The Visiting Privilege (17 page)

“A happy memory can be a very misleading thing,” my mother said. “Would you like to go home?”

I really did not want to leave. I wanted to see it through. I held the glossy program in my hand and turned the pages. I stared hard at the print beneath the pictures and imagined all sorts of promises being made.

“Yes, we want to see how it's done, don't we, you and I,” my mother said. “We want to get to the bottom of it.”

I guessed we did.

“All right, Lizzie,” my mother said, “but I have to get something out of the car. I'll be right back.”

I waited for her in a corner of the lobby. Some children looked at me and I looked back. I had a package of gum cigarettes in my pocket and I extracted one carefully and placed the end in my mouth. I held the elbow of my right arm with my left hand and smoked the cigarette for a long time and then I folded it up in my mouth and I chewed it for a while. My mother had not yet returned when the performance began again. She was having a little drink, I knew, and she was where she went when she drank without me, somewhere in herself. It was not the place where words could take you but another place even. I stood alone in the lobby for a while, looking out into the street. On the sidewalk outside the theater, sand had been scattered and the sand ate through the ice in ugly holes. I saw no one like my mother who passed by. She was wearing a red coat. Once she had said to me, You've fallen out of love with me, haven't you, and I knew she was thinking I was someone else, but this had happened only once.

I heard the music from the stage and I finally returned to our seats. There were not as many people in the audience as before. Onstage with the magician was a woman in a bathing suit and high-heeled shoes holding a chain saw. The magician demonstrated that the saw was real by cutting up several pieces of wood with it. There was the smell of torn wood for everyone to smell and sawdust on the floor for all to see. Then a table was wheeled out and the lady lay down on it in her bathing suit, which was in two pieces. Her stomach was very white. The magician talked and waved the saw around. I suspected he was planning to cut the woman in half and I was eager to see this. I hadn't the slightest fear about this at all. I did wonder if he would be able to put her together again or if he would only cut her in half. The magician said that what was about to happen was too dreadful to be seen directly, that he did not want anyone to faint from the sight, so he brought out a small screen and placed it in front of the lady so that we could no longer see her white stomach, although everyone could still see her face and her shoes. The screen seemed unnecessary to me and I would have preferred to have been seated on the other side of it. Several people in the audience screamed. The lady who was about to be sawed in half began to chew on her lip and her face looked worried.

It was then that my mother appeared on the stage. She was crouched over a little, for she didn't have her balance back from having climbed up there. She looked large and strange in her red coat. The coat, which I knew very well, seemed the strangest thing. Someone screamed again, but more uncertainly. My mother moved toward the magician, smiling and speaking and gesturing with her hands, and the magician said, “No, I can't of course, you should know better than this, this is a performance, you can't just appear like this, please sit down…”

My mother said, “But you don't understand I'm willing, though I know the hazards and it's not that I believe you, no one would believe you for a moment but you can trust me, that's right, your faith in me would be perfectly placed because I'm not part of this, that's why I can be trusted because I don't know how it's done…”

Someone near me said, “Is she kidding, that woman, what's her plan, she comes out of nowhere and wants to be cut in half…”

“Lady,” the magician said, and I thought a dog might appear for I knew a dog named Lady who had a collection of colored balls.

My mother said, “Most of us don't understand I know and it's just as well because the things we understand that's it for them, that's just the way we are…”

She probably thought she was still in that place in herself, but everything she said were the words coming from her mouth. Her lipstick was gone. Did she think she was in disguise, I wondered.

“But why not,” my mother said, “to go and come back, that's what we want, that's why we're here and why can't we expect something to be done you can't expect us every day we get tired of showing up every day you can't get away with this forever then it was different but you should be thinking about the children…” She moved a little in a crooked fashion, speaking.

“My god,” said a voice, “that woman's drunk.”

“Sit down, please!” someone said loudly.

My mother started to cry then and she stumbled and pushed her arms out before her as though she were pushing away someone who was trying to hold her, but no one was trying to hold her. The orchestra began to play and people began to clap. The usher ran out onto the stage and took my mother's hand. All this happened in an instant. He said something to her, he held her hand and she did not resist his holding it, then slowly the two of them moved down the few steps that led to the stage and up the aisle until they stopped beside me for the usher knew I was my mother's child. I followed them, of course, although in my mind I continued to sit in my seat. Everyone watched us leave. They did not notice that I remained there among them, watching too.

We went directly out of the theater and into the streets, my mother weeping on the little usher's arm. The shoulders of his jacket were of cardboard and there was gold braid looped around it. We were being taken away to be murdered, which seemed reasonable to me. The usher's ears were large and he had a bump on his neck above the collar of his shirt. As we walked he said little soft things to my mother that gradually seemed to be comforting her. I hated him. It was not easy to walk together along the frozen sidewalks of the city. There was a belt on my mother's coat and I hung on to that as we moved unevenly along.

