Spotlight on … Joy Williams Honored Guest (2005)

 

‘One of my favorite books is the story-collection Honored Guest (2004) by Joy Williams. I like it to a degree that its “flaws” seem to function “completely” as contributors to its “tone,” which I like, and which therefore creates a situation for me where “there are no ‘flaws,’ only ‘idiosyncrasies’ that contribute to the ‘tone.’” This contrasts with books where I can easily sense what I like and dislike, for example I like the dialogue and social interactions in Less Than Zero (1985) and American Psycho (1991) by Bret Easton Ellis but dislike the violent parts. When I think about Honored Guest’s “tone” I think it is maybe something like drinking a lot of caffeine while mildly and “calmly” depressed, taking painkillers at night while happy, going outside into sunlight in the morning after not sleeping the night before due to a specific kind of crippling loneliness, or being financially stable while unemployed and living alone in a clean studio apartment with little or no social or familial obligations.

‘Honored Guest seems versatile, powerful, reliable, and accommodating to me. If I am severely depressed I can read it and feel calmer, more accepting, and better able to utilize such depression-reducing skills as detachment, irony/sarcasm, and relativism. If I am happy I can read it and feel “delight,” an increase in the non-delusional aspects of my happiness, and that I am glad I exist and can interact with certain other humans. If I am bored I can open the book randomly and study whatever sentence or scene to see how they have been constructed, find “little jokes” or “other things” I didn’t notice before, or read it slowly in a self-conscious manner for purposes of perceiving how exactly my emotions are being affected by certain line breaks or adverbs.

‘In the past I have felt that Joy Williams’ stories were too [something] for me to enjoy at a comprehensive, “direct” level but today I do not feel that way. Today when I read Joy Williams I feel that I am not blocking out or suppressing any aspects (or only very small and vague aspects) of my personality, sense of humor, or worldview. I feel that I am “enjoying” the writing in a manner similar to how the author herself would enjoy it, as opposed to writing where I feel “ever conscious” that I am probably “enjoying” it in a different manner than the author would, for example writing that I feel is unintentionally funny or only “accidentally” detached (not completely sure what I mean re “accidentally” detached).

‘To me Joy Williams (b. 1944) and Lorrie Moore (b. 1957) overlap in their writing to some degree. I like them both a lot. Their output quantity (and, to me, quality) is similar, to some degree, a notable degree. They’re both sort of on the “edge” of whatever groups of writers journalists have successfully grouped together. They both have three story-collections of which the first ones, I feel, were in a somewhat different style than the next two, which have styles that are “crystallized” versions of the first books’ styles, in my view. I sometimes think about what they think about each other’s work. I feel interested in interviewing Joy Williams about Lorrie Moore or Lorrie Moore about Joy Williams. I have Googled their names together without success. They seem to have not ever mentioned each other’s names in print. I think almost everyone I know that likes Joy Williams’ writing a lot also likes Lorrie Moore’s writing a lot.

‘I will write about some of the stories in Honored Guest.

‘Honored Guest. In this story a girl is living with her mother who is dying. At one point the mother wakes up screaming her own name. I feel like if I were dying I would wake up screaming my own name sometimes.

‘Congress. In this story a woman’s boyfriend’s job is to examine body parts of dead people or animals to identity them as specific people or animals. Halfway through the story the man falls out of a tree while hunting with a cross bow and gets brain damage. This story feels to me like a full-length “indie” movie in terms of narrative movement, number of scenes and locations, and quirkiness level re characters.

‘The Visiting Privilege. In this story a woman visits her friend in a “mental hospital.” Her friend gets annoyed because the woman visits every day and sometimes more than once a day. The woman makes friends with an old woman and thinks the old woman is “cute,” in how she acts, and I agree. This story to me exhibits clean, beautiful, high-quality expressions of depression and meaninglessness.

‘Charity. In this story there is a small girl that is very “cute” in how she acts. I think I always feel that Joy Williams thinks her characters are cute, interesting, or funny and not ever “evil,” uninterestingly boring, immoral, or “wrong.” This and The Visiting Privilege are maybe my favorite stories in this book.

