The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “I know how to check the oil,” Gloria said.

  “How about an electrical problem? Would you know how to fix an electrical problem?”

  “No!” Gloria yelled.

  Gwendal was quiet. She stared at her fat knees.

  “I’m going to take a bath,” Gloria said.

  She went into the bathroom and shut the door. The tile was turquoise and the stopper to the tub hung on a chain. This was the Motel Lark, she thought. She dropped the rubber stopper in the drain and ran the water. A few tiles were missing and the wall showed a gray, failed adhesive. She wanted to say something but even that wasn’t it. She didn’t want to say anything. She wanted to realize something she couldn’t say. She heard a voice, it must have been Gwendal’s, in the bedroom. Gloria lay down in the tub. The water wasn’t as warm as she expected. Your silence is no deterrent to me, Gloria, the voice said. She reached for the hot-water faucet but it ran in cold. If she let it run, it might get warm, she thought. That’s what they say. Or again, that might be it.

  Health

  Pammy is in an unpleasant Texas city, the city where she was born, in the month of her twelfth birthday. It is cold and cloudy. Soon it will rain. The rain will wash the film of ash off the car she is traveling in, volcanic ash that has drifted across the Gulf of Mexico all the way from the Yucatán. Pammy is a stocky blue-eyed blonde, a daughter being taken in her father’s car to her tanning lesson.

  This is her father’s joke. She is being taken to a tanning session, twenty-five minutes long. She had requested this for her birthday, ten tanning sessions in a health spa. She had also asked for and received new wheels for her skates. They are purple Rannallis. She had dyed her stoppers to match although the stoppers were a duller, cruder purple. Pammy wants to be a speed skater but worries that she doesn’t have the personality for it. “You’ve gotta have gravel in your gut to be in speed,” her coach said. Pammy has mastered the duck walk but still doesn’t have a good, smooth crossover, and sometimes she fears that she never will.

  Pammy and her father, Morris, are following a truck that is carrying a jumble of television sets. There is a twenty-four-inch console facing them on the open tailgate, restrained by rope, with a bullet hole in the exact center of the screen.

  Morris drinks coffee from a plastic-lidded cup that fits into a bracket mounted just beneath the car’s radio. Pammy has a friend, Wanda, whose stepfather has the same kind of plastic cup in his car, but he drinks bourbon and water from his. Wanda had been adopted when she was two months old. Pammy is relieved that neither her father nor Marge, her mother, drinks. Sometimes they have wine. On her birthday, even Pammy had wine with dinner. Marge and Morris seldom argue and she is grateful for this. This morning, however, she had seen them quarrel. Once again, her mother had borrowed her father’s hairbrush and left long, brown hairs in it. Her father had brushed them out with a comb over the clean kitchen sink. Her father had left a nest of brown hair in the white sink.

  In the car, the radio is playing a song called “Tainted Love,” a song Morris likes to refer to as “Rancid Love.” The radio plays constantly when Pammy and her father drive anywhere. Morris is a good driver. He enjoys driving still, after years and years of it. Pammy looks forward to learning how to drive now, but after a few years, who knows? She can’t imagine it being that enjoyable after a while. Her father is skillful here, on the freeways and streets, and on the terrifying, wide two-lane highways and narrow mountain roads in Mexico, and even on the rutted, soiled beaches of the Gulf Coast. One weekend, earlier that spring, Morris had rented a Jeep in Corpus Christi and he and Pammy and Marge had driven the length of Padre Island. They sped across the sand, the only people for miles and miles. There was plastic everywhere.

  “You will see a lot of plastic,” the man who rented them the Jeep said, “but it is plastic from all over the world.”

  Morris had given Pammy a driving lesson in the Jeep. He taught her how to shift smoothly, how to synchronize acceleration with the depression and release of the clutch. “There’s a way to do things right,” Morris told her, and when he said this she was filled with a sort of fear. They were just words, she knew, words that anybody could use, but behind words were always things, sometimes things you could never tell anyone, certainly no one you loved, frightening things that weren’t even true.

