by Joy Williams
“This is how some people prepare for nuclear attack,” Willie said, staring in at the treasury of white two-ply.
The Umbertons could be imagined as tall. The sinks and counters were set several inches higher than usual. Perhaps they had even become giants since their wedding day. The beds were oversized, the coffee mugs. Everything was heavy duty.
The Umbertons could be imagined as loving games. In one of the rooms was a pool table and a pinball machine. On the walls of this room hung a series of coconut shell heads, loonily embellished. An entire community of coconuts, masculine and feminine, mean and happy, hanging on the wall, contemplating the Umbertons’ life of leisure. In the kitchen it was clear that the Umbertons loved their Cuisinart, for which they had many attachments, and their orange cat, who had a box full of toys. Clem looked the box over. He selected a rubber pig, which squealed, and went off with it.
The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.
“How about cutting my hair?” Willie asked Liberty. “Just a trim.”
She knew his intention and shook her head. He would gather the hair up and put it in the middle of the rug when they left, or on the table, in the center of something. Nothing would be missing, nothing out of place, but addressing the Umbertons when they returned, would be a mass of hair.
“You can’t read my mind,” Willie said. “I just wanted my hair cut.”
“It doesn’t need it,” Liberty said. “It’s fine the way it is, it looks good, I like it.”
“I could write your diary,” Willie said.
“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Liberty said. Then she said, “That’s not true.” Finally she said, “I wouldn’t keep a diary.”
Beyond the windows the bay winked greenly. It was sick, filling up with silt. Each day there was less oxygen in the water than the day before. It labored against the cement wall the Umbertons had erected between them and it.
Liberty went into a sewing room off the kitchen. There were patterns and folds of fabric, a sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy. The room was snug and painted a placid peach. A calendar on the wall showed tittering bunnies and kittens playing musical chairs in a wholesome meadow. The room was obviously Mrs. Umberton’s tender retreat from the large life she shared with Mr. Umberton. Liberty sat on a hassock covered with a cheerful chintz and felt the top slip slightly. Removing the lid, she found inside a well-thumbed paperback with a torn cover. He plunged his head between her spread thighs, Liberty read. Lunging and licking, he thrust his tongue in her sea-smelling channels and velvet whorls tasting the wine which is fermented by desire. He drew back and she whined in pleasure as she saw his glistening shaft …
Liberty threw the book back into the hassock and went into the living room. Willie was holding his hands above a spray of plastic flowers in a bud vase as though he were warming them there.
“What are we looking for here,” Liberty asked, “just in general?”
“You know, when anesthesia was first invented, many doctors didn’t want to use it,” Willie said. “They felt it would rob God of the earnest cries for help that arose from those in time of trouble.”
“Anesthesia,” Liberty said. “You can’t rob God.”
“I keep having this dream,” Willie said. “It’s a typical prison dream. I’m wandering around, doing what I please, choosing this, ignoring that. And then I realize I’m locked up.”
Liberty looked at Willie, who was turning and folding his hands. Her own hands were trembling, and her mind darted, this way and that. Once, on a sunny day, much like this day, she had been driving down the road in their truck and she had seen a male cardinal that had just been struck by a car. It lay rumpled, on the road’s shoulder, and the female rose and dipped in confusion and fright about it, urging it to continue, to go on with her. Liberty’s mind moved like that, like that wretched, bewildered bird.
During the night, it rained. The rain came down in warm, rattling sheets. It pounded the beach sand smooth, it dimpled the bay, it clattered the brown fronds of palms where rats lived. It entered the lagoons and aquifers and passed through the Umbertons’ screens. Willie was playing pinball. Liberty could hear the flap of the paddles and the merry bells. She lay on her stomach on a rug in another room, glancing through the only other reading material in the house, a newspaper, several weeks old.
The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Truth was not a guarantee made to the paper’s readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror—the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.
A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen in love with the wrong babies and now they didn’t want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.
Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children’s voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.
Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way—West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing—time for the thing, they’d say, let’s do the thing—became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.
The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children’s voices.
Liberty and Willie had not been in this town long, six months, she knew two children well, Teddy and Little Dot. In a way they were her children in this town.
