State of Grace (3 page)

The intern angrily inoculates another student and entertains grisly notions. His patients have punctured and scraped themselves with nails and chicken wire while building the floats for the college’s big Homecoming parade. The injured are predominantly waffle-thighed energetic girls with dazzling and insincere smiles. The floats are lined up in a dead-end street, covered with parachutes, waiting for tomorrow.

The sun is getting white and old. Grady double-clutches as he rounds a corner on the woods road. He slows still
further and the Jaguar thuds across an old wooden bridge. A boy about his age is fishing with a drop line. The river is purple with water hyacinths. The boy’s car, a broken-down Ford with a smashed rear fender, is parked on the bank. OUCH is painted on the fender. Grady chews on the sweet end of a blade of grass. He enters the town and finds a parking space before a movie theatre. There are no pictures on the poster advertising the film. There are black stars painted on the sidewalk. The day yawns before Grady. He might go to a movie, perhaps not today but soon. He feels aimless and wasteful and anthropomorphic. The theatre seems a greater orphan than he. The walls are mildewed. The entranceway smells like a recent excavation. Grady moves off, combing his hair with his hands.

The morning’s almost behind us and loss is the less to notice. A group of 4-H children are sitting on a bench outside a supermarket, drinking chocolate milk. One of the little girls raised the steer that brought top price at the county fair. They have just returned from a packing plant. One of the children says, “There was your old Scoobie-Doo hanging there.” “There he was.” The little girl giggles.

Noon is opening to your touch. Two ladies in Day-glo housedresses are driven into the Garden of Repose by a small man whose smooth head is barely visible over the car’s seat. The Garden has no headstones or vain statuary. It is a deep and grassy reprieve on Main Street, dotted with handsome trees. The car stops. Its occupants scan the impressive acreage. The women get slowly out. One holds a piece of paper but its information seems useless. The traffic files by on the street. The living are kept at bay from the dead by a hedge of oleander. It is highly toxic but attractive. Children have been poisoned by carrying the flowers around in their mouths at play. It makes an efficient hedge. Behind it there is almost silence. The women wobble on their high-heeled shoes. One sings a few words of an old gospel hymn:

“But none of the ransomed ever knew

How deep were the waters crossed,

Nor how dark was the night that the Lord passed through

Ere he found his sheep that was lost.”

She coughs. They are Baptists come with a pot of geraniums for a distant relation. An attendant floats by, seated on a purring motor. They extend the paper to him. He studies it and turns around in the seat of his mower, pointing in the direction of a tree that’s been pruned to a profile of an agonized prayer. The women wobble off and place their plant on the ground. Its color is lost in the brilliance of the grass.

Be grateful that everyone’s accounted for. Intentions are being pursued although nothing is being presently instigated. Everything began a long time ago.

 … Imagine the happiness of voyaging there to spend our lives together
. That’s not mine. I’m doing my lessons. Translating. Poorly, but pretty all the same. Actually, I’m considered quite good at this re-rendering, a talent that grows in direct proportion to one’s life. You can imagine how troubled I was to discover, and only recently, that Father’s scripture is based on consonants, the vowels in the original Hebrew not being clearly indicated. It’s clear the problem
there
, although in itself, it explains almost everything.
To love to our hearts content, to love and die in the land which is the image of you
. My ear, however, is terrible. As is my tongue. In France, I would sound cretinous. I would be misunderstood. My
simplest request would be denied through fear and puzzlement.

You know the old joke—a gentleman goes into a store and wants to buy
une capote noire
out of respect for his recently departed wife. Oh, they still laugh at that one, you bet. I first heard it at the age of nine, a little darling with a bottle of valve oil and a coloring book in her trumpet case, the only girl in the band. We were playing patriotic songs and the story was rendered interminably at the time by the Exalted Ruler of Sebago Lake Lodge of Elks, B.P.O.E. No. 614. It was not intended for our ears of course. Even if it was, how could we have understood it? I’m just recollecting the moment is all.

I played second and almost never had the melody. The boy who played first later blew off his lap on the Fourth of July.

