The Collected Stories of Diane Williams

by Diane Williams

  He said, “Sure you don’t want that yellow bush?” It was a peculiar bush with yellow leaves—not as if the leaves were wilting.

  “Do we want a yellow bush?” I asked my wife who was waiting for me in the car. “It’s a light yellow color—”

  “I don’t like those kinds of bushes,” she said. “And, don’t talk to him for such a long time. We have other things to do today.”

  I found Churl looking hopeful. He had that row of—not a row, a couple of bushes with yellow leaves.

  He raised his arms upward into a V position—while I took some pleasure in the wider view from the inviting grass path of his garden.

  As for my wife—no fatal clash with her or disgrace yet and we did continue on to make our stops on schedule, including the one at the picnic grove where I thought that the light of day might send out its messenger with guidance for us.

  At the top of a hackberry, I saw a bird that then pounced, landing near our chips with his big mouth open, only sitting and then rising—no beating of his wings. It arose, cheeping something I’d heard many times before, the barest basics, bare basics.

  Oh, Darling I’m in the Garden

  “Tell them all to leave. I won’t look!” her husband had said.

  He’d just returned from a visit to town when he said, “Tell your boyfriends to leave!”

  “Oh, darling,” his wife said, “I’m in the garden,” and she went back outside to stand a moment near the flowering vine—the trained pillar form by the doorway.

  Not today—none of the boyfriends were with her today and she felt poorly on account of it.

  Nonetheless, in the salad garden, she could contemplate the bib and oak leaf and the Tom Thumb and she watered a potted plant. Then she knelt to snap off its finished blossoms and she littered the lawn with them.

  On the sidewalk opposite, she saw her neighbor Mr. Timmings embracing his Affenpinscher. She left her yard, well-prepared to charm either one of them.

  Inside of the Timmings abode, the two forgot about the dog and worked hard to put a positive emphasis on one another. Within minutes—she found herself in the correct position, as if for sleeping—making the minor adjustments of her arms and legs as necessary.

  This posture has been her salvation—and Mr. Timmings, on his knees, conjoined soon with her overhead.

  Mercifully, she is free of any diseases—is intelligent, outgoing, confident—and also she tolerates hot weather reasonably well.

  People who live with her admire her sympathetic nature. Although, she is not recommended for households with toddlers or small children and once she’s alert, it takes her a while to settle down.

  Happy Presence,

  Timeless Inspiration

  Perhaps the wife is well enough acquainted with her husband’s finer qualities and with his practical knowledge, his contributions to their welfare. Now, if only she would ever smile at him.

  Yet, anybody watching guests entering into their home could see that the husband bows slightly. He is courtly and he is constantly like this.

  In the aftermath, he remembers the compliment—or was it an insult that he received?—“Oh, how you look like who you are!”

  And, while his wife sleeps, he leaves the bed to go to a sofa he likes that is covered in old shawls—first putting on his thick robe. Just a few steps bring him closer to the cushions and to some clutter on a sideboard, including dahlias in a mug.

  Surely there is something good enough here, or possibly classic.

  The telephone rings. It is too late for a call. He doesn’t answer it.

  “Who was it?” His wife appears.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You don’t know?”

  “I didn’t answer it.”

  “You didn’t answer it?”

  He places his hands together—not entirely, only the fingertips, pulls them back apart.

  “Why are you smiling?” his wife says.

  “It’s a sneer.”

  The Sure Cure

  I did brace her with one hand, but my daughter is remarkably agile and well-balanced.

  What I had done in the first place, in the park, was to pull down her trousers and put her up there on the low wire fence post. Anyone—and there were many on the pathway—could pay her mind while she obediently squatted to urinate.

  In future, this cynosure will stand her in good stead. In the present, she hardly needs my help.

  The Perverted Message

  The sky was roseate at the end of the day, in the east rather than in the west—all wrong—when I encountered a mother and her small child who behaved as if they believed in each other.

  The mother had irregular features and a rough complexion. The girl wore a pretty cap—blueberry blue—and they both had consumed only a few bites of their food.

  They tapped instead at an activity book page. “The clock doesn’t have a face!” the mother said. “Stay with Bunny, while Mommy pays.”

  I’m afraid the child’s toy rabbit had once been fat or puffed up and now it was just skin and bone and unsmiling.

  Except that this was such a tender spectacle—perhaps because I am in love these days and, I have recently gotten a better hold of Mr. Rottblatt, and he me—elderly though we may be.

  A café employee was sweeping near the girl who had dropped her toy. He lifted up her pal by its arm and he laughed. The child bawled.

  We heard a blusterous reprimand from across the room and the mother rushed back to pry the toy’s arm loose from the man.

  The rabbit was coarsened through use, thoroughly soiled, although evidently suitable to carry around and to really chew on.

  I slept well that night. The sky was white when we awoke and showed no significant departure in color from the norm.