‘Fortune. In this story a lot of young people go to South America, for a vacation, I think, and “sit around” a lot. I think their parents are also in South America on vacation. It is maybe the longest story in the book. I remember only parts of it. I remember the ending. I seem to almost always have an urge to reread this story in order to know it enough to “feel aware” of its entire structure inside of my head, at one time, as I have been able to do with the other stories after rereading them whatever number of times. I feel I will in the future reread this story for the 5th or 10th time or something and “gain” the entire structure, and then experience it at a different level, causing me to have different urges to further reread it.’ — Tao Lin

 

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Quotes

 

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Further

Podcast: Joy Williams interviewed about ‘Honored Guest’ on Bookworm’
Joy Williams, The Art of Fiction No. 223 @ The Paris Review
‘Honored Guest’ reviewed @ TNYT
‘Honored Guest’ @ goodreads
‘The In Between Space: Reconciliation in Joy Williams’ Short Stories’
‘Black beauty: Joy Williams’s ‘Honored Guest”
‘Karen Russell on how Joy Williams writes the unspeakable’
‘Joy Williams: The Intuitionist’
Joy Williams’s short story ‘Train’
‘Joy Williams is an unsettling genius’
Joy Williams’s short story ‘The Mission’
Podcast: ‘Joy Williams | 1989 | “The Last Generation”’
‘Ode to Joy Williams’
‘Joy Williams’ greatest hits’

 

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Manuscript page

 

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Why She Writes

 

from Uncanny Singing That Comes from Certain Husks: Why I Write

It’s become fashionable these days to say that the writer writes because he is not whole, he has a wound, he writes to heal it, but who cares if the writer is not whole, of course the writer is not whole, or even particularly well. There is something unwholesome and destructive about the entire writing process. Writers are like eremites or anchorites — natural-born eremites or anchorites — who seem puzzled as to why they went up the pole or into the cave in the first place. Why am I so isolate in this strange place? Why is my sweat being sold as elixir? And how have I become so enmeshed with works, mere works, phantoms?

[…]

A writer starts out, I think, wanting to be a transfiguring agent, and ends up usually just making contact, contact with other human beings. This, unsurprisingly, is not enough. (Making contact with the self — healing the wound — is even less satisfactory.) Writers end up writing stories — or rather, stories’ shadows — and they’re grateful if they can but it is not enough. Nothing the writer can do is ever enough.

[…]

The significant story possesses more awareness than the writer writing it. The significant story is always greater than the writer writing it. This is the absurdity, the disorienting truth, the question that is not even a question, this is the koan of writing.

[…]

A writer’s awareness must never be inadequate. Still, it will never be adequate to the greater awareness of the work itself, the work that the writer is trying to write. The writer must not really know what he is knowing, what he is learning to know when he writes, which is more than the knowing of it. A writer loves the dark, loves it, but is always fumbling around in the light. The writer is separate from his work but that’s all the writer is — what he writes. A writer must be smart but not too smart. He must be dumb enough to break himself to harness.

[…]

The moment a writer knows how to achieve a certain effect, the method must be abandoned. Effects repeated become false, mannered. The writer’s style is his doppelgänger, an apparition that the writer must never trust to do his work for him.

[…]

But a writer isn’t supposed to make friends with his writing, I don’t think.

[…]

Language accepts the writer as its host, it feeds off the writer, it makes him a husk. There is something uncanny about good writing — uncanny the singing that comes from certain husks. The writer is never nourished by his own work, it is never satisfying to him. The work is a stranger, it shuns him a little, for the writer is really something of a fool, so engaged in his disengagement, so self-conscious, so eager to serve something greater, which is the writing. Or which could be the writing if only the writer is good enough. The work stands a little apart from the writer, it doesn’t want to go down with him when he stumbles or fails to retreat. The writer must do all this alone, in secret, in drudgery, in confusion, awkwardly, one word at a time.

