The Collected Stories of Diane Williams Read online

  Even better than catching my own husband in the act with her, I opened my mouth, but I left her probably forever, before I made a statement.

  She was presiding with her face flattened by some shadow. Her shoulders and her arms, and all across the front of her also were gray which was what made the idea of her dark.

  I saw the top half of her blotted out—more than half of what was behind her—nothing more, except some of her black hair curled away up into the—the way hair will, the way hers did. What of it?

  If you care, it was like, like going by her like I was this big fish swallowing a big big fish whole, but be­cause I am bigger, and what of it?

  She kept on having orgasms with my husband.

  The orgasms—where do they go?—crawling up into—as if they could have—up into—dying to get in, ribbed and rosy, I saw seashells were the color mouths should be, or the nipples of breasts, or the color for a seam up inside between legs, or, for I don’t care where. Since they are pretty is why I collect them.

  Killer

  Past the shimmering gewgaws on the velvet shoes at N-M, I went on by them, chasing two women, especially the one in the raccoon coat, who is glamorous—Marlene—my neighbor’s new third wife—he had to have—a divorcee with five chil­dren, a convert from Catholicism for him for love—I was on her side. They are all so devout.

  I adore I adore I adore—she should have said, I love only you, when she took what I had to give her away from me, because the sunglasses on the counter where I had just paid for my lunch might have been hers, and they were hers! She said something ecstatic and I hardly had to do anything, except ride back down the escala­tor, past pricey purses, veering nearly into jewels, and then into the jewels, where I said no, then on out the huge doors of N-M. I needed to go along over the black pavement, stamping and looking, and, bingo, with my instinct, I would see my car. Postponing the joy of getting into it, for what I would be doing next, I stood and took in the air, and looked around at so much air.

  You know how it can hug you and kiss you all over because it is all over you anyway, and inside of me, and I was out there like a smoker—not to try to smother my lungs—just to have something to do with my fingers, and with my hands, and with my mouth, pressing them up against absolutely nothing at all, or aiming to get through it, when there is not a human being I know of who wants to do it with me, my feelings are hurt, when all they would have to do is bat their eyes at me and I would consider myself half the way there.

  He doesn’t have to stand on his head. Who cares what he does? I think my luck will hold for me. Yester­day they picked up Squeaky Fromme—two men did, after her breakout out of jail. Her being wanted, it didn’t go on overly long.

  All American

  The woman, who is me—why pretend other­wise?—wants to love a man she cannot have. She thinks that is what she should do. She should love a man like that. He is inappropriate for some reason. He is married.

  When she thinks of the man, she thinks force, and then whoever has the man already is her enemy—which is the man’s wife.

  The woman makes sure the man falls in love with her. She has fatal charm. She can force herself to have it. Then she tells the man she cannot love him in return. She says, “You are in the camp with the enemy.”

  Of course, the woman knew the man was sleeping with the enemy before she ever tried to love him, and the word enemy gives joy—the same as I get when the wrong kind of person calls me darling, as when my brother says, “Okay,” to me, “goodbye, darling,” be­fore he hangs up the phone, after we have just made some kind of pact, which is what we should do, because I have to force myself to love the ones I am supposed to love, and then I have to force myself on the ones I am not supposed to love.

  I got my first real glimpse of this kind of thing when I was still a girl trying to force myself on my sister. I didn’t know what I was doing until it was obvious. We were in the back seat of the family car. The car had just been pulled into the garage. The others got out, but we didn’t. I thought I was not done with something. Something was not undone yet—something like that—and I was trying to kiss my sister, and I was trying to hug my sister, and she must have thought it was inap­propriate, like what did I think I was a man and she was a woman?

  I must have been getting rough, because she was getting hysterical. I remember I was surprised. I re­member knowing then that I was applying force and was getting away with it.

  The Uncanny

  Her silver hair ornament was awfully big. I saw a great emerald-diamond ring. I saw the plat­ter of steak tartare leave its position near me and then dive away into the party crowd on the back lawn. Then I saw my own husband having the meat on a Ritz cracker. I saw it in his hand next to his mouth. I drank my iced drink while it was changing color from a deep gold color that had satisfied me deeply to a gold color that certainly did not.

  I asked Mrs. Gordon Archibald what she would have done with all of the people if it had rained. I gave her a suggestion for an answer she could give me which was an antisocial answer. She had a different antisocial an­swer for me of her own.

  After this, my husband and I went off to a dinner club where there was dancing, where a woman touched my earring. She got it to move, saying, “These are buckets!”

  My husband said to me while I was swooning in his arms, “Why are all the longest dances the draggiest?”

  I took this to mean that he has not loved me for a very long time. Everything means something, or it does not. I have expressed an opinion. Every effect has a source that is not unfamiliar. It’s all so evil.

  Claudette’s Head

  Heddy had no baby. Then we saw Heddy pluck the baby out from somebody’s arms. Heddy’s face when she turned to us, holding the baby, exposed the feelings any competent woman of this century could have in my opinion. I didn’t think it then, but I think it now.

