Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) (10 page)

That evening everyone drank too much and later dreamed vivid dreams. The twins dreamed they were in the middle of a highway, trying to cross, trying to cross. Angus dreamed he was in a coffee shop where a kindly but inefficient waitress who looked like his mother was directing him to a table that wasn’t there. Lucretia dreamed she was carving
Kindertotenlieder
as sung by Kathleen Ferrier out of a block of wood with a chain
saw. That’s quite good, someone was saying. It’s only a copy, Lucretia demurred. Walter dreamed he was kneeling at the communion rail in the silk pajamas. The cup was working its way toward him but had become a thermometer to be placed beneath the tongues of the devout, and by the time it reached him it was a dipstick from a car’s engine that a mechanic was wiping with a filthy cloth.

Louise had had the dog for five months now. When she realized how much time had passed, she thought: Seven more months to go. In seven months we’ll know more.

Someone was putting a house up behind Louise’s house. The yard had been bladed and most of the trees taken down. The banal framework of a house stood there. When Louise gave a party, everyone was shocked at the change.

“I thought that yard went with this house,” Jack said.

“Well, I guess not,” Louise said.

“All those little birdhouses are gone,” Lucretia said. “People put them inside now, you know, as a decorative accent. They paint them in these already fading, flaking colors and put them around.”

“They’re safer inside,” Angus said.

“That thing is going to be huge, Louise,” Betsy said. “It’s going to loom over you.”

They talked for a while about what she could plant to block it out.

“Nothing will grow in time,” Betsy said.

“In time for what?” Walter said.

“Everything takes so long to grow. My god, Louise,” Betsy said, “you’d better just move.”

“Louise,” the twins said, “if you die are you going to leave us anything?” They were sitting on the sofa eating pretzels.
Outside, the wind was blowing hard but there were no trees anymore to indicate this with their tossing branches. A door blew open, banging, though.

Louise was going to move. She didn’t want that house going up behind her. Within a week, she had found another place. Walter and Lucretia helped her move. Walter had a truck and they transferred all the furniture in one trip. They transferred Broom too, with his dog bed and his dish for water and his dish for food. Then Louise packed her car with what remained, right up to the roof. Even so, she had thrown away a lot of things. She was simplifying and purifying her life, keeping only her nicest, most singular things. Louise swept the old house clean, glad to be leaving. She looked with satisfaction at the empty rooms, the stark windows and their newly ugly vistas. She slammed the door and headed for her car but it wasn’t where she’d left it. She stared at the place where the car had been. But it had vanished, been stolen, and everything was gone. The sun was bright, still shining on the place where it had been.

It was Betsy’s turn to have a party. They told theft stories—they all had them—and tried to cheer Louise up. She had already bought another car with the insurance money. It wasn’t as appealing but she liked it in a different way. She liked it because she didn’t like it that much, wasn’t as girlishly pleased with it as she had been with the other one.

“You can get all new clothes,” Lucretia said. “You can go on a spree. That favorite dress of yours had a spot on it anyway and kind of on the back at that.”

“It did not,” Louise said. “I got that spot out. I loved that dress.”

“I bet you can’t even remember everything you packed in the car,” Jack said.

“My pearls,” Louise said sadly.

“Christmas is coming,” Angus said. But he always said that, as if he were going to buy everyone wonderful gifts, the gifts of their most perfect desiring. But he bought champagne and cookies that they would drink and eat was all.

“My grandmother’s silver tea service.”

“Louise, you know you never used that and would never use that in your life,” Lucretia said. “It didn’t have a place.”

“But it’s gone,” Louise said. It was gone, of course, but there was something else, something worse. She had made all these choices. She had discarded this and retained that and it hadn’t mattered.

“Things are ephemeral,” Daisy said.

“And an illusion,” Wilbur said.

“Well, which is it?” Jack demanded, annoyed.

Everyone was a little embarrassed. Seldom did anyone respond to the twins.

“I’ll tell you one thing,” Jack said, “I sold that crazy bowl of Elliot’s to an antique store.”

