by Joy Williams
“No,” Liberty said. The coldness of the house made the bones around her eyes ache.
“Neither do I,” Mercury said. “So,” she said, “I’d best get started. I don’t want the lady to see too many of them dead leaves.” Mercury had put too much fertilizer around the trees near the swimming pool and the leaves were dropping. They floated, green and gold, on the surface of the pool and cluttered the trap. “I should have rinsed down into the roots more,” Mercury said.
“They’ll come back.”
“Sure they will!” Mercury agreed. She unfolded her long self from the chair she’d been sitting on and went outside. Heat clawed its way into the kitchen before the door swung shut. The heat had a force and a sound to it that summer, a smell and even a language to it—a dry and erratic click like a foreign tribe speaking, the sound of parched leaves and hot air stirring and clicking, the sound an animal’s untrimmed nails would make tapping and clicking on some polished floor.
Liberty went down the hall to Willie’s room. The bed was neatly made, the sheets pulled tight without a crease. Above it was the only decoration in the room, a poster of the planet Saturn and its mysterious rings. Willie had bought it the year before when their class had visited a planetarium. Liberty remembered how trapped she had felt there, in the darkness, beneath the expanding dome. The days had hurried by in the planetarium. Celestial bodies rose, moved toward the west, set. The heavens turned round and round. Sunrises followed one another more and more rapidly. Liberty had clenched the armrests, feeling she was going to be spun away. Then the sky had become dense black. In the place of stars, question marks appeared. “This,” a voice had said, “is the Universe as we know it.”
Liberty lay on the bed and looked at the poster. Saturn was cold and gloomy and peaceful. For a moment or two she lay composed, her mind blank. Then she thought, this is the way Willie feels alone here, everything quiet and still and far away, and then she wasn’t peaceful anymore for her mind had started to run, trying to capture what it was that Willie felt when he was feeling nothing. It wasn’t her own voice she heard but just the mind’s running in a rapid cold and clotted circle like Saturn’s rings.
She was fifteen and she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby, she was going to have a baby.
They hadn’t done it all the time. There was the first time, but then they grew cautious and there were other times but not always. There were good days and bad days, safe and dangerous ones, even as Mercury had attested, false days and true. But now there were just days that multiplied.
Liberty got up and smoothed the sheets tight again. She sniffed the pillowcase, which smelled of Willie, a soft palmy smell like a lake, then went back to her own room where she took off her clothes and put on her bathing suit. The suit was a faded one from the summer before that had lost its shape and begun to nubble. She felt childish and obscure in it and for a while picked abstractly at the beaded material, rolling the balls in her fingers and dropping them into the wastebasket on top of the calendar that she—sick of seeing the numbered days—had discarded there that morning. The calendar was one from church—there were several scattered throughout the house—and above the days that month was the Red Sea being parted, a picture that Liberty had come to dislike intensely. It was a quite ordinary interpretation. The blessed marched between towering but submissive walls of water behind which the creatures of the sea gazed forth, in wonder, with troubled, babylike faces, innocent and isolated.
She walked around her room. It was a pretty room, cheerful. The one window was filled with the view of the garden and it caught her eye once more, like a nail catching the sleeve of a blouse, but the garden was empty except for the massed colors of its flowers trembling in the heat. She was the only one at home. Calvin and Doris and Willie, too, were down at the church with other volunteers, painting the nave. She had been with them, but the fumes from the paint had made her sick. Honey, get away from that can and put your head way back, a lady had said. She was one of Doris’s friends. Her hair was in a bun and she had a dagger of dried paint on her cheek. Liberty had put her head way back and had seen the single fan in the vertex of the church, its paddles beating in a blur, whirling silently far above her, like a bat. And that had comforted her a little, for it was a familiar thing and something she had thought long ago for a time to be a bat before she knew it was a fan.
She had felt sick and she had come home. She would be all right. Everyone would be all right, she thought. Her life would be different. Very different, that was all. And that was fine. That’s what life was, the whole purpose of it was not to be left behind. And she and Willie and the baby would all three just go ahead and not be left behind, and it would be different, which was fine. She would be happy and stoical about it. Could one be happy and stoical at once?
Sweat crawled through her hair. She went out to the swimming pool.
“Ah,” Mercury said, “I been waiting on you for some company here.” She had tied herself up top and bottom in two big handkerchiefs, the knots riding like rabbit ears on her bony hips. The two girls went to the edge of the pool and fell flat out in.
“This water warm as buns,” Mercury screamed. They paddled around, Mercury kicking the water like a can before she stepped back out. “This is not the refeshment I imagined at all,” she fretted. “How’s it doing you?”
“It’s doing me all right,” Liberty said.
Mercury drew on her clothes, shook the corn rows of her hair. Liberty lay floating on her back, watching her through her spread out feet. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” Mercury said, “hold on, day after tomorrow.”
“Bye then,” Liberty said.
“Bye.”
Liberty swam back and forth the length of the pool, first rapidly, then doggedly. Then she swam leisurely, as though she had all the time in the world, back and forth.