  Heddy brought the baby to us.

  The baby was curled into her arm and into her breast, and was not crying. It was not at all one of those forlorn babies.

  I have seen a face on a baby just after the delivery that made me think you could dress the baby up in a busi­ness suit and it could, just as it was, go to the office and run things splendidly. Not this baby. But this baby, which belonged to Heddy’s sister, with its good nature, was reassuring to me, which meant absolutely the world at the time.

  That’s the moment I chose to tell Heddy’s sister about the stranger-than-fiction newspaper account I had read the night before, when Heddy gave the baby back to her sister for its bottle.

  I said, “Tell me if this surprises you,” after I told her what the story was about. Heddy’s sister Claudette is an emergency-care doctor, who selected that specialty, she had said, because she likes the variety and the surprise of it.

  It probably was not fear I saw in Claudette. It was probably discomfort I saw. The baby probably had been stepping on her arm, pinching her, or scratching her, or something, when I said, “It’s about a woman delivering her own baby—one of those stories.”

  Claudette said, “I am trying—” and by then she had the baby in a sitting posture in her lap, and she had the nipple of the bottle stuck into its mouth.

  I don’t even want to go into the gory details again of the newspaper story I told Claudette, of that woman giving birth in the airplane bathroom. Suffice it to say, the woman accomplished the birth undiscovered. She traveled then, afterward, unremarkably, from Newark to San Francisco, and the baby was lying under the sink for six more hours—but was not dead.

  What I did was I pressured Claudette into saying the story surprised her, because I could tell she was not surprised. But I got her to say with a laugh, “Any—” and then I interrupted and filled in for her the rest, until she was shaking her head gaily, yes, yes. What I said was, “There never is any follow-up.” I said, “These reports of women who squat in the fie
ld, who give birth, and then who carry on in the field with their work, these reports, they never mention for how long those women carry on. These women, down through the ages, could have dropped dead within minutes. Who does the follow-up?” I asked, does she, Claudette, do any follow-up at her hospital, after she gives these patients their emergency care, because Claudette had said she had to make a fast good guess about what was wrong with people. Claudette said she had to use com­mon sense. Claudette said, “It is such a small commu­nity.” She said, “You hear, and if you really care, you call, and you find out.” About her baby, she said, “He always does this. He just plays.” About me, of course, she didn’t say. I didn’t say a word about it either, because my husband was there with us also, listening to every word.

  I am terrified I will be found out.

  There was a downhill sweep of burnt lawn that I could see out the window behind Claudette’s head, which led the eye to the grander blue sweep of a lake with sailboats on it and to the sky, which was not too much—all of it—to take in.

  The Kind You Know Forever

  I had just met them—the brother and the sister who had fucked each other to see what it would be like. And then they said—either he said or she said—that it was like fucking a brother or a sister, so they never did it again.

  That they had fucked each other was gossip intended to warn me away from the brother at the party where I watched the sister spread her legs carelessly, so that anyone—for instance, me—could look up her skirt to see darkness when she was sitting on the sofa.

  Her husband was next to her—a thick man in a suit which was too small for him or was just under strain. The suit was ripped, I could see, under the arm at the seam. He had his arm up and around his wife, the sister who had fucked her brother.

  I wondered if the husband knew, if he knew every­thing about her or not. I wondered as I watched her legs, her knees bump together, and then spread apart, and I kept my eye on him, while we were sitting around, but I forgot about the husband altogether while we ate. It was a fine meal we had.

  And after that meal, the woman who had tried to warn me away from the brother took me aside. We went together from her kitchen to her bathroom. It was her party, and she led me there, and she closed the door. She said, “Look, you be careful.” She said, “He’s knocked up six girls.”

  And I said, “What does that mean?”

  Then I saw how her long dark hair moved back and forth on either side of her head while she was moving her head, while her eyes were moving around, but not looking at me, while she was figuring me out. She said, “He got them all pregnant.”

  And I said, “And he didn’t care what happened to them?”

  “Yes. That’s it,” she said. “Now you be careful.”

  She must have known then her party was almost over, because there wasn’t much time left after that. She handed out little wrapped gifts in such a hurry at the door, when we were all saying goodbye—it was such a hurry—I didn’t get to see where she was getting all of her gifts from. All of a sudden there was just a gift in my hand, as I was going out the door. At the end of a party, I had never gotten a gift before, not since I was a girl, and then we thought we deserved those gifts. So now, something was turned around.

  The gift she gave me was a cotton jewel pouch, in a bright shade of pink, made in India, which snapped shut.

  I left the party with the sister-fucker. It was logical. We were near to the same age and we were both pretty for our kind, which must have mattered. Let me not forget to add that his sister was pretty, and that her husband was handsome, and that the woman who gave the party was pretty, and that her husband was hand­some too.

