The Visiting Privilege (18 page)

“Do you remember that little song,” she asked.

“Almost,” Dwight said.

“What was that about anyway,” Lucy asked. “The tiny ant didn't do anything, he was just waiting at his doorway.”

“It was just nonsense stuff you'd sing to a little baby,” Dwight said. He looked at her vaguely and said, “My sweet…”

Lucy called up her friend Daisy and told her about the black Thunderbird. She did not mention rot. Daisy was ten years older than Lucy and was one of the last of Dwight's girlfriends. Daisy had recently had one of her legs amputated. There had been a climbing accident and then she had just let things go on for too long. She was a tall, boyish-looking woman who before the amputation had always worn jeans. Now she slung herself about in skirts, for she found it disturbed people less when she wore a skirt, but when she went to the beach she wore a bathing suit, and she didn't care if she disturbed people or not because she loved the beach, the water, so still and so heavy, hiding so much.

“I didn't read in the paper about a dead man just sitting in his car like that,” Daisy said. “Don't they usually report such things? It's unusual, isn't it?”

Lucy had fostered Daisy's friendship because she knew Daisy was still in love with Dwight. If someone, God, for example, had asked Daisy if she'd rather have her leg back or Dwight, she would have said, “Dwight.” Lucy felt excited about this and at the same time mystified and pitying. Knowing it always cheered Lucy up when she felt out of sorts.

“Did I tell you about the man in the supermarket with only one leg,” Daisy asked. “I had never seen him before. He was with his wife and baby and instead of being in the mother's arms the baby was in a stroller so the three of them took up a great deal of room in the aisle, and when I turned down the aisle I became entangled with this little family. I felt that I had known this man all my life, of course. People were smiling at us. Even the wife was smiling. It was dreadful.”

“You should find someone,” Lucy said without much interest.

Daisy's leg was in ashes in a drawer in a church garden, waiting for the rest of her.

“Oh no, no,” Daisy said modestly. “So!” she said. “You're going to have another car!”

It was almost suppertime and there was the smell of meat on the air. Two small, brown birds hopped across the patchy grass and Lucy watched them with interest for birds seldom frequented their neighborhood. Whenever there were more than three birds in a given place, it was considered an infestation and a variety of measures were taken, which reduced their numbers to an acceptable level. Lucy remembered that when she was little, the birds that flew overhead sometimes cast shadows on the ground. There were flocks of them at times and she remembered hearing the creaking of their wings, but she supposed that was just the sort of thing a child might remember, having seen or heard it only once.

She set the dining room table for three as this was the night each spring when Rosette would come for dinner, bringing shad and shad roe, Dwight's favorite meal. Rosette had been the most elegant of Dwight's girlfriends, and the one with the smallest waist. She was now married to a man named Bob. When Rosette had been Dwight's girlfriend, she had been called Muffin. For the last five springs, ever since Lucy and Dwight had been married, she would have the shad flown down from the North and she would bring it to their house and cook it. Yet even though shad was his favorite fish and he only got it once a year, Dwight would be coming home a little late this night because he was getting another opinion on the T-Bird. Lucy no longer accompanied him on these discouraging expeditions.

Rosette appeared in a scant, white cocktail dress and red high-heeled shoes. She had brought her own china, silver, candles and wine. She reset the table, dimmed the lights and made Lucy and herself large martinis. They sat, waiting for Dwight, speaking aimlessly about things. Rosette and Bob were providing a foster home for two delinquents, whose names were Jerry and Jackie.

“What awful children,” Rosette said. “They're so homely too. They were cuter when they were younger, now their noses are really long and their jaws are odd-looking too. I gave them bunny baskets this year and Jackie wrote me a note saying that what she really needed was a prescription for birth-control pills.”

When Dwight arrived, Rosette was saying, “Guilt's not a bad thing to have. There are worse things to have than guilt.” She looked admiringly at Dwight and said, “You're a handsome eyeful.” She made him a martini, which he drank quickly, then she made them all another one. Drinking hers, Lucy stood and watched the T-Bird in the driveway. It was a dainty car, and the paint was so black it looked wet. Rosette prepared the fish with great solemnity, bending over Lucy's somewhat dirty broiler. They all ate in a measured way. Lucy tried to eat the roe one small egg at a time but found that this was impossible.

“I saw Jerry this afternoon walking down the street carrying a weed whacker,” Dwight said. “Does he do yard work now? Yard work's a good occupation for a boy.”

“Delinquents aren't always culprits,” Rosette said. “That's what many people don't understand, but no, Jerry is not doing yard work, he probably stole that thing off someone's lawn. Bob tries to talk to him but Jerry doesn't heed a word he says. Bob's not very convincing.”

