Authors: Joy Williams
He gets angry at me often now. I’m afraid it’s the way I keep house. I don’t keep house. His face becomes rigid and he speaks so softly I can barely hear him. The place is so soiled that nothing can be found. It smells. It doesn’t bother me. What is the purpose of order?
Each morning I am ravenous. I eat with a lamp on and my
feet in a pair of his socks. The mice have left their turds all over everything, in the sink and in our shoes and in the dog’s dish. It doesn’t bother me.
I am chewing on this bread.… I must admit I eat this garbage because I want to insult myself. We think as we eat. Our brains take on flavor and scope. What I want is to slow down my head and eventually stop it. I strive for a brain friendly and homogenized as sweet potato pie.
In the early morning, alone, eating, I push back the curtains and watch the birds. The curtains are old and streaked with the sun. They must have been brought here from another place. The cloth is rotten. It seems to come off on my hands. I use our binocular. I recognize the osprey naturally, the little blue heron, the flicker, titmouse and kingfisher. I have difficulty with ducks and hawks. I have a guide book. I have lists and charts and know proper terminology and range. Nonetheless, I am able to identify very little. The birds I often see can never be found in the book. The eye ring is incomplete or the shading of the primaries is wrong or the pattern of flight. Everything might be in order except for the silhouette. It is annoying but not surprising. Perhaps the artist who drew all these colorful pictures that appear in my book is untalented or anarchistic.
I like birds although I realize that they are dull-witted. That is part of the reason. Birds are uncompromised by their surroundings and never react differently, an ideal, I believe. I am like them with my inflexible set of instincts. It seems I cannot improvise. For I have been through this before. I have seen these things.…
… The important thing is to consider the significance of things and not to worry about their authenticity. This is the way I have lived my life but I really cannot comment about the efficacy of the method. It’s difficult to tell at the end of the day whether it was theory or need that got you through it. I try not to judge or feel responsible for events. I try not
to make decisions. This often causes problems. For example, I’m five months pregnant. It’s only as big as a man’s palm, it’s true, but it turns and feeds inexorably. I don’t look at all pregnant and never would have thought of it myself, but I’ve been told firmly that it’s so. I peed into a paper cup and now I know.
I would like to go off with Grady, to be with him while he is going but I lack the courage or even the ability. He has a journey to make as does the baby. I will not accompany either of them. I remain, as I will say, still. I try not to be intrusive. And I conduct myself not only carefully but hardly at all. Who could prove the life of such a creature? And who would think it necessary to deny it?
Yes, Grady and the baby, all those people with things to do, moving through their landscapes, victimized by their sceneries. Even Daddy once took a trip. Even I years ago made a trip, which it is difficult for me to reconstruct as I was quite sick, I believe, at the time. It was on the bus. I slept for forty-seven hours on the bus. Abandoned in the seat beside me was a plastic orange, filled with disgusting perfume, purchased at a roadside rest. Also a complimentary three-inch bale of cotton. I changed seats several times, usually to free myself from unpleasant companions. One was a man with a tan reading aloud from his Bible. A real doppelgänger though cruddy and with a speech defect. “Oh remember that my life is wind,” he kept bringing up like yesterday’s breakfast. Wind, wind—we’ve all heard that line before. Well, I want to tell you something.
Here there is not even wind. There is scarcely any air at all in these woods where Grady and I live. There is no wind or sound and nothing moves. My boy husband lies flat and prim beneath the sheets. He looks two-dimensional. When he opens his eyes, I may find that they are painted on his head. Perhaps I can dress him myself, cutting out paper trousers,
shirt and Levi jacket, bending the cardboard tabs to pass and cling to his ankles, hips, waist and shoulders. Perhaps I can press some tea down his throat or drive to the coast and place him in the sun. I don’t care to watch him sleeping and always leave the room immediately. It confuses me, his lying there, his mouth dry at the corners, foam from a punctured pillow gathered round his damp cheek.
Time does not move here. I do not change. Only the baby changes. I want to be rid of them all. I want to be rid of this terrible imposition of recall.
One wants and wants … I used to lie constantly, but now, I assure you, I’ve stopped.
I listen to the radio. I sleep only a few hours every night and spend the rest of the time listening to the airwaves. It is very tiny, a transistor, and rather weak. I can only get one station. From midnight until six, I listen to “Action Line.” People call the station and make comments on the world and their community and they ask questions. Music is played and a brand of beef and beans is advertised. A woman calls up and says in a strangled voice, “Could you tell me why the filling in my lemon meringue pie is runny?” These people have obscene materials in their mailboxes. They want to know where they can purchase small flags suitable for waving on Armed Forces Day.
