The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

by Diane Williams

  His mother had a way of being strong, but not nasty. It was so sensuous. She and I both are short, short-haired women without eyeglasses. My husband has big eyes and he is large and muscular. I am very shy. His mother put her arm plus her leg around me—just live with it for a while. I, myself, how gladly I do.

  Before long, legend has it that when a partner­ship works, it is no accident. More accurately, more importantly, this illustrates this: I learn more about the arts and skills.

  Inspiring One

  I am living in a lively way with slight sobs now and then. My face squeaked under the pressure. I came to as many conclusions as possible, which puffed out loudly along with sobs. In this I was much helped by Fred. I took a look at what looked eerie—Fred. I am excited. He appears to have just had very good news. He can be receiving it every day.

  If I don’t refer to anything sexual, I’ll be a much more likeable person, for lack of a better idea.

  I am a weak woman of thirty-two in a metropoli­tan area. Life might be gaily spoken of.

  What Fred said: “I only hope and pray. I should so much like to help you. I hope you are keeping well. I hope you will have peace of mind. Do not bother to answer me. Of course, don’t reply. Please accept my sympathy. Sorry for this intrusion. I would love to see you again some day. Please never think of answering. I am horrified.”

  Some months later I was about to go on a danger­ous expedition to see Tiny. I can tell you about Tiny. She gave me her stationery. She’s the messiest writer of bills. She used to have crinkling paper, but this time it had Tiny Boynton written on it in big letters. And she’s been together with Marcel all these years and it’s a very poor relationship, but then he had an affair, of course. They must have seen one another enough to have twins. I don’t know how she does it. I used to chat with her. She spends all day long and she takes all the dogs on this big loop. I was wonder­ing, not knowing what her schedule was. She walks around in jodhpurs and a riding crop and totes the dogs along, and so I was desperate and I was running after her and I introduced myself and I am at the end of the world!

  The Widow and the Hamburger

  I can’t be expected to remember his privates—a pink head or yellow head. She wipes cream off of his face and I thought, I like his haircut now. She needs to take out whiskers. I don’t see why any opportunity can’t be taken to do something beautifully. I look for people to admire and she is one person.

  I have on Billy’s robe. The robe is filthy.

  I saw his penis.

  She wiped shaving cream off of his face. Those two never helped the poor because they were too poor.

  Sometimes he sat near her, but tried to get away if she tried to greatly entertain him.

  People say the dog lay on its back, some blood near its tail.

  Their house has plain bricks painted red and a shaded porch. They set their table with a cloth and the dishes and the cups—they kept them dashing off through the empty space.

  If she had worried about money all the time, she’ll have much more money.

  For instance, your wishes are fulfilled and the dream comes true.

  It is a great pleasure to be in a fascinating group.

  Satisfying, Exciting, Superb

  It may even be her real name. Lucky I called out to Swanhilda. I was in the bedroom concocting rocket fuel. I had a fold-down bed and it was in the fold-up position. It had like a long shelf and the bed was tucked in underneath and the shelf was fairly high and when it ignited it was just one bright white yel­low flare—the rocket fuel! I used the shelf of the bed for the laboratory. I went into the hallway where there was a full-length mirror. I looked at myself, at the little scraps of thrushbeard peeling off of my hands and my face.

  We should all attempt to send rockets into space. Maybe it would be a good idea to ask someone how to do it.

  There was a wooden shelf. There was a wooden shelf and there was a curtain over the bed, so that the curtain caught fire and the wood caught fire but I was able to put it out. I didn’t feel this was serious.

  I was the one who got blown up.

  I tried it a number of times and sent off a number of rockets. I tried to improve on the fuel mixture.

  I may have put too much magnesium in my mix.

  Well, the whole thing was like my mother used to say.

  So we attached fins at the bottom and made it heavier so it didn’t tumble.

  I say it too!—our mother used to tell us—“A burnt child smells bad.”

  But after that incident I gave up my career as a rocket builder. How far did it go in the air? I try to figure that out.

  Magnesium—it is not controlled, nor is sulphur and today you can buy it. Okay, and then I’m going to blow myself up.

  Affection

  She did so very slowly and needless to say she had to go get something in the dark room. She stepped into cold liquid. There was the crap in the dark and she hadn’t reached any stream! She cried!

  Like her father she had an ordinary way with walking, paying no attention to daylight or to artifi­cial light. Sometimes she would pass on her philoso­phies to her son. Her husband also encouraged her. His job was mainly looking for nests and getting into mischief and he made quite a name for himself. Their house sits beside a dried-up tree. All the gaiety and the color she finds in sex.

  Other Rash

  Peter pets her. He says, “I said I’ve been experiencing a little rash on my wrists and just under my eyebrows from exposure to epoxy resins which I have been working in to complete the sanitary project. I have to get some medicine to treat it.”

  She says, “Good luck.”

  You hear the snap—it really pulls the two halves together!

