The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “Tell me the whole book,” Tommy said.

  “Emily Brontë wrote Wuthering Heights. I’ll tell you a story about her.”

  He picked at a scab on his knee.

  “Emily Brontë had a bulldog named Keeper that she loved. His only bad habit was sleeping on the beds. The housekeeper complained about this and Emily said that if she ever found him sleeping on the clean white beds again, she would beat him. So Emily found him one evening sleeping on a clean white bed and she dragged him off and pushed him in a corner and beat him with her fists. She punished him until his eyes were swelled up and he was bloody and half blind, and after she punished him, then she nursed him back to health.”

  Tommy rocked on his chair, watching Audrey. He stopped picking. The scab didn’t want to come off.

  “She had a harsh life,” Audrey said, “but she was fair.”

  “Did she tell him later that she was sorry,” Tommy asked.

  “No. Absolutely not.”

  “Did Keeper forgive her?”

  “Dogs can’t think that way.”

  “I’ve never had a dog,” Tommy said.

  “I had a dog when I was little. She was a golden retriever. She looked exactly like all golden retrievers. Her size was the same, the color of her fur, and her large, sad eyes. Her behavior was the same. She was devoted, expectant and yet resigned. Do you see what I mean? But I liked her a lot. She was special to me. When she died, I wanted them to bury her under my window, but you know what they said to me? They said, The best place to bury a dog is in your heart.”

  She looked at him until he finally said, “That’s right.”

  “That’s a crock,” she said. “A crock of you know what. Don’t agree to so much stuff. You’ve got to watch out.”

  “All right,” he said, and shook his head.

  Sometimes, Audrey visited him at school. He told her when his recess was and she would walk over to the playground and talk with him through the playground’s chain-link fence. Once she brought a girlfriend with her. Her name was Flan and she wore large clothes, a long, wide skirt and a big sweater with little animals running in rows. There were only parts of the little animals where the body of the sweater met the sleeves and collar.

  “He’s like a little doll, like, isn’t he,” Flan said.

  “Now don’t go and scare him,” Audrey said.

  Flan had a cold. She held little wadded tissues to her mouth and eyes. The tissues were blue and pink and green and she would dab at her face with them and push them back in her pockets but one spilled out and fluttered in the weeds beside the school-yard fence. It didn’t blow away and stayed there, fluttering.

  “I ain’t scaring him. Where’d you get all them moles around your neck?” she said to Tommy.

  “What do you mean, where’d he get them?” Audrey said. “He didn’t get them from anywhere.”

  “Don’t you worry about them moles?” the girl persisted.

  “Naw,” Tommy said.

  “You’re a brave little guy, aren’t you,” Flan said. “There’s other stuff, I know. I’m not saying it’s all moles.” She tugged at the front of the frightful sweater. “Audrey gave me this sweater. She stole it. You know how she steals things and after a while she puts them back? But I like this so it’s not going to get put back.”

  Tommy gazed unhappily at the sweater and then at Audrey.

  “Sometimes putting stuff back is the best part,” Audrey said. “Sometimes it isn’t.”

  “Audrey can steal anything,” Flan said.

  “Can she steal a house,” Tommy asked.

  “He’s so cute,” Flan shrieked.

  “I gotta go in,” Tommy said. Behind him, in the school yard, the children were playing a peculiar game, running, crouching, calling. There didn’t seem to be any rules. He trotted toward them and heard Flan say, “He’s a cute little guy, isn’t he.”

  Tommy never saw Flan again and he was glad of that. He asked Audrey if Flan was in the last generation.

  “Yes,” Audrey said. “She sure is.”

  “Is my brother in the last generation too?”

  “Technically he is, of course,” Audrey said. “But he’s not really. He has too much stuff.”

  “I have stuff,” Tommy said. He had his little cars. “You’ve given me stuff.”

  “But you don’t have possessions because what I gave you I stole. Anyway, you’ll stop caring about that soon. You’ll forget all about it, but Walter, Jr., really likes possessions and he likes to think about what he’s going to do. He has his truck and his barbells and those shirts with the pearl buttons.”

