The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

by Diane Williams

  My mother touched the doctor’s hair—“Your hair—” she said. I was looking at the doc­tor’s eyes—black and as sad as any eyes I had ever looked at—doleful, mournful—but I thought she is hard-hearted too, this doctor. She must be hard­hearted. Hard-hearted is part of her job. It has to be.

  The doctor’s hair was full and long and down, kinky and wavy and black. My mother’s hair is short and white and kinky and wavy and I could see why my mother was admiring her hair. I was admiring the doc­tor’s body in her jeans. She had what I thought was a girlish and perfect form in her jeans, an enviable form.

  There were four of us backed up to the large window at the end of the hall, because I had said, “Let’s go over to the window to talk”—my mother, my sister, and me, and this very young woman doctor with black hair, black eyes, and jeans on.

  We were at the window at the hospital, at the end of a hall, down from what was left of my father. We were getting the report on my father, because I had said to the doctor, “Tell us.”

  Maybe the doctor was a little ashamed too, or bellig­erent, when she was telling us. Her eyes had such a film over them, so that they sparkled when she spoke of his cerebellum, about his brain stem, about the size of his cortical function. She said, “He doesn’t know who he is. He does not know who he once was. He does not feel grief or frustration. He does not know who you are.” What I was envying then were the doctor’s legs in her jeans. “Maybe—” I said, “you know, maybe—he had such a big brain before—it is just possible,” I said, “that even if his brain has been ravaged, he is still a smart enough person.”

  The doctor did not say anything about that. No one did.

  Chrissy, one of Dad’s day-shift nurses, was coming along then toward us. Her glasses are the kind my sister will not wear. She will not get glasses like that. My mother will not either. A serious person’s glasses—even if Chrissy is only just a nurse, even if she cannot explain very much about the brain, because she explained to me she has been out of school for too long—I can tell she is serious, that she is serious about me too. If she were a man, I would call what we have shared romantic love—we have shared so much, so often here—talking about my father with feeling. If she were a man—even if she couldn’t remember half of what she had learned about the brain—even if she had forgotten it all—no—if she had forgotten it all, totally, I don’t think I’d want to spend the time of day in her presence. She would disgust me if she were a man like that. So when she called us, when she said, “Your father—” and then when I called “Dad! Dad!” from the—and it sounded even to me as if I expected he would rise up—then I was ready for what I was feeling when I touched his forehead—which was still warm. His mouth was open. The front of the lower row of his teeth was showing. The teeth had never looked, each of them, so terribly small. Some of his teeth were the last things on my father that I ever touched.

  Passage of the Soul

  She said, “Don’t get excited,” to the scar-faced man.

  He was excited, more like agitated. I remem­bered lots of men I have been with being like that. It was a worry. Maybe he was someone who shouldn’t have been out.

  She said, “We don’t have to stay,” and then I saw him in the snack line, way behind me, stuck in the heavy crowd, from where another woman’s voice scolded somebody, “You had to pick the most popular picture of all the pictures!” Next, I found my husband. I always can. He goes ahead without me for the seats.

  We hardly speak in theaters, waiting. I twisted my­self around to watch a girl behind us feed her boyfriend one popped kernel of corn, and then kiss him, and I saw him touch her breast, because we had to wait and wait, even for the previews to begin. I decided her boyfriend was no one I would want touching from, and I didn’t flinch; he did, when I watched him watch me make my decision. It was as if he couldn’t believe it, that he couldn’t believe it—that I would judge him with such haste.

  I would have run off with the character named Tom in the movie, so that they could see once and for all, as he put it to the woman, how they would be together, away from all of this. She ended up unappealing. She must have had a moment of horror—the actress—when she first saw herself like that.

  At one time, seven years earlier in the movie, it seemed the whole audience had heaved a huge sigh watching her—not me, I just listened—I never would want to let on what I was thinking, You are so bold and lucky, when she dropped the prophylactics into her purse before she went out, and I was eager to see what would happen.

  There are so many other things to recount about that movie. I left the theater with our balled-up empty popcorn bucket in my hand, to throw it away at home: that’s what I was thinking about on the way to our car, that I’d have to hold it in my hand, which I did, feeling it, the squashed-up waxy rim of the bottom of it, all the way home; that somehow I had ended up like this. I had missed, just to begin with, the opportunity to throw it away inside the theater.

  When we were getting ready for bed, I got myself into sort of a state. I saw that my husband was wearing what I considered to be the trousers of my pajamas—I have only one pair—which I had planned to put on, which had belonged to him once long ago, it’s true, but hadn’t he given them to me?

  “What do you think you’re doing?” I asked him. “I don’t get it. What are you doing?”

  I saw him, his body, his bare chest, which is sleek and perfectly formed by my standards—he was pulling down and folding the spread of our bed, in those cotton striped trousers. My husband is so graceful, how he moved around the foot of the bed was so graceful, how he gently, carefully folded.

