The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  “We always need forks,” Rose explained to Janice. “I don’t know what happens to them at our house.”

  The children ordered large butterscotch sundaes and polished them off within minutes. ZoeBella ate delicately but with lightning speed. She had released Janice’s hand to better wield the long spoon, but when she finished she tucked her hand in Janice’s once again.

  “I hope I’m at school tomorrow,” she said in her almost inaudible voice. “If I’m not at school tomorrow I don’t know what I’ll do.” She arranged her face in an expression of horror.

  Janice couldn’t imagine a child like ZoeBella thriving at school, but she squeezed the child’s sticky hand. The magician and the sheep had caused her to feel a little unwell and considerably undirected, though she now knew what she would do. She would take Rose and the children to their home. She was sure that the situation with Leo and the van had not improved and she was eager to finish what she had begun. Otherwise, how would she be able to think about it? She wouldn’t be able to think about it. They lived in a town that wasn’t exactly on the way to Santa Fe, but she could still make it to Santa Fe before dark if they left immediately. Richard had made reservations at a hotel there. There would possibly be a message waiting, or even Richard himself. If there wasn’t, if he wasn’t, then when she arrived she would be the message. One’s life after all is the message, isn’t it, the way one lives one’s life, the good one carries out?

  “I can see you’re thinking,” ZoeBella said in a quiet, disappointed voice.

  Back at the garage, Leo was agreeable to Janice’s idea. “I believe I’m going to be here for days,” he said. He kissed the children and shook Janice’s hand. In the car again, Janice remarked that Leo seemed like a good man.

  “He’s all right,” Rose said. “Whenever he gets drunk he threatens to kill the kids’ rabbits, but he hasn’t done it yet.”

  They drove in silence for a while. When they got to their home, Janice was not going to go inside. She would be invited, but under no circumstance would she go inside. She didn’t want to go so far as to enter that home even in her thoughts. She would leave them at their own threshold and be gone.

  “What’s your credit card look like,” Zorro asked. “Is it black with a mountain on it and an eagle and a big orange sun? Because if it is, you left it back there by the cash register. I saw it when I got the toothpicks.”

  “Zorro sees credit cards everywhere,” Rose said. “I’ve told him never never pick them up. He’s got a shrewd eye, and I want him to have a shrewd eye, but my feeling is that he could go from shrewd to dishonest real quick.”

  “I’m not going back,” Janice said.

  No one contested this. They were on a narrow blacktop road streaking urgently through the desert. In the distance, a man was riding a horse.

  “There is a horse,” ZoeBella said reverently.

  Then Zorro saw the snake on the edge of the asphalt.

  “Look at him!” he screamed. “Look at the size of that sucker! He’s a miracle, you can’t just pass him by!”

  He grabbed the wheel and turned it toward the snake, but Janice wrenched it back and slammed on the brakes. The car shot off the road, not quite clearing a stony wash, and with a snapping of axles it crumpled against a patch pocket of wildflowers—primrose and sand verbena and, as ZoeBella pointed out quietly later, sacred datura, a plant of which every part was poisonous.

  “Is everyone all right?” Rose said. “All in one piece? That’s the important thing, nothing else matters.”

  “I just wanted that snake so bad,” Zorro said.

  “He’s always after his dad to hit things for him,” Rose said. “You’re in somebody else’s vehicle, Zorro! You are a guest in another person’s car!”

  They got out of the car with difficulty and looked at it. It was clearly a total wreck. The key had snapped off in the ignition, so Janice couldn’t even unlock the trunk to retrieve her suitcase.

  ZoeBella touched Janice’s hand. “I’m glad you didn’t run over the snake,” she whispered.

  “I have a terrible headache,” Janice said.

  “You bumped your head pretty bad,” Rose agreed. “I saw a motel back there. Why don’t we get a room and declare this day over.”

