Breaking and Entering

by Joy Williams

  Liberty felt as though she were dreaming. She saw her hands on Clem’s coat as though dreaming them. But she moved her hands and the hands moved.

  “I apologize for being so voluble, but you are my first visitors in many years,” Poe said. “It’s been almost as long since I’ve had a lover. My relationships with my lovers always went on too long. I always had difficulty extricating myself. My last lover drank a bottle of mercurochrome in front of me one evening. I had just said, ‘You don’t excite me anymore, Helen. One can’t be excited by the same individual indefinitely. People tend to be hypocritical about long relationships, and not to face the truth.’ She begged me to be hypocritical, then she swallowed mercurochrome. Nothing happened. We were both disappointed. Gesture had become the very heart of our affair. She had succeeded in poisoning her husband years before we met. It was arsenic. If you dug that man up this moment he’d be perfectly preserved. Like Napoleon. Helen was a theatrical woman, devoted to radical thought processes. For some, you know, the temptation is to play, to dream, to hang on to substitution forever.”

  “I could understand Helen,” Willie said. “What became of her?”

  “She disappeared, as many living people do,” Poe said.

  “I could understand that too,” Willie said. “Living people disappear. It happens every day.”

  Liberty closed her eyes. She had disappeared long ago, she knew, and so had Willie. But it was time to come back. It was time to come back or vanish. And yet what this was about was that it was too late to come back. The noontide demons were all illusion and error playing a game of outlaws and hermits, hiding behind the apparently real, the stubbornly real. The other couple appeared to her. There had been another couple, a horrible couple, tricked out to deceive, a man and a woman, then just a woman, through some accident.… Liberty opened her eyes and fixed her gaze outside, at the clear, vacant light there. The beach was still. Poe was saying,

  “… and those who are left are usually so puzzled by it, the children, the lovers, the parents, the friends. They can’t believe it. I’ve never understood their confusion myself …” She looked at Liberty. “You’re admiring the light, dear? There is an extraordinary light here, isn’t there? It only reveals, never explains.”

  “It’s just daylight,” Liberty said. “It falls on us all.” She hated the talk. Talking never explained anything, it was like the light, like one’s life.

  “You can tell me anything,” Poe said. “Whatever you tell me will be the truth.”

  “It’s not possible,” Liberty said slowly. “You are not a possibility.”

  She saw the other couple again. She was aware of the mirrors, the loud music at the critical moment, the sweetness of the food.

  “You don’t know what you want, do you dear?” Poe said. “Willie knows what he wants.”

  “I don’t want anything,” Liberty said. She was close to tears.

  Poe drew back. “And this animal,” she said, smiling at Clem, “who is always with you. Has he ever indicated what it is he wants? Would he care for my jacket, do you think?” She rose and took it off. The scales of the jacket caught the light and shook like oil. She lay it before them on the table. “I knew this snake. He was a companion of mine for many years. You mustn’t be alarmed. He died a natural death. He was enormous. An entire room here was devoted to his habitat and glassed off. He made such a lovely sound—the sound of a hundred castanets. When the little girl I was telling you about first saw him, she pressed her little hands against the glass and said, ‘Goodness.’ ”

  “She spoke?” Willie wondered.

  “That was the only time. ‘Goodness,’ she said.” Poe’s smile widened and she turned toward Liberty. “Why so glum, my dear! We should all be enjoying this rather sinister moment.”

  “Liberty believes that freedom consists in being inaccessible,” Willie said.

  “I’m not sure that’s true at all,” Poe said. “Perhaps your Liberty is trying to make an object of her life. It’s very difficult, you know, far more difficult than merely longing for what comes after—to try to make one’s life into an object for a sort of knowledge.”

  Poe was pumped up, sharp, with not a single, blurred line. Her face was spectacularly, peacefully ugly.

  “You’re a boy who likes to tell lies, aren’t you?” she went on. “Why is that? The truth is so much more frightening. I watched you here for a long time in this house. Oh, I didn’t watch you every moment, but I was here. You’re a boy who makes promises. You promise to make up everything. You’re the one who has dreams of serving the inconceivable.”

  The day had a terrible sweet heat to it. Small black butterflies wobbled through the air.

  “For a moment just then,” Poe exclaimed, “I was seeing us all from a great distance. The first time it happened to me I was with my husband, but it’s occurred dozens of time since then. My husband and I had just gotten into bed when I suddenly found myself suspended just beneath the ceiling, looking down on him in his pajamas, sipping his nightcap. My husband said afterward that he himself had seen nothing unusual. This from a man who had danced with Jesus! Well, perhaps he had seen nothing unusual. But I enjoy seeing my own body, as well as others, from a distance. I don’t dwell upon my head, but my body is good looking and I know it. Nevertheless, I’ve always felt that autoscopy was a rather vulgar practice.” She stretched her hand toward Clem, but he stepped backward, out of reach.