  “I’m sick of being behind this truck,” Morris says. The screen of the injured television looks like dirty water. Morris pulls to the curb beside a Japanese market. Pammy stares into the market, where shoppers wait in line at a cash register. Many of the women wear scarves on their heads. In school, in social studies class, she is reading eyewitness accounts of the aftermath of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. She reads about young girls running from their melting city, their hair burned off, their burned skin in loose folds, crying, “Stupid Americans.” Morris sips his coffee, then turns the car back onto the street now free from fatally wounded television sets.

  Pammy gazes at the backs of her hands, which are tan but not, she feels, quite tan enough. They are a dusky peach color. This will be her fifth tanning lesson. In the health spa, there are ten colored photographs on the wall showing a woman in a bikini, a pale woman being transformed into a tanned woman. In the last photograph she has plucked the bikini slightly away from her hip bone to expose a sliver of white skin and she is smiling down at the sliver.

  Pammy tans well. Without a tan, her face seems grainy and uneven for she has freckles and rather large pores. Tanning draws her together, completes her. She has had all kinds of tans—golden tans, pool tans, even a Florida tan that looked yellow back in Texas. She had brought all her friends the same present from Florida—small plywood crates filled with tiny oranges that were actually chewing gum. The finest tan Pammy has ever had, however, was in Mexico six months ago. She went there with her parents for two weeks and had gotten the truly remarkable tan and also tuberculosis. This has caused some tension between Morris and Marge as it had been Morris’s idea to swim at the spas in the mountains rather than in the pools at the more established hotels. It was believed that Pammy had become infected at one particular public spa just outside the small dusty town where they had gone to buy tiles, tiles of a dusky orange with blue rays flowing from the center that are now in the kitchen of their home, where each morning Pammy drinks her juice and takes three hundred milligrams of isoniazid.

  “Here we are,” Morris says. The health spa is in a small, concrete-block building with white columns, salvaged from the wrecking of a mansion, adorning the front. Along the street there are gift shops, palmists and an exterminating company. This was not the company that had tented Wanda’s house for termites. That had been another company. When Pammy was in Mexico getting tuberculosis, Wanda and her parents had gone to San Antonio for a week while their house was being tented. When they returned, they’d found a dead robber in the living room, with the things he was stealing piled neatly nearby. He had died from inhaling the deadly gas used by the exterminators.

  “Mommy will pick you up,” Morris says. “She has a class this afternoon so she might be a little late. Just stay inside until she comes.”

  Morris kisses her on the cheek. He treats her like a child. He treats Marge like a mother, her mother.

  Marge is thirty-five but still a student. She takes courses in art history and film at one of the city’s universities, the same university where Morris teaches petroleum science. Years ago when Marge had first been a student, before she met Morris or Pammy was born, she had been in Spain, in a museum studying a Goya, and a piece of the painting had fallen at her feet. She had quickly placed it in her pocket and now has it on her bureau in a small glass box. It is a wedge of greenish violet paint, as large as a thumbnail. It is from one of Goya’s nudes.

  Pammy gets out of the car and goes into the health spa. There is no equipment here except for the tanning beds, twelve of them in eight small rooms. Pammy has never had to share a room with anyone. If asked to, she would probably say no, hop
ing this wouldn’t hurt the other person’s feelings. The receptionist is an old, vigorous woman behind a scratched metal desk, wearing a black jumpsuit and feather earrings. Behind her are shelves of powders and pills in squat brown bottles with names like DYNAMIC STAMINA BUILDER and DYNAMIC SUPER STRESS-END and LIVER CONCENTRATE ENERGIZER.

  The receptionist’s name is Aurora. Pammy thinks the name is magnificent and is surprised that it belongs to such an old woman. Aurora leads her to one of the rooms at the rear of the building. The room has a mirror, a sink, a small stool, a white rotating fan and the bed, a long bronze coffin-like apparatus with a lid. Pammy is always startled when she sees the bed with its frosted ultraviolet tubes, its black vinyl headrest. In the next room, someone coughs. Pammy imagines people lying in all the rooms, wrapped in white light, lying quietly as though they were being rested for a long, long journey. Aurora takes a spray bottle of disinfectant and a scrap of toweling from the counter above the sink and cleans the surface of the bed. She twists the timer and the light leaps out.

