The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

by Diane Williams

The odd woman, actually.

  Boys!

  It was as if I heard a hiss come out of my mother, or she was letting me have it some way with air when I said to her You look so beautiful.

  But she didn’t do that.

  What she did do was she looked at me.

  Maybe not even that, because I was standing—my mouth was at her ear—when I said You look so beauti­ful, so that no one else sitting at the table would hear. Was I whispering because her face had looked to me manhandled, if that were possible, with dips and curves lying pleasingly on her, pleasingly to me on her face?

  So what happened then? Because it was her turn. Was I pulled away to say something to someone else?

  No, I think I sat back down next to her. There was no getting away from her. I had been put there with her for the meal.

  But I did not look at her. I was looking to see the shine on my plate rim, the sauce shine on my meal, and I was seeing the beauty of the man next to me, which was so careful in his hair, in his wife’s hair that matched his hair, in his wife’s pink mouth when she spoke. And with all this beauty going on, my knife, I kept it slicing competently through my meal. I kept it slicing, and I kept putting my knife back into the correct station on the rim of my plate after having sliced.

  So when my meal was finished, and I felt that it was finished with no trouble, I got up and I left the people at the table. It must have been just for a moment when I got up, which was to go to the commotion why I finally got up, not to leave my mother—because I am a mother, too, and the commotion was my problem, my children, a disorganization.

  My children were going around and around the ta­ble. I think that they were going so fast that I could not have caught the sleeve of even the youngest, even if I had tried reaching out for it. I think, maybe, I did try reaching out for it. But perhaps I didn’t.

  They all must have been waiting for me for what I would do, everyone else at the table—all the grown-up people—but I was just looking at my children, my children going on and on, and their noise was like huge spills to me that kept being sudden and kept pouring.

  And it was pleasing to me, then it was, in a certain way, the motion and the commotion, the children get­ting away from me, and I was watching it, and it was all my fault until the time when it would be over, and it wasn’t as if anything could be ruined, I didn’t think.

  Then I called Boys! which I thought was loud, but when I hardly heard the word, because it was as if I had sent the word away, when the children hardly heard the word—they must not have—then I knew it must have been very faint out of my mouth, or just loud enough to be just another push of air to send them around again, to keep them going.

  Then I saw a little girl, little enough that I must have missed her when she was going around with the boys, someone else’s little girl, shorter than my littlest boy, that I did not know.

  She must have thought she was so cute. The girl looked full of glee to me, and I was standing there, waiting for some other mother, the mother of the girl I did not know, to stand up and do something—because it was clear to me then that this little girl was the cause, that it was all her fault, and that she was the one in charge.

  Ultimate Object

  She did not know there would be a cupboard full of vases, but she had had a hunch, as when her tongue on someone’s skin could give her a hunch of what would happen. Let me repeat—a tongue on someone’s skin.

  She was with a friend with whom she could share her joy that there was a cupboard full. She said, “We’re okay! They’ve got everything we could ask for!”

  She was crouched, flat-footed, her body nearly into a ball, except for her neck and for her head not conform­ing, so that she could look into the cupboard to let all the joy which was packed inside of the cupboard for her, into her.

  One plastic vase with a bulb shape, with a narrow tube protruding from the bulb upward, was light as a feather, and was as warm as plastic is.

  One glass vase, the shape of a torso, was covered all over with rough-grained glass, when she took it out.

  She did not let her friend take vases away when she held up vases to prove they were unsuitable because she pronounced it was so.

  Each time she went down, to look in, the quality of the joy was as good, did as much for her—four times.

  It was festivity.

  And to her, it was festivity, the cooking or the heat­ing, that the man who had nothing to do with either her or her friend was doing nearby at the stove.

  His peaceable plan—to lift and to unfurl, flat, round, yellow, black-speckled cakes—was the only other romantic transformation—not the product of imagination—going on in the place at the same time. And the man had no more right to be in this place—he was on the same shaky ground as she was, and as her friend was, by being there—which she saw him con­firm with a smile.

  It did not occur to her to get close to the man, to make an advance to taste, to do anything at all conse­quential vis-à-vis the man.

  At the risk of startling readers, there was a dead body hidden not far from the man, which was the body of a woman the man had killed the day before, with a sharp enough knife, then lying—the knife was—in a drawer above the cupboard of vases.

  The woman’s naked, somewhat hacked body, decapi­tated and frozen, was in the institutional-sized freezer, adjacent to the stove. Out of her swollen face, her tongue protruded.

  The wrong door, for all time, had been opened.

  Again

  Earlier, when my son was with me against his will, only for a moment, there had been a lot of baying we had heard on the radio. I had called to him, “Come hear the cattle!” but then thought, What a lie! when my son walked back out. Those had not been cattle.

  On the radio—on the same program—I heard this woman saying she was better off. I was all by myself then.

