by Joy Williams
She went outside. “Dennis,” she began.
He turned toward her, not a young man. He had deep lines in his narrow face, running from his eyes to the corners of his mouth. They were not unattractive. If a woman dared to have lines like that she would naturally be considered freakish.
“Rattlesnakes don’t have anyplace to go anymore,” Dennis said.
The snake, deposited in a flower bed maintained by the Benchleys at a cost of great aggravation, set off in the direction of a large rock Francine knew to be fraudulent. It weighed little more than an egg carton and concealed a spare house key for the maid.
“Dennis, I’m afraid we must terminate your services. We haven’t the money to pay you.”
Dennis shrugged. “Nobody’s paid me for coming on a year.”
“Freddie hasn’t been paying you?”
“Told me six months ago you didn’t have any money. I come here because you remind me of Darla. When I first saw you I said to myself, Why, she’s the spit and image of Darla, taking the years into account.”
“Spitting image,” Francine said. “What on earth does that mean?”
“I’ll talk any way you want me to. You want me to talk less formal? I’m just so happy we’re talking at last, like the more than friends we were meant to be.”
“This is of no interest to me, but who is Darla?”
“Darla was my nanny when I was eight years old. She was ten years older than me.”
Francine was shocked. A nanny! Though she did not want to believe herself a snob.
“Darla liked snakes.”
“I don’t like—”
“She had lots of stories about snakes. She told me, for instance, that the Mayans practiced frontal deplanation in newborn children so their heads would look like a rattlesnake’s head. They bound up the newborn’s soft little skull with weights. They believed snakes were sacred and that people with rattlesnake skulls would be more intelligent and creative. This had a positive, motivating psychological force on them. They became freer, more aware, bright and unusual. And I remember saying to Darla when she told me this that I wished someone had the imagination and foresight to do that to me when I was first born because I wouldn’t mind having a deeply ridged, crenellated head. And Darla said it was too bad but that knowing my parents, which of course she did very well, it would never have happened were they given the opportunity for a thousand years, they still wouldn’t have done it. They were very conservative. Not like Darla. Darla could leap up as high as her own shoulders from a standing position. Darla rocked! We lived in St. Louis, and once a year Darla and I would come out here to the desert, each spring for three years, and spend a week at a dude ranch and shoot bottles and ride mules and sleep in bunk beds. The corral is where Galore is now.”
“Is that a new town?”
“Barbeques Galore is there.”
“Oh,” Francine said. She found this quite funny but decided to say in her most gracious manner, “Change can be quite overwhelming at times.”
“That’s right, that’s right,” Dennis said. “And then we’d come back to St. Louis and Darla would go off on another week of vacation but without me, and as you might imagine I resented that other week very much because I loved Darla. And then Darla had to have an operation.”
“Wait,” Francine said. “An operation?”
Dennis nodded. “She had to go under the anesthesia. And when a person goes under the anesthesia they’re never the same when they come back up. You’ve got another person you’re dealing with then. It makes just the smallest difference, but it’s permanent. The change only happens once. That is, you might have to go under the anesthesia again for one reason or another and there’d be no change. Change don’t build on that first change.”
“Why did she have to have an operation?” Francine wondered.
“I was never told why,” Dennis said, “so that’s not important.”
She shouldn’t have been jumping as high as her own shoulders, perhaps, Francine thought.
“We still talked about snakes and made pineapple upside-down cake and swam and rode bicycles and I was still in love with her and then she took her other week again, which I begrudged her as usual, and when she came back she died.”
“I’ll be darned!” Francine exclaimed. She really was trying to follow this unformed history. It would cost her nothing to be polite. They owed him money and he had done a good job. Not a remarkable job, but a good one. Also, he was a human being who had suffered a loss, even if this had been by her estimation almost thirty years ago. The shock had clearly addled him. It must have come exactly at the wrong time. A moment either side of it and he would’ve been perfectly all right. She hoped they hadn’t had an open casket.
“My parents permitted me to put a piece of broken glass in the coffin because Darla and I collected pieces of broken glass. It was one of the many collections we maintained. My parents didn’t want there to be any confusion in my mind. They wanted me to realize that this time Darla was gone for good. Still, I had difficulty with the concept. It was a little beyond me.”
“An open casket can sometimes backfire,” Francine said.
“What?”
Darla sounded like a good-hearted girl, energetic, inventive, a nice kid, called too soon from life’s parade or banquet, whatever it was. She couldn’t imagine anyone being further from the idea of Darla than herself.
“I don’t know what I would have done if I hadn’t found you,” Dennis said.
“You haven’t found me!” Francine said, alarmed.
“I’m not saying you are Darla. Jeesh, I’m not crazy. I’m just wondering if you wouldn’t like to go out some night and talk like we used to.”
“I was never Darla.”
“Jeesh,” Dennis said. “I’m not saying you were Darla and now you’re not, I’m not crazy. But I was thinking we’d go out in the desert and build a little fire. Darla loved those fires so! I could bring the wood we’d need to get it started in the motorcycle’s saddlebags. In less than fifty miles we could be in the desert. Fat Boy could get us there in an hour.”