  There was only one room available at the motel, and there was a lone, large bed, which pretty much filled it. The other rooms were unoccupied, according to the Indian girl in the office, but each possessed a unique incapacity disqualifying it from use. A clogged drain, a charred carpet, a cracked toilet, a staved-in door. Fleas.

  Zorro soared from the door to the bed and began bouncing on it. “Skinny Puppy enters the ring!” he shouted. He crouched and weaved, jabbing the air. Rose swatted him away.

  “You lie down,” she instructed Janice. “I’ll take the kids over to the cafe so you can rest. They’ve got cocktails, I noticed. Do you want me to bring you back a cocktail?”

  “I think I’ll just lie down,” Janice said.

  “Don’t do anything until you’ve rested a bit,” Rose said.

  “Don’t look in the mirror or anything,” ZoeBella urged her softly.

  “You look white as a sheet,” Rose said. “Maybe we should stay with you just until you get your color back.”

  “I don’t feel at all well,” Janice said. She crept across the bed and lay on her back. She didn’t want to close her eyes.

  “Scooch over just a little bit,” Rose said, “more to the middle so we can all fit.”

  They all lay on the bed. After a few moments someone began to snore. Janice wouldn’t want to bet her last fifty that it wasn’t her.

  Anodyne

  My mother began going to gun classes in February. She quit the yoga. As I understand it, yoga is concentration. You choose an object of attention and you concentrate on it. It might be, but need not be, the deity. This is how it was explained to me. The deity is different now than it used to be; it can be anything, pretty much anything at all. But even so, my mother let the yoga go and went on to what was called a .38—a little black gun with a long barrel—at a pistol range in the city. Classes were Tuesday and Thursday evenings from five to seven. That was an hour and a half of class and half an hour of shooting time. I would go with her and afterward we would go to the Arizona Inn and have tea and share a club sandwich. Then we would go home, which was just as we had left it. The dogs were there and the sugar machine was in the corner. We left it out because we had to use it twice a day. I knew how to read it and clean it. My mother and I both had diabetes and that is not something you can be cured of, not ever. In another corner was the Christmas tree. We liked to keep it up, although we had agreed not to replace any of the bulbs that burned out. At the same time we were not waiting until every bulb went dark before we took the tree down, either. We were going to be flexible about it, not superstitious. My grandmother had twelve orange-juice glasses. A gypsy told her fortune and said she’d live until the last of the twelve glasses broke. The gypsy had no way of knowing that my grandmother had twelve orange-juice glasses! When I knew my grandmother, she had seven left. She had four left when she died. The longest my mother and I ever left the tree up was Easter once when it came early.

  This is Tucson, Arizona, a high desert valley. Around us are mountains, and one mountain is so high there is snow in the winter. People drive up and make snowmen and put them in the backs of their trucks and on the hoods of their cars and drive back down again, seeing how long they will last. My mother and I have done that, made a little snowman and put him on the hood of the car. There are animals up there that don’t know that the animals below them in the desert even exist. They might as well be in different galaxies. The mountain is 9,157 feet tall, and 6,768 feet above the city. Numbers interest me and have since the second grade. My father weighed 100 pounds when he died. Each foot of a saguaro cactus weighs 100 pounds, and that’s mostly water. My father weighed no more than one cactus foot. I weigh 68 pounds, my mother weighs 116, the dogs weigh 80 each. I do my
mother’s checkbook. Each month, according to the bank, I am accurate to the penny.

  The man who taught the class and owned the firing range was called the Marksman. He called his business the Pistol Institute. There were five people attending the class in addition to my mother, three women and two men. They did not speak to one another or exchange names because no one wanted to make friends. My mother had had a friend in yoga class, Suzanne. She was disturbed that my mother had dropped the yoga and was going to the institute, and she said she was going to throw the I Ching and find out what it was, exactly, my mother thought she was doing. If she did, we never heard the results.