  “He wants a pair of lizard boots for his birthday,” Tommy said.

  “Isn’t that pathetic?” Audrey said.

  Every night, Walter would come home from work, scrub down his hands and arms, set the table, pour the milk. The boys sat on either side of him. The chair where their mother used to sit looked out at the yard, at a woodpile there.

  “Men,” Walter began, “when I was your age, I didn’t know…” He shook his head, his eyes filling with tears.

  He had been forgetting to empty the bucket in the space above Tommy’s room. A pale stain had spread across the ceiling. Tommy showed it to Audrey.

  “That’s nice,” she said, “the shape, all dappled brown and yellow like that, but it doesn’t really tell you anything. It’s just part of the doomed reality all around us.” She climbed up and brought the bucket down.

  “A monk would take this water and walk into the desert and pour it over a dry and broken stick there,” she said. “That’s why people become monks, because they get sick of being around doomed reality all the time.”

  “Let’s be monks,” he said.

  “Monks love solitude,” Audrey said. “They love solitude more than anything. When monks started out, long, long ago, they were waiting for the end of time.”

  “But the end of time didn’t happen, did it,” Tommy asked.

  “It was too soon then. They didn’t know what we know today.”

  She wore silver sandals. Once she had broken a strap on the sandal and Tommy had fixed it with his Hot Stuff instant glue.

  “Someday we could have a little boy just like you,” she said, “and we’d call him Tommy Two.”

  But he was not fond of this idea. He was afraid that it would come out of him somehow, this Tommy Two, that he would make it and be ashamed. So, together, they dismissed the notion.

  One day, Walter, Jr., said to him, “Look, Audrey shouldn’t be hanging around here all the time. She’s weird. She’s no mommy, believe me.”

  “I don’t need a mommy,” Tommy said.

  “She’s mad at me and she’s trying to get back at me through you. She’s just practicing on you. You don’t want to be practiced on, do you? She’s just a very unhappy person.”

  “I’m unhappy,” Tommy said.

  “You need to get out and play some games. Soccer, maybe.”

  “Why?” Tommy said. “I don’t like Daddy.”

  “You’re just trying that out,” Walter, Jr., said. “You like him well enough.”

  “Audrey and me are the last generation and you’re not,” Tommy said.

  “What are you talking about?”

  “You should be but you’re not. Nothing can be done about it.”

  “Let’s drive around in the truck,” Walter, Jr., said.

  Tommy still enjoyed riding around in the truck. They passed by the houses their mother had cleaned. They looked all right. Someone else was cleaning them now.

  “You don’t look good,” Walter, Jr., said. “You’re too pale. You mope around all the time.”

  Inside the truck, the needle of the black compass on the dashboard trembled. The compass box was filled with what seemed like water. Maybe it was water. Tommy was looking at everything carefully, but trying not to think about it. Audrey was teaching him how to do this. He remembered at some point to turn toward his brother and smile, and this made his brother feel better, it
was clear.

  The winter nights were cool. Audrey and Tommy still sat in their chairs at dusk on the porch but now they wrapped themselves in blankets.

  “Walter, Jr., is dating a lot anymore,” Audrey said. “It’s nice we have these evenings to ourselves but we should take little trips, you know? I have a lot to show you. Have you ever been to the TV tower north of town?”

  The father, Walter, was already in bed. He worked and slept. He’d saved the fragments of soap his wife had left behind in the shower. He had wrapped them in tissue paper and placed them in a drawer. But he was sleeping in the middle of the bed these nights, hardly aware of it.

  “No,” Tommy said. “Is it in the woods?”

  “It’s a lot taller than the woods and it’s not far away from here. It’s called Tall Timbers. It’s right smack in the middle of birds’ migration routes. Thousands of birds run into it every year, all kinds of them. We can go out there and look at the birds.”

  Tommy was puzzled. “Are the birds dead?”

  “Yes,” she said. “In an eleven-year period, thirty thousand birds of a hundred and seventy species have been found at the base of the tower.”