  She said the animals she ate were better off too. She said, “They’re better off and so am I.”

  She said, “Most people think only of the chops and the steaks. They don’t think about the ribs and the flanks and the neck.”

  She said, “I’ll show you.” She had some man there asking her questions. She said to him, “Let me show you.” Then she was doing all this breathing, this gasp­ing. She said, “God, I hate this. This happens to me every time.” Then she said, “Come here, honey. Come here.”

  She was trying to get a lamb to come to her, I think. It was small, I imagined, like a baby lamb. She said, “Honey.” She had to say it again. There was lots of wrestling that I heard.

  She was wrestling with an animal which had ivory curls all over it, and gray, red-rimmed eyes, in my mind. She grabbed that baby lamb finally around the neck, her head on top of its head, I was thinking. She was hugging the baby, her pistol pressed into it some­where, while the baby twisted to get loose, and she said, “Honey,” again, and then there was this dull bang that I have heard, and the sound of falling down that I have heard.

  It was at breakfast time when I heard the falling down, when I was caught next to the table I had set up for the breakfast. It was time for me to do what I do. I call.

  Lifeguard

  We had tried we had tried my mother and I to get someone to help us stop the flood in the house. We had tried to get some man. So that when my father and the man who guards my father returned, but when they were not yet inside the house, I went out to them.

  That man who guards my father was sizing me up like he was wild. His head was on its side in midair bouncing, his shoulder all dipped down because I was forcing him to leave me alone with my father, and I was forcing him to go into the house to deal with the flood and with my mother, so that I was the one left guarding my father, who was wearing those shoes, who was taking those small steps toward the house. I was say­ing to my father, “It’s not so bad, the flood. You’ll see,” and I was talking as slowly as h
e was walking in those shoes.

  Those shoes on my father were the worst things I saw when I was getting him into the house, not getting him into the house, guarding him while he inched his way toward it.

  Those shoes did not look like shoes that could hold a foot. There did not look to be room for a foot of flesh inside them, just a foot of bone, long like a pipe and they were forcing their way to the door of his house which was open, but from which we could not hear yet the rushing of water that I had felt rushing inside of the pipe—the hot rushing that I had seen blur the floor so that the floor was no longer a clear thing to see, so that the ceiling of our house was shedding through its lights the way rain comes down out from under a bright sun.

  So that of course we were wet, my mother and I, with water binding like bracelets on our wrists, up and down our arms, like extra hair on our foreheads, on our clothes extra shapes, in our shoes which made my feet feel larger and heavier than they had ever felt.

  At the door with my father, it was as if everything was hotter and wetter and louder in the house than I had remembered and was getting more so, just with us about ready to enter—and my mother and the man who guards my father must have been the cause. They had had so much time, I thought they had, and to­gether they had not stopped it.

  And then, before we ever entered, my father was telling me what we should do, even though I could not make it out, not the words, but I knew he was telling me how to stop the flood, if we wanted to.

  The Nub

  The cantor was slumped in the winged chair on the platform behind the pulpit. For the time being, she was finished with her part.

  I felt sorry for her, that we could not have given her applause for the job she had done. Something was definitely wrong when she was done, when we could not give her any applause, because she had sung her heart out.

  That’s what was wrong. I was thinking about the rabbi too. How could he know it right away that I thought he was boyish and candid, so adorable and appropriate for everything he had said to the thirteen-year-old girl on this great occasion?

  He had stood with the girl in front of the open ark with his hands on her. I have never seen this. He was staring into her eyes. She was staring into his eyes for how long? for how long?

  A matron with a navy velvet hat on, cocked saucily, began to weep when it was her turn at the pulpit, when she said the girl’s name.

  Then all of that was behind us.

  Then to kick off the snowball dance at the luncheon party afterward, thirteen-year-old girls asked grown men, most of whom they did not know, to dance with them, on the order of the bandleader. Dessert—a sug­ary baked apple with cream—was served ahead of the main course, and then there was another dessert.

  I was saying all of the appropriate things to everyone to get happiness from the happiness, to have a good time at the good time and I was getting it done.

  Then, with the band, the thirteen-year-old girl was singing “I’ll cry if I want to,” and the bandleader told her she had done a good job when she was done, and we all gave her a lot of applause.

  Later, at home, on the telephone, talking to my hus­band, only about this and about that, when I was in the same room with my children, I was pressing the nub of myself for the pleasure of the pleasure of it—my—what I am calling the nub—call it what you like—it was at exactly the point of the corner of my bureau top. I was pressing on this nub to get aware of the possibility of the pleasure, up and down. Then I did these very gentle moves over to the side of my nub on it, while I was talking.

  What I was doing to myself, just so, was working for me, but nobody could appreciate what it meant to me, except for me.

  A child learns from this. Children can learn all by themselves, if they have to, not to show off.