[…]

The good piece of writing startles the reader back into Life. The work — this Other, this other thing — this false life that is even less than the seeming of this lived life, is more than the lived life, too. It is so unreal, so precise, so unsurprising, so alarming, really. Good writing never soothes or comforts. It is no prescription, either is it diversionary, although it can and should enchant while it explodes in the reader’s face. Whenever the writer writes, it’s always three o’clock in the morning, it’s always three or four or five o’clock in the morning in his head. Those horrid hours are the writer’s days and nights when he is writing. The writer doesn’t write for the reader. He doesn’t write for himself, either. He writes to serve…something. Somethingness. The somethingness that is sheltered by the wings of nothingness — those exquisite, enveloping, protecting wings.

[…]

Why does the writer write? The writer writes to serve — hopelessly he writes in the hope that he might serve — not himself and not others, but that great cold elemental grace which knows us.

A writer I very much admire is Don DeLillo. At an awards ceremony for him at the Folger Library several years ago, I said that he was like a great shark moving hidden in our midst, beneath the din and wreck of the moment, at apocalyptic ease in the very elements of our psyche and times that are most troublesome to us, that we most fear.

Why do I write? Because I wanna be a great shark too. Another shark. A different shark, in a different part of the ocean. The ocean is vast.

Joy Williams reading ‘Uncanny Singing That Comes from Certain Husks: Why I Write’

 

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Interview
from The Rumpus

 

In your story, “Yard Boy,” from your first story-collection, Taking Care, and in many stories since, you talk about being enlightened, about seeing things without preconception, which means allowing the possibility that inanimate objects have feelings and thoughts, that everything is relative and arbitrary, and other concepts involving “enlightenment” such as that the physical world is an illusion and that nothing can be “known.” In those worldviews “morals” seem irrelevant, or aren’t addressed, since they require assumptions and those worldviews tend to not want to assume anything. In your nonfiction, though, you seem to have morals, and seem to be “against” certain things like hunting, cruelty against animals, destroying the environment, etc. How do you reconcile that in your life? When you are making choices in your life, like choosing whether or not to pay more money for food or transportation that won’t destroy the earth, what do you think about? Do you more live your life like a work of art (fiction), or like a work of rhetoric (nonfiction) or some other way?

Joy Williams: You can get away with a lot more writing nonfiction (I’m not talking lies as has been the trend but attitude) than you can writing fiction. In a work of rhetoric you can take a stand, make a case, inform and inspire, scream and demean. You can’t be angry in fiction — it’s all about control. You create worlds in order to accept them. You create worlds open to interpretation. Facts have limitations. At the Univ. of Wyoming where I’m in residence for a year, there is this wonderful little geological museum wherein there is THE FLUORESCENT MINERAL ROOM. There are maybe thirty rocks in there sitting quietly on shelves, modest rocks, nice rocks, but nothing lovely or extraordinary about them. But when you flip a switch — Press Switch Here — the room goes dark and the rocks blossom into the most intense and varied colors. They are really expressing… something. Now the explanation for this is helpfully posted on the wall: Certain stimuli, such as ultraviolet light, disturbs the atomic structure of certain minerals. The energy released as the structure returns to normal results in the emission of visible light.

And there you don’t have it. Far better to have a fictional Yard Boy, prone to love and awe, come to his own understandings which he certainly would have had if he had been fortunate enough to find himself in the Fluorescent Mineral Room at the University of Wyoming.

When I read your stories I feel that everything becomes more accurately balanced out and then I feel calmer, I feel “better.” There is an attempt, I feel, in your writing, to not give anything more “importance” or “weight” than anything else, and to not “rule out” anything. It is like how a child sees things — without preconception. Or more accurately, maybe, how a robot or tree would see things — without even the preconception of consciousness. Do you write or read to feel calmer, to feel less scared of death and other mysteries, to feel less “bad”?

JW: No.

