State of Grace

by Joy Williams

I know I don’t have much time left with him. He’s getting off the track. Listen, I say, the spinal tap was only a partial success, leaving me dead from the knee to the foot and the waist to the bridge of the nose. There’s no recourse for they never made me any promises, although they spoke frequently and in depth.

  You’ll acclimate, he says.

  But the death I thought I’d died is back now for a slight correction and they’ve given me a cornea injection and now I’m only useless in the eyes and the loving parts. I’m perfectly able to do all the things I couldn’t do before. I can eat and drink, bite my nails, take a walk and bend for prayers and toilet. They’re pleased.

  I can well see that, he says.

  I was immediately released, I say hurriedly. Not for one day was I in Intensive Care which is reserved for outpatients, ordinary seamen, phronemaphobiacs and the like.

  Un-huh, he says. There is static and humming. On the radio, while he is listening to me, he is playing the mystery tune which I can tell him is “Sapphire” and win myself two free tickets to the drive-in movie. But I don’t want admission. I want to know my hour! When is the fatal hour and when will the truth come to me?

  Why it went when you were sleeping, he says. It come and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.

  4

  Some memories have no past. This town for example, this setting. I have mentioned the frame that held Grady and I. There, goats were often seen climbing in the trees. They preferred live oaks because of the low sturdy branches. This is not peculiar. It is an invisible landscape. Everything, more or less, is invisible upon it.

  Don’t sulk. Everything is over. Here is the place. There are Grady’s woods and river. Then there is the logging road. Rattlers slide down the colored gullies. Great cattails rise from clear yellow pools. There is the blacktop that meets the coast. Black people live here in low and fragile houses with tile roofs. Sea grape shields the windows from the sun. They farm. There are a few calves and chickens. Some of the livestock are hobbled to the docks at low tide. The cormorants rest on the pilings, drying their wings. Everywhere there are glistening unnatural mountains of oyster shells. They spill into the road, cracking beneath the car’s wheels, shining like oil. Then there are palmists, bars and spaghetti houses. There is a sign that points the way to BRYANT’S BEASTS. There is a sign that points the way to the college. It is futile and oppressive—the entry to a southern town. It is hot. The streets are empty. Huge fans move the air in restaurants. You watch the blades turning as you pass. The town is irreconcilable to its space. Dismiss it. If you must, think of the cheap motels, the drugstore luncheonettes, the hospital. Once there were more cats in the corridors than doctors. Think of the bars, the empty De Chirico train station, the grassy subtle tracks that fade to the north. Think of the highway that moves to other places.

  Don’t become impatient. Here is the time. It is late in the year but summer will soon follow. My friend Corinthian Brown comes out of a small café. He is digesting their weekday special which is pizza, chicken, roll and potato. The time is shown in a clock set in an electric waterfall on a wall beside the pies. The water is a shiny neon blue falling from shadow-box mountains. The scene clicks and hums from the current that keeps it operating. Corinthian patronizes this café because of the waterfall clock. It is popular with others as well and a source of speculation. “It’s the Adironeracks,” someone is saying. “I been in that area in 1953. It’s the Adironeracks for sure. Water’d freeze your pecker off.”

  It is early morning. The pizza is still cold from the day before. Corinthian carries a book, Heart of Darkness. I will have given it to him. He walks toward his job at Al Glick’s Automobile Junk Yard. Now the job of guarding objects that people no longer feel the need to molest is far too much for any one man. Corinthian realizes this. He realizes that, in particular, guarding junk should be the job of presidents, of congressmen, of those with far more power and influence than himself. It is not the task for one with no resources, no persuasive menace, no continuing stake in the eventual outcome. Nonetheless, those who could perform the function best are not called. Or do not answer. So Corinthian serves. In return, Al Glick allows him to sleep anyplace he wants to and to use his hot plate. Corinthian hardly ever takes advantage of the last benefit because he doesn’t want to be pushy. Some of the wrecked cars are quite well-appointed and it is a joy for him to sit in the plush seats, particularly on a rainy day, and read a good book or two. Corinthian has become attached to some of these cars. He is broken, after all, and these machines are as well, although he realizes that he is still using himself up whereas someone has finished them long ago. This is not to say that he deals in endings. Who could claim that? He simply protects the things whose defeat and destruction have already occurred. Like us, he keeps a feckless guard, one with the resting objects.