  Mystery of the Universe

  The five-year-old sitting at the head of the table said, “Think! You’re not thinking. Think!” So I tried to think, because he had said I had to.

  “It has something to do with the angel,” he said.

  We all looked up at the lit-up Christmas tree, to the top, where I saw it pressed into the wooden beam, something golden and bent. The question, the child’s question, was “What made the roof cave in?”

  “He changes the rules when you start to guess it,” his ten-year-old brother said.

  It was true. I remembered his first hint—“It has something to do with the train,” which was on tracks at the base of the tree.

  The size of the child’s forehead, of his whole head, is astonishing for anyone of that age, for a child of any age, for any person—the breadth and the depth and the length of it—and then at dinner it was full of the question.

  “You’re not thinking!” he said again. “Think!” when I said that the top of the tree had pushed through the ceiling, had made the ceiling cave in, and I am forty-two.

  “No!” he said. “That’s not it! Who can guess it what it is?”

  There were two families together, guessing while we were eating. He wasn’t my child with this question, but I wished that he were. He is a child to be proud of, who would force us to think, who would not let up. I didn’t mind that he’d stoop to being sneaky. I was proud of him. I am proud of anyone who stands up to everyone, who would say it to everyone in front of everyone—“You’re the kind of person who would pull out a tree out of our front yard and throw it down on the house!” I was so proud of a person who would think of doing the scariest thing he could think of, and he isn’t even Jewish.

  Egg

  She had never allowed any egg of hers to get into such a condition, looking unlike itself and bulg­ing, which was why the egg had all her attention from where it was in the depth of the sink, and from the depth of where it had been all dark yellow in the bowl, which had not been very far down inside the bowl, for there was no depth of anything inside the bowl, no particular depths of anything in either of her kitchen sinks either.

  When she walked off from the sinks, thinking of the egg—“How unlike itself!”—she heard a yell which was noise produced by standing water which was falling suddenly down deeply into the pipes below the sinks.

  Variously, this yell was a choke to her, a slap, or the end of a life, so that she stopped when she heard the yell with her back to the sinks. She had the impression of a preamble.

  This is the beginning of something.

  She went and got another bad egg and gave it to the dog to eat out of the bowl, so that the bowl was scoured and banged about.

  The dog, she thinks, gets everything, she was think­ing later, walking the dog. He gets it, but pisses it and craps it away—daily—everything, and yet everyone shows the dog all of their love.

  Even she loves and she loves and she loves the dog.

  The dog goes along down the street and the people say to her, “What a nice dog,” and “That’s a nice-looking dog you’ve got there!” The dog takes her farther down the street than she intended to go, where then she is murdered.

  The murderer loves and he loves the woman’s dog for the rest of the dog’s life. The dog loves the murderer in return. The love that they share is perfect. It is not a love that would stoop to being sexual.

  What We Were There For

  She revealed a sweet temperament over and over again. Her companion kept showing her respect.

  I interrupted the two of them once, before they stood to take their turn. “Mrs. Gackenback!” the secretary called.

  So that’s who she is! The thought expelled itself with such force from me that it startled me.

  I had startled Mrs. Gackenback when I interrupted her and her companion. I interrupted Mrs. Gacken­back to ask, “Was it the Pointer Sisters?”

  Mrs. Gackenback told her companion, not me, that she was not sure if it had been the Pointer Sisters.

  I had heard Mrs. Gackenback say to her companion just befor
e I had interrupted them, “It wasn’t the An­drew Sisters.”

  After being startled, Mrs. Gackenback appeared to me uncomfortable, perhaps upset, not ruined.

  Mrs. Gackenback had to be helped to stand. She had to be helped to walk. Her companion did that for her.

  When it was my turn, when the secretary called me, when the secretary examined me up close, she said, “You should have been a Balinese dancer.” Then she said, “You do with your eyes what they can do with their hands.”

  I paid no attention to the secretary’s hands. Her shoes were not white nurse’s shoes. Her mint-green nylon dress had buttons up and down the front. Some­thing momentous was being revealed to me which goes up and down over and over again. It was being revealed. I had to put my head down between my legs. There is nothing I can think of that is fair. There is nothing I can think of that is fair. There is nothing I can think of that is fair. There is nothing I can think of that is fair there enough. There is nothing I can think of that is there enough.

  Science and Sin or Love

  and Understanding

  I am not going to look it up in a book or do research. There are those of you who probably know why the small switching tail of a small animal makes me remember how I want to copy lewd people.

  If the answer to the question is: Animals set an ex­ample for people, then I accept the answer. Do I have a choice?

  I gave my husband no choice.

  The last time I shoved something down my hus­band’s throat was when I cheated on him. Now I say to him, “I didn’t want to shove anything down your throat.”

  “It’s because I love you,” was the puny thing to say. It was puny compared to the size of the power which had made me say it to him.