The Visiting Privilege

by Joy Williams

  My mother and father loved each other. He had been big and strong before he got sick. He had favorite meals and movies and places. He even had a favorite towel. It was a towel I’d had with big old-fashioned trains on it. He said he liked it because whenever he dried himself he felt he was going somewhere, but when he got sick he couldn’t wash himself or dry himself or feed himself. When he was very sick my mother had to be careful about washing him or his skin would come off on the cloth. He liked to talk, but then he became too weak to talk. My mother said my father’s mind was strong and healthy, so we read to him and talked to him, even though I grew to hate the thought of it. This hidden mind in my father’s body.

  The Marksman had been coming over for several weeks when he appeared one evening with a cake in a box for dessert. I told him that we couldn’t have dessert, that we had the sugar. It had never come up before.

  “What do you do on your birthday without cake?” he said.

  “I have cake on my birthday,” I said.

  He didn’t ask me when my birthday was.

  I wanted to show him how I used the sugar machine, but didn’t want to tell him about it. I took the lancet, which was in a plastic cylinder and cocked with a spring, and touched it against my finger to get a drop of blood. I squeezed the single drop onto the very center of the paper tab and put it into the machine. My mother was outside, in the back of the house, putting out fruit for the birds, halves of oranges and apples. I looked at the screen of the machine, acting more interested than I actually was, as it counted down and then made the readout. A hundred and twenty-four, it said.

  “I’m all right,” I said.

  “You’re an American girl,” the Marksman said, watching me.

  “What are you doing?” my mother said.

  “I’m all right,” I said. “Nothing.”

  I took the pitcher of water off the dining table and busied myself by pouring some into the saucer of the Christmas tree stand. The tree wasn’t taking water anymore. The room was sucking up the water, not the tree. But it looked all right. It was still green.

  “Do you want to learn to shoot,” the Marksman asked me.

  “Goodness no,” my mother said. “Isn’t there a law against that or something? She’s just a child.”

  “No law,” the Marksman said. “The law allows you certain rights—you, me, her, everybody.”

  I wondered if he was going to say I could be a natural, but he didn’t.

  “No,” my mother said. “Absolutely not.”

  I didn’t say anything. I knew I would not always be with my mother.

  I went to the psychiatrist longer than my mother and I went to the institute. We stopped going and the Marksman stopped coming over for dinner. The last time I went to the psychiatrist there was a new girl in the waiting room. There had always been a little girl about my age and now there was this new one, an older one. We were all girls there. It was a coincidence, is my understanding, that there were no boys. The littlest one was cute. She had a pretty heart-shaped mouth and she carried a toy, a pink and purple dinosaur that she was always trying to give away. You could tell she liked it, that she’d had it probably since she was born, it was all worn smooth and gnawed in spots. Once I got there and she had another toy, a rabbit wearing an apron, and I thought that someone had actually been awful enough to take the dinosaur when she offered it. But it showed up with her again and she was back to trying to give it not just to me but to anyone who came into the waiting room. That seemed to be the little girl’s problem, or at least one of them.

  The new girl told us that she was there because her hair was thinning and making her ugly. It looked all right to me, but she said it was thinning and that she had to spend an hour each day lying upside down with her head on the floor to stimulate its growth. She said she had to keep the hairs in the sink after she washed it and the hairs in the brush and the hairs on her pillows. She said she’d left some uncollected hairs on a blouse that her mother had put in the laundry, and when she found out about it she’d become so upset that she did something she couldn’t even talk about. The other girl, the one my age, said that our aim should be to get psychopharmacological treatment instead of psychotherapy, because otherwise it was a waste of time, but that’s what she always said.

  I was the last of us to see the psychiatrist that afternoon. When my time was almost up he said, “You’re a smart girl, so tell me, what’s your preference, the manifest world or the unmanifest one?”

  It was like he was asking me which flavor of ice cream I liked. I thought for a moment, then went to the dictionary he kept on a stand and looked the word up.

  “The manifest one,” I said, and there was not much he could do about that.