  But objects need not detain you. Forget them. Remember instead the picture of Corinthian Brown. He is running now, he is late. His mind is on the menagerie that he has just left. Corinthian labors continually. He works at Bryant’s Beasts as well. It is a terrible job that affects and grieves him. He worries that he has not given the ostrich enough water. He loves the bird’s eyes which have long thick lashes. He loves its poor wings. Think of lovers. That’s where stories lie.

  It is morning in the South, on the Gulf Coast. On the empty beach there are two girls. They are eating powdered donuts. One is bare chested and pretty. She is lying on her back and eating. The sugar crumbs fall on her chest. The other girl removes the crumbs, sometimes with her moistened finger, sometimes with her mouth. It is an obvious attempt at an unspeakable practice. The pretty girl has a dogged and sincere expression. The other girl is charmed. Her name is Cords. She kisses her friend’s hair wryly. A helicopter beats toward the coast from inland. It flies low over the girls, turns, hovers. They can see the Navy men inside it. Cords raises her middle finger and waves it stiffly. The chopper clatters angrily above them.

  To the north, a train is moving toward the town. Everything is amiss on southern trains. There is no ice water. There is no meat, no flowers. There is no service at all. The train does not speed but it’s never not arrived. There’s no timetable available but it is never late. The train bears doom and Daddy through a swamp. Part of the swamp is burning. There’s a smell of toast. People are filing into the dining car.

  The sun moves up a mite, startling no one. Tradesmen sit on the curbs outside convenience stores and eat their snacks of raisins. In the hospital, the new babies are wheeled out of the nurseries for their feedings. They are like fancy pastries offered in their aluminum cart. The mothers in the wards try to be clever with one another but what is there to think? Down in the basement, in the emergency room, a few college students are being given tetanus shots by a moody intern. The intern is brooding because he is monorchid. The college girl that he had had a date with the evening before had been discomfited when he had pulled off his boxer shorts. She had been coolly disapproving throughout, but her surprise had not curbed her speech. “Well, that’s really interesting,” she had said. “At school, they’re always putting the vegetables on my plate that look like a man’s parts and everyone teases me about this, but never in my life have I ever seen anything that could be construed to look like that.” He had bought her all the shrimp she could eat and then he had bought her five brandy alexanders and listened to her ballad of interminable immutable opinions. She was a girl with a great deal of gorgeous wavy hair and she wore expensive clothes. Her aunt owned the controlling interest in the country’s most popular baking soda. He learned that her aunt had sent her to Venice in, as luck would have it, the year of the flood. “It was beyond belief,” she had told him, “I couldn’t buy Tampax. No one anywhere had Tampax.” She was so beautiful and he had taken her back to his apartment and pulled off his boxer shorts. “Well, that’s really amazing,” she had said, but not in a special way.

  The intern angrily inoculates another student and entertains grisly notions. His pati
ents have punctured and scraped themselves with nails and chicken wire while building the floats for the college’s big Homecoming parade. The injured are predominantly waffle-thighed energetic girls with dazzling and insincere smiles. The floats are lined up in a dead-end street, covered with parachutes, waiting for tomorrow.

  The sun is getting white and old. Grady double-clutches as he rounds a corner on the woods road. He slows still further and the Jaguar thuds across an old wooden bridge. A boy about his age is fishing with a drop line. The river is purple with water hyacinths. The boy’s car, a broken-down Ford with a smashed rear fender, is parked on the bank. OUCH is painted on the fender. Grady chews on the sweet end of a blade of grass. He enters the town and finds a parking space before a movie theatre. There are no pictures on the poster advertising the film. There are black stars painted on the sidewalk. The day yawns before Grady. He might go to a movie, perhaps not today but soon. He feels aimless and wasteful and anthropomorphic. The theatre seems a greater orphan than he. The walls are mildewed. The entranceway smells like a recent excavation. Grady moves off, combing his hair with his hands.