“How is Bob?” Lucy asked.

“Husband Bob is a call I never should have answered,” Rosette said.

Lucy crossed her arms over her stomach and squeezed herself with delight because Rosette said the same thing each year when she was asked about Bob.

“Life with Husband Bob is a long twilight of drinking and listless anecdote,” Rosette said.

Lucy giggled, because Rosette always said this, too.

The next day, Dwight told Lucy of his intentions to bring the T-Bird into the house. “She won't last long on the street,” he said. “She's a honey but she's tired. Elements are hard on a car and it's the elements that have done this sweet little car in. We'll put her in the living room, which is underfurnished anyway, and it will be like living with a work of art right in our living room. We'll keep her shined up and sit inside her and talk. It's very peaceful inside that little car, you know.”

The T-Bird looked alert and coquettish as they spoke around it.

“That car was meant to know the open road,” Lucy said. “I think we should drive it till it drops.” Dwight looked at her sorrowfully and she widened her eyes, not believing she had said such a thing. “Well,” she said, “I don't think a car should be in a house, but maybe we could bring it in for a little while and then if we don't like it we could take it out again.”

He put his arms around her and embraced her and she could hear his heart pounding away in his chest with gratitude and excitement.

Lucy called Daisy on the telephone. The banging and sawing had already begun. “Men go odd differently than women,” Daisy said. “That's always been the case. For example, I read that men are exploring how to turn the earth around toxic waste dumps into glass by the insertion of high-temperature electric probes. A woman would never think of something like that.”

Dwight worked feverishly for days. He removed the picture window, took down the wall, shored up the floor, built a ramp, drained the car of all its fluids so it wouldn't leak on the rug, pushed it into the house, replaced the studs, put back the window, erected fresh Sheetrock and repainted the entire room. In the room, the car looked like a big doll's car. But it didn't look bad inside the house at all and Lucy didn't mind it being there, although she didn't like it when Dwight raised the hood. She didn't care for the hood being raised one bit and always lowered it when she saw it was up. She thought about the Thunderbird most often at night when she was in bed lying beside Dwight and then she would marvel at its silent, unseen presence in the room beside them, taking up space, so strange and shining and full of rot.

They would sit frequently in the car, in their house, not going anywhere, looking through the windshield out at the window and through the window to the street. They didn't invite anyone over for this. Soon, Dwight took to sitting in the car by himself. Dwight was tired. It was taking him a while to bounce back from the carpentry. Lucy saw him there one day behind the wheel, one arm bent and dangling over the glossy door, his eyes shut, his mouth slightly open, his hair as black as she had ever seen it. She couldn't remember the first time she had noticed him, really noticed him, the way he must have first noticed her when she'd been a baby.

“I wish you'd stop that, Dwight,” she said.

He opened his eyes. “You should try this by yourself,” he said. “Just try it and tell me what you think.”

She sat for some time in the car alone, then went into the kitchen, where Dwight stood, drinking water. It was a gray day, with a gray careless light falling everywhere.

“I had the tiniest feeling in there that the point being made was that something has robbed this world of its promise,” Lucy said. She did not have a sentimental nature.

Dwight was holding a glass of water, frowning a little at it. Water poured into the sink and down the drain, part of the same water he was drinking. On the counter was a television set and on the screen men were wheeling two stretchers out of a house and across a lawn and on each stretcher was a long still thing covered in a green cloth. The house was a cement-block house with two metal chairs on the porch with little cushions on them, and under the roof's overhang a basket of flowers swung.

“Is this the only channel we ever get?” Lucy said. She turned the water faucet off.

“It's the news, Lucy.”

“I've seen this news a hundred times before. It's always this kind of news.”

“This is the Sun Belt, Lucy.”

That he kept saying her name began to irritate her. “Well, Dwight,” she said. “Dwight, Dwight, Dwight.”

Dwight looked at her mildly and went back to the living room. Lucy trailed after him. They both looked at the car and Lucy said to it, “I'd like an emerald ring. I'd like a baby boy.”

“You don't ask it for things, Lucy,” Dwight said.

“I'd like a Porsche Carrera,” Lucy said to it.

“Are you crazy or what!” Dwight demanded.

“I would like a little baby,” she mused.

“You were a little baby once,” Dwight said.

“Well, I know that.”

“So isn't that enough?”

She looked at him uneasily, then said, “Do you know what I used to like that you did? You'd say, ‘That's my wife's favorite color…' or ‘That's just what my wife says…' ” Dwight gazed at her from his big, inky eyes. “And of course your wife was me!” she exclaimed. “I always thought that was kind of sexy.”

