Authors: Joy Williams
Grady enjoys going to classes. He wants to make a fine life for us. He works very hard. There is going to be the baby. He sees other babies. He sees a fantastic tree house on his beloved river. He will design it himself. He will build it himself. Inside it will be leather and wicker and aluminum and wood. We will have pet otters that will bring us fish. We will have lime and lemon and grapefruit and orange trees and ladybugs to eat the aphids. We will have a telescope and study the stars. We will have an herb garden. We will have a Land Rover and a De Tomaso Mangusta. We will live in our fantastic house. Then we will travel. We will get a motor sailer. Go to Greece. The Pacific. Go everywhere. Then we will return. Our children will be loving and handsome. The orchids will grow on the trees. Everything will always grow around us beautifully. We will always be in love.
Of course this is in the future.
I tell him, “Love, love, I have no future.” I say this. I say, “When they were casting the Weird of my life, that third sister was out on an apéritif.”
Naturally, he does not agree. There is the future of this day, for instance. I’ve promised him I’ll go to school today and I’ve dressed and I have. We are in town, going to school,
but first we stop in a hardware store, for he has to buy a tool or two, for his Jaguar, for his class. I wander off to the seed bins. They’re lovely. St. Augustine, Argentine bahia, centipede, zoysia, Tiflawn bermuda. I plunge my hands into the bins. It’s wonderful. I worm my hands around, up to my elbows. Tiny slippery busy beads. A clerk comes up. He points to a sign. “They’ll have to be baked now,” he says angrily. “You’ve contaminated them.” Insulted, I buy fifteen pounds. I turn out my pockets. I give him every cent. “A good choice,” he says, handing me a sack. “Low maintenance. Will survive total neglect.” Grady’s at my side. He’s bought a picnic basket. He puts my sack inside it.
“It’s pasture grass,” he tells me as we leave.
“Let’s make a pasture!” I am so enthusiastic. Where will we plant it? Who will come to watch it grow? I imagine already friendly beasts following us down the street, birds and bees and grazing things. But I become weary. My feet lag. What a responsibility, this grass! What a burden! I have poisoned it. The man said so. I am so destructive. My hands are hatchets. Daddy had told me this. He’d said,
AND WHERE THE SLAIN ARE THERE IS SHE
. Job. He’d said, It’s happened and it’s ahead of you, forever and ever.
We enter the college grounds.
I sit down beneath a banyan tree though I only want to be back in the trailer or sitting in the Jaguar, at rest, resting. Grady kisses me good-by and enters the chemistry building. He turns before he opens the door, his hair all smacked askew with water, heartbreaking as a grebe, and waves at me. I wave back, grateful for his familiarity. He drops from sight into forestry and mathematics.
He has a theory for the animals, with which by equation the earth can be saved.
I have a malapropism or two.
The leaves on this tree are long as baseball bats. Many of the roots haven’t rooted yet but stick out stiff as wires, at
eye-level, from the trunk. Everything’s so colorful and fecund. A bellowing order and thoughtful rhyme. Noah’s Ark. A path for every foot to trod. A trot for any taste. Students move heartily by with the faces of winning contestants. Everyone’s a winner here! The South is Cracker-Jax!
“Hello!” they cry. I blink.
“Hiyew,” a girl says cutely as a comic book. “Why we haven’t seen you for quite some time. My boyfriend’s sleeping in your bed.”
“O.K.!” I cry cheerfully. I am speaking too loudly. I know this girl. Debbie Dow. Before I’d gone off with Father five months ago and then immediately with Grady, five months ago, I had known this girl. A sister. With a pin and a barrette of hammered silver weighing down her head.
“Those your sheets?” the girl asks. “Or are they from the service? Better get yourself some new sheets when you come back. Are you coming back? Jean’s wearing your clothes. Half of them are in her closet now.”
Her teeth do not grow out of the gums but are perched there as though in afterthought. Other than this, the girl’s face is wealthy.
So many questions, so much news. “OK.!” I cry joyously.
“Those sheets certainly have had their lives,” the girl says. “Those pussycat sheets.”
I know this girl. I’ve seen her squatting for the soap. Rump bumpy as an ugly lemon. I know the boy as well. A baseball player on a scholarship. A pitcher with big ears. What’s all this talk about boys and beds? A whore is a deep ditch and a strange woman is a narrow pit. A youth’s a rictus and an aging man is ruinous. There’s no turnpike to love. Just snares and snaffles. I want to go back, back. But to what?
