The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  They would sit frequently in the car, in their house, not going anywhere, looking through the windshield out at the window and through the window to the street. They didn’t invite anyone over for this. Soon, Dwight took to sitting in the car by himself. Dwight was tired. It was taking him a while to bounce back from the carpentry. Lucy saw him there one day behind the wheel, one arm bent and dangling over the glossy door, his eyes shut, his mouth slightly open, his hair as black as she had ever seen it. She couldn’t remember the first time she had noticed him, really noticed him, the way he must have first noticed her when she’d been a baby.

  “I wish you’d stop that, Dwight,” she said.

  He opened his eyes. “You should try this by yourself,” he said. “Just try it and tell me what you think.”

  She sat for some time in the car alone, then went into the kitchen, where Dwight stood, drinking water. It was a gray day, with a gray careless light falling everywhere.

  “I had the tiniest feeling in there that the point being made was that something has robbed this world of its promise,” Lucy said. She did not have a sentimental nature.

  Dwight was holding a glass of water, frowning a little at it. Water poured into the sink and down the drain, part of the same water he was drinking. On the counter was a television set and on the screen men were wheeling two stretchers out of a house and across a lawn and on each stretcher was a long still thing covered in a green cloth. The house was a cement-block house with two metal chairs on the porch with little cushions on them, and under the roof’s overhang a basket of flowers swung.

  “Is this the only channel we ever get?” Lucy said. She turned the water faucet off.

  “It’s the news, Lucy.”

  “I’ve seen this news a hundred times before. It’s always this kind of news.”

  “This is the Sun Belt, Lucy.”

  That he kept saying her name began to irritate her. “Well, Dwight,” she said. “Dwight, Dwight, Dwight.”

  Dwight looked at her mildly and went back to the living room. Lucy trailed after him. They both looked at the car and Lucy said to it, “I’d like an emerald ring. I’d like a baby boy.”

  “You don’t ask it for things, Lucy,” Dwight said.

  “I’d like a Porsche Carrera,” Lucy said to it.

  “Are you crazy or what!” Dwight demanded.

  “I would like a little baby,” she mused.

  “You were a little baby once,” Dwight said.

  “Well, I know that.”

  “So isn’t that enough?”

  She looked at him uneasily, then said, “Do you know what I used to like that you did? You’d say, ‘That’s my wife’s favorite color…’ or ‘That’s just what my wife says…’ ” Dwight gazed at her from his big, inky eyes. “And of course your wife was me!” she exclaimed. “I always thought that was kind of sexy.”

  “We’re not talking sex anymore, Lucy,” he said. She blushed.

  Dwight got into the Thunderbird and rested his hands on the wheel. She saw his fingers pressing against the horn rim but it made no sound.

  “I don’t think this car should be in the house,” Lucy said, still fiercely blushing.

  “It’s a place where I can think, Lucy.”

  “But it’s in the middle of the living room! It takes up practically the whole living room!”

  “A man’s got to think, Lucy. A man’s got to prepare for things.”

  “Where did you think before we got married?” she said crossly.

  “All over, Lucy. I thought of you everywhere. You were part of everything.”

  Lucy did not want to be part of everything. She did not want to be part of another woman’s kissing, for example. She did not want to be part of Daisy’s leg, which she was certain, in their time, had played its part and been something Dwight had paid attention to. She did not want to be part of a great many things that she could mention.

  “I don’t want to be part of everything,” she said.

  “Life is different from when I was young and you were a little baby,” Dwight said.

  “I never did want to be part of everything,” she said excitedly.

  Dwight worked his shoulders back into the seat and stared out the window.

  “Maybe the man who had this car before died of a broken heart, did you ever think of that?” Lucy said. When he said nothing, she said, “I don’t want to start waiting on you again, Dwight.” Her face had cooled off now.