You write about nonexistence a lot, about being either not-yet-born or “dead,” and have been focused on this pretty steadily, in your writing, for more than 30 years — speculating on what it actually is (to not exist), making jokes about it, and “trying out” ways to feel and think about it. Has this affected your life in concrete reality, do you think, as opposed to someone who thinks less, and less creatively and originally, about not existing?

JW: Annie Dillard quotes someone who ventured that “the worst part of being dead must be the first night.” The themes you mention are in the new novel I’m working on as well. Back to the non-expressible. I so wish I were smarter! All art deals with the peculiarity, the strangeness of our situation. We do all this stuff — we think, we marvel, we despair, we care — and then we die. That makes no sense. Surely we should be spending our time differently since that is the case, but how? With the injustice, the political stupidity, the destruction of the natural world, it is tempting to believe (in our non-believing) that things are not what they seem, that there is a link between the dead and the unborn that can replenish the void we know awaits each of us and all we love.

What things have made you feel excited in your life?

JW: Excited? Why do you ask?

You said about The Changeling, “That book was just destroyed. It was an awful experience. […] I felt at the time that some of the reviewers wanted me to die. They just wanted me to stop writing. They were saying, ‘We have other writers out there who we have to deal with and all the writers yet unborn, so please go away.’” Your recent novel, The Quick and The Dead, however, received a lot of praise from almost every reviewer and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. Why do you think “critics” reacted differently to the two different novels?

JW: The late ’70s were a tough time for women novelists. We were supposed to be feminist, engaged, angry. It was really, weirdly, a very conformist time. (Of course, Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon came out around then and she avoided those problems profoundly and beautifully.) The Changeling is about a guilty young drunk named Pearl on an island with feral children. The prose is lushly stark and imaginative, the method magical, even demented. Feminism did not need a guilty drunk! The Quick and the Dead had larger, more charming and annoying characters and a bigger theme. It’s a better book. It was published in 2000, a millennium baby. Maybe people were more willing to contemplate the straits between the living and the dead. Still, the critics didn’t like it that much.

Throughout the ’70s and ’80s there was a term, “K-Mart Realism,” or “Minimalism,” that journalists used for a group of writers you were sometimes mentioned with — Raymond Carver, Ann Beattie, Bobbie Ann Mason, Frederick Barthelme, etc. Did — and are — you interested or excited by work from that “group” of writers?

JW: Of the ones you mention, it’s Carver who’s the stand-out, and he very much disliked the term minimalism as it was applied to his own work. The editor Gordon Lish was the maestro of minimalism and under his uncanny pencil, many an ordinary story became a very good one. Minimalism as a productive style can be very affective, alarming and satisfying, but I don’t think there ever was a pure strain of it. For a time, it was just a kettle into which many a strange fish were flung. Now with America’s miniaturization of not irrelevance in the world, it might return to the short story in grim and freshened renewal. Certainly the days of the giddy blowhard are over. I hope.

I feel like your writing has become more concrete and less abstract over time. There are more scenes and more of a narrative, I feel, especially in your last two books, The Quick and the Dead & Honored Guest, than in your first books, specifically State of Grace & The Changeling. I like your writing more with each new book. It seems funnier and calmer now to me, I can picture things easier, the sentences feel to me more interesting like you spent more time selecting each sentence that is allowed in each story. I feel like most writers become more abstract over time, you seem like the exception to me. Do you ever think about this? Why do you think you became more concrete over time, or do you not think (or have not thought about) that?

JW: A writer is always seeing pitfalls inherent in a skill he thinks he’s already mastered. You write, you change, everything changes. The pressures on language fail to evoke the desired effect. The “gift” you feel you may have undeservedly received can’t be used for everything. The dependable friend has become untrustworthy. Your ear goes, or confidence that the delivering word will appear, erodes. You get sick of fulfilling your characters, your ease with Time evaporates. Endings, beginnings, impossible. Strategies change. It never gets easier, that’s for certain. Abstraction in fiction is supposed to be bad, but it can be just the struck match that illuminates. Much of a writer’s work is to unexpress the expressible as well as the opposite. And the “concrete” is essential to both.