  “There you are, honey,” Aurora says. She pats Pammy on the shoulder and leaves.

  Pammy pushes off her sandals and undresses quickly. She leaves her clothes in a heap, her sweatshirt on top of the pile. Her sweatshirt is white with a transfer of a skater on the back. The skater is a man wearing a helmet and kneepads, side-surfing and goofy-footed. She lies down and with her left hand pulls the lid to within a foot of the bed’s cool surface. She can see the closed door and the heap of clothing and her feet. Pammy considers her feet to be her ugliest feature. They are skinny and the toes are too far apart. She and Wanda had painted their toes the same color, but Wanda’s feet were pretty and hers were not. Pammy thought her feet looked like they belonged to a dead person and there wasn’t anything she could do about them. She closes her eyes.

  Wanda, who reads a lot, told Pammy that tuberculosis was a romantic disease, one suffered only by artists and poets and “highly sensitive individuals.”

  “Oh, yeah,” her stepfather had said. “Tuberculosis has mucho cachet.”

  Wanda’s stepfather is always joking, Pammy thinks. She feels Wanda’s parents are pleasant enough but she’s always a little uncomfortable around them. Wanda wasn’t the first child they adopted. There had been another baby, but it was learned that the baby’s background had been misrepresented. Or perhaps it had been a boring baby. In any case the baby had been returned and they got Wanda. Pammy doesn’t think Wanda’s parents are very steadfast. She is surprised that they don’t make Wanda nervous.

  The tanning bed is warm but not uncomfortably so. Pammy lies with her arms straight by her sides, palms down. She hears voices in the hall and footsteps. When she first began coming to the health spa, she was afraid that someone would open the door to the room she was in by mistake. She imagined exactly what it would be like. She would see the door open abruptly out of the corner of her eye, then someone would say “Sorry” and the door would close again. But this had not happened. The voices pass by.

  Pammy thinks of Snow White lying in her glass coffin. The queen had deceived her how many times? Three? She had been in disguise, but still. And then Snow White had choked on an apple. In the restaurants she sometimes goes to with her parents there are posters on the walls that show a person choking and another person trying to save him.

  Snow White lay in a glass coffin, not naked of course but in a gown, watched over by dwarfs. But surely they had not been real dwarfs. That was just a word that had been given to them.

  When Pammy had told Morris that tuberculosis was a romantic disease, he said, “There’s nothing romantic about it. Besides, you don’t have it.”

  It seems to be a fact that she both has and doesn’t have tuberculosis. Pammy had been given the tuberculin skin test along with her classmates when she began school in the fall and within forty-eight hours had a large swelling on her arm.

  “Now that you’ve come in contact with it, you don’t have to worry about getting it,” the pediatrician had said in his office, smiling.

  “You mean the infection constitutes immunity,” Marge said.

  “Not exactly,” the pediatrician said, shaking his head, still smiling.

  Her lungs are clear. She is not ill but has an illness. The germs are in her body but in a resting state, still alive though rendered powerless. Outwardly, she is the same, but within, a great drama has taken place and Pammy feels herself in possession of a bright, secret and unspeakable knowledge.

  She knows other things too, things that would break her parents’ hearts, common, ugly, easy things. She knows a girl in school who stole money from her mother’s purse and bought a personal massager. She knows another girl whose brother likes to wear her clothes. She knows a boy who threw a can of motor oil at his father and knocked him unconscious.

  Pammy stretches. Her head tingles. Her body is about a foot and a half off the floor and appears almost gray in the glare from the tubes. She has heard of pills you could take to acquire a tan. Just take two pills a day and after twenty days you’d have a wonderful tan that could be maintained by continuing to take the pills. You ordered them from Canada. It was some kind of food-coloring substance. How gross, Pammy thinks. When she had been little she bought a quarter of an acre of land in Canada by mail for fifty cents. That was two years ago.

