by Joy Williams
Denise looked at her hands covered in the casts. They were like little dead creatures safely concealed in snow-covered burrows. Ugly dishes don’t break, she thought. But they had.
“Try to stay alert, miss,” the doctor said, playfully slapping her now utterly exempt hands.
Then they were driving slowly away from the coast through small towns. “I’m tired, Denise,” Steadman was saying. “I’m really tired.”
“Yes, yes,” Denise said. She was thinking of all the nice things she would do for this man she loved.
“I think we should stay somewhere until your hands are better,” he said. “Rent a house. Get some rest.”
“I agree, I agree. No more hotels. We’ll get a house for a while.” She was crazy about him, everything was going to be fine.
He turned off the road at a sign that said CAFE REALITY and into a parking lot. Actually, it said CAPE REALTY. Denise laughed. “And we’ll stop drinking,” she said. “We’ll just stop.”
“Sure,” Steadman said.
“I don’t want to see a lot of places, though,” Denise said. “I don’t want to choose.”
She sat in the car. She had ruined that room back there. Embarrassing, she thought. But the room had fought back. It made one think, really.
Steadman returned to the car and put several photographs of a house on her lap. It had a porch in front and a pool in back and was surrounded by a tall, whitewashed wall.
“I’m going to use this month wisely,” Denise assured him.
“Good,” Steadman said.
The important thing was to stop drinking. If she could get twenty-four hours away from last night, she could start stopping. Maybe they could get rid of all the glasses in the house. Glasses were always calling to you. Maybe this house wouldn’t have any. Their drinking had brought them here. Denise was determined to learn something, to leave this place refreshed. She yawned nervously. Steadman’s forehead was beaded with sweat, the back of his jacket was dark with sweat as he lifted their bags from the trunk.
In one of the rooms, a young woman was sweeping the floor. “I’m the cleaning woman,” she said. “Are you renting this place? I’ll be through in a minute.” She wore shorts and red high-top sneakers. “I’ll put on a shirt,” she said. “I didn’t know anyone was coming. I always sweep without a shirt.” With her was a small dog with black saucery eyes, thick ears and double dewclaws.
“What is that,” Denise asked. It was one of the strangest dogs she had ever seen.
“Everyone asks that,” the girl said. “It’s a Lundehund. It’s used for hunting puffins in Norway.”
“But what’s it doing here?”
“He comes with me while I clean. You’ll probably ask next how I ended up with a dog like this. I can’t remember the ins and outs of it. I started off wanting a Welsh corgi, the ones you always see in pictures of the queen, greeting her on her return from somewhere or bidding her farewell as she departs. I’m not English, of course. I’ve never been to England. The Lake District, the Cotswolds, the white cliffs of Dover…you couldn’t prove any of them by me. I was born in this town and I’ve never been anywhere else. But I make sure that everything I have comes from other places, though I try to avoid China. This shirt comes from Nepal, and my perfume’s from Paris. I realize it’s wrong to subject caged civet cats to daily genital scrapings just to make perfume, but it was a present. My sneakers were put together in Brazil and you’re probably about to say that Brazilian laborers make only pennies an hour, but I did purchase them secondhand. See the little stones in these earrings? They come from Arizona. Navajoland.”
She had put on a shirt and was buttoning it as she spoke.
Denise wasn’t going to allow the cleaning woman to unnerve her. Her hands throbbed and itched. She had to drink a lot of water, lots and lots of water.
“You shouldn’t be here, should you,” she said to the Lundehund. “You should be scrambling up and down rocky crevices, carrying birds’ eggs in your teeth.”
It was disgusting and sad, Denise thought, but a great many things were. One’s talents should be used.
The woman and the grotesque dog were clearly fresh catastrophes. She was trying to begin and then these catastrophes appeared immediately. Though it wasn’t what you thought that was important, but how you acted. Or was it the other way around?