At the end of one of your essays on writing you said, “None of this is what I long to say. I long to say other things. I write stories in my attempt to say them.” Is there mostly just one thing that you long to say, so that you try, in each story, to “say it all,” to express that one thing, or are there different things that you long to say, each requiring a different story?

JW: The conundrum of literature is that it is not supposed to say anything. Often a reader can enjoy a story or novel simply because he can admire the writer’s skill in getting out of it.

In Corinthians there is this passage: Behold, I show you a great mystery: we shall not all sleep but we will all be changed… in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye… This is one of those terrifying Biblical passages, though not as terrifying as many others, that addresses the unspeakable heart of our human situation and commands us to be aware. The best stories, I think, always contain this annunciation of awareness, no matter how cloaked. Emerson said, “No one suspects the days to be gods.” Stories can’t be gods of course. Maybe little godlets.

Do you have an “ideal” that you strive for (some already existing story, novel, movie, or song that you think of) when you write a short story? A novel?

JW: No. The first note must be sounded and why have it be another’s? To name an ideal and then seek to riff it anew is an exercise for writers’ workshops.

What story or novel writers, if any, do you feel are (or were) trying to “get at” the same things you are?

JW: I can tell you who I admire greatly — writers who always move and trouble me — Sebald, Coetzee, Delillo. They are rigorous, merciless novelists of great beauty and integrity.

Do you like to be around people and go to parties and drink alcohol?

JW: Not really. I’m shy.

 

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Book

Joy Williams Honored Guest
Vintage

‘With her singular brand of gorgeous dark humor, Joy Williams explores the various ways–comic, tragic, and unnerving—we seek to accommodate diminishment and loss. A masseuse breaks her rich client’s wrist bone, a friend visits at the hospital long after she is welcome, and a woman surrenders her husband to a creepily adoring student. From one of our most acclaimed writers, Honored Guest is a rich examination of our capacity for transformation and salvation.’ — Vintage

Excerpt

She had been having a rough time of it and thought about suicide sometimes, but suicide was so corny and you had to be careful in this milieu which was eleventh grade because two of her classmates had committed suicide the year before and between them they left twenty-four suicide notes and had become just a joke. They had left the notes everywhere and they were full of misspellings and pretensions. Theirs had been a false show. Then this year a girl had taken an overdose of Tylenol which of course did nothing at all, but word of it got out and when she came back to school her locker had been broken into and was full of Tylenol, just jammed with it. Like, you moron. Under the circumstances, it was amazing that Helen thought of suicide at all. It was just not cool. You only made a fool of yourself. And the parents of these people were mocked too. They were considered to be suicide-enhancing, evil and weak, and they were ignored and barely tolerated. This was a small town. Helen didn’t want to make it any harder on her mother than circumstances already had.

Her mother was dying and she wanted to die at home, which Helen could understand, she understood it perfectly, she’d say, but actually she understood it less well than that and it had become clear it wasn’t even what needed to be understood. Nothing needed to be understood.

There was a little brass bell on her mother’s bedside table. It was the same little brass bell that had been placed at Helen’s command when she had been a little girl, sick with some harmless little kid’s sickness. She had just to reach out her hand and ring the bell and her mother would come or even her father. Her mother never used the bell now and kept it there as sort of a joke, actually. Her mother was not utterly confined to bed. She moved around a bit at night and placed herself, or was placed by others, in other rooms during the day. Occasionally one of the women who had been hired to care forher during the day would even take her for a drive, out to see the icicles or go to the bank window. Her mother’s name was Lenore and sometimes in the night her mother would call out this name, her own, “Lenore!” in a strong, urgent voice and Helen in her own room would shudder and cry a little.

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 nightand 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.

At the beginning they had talked eagerly like equals. This was more important than a wedding, this preparation. They even laughed like girls together remembering things. They remembered when Helen was a little girl before the divorce and they were all driving somewhere and Helen’s father was stopped for speeding and Lenore wanted her picture taken with the policeman and Helen had taken it. “Wasn’t that mean!” Lenore said to Helen.

