The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  She was taken immediately to a chair in front of a long mirror. The women in the chairs beside her were all looking into the mirror while their hairdressers stared into it too and cut their hair. Everyone was chatting and relaxed, but Helen didn’t know how to do this, even this, this simple thing.

  Sometimes Helen dreamed that she was her own daughter. She was free, self-absorbed, unfamiliar. Helen took up very little of her thoughts. But she could not pretend this.

  She looked at the woman beside her, who had long wet hair and was smoking a cigarette. Above her shoe was a black parole anklet.

  “These things don’t work at all,” the woman said. “I could take the damn thing off but I think it’s kind of stylish. Often I do take the damn thing off and it’s in one place and I’m in another. Quite another.”

  “What did you do?” Helen asked.

  “I didn’t do anything!” the woman bawled. Then she laughed. She dropped her cigarette in the cup of coffee she was holding.

  The washing, the cutting, the drying, all this took a long time. Her hairdresser was an Asian named Mickey. “How old do you think I am,” Mickey asked.

  “Twenty,” Helen said. She did not look at her, or herself, in the mirror. She kept her eyes slightly unfocused, the way a dog would.

  “I’m thirty-five,” Mickey said delightedly. “I am one-eighteenth Ainu. Do you know anything about the Ainu?”

  Helen knew it wasn’t necessary to reply to this. Someone several chairs away said in disbelief, “She’s naming the baby what?”

  “The Ainu are an aboriginal people of north Japan. Up until a little while ago they used to kill a bear in a sacred ritual each year. The anthropologists were wild about this ritual and were disappointed when they quit, but here goes, I will share it with you. At the end of each winter they’d catch a bear cub and give it to a woman to nurse. Wow, that’s something! After it was weaned, it was given wonderful food and petted and played with. It was caged, but in all other respects it was treated as an honored guest. But the day always came when the leader of the village would come and tell the bear sorrowfully that it must be killed though they loved it dearly. This was this long oration, this part. Then everyone dragged the bear from its cage with ropes, tied it to a stake, shot it with blunt arrows that merely tortured it, then scissored its neck between two poles where it slowly strangled, after which they skinned it, decapitated it and offered the severed head some of its own flesh. What do you think, do you think they knew what they were doing?”

  “Was there something more to it than that?” Helen said. “Did something come after that?” She really was a serious girl. Her head burned from the hair dryer Mickey was wielding dramatically.

  “These are my people!” Mickey said, ignoring her. “You’ve come a long way, baby! Maine or Bust!” She sounded bitter. She turned off the dryer, removed Helen’s smock and with a little brush whisked her shoulders. “Ask for Mickey another time,” she said. “That’s me. Happy Holidays.”

  Helen paid and walked out into the cold. The cold felt delicious on her head. “An honored guest,” she said aloud. To live was like being an honored guest. The thought was outside her, large and calm. Then you were no longer an honored guest. The thought turned away from her and faded.

  Her mother was watching television with the sound off when Helen got home. “That’s a nice haircut,” her mother said. “Now don’t touch it, don’t pull at it like that for god’s sake. It’s pretty. You’re pretty.”

  It was a ghastly haircut, really. Helen’s large ears seemed to float, no longer quite attached to her head. Lenore gazed quietly at her.

  “Mom,” Helen said, “do you know there’s a patron saint of television?”

  Lenore thought this was hysterical.

  “It’s true,” Helen said. “St. Clare.”

  Lenore wondered how long it would take for Helen’s hair to grow back.

  Later they were eating ice cream. They were both in their nightgowns. Helen was reading a Russian novel. She loved Russian novels. Everyone was so emotional, so tormented. They clutched their heads, they fainted, they swooned, they galloped around. The snow. Russian snow had made Maine snow puny to Helen, meaningless.

  “This ice cream tastes bad,” her mother said. “It tastes like bleach or something.” Some foul odor crept up her throat. Helen continued to read. Anyway, what were they doing eating ice cream in the middle of winter? Lenore wondered. It was laziness. Something was creeping quietly all through her. She’d like to jump out of her skin, she really would.