“Look, I've pulled myself through,” he said. “You can pull yourself through.” He was speaking to my mother.

We went into a coffee shop and sat down in a booth. “You can collect yourself in here,” he said. “You can sit here as long as you want and drink coffee and no one will make you leave.” He asked me if I wanted a donut. I would not speak to him. If he addressed me again, I thought, I would bite him. On the wall over the counter were pictures of sandwiches. I did not want to be there and I did not take off either my mittens or my coat. The little usher went up to the counter and brought back coffee for my mother and a donut on a plate for me. “Oh,” my mother said, “what have I done?” and she swung her head from side to side.

“I could tell right away about you,” the usher said. “You've got to pull yourself together. It took jumping off a bridge for me and breaking both legs before I got turned around. You don't want to let it go that far.”

My mother looked at him. “I can't imagine,” my mother said.

Outside, a child passed by, walking with her sled. She looked behind her often and you could tell she was admiring how the sled followed her so quickly on its runners.

“You're a mother,” the usher said to my mother, “you've got to pull yourself through.”

His kindness made me feel he had tied us up with rope. At last he left us and my mother laid her head down on the table and fell asleep. I had never seen my mother sleeping and I watched her as she must once have watched me, as everyone watches a sleeping thing, not knowing how it would turn out or when. Then slowly I began to eat the donut with my mittened hands. The sour hair of the wool mingled with the tasteless crumbs and this utterly absorbed my attention. I pretended someone was feeding me.

As it happened, my mother was not able to pull herself through, but this was later. At the time, it was not so near the end and when my mother woke we found the car and left Portland, my mother saying my name. “Lizzie,” she said. “Lizzie.” I felt as though I must be with her somewhere and that she knew that too, but not in that old blue convertible traveling home in the dark, the soft, stained roof ballooning up as I knew it looked like it was from outside. I got out of it, but it took me years.

L
ucy was watching the street when an old Ford Thunderbird turned in to their driveway. She had never seen the car before and her husband, Dwight, was driving it. One of Dwight's old girlfriends leapt from the passenger seat and ran toward the house. Her name was Caroline, she had curly hair and big white teeth, more than seemed normal, and Lucy liked her the least of all of Dwight's old girlfriends.

“I was the horn,” Caroline said. “That car doesn't have one so I was it. I'd yell out the window, ‘Watch out!' ”

“Were you the brakes too or just the horn,” Lucy asked.

“It has brakes,” Caroline said, showing her startling teeth. She went into the living room and said, “Hello, rug.” She always spoke to the rug lying there. The rug was from Mexico with birds of different colors flying across it. All of the birds had long, white eyes. Dwight and Caroline had brought the rug back from the Yucatán when they had gone snorkeling there years before. Some of the coves were so popular that the fish could scarcely be seen for all the suntan oil floating in the water. At Garrafón in Isla Mujeres, Dwight told Lucy, he had raised his head and seen a hundred people bobbing facedown over the rocks of the reef and a clean white tampon bobbing there among them. Caroline had said at the time, “It's disgusting, but it's obviously some joke.”

Caroline muttered little things to the rug, showing off, Lucy thought, although she wasn't speaking Spanish to it, she didn't know Spanish. Lucy looked out the window at Dwight sitting in the Thunderbird. It was old with new paint, black, with a white top and portholes and skirts. He looked a little big for it. He got out abruptly and ran to the house as though through rain, but there was no rain. It was a still day in spring, just before Easter, with an odious weight to the air. Recently, when they had been coming inside, synthetic stuff from Easter baskets had been traveling in with them, the fake nesting matter, the pastel and crinkly stuff of Easter baskets. Lucy couldn't imagine where they kept picking it up from, but no festive detritus came in this time.

Dwight gave her a hard, wandering kiss on the mouth. Lately, it was as though he were trying out kisses, trying to adjust them.

“You'll tell me all about this, I guess,” Lucy said.

“Lucy,” Dwight said solemnly.

Caroline joined them and said, “I've got to be off. I don't know the time, but I bet I can guess it to within a minute. I can do that,” she assured Lucy. Caroline closed her eyes. Her teeth seemed still to be looking out at them, however. “Five-ten,” she said after a while. Lucy looked at the clock on the wall, which showed ten minutes past five. She shrugged.

“That car is some cute,” Caroline said, giving Dwight a little squeeze. “Isn't it some cute?” she said to Lucy. “Your Dwight's been tracking this car for days.”

“I bought it from the next of kin,” Dwight said.

Lucy looked at him impassively. She was not a girl who was quick to alarm.

“I was down at the Aquarium last week looking at the fish,” Dwight began.