When Lenore died, Helen would go down to Florida and live with her father. “I’ve never had the slightest desire to visit Florida,” Lenore would say. “You can have it.”

At the beginning, death was giving them the opportunity to be interesting. This was something special. There was only one crack at this. But then they lost sight of it somehow. It became a lesser thing, more terrible. Its meaning crumbled. They began waiting for it. Terrible, terrible. Lenore had friends but they called now, they didn’t come over so much. “Don’t come over,” Lenore would tell them, “it wears me out.” Little things started to go wrong with the house, leaks and lights. The bulb in the kitchen would flutter when the water was turned on. Helen grew fat for some reason. The dog, their dog, began to change. He grew shy. “Do you think he’s acting funny?” Lenore asked Helen.

She did not tell Helen that the dog had begun to growl at her. It was a secret growl, he never did it in front of anyone else. He had taken to carrying one of her slippers around with him. He was almost never without it. He cherished her slipper.

“Do you remember when I put Grecian Formula on his muzzle because he turned gray so young?” Lenore said. “He was only about a year old and began to turn gray? The things I used to do. The way I spent my time.”

But now she did not know what to do with time at all. It seemed more expectant than ever. One couldn’t satisfy it, one could never do enough for it.

She was so uneasy.

Lenore had a dream in which she wasn’t dying at all. Someone else had died. People had told her this over and over again. And now they were getting tired of reminding her, impatient.

She had a dream of eating bread and dying. Two large loaves. Pounds of it, still warm from the oven. She ate it all, she was so hungry, starving! But then she died. It was the bread. It was too hot, was the explanation. There were people in her room but she was not among them.

When she woke, she could feel the hot, gummy, almost liquid bread in her throat, scalding it. She lay in bed on her side, her dark eyes open. It was four o’clock in the morning. She swung her legs to the floor. The dog growled at her. He slept in her room with her slipper but he growled as she made her way past him. Sometimes self-pity would rise within her and she would stare at the dog, tears in her eyes, listening to him growl. The more she stared, the more sustained was his soft growl.

She had a dream about a tattoo. This was a pleasant dream. She was walking away and she had the most beautiful tattoo covering her shoulders and back, even the back of her legs. It was unspeakably fine.

Helen had a dream that her mother wanted a tattoo. She wanted to be tattooed all over, a full custom bodysuit, but no one would do it. Helen woke protesting this, grunting and cold. She had kicked off her blankets. She pulled them up and curled tightly beneath them. There was a boy at school who had gotten a tattoo and now they wouldn’t let him play basketball.

In the morning Lenore said, “Would you get a tattoo with me? We could do this together. I don’t think it’s creepy,” she added. “I think you’ll be glad later. A pretty one, just small somewhere. What do you think?” The more she considered it, the more it seemed the perfect thing to do. What else could be done? She’d already given Helen her wedding ring.

“I’ll get him to come over here, to the house. I’ll arrange it,” Lenore said. Helen couldn’t defend herself against this notion. She still felt sleepy, she was always sleepy. There was something wrong with her mother’s idea but not much.

But Lenore could not arrange it. When Helen returned from school, her mother said, “It can’t be done. I’m so upset and I’ve lost interest so I’ll give you the short version. I called … I must have made twenty calls. At last I got someone to speak to me. His name was Smokin’ Joe and he was a hundred miles away but sounded as though he’d do it. And I asked him if there was any place he didn’t tattoo, and he said faces, dicks and hands.”

“Mom!” Helen said. Her face reddened.

“And I asked him if there was anyone he wouldn’t tattoo, and he said drunks and the dying. So that was that.”

“But you didn’t have to tell him. You won’t have to tell him,” Helen said.

“That’s true,” Lenore said dispiritedly. Then she looked angrily at Helen. “Are you crazy? Sometimes I think you’re crazy!”

“Mom!” Helen said, crying. “I want you to do what you want.”