  My mother was not the kind of person who lived each day by objecting to it, day after day. She was not. And I do not mean to suggest that the sugar machine was as large as the Christmas tree. It’s about the size of my father’s wallet, which my mother now uses as her own.

  When my father died, my mother felt that it was important that I not suffer a failure to recover from his death and she took me to a psychiatrist. I was supposed to have twenty-five minutes a week with the psychiatrist, but I was never in his office for more than twenty. Once he used some of that time to tell me he was dyslexic and that the beauty of words meant nothing to him, nothing, though he appreciated and even enjoyed their meanings. I told him one of our dogs is epileptic and I had read that in the first moments of an epileptic attack some people felt such happiness that they would be willing to give up their life to keep it, and he said he doubted that a dog would want to give up its life for happiness. I told him dead people are very disappointed when you visit them and they discover you’re still flesh and blood, but that they’re not angry, only sad. He dismissed this completely, without commenting on it or even making a note. I suppose he’s used to people trying things out on him.

  My mother did not confide in me but I felt that she was unhappy that February. We stopped the ritual of giving each other our needles in the morning before breakfast. I now gave myself my injections and she her own. I missed the other way, but she had changed the policy and that was that. She still kissed me good morning and good night and took the dogs for long walks in the desert and fed the wild birds. I told her I’d read that you shouldn’t feed the birds in winter, that it fattened up the wrong kind of bird. The good birds left and came back, left and came back, but the bad ones stayed and were strengthened by the habits of people like my mother. I told her this to be unpleasant because I missed the needles together, but it didn’t matter. She said she didn’t care. She had changed her policy about the needles, not the birds.

  The Pistol Institute was in a shopping mall where all the other buildings were empty and for lease. It had glass all across the front and you could look right into it, at the little round tables where people sat and watched the shooters and at the long display case where the guns were waiting for someone to know them, to want them. When you were inside you couldn’t see out, because the glass was dark. It seemed to me the reverse of what it should be, but it was the Marksman’s place so it was his decision. Off to the right as you entered was the classroom and over its door was the sign BE AWARE OF WHO CAN DO UNTO YOU. No one asked what this meant, to my knowledge, and I wasn’t about to ask. I did not ask questions. I had started off doing this deliberately sometime before but by now I did it naturally. Off to the left behind a wall of clear glass was the firing range. The shooters wore ear protectors and stood at an angle in little compartments firing at targets on wires that could be brought up close or sent farther away by pressing a button. The target showed the torso of a man with large square shoulders and a large square head. In the left-hand corner of the target was a box in which the same figure was much reduced. This was the area you wanted to hit when you were good. It wasn’t tedious to watch the shooters, but it wasn’t that interesting either. I preferred to sit as close as possible to the closed door of the classroom and listen to the Marksman address the class.

  The Marksman stressed awareness and responsibility and the importance of accuracy and power and speed and commitment and attitude. He said that having a gun was like having a pet or a child. He said there was nothing embarrassing about carrying a gun into public places. You can carry a weapon into any establishment except those that serve liquor, unless you’re requested not to by the operator of that establishment. No one else can tell you, only the operator. Embarrassment is not carrying a gun, the Marksman said. Embarrassment is being a victim, naked, in a bloody lump, gazed upon by strangers. That’s embarrassment, he said.

  The Marksman told horrible stories about individuals and their unexpected fates. He told stories about doors that were opened a crack when they had been closed before. He told stories about tailgating vehicles. He told a story about the minivan mugger, the man who hid under cars and slashed women’s Achilles tendons so they couldn’t run away. He said that the attitude you have toward others is important. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt. Give them the benefit of the doubt and you could already be dead or dying. The distinction between dead and dying was an awful one and I often went into the bathroom, the one marked DOES, and washed my hands and dried them, holding and turning them for a long time under the hot-air dryer. The Marksman told the story about the barefoot, bare-chested madman with the machete on the steps of the capitol in Phoenix. This was his favorite story, illustrating as it did the difference between killing power and stopping power. The madman strode forward for sixteen seconds after he had been warned and his chest blown out. You could see daylight through his chest. You could see the gum wrappers on the marble steps behind him right through his chest. But for sixteen seconds he kept coming, wielding his machete, and in those sixteen seconds he annihilated four individuals. My mother kept taking the classes, so I heard this story more than once.