  “You wait the way you have to,” Dwight said. “You’ve got to know what you want while you’re waiting.” He patted the seat beside him and smiled at her. It wasn’t just a question of moving this used-up thing out again, she knew that. Time wasn’t moving sideways in the manner it had always seemed to her to move but was climbing upward, then falling back, then lurching in a circle like some poisoned, damaged thing. Eventually, she sat down next to him. She looked through the glass at the other glass, then past that.

  “It’s raining,” Lucy said.

  There was a light rain falling, a warm spring rain. As she watched, it fell more quickly. It was silverish, but as it fell faster it appeared less and less like rain and she could almost hear it rattling as it struck the street.

  The Skater

  Annie and Tom and Molly are looking at boarding schools. Molly is the applicant, fourteen years old. Annie and Tom are the mom and dad. This is how they are referred to by the admissions directors. “Now if Mom and Dad would just make themselves comfortable while we steal Molly away for a moment…” Molly is stolen away and Tom and Annie drink coffee. There are cookies on a plate. Colored slides are flashed on a screen showing children earnestly learning and growing and caring through the seasons. These things have been captured. Rather, it’s clear that’s what they’re getting at. The children’s faces blur in Tom’s mind. And all those autumn leaves. All those laboratories and playing fields and bell towers.

  It is winter and there is snow on the ground. They have flown in from California and rented a car. Their plan is to see seven New England boarding schools in five days. Icicles hang from the admissions building. Tom gazes at them. They are lovely and refractive. They are formed and then they vanish. Tom looks away.

  Annie is sitting on the other side of the room, puzzling over a mathematics problem. There are sheets of problems all over the waiting room. These are to keep parents and kids on their toes as they wait. The cold, algebraic problems are presented in little stories. Five times as many girls as boys are taking music lessons or trees are growing at different rates or ladies in a bridge club are lying about their ages. The characters and situations are invented only to be exiled to measurement. Watching Annie search for solutions makes Tom’s heart ache. He remembers a class he took once himself, almost twenty years ago, a class in myth. In mythical stories, it seems, there were two ways to disaster. One of them was to answer an unanswerable question. The other was to fail to answer an answerable question.

  Down a corridor there are several shut doors and behind one is Molly. Molly is their living child. Tom and Annie’s other child, Martha, has been dead a year. Martha was one year older than Molly. Now they’re the same age. Martha choked to death in her room on a piece of bread. It was early in the morning and she was getting ready for school. The radio was playing and two disc jockeys called the Breakfast Flakes chattered away between songs.

  —

  The weather is bad, the roads are slippery. From the backseat, Molly says, “He asked what my favorite ice cream was and I said, ‘Quarterback Crunch.’ Then he asked who was President of the United States when the school was founded and I said, ‘No one.’ Wasn’t that good?”

  “I hate trick questions,” Annie says.

  “Did you like the school,” Tom asks.

  “Yeah,” Molly says.

  “What did you like best about it?”

  “I liked how our guide—you know, Peter—just walked right across the street that goes through the campus and the cars just stopped. You and Mom w
ere kind of hanging back, looking both ways and all, but Peter and I just trucked right across.”

  Molly was chewing gum that smelled like oranges.

  “Peter was cute,” Molly says.

  —

  Tom and Annie and Molly sit around a small table in their motel room. Snow accumulates beyond the room’s walls. They are nowhere. The brochure that the school sent them states that the school is located thirty-five miles from Boston. Nowhere! They are all exhausted and merely sit there regarding their beverages. The television set is chained to the wall. This is indicative, Tom thinks, of considerable suspicion on the part of the management. There was also a four-dollar deposit on the room key. The management, when Tom checked in, was in the person of a child about Molly’s age, a boy eating from a bag of potato chips and doing his homework.

  “There’s a kind of light that glows in the bottom of the water in an atomic reactor that exists nowhere else, do you know that?” the boy said to Tom.

  “Interesting,” Tom said.

  “Yeah,” the boy said, and marked the book he was reading with his pencil.

