The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “My husband wants to move,” Sarah said.

  “I can understand that, but you’re the real drinker, after all, aren’t you, not him.”

  “I don’t drink anymore,” Sarah said. She looked at the woman dizzily.

  Genevieve was not pretty but she had a clear, strong face. She sat down on the opposite side of the room. “I guess I would like something,” she said. “A glass of water.” Sarah went to the kitchen and poured a glass of Vichy for them both. Her hands shook.

  “We are not strangers to one another,” Genevieve said. “We could be friends.”

  “My first husband always wanted to be friends with my second husband,” Sarah said after a moment. “I could never understand it.” This had somehow seemed analogous when she was saying it but now it did not. “It is not appropriate for us to be friends,” she said.

  Genevieve continued to sit and talk. Sarah found herself concentrating desperately on her articulate, one-sided conversation. She suspected that the words Genevieve was using were codes for other words, terrible words. Genevieve spoke thoughtlessly, dispassionately, with erratic flourishes of language. Sarah couldn’t believe that they were chatting about food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.

  “I have a friend who is a designer,” Genevieve said. “She hopes to make a great deal of money someday. Her work has completely altered her perceptions. Every time she looks at a view, she thinks of sheets. ‘Take out those mountains,’ she will say, ‘lighten that cloud a bit and it would make a great sheet.’ When she looks at the sky, she thinks of lingerie. Now when I look at the sky, I think of earlier, happier times when I’d looked at the sky. I’ve never been in love, have you?”

  “Yes,” Sarah said, “I’m in love.”

  “It’s not a lucky thing, you know, to be in love.”

  There was a soft scuffling at the door and Martha came in. “Hello,” she said. “School was good today. I’m hungry.”

  “Hello, dear,” Genevieve said. To Sarah, she said, “Perhaps we can have lunch sometime.”

  “Who is that?” Martha asked Sarah after Genevieve had left.

  “A neighbor,” Sarah said. “One of Mommy’s friends.”

  —

  When Sarah told Tommy about Genevieve coming to visit her, he said, “It’s harassment. It can be stopped.”

  It was Sunday morning. They had just finished breakfast and Tommy and Martha were drying the dishes and putting them away. Martha was wearing her church-school clothes and she was singing a song she had learned the Sunday before.

  “…I’m going to a Mansion on the Happy Day Express…” she sang.

  Tommy squeezed Martha’s shoulders. “Go get your coat, sweetie,” he said. When the child had gone, he said to Sarah, “Don’t speak to this woman. Don’t allow it to happen again.”

  “We didn’t talk about that.”

  “What else could you talk about? It’s weird.”

  “No one talks about that. No one, ever.”

  Tommy was wearing a corduroy suit and a tie Sarah had never seen before.

  “I’ve done everything I could to protect you, Sarah, to help you straighten yourself out. It was a terrible thing but it’s over. You have to get over it. Now, just don’t see her again. She can’t cause trouble if you don’t speak to her.”

  Sarah stopped looking at Tommy’s tie. She moved her eyes to the potatoes she had peeled and put in a bowl of water.

  Martha came into the kitchen and held on to her father’s arm. Her hair was long and thick, but it was getting darker. It was as though it had never been cut.

  After they left, Sarah put the roast in the oven and went into the living room. The large window was full of the day, a colorless windy day without birds. Sarah sat on the floor and ran her fingers across the smooth, varnished wood. Beneath the expensive flooring was cold cement. Tanks had once lined the walls. Lobsters had crept back and forth across the mossy glass. The phone rang. Sarah didn’t look at it, suspecting it was Genevieve. Then she picked it up.

  “Hello,” said Genevieve. “I thought I might drop by. It’s a bleak day, isn’t it. Cold. Is your family at home?”

  “They go out on Sunday,” Sarah said. “It gives me time to think. My husband takes our daughter to church.”

  “What do you think about?” The woman’s voice seemed far away. Sarah strained to hear her.

  “I’m supposed to cook. When they come back we have a noonday dinner.”