They had all come home by early suppertime, spattered with paint in an earthly camouflage of divine works. Liberty begged off supper by saying she still felt too hot to eat. She wrapped herself in a towel and sat on the canvas of the diving board, watching Willie and his parents moving about in the kitchen and settling around the table, bowing their heads momentarily in prayer over the fruit cup. The table was covered with layers of old clean cloths, for Doris and Calvin did not believe in throwing things away. When a person dropped his arm on that table, it would just about bounce off the padding.
Their motions seemed slow and insubstantial to her, as though they had been interchanged with wavering holographs and as she watched, a shiver moved slowly like a hand with outstretched fingers up her skull. Everything would not be all right, not all right at all. She had lived in this house like a child, like a daughter, for years. And now, wrapped in her towel, watching, she felt like a thief, but what was it she had stolen? She felt like a thief in a large coat, a coat with many pockets. But what was it that was missing from others, exactly, that she had so artlessly taken? Oh, but of course it was their love, and their trust, misplaced. In her. She strained forward a little, watching them eat. They seemed a circle, but there was her place, not set, but her place, empty. They were her family. Doris and Calvin were like Lucile and Lamon, but of course they were not, and Willie was like a twin to her, but he was not. He was not her brother, he was her lover, her first and only lover …
She didn’t belong to any of them anymore. She belonged to something else. She watched them, her mind turning slowly, falling. Willie was thin, as thin as she, they were both tall and skinny, as though the life they led that others did not see or know was wearing them away, the real life feeding on the merely visible one, the real life being secretive and inward and hidden. Their real life was exhilarating and artful and treacherous. It was invisible, but it was growing, growing away from them, and they could not be left behind, they would not be. They would have to follow it, leave with it. They would be driven out, they would not be fine, they would be led now by this life that others could see, and what kind of life was that?
/> Liberty’s mind turned and turned, hearing herself again, her own voice saying Don’t give yourself away, don’t give yourself away. The night sounds of insects were beginning, gently pulling in the dark.
Willie walked from the house toward her. He was not wearing swimming trunks but black trousers and a T-shirt that was very white. She pulled the towel more tightly around her shoulders. He was her first and last and only lover, she thought, and felt a thrill of sadness.
“I’ve got a job starting tomorrow,” Willie said. “Roofing. Tar and gravel. It’s going to be miserable.” He seemed pleased with himself. “In this heat it’s going to be murder. I’ll be working with four boys from Blossum.”
Blossum was the black part of town. Mercury lived there, all the blacks did. Blossum had a sewer winding through it that once had been a creek. The blacks didn’t want to make a fuss about it. The town was proud of the fine way they got along with their blacks, they were good blacks. On occasion, someone would get upset over there and kill some people, but they were usually his own people. They were his to kill was more or less the opinion when something like this happened. The boys who made good in Blossum played professional basketball. Some of the investments they made went right back onto the streets there. Anything you wanted you could find in Blossum. If you knew what you wanted, you could find it there. You could buy a machine gun or a child. And it had some of the finest gospel singing in the state. “Bread of Heaven,” sung almost every Wednesday night at The Church of the God of Prophecy on Marigold Street, had long been known to cause even the merciless to weep.
“I’ve got to tell you something,” Liberty said.
Don’t give yourself away the voice still said to her. Don’t give yourself away, which meant everything and nothing in a comforting and hopeless way. Liberty said the other words, the words that were not the real words, without even thinking she was about to.
“I saw a pelican in the garden today, one of the maimed ones, one that’s had part of its bill sawed off. It was so close … it was … I can’t get it out of my mind.”
“Birds are thoughts,” Willie said.
“Oh,” Liberty exclaimed, hurt. “Don’t be so indifferent. ‘Birds are thoughts.’ They’re not thoughts.”
“Why, sure they are,” Willie said. “You didn’t think that birds were all they were.”
His words, his presence, so familiar and yet so distant, had a peculiar effect on her. She thought that perhaps she had been the one stolen, after all.
“It was a real thing,” she said sadly.
“That’s a very old notion, you can’t blame it on me,” Willie said. “There’s a second part too which follows logically enough. If birds are thoughts, the mind is a birdcage.” He shook his head and made twittering sounds. Then he said, “You shouldn’t see such birds, Liberty. Poor Liberty.”
“Why would people do anything like that, why would they … I know you don’t know, it’s just I can’t imagine how they could do something like that, and do it over and over again.”
“They hate,” Willie said. “They’re good haters. They want to finish up things before they’re finished up.”
“Do you ever think about the future?” Liberty asked.
“How can you think about it?”
“Imagine it then.”
“Did you ever kiss a picture?” Willie asked. “Like a photograph or something in a magazine?”
“I guess,” Liberty said.
“The future’s like that. You’d be crazy to think it was real.”
“That’s not all craziness,” Liberty said. “I mean, it’s more deliberate. You let yourself go a little.” She was embarrassed about the photograph. She couldn’t even remember doing it exactly. But it was the sort of thing she might do.
“I’m ready for something though,” Willie said. “I’m ready.”
The summer night pulled and whined around them with its sounds and Liberty looked at him, thinking, why he knows this, he knows what there is next for us.