  “You now,” she said, “I believe that if Jesus walked into this house this minute, you wouldn’t even raise your eyes.”

  Helen bit her lip and reluctantly put down the book. “Oh, Mom,” she said.

  “And maybe you’d be right. I bet he’d lack charisma. I’d bet my last dollar on it. The only reason he was charismatic before was that those people lived in a prerational time.”

  “Jesus isn’t going to walk in here, Mom, come on,” Helen said.

  “Well, something is, something big. You’d better be ready for it.” She was angry. “You’ve got the harder road,” she said finally. “You’ve got to behave in a way you won’t be afraid to remember, but you know what my road is? My road is the new road.”

  Like everyone, Lenore had a dread of being alone in the world, forgotten by God, overlooked. There were billions upon billions of people, after all, it wasn’t out of the question.

  “The new road?” Helen asked.

  “Oh, there’s nothing new about it,” Lenore said, annoyed. She stroked her face with her hands. She shouldn’t be doing this to Helen, her little Helen. But Helen was so docile. She wasn’t fighting this! You had to fight.

  “Go back to what you were doing,” Lenore said. “You were reading, you were concentrating. I wish I could concentrate. My mind just goes from one thing to another. Do you know what I was thinking of, did I ever tell you this? When I was still well, before I went to the doctor? I was in a department store looking at a coat and I must have stepped in front of this woman who was looking at coats too. I had no idea…and she just started to stare at me. I was very aware of it but I ignored it for a long time, I even moved away. But she followed me, still staring. Until I finally looked at her. She still stared but now she was looking through me, through me, and she began talking to someone, resuming some conversation with whoever was with her, and all the while she was staring at me to show how insignificant I was, how utterly insignificant…” Lenore leaned toward Helen but then drew back, dizzy. “And I felt cursed. I felt as though she’d cursed me.”

  “What a weirdo,” Helen said.

  “I wonder where she picked that up,” Lenore said. “I’d like to see her again. I’d like to murder her.”

  “I would too,” Helen said. “I really would.”

  “No, murder’s too good for that one,” Lenore said. “Murder’s for the elect. I think of murder…sometimes I think I wish someone would murder me. Out of the blue, without warning, for no reason. I wouldn’t believe it was happening. It would be like not dying at all.”

  Helen sat in her nightgown. She felt cold. People had written books about death. No one knew what they were talking about, of course.

  “Oh, I’m tired of talk,” Lenore said. “I don’t want to talk anymore. I’m tired of thinking about it. Why do we have to think about it all the time! One of those philosophers said that Death was the Big Thinker. It thinks the instant that was your life, right down to the bottom of it.”

  “Which one,” Helen asked.

  “Which one what?”

  “Which philosopher?”

  “I can’t recall,” Lenore said. Sometimes Helen amused her, she really amused her.

  Lenore didn’t dream that night. She lay in bed panting. She wasn’t ready but there was nothing left to be done. The day before the girl had washed and dried the bedsheets and before she put them on again she had ironed them. Ironed them! They were just delicious, still de
licious. It was the girl who loved to iron. She’d iron anything. What’s-her-name. Lenore got up and moved through the rooms of the house uncertainly. She could hardly keep her balance. Then she went down into the cellar. Her heart was pounding, it felt wet and small in her chest. She looked at the oil gauge on the furnace. It was a little over one-quarter full. She wasn’t going to order any more, she’d just see what happened. She barely had the strength to get back upstairs. She turned on the little lamp that was on the breakfast table and sat in her chair there, waiting for Helen. She saw dog hairs on the floor, gathering together, drifting across the tiles.

  Helen felt sick but she would drag herself to school. Her throat was sore. She heated up honey in a pan and sipped it with a spoon.

  “I’m going to just stay put today,” Lenore said.

  “That’s good, Mom, just take it easy. You’ve been doing too much.” Helen’s forehead shone with sweat. She buttoned up her sweater with trembling fingers.