  “I can prepare clams in forty-three different ways,” Genevieve said.

  “This is a roast. A roast pork.”

  “Well, may I come over?”

  “All right,” Sarah said.

  She continued to sit on the floor, waiting for Genevieve, looking at the water beneath the sky. The water on the horizon was a wide, satin ribbon. She wished that she had the courage to swim on such a bitter, winter day. To swim far out and rest, to hesitate and then to return. Her life was dark, unexplored. Her abstinence had drained her. She felt sluggish, robbed. Her body had no freedom.

  She sat, seeing nothing, the terrible calm light of the day around her. The things she remembered were so far away, bathed in a different light. Her life seemed so remote to her. She had sought happiness in someone, knowing she could not find it in herself, and now her heart was strangely hard. She rubbed her head with her hands.

  Her life with Tommy was broken, irreparable. Her life with him was over. His infidelities kept getting mixed up in her mind with the death of the boy, with Tommy’s false admission that he had been driving when the boy died. Sarah couldn’t understand anything. Her life seemed so random, so needlessly constructed and now threatened in a way that did not interest her.

  “Hello,” Genevieve called. She had opened the front door and was standing in the hall. “You didn’t hear my knock.”

  Sarah got up. She was to entertain this woman. She felt anxious, adulterous. The cold rose from Genevieve’s skin and hair. Sarah took her coat and hung it in the closet. The fresh cold smell lingered on her hands.

  Sarah moved into the kitchen. She took a package of rolls out of the freezer.

  “Does your little girl like church,” Genevieve asked.

  “Yes, very much.”

  “It’s a stage,” said Genevieve. “I’m Catholic myself. As a child, I used to be fascinated by the martyrs. I remember a picture of St. Lucy, carrying her eyes like a plate of eggs, and St. Agatha. She carried her breasts on a plate.”

  Sarah said, “I don’t understand what we’re talking about. I know you’re just using these words, that they mean other words, I—”

  “Perhaps we could take your little girl to a movie sometime, a matinee, after she gets out of school.”

  “Her name is Martha,” Sarah said. She saw Martha grown up, her hair cut short once more, taking rolls out of the freezer, waiting.

  “Martha, yes,” Genevieve said. “Have you wanted more children?”

  “No,” Sarah said. Their conversation was illegal, unspeakable. Sarah couldn’t imagine it ever ending. Her fingers tapped against the ice-cube trays. “Would you care for a drink?”

  “A very tall glass of vermouth,” Genevieve said. She was looking at a little picture that Martha had made and Sarah had tacked to the wall. It was a very badly drawn horse. “I wanted children. I wanted to fulfill myself. One can never fulfill oneself. I think it is an impossibility.”

  Sarah made Genevieve’s drink very slowly. She did not make one for herself.

  “When Stevie was Martha’s age, he knew everything about whales. He kept notebooks. Once, on his birthday, I took him to the whaling museum in New Bedford.” She sipped her drink. “It all goes wrong somewhere,” she said. She turned her back on Sarah and went into the other room. Sarah followed her.

  “There are so many phrases for dead, you know,” Genevieve was saying. “The kids think them up, or they come out of music or wars. Stevie had one that he’d use for dead animals and rock stars. He’d say they’d ‘bought the farm.�
� ”

  Sarah nodded. She was pulling and peeling at the nails of her hands.

  “I think it’s pretty creepy. A dark farm, you know. Weedy. Run-down. Broken machinery everywhere. A real job.”

  Sarah raised her head. “You want us to share Martha, don’t you,” she said. “It’s only right, isn’t it?”

  “…the paint blown away, acres and acres of tangled, black land, a broken shutter over the well.”

  Sarah lowered her head again. Her heart was cold, horrified. The reality of the two women, placed by hazard in this room, this bright functional tasteful room that Tommy had created, was being tested. Reality would resist, for days, perhaps weeks, but then it would yield. It would yield to this guest, this visitor, for whom Sarah had made room.

  “Would you join me in another drink?” Genevieve asked. “Then I’ll go.”

