by Joy Williams
“Now has the feeling of certainty about it,” Willie said. “Yet now is not the present moment. Now is incommensurable with the present moment.”
“Incommensurable,” Teddy said. “Is that a word? I learned ‘perspiration’ yesterday. I always used to say ‘sweat.’ ”
“The deal is,” Willie said, “that things change every moment, making everything happen either later or sooner. Let’s order food over the phone.”
“I’ve never ordered food over the phone!” Teddy said.
They ordered raspberries, burritos, black-and-white sodas. On television, everything concerned mayhem or thwarted love. Liberty checked the children’s Halloween bags to make sure there were no razor blades, tacks, pills, or hallucinogenic tattoos.
“Gorden gave me an envelope,” Little Dot said. “I’m the only who got an envelope.”
Inside the envelope was a fifty-dollar bill. The bill was crisp and thin without a bit of history to it.
“You can buy something you’d like with this,” Liberty said. “Lots of things.”
Little Dot didn’t see the connection. She held the bill in her fingers, then folded it into a square. She dropped it on the carpet, hid it with her foot, disclosed it again. She kissed it. She kissed Teddy, then Willie, then Clem, all gravely.
Liberty put the bill back into the envelope. “Don’t lose this,” she said. “This is yours, you hold onto it.”
“This is very relaxing here,” Teddy said. “When I think of all the things I have to do tomorrow!” He slapped his forehead dramatically with his hand. “But I’m not going to think.”
Little Dot took hotel stationery from a drawer and drew their picture. Each picture was a line as straight as she could make it. Liberty thought of circles, degrees, levels, dimensions, perspectives, all harassing things. The line soothed her, though she was quite aware that life was not a line.
“We should leave in about an hour,” Willie said. He doodled on another piece of paper. He made the doodle of the butterfly jumping rope and the doodle of the ship arriving too late to save the drowning witch. He drew the doodle of four elephants inspecting a grapefruit.
Little Dot told them her dream. It was always the same dream she told. She had a favorite bowl, no bowl that her parents had made but a little chipped china bowl, at the bottom of which was a rabbit in a garden. The rabbit wore a little dress. When Little Dot finished the soup or cereal in the bowl, she would find the little rabbit with its little dress and shoes. Little Dot loved the bowl. She thought it beautiful, its cracks and lines, the rabbit’s musing face worn pale by the scraping spoon. Each night she dreams she breaks it, it mends itself and becomes more beautiful still …
“Sometimes I don’t think I can find my way back from these places,” Liberty said to Willie.
“Isn’t that the point?” he said.
They were just a family traveling, on their way somewhere, but for the moment, at rest. It was just a moment without the future or the past. It was the moments that took practice.
“We lie too much,” Liberty said.
They were standing by the window, eleven stories up.
“Someone’s having a little trouble out there in the bay,” Willie said. There were two helicopters. Floodlights on a slight chop.
“Well, you’re too far away to do anything about it,” Liberty said.
“That’s got the real look of yesterday to it for somebody,” he said.
When they returned to the pottery shop, Rosie was standing in the doorway watching Roger sweep the floor. Roger’s shadow drifted thinly across the rear wall of the shop, past all the shelves that held the obscure work of their hands.
“I just love watching Roger sweep,” Rosie said. “Because you know when he sweeps he’s the sweeper and the sweeping and the broom and what the broom gathers up. All at the same time!”
Ribbons of dust unfurled in the air.
“Gee, I’m really grateful to you for taking Little Dot trick or treating,” Rosie said to Liberty. “How many hours have you watched Little Dot? Why, I bet you’ve watched Little Dot hundreds of hours!” She lowered her voice in dismay. “How much do we owe you?”
“Nothing,” Liberty said. “It’s …”
“Oh that’s great,” Rosie exclaimed. “I’m really grateful to you. Little Dot gets wary around me, you know. Just a little kid and so wary …”
Roger had been advancing toward them, steadily sweeping. Now he stopped. His broom nature receded.