“This was my idea, mine!” Lenore said. The dog gave a high nervous bark. “Oh dear,” Lenore said, “I’m speaking too loudly.” She smiled at him as if to say how clever both of them were to realize this.

That night Lenore could not sleep. There were no dreams, nothing. High clouds swept slowly past the window. She got up and went into the living room, to the desk there. She looked with distaste at all the objects in this room. There wasn’t one thing here she’d want to take with her to the grave, not one. The dog had shuffled out of the bedroom with her and now lay at her feet, a slipper in his mouth, a red one with a little bow. She wanted to make note of a few things, clarify some things. She took out a piece of paper. The furnace turned on and she heard something moving behind the walls. “Enjoy it while you can,” she said. She sat at the desk, her back very straight, waiting for something. After a while she looked at the dog. “Give me that,” she said. “Give me that slipper.” He growled but did not leave her side. She took a pen and wrote on the paper, When I go, the dog goes. Promise me this. She left it out for Helen.

Then she thought, That dog is the dumbest one I’ve ever had. I don’t want him with me. She was amazed she could still think like this. She tore up the piece of paper. “Lenore!” she cried, and wrung her hands. She wanted herself. Her mind ran stumbling, panting, through dark twisted woods.

When Helen got up she would ask her to make some toast. Toast would taste good. Helen would press the Good Morning letters on the bread. It was a gadget, like a cookie cutter. When the bread was toasted, the words were pressed down into it and you dribbled honey into them.

In the morning Helen did this carefully, as she always had. They sat together at the kitchen table and ate the toast. Sleet struck the windows. Helen looked at her toast dreamily, the golden letters against the almost black. They both liked their toast almost black.

Lenore felt peaceful. She even felt a little better. But it was a cruelty to feel a little better, a cruelty to Helen.

“Turn on the radio,” Lenore said, “and find out if they’re going to cancel school.” If Helen stayed home today she would talk to her. Important things would be said. Things that would still matter years and years from now.

Callers on a talk show were speaking about wolves. “There should be wolf control,” someone said, “not wolf worship.”

“Oh, I hate these people,” Helen said.

“Are you a wolf worshipper?” her mother asked. “Watch out.”

“I believe they have the right to live too,” Helen said fervently. Then she was sorry. Everything she said was wrong. She moved the dial on the radio. School would not be canceled. They never canceled it.

“There’s a stain on that blouse,” her mother said. “Why do your clothes always look so dingy? You should buy some new clothes.”

“I don’t want any new clothes,” Helen said.

“You can’t wear mine, that’s not the way to think. I’ve got to get rid of them. Maybe that’s what I’ll do today. I’ll go through them with Jean. It’s Jean who comes today, isn’t it?”

“I don’t want your clothes!”

“Why not? Not even the sweaters?”

Helen’s mouth trembled.

“Oh, what are we going to do!” Lenore said. She clawed at her cheeks. The dog barked.

“Mom, Mom,” Helen said.

“We’ve got to talk, I want to talk,” Lenore said. What would happen to Helen, her little girl …

Helen saw the stain her mother had noticed on the blouse. Where had it come from? It had just appeared. She would change if she had time.

“When I die, I’m going to forget you,” Lenore began. This was so obvious, this wasn’t what she meant. “The dead just forget you. The most important things, all the loving things, everything we …” She closed her eyes, then opened them with effort. “I want to put on some lipstick today,” she said. “If I don’t, tell me when you come home.”

Helen left just in time to catch the bus. Some of her classmates stood by the curb, hooded, hunched. It was bitter out.

In the house, Lenore looked at the dog. There were only so many dogs in a person’s life and this was the last one in hers. She’d like to kick him. But he had changed when she’d gotten sick, he hadn’t been like this before. He was bewildered. He didn’t like it-death-either. She felt sorry for him. She went back into her bedroom and he followed her with the slipper.

At nine, the first in a number of nurse’s aides and companions arrived. By three it was growing dark again. Helen returned before four.

“The dog needs a walk,” her mother said.

“It’s so icy out, Mom, he’ll cut the pads of his feet.”