“We're not talking sex anymore, Lucy,” he said. She blushed.

Dwight got into the Thunderbird and rested his hands on the wheel. She saw his fingers pressing against the horn rim but it made no sound.

“I don't think this car should be in the house,” Lucy said, still fiercely blushing.

“It's a place where I can think, Lucy.”

“But it's in the middle of the living room! It takes up practically the whole living room!”

“A man's got to think, Lucy. A man's got to prepare for things.”

“Where did you think before we got married?” she said crossly.

“All over, Lucy. I thought of you everywhere. You were part of everything.”

Lucy did not want to be part of everything. She did not want to be part of another woman's kissing, for example. She did not want to be part of Daisy's leg, which she was certain, in their time, had played its part and been something Dwight had paid attention to. She did not want to be part of a great many things that she could mention.

“I don't want to be part of everything,” she said.

“Life is different from when I was young and you were a little baby,” Dwight said.

“I never did want to be part of everything,” she said excitedly.

Dwight worked his shoulders back into the seat and stared out the window.

“Maybe the man who had this car before died of a broken heart, did you ever think of that?” Lucy said. When he said nothing, she said, “I don't want to start waiting on you again, Dwight.” Her face had cooled off now.

“You wait the way you have to,” Dwight said. “You've got to know what you want while you're waiting.” He patted the seat beside him and smiled at her. It wasn't just a question of moving this used-up thing out again, she knew that. Time wasn't moving sideways in the manner it had always seemed to her to move but was climbing upward, then falling back, then lurching in a circle like some poisoned, damaged thing. Eventually, she sat down next to him. She looked through the glass at the other glass, then past that.

“It's raining,” Lucy said.

There was a light rain falling, a warm spring rain. As she watched, it fell more quickly. It was silverish, but as it fell faster it appeared less and less like rain and she could almost hear it rattling as it struck the street.

A
nnie and Tom and Molly are looking at boarding schools. Molly is the applicant, fourteen years old. Annie and Tom are the mom and dad. This is how they are referred to by the admissions directors. “Now if Mom and Dad would just make themselves comfortable while we steal Molly away for a moment…” Molly is stolen away and Tom and Annie drink coffee. There are cookies on a plate. Colored slides are flashed on a screen showing children earnestly learning and growing and caring through the seasons. These things have been captured. Rather, it's clear that's what they're getting at. The children's faces blur in Tom's mind. And all those autumn leaves. All those laboratories and playing fields and bell towers.

It is winter and there is snow on the ground. They have flown in from California and rented a car. Their plan is to see seven New England boarding schools in five days. Icicles hang from the admissions building. Tom gazes at them. They are lovely and refractive. They are formed and then they vanish. Tom looks away.

Annie is sitting on the other side of the room, puzzling over a mathematics problem. There are sheets of problems all over the waiting room. These are to keep parents and kids on their toes as they wait. The cold, algebraic problems are presented in little stories. Five times as many girls as boys are taking music lessons or trees are growing at different rates or ladies in a bridge club are lying about their ages. The characters and situations are invented only to be exiled to measurement. Watching Annie search for solutions makes Tom's heart ache. He remembers a class he took once himself, almost twenty years ago, a class in myth. In mythical stories, it seems, there were two ways to disaster. One of them was to answer an unanswerable question. The other was to fail to answer an answerable question.

Down a corridor there are several shut doors and behind one is Molly. Molly is their living child. Tom and Annie's other child, Martha, has been dead a year. Martha was one year older than Molly. Now they're the same age. Martha choked to death in her room on a piece of bread. It was early in the morning and she was getting ready for school. The radio was playing and two disc jockeys called the Breakfast Flakes chattered away between songs.

The weather is bad, the roads are slippery. From the backseat, Molly says, “He asked what my favorite ice cream was and I said, ‘Quarterback Crunch.' Then he asked who was President of the United States when the school was founded and I said, ‘No one.' Wasn't that good?”

“I hate trick questions,” Annie says.

“Did you like the school,” Tom asks.

“Yeah,” Molly says.

“What did you like best about it?”

“I liked how our guide—you know, Peter—just walked right across the street that goes through the campus and the cars just stopped. You and Mom were kind of hanging back, looking both ways and all, but Peter and I just trucked right across.”

Molly was chewing gum that smelled like oranges.

“Peter was cute,” Molly says.