“See those little boxes on that shelf?” Roger asked. “They’re modeled after the boxes the Peruvian Indians use to save their teeth and hair and nail clippings in. They put them all in one place so everything can be brought together conveniently later, after they die, so they can begin their new life.”
“Can you imagine if you came across one of those little boxes by accident,” Rosie said. “Yechhh.”
“Peru!” Teddy said. “Did you go to Peru? Did you see the ground markings of Nazca?”
“Yeah,” Roger said, startled.
“They’re lines on the desert,” Teddy said, thrilled with explanation. “When you see them up close, they don’t look like anything, just a lot of white furrows in the brown ground, but when you get up real high you see that they’re big figures, mostly birds. The Indians made them. Archaeologists think that the Indians were trying to signal to something up in the sky.”
“Nazca makes me sad,” Rosie said sadly. “Those poor people waiting for someone to come to them for all those years and nothing ever came.”
“We’re all waiting for something,” Willie said.
“Yeah, isn’t that strange,” Rosie said.
“I know a lot about Nazca,” Teddy said. “I took a course last month in gods.”
“Gee,” Rosie said. “A course in gods. I’d love to take that course.”
“The woman who gave it left town,” Teddy said.
“We’re going to leave town for a few days too,” Roger said. “The cockatoos in the kiln haven’t laid yet. Rosie thinks we’re making them nervous.”
“A few days?” Liberty stroked Little Dot’s hair which was sticky and fine. She should have brushed it out in the hotel. The pink barrette she had bought looked forlorn clamped above the child’s ear. She should have done something. What should she have done?
“Maybe a few weeks,” Roger was saying softly. “Maybe even longer.”
“We’re going to look for a place for Little Dot,” Rosie whispered. “We’ve heard there are these places. They know what they’re doing there. They can handle it.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Willie asked.
“We’re not ‘they,’ ” Rosie said.
“I can handle it,” Liberty said. “I’ll watch her.”
“You’re not ‘they,’ Liberty. None of us are ‘they.’ ”
Liberty knelt down quickly and embraced Little Dot. “Goodbye, honey,” she said. Little Dot opened her mouth, which smelled of chocolate. Her thumb moved about blindly, then found her mouth. She was the thumb and the little girl sucking the thumb too.
“Don’t do that, baby,” Rosie said.
Good-bye, good-bye, everyone said.
Little Dot did not hold onto the fifty-dollar bill. She gave it to Rosie who donated it to a large charitable organization. The large charitable organization funneled it into a drug rehabilitation clinic. It was taken from the clinic’s account to purchase a toaster oven for the office staff. The owner of the appliance store where the toaster oven was purchased blew it at the track one muggy matinee on a dog named Bat Mister. The bill then commenced a round of payment for lingerie, biopsy results and brake linings. It suffered a life that the most lurid of imaginations could not conjure. It penetrated deep into the repulsive nature of banality. It traveled and was suckered more than once. It knew bright lights and dark pockets. It knew admissions to pornographic films. It bought ten pairs of Mexican boxing shoes, a cheap cashmere sweater and a down payment for a trip never realized. It went off like a
n orphan, wailing. The flashly coincidences it disclosed were made routine by repetition. It never looked life straight in the eye. Not once. And it never returned.
4
The next morning, the phone rang before daybreak. Clem woke with a grunt. Liberty stumbled naked into the kitchen.
“Hello, Mother,” she said.
“I have been trying to reach you for a week, Liberty. Where on earth have you been? I want to explain some of the incidents in my life to you, dear.”
Her mother’s voice was clear and determined.
“Everything is all right, Mother. I love you. Daddy loves you.”
“I had a terrible dream about penguins just a few moments ago, Liberty.”
“Penguins are nice, Mother. They don’t do anyone any harm.”
“There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were all standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little costumes.”
“That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful.”
