Breaking and Entering (17 page)

“You can’t.”

“I will,” Charlie said. “I will see you. Has your old man returned?”

“No,” Liberty said.

“Where does he go? Where do
you
go? I saw in the paper that two kids had been saved from a burning house in the Panhandle by an unidentified man. Do you think Willie traveled up there to do that? Could that have been our Willie? He saved the children. I think he even saved the aged collie. Do you know if Willie gives blood?”

“I don’t think he’s ever given blood.”

“Too minor probably. There’ll always be blood, right? I think he’ll be donating his living organs soon, important living organs. Then he’ll open the zoos and prisons. I have a theory. I think Willie saves people as a kind of joke.”

“That would be terrible,” Liberty said.

“Really. A joke. Willie thinks abstractly. He thinks in opposition
to his brain. Actually, Willie doesn’t give a shit. Now myself, I think concretely. Your past is irredeemable, but it’s not over yet. Here’s what I want to tell you. I went out and bought us a car with the money I just made, a finny old Caddy, big enough to hold us all, the means by which we will make good our escape. Blinding chrome everywhere, my favorite color. And the trunk! Wait until you see the size of the trunk! I’ve begun filling it with stuff for us. Butterfingers, hot sauce, Chuckles, hominy, potted meats. When we’re ready to go, I’ll fill the cooler with limesickles for the kid.”

“All this is impossible, Charlie,” Liberty said.

“We’ll have to start out by car. It’s only reasonable. Then we’ll determine other means of travel. The kid doesn’t like limesickles, I’ll fill it with Creamsicles.”

“He likes the ice cream with the polar bears on them, actually,” Liberty said. “He collects the wrappers.” But he wouldn’t need the wrappers if they went away, she thought. They’d leave all that behind.

“All right!” Charlie said.

“Those polar bears kind of depress me, really,” Liberty said. “I imagine the real thing. And then I see the real thing far from its ice floe home, lying flat, jaws agape, on the floor of a Dallas mansion.”

“Liberty, you mustn’t allow yourself to be brought down by an ice cream sandwich.”

She laughed.

“Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, you think going away is just a feverish fancy of mine, but it’s not. Why would I want to deceive us? We have to begin. What I’m going to do is give up drinking. This is my last drink. This one right here, this luminous lovely, unlike all the others and more precious because it is the last …”

Liberty heard the sound of breaking glass.

“Oh no, oh shit, I dropped it,” Charlie cried. They both clung to the phone in silence. Then there was a click. Charlie had hung up.

Clem gazed at her from the floor, his forepaws curled beneath him. Liberty’s hands were sweating. It was quiet. Someone could break into this house, and it would be like herself breaking into the house of another. It would be someone just like herself.
What is it that you want?
she would ask the intruder.

When the phone rang again, she stared at it. There was something wrong with it, surely.

“I’ve been on a very pretty inlet,” the voice began, “the tide comes in, goes slack, pours back out. Very peaceful there.”

“Willie,” Liberty said.

“One sinks gently from nothingness to nothingness. No bubbles.”

“You’ve been gone for days,” Liberty said.

“It always amazes me. There’s nobody out here.”

“There’s nobody out
there
, I thought that’s what we always said.”

“We have our parts, don’t we,” Willie said. “Our lines.”

“Please come back. I’m missing you.”

“Come to me,” Willie said. “I called earlier, but the line was busy. Who was that?”

“Charlie.”

“Charlie is a tragic figure, but dimly, only dimly so. Have you been seeing him?”

“No.” Liberty looked at some daisies she had cut and put in a glass.

“He believes that everything’s meant to be forgotten,” Willie said.

Liberty watched the daisies. There had been daisies in such a glass for years and years, everywhere.

“Come to me tomorrow,” Willie said. “Walk to the end of Buttonwood Beach. Go down around six in the morning. That’s when the Gulf is going to be pouring back through the Pass. Jump in, and it will sweep you about a quarter mile down Long Key to a yellow house. I’ll meet you there.”

“Jump in? There’s a bridge to Long Key.”

“But it’s almost twenty miles from you. Jumping in is the way. I’ve checked the tides. You’ll drift.”

“Jump in, then drift,” Liberty said. “It sounds like what we’ve been doing all right.”

“That’s what we’re doing,” Willie said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.”

Liberty went into the bathroom and turned the water on in the shower. She undressed, then hesitated. She looked at the pitted handles and the silver water with its sulfur smell falling from the corroded head like thousands of needles. The water swept a small brown spider from a spotted tile. She turned the water off. Charlie had a point about showers.

In the bedroom, a voice from the radio was singing

The paddles of an overhead fan threw shadows on the wall. On the bureau was a framed picture of her and Willie, taken
years before, when they were children. They did not stand close to one another. They had left plenty of room for something between them.

