by Joy Williams
“Live with them,” Liberty said. “Live with Willie Stone?”
“Isn’t that nice?” Lucile said, cheerfully scrubbing the sink. “They have a little boy who’s in your class and you can be their little girl for a while.”
“Live with Willie Stone?” Liberty repeated faintly. Willie’s head and hands looked too big for his skinny body. He was so pale he looked as though he dusted himself in flour each morning, and his hair was dark and lanky. He wore boots and cuffed jeans like a redneck, although his father was a banker and his house had a swimming pool. Willie chewed on gum and a toothpick at the same time and always gave replies to the teacher’s questions that were wildly inappropriate without being exactly incorrect. At recess in the schoolyard when the girls combed one another’s hair and talked about the boys, no one ever talked about Willie Stone. No one wanted him in their heads at all.
“I think that a person thinks differently at night, Liberty,” Lucile said, “and last night I had a good think, and Daddy and I came up with this plan. Either we live by accident and die by accident, or we live by plan and die by plan. That’s my feeling.”
Liberty pressed the bottle of 7-Up against her cheek.
Lucile looked radiant. She moved about the kitchen as though it were a ballroom. “Now, Mr. Stone is well off, I gather, and Mrs. Stone is quite religious. I don’t mean crackpot religious, the type who claims that Jesus enters them through the vessels of their ears and tells them what color to paint the kitchen cabinets, I mean Sunday morning services, Wednesday luncheon prayer, Friday evening faith healing type religious. So we may have to go to the expense of getting you a pair of black patent leather shoes or something. A realtor is coming over this afternoon so the house will be listed tomorrow. We’re selling it furnished, so if you want anything from your room, you should get it out. It will be a breath of fresh air for all of us, I’m sure. Daddy will teach and I hope to get a position with the Forestry Service. I believe that one can outwit Time if one pretends to be what one is not. That’s my feeling.”
“Mommy,” Liberty said.
“Some of us weren’t meant to be mothers, Liberty. But as far as I can gather, Doris Stone is a fine mother. She plants flowers from seeds—something that’s always impressed me—and she knows how to sew. These are good signs. Of course, I’ll call you every week, and after Daddy and I get settled, we can make other arrangements, but I know you’d prefer staying behind for now with your school and your friends.”
Liberty sat in the kitchen, which she had sat in more or less off and on since she was a baby, and felt it becoming increasingly unfamiliar. The improbability and injustice of her parents’ plan did not really occur to her. She arranged her books and papers in neat stacks, then examined the contents of her purse, a cheap and cherished zippered bag, which pictured a pink, sequined flamingo. In her purse was a snapshot of her mother and father taken at some cocktail party where they appeared somewhat flushed. There was also a pyramidical folded paper predictor, several shiny pennies minted the year of her birth, and one gummy quarter.
“I don’t have any money,” Liberty said.
“Oh, you don’t need any money!” her mother said. “From what Daddy told me, he absolutely recreated Calvin Stone’s mouth—made it better than new!”
Liberty did not receive calls every week from her mother. During the first year, her parents telephoned half a dozen times. Her father’s vague and cheerful tone was much as she remembered it being with his patients, while her mother related with breathless excitement her volunteer work for the Forestry Service. Liberty listened, holding her own phone in her own little room in the Stones’ house.
“The Florida black panther is, as I’m sure you know, Liberty, almost extinct, and my job is to go into the wild, deep into his habitat, and find out more about him or her, as the case may be. I find out more about him by finding his feces. Yes, that’s right. Yes, it is difficult. It takes a good eye. And I examine his feces and I find the hairs and little things of whatever he’s been eating and I analyze the hairs and whatever to determine his diet. And do you know what his feces tell me? Everything speaks to us, Liberty, remember that. His feces tell me that he eats rabbits and deer and armadillos.”
