Free State of Grace by Joy Williams Page A

would have been the time to be there,” I agree.
    “You bet!” squeals Debbie.
    “We saw the parade,” I say.
    “You and your daddy?”
    “Pardon me?” I say.
    “I find older men sort of frantic myself,” dimpled Deb confides.
    “What a parade!” I exclaim.
    Thousands and thousands of tissues stuffed into chicken wire.
    “Better than the Rose Bowl,” Debbie ventures.
    All that paper! Three thousand trees vanish from Big Cypress Swamp.
    “The Toilet Bowl!”
    The girl’s face is smooth and silly and kind. I am so exhaustednow with all this conversation. I want to lie down and put my mouth on the grass. It is a beautiful day. Grady was right. Blue pours through the trees. And it is so still. I wear my bathing suit beneath my clothes. They are wrinkled and old, clothes that Daddy bought me, things I wore years ago when I was with him, walking across the brown crisp ground in the springtime. I try to blink my eyes. Someone’s rolled a stone across them. Why is this girl talking to me? Why does anyone ever begin anything when none of it can ever end?
    “It’s really mostly crepe,” Debbie is saying. Of course she does not care for weird stringy me. But she is a sister and the sisters are bound in the solemn ceremony of Omega Omega Omega, linked one to one by their knowledge of the secrets of Catherine who was not only a virgin and perfect in every way but also had her paps burnt away and her head smote off.
    Debbie is being gracious. She is exercising her southern self—that is, she does not see rag-tag unpleasant me. She sees no object specifically. She works utterly on a set of principles.
    The stone rolls back across my eyes. I open them and then I close them firmly. I would like a glass full of gin and cold orange juice and a few drops of Angostura bitters and I would like to be under the sun on the beach, getting hot and clean. The thought of gin makes me sick but I persist in its conjuring. My stomach turns for I am really afraid. My stomach is no longer my own. It is the baby that my thought of gin repels. I think of Sweet Tit Sue. I am deliberate in restoring her. She didn’t touch me. She smelled of shade and wild tarragon growing. She wouldn’t touch me. She stood with her arms crossed over her enormous chest. There were plants everywhere, growing in red dirt out of potato chip cans. You’re Grady’s girl, she said. I’m not about to do anything to mess him up. If you’re messing him up it’s best he be shut of you, she said. She wouldn’t put her hand on me.
Where did he touch you
, Mother had said. She was weeping, she had lost hermind.
Was it here? Here?
Something flew from her mouth and dropped wetly on my knee. Mother was crying.
God
. She shook me. A bubble of sickness rose in my throat. I knows that good boy Grady, Sweet Sue said. It’s him I’ll do the favors to. You come back here with Grady if you want. The baby was twisting and clawing inside of me. His fear took up the oxygen. Her cabin has one room. Someone drops an egg—a brown one with a tiny fluff of feather stuck to it. It falls and falls. It’s not for me, I said. I don’t care what happens to me. I sat down on a corner of her beautiful brass bed. Sue made a small rude sound. The sheets smelled of onions. She made me go away.
Tell me
, Mother had said.
Tell me what he did
.
    “I must be off,” Debbie is saying. “See you round like a donut.”
    The swollen banyan bloats out around me. I sniff my absent repulsive and wonderful gin. One can feel only so sick after all and I am not really sick. If anyone ever leaves this world alive it will be me, or someone like me, a woman and a lover, bearing a bad beginning in my womb. Kate fecit. When will the bottom be? What joy, the bottom of the pit. BUT HE BEING FULL OF COMPASSION DESTROYED THEM NOT … FOR HE REMEMBERED THAT THEY WERE BUT  … words, words. I must only be silent as Daddy said. I must not tell. And what is the pain of this moment? I am a young thing gripping