by
Joy Williams
View all notes
Available query params: commented=1, untagged=1
Morris had given Pammy a driving lesson in the Jeep. He taught her how to shift smoothly, how to synchronize acceleration with the depression and release of the clutch. “There’s a way to do things right,” Morris told her, and when he said this she was filled with a sort of fear. They were just words, she knew, words that anybody could use, but behind words were always things, sometimes things you could never tell anyone, certainly no one you loved, frightening things that weren’t even true.
Bliss went downstairs and reappeared a few moments later with a glass of bourbon and ice. Joan ran a bath and sat in the tub, listening to the cars coming up the driveway, the slamming of doors and people’s greetings. She did not touch the bourbon. She thought about Daniel, his voice, his prematurely gray hair. He had big feet. The shoes he wore in church seemed enormous. Joan went to church several times a week and sat, rose or knelt in accordance with the service. She sat in the back, in a pew where someone had once outlined a flower in the brocade of the kneeling bench with green crayon. In each pew, by the hymnal rack, was a smaller rack holding printed information cards and a small sharpened pencil. One could introduce oneself, ask questions, request a hymn, seek counseling. Joan did none of these things. She sat quietly in church, her head tilted upward, listening, feeling vain, unfixed, distracted. With Daniel she felt she was close to something, some comprehension of what there was left for her to want. Bliss was right, she thought, to be jealous of Daniel, although she and the priest were little more than acquaintances. And Daniel, of course, doesn’t know anything about her—he doesn’t know the past, about the babies, he doesn’t know her breasts, her lips. He doesn’t know the terrible way she thinks, like Bliss knows.
This had been going on for a while. In the summer Lenore had been diagnosed and condemned but she kept bouncing back, as the doctors put it, until recently. The daisies that bloomed in the fall down by the storm-split elm had come and gone, even the little kids at Halloween. Thanksgiving had passed without comment and it would be Christmas soon. Lenore was ignoring it. The boxes of balls and lights were in the cellar, buried deep. Helen had made the horrible mistake of asking her what she wanted for Christmas one night and Lenore had said, “Are you stupid?” Then she said, “Oh, I don’t mean to be so impatient, it’s the medicine, my voice doesn’t even sound right. Does my voice sound right? Get me something you’ll want later. A piece of jewelry or something. Do you want the money for it?” She meant this sincerely.
:(
Miriam hated it when Jack was judgmental, and Jack was judgmental a great deal. She herself stole on occasion, mostly sheets. For some reason, it was easy to steal sheets. As a girl she had wanted to become a witty, lively and irresistible woman, skilled in repartee and in arguments on controversial subjects, but it hadn’t turned out that way. She had become a woman who was still waiting for her calling.
But eventually Jack’s lack of success began to vex him. Miriam and the lamp continued to wait solemnly for his empty-handed return. He grew irritable. Sometimes he would forget to wash off his camouflage paint, and he slept poorly. Then, late one afternoon when Jack was out in the woods, he fell asleep in his stand and toppled out of a tree, critically wounding himself with his own arrow, which passed through his eye and into his head like a knife thrust into a cantaloupe. A large portion of his brain lost its rosy hue and turned gray as a rodent’s coat. A month later, he could walk with difficulty and move one arm. He had some vision out of his remaining eye and he could hear but not speak. He emerged from rehab with a face as expressionless as a frosted cake. He was something that had suffered a premature burial, something accounted for but not present. Miriam was certain that he was aware of the morbid irony in this.
oh my god she just sneaks this in mid-paragraph. brutal
[...] The taxidermist was a genius. He couldn’t make an animal look dead if he wanted to.
lmao
She gave Donna the address and a key from her pocketbook. That evening, when visiting hours were over, Donna drove to the house, which was boxy and tidy with a crushed-rock yard and a dead nestling in the driveway. The house didn’t seem that strange to Donna. One would be desperate to get out of it, certainly. There were lots of things that were meant to be plugged into wall outlets but none of them were. She found the cards almost immediately, in the kitchen. There were the colorful fish on the cover of the box and the deck inside had the image of the foreign city. Idly, she opened the refrigerator, which was full of ketchup, nothing but bottles of ketchup, each one partially used. Donna had an urge to top off some bottles from others, to reduce the unseemly number, but with not much effort she resisted this.
this is so me lol
Outside, the heat was breathtaking and the desert had a slightly lavender cast. People were standing under a ramada, speaking loudly about family members who smoked like chimneys and lived into their nineties. Farther away, someone was calling to a small dog. “Peaches,” the woman called, “you come here now.” The dog seemed sincere in its unfamiliarity with the name Peaches. This was clearly a name the dog felt did not indicate its true nature, and it was not going to respond to it.
He sighed and walked away, patting the breast pocket of his jacket for his wallet. Janice moved across the seat quickly, grasped the wheel and drove off in a great rattle and shriek of sand. She was back at the rest stop in fifteen minutes. The children had climbed the van’s ladder and were lying on the roof. The woman was nowhere visible. The man was still rigidly holding the sign. Janice pulled up beside him.
jesus. surprised by this
Janice continued to scan the street for Richard. She saw no one who even remotely resembled him, not that she would have settled for that, of course.
lmao