“Oh, that Aquarium,” Lucy said.

The Aquarium was where a baby seal had been put to sleep because he was born too ugly to be viewed by children. He had not been considered viewable so off he went. The Aquarium offended Lucy. “I like fish,” Dwight had told Lucy when she asked why he spent so much of his free time at the Aquarium. “Men like fish.”

“And when I came out into the parking lot, next to our car was this little Thunderbird and there was a dead man sitting behind the wheel.”

“Isn't that something!” Caroline exclaimed.

“I was the first to find him,” Dwight said. “I'm no expert but that man was gone.”

“What did this dead man look like,” Lucy asked Dwight.

He thought for a moment, then said, “He looked like someone in the movies. He had a large head.”

“In any case,” Lucy said a little impatiently.

“In any case,” Dwight said, “this car just jumped at me, you know how some things do. I knew I just had to have this car, it was just so pretty. This car is almost cherry,” Dwight said, gesturing out at it, “and now it's ours.”

“That car is not almost cherry,” Lucy said. “A man died in it. I would say that this car was about as un-cherry as you can get.” She went on vehemently like this for a while.

Caroline gazed at her, her lips parted, her teeth making no judgment. Then she said, “I've got to get back to my lonely home.” She did not live far away. Almost everybody they knew, and a lot of people they didn't, lived close by. “Now you two have fun in that car, it's a sweet little car.” She kissed Dwight and he patted her back in an avuncular fashion as he walked her to the door. The air outside had a faint, thin smell of fruit and rubber. A siren screamed through it.

When Dwight returned, Lucy said, “I don't want a car a man died in for my birthday.”

“It's not your birthday coming up, is it?”

Lucy admitted it was not, although Dwight often planned for her birthday months in advance. She blushed.

“It's funny how some people live longer than others, isn't it,” she finally said.

When Dwight had first seen Lucy, he was twenty-five years old and she was a four-month-old baby.

“I'm gonna marry you,” Dwight said to the baby. People heard him. He was tall and had black hair, and was wearing a leather jacket that a girlfriend had sewed a silk liner into. It was a New Year's Eve party at this girlfriend's house and the girl was standing beside him. “Oh, right,” she said. She didn't see anything particularly intriguing about this baby. They could make better babies than this, she thought. Lucy lay in a white wicker basket on a sofa. Her hair was sparse and her expression solemn. “You're gonna be my wife,” Dwight said. He was very good with babies and good with children too. When Lucy was five, her favorite things were pop-up books in which one found what was missing by pushing or pulling or turning a tab, and for her birthday Dwight bought her fifteen of these, surely as many as had ever been produced. When she was ten he bought her a playhouse and filled it with balloons. Dwight was good with adolescents as well. When she was fourteen, he rented her a horse for a year. As for women, he had a special touch with them, as all his girlfriends would attest. Dwight wasn't faithful to Lucy as she was growing up, but he was attentive and devoted. Dwight kept up the pace nicely. And all the time Lucy was stoically growing up, learning how to dress herself and read, letting her hair grow, then cutting it all off, joining clubs and playing records, doing her algebra, going on dates, Dwight was out in the world. He always sent her little stones from the places he visited and she ordered them by size or color and put them in and out of boxes and jars until there came to be so many she grew confused as to where each had come from. At about the time Lucy didn't care if she saw another little stone in her life, they got married. They bought a house and settled in. The house was a large, comfortable one, large enough, was the inference, to accommodate growth of various sorts. Things were all right. Dwight was like a big strange book where Lucy just needed to turn the pages and there everything was already.

They went out and looked at the Thunderbird in the waning light.

“It's a beauty, isn't it,” Dwight said. “Wide whites, complete engine dress.” He opened the hood, exposing the gleaming motor. Dwight was happy, his inky eyes shone. When he slammed the hood shut there was a soft rattling as of pebbles being thrown.

“What's that,” Lucy asked.

“What's what, my sweet?”

“That,” Lucy said, “on the ground.” She picked up a piece of rust, as big as her small hand and very light. Dwight peered at it. As she was trying to hand it to him, it dropped and crumbled.

“It looked so solid, I didn't check underneath,” Dwight said. “I'll have some body men come over tomorrow and look at it. I'm sure it's no problem, just superficial stuff.”

She ran her fingers behind the rocker panel of the door and came up with a handful of flakes.

“I don't know why you'd want to make it worse,” Dwight said.

The next morning, two men were scooting around on their backs beneath the T-Bird, poking here and there with screwdrivers and squinting at the undercarriage. Lucy, who enjoyed a leisurely breakfast, was still in the kitchen, finishing it. As she ate her cereal, she studied the milk carton, a panel of which made a request for organs. Lucy was aware of a new determination in the world to keep things going. She rinsed her bowl and went outside just as the two men had slipped from beneath the car and were standing up, staring at Dwight. Gouts and clots of rust littered the drive.