Denise took leave of them and went into a narrow monochromatic room that overlooked the pool. There were empty bookcases over a single bed and numerous indentations in the hardwood floor as though a woman wearing high heels in need of repair had moved back and forth across it, again and again. Her own shoes, too, were run-down. She kicked them off. She sighed, and later it seemed the water in the pool was darker and the shadows were different. Her hair smelled of gin, and her skin. There was someone in the pool, a man, but he left quickly when she got up. It was just the liquor leaving, she thought. She could understand that. The doors in the house were sliding ones she could move with her foot. Her hands bobbed in the casts beside her as she walked. Steadman was where she had last seen him but he was sitting down. The cleaning woman was holding him in her arms and he was weeping loudly.
“I just saw your husband,” Denise said. “He was swimming in the pool. No one should be using the pool now that we’re here, should they? We’ve rented this place, after all. And we don’t need a cleaning woman either. This place is clean enough. We’ll keep it clean.”
“I don’t have a husband,” the cleaning woman said. “You have a husband.” Her shirt was off again, she just couldn’t seem to keep that shirt on. She had been combing Steadman’s hair back with her fingers. His tears had dried and he looked like a boy, washed and fresh.
While Denise was musing on this, the Lundehund rose softly up against her side and began chewing on the casts.
“Get down,” the cleaning woman scolded him. “That’s a naughty boy.”
“You should allow dogs their pleasures,” Denise said. “They don’t live long.” She had intended this remark to make the woman sad, but apparently everyone realized the truth of it. It had no effect because it was something that was already known.
“You’re in terrible shape,” the cleaning woman said. “Both of you. Let me come a few hours each day. I’ll make the meals and keep things tidy. Drink, drank, drunk, no more. That was there but now you’re here. This is the subjunctive here. Look,” she said, “it’s going to be all right.”
It’s like when a person dies and someone says it’s going to be all right, Denise thought. So stupid! This woman wanted to be Steadman’s mistress, she could tell. She’d been pressing her lips against his temple and laying her long breasts against his chest. But she could only be the mistress of some delusion, Denise thought triumphantly. The woman gathered up her things, the Lundehund’s nails clicked across the floor, the door closed and they were gone.
Denise looked at Steadman. She was crazy about him. Though it wasn’t easy, this house. It was small and hot in the dark. They hadn’t had a drink in hours. She looked at Steadman’s watch: sixteen hours, exactly. Maybe they shouldn’t try to get better here. That was the problem with houses. They belonged to other people, even if those people were far away, but a hotel room didn’t belong to anybody. Maybe they should just get back in the car. This was the law, the doctrine, of maybe. She believed in this, and in her love for Steadman, and these were her beliefs.
She smiled at him.
“Denise,” he said. “Please.”
She was standing in the dark and he was still sitting. She wanted a drink badly. She closed her eyes and swallowed. You are what you drink, she thought, but here they were nothing, they were nowhere. Maybe she should say farewell to love, she thought. It gives you more balance. She should have considered this long ago. She stared at Steadman in the dark.
At last he said, “Groceries.”
She had been thinking about the state they were in. They executed people in this state for certain things, but before they could do it the perso
n had to realize what the results, the significance, of execution would be. That was the law. So of course you pretended you didn’t realize. As long as you could do that they had to leave you alone.
“So,” Steadman said. “What do you want?”
She felt a little Februaryish, as she always did in that forlorn, short, spiky month.
“Let’s not get groceries now,” she said. Groceries meant more than food. They implied duration. She didn’t want that here. “There’s nothing to drink here. It’s fantastic, isn’t it? Let’s lie down. Would you hold me? I can’t hold you.”
She raised her hands, moving them up and down in their white casts. She remembered a bar they’d been in. Was it Gary’s? There were framed hunting and fishing pictures on the walls. A woman was holding two snow geese by their necks. She held them high, in gloved hands, close to her head, as though they were earrings.
“Where are you going,” Denise asked.
“I’m not going anywhere,” Steadman said. He ran his hands across his face.
“You’re not going to get a drink, are you?”
“No,” Steadman said. “I am not.”