  The motel room is darkly paneled and there is a painting of a moose between the two large beds. The moose is knee-deep in a lake with his head raised. Annie goes into the bathroom and washes her hands and face. It was her idea that Molly go away to school. She wants Molly to be free. She doesn’t want her to be afraid. She fears that she is making her afraid, as she herself is afraid. Annie hears Molly and Tom talking in the other room and then she hears Molly laugh. She raises her fingers to the window frame and feels the cold seeping in. She adjusts the lid to the toilet tank. It shifts slightly. She washes her hands again. She goes into the room and sits on one of the beds.

  “What are you laughing about?” she says. She means to be offhand, but her words come out heavily.

  “Did you see the size of that girl’s radio in the dorm room we visited?” Molly says, laughing. “It was the biggest radio I’d ever seen. I told Daddy there was a real person lying in it, singing.” Molly giggles. She pulls her turtleneck sweater up to just below her eyes.

  Annie laughs, then she thinks she has laughed at something terrible, the idea of someone lying trapped and singing. She raises her hands to her mouth. She had not seen a radio large enough to hold anyone. She saw children in classes, in laboratories in some brightly painted basement. The children were dissecting sheep’s eyes. “Every winter term in biology you’ve got to dissect sheep’s eyes,” their guide said wearily. “The colors are really nice, though.” She saw sacks of laundry tumbled down a stairwell with names stenciled on them. Now she tries not to see a radio large enough to hold anyone singing.

  —

  At night, Tom drives in his dreams. He dreams of ice, of slick treachery. All night he fiercely holds the wheel and turns in the direction of the skid.

  In the morning when he returns the key, the boy has been replaced by an old man with liver spots the size of quarters on his hands. Tom thinks of asking where the boy is, but then realizes he must be in school learning about eerie, deathly light. The bills the old man returns to Tom are soft as cloth.

  —

  In California, they live in a canyon. Martha’s room is not situated with a glimpse of the ocean like some of the other rooms. It faces a rocky ledge where owls nest. The canyon is cold and full of small birds and bitter-smelling shrubs. The sun moves quickly through it. When the rocks are touched by the sun, they steam. All of Martha’s things remain in her room—the radio, the posters and mirrors and books. It is a “guest” room now, although no one ever refers to it as such. They still call it “Martha’s room.” But it has become a guest room, even though there are never any guests.

  —

  The rental car is without distinction. It is a four-door sedan with automatic transmission and a poor turning radius. Martha would have been mortified by it. Martha had a boyfriend who, with his brothers, owned a monster truck. The Super Swamper tires were as tall as Martha, and all the driver of an ordinary car would see when it passed by was its colorful undercarriage with its huge shock and suspension coils, its long yellow stabilizers. For hours on a Saturday they would wallow in sloughs and rumble and pitch across stony creek beds, and then they would wash and wax the truck or, as James, the boyfriend, would say, dazzle the hog. The truck’s name was Bear. Tom and Annie didn’t care for James, and they hated and feared Bear. Martha loved Bear. She wore a red and white peaked cap with MONSTER TRUCK stenciled on it. After Martha died, Molly put the cap on once or twice. She thought it would help her feel closer to Martha but it didn’t. The sweatband smelled slightly of shampoo, but it was just a cap.

  —

  Tom pulls into the frozen field that is the parking lot for the Northwall School. The admissions office is very cold. The receptionist is wearing an old worn chesterfield coat and a scarf. Someone is playing a hesitant and plaintive melody on a piano in one of the nearby rooms. They are shown the woodlot, the cafeteria and the arts department, where people are hammering out their own silver bracelets. They are shown the language department, where a class is doing tarot card readings in French. They pass a room and hear a man’s voice say, “Matter is a sort of blindness.”