  The morning’s almost behind us and loss is the less to notice. A group of 4-H children are sitting on a bench outside a supermarket, drinking chocolate milk. One of the little girls raised the steer that brought top price at the county fair. They have just returned from a packing plant. One of the children says, “There was your old Scoobie-Doo hanging there.” “There he was.” The little girl giggles.

  Noon is opening to your touch. Two ladies in Day-glo housedresses are driven into the Garden of Repose by a small man whose smooth head is barely visible over the car’s seat. The Garden has no headstones or vain statuary. It is a deep and grassy reprieve on Main Street, dotted with handsome trees. The car stops. Its occupants scan the impressive acreage. The women get slowly out. One holds a piece of paper but its information seems useless. The traffic files by on the street. The living are kept at bay from the dead by a hedge of oleander. It is highly toxic but attractive. Children have been poisoned by carrying the flowers around in their mouths at play. It makes an efficient hedge. Behind it there is almost silence. The women wobble on their high-heeled shoes. One sings a few words of an old gospel hymn:

  “But none of the ransomed ever knew

  How deep were the waters crossed,

  Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through

  Ere he found his sheep that was lost.”

  She coughs. They are Baptists come with a pot of geraniums for a distant relation. An attendant floats by, seated on a purring motor. They extend the paper to him. He studies it and turns around in the seat of his mower, pointing in the direction of a tree that’s been pruned to a profile of an agonized prayer. The women wobble off and place their plant on the ground. Its color is lost in the brilliance of the grass.

  Be grateful that everyone’s accounted for. Intentions are being pursued although nothing is being presently instigated. Everything began a long time ago.

  5

  … Imagine the happiness of voyaging there to spend our lives together. That’s not mine. I’m doing my lessons. Translating. Poorly, but pretty all the same. Actually, I’m considered quite good at this re-rendering, a talent that grows in direct proportion to one’s life. You can imagine how troubled I was to discover, and only recently, that Father’s scripture is based on consonants, the vowels in the original Hebrew not being clearly indicated. It’s clear the problem there, although in itself, it explains almost everything. To love to our hearts content, to love and die in the land which is the image of you. My ear, however, is terrible. As is my tongue. In France, I would sound cretinous. I would be misunderstood. My simplest request would be denied through fear and puzzlement.

  You know the old joke—a gentleman goes into a store and wants to buy une capote noire out of respect for his recently departed wife. Oh, they still laugh at that one, you bet. I first heard it at the age of nine, a little darling with a bottle of valve oil and a coloring book in her trumpet case, the only girl in the band. We were playing patriotic songs and the story was rendered interminably at the time by the Exalted Ruler of Sebago Lake Lodge of Elks, B.P.O.E. No. 614. It was not intended for our ears of course. Even if it was, how could we have understood it? I’m just recollecting the moment is all.

  I played second and almost never had the melody. The boy who played first later blew off his lap on the Fourth of July.

  Aimer à loisir. Lovely, isn’t it. I’m dawdling on the porch swing of the sorority house. A sister lies folded messily on the other end, reading a volume on necessary proteins and table settings. She has pimples on her upended thighs but her face is as smooth as a waxed car bonnet. Under her blouse, she has rigged a complex padded harness to her bra so that the sweat won’t show. The sun’s like lemon juice, splashed across the sky. It’s so prevalent, it’s really nowhere to be seen.

  The sister is eating maraschino cherries from a jar. I have told her many times that they’ll be the end of her. They’re our only words with one another. I tell her that because of them, someday, someone will sadly have to cut it all out—sphincter, kidney and ovaries. Inside, she’ll be all smushy like a pear. She disagrees. She likes them because they have no pits. The porch is littered with ants and stems.