There is a man there that answers the question, almost always right away and
right on the air
.
A woman calls. Yes. She asks, “Can you get us a report on
the progress of the collection of Betty Crocker coupons for the kidney machine?” The man can and does. He answers the lady’s question. He complies with her request. Astonishing.
I think sometimes that this man can help me.
And I live by the airport, what is this that hits my house, that showers my roof on takeoff? We can hear it. What crap is this, I demand to know. My plants are green, my television reception is fine but something is going on without my consent and I am not well, my wife’s had a stroke and someone stole my stamp collection and twenty silver dollars.
Yes, well, each piece of earth is bad for something. Something is going to get it on it and the land itself is no longer safe. It’s weakening. If you dig deep enough to dip your seed, beneath the crust you’ll find an emptiness like the sky. No, nothing’s compatible to living in the long run.
Next caller, pulease.
See, look, I begin, we can see it all. I want to flatter him. It’s all prerecorded. They can cut it out but now I have his ear, he’s mine. I can’t make you out, he says. I speak more firmly. See, look. There’s the chamois running, the cutlet nursing, the sandwich cropping grass. The bleeding baby seal capes. And the smells are overwhelming as we know. The limbs adrift in hospital incinerators. The race horse pies at the yearling auction swept up by those men in tuxedos.
Right, he says.
All those trees being made into publishable lies, I say. The mucus under the leaves …
I must correct you there, he says. That’s humus. Essential to the fertility of the earth. Humus.
I know I don’t have much time left with him. He’s getting off the track. Listen, I say, the spinal tap was only a partial success, leaving me dead from the knee to the foot and the waist to the bridge of the nose. There’s no recourse for they never made me any promises, although they spoke frequently and in depth.
You’ll acclimate, he says.
But the death I thought I’d died is back now for a slight correction and they’ve given me a cornea injection and now I’m only useless in the eyes and the loving parts. I’m perfectly able to do all the things I couldn’t do before. I can eat and drink, bite my nails, take a walk and bend for prayers and toilet. They’re pleased.
I can well see that, he says.
I was immediately released, I say hurriedly. Not for one day was I in Intensive Care which is reserved for outpatients, ordinary seamen, phronemaphobiacs and the like.
Un-huh, he says. There is static and humming. On the radio, while he is listening to me, he is playing
the mystery tune
which I can tell him is “Sapphire” and win myself two free tickets to the drive-in movie. But I don’t want admission. I want to know my hour! When is the fatal hour and when will the truth come to me?
Why it went when you were sleeping, he says. It come and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.
Some memories have no past. This town for example, this setting. I have mentioned the frame that held Grady and I. There, goats were often seen climbing in the trees. They preferred live oaks because of the low sturdy branches. This is not peculiar. It is an invisible landscape. Everything, more or less, is invisible upon it.
Don’t sulk. Everything is over. Here is the place. There are Grady’s woods and river. Then there is the logging road. Rattlers slide down the colored gullies. Great cattails rise from clear yellow pools. There is the blacktop that meets the coast. Black people live here in low and fragile houses with tile roofs. Sea grape shields the windows from the sun. They farm. There are a few calves and chickens. Some of the livestock are hobbled to the docks at low tide. The cormorants rest on the pilings, drying their wings. Everywhere there are glistening unnatural mountains of oyster shells. They spill into the road, cracking beneath the car’s wheels, shining like oil. Then there are palmists, bars and spaghetti houses. There is a sign that points the way to
BRYANT’S BEASTS
. There is a sign that points the way to the college. It is futile and oppressive—the entry to a southern town. It is hot. The streets are empty. Huge fans move the air in restaurants. You watch the blades turning as you pass. The town is irreconcilable to its space. Dismiss it. If you must, think of the cheap motels, the drugstore luncheonettes, the hospital. Once there were more cats in the corridors than doctors. Think of the bars, the empty De Chirico train station, the grassy subtle tracks
that fade to the north. Think of the highway that moves to other places.