I will tell this girl instead. I will whisper in her ear’s veranda. The girl’s head tips expensively, from the barrette. She speaks first.
“There’s been some mail for you. One or two letters. I saw them just the other day but they were gone this morning. I suppose you picked them up?”
The girl seems to be shouting at me. From a distance. I look down at the ground, expecting to see a cheeping creek separating us, an unfordable crinkle in the earth. It’s almost there. There’s a plastic straw on the ground. I pick it up and put it in the new picnic basket. A straw’s as good as a cup. One never knows what the day will bring.
“Was that your daddy I saw you with? Down for Homecoming? Down for the water show?”
“Oh, but that was a long time ago,” I shout.
“Yes, but that was the last time I saw you,” the girl says confidently. “Why wasn’t that the Homecoming though? With our float winning and all? What a time Cloyd and I had! We fell asleep and the tide just about took us out.”
I think of replies. I discard them all.
“We had champagne in the House after the parade,” Debbie persists. “Why weren’t you there?”
“That certainly would have been the time to be there,” I agree.
“You bet!” squeals Debbie.
“We saw the parade,” I say.
“You and your daddy?”
“Pardon me?” I say.
“I find older men sort of frantic myself,” dimpled Deb confides.
“What a parade!” I exclaim.
Thousands and thousands of tissues stuffed into chicken wire.
“Better than the Rose Bowl,” Debbie ventures.
All that paper! Three thousand trees vanish from Big Cypress Swamp.
“The Toilet Bowl!”
The girl’s face is smooth and silly and kind. I am so exhausted
now with all this conversation. I want to lie down and put my mouth on the grass. It is a beautiful day. Grady was right. Blue pours through the trees. And it is so still. I wear my bathing suit beneath my clothes. They are wrinkled and old, clothes that Daddy bought me, things I wore years ago when I was with him, walking across the brown crisp ground in the springtime. I try to blink my eyes. Someone’s rolled a stone across them. Why is this girl talking to me? Why does anyone ever begin anything when none of it can ever end?
“It’s really mostly crepe,” Debbie is saying. Of course she does not care for weird stringy me. But she is a sister and the sisters are bound in the solemn ceremony of Omega Omega Omega, linked one to one by their knowledge of the secrets of Catherine who was not only a virgin and perfect in every way but also had her paps burnt away and her head smote off.
Debbie is being gracious. She is exercising her southern self—that is, she does not see rag-tag unpleasant me. She sees no object specifically. She works utterly on a set of principles.
The stone rolls back across my eyes. I open them and then I close them firmly. I would like a glass full of gin and cold orange juice and a few drops of Angostura bitters and I would like to be under the sun on the beach, getting hot and clean. The thought of gin makes me sick but I persist in its conjuring. My stomach turns for I am really afraid. My stomach is no longer my own. It is the baby that my thought of gin repels. I think of Sweet Tit Sue. I am deliberate in restoring her. She didn’t touch me. She smelled of shade and wild tarragon growing. She wouldn’t touch me. She stood with her arms crossed over her enormous chest. There were plants everywhere, growing in red dirt out of potato chip cans. You’re Grady’s girl, she said. I’m not about to do anything to mess him up. If you’re messing him up it’s best he be shut of you, she said. She wouldn’t put her hand on me.
Where did he touch you
, Mother had said. She was weeping, she had lost her
mind.
Was it here? Here?
Something flew from her mouth and dropped wetly on my knee. Mother was crying.
God
. She shook me. A bubble of sickness rose in my throat. I knows that good boy Grady, Sweet Sue said. It’s him I’ll do the favors to. You come back here with Grady if you want. The baby was twisting and clawing inside of me. His fear took up the oxygen. Her cabin has one room. Someone drops an egg—a brown one with a tiny fluff of feather stuck to it. It falls and falls. It’s not for me, I said. I don’t care what happens to me. I sat down on a corner of her beautiful brass bed. Sue made a small rude sound. The sheets smelled of onions. She made me go away.
Tell me
, Mother had said.
Tell me what he did
.
“I must be off,” Debbie is saying. “See you round like a donut.”
The swollen banyan bloats out around me. I sniff my absent repulsive and wonderful gin. One can feel only so sick after all and I am not really sick. If anyone ever leaves this world alive it will be me, or someone like me, a woman and a lover, bearing a bad beginning in my womb. Kate fecit. When will the bottom be? What joy, the bottom of the pit.