Liberty imparted this information at the Stones’ dinner table. It was received with respect. Conversation was encouraged at meals as well as any insight into God’s sometimes troubling ways. For some time, the subject discussed was Doris Stone’s daily struggle, through prayer, against a growing lack of confidence in her pastor who had cited wisdom from the cartoon character Charlie Brown in eighteen of his last twenty sermons.
Both Calvin and Doris Stone had always wanted a daughter and they were thrilled with Liberty’s presence in their moody home. Willie was a puzzle to them, as mysterious as a Communist. Calvin brought Liberty barrettes and comic books, taught her how to drive and how to fillet a fish. He wanted to teach her how to stuff an owl, something he had learned as a boy, but Liberty didn’t want to know. He taught her to dance by letting her stand on his feet, and he gave her a silver dollar for each of her years on earth. He taught her how to swim underwater with her eyes open. Whereas, once Liberty had stopped off at the dentist’s office on her way back from school, she now stopped off at the bank. They discussed the vile William Tecumseh Sherman and played a game of their invention called Beg-A-Loan in which Liberty would plead for large sums of money that would be used to put trees back together after they had been chopped down, or toward the invention of a new animal. At the bank, Liberty counted and added. She stuffed pennies into paper tubes and wrapped white bands around stacks of bills. Liberty was good and Calvin loved her. He was a simple man and he loved goodness. Choices had never been difficult for him to make.
Doris was kind to Liberty and told her many things. She told her that the way to prevent God’s anger was to be angry with oneself, and she advised her never to stumble over that which was behind her. Doris wasn’t a chatterer, but she told Liberty about menstruation and the idiosyncrasies of the Four Evangelists. She taught her calligraphy and stain removal and how to trim a rose bush.
The Stones lived in a development of two-acre tracts called Pelican Estates. The door knocker on each house was in the form of a pelican. Doris Stone had been drawn to this particular development because of the pelican motif. Pelicans were the bird of Christ, Doris Stone said, the bird of resurrection. The iconical pelican, as Doris had explained to Liberty, returns to its nest to find its young dead. Slashing its breast with its beak in grief, it draws blood which brings the young back to life. Pelican Estates had been built by the Abcoda Corporation, a fertilizer and insecticide giant, which had recently gotten into construction. Abcoda had no more connection with the bird of Christ than a tennis ball, but Doris lived her life by religious clue and inference, and it was Pelican Estates where inference had led her.
Each night Doris would come into Liberty’s little white room, set out her blouse and jumper and socks for the next day, smooth the bedsheets, plump up the pillows, remind her to keep God as a judge in her heart, and kiss her good night. She would then go down the hall to her son’s austere room where she would often find him, not in bed at all, but lying on an empty bookshelf, as cool and as still as a reptile, “just thinking” he would tell her. She would remind him that his evening thoughts should be an image of the day of judgment. She would urge him to recall the conversations and events and errors of the day and see if he could do better tomorrow. Then she would kiss her Willie and go downstairs where she would set out the breakfast things. This habit of Mrs. Stone’s always dismayed Liberty. Coming down in the middle of the night for a glass of water, Liberty would see the table set with its bowls and plates, its juice glasses and bottles of syrup. The kitchen would be dim and empty, clean and slightly humming, like a tomb in which comfy familiarities had been placed to accompany the dead into the unknown. Seeing clothing set out for the morrow or a table set out for a future meal would, years later, still fill Liberty with melancho
ly. But for Doris Stone, it was just another in the small acts of faith that enabled her to inch her way through the days.
After establishing, as far as she was able, the probability of a tomorrow that would proceed much in the way of the known today, Doris would make her own night preparations and slip into bed beside her husband. “Calvin,” she would say, “now, it’s too quiet outside to snore tonight. It’s a lovely, quiet night.” Calvin, half-asleep, would mutter, “I’m not as hard-hearted as people think,” in his mind already in the morning, in the bank, weighing and calculating, counting. The house would slowly grow still as each in their manner counted their own way into sleep.