“We are in the desert.”
“You know they don’t know what this is now where we are.”
He was missing a tooth, far back, only noticeable in the way that hardly noticeable things are.
“You’ve seen my Harley. Haven’t you just wanted to climb on Fat Boy and go? That bike gets so many compliments. If I ever wanted to sell, the ad would read Consistent compliments, but I’ll never sell. Or maybe you’d want to go somewhere else. I’ll take you anywhere you want. I got another pair of jeans, newer jeans. What? My hearing’s not so good. After Darla died I stuck knives in my ears. You know how they say you shouldn’t put anything smaller than your elbow in your ear? It was in honor of Darla because I loved her voice so much and never wanted to hear another’s. I probably hear better than I should but I miss some of the mumble. You were mumbling there, not making yourself clear.”
“The only place I’m going now, Dennis, is inside my home. I don’t feel well.”
“You don’t look as good as you do sometimes. You got a headache? Darla used to have the cruelest headaches. I’d soak cloths in cool vinegar and put them on her head.”
She probably had tumors the size of goose eggs in that head, Francine thought. Any operation was bound to be futile.
“OK, you go on inside,” Dennis said. “Close the blinds. Put on this music I’m going to give you. Put this in your tape player. Take whatever’s in there and throw it away. You’ll never care for it again.” He unbuttoned the pocket of his denim shirt and removed a plastic baggie containing a tape. “It’s Darla playing the piano. It was in the lodge at the dude ranch right where Galore is, as I’ve told you. We didn’t have a piano in St. Louis. This is pure Darla. She was so talented! When you hear this you’ll recognize everything for the first time.”
“Music can’t do that.”
“It can’t?” He pressed the tape into her hand. “
Since when?”
—
There was still no coffee. She wasn’t going to waste her time looking for coffee when there wasn’t any. A moth was floating in the sheltie’s water bowl. This was one of those recurrent things. She went into the bedroom and lay down on the unmade bed. She wanted to sleep. She could no longer fall asleep! Insomnia, of course, was far worse than just being awake. She thought longingly of those two stages—the hypnogogic and the hypnopompic, although she could never declare with confidence which was which once she’d been informed of their existence—on either side of sleep, the going into and the coming out when the conscious and the subconscious were shifting dominance, when for an instant the minds were in perfect balance, neither holding dominion. But she couldn’t sleep, she lacked her escorts, the hypnopompic and the hypnogogic, who of late had been acting more like unfriendly guards.
The sun was slipping into the afternoon, exposing the dirtiness of the windows, which she never cleaned in the hope of dissuading doves from crashing into the glass. The doves flew undissuaded. The many blurred impressions of their bodies depressed her but she was convinced that sparkling windows would be even more inviting to them as they attempted to thread through the houses in their evening plunge from the foothills to the valley below.
She had removed the tape from the dusty little bag and played it. It was a formal exercise—familiar, pleasant, ordinary. It didn’t cast a spell or create a mood. It was not the kind of music that tore hungrily at her. It did not appeal to her at all. Much of the tape was empty of all but hum and hiss. The playing had simply stopped and had not resumed again. There was no applause, no exclamations of approval, no sense of an audience being present, least of all an impressionable child. Darla had certainly taken that kid for a ride. Had she confounded everyone she met in her brief life or only him? Probably him alone. Francine didn’t think Dennis even knew this Darla very well, not really. He had a collection of queer memories—a girl leaping in place to what avail—of no more value than bits of broken glass. He had nothing. Darla inhabited his world more than he did, for she infused it, doing what the dead would like to do but in most cases couldn’t, which in Francine’s opinion was a very good thing. As far as she was concerned, though, Darla, her quenched double, was a disappointment.
She played the tape again and it sounded even less interesting than before and briefer as well. She didn’t know what was missing, it had just become, was becoming, more compressed. She began to play it once more, then thought better of it. She ejected it from the machine and put it back in the baggie. Locating a pencil, she tore an envelope in half—another unpaid bill!—and wrote:
Dear Dennis. We appreciate the work you’ve done. Good luck in raising security cactus! Good-bye and all best.
Her sentiments were not at all sincere but such were the means by which one expressed participation in the world.
Dennis was scrubbing the swimming pool tiles with a pumice stone.
“Here’s your tape back,” Francine said.
“It’s something, isn’t it,” Dennis said.
“I found it a little repetitive.”
“Yes, yes, those final chords can never be forgotten quickly enough.” He seemed pleased.
“Dennis, I’m curious about a number of things.”
“Darla was curious.”
“You are from St. Louis and Darla is buried there?”
He nodded. “My family once owned half of St. Louis but they don’t anymore.”
“It seems a lot to be responsible for,” she agreed. “But my point is, with you treasuring the memory of Darla so, I would think you would find her more present back there.”
Dennis opened his mouth in a wide grimace. “Sorry,” he said. “Darla always told me I eat too fast. Sometimes I can’t catch my breath. I just had lunch.”
“You could visit her grave and such,” Francine went on relentlessly.