BUT HE BEING FULL OF COMPASSION DESTROYED THEM NOT … FOR HE REMEMBERED THAT THEY WERE BUT
… words, words. I must only be silent as Daddy said. I must not tell. And what is the pain of this moment? I am a young thing gripping a picnic basket, waiting for my man. All is sequence and little is substance …
“Hullo, Kate.” The voice is too familiar. I would know it anywhere, as though I had never had to relate it to a form. “Come back, have you? Had an adventure?” Cords stands over me as though it was she who laid me low. Doreen stands behind her, a pretty little doll with glassy eyes. Cords has bitten her nails down to stubs and wears gloves, trying to break the habit. They are black vinyl gloves and their presence,
so close to me seems apocalyptic.
A BAD ANGEL. AN ANGEL OF DEATH
.
“Well, Cords,” I say, “you’re cutting an impressive shape this morning.”
Doreen looks empty-headedly down. Her hair swings around her hips. She passes her hand across her neck in a precise gesture of languor. She smiles at me. Then she smiles more anxiously at Cords.
Cords says, “You definitely look peaked. Think a picnic lunch will really perk you up? Picnics aren’t for you, Kate. They’re for those with lighter hearts.”
“I am waiting for someone,” I say.
“So are we all,” Cords sighs, “but you do it so drably. You’ve dropped out of our sights for months and now that you’re back, you’re the same.”
“More of the same,” I correct her wittily.
Oh, Grady, I cannot right myself
.
“Yes indeed, you’ve got all those things you keep thinking about. All in the past. And you keep chewing on them. You’re choking on them.”
“You’re right,” I say. “I had a bird once. He was a toucan and extraordinary looking but everything about him was forgettable.”
“We are speaking of your problem,” Cords says, putting her little finger in the corner of her mouth. She immediately jerks it away. There is a look that is almost pain on her face. “These goddamn hands of mine. I’ve abused them too long and now they’re just blood waiting to spill.”
“Icchhh,” Doreen says.
“Tender as hell,” Cords complains. “Like some of those poor mammals born without skin.”
“Icchhh,” Doreen cries.
Vivid Cords. Today she wears a black suit, a mauve linen shirt with huge soft cuffs. She is striking. The heat has made tight ringlets of her hair. She is the leader of our sisterhood.
As in most things, the real leader is not the acknowledged head. Our head is a girl with a slight mustache whose mother sends a torte from Cleveland monthly. When motorists scream
dimyerlights
at her while she is driving she thinks that they are from Ohio too and acknowledges them with a cheery thump on her horn. She is seldom heeded, even on her own terms, and has a continual expression of candid disappointment. No, it is Cords who’s in the saddle, as it were. It is she who plays big brother to all the little sisters. They run around her thither and there, cooing in their Italian underwear. One size fits all. They do not discuss her with each other. They want her to themselves. She is fashionable. She is smart. The sources and supply of her insults and praise are inexhaustible. The girls clamor for her attention and authority. When she leaves them they feel lovelier and luckier than they had before. They feel relieved and knowledgeable without being wise, like bunnies escaping from a snare.
She exhibits her profile to me. It is as cold and inarguable as a knife. She has never been touched by a man and makes no attempt to conceal her success. Each year she chooses a girl for herself. The choice is never questioned by the chosen. They are without exception beautiful girls. They are usually rich. It was apparent that the moment Doreen walked on campus, Cords would want her. And she got her. Which was not to say that Doreen didn’t enjoy the boys. Cords urged her to, for Cords was out to make her the Golden Rain Tree Queen, queen of the town, of the state, of the country.
Doreen is looking up into the branches of the banyan, alternately tossing her hair and twisting her fingers around her necklace. It is a mustard seed in heavy-duty plastic, crouched in the dimple of her throat. It really is.
“I have a notion that we are akin in many ways,” Cords says to me.
“Don’t be forward.” I try to rise in one long and confident motion to my feet, but fail.
“Where have you been?” Cords muses softly. “Canceling issue?”
“Ahh,” breathes Doreen.
Cords shakes her head. Her skin is eerily matte flat, lacking blemish or shadow or curve. “No, I don’t think so. You’re the one with one foot in religion. Think all the little babies are stars in heaven waiting to be plucked out to bless earth.”