by Joy Williams
“What do you think?” he addressed them hoarsely. “Is it well done? It’s not true, I know you know that, but is it well done?”
Pearl applauded. The children hooted and clapped. Clouds moved fast across the sky and Peter seemed backlit, blunt around the edges in the waning afternoon. On the horizon was a boat, no bigger than a child’s thumb. The first drops of rain fell with another roll of thunder.
“We must get back to the house,” Pearl exclaimed. “It’s dangerous being here.”
“I love electrical storms,” Trip said. “Do you know that a dead tree struck by lightning can come back to life?”
“Yes,” said Pearl.
“Do you believe that?” Trip asked, amazed.
“Please,” Pearl said, “everybody now, run up to the house.”
They scattered joyfully and ran. Pearl careened after them. By the time she reached the porch, she was soaked. She stood panting for a moment. This house was her home. It seemed improbable even after all these years. But it was the only one she had unless she could consider her body her home, a disheartening thought— this shabby tower of bones and water in which she more or less permanently resided, a lonely place and yet one always occupied to say nothing of visited continuously, shared with guests and occupied by travelers, full of tumult and disturbance and greed and sharing. Some visitors lingering only briefly, others staying a long, long time; one guest being fantastic, another quite dull. Prudes and incontinents, mommies and murderers, philosophers and mice. The body the home. One could entertain almost any notion there. Poor dump.
She ducked inside. There wasn’t a child to be seen. Shivering, she stepped into the kitchen. Miriam was there dribbling little vials of food coloring into bowls of frosting. She was crying. She always cried when she made cakes for the children’s birthdays.
“The cakes look delicious,” Pearl said.
There were five cakes cooling on racks. Pearl went over to dry herself by the oven. Miriam sighed and mopped at her face with the back of her hand.
“Johnny would have been thirteen this year,” she said. “I wouldn’t recognize him.”
Pearl looked at the clock over Miriam’s head. REGULATOR it said on the glass coffining the pendulum.
Miriam sat on a stool and slathered frosting on a cake.
“He used to wait for me to finish with my baking so I could read a story to him. He loved stories. I had an old book with big black and white pictures. The Good Luck Story Book it was called. And sometimes I would just make things up while I combed his hair. He had very fine, curly hair, always tangled, and I would comb it out while he sat on my lap. I would speak about each curl that I untangled as though it were the home of some living thing. I called my Johnny’s head a ‘curiosity shop.’
“‘Here now,’ I would say. ‘Here now, here’s a little bird’s nest. But where are the birds? Have they flown away? And, oh, hear that pig squeal! That couldn’t be you! And here, look at this wrapped up so carefully, I’ll have to pull hard. Oh what a roar! There must be a lion in there . . .’”
“I know it’s terrible, Miriam, but please, Franny and Ashbel . . .” Pearl stared at the stain on the butcher block. The children had spilled dye that spring when they had been coloring Easter eggs.
“The darkness has him now,” Miriam said, “and the darkness is not going to give him back. Now that man from New Zealand who had sent the bit of rabbit fur from his little girl’s muff, now think of him. His little girl had died from fever when she was five and he and his wife thought they’d never get over it but within the year they had another baby daughter who now is five and although she doesn’t in the least resemble the lost girl, she can remember everything about her, everything, favorite toys and places and food. I think that’s wonderful . . . imagine the comfort she can provide . . .”
Pearl looked at the clock. The hands hadn’t moved. Time for a drink, she thought. Musn’t miss my appointments. It must be awful, she thought, to have a child who could remember the day it died.
On the wall was a long and silly donkey she had drawn for the children’s birthday. The donkey’s buttocks were crucified with long needles to which scraps of paper had been glued. And there, beneath it, orderly, arranged, were rolls of bright crepe streamers, a dozen packages of balloons, an assortment of cheap and lively favors. Motion books, buzzer rings, snapping gum packs, make-up kits, vari-vues.
She moved one of the vari-vues slowly between her fingers. A bride and groom kissing. Again and again. Another showed a child jumping rope. Over and over the feet skipped, the head flew back, the rope completed its arc.