  My mother decided that she wanted to know the Marksman socially and invited him to dinner along with the others in the class. We decided on a buffet-style arrangement, the plates and silverware stacked off to the side. This way, if no one came, we wouldn’t feel humiliated. The table had not been set. No one came except the Marksman. Not the fat lady who had her own pistol and a purple holster for it, not the bald man or the two college girls, not the other man with the tattoo of a toucan on his arm. The Marksman was a thin man in tight clothes and he wore a gold chain and had a small mustache. Sometimes he favored bloused shirts but that night he was wearing a jacket. I sat with him in the living room while my mother was in the kitchen. The dogs came in and looked at him. Then they jumped up onto the sofa and curled up and looked at him.

  “You allow those dogs every license, I see,” he said.

  I wanted to say something but had no idea what it was.

  He asked me if I’d been to Disneyland.

  “No,” I said.

  “How about the other one, the one in Florida?”

  I said that I hadn’t.

  “Where are you from,” he asked me.

  “Here,” I said.

  “I’m from San Antonio,” he said. “Have you ever been to San Antonio?”

  “No,” I said.

  “There’s a big river there, a big attraction, that runs right past all the shops and restaurants and that’s all lit up with fairy lights,” the Marksman said. “Tourists take cruises on it and stroll beside it. They promenade,” he said in a careful voice. “Once a year, they pump the whole thing out, the whole damn river, and clean it and then put the water back in again. They scrub the bottom like it was a bathtub and fill it up again. What do you think about that?”

  My hands were damp. I was beginning to worry about this, but my mother always said there was nothing more useless than dreading something you weren’t understanding.

  “People have lost their interest in reality,” the Marksman said.

  —

  The classes continued at the institute. The old group left and a new one with the same silent demeanor took its place. I stayed close to the door and listened. The Marksman said never to point the muzzle of a g
un at something you weren’t willing to destroy. He said that with practice you’re often just repeating a mistake. He stressed caution and respect, response and readiness and alertness. When class was over, everyone filed out to choose a handgun and buy a box of ammunition, then strode to their appointed cubicle.

  My mother did not extend any more dinner invitations to the group, although the Marksman came every Friday. It became the custom. I knew my mother did not exactly want him in our life, because she already was making fun of his manner of speaking, but she wanted him somehow. There are many people who have artificial friendships like this that become quite fulfilling, I’m sure. I tried to imagine him living with us. The used targets papering the rooms, his bloused shirts hanging on the clothesline, his enormous black truck in the driveway. I imagined him trying to turn my father’s room into a safe room, for the Marksman spoke often about the necessity of having one of these in every house. The requirements were a solid-core door, a dead bolt, a wireless telephone and a gun, and this was the place you should immediately go to when a threat presented itself, a madman or a fiend or merely someone who, for whatever reason, wanted to kill you and cease your life forever. My father had died in his room, but the way I understood it, with very few modifications it could be made into a safe room of the Marksman’s specifications.

  The psychiatrist had said that my father had been fortunate to have his room, in his own home with his own family—that is, my mother and myself and the dogs. I did not disagree with this.

  I liked the Marksman’s truck. One Friday night when we were eating dinner I told him so.

  “That’s because you’re an American girl,” the Marksman said. “Something in the American spirit likes great size and a failure to be subtle. Nothing satisfies this better than a truck.”

  The Marksman usually ignored me, but would address me if I spoke to him directly. With my mother he was courteous. I think he liked her. She did not like him, and I didn’t know what she was doing. She had not become a very good shot, either.