  Pammy hears voices from the room next to hers, coming through the thin wall. A woman talking rapidly says, “Pete went up to Detroit two days ago to visit his brother who’s dying up there in the hospital. Cancer. The brother’s always been a nasty type, very unpleasant. Younger than Pete and always mean. Tried to commit suicide twice. Then he learns he has cancer and decides he doesn’t want to die. Carries on and on. Is miserable to everyone. Puts the whole family through hell, but nothing can be done about it, he’s dying of cancer. So Pete goes up to see him his last days in the hospital and you know what happens? Pete’s wallet gets stolen. Right out of a dying man’s room. Five hundred dollars in cash and all our credit cards. That was yesterday. What a day.”

  Another woman says, “If it’s not one thing, it’s something else.”

  Pammy coughs. She doesn’t want to hear other people’s voices. It is as though they are throwing away junk, the way some people use words, as though one word were as good as another.

  “Things happen so abruptly anymore,” the woman says. “You know what I mean?”

  Pammy does not listen and does not open her eyes for if she did she would see this odd bright room with her clothes in a heap and herself lying motionless and naked. She does not open her eyes because she prefers imagining that she is levitating on a stage in a coil of pure energy. If one thought purely enough, one could create one’s own truth. That’s how people accomplished astral travel, walked over burning coals, cured warts. There was a girl in Pammy’s class at school, Bonnie Black, a small owlish-looking girl who was a Christian Scientist. She raised rabbits and showed them at fairs, and was always wearing the ribbons they had won to school, pinned to her blouse. She had warts all over both hands, but one day Pammy noticed that the warts were gone and Bonnie Black told her they’d disappeared after she clearly realized that in her true being as God’s reflection, she couldn’t have warts.

  It seemed that people were better off when they could concentrate on something, hold something in their mind for a long time and really believe it. Pammy had once seen a radical skater putting on a show at the opening of a shopping mall. He leapt over cars and pumped up the sides of buildings. He did flips and spins. A disc jockey who was set up for the day in the parking lot interviewed him. “I’m really impressed with your performance,” the disc jockey said, “and I’m impressed that you never fall. Why don’t you fall?” The skater was a thin boy in baggy cutoff jeans. “I don’t fall,” the boy said, looking hard at the microphone, “because I’ve got a deep respect for the concrete surface and because when I make a miscalculation, instead of falling I turn it into a new trick.”

  Pammy thinks it is wonderful
that the boy was able to tell himself something that would keep him from thinking he might fall.

  The door to the room opened. Pammy had heard the turning of the knob. At first she lies without opening her eyes, willing the sound of the door shutting, but she hears nothing, only the ticking of the bed’s timer. She swings her head quickly to the side and looks at the door. A man is standing there, staring at her. She presses her right hand into a fist and lays it between her legs. She puts her left arm across her breasts.

  “What?” she says to the figure, frightened. In an instant she is almost panting with fear. She feels the repetition of something painful and known, but she has not known this, not ever. The figure says nothing and pulls the door shut. With a flurry of rapid ticking, the timer stops. The harsh lights of the bed go out.

  Pammy pushes the lid back and hurriedly gets up. She dresses hastily and smooths her hair with her fingers. She looks at herself in the mirror, her lips parted. Her teeth are white behind her pale lips. She stares at herself. She can be looked at and not discovered. She can speak and not be known. She opens the door and enters the hall. There is no one there. The hall is so narrow that by spreading her arms she can touch the walls with her fingertips. In the reception area by Aurora’s desk, there are three people, a stoop-shouldered young woman and two men. The woman was signing up for a month of unlimited tanning, which meant that after the basic monthly fee she only had to pay a dollar a visit. She takes her checkbook out of a soiled handbag, which is made out of some silvery material, and writes a check. The men look comfortable lounging in the chairs, their legs stretched out. They know each other, Pammy guesses, but do not know the woman. One of them has dark spiky hair like a wet animal’s. The other wears a tight red T-shirt. Neither is the man she had seen in the doorway.