  I’m having difficulty ton souvenir en moi luit comme un otensoir. I close the book and idly watch the avenue that winds up into the college buildings. I am content here, warm and dopey from the sun. Inside the house, the fans are turned on and small balls of dust and hair float out the open door. The light pours through the leaves of the orange trees. The mail is delivered. The housemother appears, collects the letters and sorts them. She turns her head carefully and then swivels her shoulders around after it. It is as though she had bones webbed in her throat. I get no mail. No one knows where I am. The housemother has received a tiny box of detergent and a Corn Flakes coupon. She’s enormous. Which brings to mind, “Inside every fat man is a thin man trying to get out” … which I’ve never understood. Not only that, I would go so far as to say that it isn’t even true. It’s not a question of getting out at all. One’s true nature must be considered. It’s a question of performing one’s role.

  The housemother’s dog is eating ants. She pries him away with her foot and they re-enter the house side by side. Her dress is as big as a bedsheet. As Father said, it is not we who live but the god who lives within us. The housemother and her skinny god retire.

  I swing on the swing. I’m a little bored but that’s acceptable enough. It’s my second season here. I’m a fugitive, you might say. A vacationer from the future. I’m taking time off and may never take it on again. I’m getting my strength back and don’t want to discuss it. I’m in an awkward position, you see. The first thought I had as a child was not an enlightened one, thus all my subsequent thoughts have been untrue. I’m doing very well now though, thank you. I’m getting back my sense of reality. In the sorority house, the girls wash one another’s hair and play cards. Bridge, which is supposed to be good for the mind. We have parties and dances and so on, and we have meetings in the cellar which are conducted according to parliamentary procedure. Our colors are maroon and white, our pin an inverted triangle, a sliver of diamond at each tip—moral, social, intellectual, good deeds, femininity, order—a plastic pubis, respected by none. Our motto is

  THAT WE MAY BE PURE ENOUGH FOR HIM

  All the sisters fuck like bunnies.

  They work out after supper, splashing and panting. Trying to find themselves. I’ve tripped across them many a night, practicing. A rolling eye, a shaking wrist, a tapping foot … It’s enough to scare the pure yell out of you, the earnestness with which they go about it.

  They tried once to bring a boy in, to service us all. The first of every month, along with the bills and the grocery order. A pleasant enough boy, though his nostrils were overlarge. The hairs blew like wheat as he’d come down for a kiss. Distracting. And there was a whistling noise, a soun
d like plumbing. I don’t know. The sisters complained and soon ceased to use him altogether. It just didn’t work out. These girls have to be in love, after all. They kept him on but he grew surly. This was before my time. Now he’s gone. And we’re back to the old mitt and hiss.

  I’ve been away for a year and a day, just like in the fairy tales. That first month, the heat was marvelous. I was fainting constantly. My soul cringed before it, my heart sweated and shrunk in my chest. I became all matter, lush and blameless, turning into the sun. I had been the perfect child—motherless—and now I was the ideal young woman. All tanned meat, carefree and compliant. Yet I find myself performing as he would want me to, though I hardly ever dwell on Father any more. I use the doggerel, of course, which can’t be helped. But he is so constant! His pursuit in my head and my heart stops only long enough to show me that it is going on still.

  Yes, I’m going into my second year. Like the alcoholic, I’ll age myself through abstinence. I’ve even learned a harmless thing or two. In the summer, I worked in the dirtiest little Dairi-Whip in the South. The practices that went on there! My God. I left to become a cocktail waitress in one of the town’s finest restaurants. Where even more terrible things occurred. Why, I’ve heard them pissing in the Rhine wine. Jizz in the béchamel. Running sores in the cherry flan. I let it all ride. Who am I to bubble the globe of the ordinary life? My only concern was that Father would enter and demand to be served. He sent his surrogates, I know, but never himself. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this, they’d say. Actually, I’ve never seen a man who resembles him in any way, but if Father’s the Shepherd, then we’re all his willing lambs.

  You’ve a nice face, dear, they’d say. You bring to mind a girl I loved once and lost, and what are you doing after this place closes and you’ve washed your lovely hands?