Doris counts the foundations of the wall of the city of God. The first foundation is of jasper, the second, sapphire, the third a quartz of the palest blue, the fourth emerald, the fifth—the fifth she can never recall—the sixth and seventh are strange ones too, although sometimes they come to her, the eighth, beryl … and she sleeps. Below them all the table is set. Liberty lies with her cheek on the crisp pillowcase and counts. She counts the number of children she will have, their names and talents. And Willie counts too, counts something, perhaps the days ahead, the houses and voices and faces in them, their boredoms and luxuries and terrors …
When Liberty was twelve, Willie gave her a heart pendant for her birthday. It was a pretty little heart, thin and gold-plated.
“I was looking for a locket,” Willie said. “Something you could open up, but they were all too big. I wanted just a tiny one so you could maybe wear it all the time, so you’d hardly even know that you were wearing it.”
“I like it,” Liberty said. She was still a little frightened of him, but now she thought it was love. She clasped the necklace around her neck and kissed him.
“You don’t know how to kiss,” Liberty said.
“Sure I do,” Willie said.
Liberty giggled. “No, you don’t. You don’t kiss like that with your mouth just hanging open.”
“Well, where did you learn to kiss?”
“Travis kissed me once at school, but I’m sure I didn’t learn anything from that.” She made a face.
“Whores won’t let you kiss them. That’s why I don’t know.”
“Oh, Willie, you’ve never been to a whore.”
“One of them told me that the Devil was Jesus’ older brother. She insisted upon it.”
“You’ve never,” Liberty said.
“I might have,” Willie said. “But it’s a secret.”
“Just because you’ve told a secret doesn’t necessarily mean you’ve told something true,” Liberty said.
That night, on her birthday, Calvin took them all out to dinner. They went to Liberty’s favorite restaurant, a place called The Dollhouse. The building had once housed a loud, mean bar until, after a series of maimings and maulings, it had been shut up by the town, then bought by ladies of the Garden Club, an organization of which Doris was an active member. In the center of the restaurant was a five-foot, twenty-room, elaborately decorated dollhouse with over two thousand pieces of tiny furniture, the collective hobby of the Garden Club ladies. Doris had sewn the draperies for many of the rooms and the cabbage rose slipcovers for the chairs on the sun porch. Calvin himself had carved out a small plaque that was mounted near the front door of the dollhouse, because besides being a banker, he was a devoted fan of history. The plaque said:
On This Site
in 1865 Nothing
Happened
The Club was divided in their enthusiasm for Calvin’s addition. Some thought it too flippant an accord for all the work they had put into the project. Calvin Stone was a peculiar man, most of them agreed. He seemed to have no more pretense than a broom, but you never quite knew where you stood with him.
“How you all doing,” Calvin said to the diners to his right and left. He knew almost everyone in town. Doris followed and Liberty and Willie ambled behind. The hostess seated them at a round table near the dollhouse. She was a Frenchwoman with a fine bosom and round, fragrant arms.
“Ah,” she said, “it’s so good to see you and it’s an occasion, I can tell. May I bring you some wine?”
Doris placed her hand on her heart and shut her eyes, weakened by the very suggestion.
The hostess laughed and quickly removed the wine glasses. Her lips blossomed into a pout. “My car today, it just stopped on the road. You might have see it. It didn’t want to be a car anymore. My life, at times, seems planned by enemies. It’s an effort to live gracefully a life that seems planned by enemies, don’t you think?”
Calvin looked at her, bewildered. Liberty smiled.
“You look good today,” the woman said to Liberty.
Liberty had straw-colored hair, the white straight teeth of a dentist’s child.
“And your necklace, it is so beautiful. Is it a gift from your boyfriend?” She tousled Willie’s hair. “Un monsieur qui est par hasard un enfant,” she said. “It’s only chance that such a man is still a child.”
Calvin shook his head and grinned. “You sure are one heck of a hostess,” he said. “Do you believe we could all have some Coca-Cola?”