  It was a Spot the Difference puzzle that the mother and the daughter had been fixed upon, displaying two pictures that at first glance appeared to be the same.

  Alas, there was no end to the girl’s obtuseness. She was unamazed by the missing pot of geraniums, by merely one button, only one eyeball, and no ice cream.

  But how faithfully the mother urged her lamb to see.

  Grace God

  Scraps of foliage that smelt of urine or of some animal and soil blew into the foyer through the open door as she went out quickly and she didn’t close the door. The rain came through it, too. My wife Grace carried no suitcase—because this was just her preliminary, showy act of leaving, which left its trail.

  Everything in the world I still owe to Grace. I owe her something, perhaps—oh, god. But what do I owe Grace, God?

  Grace came back to me once after she’d left for good. And, in the little room that overlooks the orchard we ate a meal. It was simple. It was nothing.

  She was dressed up in all of her fallas and sitting right here unamused, as if there was nothing that had ever happened to her that had been laughable.

  But she was so much like an independent woman at that time because she busily, as far as I knew, pursued her philosophy of life.

  And didn’t she often imply that she knew valuable things about pleasure and about money that might interest me?—with hints such as this: If reason is the source of desire, then it can do no harm.

  “And aren’t you proud of yourself?” she said.

  How true. I had formed the Alfalfa Process Company and built the U-shaped house, with its tower that is hidden from the street by many trees.

  “I do have a lot of money,” I said. “I can certainly give you more.”

  She drove away happily that day, down the drive, once again, past the pink cherry toward the bottom of the garden.

  And Grace did return one more time. Why?

  Well, it pains me to make it clear that I asked her to.

  “For nearly everything that was faulty between us
,” she said, “I don’t mind if I take the blame.”

  That day in the garden I held on to her shoulder and kissed her hand, which she kept fisted.

  There was a pretty perfume in the air because I’d stocked the rose beds with First Love and Summer Song. All heavy feeders.

  “You’re too close,” Grace told a wren. “Do you remember?” she asked me, “—those birds at The Eldorado. I don’t want him to hop up near the food.”

  An inchworm inched along the table’s glass surface. Squirrels made their chuckling noises.

  What should I have done next?

  “I have everything I ever wanted,” Grace said. “I could have you, too, again—but I don’t want that.”

  I coaxed the inchworm up onto the point of a paper napkin and offered it to a fern. The insect situated itself on the leaf’s underside—passively and I suspect angrily. I took it personally.

  The Fucking Lake

  She was reclining on the shore of the lake when I made my own appearance naked—and I get sentimental remembering my young manhood and the young woman who became my wife.

  And as I remember, she did nothing to stop me—no stop!—stop!

  A story is told about this very same lake—something about a man who was swimming in it and displeasing the gods and they did everything to stop him.

  But when I swam across it, I had the sensation that I would never get tired.

  And that day of the swim I picked up a stone that is likely an ancient whetstone or chisel—and I can summon up a dour primitive person making good use of it.

  Somebody lost his whetstone or died beside his whetstone. He was slain! Or in a rage, he lobbed the thing away.

  Or let’s just say he is modern and he doesn’t need it.

  At present, I am an old man—guessing that the major events of my life are done with, except, of course, for my final downfall.

  I heard shouting and a loud a-hah!—a-heh!—a-hah—a-heh-heh! in the street, and Yvette is still here with me and she moved with short, jerky movements toward the sofa to lie down and she’s not one to be laughing with me, but she still loves conversation, parties and good food. And, the lake—rather—the lack of affection that she now has for me is something for which no person can be blamed.

  For are we not surrounded by objects we defer to—for only a certain stretch of our choosing? And, isn’t there an august mountain visible from my balcony that I have no need to look at anymore?

  Well, the front door lock clacked and opened, and our son Ben came in and he’s nearly elderly himself.

  Yvette said, “You need to be here some of the time.”

  Ben wore a T-shirt that had these words all over it—ROCKS THAT LOOK LIKE TREES. His face was flaccid. The street sounds had ceased.

  He bent over his mother, his hands on her hands and although she’s old, she’s beautiful and she was so very docile.

  She reminds me of a Greek relic I once saw inside of a glass case that I have never forgotten—a terracotta siren with a dove’s body and a most affable female face.

  Yvette said, “Play the piano, Ben!”

  And then there was that demoralizing outgush—the piano is so responsive—smiling, crying, just trying for now.

  A Pot over a Very Low Heat

  “I am not a bad person, I promise you,” the husband said. “But what would you do if you were me?”

  “If I were you?” the wife answered—“I’d never have had such a good time with Della Lou.”

  Regardless, by that time, the wife had been perpetually thinking about Della Lou.

  These days, more typically, her mind is elsewhere paying homage to her seasoned husband or to their loot—to the silver vessels, the Meissen—the prized pair of porcelain magpies, with tongues out, who turn on their perches.