  “Do you have a cold?” her mother said. “Where did you get a cold? Stay home. The nurse who’s coming this afternoon, she can take a look at you and write a prescription. Look at you, you’re sweating. You’ve probably got a fever.” She wanted to weep for her little Helen.

  “I have a test today, Mom,” Helen said.

  “A test,” Lenore marveled. She laughed. “Take them now but don’t take them later, they don’t do you any good later.”

  Helen wiped at her face with a dish towel.

  “My god, a dish towel!” Lenore said. “What’s wrong with you? My god, what’s to become of you!”

  Startled, Helen dropped the towel. She almost expected to see her face on it. That was what had alarmed her mother so, that Helen had wiped off her own face. Anyone knew better than to do that…She felt faint. She was thinking of the test, of taking it in a few hours. She took a fresh dish towel from a drawer and put it on the rack.

  “What if I die today?” Lenore said suddenly. “I want you to be with me. My god, I don’t want to be alone.”

  “All this week there are tests,” Helen said.

  “Why don’t I wait, then?” Lenore said.

  Tears ran down Helen’s cheeks. She stood there stubbornly, looking at her mother.

  “You were always able to turn them on and off,” Lenore said, “just like a faucet. Crocodile tears.” But with a moan she clutched her. Then she pulled away. “We have to wash these things,” she said. “We can’t just leave them in the sink.” She seized the smudged glass she’d used to swallow her pills and rinsed it in running water. She held it up to the window and it slipped from her fingers and smashed against the sill. It was dirty and whole, she thought, and now it is clean and broken. This seemed to her profound.

  “Don’t touch it!” she screamed. “Leave it for Barbara. Is that her name, Barbara?” Strangers, they were all strangers. “She never knows what to do when she comes.”

  “I have to go, Mom,” Helen said.

  “You do, of course you do,” her mother said. She patted Helen’s cheeks clumsily. “You’re so hot, you’re sick.”

  “I love you,” Helen said.

  “I love you too,” Lenore said. Then she watched her walk down the street toward the corner. The day was growing lighter. The mornings kept coming, she didn’t like it.

  On the bus, the driver said to Helen, “I lost my mother when I was your age. You’ve just got to hang in there.”

  Helen walked toward the rear of the bus and sat down. She shut her eyes. A girl behind her snapped her gum and said, “ ‘Hang in there.’ What an idiot.”

  The bus pounded down the snow-packed streets.

  The girl with the gum had been the one who told Helen how ashes came back. Her uncle had died and his ashes had come in a red shellacked box. It looked cheap but it had cost fifty-five dollars and there was an envelope taped to the box with his name typed on it beneath a glassine window as though he was being addressed to himself. This girl considered herself to be somewhat of an authority on how these things were handled, for she had also lost a couple of grandparents and knew how these things were done as far south as Boston.

  Congress

  Miriam was living with a man named Jack Dewayne, who taught a course in forensic anthropology at the state university. It was the only program in the country that offered a certificate in forensic anthropology, as far as anyone knew, and his students adored him. They called themselves Deweenies and wore skull-and-crossbones T-shirts to class. People were mad for Jack in this town. Once, in a grocery store, when Miriam stood gazing into a bin of limes, a woman came up to her and said, “Your Jack is a wonderful, wonderful man.”

  “Oh, thanks,” Miriam said.

  “My son Ricky disappeared four years ago and some skeletal remains were found at the beginning of this year. Scattered, broken, lots of bones missing, not much to go on, a real jumble. The officials told me they probably weren’t Ricky’s but your Jack told me they were, and with compassion he showed me how he reached that conclusion.” The woman waited. In her cart was a big bag of birdseed and a bottle of vodka. “If it weren’t for Jack, my Ricky’s body would probably be unnamed still,” she said.

  “Well, thank you very much,” Miriam said.