Franny liked to jump rope. Pearl had heard her sing:
“Fudge-Fudge call the Judge
Mama has a newborn baby
It’s not a girl
It’s not a boy
It’s just a newborn baby.”
“I know,” Miriam said, “I must stop this. People depend upon me, don’t they? Living people. And I depend upon them, upon the constancy of strangers, sorrows, the same sorrows, undergone over and over for nothing . . .” She squeezed her lips together.
Pearl came toward her. “Poor Miriam, can I help?”
“Oh no,” she said gently, surprised. Her gaze settled on Pearl as if for the first time. “You’re shivering,” she said. “You should get dry.”
“All right,” Pearl said.
“You’re worse than the children,” Miriam sighed. “Look how you’ve puddled my kitchen.”
Pearl went into the library, where the bar was. The oriental rug in front of the cabinet of bottles was worn in strips.
“I’m not the only one who’s ever had a drink in this house,” Pearl muttered as she poured gin into a glass.
Thomas’s voice startled her.
“Ahh, Pearl,” he said, “your looks are positively medieval today. You have the disease of that time, languor and emaciation.”
Pearl looked at Thomas’s handsome, imperturbable face. She looked at the Atlantic that was on the coffee table.
Pearl, look! a child screamed in her head, I can eat with my feet!
The rain covered the glass with artificial night like a dark archangel and then lifted and was gone. The wan light of the interrupted day fell into the room.
Pearl ignored Thomas. Instead, she looked downward. Beside the bar was a wastebasket made from a rhinoceros’s foot. It held a crushed can of grapette. The rhinoceros must have been a beautiful specimen once, although it certainly had been secured only by altering its appearance considerably. It made Pearl sad.
She walked out of the library and began her careful ascent of the stairs, careful not to falter or spill. On the wall was an alphabet made from misshapen twigs glued to a piece of plasterboard. An idea Trip had struck upon at the age of three. And there was the tile rubbing that Sweet had done. Something definitely carnal was going on there.
By the time she had reached the first landing, her gin was almost gone. She couldn’t remember sipping it, but she couldn’t recall feeling it slide down her leg either.
On the second landing, Pearl oriented herself by the bookcase there upon which old photographs were jumbled with rare first editions. Pictures of the island the century before. The family through the generations. Ladies and gentlemen always, in launches and on lawns. Children grinning happily over one thing or another. A barbecue behind the stone house. People looking into a pit over which some charred animal turned. A tree limb upon which ten people sat. And views, many views. And of course in the center of it all, the founding father, Aaron, and the foundered ma.
Before her children had been born, Emma cradled heaps of rabbit skins and sang to them.
Pearl never went by without glancing at Emma’s picture. She fancied that she resembled her in some mocking way. Nothing literal, but something, an image in the bones. Perhaps it was just her thinness. The shadows beneath her eyes.
Isn’t that the way with most of us, Pearl thought . . . going to all that trouble, living and dying for all tho
se years we’re in the process of it, only to be remembered in the end by those who never knew us, by a single photograph which might not have been accurate at all . . .
One of the children had left a partially eaten cracker on the top shelf. It had a banana or something spread on it. Pearl picked it up and put it in her mouth. Pearl liked eating the odds and ends of the children’s leftovers. She would pick up half-gnawed apples, tip the warm drops of cereal milk into her mouth, chew the gristle of the bones they left behind. She liked seeing them eat, the way they ate with open, happy mouths.
Pearl climbed the last few steps and walked down the corridor to her room. On her dresser was a bottle of gin and a bottle of quinine. She poured some gin into her glass. She looked at the bottles and sighed.
She turned toward the bathroom and saw a beetle making its tortured way across the floor. It was a thing the size of her thumb with a dull, gleaming skeleton and peculiar open jaws. The wings were transparent. The eyes were on stalks protruding from the head.
There would be something for Ashbel’s collection, Pearl thought fleetingly. It lurched beneath her foot. She heard the crack of its carapace.
