Breaking and Entering (7 page)

“Oh baby,” Liberty said.

“Do you know what they say? They say that that man used to be Mrs. Bates’ boyfriend. Do you have any paper? I have my colored pens. I want to make her a get-well card.”

Mrs. Bates had no husband, Teddy explained. Her husband was in New Zealand making hang-gliders. Teddy sat on the couch, a telephone book upon his knees, supporting the frail paper upon which he drew. He drew a plane descending upon a beautiful green and purple island in a blue sea. The island wore palm trees and waving, smiling children.
Please get well Mrs. Bates
, the plane’s wings said. It was a drawing of such earnest innocence and grubby grace that Liberty knew it would pluck Mrs. Bates from the plain of depressing twilight from which she was struggling to arise and shove her right back into the valley of bleakest night.

“Tonight’s Halloween, you haven’t forgotten, have you, Liberty? You said we’d all go out. I’m going to go as a doctor. My daddy and Janiella are going to give a party so I have to be out for a long time.”

“Okay, baby,” Liberty said. “We’ll have fun. I’ll see you tonight. Come over before it gets dark.”

“I love you,” Teddy said. He watches her, he opens his arms.

“I love you too,” Liberty said and hugged him. It’s timing. He always says it first.

The phone was ringing. Someone muttered something.

“What are you saying?” Liberty asked. “Who are you calling?”

“Number seventeen,” a voice said. It was a man’s voice. He sounded old and nervous, even on the verge of tears.

“I believe you have the wrong number,” Liberty said.

There was a strangled cry, then a click. She put the phone down and sat upon the sofa. Fallen between the cushions was
a folded piece of mimeographed paper from the school that Teddy had left behind.
GENERAL INFORMATION FOR PARENTS
the paper said.

The principal had misspelled absorption. The school had faulty wiring, daily tornado drills, and nervous German shepherds with names like Kong and Goforit prowling the corridors seeking illegal substances. They had banned
The Little Lame Prince
from the library, had a nurse who spanked children in the infirmary, and had turned off the drinking fountains because there was saltwater infusion in the wells. A teacher had just been attacked in a room where children were dutifully growing radishes in egg cartons and making cameras out of Quaker Oats boxes. There wasn’t time for spelling.

Liberty went into the bathroom where she turned the water on in the shower. She undressed and stood in the small stall beneath the spray until the hot water ran out. She turned off the water and stared uneasily at the shower curtain, which portrayed soiled palm trees staggered in rows.

“Hi,” Willie said. He pushed the curtain back. His lean jaws moved tightly, chewing gum. Willie made chewing gum look like one of the great pleasures of being a human being. He was wearing faded blue jeans and a snug, faded polo shirt.
His eyes were a faded blue. Liberty felt that they passed over her lightly. Communication had indeed broken down considerably. Signals were intermittent and could easily be misread.

“Why are you standing in there?” he asked.

“I was just getting out.”

“I was in a house,” Willie said, “and in a shower pretty much like this one there was …”

Liberty raised a finger to her lips wanting to hush him. She felt awkward being naked in front of this man. This was her husband. She had known him for long years and was indeed closer to him than to her own self. She shivered.

“Don’t you want to know what was in this shower?”

“I trust you,” Liberty said. “I trust you and want to be with you.” She spoke loudly.

“There was a bitch nursing six puppies. Their eyes were squeezed shut. It was cute.”

Liberty looked at him and stepped out of the shower. She wrapped a towel around herself, went to the sink and brushed her teeth.

“I was in a house,” Willie said, “where there were huge paintings on the walls of greatly enlarged amoebae, jellyfish and polyps.”

“The things people do for protection,” Liberty said, rinsing.

“People are so deceitful these days. You wouldn’t believe the number of houses that merely give the appearance of being secured. Fake tubular locks. Alarm system decals that look as though they came out of cereal boxes. It’s all an illusion, produced for the stranger.”

“And you’re the stranger,” Liberty said. She looked into the mirror. There were her lips, her teeth.

“We’re all the stranger,” Willie said.

“We should lighten up this hobby of yours,” Liberty said. “Why don’t you hot-wire a nice car and we’ll drive to New Orleans, the City that Care Forgot.”

“That’s not the plan. Do you think I’m a thug?”

“What is the plan?”

“Liberty prefers not to read between the lines,” Willie said. “The clearly visible is exhausting enough, Liberty feels.”

She could no longer see herself in the mirror which had steamed up. She drew a line down the center of the glass with her finger. At the top on the right she wrote
yes
and on the left no. She regarded her list. It certainly lacked qualification.

Willie took a soft mask from his jeans pocket and pulled it on. It was a duck mask, the duck’s expression registering surprise and concern. It was not Donald Duck. It was a duck personality entirely different from Donald’s.

Turning, Liberty said, “Oh, that’s good!”

“I’m set,” the duck said. “What are you going as?”

“Nothing. But I’m going.”

“Nothing is usually indicated by a dark forest, a wasteland tract, a desert, et cetera,” the duck said.

“Don’t,” Liberty said.

“But instead you’re going as the path you could take. You feel the path you could take, the path you could have taken inside you. You feel it as an unhappiness, an incompleteness.”