Whenever Liberty came to the restaurant, she would kneel on the padded platform encircling the dollhouse and raptly study its cluttered contents—its satin pillows, its variety of windows and cupboards, its closet hung with tiny clothes. The grand staircase in the hallway was papered with an optical deceit of gardens and flowers stretching into the distance. The parlor had wooden wainscotting and blue walls and in the corner was a New Year’s tree—a twig from a tree festooned with confetti. The ceiling of the nursery was painted with stars. In the kitchen was a black stove that flickered with paper flames and on the table was a plate of donuts. The donuts were toy automobile tires coated with baking soda. On the table too was a tiny knife and a pink-and-white roast on a platter. There was a gilded haircomb for the headboard of a bed, and there was water in the sinks and books on the shelves. There were a man and a woman sitting on leather chairs in the library, sprawled rigidly as though dead. There was always a lady writing a letter at a desk and always a child being given a bath by a girl in a white uniform. In the dining room, someone was always dining. In the pantry, a maid was always looking in horror at a plate just dropped and broken.
Liberty always examined the dollhouse carefully, noting what had been added and what removed. That night, as she knelt there, touring it carefully with her eyes, the Frenchwoman came up to her.
“You are a romantic, I know,” she said. “You remind me of myself when I was your age, when I was just beginning. Lots of things can go wrong with girls, you know, with boys not so much. Girls lose sight of themselves more quickly. Your little boyfriend, he is just a little boy, but he has many men inside himself. Perhaps you will not love them all.”
“Tonight’s my birthday,” Liberty said.
“Yes, yes,” the Frenchwoman said. “Everything is just beginning now.”
For dessert they had cake and ice cream. A sparkler flared from Liberty’s portion.
“This was so nice of you,” Liberty said, “all this.”
“What was in that package you got from your momma today?” Doris asked. “I’m just curious. Curiosity is something I just can’t stamp out of myself.”
“Well,” Liberty said, “it was a Fry-Pappy.”
“A Fry-Pappy!” Calvin said, slapping at his jacket pockets to call forth his wallet. “What you want with a Fry-Pappy?”
“We could make some banana fritters,” Doris said. “Maybe that’s what she had in mind.”
“Was it supposed to be a present or what?” Calvin asked.
“I guess,” Liberty said.
“We’ll make some banana fritters in it,” Doris said with determination.
“I’m not sure if it works,” Liberty said.
“It’s not a new Fry-Pappy?” Calvin said, puzzled.
“It might have come from a yard sale,” Liberty said. “It looks like it might have. My moth
er likes to go to yard sales.”
“Terrible advantage can be taken of a person at those places,” Doris said.
“Where’s your heart?” Willie said to Liberty. He put his hand against his own throat.
The heart Willie had given her was no longer there. The pendant had fallen from the cheap clasp. They all searched for it, on the table, on the floor, but it could not be found.
The Frenchwoman helped them look. “I know, I know,” she said to Liberty. “It’s just as though it were real. It is very important.”
Liberty thought that the woman did not know anything, although she was very pretty, very nice, crouching on the floor, searching, wrinkling her pretty skirt. She would later die of cancer, a year after she refused to have her breasts removed. She would die alone, the lonely death that disease had prepared for her.
“It is a great loss,” the woman said, trying to comfort Liberty, “but a romance like yours requires obstacles, dangers, fantasies. Always. Again and again.”
Then the locket was found. Willie found it. It was by the dollhouse on the lip of one of the staggeringly intricate rooms. After holding it in her hands for a moment, Liberty put it in her mouth and swallowed it.
“What a metaphor!” exclaimed the Frenchwoman. “What lovers they will be!”
“She is just a little girl,” Doris protested.
Afterward, they made Liberty eat a piece of bread.
But this was long ago. Liberty is not a little girl now, she is a woman, wedded to the boy who shared her childhood. She still has a beautiful hand and the power to render blood, wax, oil and grass stains invisible, but the mornings once spent in Doris and Calvin Stone’s house have darkened and become the afternoon. Years pass as moments do. And the moments of the past are stones behind her, over which she stumbles forward.