None of them could think about Elliot without being thwarted by the mystery of the things he’d given them. His behavior had been inexplicable. It was all inexplicable.

“Oh, I can’t think about it anymore!” Louise cried. They were all drinking margaritas out of silly glasses.

“How is Broom?” Andrew asked delicately.

“Oh, I’ve rather gotten used to Broom,” Louise said.

Lucretia looked at her unhappily. Louise had lost her sparkle, Lucretia thought.

Louise settled quickly into her new house. It was bigger than the other one and more ordinary. Broom didn’t know which room to disappear into. He had tried them all and couldn’t decide. He would take up in the most unlikely places. Sometimes she would come across him on the fifth step of a narrow back staircase. What an odd place to be! Wherever he was he looked uncomfortable. Still, she was sure Elliot would not have wanted her to surrender the animal so easily. Of course she would never know Elliot’s thoughts. She herself could only think—and she was sure she was like many others in this regard, it was her connection with others, really—that life would have been far different under other circumstances, and yet here it wasn’t, after all.

M
Y MOTHER BEGAN
going to gun classes in February. She quit the yoga. As I understand it, yoga is concentration. You choose an object of attention and you concentrate on it. It may be; but need not be, the deity. This is how it was explained to me. The deity is different now than it used to be, it can be anything, pretty much anything at all. But even so, my mother let the yoga go and went on to what was called a “.38”—a little black gun with a long barrel—at a pistol range in the city. Classes were Tuesday and Thursday evenings from five to seven. That was an hour and a half of class and half an hour of shooting time. I would go with her and afterwards we would go to the Arizona Inn and have tea and share a club sandwich. Then we would go home, which was just the way we left it. The dogs were there and the sugar machine was in the corner. We left it out because we had to use it twice a day. I knew how to read it and clean it. My mother and I both had diabetes and that is not
something you can be cured of, not ever. In another corner was the Christmas tree. We liked to keep it up, although we had agreed not to replace any of the bulbs that burned out. At the same time we were not waiting until every bulb went dark before we took the tree down, either. We were going to be flexible about it, not superstitious. My grandmother had twelve orange-juice glasses. A gypsy told her fortune and said she’d live until the last of the twelve glasses broke. The gypsy had no way of knowing that my grandmother had twelve orange-juice glasses! When I knew my grandmother, she had seven left. She had four left when she died. The longest my mother and I ever left the tree up was Easter once when it came early.

This is Tucson, Arizona, a high desert valley. Around us are mountains, and one mountain is so high there is snow in the winter. People drive up and make snowmen and put them in the backs of their trucks and on the hoods of their cars and drive back down again, seeing how long they will last. My mother and I have done that, made a little snowman and put him on the hood of the car. There are animals up there that don’t know that the animals below them in the desert even exist. They might as well be in different galaxies. The mountain is 9,157 feet tall, and is 6,768 feet above the city. Numbers interest me and have since the second grade. My father weighed one hundred pounds when he died. Each foot of a saguaro cactus weighs one hundred pounds, and that is mostly water. My father weighed no more than one cactus foot. I weigh sixty-eight pounds, my mother weighs one hundred and sixteen, the dogs weigh eighty each. I do my mother’s checkbook. Each month, according to the bank, I am accurate to the penny.

The man who taught the class and owned the firing range was called the Marksman. He called his business an Institute. The Pistol Institute. There were five people attending the class in addition to my mother, three women and two men. They did not speak to one another or exchange names because no one wanted to make friends. My mother had had a friend in yoga class, Suzanne. She was disturbed that my mother had dropped the yoga and was going to the Institute, and she said she was going to throw the I Ching and find out what it was, exactly, my mother thought she was doing. If she did, we never heard the results.

My mother was not the kind of person who lived each day by objecting to it, day after day. She was not. And I do not mean to suggest that the sugar machine was as large as the Christmas tree. It’s about the size of my father’s wallet, which my mother now uses as her own.