Denise wandered back into the bedroom again. The man had returned to the pool and was swimming with powerful strokes. She heard herself speaking to him, asking him to leave. “Be reasonable,” she said. “We’re here now. You can’t be here now that we are.” She said this and that, choosing her words carefully, shouting from inside the house. The man pulled himself out and stood, dripping. Then he crouched and she was afraid of this, she had worried that something like this would happen, that he would begin to dismantle the pool somehow, that he would begin by pulling at the big submerged light at the deep end, rotating it, twisting it out. Water was spilling and buckling everywhere and the light was trailing its cord behind it, like a huge white eye on its long stalk.
Denise couldn’t stay here a moment longer. She was trembling, she had to get out. They would get in the car, she and Steadman, they would drive away and never come back. They loved driving in the dark and drinking, mixing cocktails in paper cups, driving around. They had done it a lot. They would mix up some drinks and go out and tease cars. That’s what they called it, Steadman and Denise. They’d tailgate them, pounce on them out of nowhere. Crazy stuff.
“Steadman!” she called. He knew what she wanted, he knew what they would do, that this had been a mistake. He opened the door to their car, and she smelled the lovely gin. It was in a glass from before, wedged between the seats.
They drove down the street, picking up speed. They passed a house with a wrought-iron sign hanging from a post. The design was of a wrought-iron palm tree and the wrought-iron waves of a sea. Below it, where the custom lettering was supposed to be, it said YOUR NAME. Delightful! Denise thought. They had ordered it just the way it had been advertised.
“God, that was funny,” she said. People could be so funny.
“It really was,” Steadman said.
They were driving fast now. They were so much alike, they were just alike, Denise thought. “Roll my window down, please,” she said.
Steadman reached across her and did.
“Oh, thank you,” she said. Warm, humid, lovely air passed across her face. “Go faster.”
He did. She giggled.
“Slow down,” she said, “speed up. That road there.”
Steadman did, he did.
They had left the town behind. “Turn the lights off, maybe,” she said.
They rocketed down the road in the dark. Before them was nothing, but behind them a car was gaining.
She turned and saw the two wild lights moving closer. They’re going to tease us, she thought. “Faster,” she said.
But the car, weaving, was almost upon them and then, with a roar, was beside them. It was all outside them now.
“There it is, Steadman,” Denise said. It all just hung there for an instant before the car swerved around them and turned in inches beyond their front bumper. Then, whatever was driving it slammed on the brakes.
Many of the stories included here were previously published in the following works:
“The Excursion,” “The Farm,” “The Lover,” “Preparation for a Collie,” “Shepherd,” “Shorelines,” “Summer,” “Taking Care,” “Train,” “The Wedding,” “Winter Chemistry,” and “The Yard Boy” from Taking Care by Joy Williams, copyright © 1972, 1973, 1974, 1976, 1977, 1980, 1981, 1982 by Joy Williams (Random House, New York). Reprinted by permission.
“The Blue Men,” “Bromeliads,” “Escapes,” “Health,” “The Last Generation,” “The Little Winter,” “Lu-Lu,” “Rot,” and “The Skater” from Escapes by Joy Williams, copyright © 1990 by Joy Williams (originally The Atlantic Monthly Press, New York, subsequently Vintage Books, New York).
“ACK,” “Anodyne,” “Charity,” “Congress,” “Fortune,” “Hammer,” “Honored Guest,” “Marabou,” “The Other Week,” “Substance,” and “The Visiting Privilege” from Honored Guest: Stories by Joy Williams, copyright © 2004 by Joy Williams (Alfred A. Knopf, New York). All rights reserved. Adapted by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.
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Several of the stories initially collected here were previously published in the following journals:
Granta: “Brass” (Autumn 2011) and “Dangerous” (Winter 2014)
Idaho Review: “The Girls” (2004) and “Revenant” (2014)
Little Star: “The Mission” (January 2014)
No Tokens: “The Mother Cell” (February 2014)
Ploughshares: “Craving” (August 1991)
Prairie Schooner: “Another Season” (Summer 1966)
Tin House: “The Country” (Spring 2014)
Vice: “The Bridgetender” (Summer 2015)
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Joy Williams is the author of four novels—the most recent, The Quick and the Dead, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in 2001—and three earlier collections of stories, as well as Ill Nature, a book of essays that was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. Among her many honors are the Rea Award for the Short Story and the Strauss Living Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She was elected to the Academy in 2008.