“That would be unhealthy, wouldn’t it?” Dennis said. “Besides, Darla never liked St. Louis. She didn’t care for vernacular landscapes. You couldn’t see the stars in St. Louis. Darla liked a pretty night. No one liked a pretty night more than that girl did.”
“She sounds like an exceptional young woman,” Francine said dryly.
“She was beautiful and smart and kind and generous.”
“I don’t see her, Dennis! I can’t picture her at all!”
“And when she looked at you, she did it with her whole heart. You existed when she looked at you. You were…” He appeared to be short of breath again.
“I’m not a particularly nice person, Dennis. I’ve had to admit that to myself, and I’ll admit it to you as well. I might have been nice once but I get by the best I can now. I don’t even know how you’d look at someone, anything, with your whole heart. Why, you’d wear yourself out. You’d become nothing but a cinder. Now, it sounds as though you had a very fortunate childhood until you didn’t. It’s what I always think when I see cows grazing in the fields or standing in those pleasant little streams that wind through the fields or finding shade beneath the occasional tree, that they have a very nice life until they don’t. An extreme analogy, perhaps—well, yes, forget that analogy, but you have to move on, Dennis.”
“What?” Dennis said.
“Now I want you to read the note I’ve given you. And I really must find Freddie. He and the sheltie have been gone for an unusually long while.”
Francine walked briskly through the patio to the garage. The door was open and Freddie’s large dour Mercedes was gone, leaving only “her” car, an unreliable convertible she professed to adore. She would go to the dog park. She stepped into the convertible, turned on the ignition and studied the gauges. It was very low on fuel.
At the gas station, the attendant inside said, “What would you do if this wasn’t a real twenty-dollar bill, backed by the United States government?”
“What would I do?”
“Yeah!” The girl had unnaturally black hair and a broad unwinning smile.
“Of course it’s real. Do you think I’m trying to pass off a counterfeit?”
“I’m not going to take it,” the girl said. “I’m using my discretion. Nobody uses money anymore.”
“It’s a perfectly good bill,” Francine said. “Don’t you have a pen or a light or something that you pass over these things?”
“I’m using my discretion.”
Francine was about to continue her protests but realized this would only prolong the girl’s happiness. She returned to her car, annoyed but not so shaken that she failed to offer the moribund palm on the pump island her customary sympathy.
There was no dearth of gas stations. She sacrificed the entire twenty to the gluttonous little car. Then, after driving for miles and making several incorrect turns, she arrived at the dubious park. When she and Freddie had first moved to Arizona they took a rafting trip and everyone on it got sick. The guide hadn’t lost enthusiasm for his troubled industry, however. “Nobody likes to get sick from a little bacteria!” he said. “But you’re on the river! Some folks only dream of doing this!” This was another river, though, or had been.
A half dozen dogs rushed up to her. One had a faded pink ribbon attached somehow to the crown of its head, but none of them had collars. She tried to befriend them with what Freddie referred to as her birthday-party voice, though they seemed a wary lot and disinterested in false forms of etiquette. She wondered which one of them had the hallucinations and what he thought was going on around him right then. She waded through the pack and approached a group of people sitting on a cluster of concrete picnic tables.
“Has a man with a sheltie been here today?”
“The sheltie,” a woman said. “Congratulations!”
“I’m sorry?” Francine said.
“No need to be. It was a dignified departure, wasn’t it, Bev?”
“As dignified as they come,” Bev said. “We all almost missed it.”
“I find it so much more convincing to just see
how things happen rather than to observe how we, as humans, make them happen,” a man said.
“Yeah, but we still almost missed it,” Bev said, “even you.” She winked at Francine. “He thinks too much,” she confided.
“A swift closure,” another man said. “One of the best we’ve seen.”
Francine began to cry.
“What’s this, what’s this,” someone said fretfully.
Francine returned to the car and drove aimlessly, crying, around the sprawling city. “Poor old dear,” she cried. “Poor old dear.” But I might have misunderstood those people completely, she thought. What had they said, anyway? She stopped crying. When it was almost dark she pulled up to a restaurant where she and Freddie had dined when they did such things. She went into the restroom and washed her face and hands. Then she opened her purse and studied it for a long moment before removing a hairbrush. She pulled the brush through her hair for a while and then replaced it. Slowly she closed the handbag, which as usual made a decisive click.
In the dining room, the maître d’ greeted her. “Ahh,” he said noncommittally. She was seated at a good table. When the waiter appeared she said, “I’m starving. Bring me anything, but I have no money. Tomorrow I can come back with the money.” She was a different person now. She felt like a different person saying this.
The waiter went away. Nothing happened. She watched the waiters and the maître d’ observing her. On the wall beside her was a large framed photograph of a saguaro that had fallen on a Cadillac Brougham in the parking lot and smashed it badly. Save for such references, one hardly knew one was in the desert anymore.
People came into the restaurant and were seated. They made their selections, were served and then left, all in an orderly fashion. A glass of water had been placed before Francine when she first sat down and she had drunk that but the glass had not been refilled.