Tom and Annie and Molly sit around a small table in their motel room. Snow accumulates beyond the room's walls. They are nowhere. The brochure that the school sent them states that the school is located thirty-five miles from Boston. Nowhere! They are all exhausted and merely sit there regarding their beverages. The television set is chained to the wall. This is indicative, Tom thinks, of considerable suspicion on the part of the management. There was also a four-dollar deposit on the room key. The management, when Tom checked in, was in the person of a child about Molly's age, a boy eating from a bag of potato chips and doing his homework.

“There's a kind of light that glows in the bottom of the water in an atomic reactor that exists nowhere else, do you know that?” the boy said to Tom.

“Interesting,” Tom said.

“Yeah,” the boy said, and marked the book he was reading with his pencil.

The motel room is darkly paneled and there is a painting of a moose between the two large beds. The moose is knee-deep in a lake with his head raised. Annie goes into the bathroom and washes her hands and face. It was her idea that Molly go away to school. She wants Molly to be free. She doesn't want her to be afraid. She fears that she is making her afraid, as she herself is afraid. Annie hears Molly and Tom talking in the other room and then she hears Molly laugh. She raises her fingers to the window frame and feels the cold seeping in. She adjusts the lid to the toilet tank. It shifts slightly. She washes her hands again. She goes into the room and sits on one of the beds.

“What are you laughing about?” she says. She means to be offhand, but her words come out heavily.

“Did you see the size of that girl's radio in the dorm room we visited?” Molly says, laughing. “It was the biggest radio I'd ever seen. I told Daddy there was a real person lying in it, singing.” Molly giggles. She pulls her turtleneck sweater up to just below her eyes.

Annie laughs, then she thinks she has laughed at something terrible, the idea of someone lying trapped and singing. She raises her hands to her mouth. She had not seen a radio large enough to hold anyone. She saw children in classes, in laboratories in some brightly painted basement. The children were dissecting sheep's eyes. “Every winter term in biology you've got to dissect sheep's eyes,” their guide said wearily. “The colors are really nice, though.” She saw sacks of laundry tumbled down a stairwell with names stenciled on them. Now she tries not to see a radio large enough to hold anyone singing.

At night, Tom drives in his dreams. He dreams of ice, of slick treachery. All night he fiercely holds the wheel and turns in the direction of the skid.

In the morning when he returns the key, the boy has been replaced by an old man with liver spots the size of quarters on his hands. Tom thinks of asking where the boy is, but then realizes he must be in school learning about eerie, deathly light. The bills the old man returns to Tom are soft as cloth.

In California, they live in a canyon. Martha's room is not situated with a glimpse of the ocean like some of the other rooms. It faces a rocky ledge where owls nest. The canyon is cold and full of small birds and bitter-smelling shrubs. The sun moves quickly through it. When the rocks are touched by the sun, they steam. All of Martha's things remain in her room—the radio, the posters and mirrors and books. It is a “guest” room now, although no one ever refers to it as such. They still call it “Martha's room.” But it has become a guest room, even though there are never any guests.

The rental car is without distinction. It is a four-door sedan with automatic transmission and a poor turning radius. Martha would have been mortified by it. Martha had a boyfriend who, with his brothers, owned a monster truck. The Super Swamper tires were as tall as Martha, and all the driver of an ordinary car would see when it passed by was its colorful undercarriage with its huge shock and suspension coils, its long yellow stabilizers. For hours on a Saturday they would wallow in sloughs and rumble and pitch across stony creek beds, and then they would wash and wax the truck or, as James, the boyfriend, would say, dazzle the hog. The truck's name was Bear. Tom and Annie didn't care for James, and they hated and feared Bear. Martha loved Bear. She wore a red and white peaked cap with
MONSTER TRUCK
stenciled on it. After Martha died, Molly put the cap on once or twice. She thought it would help her feel closer to Martha but it didn't. The sweatband smelled slightly of shampoo, but it was just a cap.

Tom pulls into the frozen field that is the parking lot for the Northwall School. The admissions office is very cold. The receptionist is wearing an old worn chesterfield coat and a scarf. Someone is playing a hesitant and plaintive melody on a piano in one of the nearby rooms. They are shown the woodlot, the cafeteria and the arts department, where people are hammering out their own silver bracelets. They are shown the language department, where a class is doing tarot card readings in French. They pass a room and hear a man's voice say, “Matter is a sort of blindness.”

While Molly is being interviewed, Tom and Annie walk to the barn. The girls are beautiful in this school. The boys look a little dull. Two boys run past them, both wearing jeans and denim jackets. Their hair is short and their ears are red. They appear to be pretending they're in a drama that's being filmed. They dart and feint. One stumbles into a building while the other crouches outside, tossing his head and scowling, throwing an imaginary knife from hand to hand.