She wanted to take Teddy out of his daddy’s house, but she was weak, she could not be trusted. She was weak, a drifter. If she took him with her, he’d be a drifter too. A baby drifter.

She set the alarm clock, darkened the room and lay down on the bed. She heard Clem drop his weight to the floor. She tried to bring to mind her ladder, but this night it was not there, the smooth, furled, endless rungs, each of which she created, then searchingly found, down into sleep. This night it was the stairway of the song, now ended, a stairway rising crookedly upward, empty, but full of voices.

II

It is living and ceasing to live

that are imaginary solutions
.

Existence is elsewhere
.

—André Breton

1

T
he voices went on and on. This was years ago. Liberty’s father, Lamon, had once been a successful dentist. He was popular because he administered gas when he cleaned teeth and he used his prescription pad in an imaginative manner. Every afternoon after school, Liberty hurried to his office to observe his patients under the influence of nitrous oxide. Her mother thought she was there reading the magazines.

Liberty’s father was handsome and carefree, prone to minimalize the importance of the waning of love and the passage of time. His patients adored him.

“Your daddy,” Lenore Biddle said one hot morning in Liberty’s childhood, just before she reeled out the door, “highly resembles
both
William Holden and Father Johnson of St. Luke’s.”

In fact, there was something priestly about Liberty’s father’s ministrations. No matter how discouraged or tired his patients seemed when they entered the little rooms, they always left in high spirits, refreshed and confident, absolved, for the moment, of both care and carious lesions. The walls were blue, the color of peace; the tone of her father’s smock, green. The
combination elicited confidence and confession. The need for confession seemed paramount among the men.

“I’ve been thinking, Doc, about time. We spend time as if we had too much time. We complain that the day is long and the night is long and then we complain because our days and nights are gone too soon. I’ve also been thinking about boredom. I have discovered that I am a boring man. It dawned on me yesterday when I walked into my office and realized that all the women I’ve hired look like Linda. Dark, sort of frizzy hair, so-so breasts, sweet personalities. You know my little wife, Linda. Well, it was a humbling realization, Doc, it was a boring realization. I can’t believe I was put on this earth just to be faithful to Linda …”

That was the lawyer. And there was the butcher, the gardener, the boat broker.

“I worry about being locked up. I can feel it, the pressure. Like being buried in mud, or frozen solid in a block of ice, or crushed beneath stones. Do you think I’m going to do something awful …”

There was the man who owned the old hotel, Oversea—where Liberty and her parents dined freely and badly once a week in the deserted dining room—who had the need, under gas, to recite limericks.

“There was a stout lad name of Pizzle,”
he’d begin. “Oh, the little girlie’s here. Hi, sweetie,” he’d say to Liberty, who was slumped behind her copy of
Jack and Jill
.

He’d suck on the gas a moment more and puddle his bib a little. He couldn’t keep himself from continuing. “The best one of all,” he’d say.
“There was a young plumber of Leigh …”

He seemed the cheeriest of the patients, but he killed himself one night, laying his head in one of the Oversea’s big dirty ovens.

The women seemed less philosophical. Even when the nitrous oxide took hold, they’d be talking about dinner and movies and what they’d read in the papers.

“D’jall see that article on those Siamese black girls joined at the head? They’re alike in every thought and mood except that one worries about her hair all the time, always fussing at it with brushes and combs and all, and the other one couldn’t care less … Joined at the
head
, I swear. They try to lead as normal a life as possible, the article says. They want to marry and have babies and they like Italian food and yard sales …”

Eventually, though, all would grow calm. Feet and knuckles would relax, eyes would shine, and mouths would move languidly around pic and pad and paste, as their terrors and concerns were absorbed for a moment in the vastness of the vision of a healthy mouth.

Liberty’s father lost his practice through prescription misuse and income tax fraud, but grateful patients kept the family going. Her father could always get a free haircut; her mother could have a chair reupholstered for next to nothing. Appliances and wine and citrus and quartered beef continued to arrive for months after the suspended sentence. Their house filled up with bad art. The gratitude of a man named Bobby String, who had been cured of trench mouth, knew no bounds. He owned a shop that specialized in Western Wear and Furnishings, and Liberty had a closet full of fringed jackets, chaps, leather vests and boots and belts with brass buckles the size of fists. Her books were clamped together with horse bookends, the shade of her bedside lamp depicted horses grazing and her bath towel hung from a ring gripped in the mouth of a bronze horse’s head. There were horses on her curtains, there were horses on her rug. She had a frightening milk mug where the handle was in the shape of a hysterically rearing
horse. Liberty did not ride and actually had no longing for or opinion about horses, but her room resembled a shrine to the symbols and codes of puberty.