“I’m going to have a baby,” she said.
He said nothing. She fixed her eyes on his shirt, white as an egg in the darkness. Nothing. She pushed the towel from her shoulders and slipped into the water. It was cooler now, and dark. Her own voice said you’ve given yourself away … She let her head slide back and let the water hold her. Her body, floating, felt draped as though over a stone, and she felt peaceful, as those, she imagined, about to be sacrificed, felt peaceful. She floated, looking upward, a little breathless as though she had climbed many, many steps, and the terrible but peaceful image came to her of her beating heart being seized from her breast, being plucked like a carp from a pond, wriggling and rising into the night, becoming a star.
In the house, Doris and Calvin were listening to hymns on the record player. Calvin was dozing. Somewhere, in his dream, a toilet was overflowing. Money, he thought. Half awake, he rattled his newspaper.
And He walks with me,
And He talks with me,
And He tells me I am his own …
“I’ve always worried about this hymn,” Doris said. “It sounds so flirtatious.”
“Good night,” Liberty called to them from the hall.
“Good night,” Calvin said hoarsely. He cleared his throat. “Good night.”
Doris blew her a kiss on her fingertips.
Willie was waiting for her in her bedroom. She opened the door and he said in the dark, “We’re so happy. We’ll never be this happy again.” She turned the light on because she didn’t want to hear the words he was saying in the dark. The light fell between them. “We’ll never be this happy again,” Willie said, “that’s what you don’t understand.”
“I don’t.”
“No, you don’t.”
“I don’t want to.”
Liberty took off her bathing suit and got into bed, raising the sheets to her throat. Willie went to her bureau, pulled a red scarf from the drawer and draped it over the little lampshade by her bed.
“Just the light,” she said. “I don’t like that rosy light.”
“It’s pretty,” Willie said.
“It’s lurid,” Liberty said fretfully. “Oh, I don’t care about the light,” she said. She pushed the pillow up behind her back and studied the hem of the white sheet. A hole in it had been mended with a circle of bright cloth.
“Are you frightened?” Willie asked.
“No.”
“Remember the planetarium, how frightened you were?”
“You said it was all done with machines.”
“You can’t remember the way you were, always frightened.”
“I’m not frightened now.”
“You’re not making this up?” Willie said. “You’re not just trying to make yourself up in another way?”
Liberty shook her head. “It’s a baby.”
“What’s it feel like?”
“Like me, but a moving away from me too. It’s nice.”
“It’s got gills still, and a tail.”
“Not anymore.”
“I’ve heard you can feel their fingernails scratching inside you.”
“No, no, not yet.”
“Like this,” Willie said. He slowly moved his hand toward her face and drew a long nail lightly down her cheek.
“Don’t,” Liberty said.
He put his hands to his own face and drew the nails heavily down. She saw red lines obediently follow the gesture across his skin.
“Your nails are too long,” she said. “You’ll hurt yourself.”
He picked a paper punch from her desk and made a perfect moon in his thumbnail, then moved it, punching circles in the nails of each hand.
“That’s gruesome,” Liberty said.
“It doesn’t hurt.” He gathered the cuttings in his palm and closed his hand over them.
“You know what the worst thing is?” he asked. “The worst thing is to lead another’s life.”
“You mean the baby? The baby’s not going to be
leading my life.”
“There’ll be three of us,” Willie said. “Before, there’s just been one of us, you and me.”
“We can do anything still.”
“You’re making plans. You’re making agreements. You make too many agreements with the world, Liberty. Something’s trying to murder you and you’re helping it choose the time and the place.”
“It’s not a murderer,” she said. “What are you saying? I’m not going to hurt this baby, it’s what’s happened to us now.”
“Happened to us,” he said. He shook the full moons of his nails into the wastebasket. That’s filling up, Liberty thought, filling up quite sensibly. “I want myself and you,” Willie was saying. “Not children. I don’t want this circular stuff.”
“Circular stuff,” Liberty said. “Circular stuff.” She was astonished.
“You want to become your own mother, instead of your own self.”
“I certainly don’t want to become my mother,” Liberty said. She tried to smile. His words were a net of abstraction, falling, settling. “You’re just scared is all,” she said miserably.
“We can’t just let things happen,” he said. “I’m not scared.” He wandered around the room, touching things, books and jars, with his strange fingers. He sat down beside her on the bed and pulled the sheet from her breasts, ran his hands across her ribs and belly. “We’re so beautiful,” he said.
“Ugh,” Liberty said, “those hands. You’re not as beautiful as you used to be.”
“Look at us, we’re beautiful. Haven’t we made up everything perfectly so far?”
“Well,” she said, “I guess not, no. There were a few things we didn’t learn when we should have, I guess.”
“You can’t learn everything.”
“Sure you can. You can share with anything too, love anything. And that’s what you’ve got to learn.”
“You can’t learn love, you can’t learn death.”
“Sure you can,” Liberty said. It was as though words were a bridge and the bridge had abruptly broken and she was falling. She touched Willie’s shoulder—the sensation was that real—to keep herself from falling.