  Oh, he gave me back the trousers; so then we slept.

  I didn’t know what the issue was.

  When the ringing of the telephone woke us in the night, we both knew what it could mean—everybody does—or it could have been just somebody borderline, wanting to hear the sound of anyone in a fright. That’s what it was that time.

  More will happen.

  It will be stunning.

  It’s what I’m waiting for.

  Some people are lucky—just walking, just going around, when you look at them.

  Original Belief

  I was thinking, Would someone else’s husband—not mine!—would Nancy Harp’s husband want the woman?

  To make a judgment I thought, do I want her?

  Oh, yes!

  When her cutaway shirt buckled and slid, I saw the perky, side-view form of her naked breast.

  Nancy Harp’s husband, I thought, must be beside himself all the time with this woman—and she was straight-legged, and she intended for her face to be pretty, and it was!

  The Harps’ whole kitchen, where I met the woman—their Formica getting all the sun—the wood floor, when I looked down, I thought, It must be cherry! was driving me crazy.

  Oh, I knew the woman was a do-nothing maid. Her employer, Nancy—and Nancy is my friend—told me she does not allow this maid to cook. Nancy said she told the maid, “I do that!” when the maid had said, “I could do that.”

  While I watched her, the maid went this way or she went that way, ever so lightly on her bare feet. She was not upset. But, she may have considered the possi­bilities to share with me, because neither my son, nor any member of the Harp family, was on the premises, and they should have been when I got there.

  At the stairs, she called, “Davey!”

  It could be a blessing that I was not worried, to not know what she did not understand, because there was the problem of the language problem.

  She did say, “Who are you?” so I said, “The mom.”

  I underscored naughty about Davey because he should have been there at the Harps’. He said he would.

  I was safe and she was safe, including Davey, with my naughty.

  Something about cute and safe means the same thing to me. But I didn’t stop there. I got
myself degraded.

  The Spoils

  The girl did not know why the boys were look­ing for her when she was spoiling herself—what to her was a spoiling—why the boys inside from the garden party in the hall of her house were banging on the locked door to get to her. She knew who they were. They were her guests.

  The girl had not yet spoiled herself—but when she was full of it—full to bursting—she broke out of there. She broke out of there to get to those boys.

  Now none of them had to break in or out of anywhere because now they were meeting in the hall of her house.

  With one stroke in the hall of her house, for those boys, slipping suddenly out, she left her spoils for them—neatly coiled. She looked to see.

  It was the tops of their heads, the three tops of their heads that she saw, because those boys were looking to see too.

  Then the girl was going back out to more guests—to the garden, to the garden party, and she was going on, back out to where she was the smallest daughter of the host and hostess of the garden party, the party which was for every aunt and uncle and cousin and for all friends.

  This garden was full of it for her. She could name the flowers in the garden. She could name the flowers that had been in the garden. She could name the flowers that would come into the garden.

  Her largest uncle was scolding in the garden—her uncle with the ring of hair around his skin-topped head—like teeth biting neat bites, she thought, all the way around his skin-top. She heard him. He said You are so spoiled with his head hanging over his daughter, so that to the girl watching, his head was where his daugh­ter’s head should have been, and the daughter and the uncle were stuck on the stony path between the hedges that led to the steps up back into the house.

  When the uncle said You are so spoiled, neither of them moved, and those hedges, those big green hedges were brushing them.

  Then the uncle’s daughter was going up the steps, leaving the uncle, because, the girl thought, because You are so spoiled means you must leave.

  That girl will meet the boys inside there when she gets inside there, the girl watching thought.

  And the girl watched the girl disappear.

  Intercourse

  At the post office the woman finally got a good long look at the monster, a stare. She was breathing the same air, not as before, de­prived.

  When she had first sighted the monster, this woman had not been sure whether or not to trust her instinct.

  Was it a monster?

  What it was was a monstrous posture she had seen, and the hair on top of the head was heaped so that it appeared as a bulge of hair, with far too much hair coming down at the side, so as to be an abnormal amount. Otherwise, the form of the monster was spin­dly. It was a small-sized monster.

  The eyes were pale turquoise. The facial skin was milky milky white. The nose was a short, finely shaped nose. The mouth was full-lipped, painted coral. The hair was the woman’s favorite color hair—cinnamon color. The voice was girl-like when the woman heard it. The black-inked handwriting on the brown-paper-wrapped package was indecipherable from the distance it was observed from, but it was a curvaceous handwrit­ing. The high-heeled shoes with ankle straps were made of metallic gold leather. The purse was like bronze.

  Okay, the emergence of this bombshell has gone on long enough for me. Occasionally I select a man, but my preference is for women who could easily steal away my beloved husband who is not taboo.

  Carnality is common in rude society. The incarna­tion is temporary or permanent.

  Screaming

  I thought she had grabbed her whole pearl necklace in a fist to stop it at her throat so that we could speak, because it had been crashing into itself, back and forth across her breast, as she was moving toward me.