Annie tries a door to the barn but it is latched from the inside. She walks around the barn in her high heels. The hem of her coat dangles. She wears gloves on her pale hands. Tom walks beside her with his hands in his pockets. A flock of starlings fly overhead in an oddly tight formation. A hawk flies above them. The hawk will not fall upon them, clenched like this. If one would separate from the flock, then the hawk could fall.

“I don't know about this ‘matter is a sort of blindness' place,” Tom says. “It's not what I had in mind.”

Annie laughs but she's not paying attention. She wants to get into the huge barn. She tugs at another door. Dirt smears the palms of her gloves. Then, suddenly, the wanting leaves her face.

“Martha would like this school, wouldn't she?” she says.

“We don't know,” Tom says. “Please don't, Annie.”

“I feel that I've lived my whole life in one corner of a room,” Annie says. “That's the problem. It's just having always been in this one corner. And now I can't see anything. I don't even know the room, do you see what I'm saying?”

Tom nods but he doesn't see the room. The sadness in him has become his blood, his life flowing in him. There's no room for him.

In the admissions building, Molly sits in a wooden chair facing her interviewer, Miss Plum, who teaches composition and cross-country skiing.

“You asked if I believe in
aluminum,
” Molly asks.

“Yes, dear. Uh-huh, I did,” Miss Plum says.

“Well, I suppose I'd have to
believe
in it,” Molly says.

Annie has a large cardboard file that holds compartmentalized information on the schools they're visiting. The rules and regulations for one school are put together in what is meant to look like an American passport. In the car's backseat, Molly flips through the book, annoyed.

“You can't do anything in this place!” she says. “The things on your walls have to be framed and you can only cover sixty percent of the wall space. You can't wear jeans.” Molly gasps. “And you have to eat breakfast!” Molly tosses the small book onto the floor, on top of the ice scraper. She gazes glumly out the window at an orchard. She is sick of the cold. She is sick of discussing her “interests.” White fields curve by. Her life is out there somewhere, fleeing from her while she is in the backseat of this stupid car. Her life is never going to be hers. She thinks of it raining, back home in the canyon, rain falling upon rain. Her legs itch and her scalp itches. She has never been so bored. She thinks that the worst thing she has done so far in her life was to lie in a hot bath one night, smoking a cigarette and saying
I hate God.
That was the very worst thing. It's pathetic. She bangs her knees irritably against the front seat.

“You want to send me far enough away,” she says to her parents. “I mean, it's the other side of the dumb continent. Maybe I don't even want to do this,” she says.

She looks at the thick sky holding back snow. She doesn't hate God anymore. She doesn't even think about God. Anybody who would let a kid choke on a piece of bread…

The next school has chapel four times a week and an indoor hockey rink. In the chapel, two fir trees are held in wooden boxes. Wires attached to the ceiling hold them upright. It is several weeks before Christmas.

“When are you going to decorate them,” Molly asks Shirley, her guide. Shirley is handsome and rather horrible. The soles of her rubber boots are a bright, horrible orange. She looks at Molly.

“We don't decorate the trees in the chapel,” she says.

Molly looks at the tree stumps bolted into the wooden boxes. Beads of sap pearl golden on the bark.

“This is a very old chapel,” Shirley says. “See those pillars? They look like marble, but they're just pine, painted to look like marble.” She isn't being friendly, she's just saying what she knows. They walk out of the chapel, Shirley soundlessly, on her horrible orange soles.

“Do you play hockey,” she asks.

“No,” Molly says.

“Why not?”

“I like my teeth,” Molly says.

“You
do
?” Shirley says in mock amazement. “Just kidding,” she says. “I'm going to show you the hockey rink anyway. It's new. It's a big deal.”

Molly sees Tom and Annie standing some distance away beneath a large tree draped with many strings of extinguished lights. Her mother's back is to her, but Tom sees her and waves.

Molly follows Shirley into the still, odd air of the hockey rink. No one is on the ice. The air seems distant, used up. On one wall is a big painting of a boy in a hockey uniform. He is in a graceful, easy posture, skating alone on bluish ice toward the viewer, smiling. He isn't wearing a helmet. He has brown hair and wide golden eyes. Molly reads the plaque beneath the painting. His name is Jimmy Watkins and he had died six years before at the age of seventeen. His parents had built the rink and dedicated it to him.

Molly takes a deep breath. “My sister, Martha, knew him,” she says.

“Oh yeah?” Shirley says with interest. “Did your sister go here?”

“Yes,” Molly says. She frowns a little as she lies. Martha and Jimmy Watkins of course know each other. They know everything but they have secrets too.