  “He displaces space so effortlessly,” Poe said. “He’s so sure-footed. Has he ever broken anything?”

  “He has never broken anything,” Liberty said softly. The feeling persisted that there was something in her throat, that there were stitches of coarse brown thread holding the flesh together there, keeping something in, not letting it spill out.

  “And you are never lonely with him, are you dear. And yet it is our duty to be lonely, don’t you know? One must strive to be more and more perfectly lonely. The heart grows indifferent, but one must push upward continually, more and more alone, toward the surface, like a blind, wild seed.”

  She took the rose from Willie and brushed it against the razored darkness of her breastbone.

  “Tell me about your lovers, dear,” she said to Liberty.

  “There’s only been Willie.”

  “Only is such a step into darkness, dear. The house of darkness throws wide its doors to ‘only.’ Do you know what I would like very much? If you would give me a day of your past, some summer day when you were just beginning, somewhere in that time when there were moments for you.”

  Liberty was silent.

  “You don’t want anything, dear, but you go on. That’s because your life wants, it wants you to discover it.”

  “It was in July,” Willie said, “in the year when we were fifteen.”

  “This is wonderful,” Poe said. “It was July. Really, I couldn’t ask for more.”

  “Liberty and Willie,” Willie said.

  “Lovely,” Poe said.

  “They vowed to be different.”

  “Of course,” Poe said.

  “And never to be at the mercy of events.”

  “Give me the twisted shape of the day,” Poe said. “The form that dissembler love took that day. That green and sour, fabulous, tedious day. Slim twins, golden children, your lips blistered, sweat running from your hair …”

  “They were capable of any crime,” Willie said.

  “The young, bless them, they want so to be damned.”

  “They loved dangerous games.”

  “There was something final in that day that doomed you,” Poe said. “I can see you then. You had the full lips of anarchists. Ringless, reckless hands. Your love was romantic, in defiance of life.”

  Outside, the sun was descendant and pressed fiercely against the window glass. Clem lay on the cool rim of its sprawl. On the water, light lasted the longest. It was a day that was never going to end was the way it had once seemed to Liberty. But now it was beginning to end. She saw an image befor
e her of her father, the blank canvas before him, beyond the canvas, the brilliantly flowering tree. He raised the brush … There was a moment, and beyond that moment was where the dead began.

  “Perhaps we should pray, dear, before you begin,” Poe said.

  “What would we pray for?” Willie asked.

  “The usual,” Poe said. “Understanding.”

  5

  The summer that Willie and Liberty were fifteen was the summer that someone was mutilating the pelicans. Someone was capturing the birds, slicing off half their bills with a saw, and releasing them

  Liberty saw such pelicans once; flying heavily through the bright air, flying with their dreadful injuries home. Once, she saw one closer. This was years ago.

  Under everything that summer—the summer that they were fifteen—under the heat and the fitful breezes, the slide of leaves against one another and the soft, whipping sound the water made as it was flung in an arc from the sprinkler, under everything was the voice that says, Are you ready?

  Willie’s mother had two gardens. She had her greens garden, but she had her flowers too. The flowers took up almost a quarter acre of their land and were Doris’s pride and joy as well as being the cause of her only moral transgression. She devoted a great deal of time to her flowers and did not want people to know exactly how much, for it was a considerable amount. She would often slip from the house before dawn, just as the stars were fading, to weed, to pick and pinch and dust for insects. Her head would be clear, her movements stealthy, and her heart would pound with excitement at her secret labors. Next to the flower beds, Doris had a little grove of flourishing fruit trees. When she had first planted them she had stone mulched them, and all her friends thought she was stone mulching them still, but the fact was, she wasn’t. Doris was only pretending to stone mulch her fruit trees. Any time one of her friends bought a young tree and commenced to stone mulch it, it would sicken and just about die, which confirmed everyone’s belief that Doris had a gift with things because she was so Christian. What Doris was actually doing was caring for her trees the usual way but rolling stones back around the trunk when her friends came to call.

  There was a yard girl who worked for Doris three times a week but the flower garden was not part of her duties. The yard girl, a tall beautiful black girl named Mercury, did not know much about plants but she was strong and dependable and a tireless raker. Actually, she did know some things and these she shared with Liberty. She knew that poinsettia sap could take the hair off your legs. She knew that epsom salts would green up a sick palm and that a woman’s pee could force a jacaranda to bloom. But what Mercury enjoyed far more than plant care was raking the long winding driveway of crushed shells to make, over and over, longer and more numerous lines with the rake tines through the fine shells.