  She never knew what to say to Jack’s fans. As for them, they didn’t understand Miriam at all. Why her of all people? With his hunger for life, Jack could have chosen better, they felt. Miriam lacked charm, they felt. She was gloomy. Even Jack found her gloomy occasionally.

  Mornings, out in the garden, she would, at times, read aloud from one of her many overdue library books. Dew as radiant as angel spit glittered on the petals of Jack’s roses. Jack was quite the gardener. Miriam thought she knew why he particularly favored roses. The inside of a rose does not at all correspond to its exterior beauty. If one tears off all the petals of the corolla, all that remains is a sordid-looking tuft. Roses would be right up Jack’s alley, all right.

  “Here’s something for you, Jack,” Miriam said. “You’ll appreciate this. Beckett described tears as ‘liquefied brain.’ ”

  “God, Miriam,” Jack said. “Why are you sharing that with me? Look at this day, it’s a beautiful day! Stop pumping out the cesspit! Leave the cesspit alone!”

  Then the phone would ring and Jack would begin his daily business of reconstructing the previous lives of hair and teeth when they had been possessed by someone. A detective a thousand miles away would send him a box of pitted bones and within days Jack would be saying, “This is a white male between the ages of twenty-five and thirty who didn’t do drugs and who was tall, healthy and trusting. Too trusting, clearly.”

  Or a hand would be found in the stomach of a shark hauled up by a party boat off the Gulf Coast of Florida and Jack would be flown off to examine it. He would return deeply tanned and refreshed, with a crisp new haircut, saying, “The shark was most certainly attracted to the rings on this hand. This is a teen’s hand. She was small, perhaps even a legal midget, and well nourished. She was a loner, adventurous, not well educated and probably unemployed. Odds are the rings were stolen. She would certainly have done herself a favor by passing up the temptation of those rings.”

  Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental, and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.

  Jack had no idea that Miriam stole sheets and more. He liked Miriam. He liked her bones. She had fine bones and he loved tracing them at night beneath her warm, smooth skin, her jawbone, collarbone, pelvic bone. It wasn’t anything that consumed him, but he just liked her was all, usually. And he liked his work. He liked wrapping things up and dealing with those whom the missing had left behind. He was neither doctor nor priest; he was the forensic anthropologist, and he alone cou
ld give these people peace. They wanted to know, they had to know. Was that tibia in the swamp Denny’s? Denny, we long to claim you…Were those little bits and pieces they got when they dragged the lake Lucile’s even though she was supposed to be in Manhattan? She had told us she was going to be in Manhattan, there was never any talk about a lake…Bill had gone on a day hike years ago with his little white dog and now at last something had been found in a ravine…Pookie had toddled away from the Airstream on the Fourth of July just as we were setting up the grill, she would be so much older now, a little girl instead of a baby, and it would be so good just to know, if only we could know…

  And Jack would give them his gift, the incontrovertible and almost unspeakable news. That’s her, that’s them. No need to worry anymore, it is finished, you are free. No one could help these people who were weary of waiting and sick of hope like Jack could.

  Miriam had a fondness for people who vanished, though she had never known any personally. But if she had a loved one who vanished, she would prefer to believe that they had fallen in love with distance, a great distance. She certainly wouldn’t long to be told they were dead.

  One day, one of Jack’s students, an ardent hunter, a gangly blue-eyed boy named Carl who wore camouflage pants and a black shirt winter and summer, presented him with four cured deer feet. “I thought you’d like to make a lamp,” Carl said.

  Miriam was in the garden. She had taken to stealing distressed plants from nurseries and people’s yards and planting them in an unused corner of the lot, far from Jack’s roses. They remained distressed, however—in shock, she felt.

  “It would make a nice lamp,” Carl said. “You can make all kinds of things. With a big buck’s forelegs you can make an outdoor thermometer. Looks good with snowflakes on it.”

  “A lamp,” Jack said. He appeared delighted. Jack got along well with his students. He didn’t sleep with the girls and he treated the boys as equals. He put his hands around the tops of the deer feet and splayed them out some.