  ACK

  We were visiting friends of mine on Nantucket. Over the years they’ve become more solitary. They’re quite a bit older than we are, lean, intelligent and carelessly stylish. They drink too much. And I drink too much when I visit them. Sometimes we’d just eat cereal for supper; other times we’d be subjected to an entire stuffed fish and afterward a tray of Grape-Nuts pudding. Their house is old and uncomfortable, with a small yard that’s dark with hydrangeas in August. This was August. I told my wife not to expect dinner from my erratic friends, Betty and Bruce. We would have a few drinks, then return to the inn where we were staying and have a late supper. Only one other guest was expected this evening, a local woman who had ten daughters.

  “What an awful lot,” my wife said.

  “I’m sure we’ll hear about them,” I said.

  “I suppose so,” Bruce said, struggling to open an institutional-size jar of mayonnaise that had been set on a weathered picnic table in the yard.

  “She’s unlikely to talk about much else with that many,” my wife said. “Are any of them strange?”

  “One’s dead, I believe,” our host said, still struggling with the jar. “ ‘Whatsoever thy hand findeth to do, do it with all thy might…’ ” he said, addressing his own exertions.

  “Let me give that a try,” I said, but Bruce had finally broken the plastic seal.

  “I meant strange as in intellectually or emotionally or physically challenged,” my wife said. She had already decided to dislike this poor mother.

  Bruce dipped a slice of wilted carrot into the jar. “I really like mayonnaise. Do you, Paula? I can’t remember.”

  “Bruce, you know very well it’s Pauline,” Betty said.

  “I’m addicted to mayonnaise, practically,” Bruce said.

  My wife smiled and shook her head. If she had resolved to become relaxed in that moment it would be a great relief, for Bruce had been kind to me and there was no need for tension between them. Pauline prefers to be in control of our life and our friendships. She’s a handsome woman, canny and direct, never unreasonable. I suppose some might find her cold but I am in thrall to her because I had almost been crushed by life. I had some rough years before Pauline, years I only just managed to live through. I might as well have been stumbling around in one of those great whiteouts that occur in the far north where it is impossible to distinguish between a small object nearby and a large object a long way off. In whiteouts there is no certainty and every instinct is betrayed—even the birds fly into the ground, believing it to be air, and perish. I strained to see and could not, and torn by strange sorrows and shames I twice attempted suicide. But then a calm overtook me, as though my mind had taken pity on me and called off the hopeless search I had undertaken. I was thirty-two then. I met Pauline the following year and she accepted me, broken and wearied as I was, with an assurance that further strengthened me. We have a lovely home outside Washington. She wants a child, which I am resisting.

  We were all smiling at the mayonnaise jar as though it were one of the sweet night’s treasures when a bell jangled on a rusted chain wrapped around the garden gate. We had engaged the same bell an hour before. A woman appeared, thinner than I expected, almost gaunt, and shabbily dressed. She seemed a typical wellborn islan
d eccentric, and looked at us boldly and disinterestedly…It was difficult to determine her age and thus impossible to guess at the ages of her many daughters. My first impression was that none of them had accompanied her.

  “Starky! Have a drink, my girl!” Bruce said in greeting.

  She embraced him, resting her cheek for a moment in his hair, which was long and reached the collar of his checkered shirt. She breathed in the smell of his hair much as I had and found it, I could imagine, sour but strangely satisfying. She then turned to Betty and kissed, as I had, her soft warm cheek.

  She had brought a gift of candles, which Betty found holders for. The candles were lit and Pauline admired the pleasant effect, for with nightfall the hydrangeas had cast an almost debilitating gloom over the little garden. It did not trouble me that we had brought nothing. We had considered a pie but the prices had offended us. It was foolish to spend so much money on a pie.

  “Guinivere,” Bruce called. “We’re so glad you came!”

  A figure moved awkwardly toward us and sat down heavily. It was a young woman with a flat round face. Everything about her seemed round. Her mouth at rest was small and round.

  “Look at all that mayonnaise,” Starky said. “Bruce remembered it’s a favorite of yours.”

