to the touch.
“Do you ever think of heaven,” she asked.
“No.”
“Good.” She laughed. “I wouldn’t want you thinking of heaven.”
We never did, did we?
I wished I were twelve again and could ask questions and pretend the answers were what I needed.
“How about divinity,” she asked.
“Gosh no,” I said, “that’s even harder to think about, isn’t it?”
She said the exciting work was about to begin—the preparation of the inner keep.
“Is that what it’s called?” I wondered, and she said that’s only what she called it.
I managed to get the cork out with a screwdriver. It seemed to take me forever. My mother accepted a glass of wine without comment and we resumed talking about the plants she would put in that would provide food and shade for the tortoise. I wondered what she would do when everything was complete since it was very close to being complete. Grief is dangerous work, I thought again, but when you have overcome it and it passes away, are you not left more bewildered and defenseless than ever?
I didn’t know what she meant by divinity, but that strange word was not mentioned again.
—
“Your mother is trying to contain her grief in a beautiful garden of her own devising,” the young widow said. “Or maybe it’s not grief at all. Maybe it’s something else, early-onset something. I’m sorry,” she said, “I don’t mean to simplify your mother’s situation in any way. Or yours. Or even mine, for that matter. You know what grief hates? Analysis or comfort of any kind.”
I believed she was wrong. Grief thrives on comfort. Comfort is the vehicle by which it can go anywhere, inhabit anything. Still, I said, “What does it love then?”
“The ones for which we grieve,” she said. “The lost. Grief knows how to love them because we don’t know how to do it anymore.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“Take Larry’s shoes, for example. What did I think I was doing? I didn’t know what I was doing.”
“They say there are many ways t
o grieve,” I said. “There’s not any right way to do it.”
I could not help but speak falsely to her, I don’t know why. She sighed and shook her head. The skin around her mouth was broken out in tiny pimples but her hair was pretty, dark and glossy like a healthy animal’s. She seemed younger than I, impossibly young, and I did not want to discuss such matters with her anymore. She didn’t drink, which made my avoidance of her easier, but I was left with her perception of grief. I began to think of it as something substantial and assured and apart, more competent and attentive than I, and no longer mindful of me and my poor efforts.
I then began to fear that my mother would be denied the very thing she had so inexplicably sought after my father’s death. She would never receive komik’c-ed. The program would have closed down. Even from the little I’d been told, the arrangement seemed unwieldy and misguided. The tortoise had to be microchipped and someone in an official capacity had to check on its health twice a year. There weren’t public funds available for these things.