It looked clean and swept around this house but it was not clean and swept. There were nasty, irrational things here. Lower life forms that wore away good intentions and a zest for happiness.
She went into the bathroom on tiptoe and wiped the insect off her sole. She ran water for a bath, took off her bikini and sat naked on the toilet seat, sipping her gin and watching the tub fill. She hummed a little.
She lowered herself into the tub. She shivered and burrowed down up to her neck. She took another sip of gin and then put the glass on the toilet, whose functions were concealed discreetly. A wicker chair with a hinged seat had been placed over the bowl. Someone’s concept of the seemly. At the back of the bowl there was a stain on the porcelain. It resembled an angel to Pearl in her giddier moments. Or at least that part of an angel which had wings, and what more was there to an angel really? A minor bidet God. A girl angel or a boy angel down there. Difficult to tell. Like snakes. There’s a mystery. How do snakes do it?
Pearl soaped her skinny face. She felt a little better. She closed her eyes. Tomorrow was the children’s birthday. She should go into town and get each of them something. Certainly she should get Sam something, her own child, after all.
She felt a wave of nausea and tipped her head back. The water lapped against her ears.
Seven years old. Thomas said that at seven one possesses the emotions that one will be guided by forever. Thomas said that at seven you stopped being a child and got the face by which you would be known or not known. When Pearl had been seven, she’d laid on the sand at her parents’ summer place and let the waves push her softly around. Actually what she’d been doing was pretending that she was the victim of a shipwreck, quite dead. Or nearly so. When she wasn’t doing that, she was bouncing on the bed in her room, stripped to her Lollipops and sparring with herself. She had never known what she was. She hadn’t the slightest clue, particularly at seven.
The water grew cold. Pearl got out. She began dressing before she realized she hadn’t dried herself. She hesitated, regarding the bed, the bottles, the window beyond which the sea stretched, glittering and gray, then finished dressing and pulled on her shoes. Looking at herself in the mirror, she realized she wasn’t dressed so much for dinner as for a walk. Perhaps she wouldn’t eat dinner tonight. Alcohol was food. What did it matter? She would eat cake tomorrow. She hated sitting down to dinner. Hated the Géricault painting above the sideboard. Twenty horses’ asses above them every night as they ate.
Pearl made her way back down to the core of the house. She heard Thomas’s voice.
“. . . more advanced than Soleri. He’s very involved in temperature control, creating ecologies which function independent of outside energy sources. I’d like to experiment with something like that here . . . I . . . ”
Pearl rolled her eyes.
The colors of the island were drained with the approach of dusk and the sea looked fat and high from the rain. It always amazed Pearl that the island was here at all. It seemed the merest accident. If the ocean were a few feet higher, and there didn’t seem to be any reason it shouldn’t be, most of the land would vanish. And yet the island was complete. It had rivers and ponds, deep, dead woods where the trees had been killed by vines and green sunny woods of oak and hickory. It had fruit orchards and oyster beds and fifty-foot dunes. Pearl had never explored it much really. The children told her about these things.
She took a path behind the house that curved to the beach, passing through the broken gates and the tumbled-down pens that hadn’t been used since Aaron’s day. She often wondered why the children didn’t have pets here. They could have had ponies and goats and calves . . . But they didn’t seem interested. In all the years that Pearl had been here not a single child had had as much as a kitten or a puppy.
She walked through the scrub woods, her knees buckling slightly. She almost fell. She stopped, then sat down. She was sitting there quietly, rather stupidly, she supposed, when she saw a raven drop from the branches of a tree and waddle self-importantly toward her. Perhaps it was the same raven she had seen drinking from the swimming pool. It moved toward her rapidly, its black eye dedicated to her. It pecked her leg.
Pearl waved her arms at it. It drew itself back up into the trees. It seemed genuinely amazed that Pearl was still alive.
Pearl scrambled to her feet. What a calamity her life was! She hurried along the path, her eyes fixed on her shoes moving forward. She could not remember why she had wanted to take this walk. Just simple desire for communion with the essential ultimate, she supposed.