  While Molly is being interviewed, Tom and Annie walk to the barn. The girls are beautiful in this school. The boys look a little dull. Two boys run past them, both wearing jeans and denim jackets. Their hair is short and their ears are red. They appear to be pretending they’re in a drama that’s being filmed. They dart and feint. One stumbles into a building while the other crouches outside, tossing his head and scowling, throwing an imaginary knife from hand to hand.

  Annie tries a door to the barn but it is latched from the inside. She walks around the barn in her high heels. The hem of her coat dangles. She wears gloves on her pale hands. Tom walks beside her with his hands in his pockets. A flock of starlings fly overhead in an oddly tight formation. A hawk flies above them. The hawk will not fall upon them, clenched like this. If one would separate from the flock, then the hawk could fall.

  “I don’t know about this ‘matter is a sort of blindness’ place,” Tom says. “It’s not what I had in mind.”

  Annie laughs but she’s not paying attention. She wants to get into the huge barn. She tugs at another door. Dirt smears the palms of her gloves. Then, suddenly, the wanting leaves her face.

  “Martha would like this school, wouldn’t she?” she says.

  “We don’t know,” Tom says. “Please don’t, Annie.”

  “I feel that I’ve lived my whole life in one corner of a room,” Annie says. “That’s the problem. It’s just having always been in this one corner. And now I can’t see anything. I don’t even know the room, do you see what I’m saying?”

  Tom nods but he doesn’t see the room. The sadness in him has become his blood, his life flowing in him. There’s no room for him.

  In the admissions building, Molly sits in a wooden chair facing her interviewer, Miss Plum, who teaches composition and cross-country skiing.

  “You asked if I believe in aluminum,” Molly asks.

  “Yes, dear. Uh-huh, I did,” Miss Plum says.

  “Well, I suppose I’d have to believe in it,” Molly says.

  —

  Annie has a large cardboard file that holds compartmentalized information on the schools they’re visiting. The rules and regulations for one school are put together in what is meant to look like an American passport. In the car’s backseat, Molly flips through the book, annoyed.

  “You can’t do anything in this place!” she says. “The things on your walls have to be framed and you can only cover sixty percent of the wall space. You can’t wear jeans.” Molly gasps. “And you have to eat breakfast!” Molly tosses the small book onto the floor, on top of the ice scraper. She gazes glumly out the window at an orchard. She is sick of the cold. She is sick of discussing her “interests.” White fields curve by. Her life is out there somewhere, fleeing from her while she is in the backseat of
this stupid car. Her life is never going to be hers. She thinks of it raining, back home in the canyon, rain falling upon rain. Her legs itch and her scalp itches. She has never been so bored. She thinks that the worst thing she has done so far in her life was to lie in a hot bath one night, smoking a cigarette and saying I hate God. That was the very worst thing. It’s pathetic. She bangs her knees irritably against the front seat.

  “You want to send me far enough away,” she says to her parents. “I mean, it’s the other side of the dumb continent. Maybe I don’t even want to do this,” she says.

  She looks at the thick sky holding back snow. She doesn’t hate God anymore. She doesn’t even think about God. Anybody who would let a kid choke on a piece of bread…

  —

  The next school has chapel four times a week and an indoor hockey rink. In the chapel, two fir trees are held in wooden boxes. Wires attached to the ceiling hold them upright. It is several weeks before Christmas.

  “When are you going to decorate them,” Molly asks Shirley, her guide. Shirley is handsome and rather horrible. The soles of her rubber boots are a bright, horrible orange. She looks at Molly.

  “We don’t decorate the trees in the chapel,” she says.

  Molly looks at the tree stumps bolted into the wooden boxes. Beads of sap pearl golden on the bark.

  “This is a very old chapel,” Shirley says. “See those pillars? They look like marble, but they’re just pine, painted to look like marble.” She isn’t being friendly, she’s just saying what she knows. They walk out of the chapel, Shirley soundlessly, on her horrible orange soles.

  “Do you play hockey,” she asks.

  “No,” Molly says.

  “Why not?”

  “I like my teeth,” Molly says.