Aimer à loisir
. Lovely, isn’t it. I’m dawdling on the porch swing of the sorority house. A sister lies folded messily on the other end, reading a volume on necessary proteins and table settings. She has pimples on her upended thighs but her face is as smooth as a waxed car bonnet. Under her blouse, she has rigged a complex padded harness to her bra so that the sweat won’t show. The sun’s like lemon juice, splashed across the sky. It’s so prevalent, it’s really nowhere to be seen.

The sister is eating maraschino cherries from a jar. I have told her many times that they’ll be the end of her. They’re our only words with one another. I tell her that because of them, someday, someone will sadly have to cut it all out—sphincter, kidney and ovaries. Inside, she’ll be all smushy like a pear. She disagrees. She likes them because they have no pits. The porch is littered with ants and stems.

I’m having difficulty
ton souvenir en moi luit comme un otensoir
. I close the book and idly watch the avenue that winds up into the college buildings. I am content here, warm and dopey from the sun. Inside the house, the fans are turned on and small balls of dust and hair float out the open door.
The light pours through the leaves of the orange trees. The mail is delivered. The housemother appears, collects the letters and sorts them. She turns her head carefully and then swivels her shoulders around after it. It is as though she had bones webbed in her throat. I get no mail. No one knows where I am. The housemother has received a tiny box of detergent and a Corn Flakes coupon. She’s enormous. Which brings to mind, “Inside every fat man is a thin man trying to get out” … which I’ve never understood. Not only that, I would go so far as to say that it isn’t even true. It’s not a question of getting out at all. One’s true nature must be considered. It’s a question of performing one’s role.

The housemother’s dog is eating ants. She pries him away with her foot and they re-enter the house side by side. Her dress is as big as a bedsheet. As Father said,
it is not we who live but the god who lives within us
. The housemother and her skinny god retire.

I swing on the swing. I’m a little bored but that’s acceptable enough. It’s my second season here. I’m a fugitive, you might say. A vacationer from the future. I’m taking time off and may never take it on again. I’m getting my strength back and don’t want to discuss it. I’m in an awkward position, you see. The first thought I had as a child was not an enlightened one, thus all my subsequent thoughts have been untrue. I’m doing very well now though, thank you. I’m getting back my sense of reality. In the sorority house, the girls wash one another’s hair and play cards. Bridge, which is supposed to be good for the mind. We have parties and dances and so on, and we have meetings in the cellar which are conducted according to parliamentary procedure. Our colors are maroon and white, our pin an inverted triangle, a sliver of diamond at each tip—moral, social, intellectual, good deeds, femininity, order—a plastic pubis, respected by none. Our motto is

All the sisters fuck like bunnies.

They work out after supper, splashing and panting. Trying to find themselves. I’ve tripped across them many a night, practicing. A rolling eye, a shaking wrist, a tapping foot … It’s enough to scare the pure yell out of you, the earnestness with which they go about it.

They tried once to bring a boy in, to service us all. The first of every month, along with the bills and the grocery order. A pleasant enough boy, though his nostrils were overlarge. The hairs blew like wheat as he’d come down for a kiss. Distracting. And there was a whistling noise, a sound like plumbing. I don’t know. The sisters complained and soon ceased to use him altogether. It just didn’t work out. These girls have to be in love, after all. They kept him on but he grew surly. This was before my time. Now he’s gone. And we’re back to the old mitt and hiss.

I’ve been away for a year and a day, just like in the fairy tales. That first month, the heat was marvelous. I was fainting constantly. My soul cringed before it, my heart sweated and shrunk in my chest. I became all matter, lush and blameless, turning into the sun. I had been the perfect child—motherless—and now I was the ideal young woman. All tanned meat, carefree and compliant. Yet I find myself performing as he would want me to, though I hardly ever dwell on Father any more. I use the doggerel, of course, which can’t be helped. But he is so constant! His pursuit in my head and my heart stops only long enough to show me that it is going on still.

