by Joy Williams
“An orgasm and seventy-five cents will get you into the silent pictures …”
We return to the movies. The gin is all gone. Upon going back, we pass a pimpled boy, running. And then a gentleman in a white smock and elevator shoes. We piece it together, Grady and I. The gent’s a druggist, making a prescription. Everyone is yelling. The boy skids around a corner and a bar of soap falls out of his sock. The pursuers seem satisfied with this and turn back, although no one picks up the soap.
As Grady parks the car, I slip behind the pneumatic door of the movie theatre. Everything is holy and works upon the principle of exhaustion. In and out. Open and close. Win or lose. No one can gain from this experience. The door closes behind Grady too. We can’t see; the floor slopes. Once again I’m guided to my seat. I feel smug but nervous for I didn’t have to pay. I came in after the show had started. The cashier had turned her head. I never paid for anything.
And there on the screen is an empty beach. Blurred. High green water. Puddle of dark pine trees on the sand. There may even be some snow, strings of ice in the grasses. A crib is set up beneath one of the pines. Solidly constructed. Fine craftsmanship. Brahm’s First Piano Concerto is playing. The part that goes
da taa taatee ta
What a foundation that crib has! The legs are set in concrete that lies buried but may very well run the entire length of the coast. This was made to last! It’s very cold. Of course you cannot feel this, but you can tell simply by observing the elderly Dürer hare at the lower left, in the wind slough behind a dune. His eyes are frozen shut. There’s no one there. Everything is white, brown and green—indigestible colors. There’s nothing in the crib but surely with a little imagination, a baby could be placed there.
The film has been terribly preserved. It’s Delluc’s The Silence. And something’s wrong with the projector. At this rate it will be tomorrow before we get out of here. And how do we get out of here? Ingress or egress. Who’s to give permission? Ahhh, what I thought was the cause is instead the consequence. Here.
The sisters assemble themselves in the middle of the room, obliterating the Persian rug. I stay in my bunk even though I will be fined for this. Fifty cents for the first absence, one dollar thereafter. I owe the sisterhood a fortune. The girls would like to send this money to the Indians in the Everglades but they don’t. They bought a Waring blender. Before that it was a fake brass fixture for the jane. Sweet God, the “jane.” Some things I refuse to bear.
The girls link arms and start to chant
“Lean Mean Doreen
Our Jungle Queen”
It’s all a lie of course. Doreen’s a dish and brainless as a cracker box. She comes leaping out in a rattan bikini and does a few bumps and grinds. The skit is very flashy, very complex. Cords created every detail. It involves extensive props, including a rented leopard and a burning bush. Ha. Pardon. A gyneco-holy term. A smutty synergism. Rather it’s a burning hoop or something through which Doreen will emerge while the sisters wail
“She’ll eat up your heart
And that’s just the start
Doreen will make you burrrnn.”
I slip out of bed unnoticed and go down to the kitchen. The room is cool and empty. The floor’s waxed. The day’s recipes are taped to the butcher block table. There are some fresh greens there with dirt still on them. Very nice. And some red and green peppers. And a bull’s tongue, all black with trauma at the tip.
I go outside and ask directions to the hospital from a passerby. As the days go on, I am able to find shorter routes.
Good-by, good-by.
27
OH THAT MINE HEAD WERE WATERS AND MINE EYES A FOUNTAIN OF TEARS THAT MIGHT WEEP DAY AND NIGHT …
But the stupor was all that was mine. Only the stupor.
Now Daddy … always … told me that my ruinous life was quickly and immediately determined. He did not elaborate. Now I wouldn’t say that I agreed. I was a simple child! Daddy used to say, Beware the wrath of the Lamb but daddys say that, you know. It was just a little joke. But I was a simple child. I was always straightening my drawers, for instance. I was always arranging, arranging … Now it’s true I suffered from lack of sleep. I dreamed but did not sleep. Daddy was mistaken there. He saw me pretending, I suppose. They say all children maintain this, but I want to tell you, I never slept. I would be the last to say I saw it all, but never was I sleeping.