“They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand.”
“You’re all right, Mother. It was just a dream and it’s gone now. It’s left you and I think I’ve got it.” Liberty scratched Clem’s hard skull.
“I have to tell you something. I had another child, a child before you, a child before Daddy. She was two years old. I lost her, Liberty. I lost her on purpose.”
“What?” Liberty said.
“Yes.”
“Oh Mother, I don’t want to know this.”
“Can you remember yourself as a child, Liberty? You used to limp for no reason and sprinkle water on your forehead to give the appearance of fevers. You used to squeeze the skin beneath your eyes to make bruises.”
“Mother, I didn’t.”
“You were a gloomy child, sweetie. You were always asking me gloomy riddles like, What would happen if a girl was tied up in a rug and thrown off the roof? What would happen if you put a girl in the refrigerator alongside the milk and the cheese?”
“None of this is true,” Liberty said uncertainly. She opened the freezer and took out an ice cream bar. She unwrapped it, rinsed the paper and set it aside, put the ice cream in Clem’s bowl to soften.
“It’s almost Thanksgiving, Liberty. What are you and Willie going to do for Thanksgiving? I think it would be nice if you had turkey and made oyster stuffing and cranberry sauce. It broke my heart when you said you ate yellowtail last year. I don’t think you can do things like that. Life doesn’t go on forever, you know. Your sister was born on Thanksgiving Day. She weighed almost nine pounds.”
Liberty was getting confused. The fluorescent light in the kitchen dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. She turned it off.
“I fell so in love with Daddy, I just couldn’t think,” Liberty’s mother said. “He was so free and handsome and I just wanted to be with him and have a love that would defy the humdrum. He didn’t know anything about Brouilly. I had kept Brouilly a secret from him.”
“Brouilly?” Liberty asked, not without interest. “That was my sister’s name?”
“It’s a wine. A very nice wine. She was cute as the dickens. I was living in New York, and when I fell in love with Daddy I drove Brouilly eighty-seven miles into the state of Connecticut, enrolled her in an Episcopalian day-care center under an assumed name, and left her forever. Daddy and I sailed for Europe the next day. Love, I thought it was. For the love of your father, I abandoned my firstborn. Time has a way, Liberty, of thumping a person right back into the basement.”
“You’ve never mentioned this before, Mother.”
“Do you know what I miss a lot,” her mother went on. “Playing Ping-Pong in the cellar. I haven’t always lived in this cellarless state, you know … Your father is saying ‘don’t start trouble, don’t start trouble …’ I chose the Episcopalians because they are aristocrats. Do you know, for instance, that they are thinner than any other religious group?”
“I don’t know what to say, Mother. Do you want to try and find her?”
“What could I possibly do for her now, Liberty? She probably races Lasers and has dinner parties for twenty-five or something. Her husband probably has tax havens all over the place.”
“Who was her father?” Liberty asked.
“He made crêpes,” her mother said vaguely. “I’ve got to go now. I’ve got to go to the bathroom.”
Liberty hung up. The room’s light was now gray and Clem glowed whitely in it. A particularly inappropriate image crept open in her mind like a waxy cereus bloom. Little groups of Hindus sitting around a dying man or woman or child on the riverbank, waiting for death to come, chatting, eating, behaving in fact as though life were a picnic.
She poured dog food from a sack onto the ice cream and set it out for Clem. The phone rang. “I just want you to know,” her mother said, “that I’m leaving your father.”
“Don’t pay any attention to this, Liberty,” her father said on an extension. “As you must know by now, she says once a month that she’s going to leave me. Once a month for twenty-nine years. Even in the good years when we had friends and ate well and laughed, she’d still say it.”
Liberty’s mother and father were both over five hundred miles away. The miracle of modern communication made them seem as close to Liberty as the kitchen sink.