  “I mustn’t drink,” Sarah said.

  Genevieve went into the kitchen and poured more vermouth for herself. Sarah could smell the meat cooking. From another room, the clock chimed.

  “You must come to my home soon,” Genevieve said. She did not sit down. Sarah looked at the pale green liquid in the glass.

  “Yes,” Sarah said, “soon.”

  “We must not greet one another on the street, however. People are quick to gossip.”

  “Yes,” Sarah said. “They would condemn us.” She looked heavily at Genevieve, full of misery and submission.

  There was knocking on the door. “Sarah,” Tommy’s voice called, “why is the door locked?” She could see his dark head at the window.

  “I must have thrown the bolt,” Genevieve said. “It’s best to lock your house in the winter, you know. It’s the kids mostly. They get bored. Stevie was a robber once or twice, I’m sure.” She put down her glass, took her coat from the closet and went out. Sarah heard Martha say, “That’s Mommy’s friend.”

  Tommy stood in the doorway and stared at Sarah. “Why was she here? Why did you lock the door?”

  Sarah imagined seeing herself naked. She said, “There are robbers.”

  Tommy said, “If you don’t feel safe here, we’ll move. I’ve been looking at a wonderful place about twenty miles from here, on a cove. It only needs a little work. It will give us more room. There’s a barn, some fence. Martha could have a horse.”

  Sarah looked at him with an intent, halted expression, as though she were listening to a dialogue no one present was engaged in. Finally, she said, “There are robbers. Everything has changed.”

  Escapes

  When I was very small, my father said, “Lizzie, I want to tell you something about your grandfather. Just before he died, he was alive. Fifteen minutes before.”

  I had never known my grandfather. This was the most extraordinary thing I had ever heard about him.

  Still, I said, No.

  “No!” my father said. “What do you mean, ‘No.’ ” He laughed.

  I shook my head.

  “All right,” my father said, “it was one minute before. I thought you were too little to know such things, but I see you’re not. It was even less than a minute. It was one moment before.”

  “Oh, stop teasing her,” my mother said to my father.

  “He’s just teasing you, Lizzie,” my mother said.

  —

  In warm weather once we drove up into the mountains, my mother, my father and I, and stayed for several days at a resort lodge on a lake. In the afternoons, horse races took place in the lodge. The horses were blocks of wood with numbers painted on them, moved from one end of the room to the other by ladies in ball gowns. There was a long pier that led out into the lake and at the end of the pier was a nightclub that had a twenty-foot-tall champagne glass on the roof. At night, someone would pull a switch and neon bubbles would spring out from the lit glass into the black air. I very much wanted such a glass on the roof of our own house and I wanted to be the one who, every night, would turn on the switch. My mother always said about this, “We’ll see.”

  I saw an odd thing once, there in the mountains. I saw my father pretending to be lame. This was in the midst of strangers in the gift shop of the lodge. The shop sold hand-carved canes, among many other things, and when I came in to buy bubble gum in the shape of cigarettes, to which I was devoted, I saw my father hobbling painfully down the aisle, leaning heavily on a dully gleaming yellow cane, his shoulders hunched, one leg turned out at a curious angle. My handsome, healthy father, his face drawn in dreams. He looked at me. And then he looked away as though he did not know me.

  My mother was a drinker. Because my father left us, I assumed he was not a drinker, but this may not have been the case. My mother loved me and was always kind to me. We spent a great deal of time together, my mother and I. This was before I knew how to read. I suspected there was a trick to reading, but I did not know the trick. Written words were something between me and a place I could not go. My mother went back and forth to that place all the time, but couldn’t explain to me exactly what it was like there. I imagined it to be a different place.

  As a very young child, my mother had seen the magician Houdini. Houdini had made an elephant disappear. He had also made an orange tree grow from a seed right on the stage. Bright oranges hung from the tree and he had picked them and thrown them out into the audience. People could eat the oranges or take them home, whatever they wanted.

  “How did he make the elephant disappear,” I asked.