It’s true I often had fevers. Daddy told me I had fevers but he always brought me back to health. It was the house that did it. The house was always cold and I was chilled. The elements were always falling in the rooms. Or some of the rooms. The rooms I liked to play in. Snow, and in the summer it was rain that fell on me.
But I was a simple child. One incident is very clear. I was swimming with Daddy, splashing in the shallows while he watched, and little fish swam into my hair and caught there, you know, in my tangled hair, for Father did not always brush my hair, and the little fish had died by the time that we discovered them. It’s very clear. It seems I was unconsolable.
But I was tired, so tired. It seems I could hardly keep my eyes open. All night, I would walk through the rooms. And I would hear the sounds of living, those unmistakable sounds of growing, you know, as all things do, toward their death. Obscure, obscene sounds. None of it ever spoke to me. They told me I would walk through the rooms the way that Mother used to. It surprises me now. What did we think was possible? What chance of finding anything that was ours? I’d never do it now, I’ll tell you. I wasn’t much of a child, to be truthful, even then.
There was nothing in the house then as I walked. Daddy had taken it all away. They tell me Daddy wanted to encourage no bad memories. But isn’t that the hope of the smallest of us … to become another’s memory? But, regardless, everything was nothing in those rooms. So much broken and so little repaired … The snow, as I’ve said, would fall in on us while we danced, melting on our faces …
And things were always out of my hands. I have always been grateful for that.
28
The dream is always the same.
A woman is riding sidesaddle. There is no space involved, no scenery. Just a woman in a long black gown and sweet old-fashioned beribboned hat riding a galloping horse. She is holding a baby in one arm and there is a dog running beside them. It is quite apparent that the dog is going to leap upon the child and eat it. I always imagine that if I could successfully preclude this intimation, I could alter everything. The dog jumps upon the infant and eats it. Or rather, he rests on the woman’s lap and tears busily at the blanket in which the infant is held. Everyone seems calm about this. That is, the woman seems calm and I, who dream the woman.
It never varies. If I were not so knowledgeable about what was going to happen, the next scene would not result. It is obviously Dream Number Fifty-Eight with its natural sequel Forty. A hand extends a bunch of balloons to a figure whose face is turned away from me. The figure reaches for the bright balloons but fails to grasp them. They float up and out of the dream’s framework. No one dares to follow them with their eyes, least of all me.
It is obviously my non-viable dream. Although it always wakes me up, it brings me calm. Not any satisfaction and not my approbation but a calm. Certainly a calm of sorts.
I turn on the radio. Someone has changed the station.
“… a good man
Preaching in the bottom-land”
I garrote the song with a twist, but cannot find my chum, my crush, my sweetness, my answer action man. I twiddle with the dial for hours. I cannot pick him up. At last I hear an old man’s voice. A very old man. He is polishing stones in his rock tumbler. He refuses to turn it off while speaking. That is why the transmission is so bad.
“Yes,” “Action Line” says. “In answer to your question. The differences between rising every morning at 6 and at 8 in the course of 40 years amounts to 29,200 hours or 3 years, 121 days and 16 hours which are equal to 8 hours a day for 10 years. So that rising at 6 will be the equivale
nt to adding 10 years to your life.”
He seems a little repulsed at the thought.
29
I am lying on my bed. They’ve taken away the sheets to be washed. It doesn’t bother me. They expect me to become excited about that! They’re welcome to everything. It’s just my little radio I care to retain … it is looped ingeniously among the bedsprings. It’s all I have now. I was never much for having things. I was never very good at it.
Sometimes my answer action man comes to me after signing off. He is a dwarf with a vast soft head. Quite horrible.
I can’t make love now, I tell him.
Yes, he says.
I’m going to have a baby.
I understand, he says.
Now I know this is bad, his coming to see me like that, perching at the foot of my bed. He, and the fellows off the bottles, all the smiling men … It’s bad but it could be worse. They could stay longer. I could really insist that I had seen them. It’s bad all right, their being there, but it could be worse.