  “Your dog Heather”—was all I could think to say to her—“I still remember your story about Heather, your dog, and about your daughter coming down the stairs in the black wig.”

  “That was Heidi,” she said.

  “Your daughter is Heidi?”

  “No,” she said, “that’s the dog.”

  “Oh, and she’s not living,” I said as she let the pearls go and they fell back down against her chest.

  “That’s right,” she said. “Heather is. Heather’s a better name—that’s why you remember Heather. Heather is—” and she rolled her eyes so that I would know that I should have remembered Heather.

  We did not talk about Heidi anymore that night, and I did not bring her up for conversation, because I did not have to. I spoke to her husband instead.

  Still, I remembered how when the daughter was coming down the stairs in the black wig, wearing the kimono, Heidi ran away. I want to say that Heidi ran away screaming when she saw the daughter—but Heidi is the dog. She was a dog.

  For the sake of conversation, when her husband and I saw a woman neither of us knew, I said, “I bet she’s not afraid of a living soul.” I said it because the woman had obviously done her hair all by herself for this gala—just stuck bobby pins you could see into her white hair, just worn an old, out-of-fashion cotton dress.

  I told the husband I’d like to shake that woman’s hand and ask her if it was true what I had guessed.

  I was considering it, getting up close. I wondered would she get scared or what she would do—what I would do.

  “What about that one there?” her husband asked.

  That one there was a woman who was trying to get back behind my husband. The woman was wincing as if she had just done something awful.

  “A gambling problem—that’s what she has,” I said. But that wasn’t sordid enough. So then I said, “I don’t have a clue.”

  “Now me,” the husband said. “Do me.”

  “You,” I said, “you are hardworking. You are—”

  “No,” he said, “not that—” The man looked fright­ened. He looked ready to hear what I would say as if I really knew.

  Then someone was at my back, tugging at my hair, moving it. I felt a mouth was on the nape of my neck. It was a kiss.

  I did not have the faintest idea who would want to do that to me. There was not a soul.

  When I saw him, when I turned, his head was still hung down low from kissing me.

  Thank God I did not know who he was.

  I kept my face near his. I liked the look of him.

  I was praying he would do something more to me.

  Anything.

  Hope

  She had the proof to prove it to me that her dying father’s idiot wife, who was not her mother, was a real idiot. My friend said that this woman spelled the word wife w-i-l-f on the hospital informa­tion request form, so that my friend had to do every­thing for her father, because he said to her, “You have to help me!”

  She had taken care of the funeral arrangements, and her father was not dead yet.

  My father’s dying was not planned for so carefully by his daughter, and it is over with. He’s dead.

  We had appointments—my friend and I—at the ex­act same time, and if it had not been for her arriving, just when she did, at the third-floor hallway of the Professional Medical Arts Building, I would have left after arriving there first, all alone, and knocking and knocking and hammering and yelling at the office door, and twisting and twisting the doorknob.

  We were well along in our discussion, comforting one another about our fathers, we had even compared our teeth, when our dentist arrived, his staff, his hygienist, and so forth.

  My friend had told me, by then, how awful her father was—she had proof—and so had I told her that my father wasn’t that awful, but that he might as well have been—because I had hated him as much as she had hated hers by the end.

  Once inside the office, while I was in the chair, the hygienist had the nerve to ask me a question after she had put a pick tool and a p
lastic tube into my mouth.

  It was unbelievable, unbelievable that a daughter such as I am, whose father had been so loving to her all of her life, who wanted to tell me what I needed to know anytime that I needed to know, that I should deliber­ately ask my father a question after the doctors had rendered him positively without the power of speech, that I should ask him a question, and then act as if it were a matter of life or death that my question had no answer.

  Every time I do not know what else to think, I go back to how my hands were grabbing onto my father’s ankles or onto his toes. I felt so incredibly nervy. He was down in his bed. I was at the end of it. My father put his head forward toward me, crazy to tell me the most essential thing I will ever need to know.

  The Divine Right

  “What your king did—” she was saying to the Dutchman.

  “King? Do you even know the country? You don’t even know which country. We have no king,” the Dutchman said.

  “No king? Your consort—the queen’s consort?” she said.

  “You mean the prince?”

  “Bern—Bern—what he did was terrible, taking all that money. Why did he take the money? He doesn’t need the money. He’s married to the richest woman in the world.”

  The Dutchman laughed. “The richest woman in the world? Do you think so? Well, I hope so.”

  “Doesn’t she own most of Fifth Avenue, along with that other queen? the Queen of England?”

  “Well, I don’t know,” the Dutchman said.

  “You don’t know? You don’t think it was a bad thing what he did, taking that money?”

  “No, none of us do,” the Dutchman said. “We all like him very much. The money was offered, and he took it. It’s no big deal.”

  “Well, here we all thought it was terrible. I thought it was. I hated him for it. I felt so sorry for the queen.”