  “He disappeared in a puff of smoke,” my mother said. “Houdini said that even the elephant didn’t know how it was done.”

  “Was it a baby elephant,” I asked.

  My mother sipped her drink. She said that Houdini was more than a magician, he was an escape artist. She said that he could escape from handcuffs and chains and ropes.

  “They put him in straitjackets and locked him in trunks and threw him in swimming pools and rivers and oceans and he escaped,” my mother said. “He escaped from water-filled vaults. He escaped from coffins.”

  I said that I wanted to see Houdini.

  “Oh, Houdini’s dead, Lizzie,” my mother said. “He died a long time ago. A man punched him in the stomach three times and he died.”

  Dead. I asked if he couldn’t get out of being dead.

  “He met his match there,” my mother said.

  She said that he turned a bowl of flowers into a pony who cantered around the stage.

  “He sawed a lady in half too, Lizzie.” Oh, how I wanted to be that lady, sawed in half and then made whole again!

  My mother spoke happily, laughing. We sat at the kitchen table and my mother was drinking from a small glass that rested snugly in her hand. It was my favorite glass too but she never let me drink from it. There were all kinds of glasses in our cupboard but this was the one we both liked. This was in Maine. Outside, in the yard, was our car, which was an old blue convertible.

  “Was there blood,” I asked.

  “No, Lizzie, no. He was a magician!”

  “Did she cry, that lady,” I wanted to know.

  “I don’t think so,” my mother said. “Maybe he hypnotized her first.”

  It was winter. My father had never ridden in the blue convertible, which my mother had bought after he had gone. The car was old then, and was rusted here and there. Beneath the rubber mat on my side, the passenger side, part of the floor had rusted through completely. When we went anywhere in the car, I would sometimes lift up the mat so I could see the road rushing past beneath us and feel the cold round air as it came up through the hole. I would pretend that the coldness was trying to speak to me, in the same way that words written down tried to speak. The air wanted to tell me something, but I didn’t care about it, that’s what I thought. Outside, the car stood in the snow.

  I had a dream about the car. My mother and I were alone together as we always were, linked in our hopeless and uncomprehending love of each other, and we were driving to a house. It seemed to be our destination but we arrived only to move on. We drove again
, always returning to the house, which we would circle and leave, only to arrive at it again. As we drove, the inside of the car grew hair. The hair was gray and it grew and grew. I never told my mother about this dream just as I had never told her about my father leaning on the cane. I was a secretive person. In that way, I was like my mother.

  I wanted to know more about Houdini. “Was Houdini in love,” I asked. “Did he love someone?”

  “Bess,” my mother said. “He loved his wife, Bess.”

  I went and got a glass and poured some ginger ale in it and I sipped my ginger ale as slowly as I had seen my mother sip her drink many, many times. Even then, I had the gestures down. I sat opposite her, very still and quiet, pretending.

  But then I wanted to know if there was magic in the way he loved her. Could he make her disappear. Could he make both of them disappear, was the way I put my question.

  “No one knew anything about Bess except that Houdini loved her,” my mother said. “He never turned their love into loneliness, which would have been beneath him of course.”

  We ate our supper and after supper my mother would have another little bit to drink. Then she would read articles from the newspaper aloud to me.

  “My goodness,” she said, “what a strange story. A hunter shot a bear who was carrying a woman’s pocketbook in its mouth.”

  “Oh, oh,” I cried. I looked at the newspaper and struck it with my fingers. My mother read on, a little oblivious to me. The woman had lost her purse years before on a camping trip. Everything was still inside it, her wallet and her compact and her keys.

  “Oh,” I cried. I thought this was terrible. I was frightened, thinking of my mother’s pocketbook, how she always carried it always, and the poor bear too.

  “Why did the bear want to carry a pocketbook,” I asked.

  My mother looked up from the words in the newspaper. It was as though she had come back into the room I was in.

  “Why, Lizzie,” she said.

  “The poor bear,” I said.

  “Oh, the bear is all right,” my mother said. “The bear got away.”