  “I like maraschino cherries now,” the girl said.

  “Yes, she’s gone on to cherries,” her mother said.

  “I have jars of them awaiting fall’s Manhattans,” Bruce assured her. “Retrieve them from the pantry, dear. They’re in the cabinet by the waffle iron.”

  “Guinivere is a pretty name,” my wife said.

  “She was instrumental in saving the whales last week,” her mother said. “The first time, not when they beached themselves again. The photographer was there from the paper but he always excludes Guinivere, she doesn’t photograph well.”

  Every year brings the summertime tragedy of schools of whales grounding on the shore. It’s their fidelity to one another that dooms them, as well as their memories of earlier safe passage. They return to a once navigable inlet and find it a deadly maze of unfamiliar shoals. The sound of their voices—the clicks and cries quite audible to their would-be rescuers—is heartbreaking, apparently.

  Pauline pointed out that those sounds would seem like that only to sympathetic ears. It was simply a matter of our changing attitudes toward them, she argued. Nantucket’s wealth was built on the harpooning of the great whales. Had they not cried out then with the same anguished song?

  Starky murmured liltingly, “Je t’aimerai toujours bien que je ne t’aie jamais aimé.”

  It was impossible to tell if she possessed an engaging voice or not, the song, or rather this fragment, being so brief. It was quite irrelevant, in my opinion, to the topic of whales.

  Pauline frowned. “ ‘I will always love you though I never loved you’? Is that it? Certainly isn’t much, is it?”

  “One of Starky’s daughters has a wonderful voice,” Betty said, looking around distractedly.

  Pauline nudged me as if to say, Here it’s beginning and now we’ll have to hear about all of them, even the dead one. She then continued resolutely, “As a statement of devotion, I mean. But perhaps it was taken out of context?”

  “Everything’s context,” Bruce said, “or is as I grow older.”

  Guinivere returned with a bottle of cherries and munched them one by one, dipping her fingers with increasing difficulty into the narrow jar.

  “Those aren’t good for you,” Pauline said.

  The girl tipped the liquid from the jar onto the flagstones and retrieved the last of the cherries.

  “They’re very bad for you,” Pauline counseled. “They’re not good for anyone.”

  The girl ignored her.

  “Guinivere has a job,” Betty said. “She works at the library. She puts all the books back in their proper places—don’t you, Guinivere?”

  “Someone has to do the lovely things,” Bruce said.

  “And someone does the ugly things too,” Guinivere said without humor. “In Amarillo, Texas, more cattle have been slaughtered than any other place in the world. They make nuclear bombs in Amarillo as well.”

  “You must read the books then,” Pauline said, “as you put them back on the shelves?” Her efforts at engagement with this unfortunate child were making me uncomfortable. She wanted a child, but of course a lovely one. She had no doubt it would be lovely. Would even a bird build its nest if it did not have the instinct for confidence in the world?

  “I have a joke,” Guinivere said. “It’s for him.” She pointed at me. “They name roads for people like you.” She paused. “One Way,” she said, and she smiled a round smile. She was much older than I initially thought.

  “You’re such a chatterbox tonight,” her mother said. “You must let others speak.”

  Guinivere immediately fell silent, and for a moment we all were silent.

  “I’m going to get more ice,” Pauline announced.

  “Thank you!” Bruce said. “And more ingredients for the rickeys all around, if you please.”

  Starky rose to accompany her into the house, which I knew would vex Pauline as she wanted only to remove herself for a while from a group I’m sure she found most unpromising.

  “You look good, my boy,” Bruce said.

  “Thank you, it’s Pauline,” I said. Betty’s look was skeptical. “I’ve found there’s a trick to knowing where you are,” I said. “It’s knowing where you were five minutes ago.”

  “Why, you were here!” Betty said.

  “I know where you were long before five minutes ago,” Bruce said.

  “Yes, you do,” I agreed. “And if that man, that man you knew, came into the garden right now and sat down with us, I wouldn’t recognize him.”

  “You wouldn’t know what to say to him,” Bruce asked.