  “Why don’t they move it?”

  “They don’t do things like that,” Audrey said. “It would never occur to them.”

  He did not want to see the birds around the tower. “Let’s go,” he said anyway.

  “We’ll go in the spring. That’s when the birds change latitudes. That’s when they move from one place to another. There’s a little tiny warbler bird that used to live around here in the spring, but people haven’t seen it for years. They haven’t found it at the base of any of the transmission towers. They used to find it there, that’s how they knew it wasn’t extinct.”

  “Monks used to live on top of tall towers,” Tommy said, for she had told him this. “If a monk stayed up there, he could keep the birds away, he could wave his arms around or something so they wouldn’t hit.”

  “Monks live in a cool, crystalline half darkness of the mind and heart,” Audrey said. “They couldn’t be bothered with that.”

  They rocked in their chairs on the porch. The porch had been painted a succession of colors. Where the chairs had scraped the wood there was light green, dark green, blue, red. Bugs crawled around the lights.

  “If I got sick, would you stay with me,” Tommy asked.

  “I’m not sure. It would depend.”

  “My mommy would have stayed.”

  “Well, you never know,” Audrey said. “You got to realize mommies get tired. They’re willing to let things go sometimes. They get to thinking and they’re off.”

  “Do you have a mommy,” he asked cautiously.

  “Technically I do,” Audrey said, “but she’s gone as your mommy, actually. Before something’s gone, it had to have been there, right? Even so, I don’t feel any rancor about her. It’s important not to feel rancor.”

  “I don’t feel rancor,” Tommy said.

  Then, one afternoon, Walter came home from his work at the garage and it was as though he had woken from a strange sleep. He didn’t appear startled by his awakening. His days and nights of grief came to an end with a shock no harder than that of a boat’s keel grounding on a river’s shore. He stopped weeping. He put his wife’s things in cardboard boxes and stored the boxes. In fact, he stored them in the space above Tommy’s room.

  “Why’s that girl here all the time,” Walter asked. “She’s not still Walter, Jr.’s girlfriend, is she? She shouldn’t be here all the time.”

  “Audrey’s my friend,” Tommy said.

  “She’s not a nice girl. She’s too old to be your friend.”

  “Then I’m too young to be your friend.”

  “No, honey, you’re my son.”

  “I don’t like you,” Tommy said.

  “You love me but you don’t like me, is that it?” Walter was thinner and cleaner. He spoke cheerfully.

  Tommy considered this. He shook his head.

  At school, at the edge of the playground, Audrey talked through the chain-link fence to Tommy.

  “You know that pretty swamp close by? It’s full of fish, all different kinds. You know how they know?”

  He didn’t.

  “They poison little patches of it. They put out nets and then drop the poison in. It settles in the gills of the fish and suffocates them. The fish pop up to the surface and then they drag them out and classify and weigh and measure each one.”

  “Who?” Tommy said.

  “They do it a couple times a year to see if there’s as many different kinds and as many as before. That’s how they count things. That’s their attitude. They act as though they care about stuff, but they don’t. They’re just pretending.”

  Tommy told her that his father didn’t want her to come over to the house, that he wasn’t supposed to talk to her anymore.

  “The Dad’s back, is he,” Audrey said. “What it is is that he thinks he can start over. That’s pathetic.”

  “What are we going to do?” Tommy said.

  “You shouldn’t listen to him,” Audrey said. “Why are you listening to him? We’re the last generation, there’s something else we’re listening to.”

  They were silent for a while, listening. The other children had gone inside.

  “What is it,” Tommy asked.

  “You’ll recognize it when you hear it. Something will happen, something unusual that we were always prepared for. The Dad’s life has already taken a turn for the worse, it’s obvious. It’s like he’s a stranger now, walking down the wrong road. Do you see what I mean? Or it’s his life that’s like the stranger, standing real still. A stranger standing alongside a dark road, waiting for him to pass.”

