by Joy Williams
“Yeah,” Sherwin said, “you and me.”
Alice nibbled more bread.
“What are you going to do about that tooth?”
“I’m getting an oral implant,” she said guiltily.
“You’ll be tracked down through your teeth. You won’t be able to call your life your own.”
“I don’t have a Social Security number,” Alice said.
“I thought you were going to unhinge things. You don’t need perfect teeth for that.”
“I never even had a cavity before,” Alice said.
“Soon you’ll be getting bone-density scans. Time goes by like this.” He snapped his long fingers. “But still, I want to confess something to you. I never intended to live this long. You want to cuddle with me in a bathtub?”
It didn’t sound wholesome. “Sure,” Alice said. “But you don’t have a bathtub.” She remembered that there was no tub where he lived; instead, a shower stall of that somewhat flexible consistency.
“You know anyone with a tub?” Sherwin lit another cigarette, and his hand shook a little. He’d tried it before. There were names for people like him. Attempters. Parasuicides. He preferred Attempter. If you were successful, you were called a Completer, although they avoided the word successful. He’d known guys … Larry, a Completer if ever there was one. He’d gone out in the most beautiful leather coat. None of them had known he even owned such a thing. It was unborn calf, or some buttery, ineffable creature. Larry had employed pills and Absolut, and what a presentation their Larry had made: fresh haircut, pedicure, a dash of glitter on his eyelids, Purcell playing over and over on his distinguished audio system. Cave, Cave, Dominus videt … Larry had actually thought God was watching!
“How about your friend Corvus? She got a tub we could borrow? She’s always seemed mystical and pessimistic to me. It’s an intriguing combination.”
“You and Corvus should never ever meet,” Alice said.
“What do you mean? We’ve met.”
“You can’t talk to her this way, the way we’re talking, this I-love-you stuff, this words-are-just-noise stuff, this bathtub stuff.”
“You know to what I allude,” Sherwin said. “This is wonderful for me.”
“You’re kind of like a disease,” Alice said sincerely, “an immunizing disease, which I like. But Corvus, no, no, no.”
“An immunizing disease,” Sherwin said.
“Corvus is … I don’t want you to talk about Corvus.” She stood up. “I want to go.”
The horrible waiter reappeared, seemingly transfixed by the sight of them together. Sherwin looked at The Icebergs on the way out. There was something on it, Alice had been right, not food itself but the stains of food. The crow’s nest really was a nice touch—a little desperate, of course, but Sherwin had always found the shape of a cross to be pleasing. The cross was the symbolic image of death, a death distinguished from mere biological anonymity, a death surrounded by an aura of hope and uncertainty.
Out in the street, the man in the harlequin clothes was screaming, “The word God shits some people’s minds!”
“The word would be shut,” Sherwin said to him mildly. “Don’t you mean shuts?”
27
Emily Bliss Pickless lived with her mother, whose most recent boyfriend was a man named John Crimmins. They had met at a gun range, where Emily’s mother met most of her boyfriends, although she made herself a rule of never double-dipping them. Emily’s mother thought this John Crimmins was “darkly intelligent.” Emily did not share this opinion, but she didn’t mind him. When he wasn’t around, she didn’t miss him either.
The first thing he told Emily in confidence was that he might be the Son of God. “It’s a hypothesis I’m checking out,” he said. “I got the same initials, don’t I?” He grinned at her. He thought Emily was as dumb as is.
“I could never be the Son of God,” Emily said, not caring much.
“No, you couldn’t,” John Crimmins agreed.
He had many things he didn’t like, whole lists of them, and urged Emily to be equally discriminatory in her life, though he warned her against adopting his particulars. Emily didn’t like him enough to adopt his particulars. J.C. didn’t like mayonnaise, dogs, or beer in cans.
“Why don’t you like dogs?” Emily had asked.
“Do you know anything about the Son of God?”
“Not much,” Emily admitted.
“He was nailed to a cross of wood and left to die hanging in the air.”