  There were dark red dots—they were small—and Peter said they were a nuisance all over the place on the second floor verandah. The tree had three or four branches. They were growing and he was thinking he should get rid of them. So, he showed her this—this which—he picked up one of them—well what do they look like? They look like little, little, li—very small olives, so he dug his nail into it and he peeled off a little of the meat, little more than a skin, that’s it, and the pit is big, is big, and the color is—he is tast­ing the meat and it was dry and sweet and a little bit leathery—an intense flavor of cherry—so Peter said they shouldn’t cut the tree.

  It’s a very nice tree. He said they were very lucky to have this very nice tree. He had no intention of using the fruit. This is a black cherry tree, so now, so what else do you want to know about Peter’s cherry tree? It grew out of a cluster.

  I bet you that tree was about sixty or eighty years old. The problem is it shades his whole backyard, but then after he tasted the cherries and they were good, maybe he reconsidered. His house doesn’t have a cellar and the first floor is really—the tree branches are all around you, really quite beautiful, if you need this vapor.

  VICKY SWANKY

  IS A BEAUTY

  (2012)

  Perfectly safe; go ahead.

  —diane williams

  My Defects

  I’m happy at least to do without a sexual relation and I have this fabulous reputation and how did I get that in the first place? I am proud enough of this reputation and it stands to reason there’s a lot that’s secret that I don’t tell anyone.

  I want to end this at the flabber, although I am flabbergasted.

  I opened the cupboard, where the treats are stored, and helped myself and made a big mess, by the lakeshore, of the food, of the rest of my life, eventually.

  Michelle, the doctor’s nurse, showed me a photograph of her cats. The smart cat opens the cupboard, Michelle says, where the treats are stored, and she can help herself, and she makes a big mess!

  I crossed the street to survey the lake and I heard crepita­tions—three little girls bouncing their ball. I
used to see them in perspective—my children—young people, one clearly un­suitable. She can’t help herself—she makes a big mess.

  With my insight and my skill—what do I search for at the shore?—the repose of the lake. But sadly, although it does have a dreamy look, it is so prone to covering familiar ground.

  If Told Correctly

  It Will Center on Me

  Jack Lam sat me on the bed. He didn’t sit me—first he had to park the car.

  Then Jack Lam sat briefly himself, put his chin down, frowned. I acted as if I was biting the top of his head—setting my teeth on, not into him—not to mention the fact that I was also swallowing darker areas.

  Over the next seven years that I kept this project close in mind, I came to understand that my devices belonged to a lost age.

  I took measures.

  Jack had lost his vigor. I was unwell.

  My luggage was packed. I’d be solitary when I arrived in Tarrytown. Stella Arpiarian still had The Curio Shop. Nikos had gone back to Greece.

  I like Jimmy here. I have to face Marlene.

  I heard the dog next door making a good imitation of what my asthma attacks sound like. Everyone is sounding like me!

  Don’t forget me!

  Pedestal

  He had chafing and I’m not having luck with anything I’m using. We had agreed to meet where they know me. The server put drinks down.

  “Hey!” he said. “I happen to have a chicken. Why don’t you come over?”

  I would say that to a friend, and it would be true!

  My anus is now irritated. My vagina’s very delicate. My stomach hurts.

  His sconces were shaded in a red tartan plaid and there were side-views of sailing boats in frames.

  I was getting to see the hair cracks in his skin that suggest stone or concrete as it hardens.

  Back out on Ninety-first Street, a man and a woman were walking their dog. The woman had turnip-colored hair. The man wore a felt hat and he motioned to me. They could have both been exhausted and penniless. No! As it turned out they were assembled there to talk me out of that. Let me think about this further. At a stand, I bought a few strands of daisies. Every bone in one of these blossoms is mended.

  Death Bed

  “Now, say good-bye to your mother,” Ruth Price says, “be­fore you die.”

  I’ve got that confident feeling.

  Then we hear the toilet bowl water.

  “Go away!” I said to Mother.

  Everybody in the original cast appears at my door—my father who was the President of the United States; Mother, who was also a President of the United States. I was a President of the United States. My two children are here who have been Presidents of the United States. My neighbor Gary Dossey who was in my high-school graduating class was a President of the United States.

  Glee

  We have a drink of coffee and a Danish and it has this, what we call—grandmother cough-up—a bright yellow filling. The project is to resurrect glee. This is the explicit reason I get on a bus and go to an area where I do this and have a black coffee.

  I emphasize, I confess, as well, that last night I came into a room, smiled a while and my laughter was like a hand on my own shoulder. As I opened up the volume of the television set, I saw a television beauty and a man wants to marry her and she says, “I don’t do that sort of thing.”

  While in their company, the woman changes her clothing and puts down an article of clothing and folds it. How fine­ly she shows us her efforts. Even as we have that behind us, the man speaks. His side-locks are worn next to his chin and his hair is marred by bright lights. The woman’s head is set against a dark-purple shield of drapery. But when something momentous occurs, I am glad to say there is a sense of crisis.