Tee, Little Dot called Liberty. There was always a scrape on her cheek or a cut on her arm, for she hurt herself often and was unaware of it. Her eyes were deeply set and dark. “Tee,” Little Dot called, something glittering on her wrist, something shining that she loved, something cheap, bright and useless that Liberty had bought her from a gum machine. Little Dot had
been brain-damaged from birth, for her parents had been heavy dopers, now reformed. Her mother, Rosie, had been junking up so long she hardly knew she was pregnant, and when she finally acknowledged that she was, she was twenty-three weeks along. The doctor said they probably had just enough time to slip in the saline, and that it was just as well since Rosie was so toxic that the baby would probably be a very unhealthy one. As Rosie lay on the table and the doctor was preparing to do the abortion, Little Dot slipped out. She just pushed her own way out, bawling, a little bigger than a lady’s hand. “She’s a keeper,” the doctor said. “Can’t do anything about this one now.” And no one could. Little Dot lived in world of her own, in mindscapes no one could know.
It had been Liberty’s first night in town and she had been walking with Clem on the beach when she first met Little Dot. The child was all alone, a broken rope around her waist.
“I like to pee on the sand and look at the stars,” Little Dot said.
“Well, we all like to do that,” Liberty said.
She wore a dog tag with her name and address stamped on it, and Liberty took her home. It was just across the beach in a rundown shopping center where her parents, Roger and Rosie had a pottery shop called Oh! They lived in their shop and in a van that was parked out front. Behind the shop was a kiln and a tepee, where Little Dot slept.
“Oh,” Rosie said, “you must think we’re awful tying a little kid up, but it’s a long rope and you can feel how light it is and if we don’t, at night she just goes over to that beach. My baby’s just mesmerized by that beach, aren’t you baby? You’re my little turtle, aren’t you? Rosie’s little turtle. You just love those bright lights.”
Rosie’s eyes filled with tears but then she drew them back somehow, they didn’t fall.
Liberty sees Little Dot all the time now. She takes her to the supermarket and to water-ski shows and roller-rinks. She buys her crayons and Big Gulps. But Little Dot hurts herself more and more. She goes for days without speaking. Little Dot is her own small keeper, and she is alone with an aloneness so heavy that her self can hardly bear its weight. Liberty is not like a mother to her, Liberty knows that. She may even be adding to the terrible weight. Sometimes Liberty thinks that each moment she spends with Little Dot is like a stone she gives the child, a small stone added to other stones.
It is Teddy to whom Liberty seems like a mother. “You could be my mother,” Teddy often says to Liberty. They both have brown eyes and are allergic to tomatoes. Liberty could easily be his mother, Teddy reasons, because he needs one and they like each other. His own mother is in California where she is in love with another woman, and Teddy lives with his father, Duane, his father’s four restored Mustangs and his father’s latest girlfriend, Janiella. They live in a modest cement-block house with an extensive attached garage on the same street along the same narrow river where Willie and Liberty live. Liberty first saw Teddy high in the banyan tree in their yard the day after they had moved into the house. She had wanted to rent the place because of the banyan tree, a tree of such magnificence that it had extinguished all vegetative life in its vicinity. The banyan was awesome with its many cement gray trunks and its pink pendent aerial roots. It was so beautiful it looked as though it belonged in heaven or hell, but certainly not on this earth in a seedy, failed subdivision in the state of Florida.
Teddy had played in the tree for years.
“There are twenty-eight places to sit or lie on in that tree,” Teddy told Liberty. He was too old now to play in the tree, he said, but he used it as a place to think. He would crawl around and think, or sit and think. Teddy is seven. Liberty sees him mostly at night, almost nightly, for Duane and Janiella like to go out. They like to get drunk, dance, and drive around.
“Put this pony to bed at nine,” Duane would say, instructing Liberty in Teddy’s care, slapping his little boy on the back with such enthusiasm that the child would spin sideways.
“Don’t let Little Dot play with that bowl and spoon too long,” Rosie would say, “it gets her too excited.”
Teddy and Little Dot, they are Liberty’s children in this town, for this moment. But she and Willie will be moving on soon, and there will be another town, although she cannot visualize it. Another place has no shape for her, it is still nothing to her.
The rain fell, swelling the Umbertons’ yard. A tree limb toppled with a crack.
Liberty opened her eyes. A single light glowed dimly in the room that was papered with silver flowers. Clem had become bored with the pink pig. He dropped it back in the box and selected a squeaking carrot. Liberty could hear the jingling and clashing of the pinball machine. She went to the doorway and watched Willie playing. He stood with his arms clasped over his head while the ball, sent forth but undirected, continued to rocket off bumpers, to plunge down channels that would not have it, its ultimate fall checked again and again.