“Well, I know that,” Emily said. “Everyone knows that.” To most people, it was the most compelling part of the story. She also had heard that he had come back, been resurrected, which she found extremely revolting, repugnant, and impossible.
“What else do you know?” J.C. demanded. He was sitting hunched over the breakfast table watching some cereal turn the milk blue. Her mother was still asleep.
In the first few weeks of their acquaintance, Emily had pretended that she didn’t know how to read. She’d ask him what signs said, billboards, magazine covers, newspaper headlines, and the like, and he’d always render them incorrectly. He’d change only one word sometimes but often entirely alter the meaning. They’d amused themselves each in their own way in this manner, for some time. Emily didn’t think he’d ever caught on.
“Nothing else,” Emily said. “I forget.” You had to act dumb around adults, otherwise there was no point in being around them at all.
“When the Son of God died, there wasn’t any of him left to bury. Even his bones disappeared. Every last scrap of him vanished. Do you know the whys and wherefores of that?”
Emily shook her head ever so slowly back and forth. Her mother lacked all discrimination when it came to men.
“The dogs took everything. The dogs that were always hanging around crucifixions. The crucified hung there as food for dogs, grim pickings for dogs. The reason the Son of God disappeared from the tomb was that he was never in the tomb, he was in the bellies of dogs. And to this day, you know, a dog will eat you. If you’re in a room with a starving dog and you’re powerless for some reason or another, he’ll eat you.”
“Not if he likes you, he won’t,” Emily offered.
“Likes you,” J.C. snorted. “Even if he loves you, he will.”
Emily’s mother walked into the kitchen. She looked at Emily as if she didn’t know how she had gotten there for an instant, but then she looked pleased. Though her mother loved her dearly, this was a way she often looked at her after the separation of some hours, particularly night’s hours. Emily didn’t mind it much, feeling like a little flower that had just come up to everyone’s surprise.
“Another thing that I don’t like,” J.C. went on, “is other people’s soaps.”
“You haven’t been using my duck and chick soap, have you?” Emily had her own tinctured soap, which she didn’t like using as their distinctive shapes would be blurred if she did. Because of this reluctance, Emily’s person was always somewhat soiled. “Mom, don’t let him use my soap.”
“J.C. wouldn’t touch your soap, honey,” her mother said, and yawned.
J.C. and Emily watched her yawn hugely. Emily was worried that one day her jaw would lock open like a sprung door, and there they’d be: her mother wouldn’t be able to work, and Emily pictured them wandering around in rags, begging, a little veil over her mother’s mouth to keep people from pitching coins in and keep the bugs out.
“I hate watching you wake up,” J.C. said. “Woke up you’re a fine, delightful, good-looking woman, but your waking up is a process I don’t believe any man should be subjected to.”
Holding her hands in front of her mouth and still yawning, her mother retreated back into the bedroom.
“She should take medicine or something for that,” J.C. said.
“So is that the only reason you don’t like dogs?”
“Isn’t that enough of a reason? I’m telling you something historically accurate. Dogs have been getting away with too m
uch for too long.”
“Have you ever bitten anyone?” Emily asked. “I wish I could bite someone whenever I felt like it.”
“You look like a biter,” J.C. said. “You feel like biting me?”
But Emily demurred.
“Come on, come on.” The arm J.C. extended had black hairs growing on it up to the elbow, where they abruptly stopped. “Not everyone would allow you this opportunity.”
Emily continued to demur, suspecting that if she did sink her teeth into his arm, he’d swat her across the room and right into the boneyard. She had things to do in this life, although she was unsure as to what they were.
28
We must see things we do not see now,” Nurse Daisy would say off and on throughout the day, “and not see things we see now.” Alice was assisting the nurse in the bathing of poor Fred Fallow, who weighed close to 350 pounds and had to be hoisted into the tub via block and tackle. Her duties were to scrub him with a long wandlike stick.
“I always think when I do this,” Nurse Daisy said, operating the lift, “of a dolphin being moved to its new home in an aquarium. I saw a picture of it in a magazine once. How you doing there, good boy? How’s the warm water feel on the old bottom, Freddie? How’s it feel on the old tush?”