  And for Vera and me—we are no exception. I’ve lived for years. In Chicago our sunsets are red creases and purple bulges and we can amuse ourselves with them.

  My First Real Home

  In there, there was this man who developed a habit of sharpen­ing knives. You know he had a house and a yard, so he had a lawnmower and several axes and he had a hedge shears and, of course, he had kitchen knives and scissors, and he and his wife lived in comfort.

  Within a relatively short time he had spent half of his fortune on sharpening equipment and they were gracing his basement on every available table and bench and he added spe­cial stands for the equipment.

  He would end up with knives or shears that were so sharp they just had to come near something and it would cut itself.

  It’s the kind of sharpening that goes beyond comprehension. You just lean the knife against a piece of paper.

  Tommy used to use him. Ernie’d do his chain saws.

  So, I take my knives under my arm and I drive off to Ernie’s and he and I became friends and we’d talk about everything.

  “I don’t sharpen things right away. You leave it—and see that white box over there?” he’d said. That was his office. It was a little white box attached to the house with a lid you could open and inside there were a couple of ballpoint pens. There was a glass jar with change. There were tags with rub­ber bands and there was an order form that you filled out in case he wasn’t there.

  He wasn’t there the first time I came back, at least I didn’t see him.

  I went up to the box and those knives were transformed.

  As I was closing the lid, he came up through the basement door that was right there and we started to chat and he has to show me something in the garden, so he takes me to where he has his plantings. It’s as if the dirt was all sorted and arranged, and then, when I said he had cut his lawn so nice, he was shin­ing like a plug bayonet.

  All the little straws and grass were pointing in one direction.

  “I don’t mow like my neighbor,” he said.

  Oh, and then he also had a nice touch—for every packet he had completed there was a Band-Aid included. Just a man after my own heart. He died.

  I was sad because whenever I got there I was very happy.

  On the Job

  He looked like a man whose leader has failed him time after time, as he asked the seller awkward questions—not hostile. He was looking for a better belt buckle.

  The seller said, You ought to buy yourself something beautiful! Why not this?

  He paid for the buckle, which he felt was brighter and stron­ger than he was. His sense of sight and smell were diminishing.

  He could only crudely draw something on his life and just fill it in—say a horse.

  “Can I see that?” he said. “What is that?”

  It was a baby porringer.

  At the close of the day, the seller counted her money, went to the bank—the next step. She hates to push items she doesn’t approve of, especially in this small town, five days a week, where everything she says contains the mystery of health and salvation that preserves her customers from hurt or peril.

  That much was settled, as the customer entered his home, approached his wife, and considered his chances. Hadn’t his wife been daily smacked across the mouth with lipstick and cut above the eyes with mascara?

  She had an enormous bosom that anyone could feel leap­ing forward to afford pleasure. She was gabbing and her hus­band—the customer—was like a whole horse who’d fallen out of its stall—a horse that could not ever get out of its neck-high stall on its own, but then his front legs—their whole length—went over the top edge of the gate, and the customer made a suitable adjustment to get his equilibrium well outside of the stall.

  “It’s so cute,” he said to his wife, “when you saw me, how excited you got.”

  His wife liked him so much and she had a sweet face and the customer thought he was being perfectly insincere.

  He went on talking—it was a mixed type of thing—he was lonely and he was trying
to get his sheer delight out of the way.

  The Use of Fetishes

  “I was a lucky person. I was a very successful person,” said the woman. She was not entirely busy with her work. She took cups and tumblers from her cupboard to prepare a coffee or a tea. She thought, We have some smaller or even smaller.

  Her Uncle Bill said, “Have you been able to have sexual intercourse?”

  She said, “Yes! And I had a climax too!”

  This idea is compact and stained and strained to the limit.

  Woman in Rose Dress

  Her sex worries will be discussed when people worry what happened to her at the end of her life when her chin droops and when her eyes are hooded. Not yet.

  Her fervor and her youth irritate her for they provide a sort of permanent entry into a shop. She lifts a bouquet of broccoli rabe. Oh, how awful it is!

  “I don’t know how to cook these. Do you cook the leaves?”

  The man says, “You chop off the ends and chop them up—look!”

  She’s got some pent-up gem on her finger. (Those colored stones, they’re all cooked, you know.)

  Didn’t she used to appreciate its rays of light? And she used to appreciate the man.

  Ask yourself sincerely at odd moments, “Am I prone to deep feeling?” for it is less than necessary—that very small, bright, enlarging thing. The passions do not knock one out, but they may permit you to have carnal complaints before proceeding further. Let’s visit another woman—Deirdre—and then Donna. What’s more—Doris grew up exhausted by shock and word of mouth. She hadn’t been married long, it was a spring day, and she was uninterested still in her own love story.