The sleeping room is empty except for Doreen and Cords who are lying on a bottom bunk several rows away from me. They are not doing much, just lying there, talking low. All the other sisters are down in the cellar, in the activation room, imparting the secrets of Catherine, our virgin patron lady, to nine pledges. They are all sitting on board and block benches in that stinking windowless hole, grasping hands, waist to waist, sculpted toe to pumiced heel, all in white and unadorned, listening to a sister who has an undisclosed, undiagnosed fungus and is not at her best this evening. Her runny voice swims up the fresh air ducts to me.
“… Catherine is said of catha, that is All, and ruina, that is falling, for all the edifice of the devil fell all from her. For the edifice of pride fell from her by the humility that she had and the edifice of fleshly desire fell from her by her virginity, and worldly desire fell from her by her despising of all worldly things. Or Catherine might be said to be like a little chain, for she made a chain of good works by which she mounted into heaven, and that chain or ladder had four steps which are innocence of work, cleanness of body, despising of vanity and saying of truth.…
“Yeh, yeh, yeh,” says Cords.
“Ha,” says Doreen. She is rubbing Tanfastic on her aureolas.
“Why aren’t you down in the activation room?” Cords says to me.
“You should be there too,” I retort wittily.
Sometimes my Answer Action man comes to me before signing on. He is never still. He has the high metabolism and temperature of a bird.
I can’t do it now, I tell him.
You needn’t make excuses to me, he says.
I’m seven months, twelve days along.
I understand, he says.
Two fat bronze palmetto bugs waddle across the mattress and over my ankles.
Your group should pledge hedgehogs instead of girls, he says. They love cockroaches and can be taught to answer to their names.
Whatever their names might be, I say.
Cords is speaking to me. “You look terrible. You’re nothing but skin and bones.”
“What you should do,” Doreen murmurs, “is make yourself a nice milk shake and put some yeast into it.”
“I’m fine,” I say.
“You’re terrific,” Cords says. “We’re going to have to call someone in to pour you off that bed and into a Mason jar.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re wasting away,” Cords insists. “You’re getting to be all conscience. Isn’t she just one skinny conscience, Doreen?”
“Uh-huh,” Doreen says.
“You’d really better put some weight on. Go down and spoon some jelly or something.”
“Ha,” Doreen says. She tosses her beautiful hair. It falls across Cords’ arm.
I lie on the bed and watch them. The sister’s voice rises up through the duct. The fungus is rising in her throat like blood, I would imagine.
“We here tonight have a responsibility to our womanhood,” she is saying.
Forty or so milky southern bosoms swell with pride and purpose, I would imagine.
“When is she going to get to the part about the wheel?” I say to no one in particular.
“She’s never going to get to the part about the wheel,” Cords replies. “It’s been dropped.”
“Wheel?” Doreen says. She is still dipping into the Tanfastic. “The wheel of love?”
“Four wheels of iron, all covered with razors which detrenched our poor Catherine over and over again and cut her up horribly in torment,” Cords elaborates helpfully.
“Ichh,” Doreen says.
“You like that part do you, Kate?”
“Oh certainly,” I say.
“Personally,” Doreen says, “I’ve never seen myself passing on.
I look at them. They’ve both taken off all their clothes and are lying there, not moving much.
“You’re jammed in neutral gear,” I say pleasantly.
“You should get out more,” Cords says just as kindly. “Loosen up. Circulate.”
I get up all the time. I eat and drink out. I go to the hospital. I see my friend Corinthian. At this very moment, I am getting out of bed.
“When you see ‘Pellicle Pete,’ tell him seventy-five dollars. Seventy-five dollars for ten minutes.”
“Better than a model in New York City,” Doreen says reverently.
“I’m not going to be speaking with Corinthian,” I say. “You’re crazy to want a leopard. That’s out of hand. Why don’t you settle for a great Dane or something?”