Don’t become impatient. Here is the time. It is late in the year but summer will soon follow. My friend Corinthian Brown comes out of a small café. He is digesting their weekday special which is pizza, chicken, roll and potato. The time is shown in a clock set in an electric waterfall on a wall beside the pies. The water is a shiny neon blue falling from shadow-box mountains. The scene clicks and hums from the current that keeps it operating. Corinthian patronizes this café because of the waterfall clock. It is popular with others as well and a source of speculation. “It’s the Adironeracks,” someone is saying. “I been in that area in 1953. It’s the Adironeracks for sure. Water’d freeze your pecker off.”
It is early morning. The pizza is still cold from the day before. Corinthian carries a book,
Heart of Darkness
. I will have given it to him. He walks toward his job at Al Glick’s Automobile Junk Yard. Now the job of guarding objects that people no longer feel the need to molest is far too much for any one man. Corinthian realizes this. He realizes that, in particular, guarding junk should be the job of presidents, of congressmen, of those with far more power and influence than himself. It is not the task for one with no resources, no persuasive menace, no continuing stake in the eventual outcome. Nonetheless, those who could perform the function best are not called. Or do not answer. So Corinthian serves. In return, Al Glick allows him to sleep anyplace he wants to and to use his hot plate. Corinthian hardly ever takes advantage of the last benefit because he doesn’t want to be pushy. Some of the wrecked cars are quite well-appointed and it is a joy for him to sit in the plush seats, particularly on a rainy day, and read a good book or two. Corinthian has become attached to some of these cars. He is broken, after all, and these machines are as well, although he realizes that he is still using himself up whereas someone has finished them long
ago. This is not to say that he deals in endings. Who could claim that? He simply protects the things whose defeat and destruction have already occurred. Like us, he keeps a feckless guard, one with the resting objects.
But objects need not detain you. Forget them. Remember instead the picture of Corinthian Brown. He is running now, he is late. His mind is on the menagerie that he has just left. Corinthian labors continually. He works at Bryant’s Beasts as well. It is a terrible job that affects and grieves him. He worries that he has not given the ostrich enough water. He loves the bird’s eyes which have long thick lashes. He loves its poor wings. Think of lovers. That’s where stories lie.
It is morning in the South, on the Gulf Coast. On the empty beach there are two girls. They are eating powdered donuts. One is bare chested and pretty. She is lying on her back and eating. The sugar crumbs fall on her chest. The other girl removes the crumbs, sometimes with her moistened finger, sometimes with her mouth. It is an obvious attempt at an unspeakable practice. The pretty girl has a dogged and sincere expression. The other girl is charmed. Her name is Cords. She kisses her friend’s hair wryly. A helicopter beats toward the coast from inland. It flies low over the girls, turns, hovers. They can see the Navy men inside it. Cords raises her middle finger and waves it stiffly. The chopper clatters angrily above them.
To the north, a train is moving toward the town. Everything is amiss on southern trains. There is no ice water. There is no meat, no flowers. There is no service at all. The train does not speed but it’s never not arrived. There’s no timetable available but it is never late. The train bears doom and Daddy through a swamp. Part of the swamp is burning. There’s a smell of toast. People are filing into the dining car.
The sun moves up a mite, startling no one. Tradesmen sit on the curbs outside convenience stores and eat their snacks of raisins. In the hospital, the new babies are wheeled out
of the nurseries for their feedings. They are like fancy pastries offered in their aluminum cart. The mothers in the wards try to be clever with one another but what is there to think? Down in the basement, in the emergency room, a few college students are being given tetanus shots by a moody intern. The intern is brooding because he is monorchid. The college girl that he had had a date with the evening before had been discomfited when he had pulled off his boxer shorts. She had been coolly disapproving throughout, but her surprise had not curbed her speech. “Well, that’s really interesting,” she had said. “At school, they’re always putting the vegetables on my plate that look like a man’s parts and everyone teases me about this, but never in my life have I ever seen anything that could be construed to look like that.” He had bought her all the shrimp she could eat and then he had bought her five brandy alexanders and listened to her ballad of interminable immutable opinions. She was a girl with a great deal of gorgeous wavy hair and she wore expensive clothes. Her aunt owned the controlling interest in the country’s most popular baking soda. He learned that her aunt had sent her to Venice in, as luck would have it, the year of the flood. “It was beyond belief,” she had told him, “I couldn’t buy Tampax. No one anywhere had Tampax.” She was so beautiful and he had taken her back to his apartment and pulled off his boxer shorts. “Well, that’s really amazing,” she had said, but not in a special way.