  Mercury thought Willie and Liberty were brother and sister, though Liberty was always telling her she was just visiting.

  “You sure been visiting for some while,” Mercury said. “Years, like.” She believed Willie to be the best looking white boy she’d ever seen. “That boy is some arresting in his looks,” she’d say, using the word arresting like a dollar she had to spend. “And he must be loaded with hormones too. I like watching his hair grow.” They would giggle together, girl and girl. In the mornings she would come to work, singing, on a pink bicycle.

  Doris had a bird bath in her garden. It was a child’s plastic wading pool set in the ground and rimmed with coral rocks, its waters kept fresh by a circulating pump hidden behind some tuberous lilies. It was here, at the edge of the wading pool, where Liberty saw the pelican. She saw it, looking out the window of her room, a window through which light streamed in moteless rays. A pelican, miles from the sea, come to Pelican Estates.

  The bird was full-sized although its head was still streaked with the downy yellow of the nestling, and it rested on the damp grass beside the pool, its head drawn back between the cleft of its folded wings. When it finally moved, it did so with a lunge, as though to capture the solace of the water unaware. Liberty saw the malformed, purpled pouch. Her eyes escorted her there, and there abandoned her.

  She walked from her room, down the hall, leaving the coolness of the house for the quiet, breathtaking heat of the outside. She could hear the water lapping at the sides of the little blue pool. The heat had a whisper to it that summer, even the rain when it came had the whisper, like the stirring of flies. The pelican had come to drink and it could not drink. It seemed to her that she had closed her eyes, and when she had opened them again, the bird had vanished.

  Liberty felt the pulling within her that was the knowledge she had—the something different from her which was the same, but further, pulling.

  Mercury came up the driveway on her bicycle, her long black legs turning, the line the wheels’ wobble made following her lightly in the dust.

  “Hey!” Mercury bawled.

  “Hey.”

  “I got a question for you, if you please.” She leaned the bike against a tree and walked over to Liberty. “This sure is a pretty garden, I wish I were accountable for it. Okay, then,” she said, “my question is, if a person is unconscious like from the sipping and he’s lying in his bed and you say something to him, can he hear it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Liberty said.

  “It’s not gonna all come back later to him? He’s not going to be visited by the total recall?”

  “He was really unconscious?”

  “My Chester was hardly breathing like,” Mercury said. “Dead drunk out.” She mopped her throat and forehead with a man’s big white handkerchief.

  “No, then.”

  “I said some things, oh! I had me a time. I worked myself up so I about could have killed him. He was lying there all defenseless and kind of cunning really, but I could have liked to drop an iron on him.”

  “Oh, why!” Liberty said.

  “I shouldn’t say why to a nice little white girl like yourself.”

  “That’s all right,” Liberty said. She felt queasy and took tiny sips of the hot, heavy air, swallowing, trying to calm herself.

  “Lipstick on his underwears,” Mercury said promptly. “My Chester’s an infidel.”

  The girls stood there, mulling.

  “An infidel is an unbeliever,” Liberty said, still distraught.

  “Chester don’t believe in much, it’s true,” Mercury said, “and maybe that’s his biggest problem, he don’t have any standards, although he do have nice clothes. He gotten suits, all different colors. But you know the only reason I didn’t drop the iron on him and murder him on the spot? After I took his clothes off and seen the lipstick on his underwears? I seen the electric chair. Right in the corner of my eye. It was a little tiny thing about the size of a postage stamp and it was red but otherwise it looked just the way you know it looks, and the sight of that electric chair deterred me from my actions on the spot, just the way they say.” She nodded somberly and daubed at herself once more with the handkerchief. “This is some cruel weather, isn’t it,” she said.

  Pressed in the corner of Liberty’s eye was the bird she had seen, the dreadful poor and feathered thing.

  “There was a pelican over there just before you came,” Liberty said, pointing at the little pool. The pump whirred secretively, behind the fleshy, drooping lilies. “Somebody had hurt it.” She tossed her head in dismay.

  “Uhh,” Mercury said. “You seen one of them. I heard about them. Some fisherman doing it, correct? This heat makes people mean. Days like this, they’re false days. It’s best to let them go right on by.”

  “I went over to it thinking I could help it, but it flew off. I had some idea about fixing it somehow.”

  “Naw,” Mercury said. “You try to fix a wild, hurt thing like that and what happens is, the same thing happens. You take them home and keep them warm and feed them things and you look at them and they look at you and in three days they die. You wouldn’t happen to have some ice for the ice tea I bought, would you?”
>
  They went inside the house, to the kitchen. Liberty cracked apart the ice from the trays and dropped them into Mercury’s jar.

  “Do you like that soft, mushy ice they give you sometimes in a cup that gets all colored up with what you’re drinking?” Mercury asked.