Freddie gave a piercing, strangulated cry.
“Upsy, downsy, back and forth, looking good, Freddie,” Nurse Daisy crooned as she feathered the gears and swished Freddie back and forth through the water. “Isn’t water a remarkable element? It’s exempt from getting wet. It’s as exempt from getting wet as God is exempt from the passion of love.”
“I’ve heard that,” Alice said, working the brush. “The first half anyway, somewhere.” Sherwin, probably, who admired exemptions in general.
“I wouldn’t be surprised,” Nurse Daisy said. “Thoughts are infusorial.”
When she had first made the nurse’s acquaintance, Alice wondered why she wasn’t working in rehabilitation since she was so strong and tireless in exhorting her lumpen charges, but each time Alice assisted her, it became clearer why she wasn’t. Nurse Daisy had more grim homilies about a bland, absentminded God than Alice had ever heard, and she poured them enthusiastically into the ears of those without hope. God had the maternal instincts of an alligator in regard to its spawn, was Nurse Daisy’s opinion. By effort and good works ye are not saved. It was hopeless to struggle, hopeless to strive. We live and die like little seeds that come to nothing.
She swished the moaning Freddie back and forth while Alice daubed worriedly at his back with the brush. The nurse was stout and sallow with a melodious voice, and hair the softness of concertina wire. Nurse Daisy did not cohere—her personal characteristics were at once pronounced and very much at odds with one another. There was even the possibility that she actually believed she loved the hapless souls gathered beneath her cold and comfortless wing.
Alice had a little theory about the soul that she was somewhat loath to share, as certain of her theories had been discredited in the past. For example, when Alice was a child, she had believed the sex of a baby was determined by the one who’d tried hardest in the making of love; girls were made by women who concentrated, and boys when the woman wasn’t quite paying attention. Concerning the soul, she had tentatively concluded that when someone ended up in this waxed and fluorescent way station that was Green Palms, his or her soul was still searching for the treasure meant for it alone. But the search had gone on just a shade too long. The soul didn’t know where it was, only that it was in the place where the treasure meant for it alone would never manifest itself. As a tentative conclusion, Alice had to admit this wasn’t much, and there were several large issues it didn’t address at all. Still, there had to be an explanation as to why some people ended up being tenured to death for so long without being dead.
“Birth is the cause of death,” Nurse Daisy liked to say, which is why they didn’t allow her to fill out the death certificates either, although she once had scribbled, “The set trap never tires of waiting,” and, since no one could decipher her handwriting, it sailed on through.
Nurse Daisy dragged and bobbled Freddie around in the tub. “Makes you feel like a little baby, doesn’t it, Freddie? Dawdling and dandling in here with all your life before you, which is why you can’t remember it.” She turned to Alice, “More suds, dear, please.”
Alice hauled in the brush and foamed it up with a bar of Ivory. She had been unsuccessful in her attempts to convince Nurse Daisy to eschew the use of Ivory.
“They test all their products on animals,” Alice had told her. “I could provide you with some very disturbing and convincing brochures.”
“Ivory soap is the madeleine of our country’s innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “No one can resist the evocative smell of Ivory on a bit of clothing or human skin, most exquisitely on bed linen. The smell draws one toward trees and earth, silken dough rising, rain in the early morning. The numbing weight of infrastructure, franchises, seven hundred channels—all is lifted from us with its purifying scent.” She fluttered her small, coarse hands Heavenward.
“Ivory soap’s parent company is responsible for the death of fifty thousand animals annually,” Alice said.
“Our capacity to do evil has nothing to do with our innocence,” Nurse Daisy said. “Honestly, dear, sometimes you sound as though you just fell off the turnip truck.” She gave Freddie a quick two dunks. “Whoopsie and whoopsie! Peekaboo! Here you are again!”