  The sister-fucker and I had both come to the party alone, and it was his idea that we should leave together. First we stopped at a bar, where we both had some drinks. I held onto a matchbook. I turned it by its four corners while he told me everything he was in the mood to tell me about his life, so that I felt I had known him forever.

  Then I told him everything I was in the mood to tell him about my life—everything that mattered. I couldn’t say now what that was. Then he said, “Write your phone number on the matchbook,” which I did.

  I asked him, “Should I write my name too?”

  And he said, “No, not your name, just your num­ber.”

  We were at the door in darkness ready to leave the bar when I gave him the matchbook. He gave me a kiss. He pressed hard on my mouth for the kiss and then I was waiting to see what would happen next.

  I still see him backing away covered in the shadows. Then he pushed his hands up into his hair. One of his hands was still holding the matchbook so that the whole matchbook went up into it too, sliding under. He was pushing so hard up into his hair with both hands on either side of his head, that he was pulling the skin of his face up and back. He was turning his eyes into slits. He was making his nose go flat. His mouth at the corners was going up.

  I didn’t know if he was playing around with me, if he was angry, or if he was trying to figure something out. I didn’t ask, What does that mean? Now I think it meant he really cared, but it never made a difference. I have fucked him and fucked him and fucked him, and I have felt all that hair on his head in my hands plenty of times.

  The Hero

  My aunt was telling me about them coming to get them after I brought back the second helping of fish for me and the vegetables she asked for—the kind that have barely been cooked that look so festive, even with the film of dressing that dulls them down. I didn’t want her to have to get up to get her own, not since she’s been sick.

  My aunt was saying, “They’re going to get us. Hurry! Hurry! They’re going to kill us!” after I put the vegetables down for her.

  She said, “Your mother was a baby in my mother’s arms.” She said, “I get out of breath now when I eat. Jule says I’m not the same since I was sick. He says to me, You’ve changed.”

  “You haven’t changed,” I said.

  She said, “They had the wagon loaded. They had the cow. You know they had to take the cow to give the children milk to drink. They were going to hide! To hide! To hide in the woods! And then Jule said, I’ve got to go!

  “Everything was loaded. They said, Hurry! They’re coming! They’re going to kill us! But Jule said, I’ve got to go! So they said, Do it! Do it! Hurry! So then Jule said, But I need the pot!”

  “He said that?” I said. “I never heard that story. Does my mother know that story?”

  My aunt smiled, which I took then to be no. And my mother wasn’t there, so I couldn’t rush to her, I couldn’t tell her, Do you know the story about your family? How you were going to be killed? How Uncle Jule stopped everything to go?

  Uncle Jule appeared then. He was wearing a white golf hat.

  My aunt said, “You could put it in your hat.” She said that to Jule. I don’t remember why she said that—You could put it in your hat.

  He must have said something first to her about her vegetables—could he take home what she wasn’t going to eat? Maybe that was it—but it doesn’t matter.

  Uncle Jule was blinking and smiling when she said, You could put it in your hat. He was blinking faster than anyone needs to blink.

  Cauliflower was what my aunt left on her plate. It looked to me like some bleached-out tree.

  Ten Feet from It

  His body shifts and gets closer to me in a shady part of our house where hardly any natural light can get to, unless a bathroom door is open fully. At no time during this is he more than two or three feet away from me, and always he keeps turn­ing to me so I can see how he is, not to prove anything to me. He is not the kind to do that. I am.

  He is my son, one of them.

  My other son broke down for me later in this day, my husband the same, a few days ago, my brother later in this day. My mother said to me, “I am not with it,” just a
fter we both witnessed my brother.

  I can put the sight of any of them up in front of myself again anytime I want to: my son in grief because I would not believe that he really is; my other son the same; my husband, when he told me, “That broke the ice,” after what I had said to him—whatever it was; my brother, as he was telling me his life is at stake.

  My mother, her grief is the most overwhelming.

  She was sitting with her Old Testament which has such tissue-thin pages and she was making the pages make a noise when I found her.

  The biggest, broadest window of her house was in front of her, where she was sitting with the open book. I have the same dark red leather-bound version of the text.

  I said to my mother, “Let me kiss you.” I was up close to her, my hands on her forearms to get closer to her, but I did not get closer. For some reason she was stand­ing at that time, perhaps to let me try, and then she was down, sitting at the desk which had been my desk when I was a girl.

  She was looking at the shake-shingled roof, at the plum tree, at the trees all pushed together beyond it, at the violent plunging-down that our land takes below that window where one of my sons killed himself, be­cause he was trying to keep my other sons from killing themselves, just about ten feet from the plum tree. He was shouting at those boys, or he was talking softly to those boys, who were talking softly to him, so all of them had to lean so far over to hear what they had to hear, so one of them could die.

  It is just a sight with the body of my mother in front of it.

  I can refer to the window glass. I can refer to the sky which might as well be the sea.

  I go down the stairs of my mother’s house, satisfied and slowly.