“I’ve seen myself walking sometimes, you know on one of those fantastic beaches in Mexico? And I’m wearing a silver lamé tunic like and silver earrings, and I’m barefoot in the shining surf.” Doreen is talking quickly as though she’s on to something.
“Doreen’s an eclectic,” Cords acknowledges.
“And I’m walking with two great Danes,” Doreen finishes breathlessly.
“No leopard.” I am walking downstairs.
“Oh, it has to be a leopard,” Cords calls after me.
Down in the kitchen, I open the refrigerator. There is nothing there but the prize steer of the county fair, rearranged in neat and mysterious packages. Daily, the cook pushes her hand into the cold. The result is uncertain. A gristly Ouija. It could be pot roast or brisket, eye of the round or sirloin tip. The steer has invaded their lives. He is everywhere. There is no room for the sisters’ diet-cola or for their underwear on sizzling mornings. They have been eating him for weeks.
From the cellar, the voice drones on. Someone whistles. The secret whistle, for god sakes. Such cheery girls. I had high hopes of becoming one of the bunch. And of course I am. One cannot deactivate. It’s not in the rules. Every girl remembers her activation day. Excuse me. There was sun. Later it set.
30
Corinthian is standing on a stepladder, changing the fly strips at Bryant’s Beasts.
“I have never seen a car like that one must of been,” Corinthian says.
I left the Jaguar on the curve. I have not paid the towing fee. I have not gone to Al Glick’s where it has been taken. The highway does not pass Glick’s. Only the railroad tracks. My head hurts now from the crashing. It didn’t hurt then but it does now. Glass is still breaking inside my head and my Grady is saying, no mistake.
“Never,” Corinthian says. The night is warm and there is juke-box music coming from the bar. All the windows are open in the menagerie and I can see people dancing in the bar. smooth.
I am sitting beside the shark pen. The water is oily and smooth.
“I can’t understand how you know if they are still alive or not,” I say, looking at the water. It shines off the cages, dappling the bars.
Corinthian shrugs. “I don’t even know how many are in there any more. Bryant puts new ones in that the fishermen give him and then he takes some out as well, so there’s no way of telling. I’ve stopped feeding them because the fish were all floating back up.” He climbs d
own the ladder and comes over to the pen. “I don’t believe there’s anything in there at all,” he says.
I look at the water. The South is full of things like this, I suddenly realize. Rotted and broken-down handmade cages and hutches and wire-wrapped boxes and tanks. Perched or suspended or shored up. Outside filling stations or drive-in restaurants or boatyards or vegetable stands.
And empty. Maybe a pan in it or a stick. And the quality of the disquietude is very complete and precise and centuries old.
“Never will touch a man’s head,” Corinthian mutters. “Will bite off the rest of him save for his head.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Sharks,” he says mildly.
“Don’t be a ghoul,” I say.
“It’s not me being ghoulish,” he says. “It’s the facts that are. Things are out to get a body, that’s the truth. There are some who’ve got just one thing waiting for them and there are others who’ve got ten, twenty things waiting for them. That’s just the truth.”
I don’t say anything.
“Once there were a lot of things I wanted to do, but lately I can’t remember any of them,” Corinthian says. He is drinking from a warm bottle of Coca-Cola.
I look at the animals fitfully. The cages are all occupied and the alarm one feels at this is accurate and ancient too. There is a kestrel here. The windhover. I cannot look at him. It is his eye that will not allow it. Not my own. The windhover. How free he must have been.
“Look here,” Corinthian says, “that box of books you brought here that time. Were they all yours?”
“Yes,” I say. My obstreperous retiree. My deep-sea diver with the butterfly stroke …
“Look here,” Corinthian says listlessly. He has gone into another room, a room where Bryant keeps the feed and hoses and brooms, and he comes back and hands me a book. It is Heart of Darkness. It falls open to a marked-up page. EXTERMINATE ALL THE BRUTES, someone has circled deeply in ink.