“Once,” her father said, “why it couldn’t have been more than a month ago, she threw her wedding ring out into the pecan grove and it took a week and a half to find it. Once she tore up every single photograph in which we appeared together. Often, she gathers up all her clothes, goes down to the Winn-Dixie for cartons, or worse, goes into Savannah and buys costly luggage, boxes the books and the French copper, makes a big bitch of a stew which is supposed to last me the rest of my days and cleans the whole damn place with ammonia.”
“It’s obviously a cry for help, wouldn’t you say, Liberty?” her mother said.
“I don’t know why you’d want to call Liberty up and pester her. She has her own life.”
“I am a victim of neglect,” her mother said. “Excuse me, everything’s just dandy here. I made pork chops last night for dinner.”
“Damn good pork chops too,” her father said. “So, Liberty, how’s your own life. How’s that Willie treating you?”
“Fine,” Liberty said.
“Never could get anything out of Liberty,” her mother said.
“You’re getting to be old married folks yourselves,” her father said. “What is it now, going on almost seven years?”
“That’s right,” Liberty said.
“She’s a girl who keeps her own witness, that’s a fact,” her mother said.
“I want you to be happy, dear,” her father said.
“Thank you,” Liberty said.
“But what is it you two do exactly all the time with no babies or jobs or whatever? I’m just curious, understand.”
“They adore one another,” Liberty’s mother said. “ ‘Adore’ is not in Daddy’s vocabulary but what Daddy is trying to say is that a grandson might give meaning and significance to the fact that Daddy ever drew breath.”
“That’s not what I’m trying to say at all,” her father said.
“They’re keeping their options open,” Liberty’s mother said to her father. “They live in a more complex time.” Her mother began to sob. “Keep your options open, Liberty! Never give anything up!”
“We’d better be signing off now,” her father said.
Liberty replaced the phone in its cradle and it instantly rang.
“Is that tree still outside your house?” Teddy asked. “Because I’m sure it was here last night. It was waving its arms outside my window, then it plodded away on its white roots. It goes anywhere it feels like going, I think, that tree.”
“Trees aren’t like people,” Liberty said. “They can’t move around.” Her reasonableness, she felt, bordered on the insincere.
“I forgot to tell you. I�
��m taking a human sexuality course, and you know what I have to do all this week?”
“Oh, honey, why are you taking a human sexuality course? Don’t do anything.”
“I have to carry an egg around all week.”
“An egg?”
“I have to pretend it’s a baby and take care of it.”
“Honey,” Liberty said, “what time is it?”
“Nineteen minutes of six. My clock woke me up.”
Janiella had bought Teddy a clock. It was wired to his bed sheets. When Teddy first began to wet his bed, shortly after her arrival months before, Janiella had long discussions with him about the need to accept responsibility for his own bladder. When Teddy continued to refuse responsibility, Janiella began smacking him with a Wiffle bat every time she had to change the sheets. Then she decided on an alarm that would awaken him every three hours throughout the night, as well as every time the bed pad grew damp.
Janiella had standards. She was not without physical imperfection herself, her personal flaw being diabetes, but she did not allow her disability to get her down. She liked to party. Her preference was for a good time. Her preference was also that Teddy spend as much time as possible away from the house. When Teddy was not wired up in the darkness, he was out somewhere, taking instruction in something. Home at night, he wets the bed. All the alarm has managed to do so far is to increase the number of Teddy’s dreams. He is always dreaming when he wakes. Most recently, he dreams that he steals the single candy bar Janiella keeps in the house in the event she has an attack and has to have sugar. He dreams of Janiella crawling through the house, not being able to find her Payday.
“Janiella and Daddy are still asleep, but Janiella left the list for the day on my desk. I have woodworking, then I have a karate lesson, then I have a flute lesson. That’s at the other end of town. In the afternoon, I have sea scouts.”
Teddy traveled many many miles when he was not in school, practically from one end of the county to the other, in an increasingly extended maze of renaissance pursuits of Janiella’s devising.