  It appeared his father was able to keep Audrey away. Tommy wouldn’t have thought it was possible. He knew his father was powerless, but Audrey wasn’t coming around. Walter moved through the house in his dark, oiled boots, fixing things. He painted the kitchen, restacked the woodpile. He replaced the pipe above the ceiling in Tommy’s room. It had long been accepted that this could not be done, but now it was and it did not leak. The bucket was used now to take ashes from the woodstove. Walter, Jr., had a job in the gym he worked out in. He had long, hard muscles, a distracted air. He worried about girls, about money. He wanted an apartment of his own, in town.

  Tommy lived alone with his father. “Talk to me, Son,” Walter said. “I love you.”

  Tommy said nothing. His father disgusted him a little. He was trying to start over. It was pathetic.

  Tommy only saw Audrey on school days, at recess. He waited by the fence for her in the vitreous, intractable light of the southern afternoon.

  “I had a boy tell me once my nipples were like bowls of Wheaties,” Audrey said.

  “When?” Tommy said. “No.”

  “That’s a simile. Similes are a crock. There’s no more time for similes. There used to be that kind of time, but no more. You shouldn’t see what you’re seeing thinking it looks like something else. They haven’t left us with much but the things that are left should be seen as they are.”

  Some days she did not come by. Then he would see her waiting at the fence, or she would appear suddenly while he was waiting there. But then days passed, more days than there had been before.

  Days with Walter saying, “We need each other, Son. We’re not over this yet. We have to help each other. I need your help.”

  It was suppertime. They were sitting at a table over the last of a meal Walter had put together.

  “I want Audrey back,” Tommy said.

  “Audrey?” Walter looked surprised. “Walter, Jr., heard about what happened to Audrey. She made her bed, as they say, now she’s got to lie in it.” He looked at Tommy, then looked away, dismayed.

  “Who wants you?” Tommy said. “Nobody.”

  Walter rubbed his head with his hands. He looked around the room, at some milk that Tommy had spilled on the floor. The house was empty except for th
em. There were no animals around, nothing. It was all beyond what was possible, he knew.

  In the night, Tommy heard his father moving around, bumping into things, moaning. A glass fell. He heard it breaking for what seemed a long time. The air in the house felt close, sour. He pushed open his bedroom window and felt the air fluttering warmly against his skin. Down along the river, the water popped and smacked against the muddy bank. It was close to the season when he and Audrey could go to the tower where all the birds were. He could feel it in the air. Audrey would come for him from wherever she was, from wherever they had made her go, and they would go to the tower and find the little warbler bird. Then they would know that it still existed because they had found it dead there. He and Audrey would be the ones who would find it. They were the last generation, the ones who would see everything for the last time. That’s what the last generation does.

  Honored Guest

  She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny in the eleventh grade and you had to be careful about this because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol, which of course did nothing at all, but word of it got out and when she came back to school her locker had been broken into and was jammed full of Tylenol. Like, you moron. Under the circumstances, it was amazing that Helen thought of suicide at all. It was seriously not cool. You only made a fool of yourself. And the parents of these people were mocked too. They were considered to be suicide-enhancing, evil and weak, and they were ignored and barely tolerated. This was a small town. Helen didn’t want to make life any harder on her mother than it already was.

  Her mother was dying and she wanted to die at home, which Helen could understand, she understood it perfectly, she’d say, but actually she understood it less well than that and it had become clear it wasn’t even what needed to be understood. Nothing needed to be understood.

  There was a little brass bell on her mother’s bedside table. It was the same little brass bell that had been placed at Helen’s command when she had been a little girl, sick with some harmless little kid’s illness. She had just to reach out her hand and ring the bell and her mother would come or even her father. Her mother never used the bell now and kept it there as sort of a joke, actually. Her mother was not utterly confined to bed. She moved around a bit at night and placed herself, or was placed by others, in other rooms during the day. Occasionally one of the women who had been hired to care for her would even take her for a drive, out to see the icicles or go to the bank window. Her mother’s name was Lenore and sometimes in the night she would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong, urgent voice, and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.