When my father died, my mother felt that it was important that I not suffer a failure to recover from his death and she took me to a psychiatrist. I was supposed to have twenty-five minutes a week with the psychiatrist, but I was never in his office for more than twenty. Once he used some of that time to tell me he was dyslexic and that the beauty of words meant nothing to him, nothing, though he appreciated and even enjoyed their meanings. I told him one of our dogs is epileptic and I had read that in the first moments of an epileptic attack some people felt such happiness that they would be willing to give up their life to keep it, and he said he doubted that a dog would want to give up its life for happiness. I told him dead people are very disappointed when you visit them and they discover you’re still flesh and blood, but that they’re not angry,
only sad. He dismissed this completely, without commenting on it or even making a note. I suppose he’s used to people trying things out on him.

My mother did not confide in me but I felt that she was unhappy that February. We stopped the ritual of giving each other our needles in the morning before breakfast. I now gave myself my injections and she her own. I missed the other way, but she had changed the policy and that was that. She still kissed me good morning and good night and took the dogs for long walks in the desert and fed the wild birds. I told her I’d read that you shouldn’t feed the birds in winter, that it fattened up the wrong kind of bird. The good birds left and came back, left and came back, but the bad ones stayed and were strengthened by the habits of people like my mother. I told her this to be unpleasant because I missed the needles together, but it didn’t matter. She said she didn’t care. She had changed her policy about the needles, not the birds.

The Pistol Institute was in a shopping mall where all the other buildings were empty and for lease. It had glass all across the front and you could see right into it, at the little round tables where people sat and watched the shooters and at the long display case where the guns were waiting for someone to know them, to want them. When you were inside you couldn’t see out, because the glass was dark. It seemed to me the reverse of what it should be, but it was the Marksman’s place so it was his decision. Off to the right as you entered was the classroom and over its door was the sign
Be Aware of Who Can Do Unto You
. No one asked what this meant, to my knowledge, and I would not ask. I did not ask questions. I had started off doing this deliberately sometime before but by now I did it naturally. Off to the left behind a wall of clear glass was the firing range.
The shooters wore ear protectors and stood at an angle in little compartments firing at targets on wires that could be brought up close or sent farther away by pressing a button. The target showed the torso of a man with large square shoulders and a large square head. In the left-hand corner of the target was a box in which the same figure was much reduced. This was the area you wanted to hit when you were good. It wasn’t tedious to watch the shooters, but it wasn’t that interesting either. I preferred to sit as close as possible to the closed door of the classroom and listen to the Marksman address the class.

The Marksman stressed awareness and responsibility. He stressed the importance of accuracy and power and speed and commitment and attitude. He said that having a gun was like having a pet or having a child. He said that there was nothing embarrassing about carrying a gun into public places. You can carry a weapon into any establishment except those that serve liquor, unless you’re requested not to by the operator of that establishment. No one else can tell you, only the operator. Embarrassment is not carrying a gun, the Marksman said. Embarrassment is being a victim, naked, in a bloody lump, gazed upon by strangers. That’s embarrassment, he said.

The Marksman told horrible stories about individuals and their unexpected fates. He told stories about doors that were opened a crack when they had been closed before. He told stories about tailgating vehicles. He told a story about the minivan mugger, the man who hid under cars and slashed women’s Achilles tendons so they couldn’t run away. He said that the attitude you have toward others is important. Do not give them the benefit of the doubt. Give them the benefit of the doubt and you could already be dead or dying. The distinction between dead and dying was an awful one and I often went
into the bathroom, the one marked
Does
, and washed my hands and dried them, holding and turning them for a long time under the hot-air dryer. The Marksman told the story about the barefoot, barechested madman with the machete on the steps of the capitol in Phoenix. This was his favorite story, illustrating as it did the difference between killing power and stopping power. The madman strode forward for sixteen seconds after he had been warned and his chest blown out. You could see daylight through his chest. You could see the gum wrappers on the marble steps behind him right through his chest. But for sixteen seconds he kept coming, wielding his machete, and in those sixteen seconds he annihilated four individuals. My mother kept taking the classes, so I heard this story more than once.