“Don’t, Willie,” Liberty said.

3

L
iberty had never cared for Halloween. The night gave the false hope that when one was summoned to the door by an unfamiliar knock, one’s most horrible fears could be objectively realized by the appearance of ghosts, witches, ambulatory corpses and the headless hounds of hell.

Liberty and Clem were not in costume. Willie wore his duck mask. Teddy came to the house in a white gown carrying a stethoscope and a saw. They walked through the streets to the small shopping center where Little Dot lived. They passed a shop that sold sportswear. A sign in the shop window said
YES! WE HAVE MASTECTOMY BATHING SUITS!

The kiln behind the pottery shop was dark. Roger and Rosie hadn’t been able to fire anything in the kiln for a month, ever since a pair of feral cockatoos had chosen to nest there.

Liberty knocked on the door. Through the window she could see Rosie bounding through a clutter of pots and bowls and cups and vases, toward them.

“Hi,” she said. “Little Dot’s all set. She has the greatest costume but she doesn’t like it. She doesn’t want to come out of her tepee.”

“What’s that?” Teddy asked, pointing at a pin on Rosie’s blouse. There was a man’s picture on the pin.

“Oh!” Rosie said, “that’s the Dalai Lama. A friend of mine met the Dalai Lama. He said he wore horn-rimmed glasses and a little button on his suit just like this one that shows the Dalai Lama wearing horn-rimmed glasses. They sell these little pins all over the place in Tibet, and my friend bought one and gave it to me. At first I thought it was really stupid but then I felt the Dalai Lama’s spirit piercing me like little arrows. It felt just like that, like being pierced by little arrows. Now I love this pin, I don’t think it’s stupid at all! But I can’t wear it very much because it gives me a great yearning for nonexistence. That’s a great feeling, very relaxing, but it’s not the kind of feeling you should have all the time. That’s why little kids shouldn’t wear this pin. It’s like they shouldn’t sit in hot tubs either.” Rosie ran her fingers through her rusty red hair and beamed at Teddy. “I used to take drugs but the Dalai Lama made me clean. It’s great to be clean, let me tell you. Then I met Roger-Dad and that was great too. I mean, I’m very accepting now.”

Roger came into the shop. He kissed Liberty on the forehead. His pigtail harbored string and dust, part of a potato chip. “Liberty,” he said mournfully. “Willie.”

“Thanks for taking Little Dot,” Rosie said. “Roger-Dad and I are just so busy tonight. You’re Christians, right? I bet you are!” Rosie had made this inference many times.

“We believe in guilt and longing,” Willie admitted. “Confession and continual defeat. The circle and the spiral.” The words filled up the room pleasantly, like boulders.

“Jesus could never have saved me from drugs. Jesus is dead.” Rosie reflected sadly upon this for a moment.

Willie walked to the back of the store and called out into
the yard where the tepee stood. The tepee looked serene. Little Dot had a sleeping bag inside and a collection of soothing photographs. Rosie subscribed to a club that sent a soothing photograph each month. The subjects offered were supposed to be especially mysterious, evocative and comforting. They were black-and-white photographs of columns and foggy roads, of ladders and lambs. Within each photograph was a place where Little Dot was free to come and go.

Little Dot pushed back the flap door of the tepee and walked stolidly past Willie and into the shop. The little girl was dressed half as a man and half as a woman. Half a tie was sewn to half a frilly blouse, half a skirt to a single trouser leg. On one side of her face was glued a beard and a thick eyebrow. There was lipstick on one side of her mouth and a rhinestone earring dangling from her ear.

“Oh, Rosie,” Liberty said.

“A representation in human form of the principle of wholeness,” Rosie said with pride.

Rosie gave Teddy and Little Dot large shopping bags, then put a highly speckled banana in the bottom of each one. “Have a ball now!” she said. The children looked at the first thing in the bottom of their bags. Before, their bags had been perfect. Now each bag had a redolent banana in it.

They left the shopping center and entered a neighborhood Willie and Liberty knew well, for they had, in the past, entered many of the homes uninvited and entertained themselves there. There was the home of the retired Colonel, for example. The retired Colonel had a bazooka and a collection of thunder jugs. He had made a coffee table out of an old gravemarker. The marker was slim and weather-pocked with an angel etched
upon it and the dates 1797–1798. The retired Colonel, in whose home the marker lies, covered with magazines and overflowing ashtrays, is a heavy, sallow man, a widower with blackheads around his eyes. This night, the house is dark, the shades drawn, and the children do not approach the door. Instead, they run between the ant mounds on the lawn to the house beside it, a house from which came the voice of Elvis Presley singing “Heartbreak Hotel.” Liberty and Willie were familiar with the house from which the voice of The King rolled. An enormous Oriental carpet filled the floor of the living room and climbed one wall. Pinned to the center of it was a photograph of Elvis with his curled lip, his thickly lashed eyes, his look of humorous sadism, Elvis in his prime, signing the hand of a dazed-looking girl in an angora sweater and poodle skirt. In the bedroom were two large teddy bears, both blue and eyeless with pieces of red felt for tongues. In the bathroom, the medicine cabinet was filled with diet pills and expensive bubble bath.