“This thing is rigged for an awful lot of free games,” Willie said.
“I want to get back tomorrow.” She pushed her hip against the machine and it stopped.
“Don’t you like it here?” Willie asked.
“Here? In the home of the tricky, comfy, rank-hearted Umbertons? Of course not.”
“You have no feeling for reality,” Willie said. “I’ve suspected it for some time. You have a real contempt for it.”
“This is someone else’s reality.”
“I’ll find the place,” Willie said. “You’ll see.”
She reached toward him and ran her fingers through his hair. She wanted to kiss his cheekbones, hold him tightly, feel him once more. She feared that they both had a longing for discovery, capture. And the longing to turn oneself in was, she knew, a fascination with the buzz saw, the stove’s red electric coil, the divider strip, the fierce oncoming light.
Willie pulled her hands away and held them in his. He rubbed them as though they were cold. They were not cold. In another room, a bed loomed white and vaporous in the darkness.
“Lie down with me,” Liberty said. “Let’s comfort one another.”
“Comfort takes twenty minutes for old hands like us,” Willie said. “I’m talking averages. Growing excitement, passion, fulfillment, despair. Twenty minutes.”
“I didn’t mean that,” Liberty said.
“Not that? What comfort then?”
“I meant that actually,” Liberty said.
“I’ve always loved you,” Willie said.
Something in the Umbertons’ house ticked, as though expanding.
At daybreak, it was still raining. Rosy-fingered dawn bloomed elsewhere, in higher, purer altitudes perhaps, where the heart beats more slowly. Liberty was dreaming the things she dreamed in stolen houses—churches and flowers and suitcases, bowls and water and caves. She stirred, and felt that Willie was standing over her, staring at her. And that was part of the dream, she thought, for Willie to be studying her so solemnly, as though he were choosing something. She was a woman in a house, sleeping. She looked at Willie, safe in her sleep-looking. She looked at him and saw herself, the form he would have her assume, a woman in a house, sleeping.
Later, she opened her eyes and saw Clem’s muzzle aimed at her, several inches away, his tail wagging slowly. She knew Willie had gone. When he hadn’t returned in an hour, she and Clem left too.
The Florida sky, the color of tin, squeezed out rain. It fell on stone and seed alike. Across the street from the Umbertons, a neighbor’s lawn consisted of large white stones dumped on black vinyl. The rain fell on that. It fell on a sheriff’s car that drove slowly past. The deputy was opening a Twinkie wrapper with his teeth. He grinned at Liberty as though she shared with him the criminal goodness of Twinkies. The car went around a corner and the street was empty. Heat rose like smoke from the damp pavement.
Clem chose a hydrant painted yellow, a garbage can and a clump of ginger lilies and made them his own. Walking out of Featherbed Lane (JUNGLE LOTS YOUR PIECE OF FANTASY WITH CENTRAL SEWER AND WATER) they entered an area bristling with g
arden apartments. There were gun shops and establishments that dealt exclusively in sandwiches. There were auto body repair shops offering reasonable rates where gypsies who had roamed the streets denting cars with baseball bats the night before hammered out the dents today. There was an open air laundromat where surfers were gloomily drying their blue jeans. They sat in plastic chairs and stared at the heaving washers, all vacationers in this expensive resort that is life.
“Oh-oh,” a surfer said, “I didn’t mean to put that shirt in there.” A screaming red pressed against the soapy glass and was pulled back.
Liberty and Clem continued walking, over to the Trail to hitch a ride home. The Trail had once been a meandering Indian footpath over coral and limestone rock, but it was now a murderous six-lane highway that gobbled up small animals for breakfast, dreamy old geezers in walkers for lunch, and doped-up young honors students in their developer-dads’ Jeeps for dinner.
Liberty stuck out her thumb. Cars poured toward them and past. Then, a pickup truck pulled over sharply. It was Duane, Teddy’s father.
“Hey, Liberty,” he called. “Why you hitching? Old man kick you out?” He grinned. Liberty attempted to match his grin with one of her own. Her jaws began to ache. With a grin like that, Duane must drool some, Liberty thought. He was short and compact, with thick, graceful eyebrows, a ruddy, healthy, milk-and-spoonbread look. He was a genius with engine blocks. Other aspects of life puzzled him and frequently pissed him off.