  Her rare brass table clock is currently in somebody else’s private collection and now the husband is too. He is living with Della Lou because he could not stop the story of his life from flopping around or from twisting, for which one of us can? Exactly.

  Guests come through the wife’s home, not always respectful of her habit of orderliness, and they often opine—You’ve got quite another country here!—while she is liable to be emptying a bowl into a pot over a very low heat.

  And left to her own devices, she does host creditable house parties and there’s her new wall–to-wall French gray wool carpeting covering many of the floors, and on her face, a growing display of maculation. These are the free-form brown marks that attest to her long service.

  She often conjures her husband who is stiff looking—backlit by her mind’s proprietary light—not aged and dedicated to her.

  “You’ll be staying,” the woman tells her guest, who is giddy when the doorbell rings, and the telephone, and a buzzer for a timer—all in synchrony.

  Some of us are subtly drawn out by these elementary wake-up calls that clang.

  Some of us have proper brisk responses.

  What has been solicited, in this particular case, are the grinning faces of a set of formally attired antique women with crimson traces on their lips, pinked fingertips. They are quite perfect with deeper color in the folds of their clothing.

  The Hours of Coincidence

  I got help hoisting my saddlebag’s cross strap over my head and some cooperation so I could get out of my heavy pelerine and then up onto their sofa with my thoughts for achieving a purpose.

  “Please, if you don’t mind,” Earlene said. “I need to talk to you!” She had crossed the room to ask me questions that I knew all the answers to, but somebody sighing, who also listened to me, begged to differ.

  And they had put the food out, so I got up to follow Sol, who was carrying his shot glass, and we passed a mahogany stand with cloth-covered books on it. I picked up Florence Nightingale.

  “The buffet!”—Sol called to me—for I hadn’t moved ahead with him and had lingered alongside the long mirrors—or those are the windows through which you can see the world or honeysuckles or whatever it is that they call it.

  An edge of the carpet may have been bent up which was why my Sol fell. Of a sudden, his head was down, face first—way over there at the corner of the floor.

  He was breathing, but nothing else.

  “Talk to me!” the old lady at the hospital said to him. I was the old lady.

  I didn’t want to spoil anything, so I gave him no assistance with the questions—with what was his name, our address or, with “Where are you now?”

  He said, “Who are you?” and “What?”—inquiries that I answered. But a nurse named Cliantha kindly corrected me because I was supposed to make my replies much more interesting.

  I had never realized that before.

  The Standard

  They looked to me worthy enough or at least quite standard—Mrs. Ryan and her lathy twin, adult daughters—who asked if they could join me.

  The threesome is frequently at The Sweetgrass when I am.

  I don’t know them—but I was, in fact, sitting solo at a table for four.

  And it was an eye-catching article near Mrs. Ryan’s neck that exerted its charm at first—an impressive brass brooch—floral—whose tendrils curled at the tips.

  A daughter held her mother’s hand and tapped at her mother’s big glassy ring. Then the mother took the end of her daughter’s nose between her fingers and lightly pinched it.

  “Iris, please!” she asked that daughter, “do me a favor.”

  And my name is also Iris. No, really.

  I thought for a moment that I should rise too, while the daughter did as she was bidden, and then she dropped it on the table—the full goblet of water her mother had asked for—and she made a spill that wetted several of us when the goblet bucked and rolled.

  “I do not understand!” her mother said, and to the other daughte
r, she said, “Please!”

  “She’s very cranky,” the daughters told me.

  The girl called Iris went after her—because her mother was leaving, using a walker that caused the early stage of her departure to be wobbly.

  “Don’t touch me!” the mother screamed. “Don’t ever speak to me!”

  As her daughters left the premises, the old lady was unbudgeable in that cradle—her walker that braced her for a minute more.

  Then she drooped and her collapse looked effortless, but she wasn’t dead and I didn’t stay to wait for any crew who must have taken her away.

  I had a good talk recently with my own daughter, who is still very daughterlike, it’s true. Although, she’s aged now and cinereal.

  She has been undergoing her life—and it’s not gone too badly—blow by blow.

  I climbed the front steps to my town house by pulling myself up them, by the wrought iron railing.

  My daughter was there and she waved to me and she had about her an uncharacteristic—unofficial-sort-of-person aspect.

  So then I wasn’t immediately cast down, by what I most prefer her to be—and that’s my lamblike lady’s maid.

  The Important Transport

  Otto told me that our opportunity had been squandered and that I should have felt compelled to contribute something. He said, “It is too bad you don’t understand what is happening here.”

  And, I saw that it was true—that I had failed to do my best.

  This was to be our short interregnum. How to proceed next?

  That morning the wake-up radio music alarm had been set, but the volume knob had been wrenched by somebody, counter-clockwise, full-on. My first thought was that the window must be open and that the wind had caught at the blinds and that it was blowing across the fins—the slats, rather—and that they were vibrating and causing this tremendous sound before it dawned on me that this blast was something other and it made me afraid.