When Alice had first started coming here, Freddie would say, “I want to go hoooome,” just like they all did, but he didn’t say it anymore. The management explained to Corvus and Alice that the residents didn’t really want to go home, they just wanted things to be the same as they once had been. The distinction had to be made. Home didn’t have anything to do with it, they assured Alice and Corvus.
“Where’s your friend today?” Nurse Daisy asked.
“Which one?” she said.
“The only one you have. When I was your age, I only had one friend, too. We were girls together.”
“She’s assisting Nurse Cormac,” Alice said.
“Nurse Cormac was born with a wimple. I hate her pious guts. No balls. Timidest person I ever met. Feckless do-gooder. Simpleton.” She spoke without excitement.
Alice daubed Freddie unhappily. He was very old, inert, massive, and alive.
“You ever drown anyone doing this?” Alice said.
“Would they allow me to continue if I had?” She reeled Freddie in a bit.
“Well, I don’t know,” Alice said. “Don’t you think he’s clean enough now?”
Nurse Daisy pretended to look at a watch on her wrist, although Alice had never seen her wear one. “Still possible for your circle to close today, Freddie. Still some time left in the day for the circle to do the right thing. But the circle closes in its own good time, doesn’t it, Freddie? Can’t rush your secession into dust, the evaporation of your little droplet above the sea …” She had hoisted Freddie up and away from the tub and was keeping him more or less upright on a padded vinyl trolley. “Towels, please, dear,” she said to Alice.
With relief, Alice swaddled Freddie up. A soapy smell rose from his pale, globe-shaped head. Innocence. Incomprehension.
“There’s my little bunny,” Nurse Daisy said.
Someone screamed, and Alice blinked.
“Nothing serious,” Nurse Daisy said. “I know my screams.”
Alice frowned.
“You think I’m adding a teeny tiny bit to their suffering, don’t you?” the nurse said. “But no one consciously suffers here. That’s the tragedy of this place. All this remarkably calibrated suffering and not a bit of consciousness involved.”
Nurse Daisy dried Freddie and dressed him in a blue sweatshirt (“Iowa Hawkeyes today, Freddie”), a diaper and red sweatpants. She regarded her handiwork with a very complicated expression, an expression Nurse Cormac couldn’t have achieved if it had been painted on her. She stroked Freddie’s vigorously
rampant eyebrows flat with her finger. The flesh around her simple gold wedding band was swollen. She should have that thing cut off and enlarged, Alice thought.
“Do you go home to a husband?” Alice inquired. She couldn’t imagine.
“I’m sure your own story is far more intriguing. Do you get credits for coming here? Points?”
“I don’t think so,” Alice said.
“Complicado, our impulses. The tubies, dear, for Freddie’s feet.”
Alice ripped open a fresh package of tube socks. She knelt and pulled the white socks over the large feet, which were sadly warm, and bloused the sweatpants over them. Secreted beneath his skin just below the breastbone was a battery that kept his weary heart beating wantonly. It had been implanted when the subject of his future was still coming up. A majority of the tenants of Green Palms were so implanted. Nurse Daisy called the apparatus the Devil’s little lamb. She called the socks toddling tubies for negotiating the chasm—the chasm, as Alice understood it, being the divide between life and death, although in this place the chasm had shrunk to a crack, even less than a crack, a crease, something technical and maladroit that people here couldn’t manage to fall into.
Freddie had a daughter who came to visit, and she was sixty-six, but Alice hadn’t seen her for a while.
They wheeled Freddie out of the scrub room into the main corridor, then down to an enclosed patio where they deposited him with three silent, similarly swaddled denizens. The patio faced the arbor where the employee of the month was entitled to park. All month a dented car painted with flowers, childish pansies, and petunias had been parked there. It belonged to Nurse Cormac, who frequently was awarded this honor.
“No daisies, you’ll notice,” Nurse Daisy said, “a quite conscious omission.”
“You ever get to park your car in that slot?” Alice asked.
Nurse Daisy ignored this absurdity, though she did snort softly through her delicate nostrils, another anomaly on her blocky, unbalanced face. The repertoire, if not the mobility, of her features seemed endless.