Yes, I’m going into my second year. Like the alcoholic, I’ll age myself through abstinence. I’ve even learned a harmless thing or two. In the summer, I worked in the dirtiest little Dairi-Whip in the South. The practices that went on there! My God. I left to become a cocktail waitress in one of the town’s finest restaurants. Where even more terrible things occurred. Why, I’ve heard them pissing in the Rhine wine. Jizz in the béchamel. Running sores in the cherry flan. I let
it all ride. Who am I to bubble the globe of the ordinary life? My only concern was that Father would enter and demand to be served. He sent his surrogates, I know, but never himself. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this, they’d say. Actually, I’ve never seen a man who resembles him in any way, but if Father’s the Shepherd, then we’re all his willing lambs.

You’ve a nice face, dear, they’d say. You bring to mind a girl I loved once and lost, and what are you doing after this place closes and you’ve washed your lovely hands?

When you think of life’s routine … They’d always have to make a remark about Entree Six: Red Snapper, Hush Puppy and Cole Slaw, our luncheon special all for only $1.35. They’d have the same attire—seersucker jacket, black pants, white shirt—and the same amusements in their linty pockets. Comb, nail clip and a roll of Life Savers in assorted flavors. I believe that 98 per cent, if not more, of all Life Savers in America are sold to middle-aged men out to turn a trick. I can’t understand why God made every tiny snowflake different and all these men the same.

Yet I’d attend to them for I’m passing the time while I recover. I’m just taking this opportunity to get better. Yes, we’d go out, these patrons, these consumers, and myself. Down to the race track and a bottle of Mums. Scratching at me beneath the clubhouse table as though I were a flea. Each time they got up they shot their cuffs and grazed me while passing. Father sees all this. He imagines that I’m doing it. I must confess, I used to see him everywhere. On the phone and in my sorority sisters’ heartshaped lockets. On some mornings when the air is very clear, windless muggy mornings when I feel my head earnestly trying to repair itself, I can hear him tracking me. It’s a sound like a hymn. Pale. Full of rectitude. And I’m distressed because I see that even when I cheat, I’m losing.

But the summer vanished and now it’s the fall. I’m rocking
on the swing as though in my dotage, watching the students leave their classes and spill across the lawns, a pretty amoeba washing up the walks, cutting across the grass, which is cut out like cookies in the shape of Greek letters.

It’s accurate grass, not a single Weed, all the roots and rhizome stacked in the gutters. This whole estate, this college acreage, once belonged to a madman. He had a circus quartered here. You can still see the lions’ paw prints on the concrete rim of the swimming pool, and stranger things still and some not so strange. What acts! Elephants, bears and Siamese twins truly from Siam. Silhouette artists and palmists. A man with a tattooed eye and another with an organ growing directly from his ear. Actually it looked more like an infant’s pacifer, but who would come to see that? They billed it as his organ.

He’s around still, a soldier of fortune.

Many of the old performers return. Dwarfs and gorgeous ladies. Noodle Man came back before leaving for Fez forever. Nine feet tall and one hundred and three pounds. He went into the Student Union and had a cup of tea. I missed seeing him, however. Oh yes, they love the returning, even though it breaks their hearts. The place is a tomb. The menagerie is buried everywhere. Even so, all the structures are in gay colors. You can see it glowing beneath the fresh cheap paint that the maintenance men have applied.

Now I see an aerialist, walking his Doberman bitch. The bitch is in heat, flagging everything in sight. The aerialist is old, bald and handsome. Perhaps he is a juggler, he has a sequined groin. He passes very closely to the house. He has pierced ears but no earrings. The dog pulls him along enthusiastically. She’ll outlast him. I wonder what will become of her.

There’s quite a mob in the streets now. Boys with bright bandanas like apaches. Girls in tennis skirts. The noon siren on the firehouse begins to blow. Everything is drenched in
sun. It’s like a festival! In the air are chemical experiments and kites and tennis balls. And in the middle of it all walks Father. He’s walking slowly, as though for amusement. I’m not startled for I knew he’d come. Redoubtable Father, it’s him all right. Ablepharous Daddy. There’s no need to ask anyone whether my recognition is true. I leave the porch and run up to my room, and come back down again with my camera. No more than half a minute has gone by. I’m not a year old now, no, I haven’t gained a day. I’m just a tiny thought now, rocking in his sperm and then I go back even further than that. I’m nothing but bloodless warmth like the hot yellow beak of a bird.