She emerged from the woods down an incline that led through a muted tangle of bayberry and broom sedge and ruined roses. She walked in a valley behind the dunes, smiling to herself as she lurched along, her shoes filling up with sand. The champagne-colored sky met the sea serenely before her, but off to the north she could see rain falling in a ribbon of gray. Small white suns sailed before her eyes, the gin, she supposed, although it could be falling stars. August was the time for them. Perhaps her brain had become so sensitive to all those neurons exploding that she could now witness stars in the daytime, although it was hardly the day now, more the dusk, the benighted hour. And there was a star, burning itself up, drifting and gone even before it made its presence manifest to human eyes. No longer supported by whatever cared to keep it in place. Like the plane seven years ago had fallen from the sky . . .
She could hear the children calling out from their beds in other nights:
“. . . Cassiopeia’s Chair. And that’s Aquila the Eagle and Vulpecula the Fox . . .
. . . and Lacerta the Lizard . . .
. . . and Equuleus the Colt . . . ”
Out of the ribbon of gray rain falling, Pearl saw a figure running, a horse pounding up the beach. Rather it looked like a horse, although she knew it was Joe, white trousers flapping, white hair streaming, the double being of horse and rider.
Imagine him mounted, thought Pearl, imagining, a little ashamed of herself. But it was a fact any woman would tell you. There was something about a mounted man. Something about a mounted man that made a woman feel that nothing else would do.
Pearl took a few more steps and then sat down, legs crossed, head just cresting a shallow dune. She watched Joe run. He was still far away. His feet running made the water foam. Horse and water. Such a pretty thing to see. Horses were so stupendous in the mind. Once the children had nailed a horseshoe above the door to her room. It hadn’t brought her much luck as far as she could see, but it wasn’t supposed to be for luck, the children said, it was for keeping the nightmares away, although it hadn’t worked in that regard either. Perhaps it had been put up upside down. Pearl hadn’t noticed it for some time now. It probably wasn’t there anymore.
She put her chin in her hands and listened to the strokes of the waves, the stirring of pebbles on the sh
ore as the water was sucked in and out.
She heard a peculiar sound, a scuffling, a hissing.
“How’s the fit, my dear?” a man’s voice said. A woman giggled.
Pearl held her breath. Sometimes picnickers came over by boat from Morgansport. They anchored off the bay side and then came over to the ocean beach. They always made a mess. The children discouraged them the best they could.
The man’s voice muttered, “Get back here with that bottom, goddamn it. Put it right up here.”
“You gonna put your frightful hog in my little ass,” the woman said, still giggling.
Pearl inched across the sand until she could see the pair, between two dunes and just slightly below her.
There was a small radio playing on a blanket. The man was short with curly red hair. His freckled complexion gave him a strained, intemperate look. His penis was like a rod, mushroom-gleaming. The woman was wearing only the top of her bikini. She was standing, facing the man, a little unsteady on her feet, smoking and laughing.
“C’mon, sugar,” the man wheedled.
“I’ve got a mind of my own, you know,” she said. “You just wait a minute.”
“Oh, sugar, your mind’s in your box, and that’s just where it should be. You shouldn’t worry about that one bit.” In a swift movement, he turned the woman around, pressed his arms across her back and pushed himself in between her haunches. She hissed slightly. A sound like water on a skillet. The man’s hand caressed her belly. He seemed to be staring sightlessly at Pearl, pushing into the woman all the while like a bull nudging against a crib. They rocked together as one. The man’s lips curled back over his clenched teeth.
Pearl was terribly shocked. What if one of the children had come across this, these awful people doing this? One of the poor little children, searching the beach for shells, for baby cradles and turkey feet . . .
“Jesus Christ,” she heard the man cry, “what in fuck’s sake is that!”
She saw Joe, rearing, falling down upon them, legs raised, powerful chest sparkling with shell. He struck the man heavily with an unshod foot. The woman squealed and went down beneath him as he rolled. Joe’s place had been taken by this whinnying, blasphemous thing, all hoofs and teeth in the instant it took before the eye could see it was a boy again, laughing and cursing them.