“This for your daughter here?” one of them said.

“No,” Dwight said irritably.

“I wouldn't give this to my daughter.”

“It's not for anyone like that!” Dwight said.

“Bottom's just about to go,” the other one said. “Riding along, these plates give, floor falls out, your butt's on the road. You need new pans at least. Pans are no problem.” He chewed on his thumbnail. “It's rusted out too where the leaf springs meet the frame. Needs some work, no doubt about that. Somebody's done a lot of work but it needs a lot more work for sure. Donny, get me the Hemmings out of the truck.”

The other man ambled off and returned with a thick brown catalog.

“Maybe you should trade up,” the first man said. “Get a car with a solid frame.”

Dwight shook his head. “You can't repair it?”

“Why sure we can repair it!” Donny said. “You can get everything for these cars, all the parts, you got yourself a classic here!” He thumbed through the catalog until he came to a page that offered the services of something called The T-Bird Sanctuary. The Sanctuary seemed to be a wrecking yard. A grainy photograph showed a jumble of cannibalized cars scattered among trees. It was the kind of picture that looked as though it had been taken furtively with a concealed camera.

“I'd trade up,” the other man said. “Lookit over here, this page here, Fifty-seven T-Bird supercharged, torch red, total body-off restoration, nothing left undone, ready to show…”

“Be still, my heart,” Donny said.

“You know if you are going to stick with this car you got,” the other man said, “and I'm not advising you to, you should paint it the original color. This black ain't original.” He opened the door and pointed at a smudge near the hinges. “See here, powder blue.”

Lucy returned to the house. She stood inside, thinking, looking out at the street. When she had been a little girl walking to school, she had once found an envelope on the street with her name on it, but there hadn't been anything in the envelope.

“We're getting another opinion,” Dwight said when he came in. “We're taking it over to Boris, the best in the business.”

They drove to the edge of town, to where another town began, to a big brown building there. Lucy enjoyed the car. It handled very well, she thought. They hurtled along, even though bigger cars passed them.

Boris was small, bald and stern. The German shepherd that stood beside him seemed remarkably large. His paws were delicately rounded but each was the size of a football. There was room, easily, for another German shepherd inside him, Lucy thought. Boris drove the Thunderbird onto a lift and elevated it. He walked slowly beneath it, his hands on his hips. Not a hair grew from his head. He lowered the car down and said, “Hopeless.” When neither Lucy nor Dwight spoke, he shouted, “Worthless. Useless.” The German shepherd sighed as though he had heard this prognosis many times.

“What about where the leaf springs meet the frame?” Lucy said. The phrase enchanted her.

Boris moved his hands around and then clutched and twisted them together in a pleading fashion.

“How can I make you nice people understand that it is hopeless? What can I say so that you will hear me, so that you will believe me? Do you like ripping up one-hundred-dollar bills? Is this what you want to do with the rest of your life? What kind of masochists are you? It would be wicked of me to give you hope. This car is unrestorable. It is full of rust and rot. Rust is a living thing, it breathes, it eats and it is swallowing up your car. These quarters and rockers have already been replaced, once, twice, who knows how many times. You will replace them again. It is nothing to replace quarters and rockers! How can I save you from your innocence and foolishness and delusions. You take out a bad part, say, you solder in new metal, you line-weld it tight, you replace the whole rear end, say, and what have you accomplished, you have accomplished only a small part of what is necessary, you have accomplished hardly anything! I can see you feel dread and nausea at what I'm saying but it is nothing compared to the dread and nausea you will feel if you continue in this unfortunate project. Stop wasting your thoughts! Rot like this cannot be stayed. This brings us to the question, What is man? with its three subdivisions, What can he know? What ought he do? What may he hope? Questions which concern us all, even you, little lady.”

“What!” Dwight said.

“My suggestion is to drive this car,” Boris said in a calmer tone, “enjoy it, but for the spring and summer only, then dump it, part it out. Otherwise, you'll be putting in new welds, more and more new welds, but always the collapse will be just ahead of you. Years will pass and then will come the day when there is nothing to weld the weld to, there is no frame, nothing. Once rot, then nothing.” He bowed, then retired to his office.

Driving home, Dwight said, “You never used to hear about rust and rot all the time. It's new, this rust and rot business. You don't know what's around you anymore.”

Lucy knew Dwight was depressed and tried to look concerned, though in truth she didn't care much about the T-Bird. She was distracted by a tune that was going through her head. It was a song she remembered hearing when she was a little baby, about a tiny ant being at his doorway. She finally told Dwight about it and hummed the tune.