  “I could be of no help to him.”

  “Those were dark times for you.”

  I shrugged. I had once wanted to kill myself and now I did not. The thoughts I harbored then lack all reality for me.

  Quiet voices from the street drifted toward us. The tourists were “laning,” a refined way of saying they were peering into the lamplit and formal rooms of other people’s houses and commenting on the furnishings, the paintings, the flower arrangements and so on.

  My thoughts returned to the whales and their deaths. They were small pilot whales, not the massive sperm whales Pauline had made reference to, the taking of which had made this island renowned. The pilot whales hadn’t wished to kill themselves, of course. But one was in distress, the one first to realize the gravity of the situation, the dangerous imminence of an unendurable stranding, and the others were caught up in the same incomprehension. In the end they had no choice but to go where the dying one was going.

  Or that’s how I’d put it. A marine biologist would know far better than I.

  Pauline returned carrying a tray with an assortment of bottles and a plastic bowl of melting ice. “Starky is on the phone,” she announced.

  “It’s probably her real-estate agent,” Bruce said. “She told me he might be contacting her tonight. She’s selling her home, the one where she raised all her girls.”

  “I’m sure she’ll get whatever he’s asking,” Pauline said. “People are mad for this place, aren’t they? They’ll pay any price to say they have a home here.”

  The night was growing colder. Bruce had brought out several old sweaters, and I pulled one over my head. It fit well enough—a murrey cashmere riddled with moth holes.

  Betty placed her tanned and deeply wrinkled hand on mine. The veins were so close to the surface I wondered that they didn’t alarm her whenever they caught her eye. She had to look at them sometimes.

  “We are all of us unique, aren’t we? And misunderstood,” she said.

  “No,” I replied, not unkindly, for I was devoted to Betty, though I was beginning to wonder if she wasn’t becoming a bit foolish with age. The world does not disting
uish one grief from another. It is the temptation to believe otherwise that keeps us in chains. “We are not as dissimilar from one another as we prefer to think,” I said.

  The rickeys were not as refreshing as they had been earlier, perhaps because of the ice.

  Starky reappeared, as gaunt and unexceptional as before and giving no explanation for what had become a prolonged absence.

  “Oh, do begin now,” Betty said.

  “Begin what?” Pauline asked.

  “Without further preamble?” Starky said.

  “Or delay,” Bruce said.

  “What must this place be like in the winter!” Pauline muttered.

  We all laughed, none more forgivingly than Starky, who then began to describe her children.

  “My first daughter is neither bold nor innovative but feels a tenderness toward all things. When she was young she was understandably avaricious out of puzzlement and boredom, but experience has made her meek and devoted. She is loyal to my needs and outwardly appears to be the most praiseworthy of my children. She ensures that my lucky dress is always freshly cleaned and pressed and waiting for me on its cloth-covered hanger. Despite such conscientiousness, I feel most distanced from this child and might neglect her utterly were she not the first.

  “My second daughter is the traveler of the family even though she seldom rises from her bed. One need only show her the shell of a queen conch or a paperweight with its glass enclosing a Welsh thistle and she is swimming in the Bahamas or tramping the British Isles, though this only in her mind for she is far too excitable and shy to make the actual journey. She prepares for her adventures by anticipating the worst, and when this does not occur she delights in her good fortune. Some who know her find her pitiful but I believe she has saved herself by her ingenuity. The bruises she shows me on her thin arms and legs, even on her dear face, incurred in the course of these travels, evoke my every sympathy.”

  “How preposterous,” Pauline whispered to me.

  “My third daughter,” Starky continued, pausing to sip her drink, “is plain and compliant with great physical stamina. In fact it is by her strength that she attempts to atone for everything. She is sentimental and nostalgic, which is understandable for given her nature her future will be little different from her past. She is not lazy, on the contrary she labors hard and conscientiously, but her work is taken for granted. She is hopeful and trusts everyone, leaving herself open to betrayal. She pores over my trinkets, believing they have special import for her. She often cries out for me in the night. She fears death more than I do, more, perhaps, than any of us here.”