“He needs to go out!” her mother screamed. She wore a little lipstick and sat in a chair wringing her hands.

Helen found the leash and coaxed the dog to the door. He looked out uneasily into the wet cold blackness. They moved out into it a few yards to a bush he had killed long before and he dribbled a few drops of urine onto it. They walked a little farther, across the dully shining yard toward the street. It was still, windless. The air made a hissing sound. “Come on,” Helen said, “don’t you want to do something?” The dog walked stoically along. Helen’s eyes began to water with the cold. Her mother had said, “I want Verdi played at the service, Scriabin, no hymns.” Helen had sent away for some recordings. How else could it be accomplished, the Verdi, the Scriabin … Once she had called her father and said, “What should we do for Mom?”

“Where have you been!” her mother said when they got back. “My God, I thought you’d been hit by a truck.”

They ate supper, macaroni and cheese, something one of the women had prepared. Lenore ate without speaking and then looked at the empty plate.

 

 

*

p.s. Hey. ** Corey Heiferman, Oh, cool. Home run. That hill, or, rather, its ruins, or perhaps the hill in and of itself is also something, sounds interesting, of course. You plan to do something transformative with that info? Okay, that Leonard Nimoy thing seems very strange. A glance made neither heads or tails of that page, so I’ll trying concentrating there once I can. Thank you. By next year there should be espressos available in Paris. By June in fact, we’re told, should we so lucky. ** David Ehrenstein, Not a shabby film at all, that one, yep. Everyone, Mr. Ehrenstein has something new up on his FaBlog called ‘Ambivalence Mon Amour’ that appears to have Stephen Sondheim prominently within it. Solve the mystery here. ** Mark Gluth, Hi, Mark. Blurb got devised, sent to Michael, he okayed it, so everything’s set for its usage however y’all see fit, I think. Yes, yes, of course, and please about the ‘welcome to the world’ post. Yes! Whenever the time is right, the blog will become a throne. Paris is not itself. I walk around in Paris thinking how much I miss Paris. According to the official pronouncement from above, stores and shops and kindergartens reopen on the 11th. Masks will be necessary. If things don’t worsen because of the reopening, other things will start to gradually open three weeks later. Otherwise, we lock down again. No concerts, theater, etc. until probably September. No travel in or out of France for non-French citizens for probably the summer. That’s the dictum. Bon day! ** _Black_Acrylic, My sleep’s been super strange too. It’s stress having a party after hours, I guess? I’ll check out that book. Yes, we might even have crossed paths at that show. We should check to see if they still have the surveillance footage. ** Bill, Hi, B. Glad you dug it, them, that. Well, yeah, we will start to reopen on the 11th a bit if the daily infection rate is 3000/day or lower then. Stores, shops. No more filling out officials forms unless one is traveling 100km or more. Wearing masks a lot of the time. That will be studied from on high, and, if the rates don’t spike, more openness will occur very incrementally. It’s a start. Oh, ‘964 Pinocchio’! I saw that, but I hardly remember it. Huh. No DVD player here, but I’ll try other resources. ** Misanthrope, Okay, that sounds reasonable. Your work’s plan. I laid out our hopefully impending reopening up above. Everything is so chaotic over there in the USA with the piecemeal, politically motivated mess of a general plan that god fucking knows what’s going to happen. Here’s hoping. Fuck knows when I’ll get to go back to the US again without getting stuck there with no way out. Seems like it could be ages. ** Steve Erickson, Nice new remix there, bud. The plan over here is that pretty much everyone can be tested in a highly available way starting on the 11th, although they haven’t explained how that will happen or what test they’re talking about. Everyone. Steve has reviewed the new and apparently quite problematic Car Seat Headrest album. Find out what went wrong or right here. You’re using your time wisely on the film watching front, and that’s good. My attention is still just scattering all over the place. ** Kyler, I’m happy you enjoyed the religious shit show. Being without any religion beliefs, it’s all curious but enjoyable Greek to me. Hope today let you make your mark. ** Okay. It’s no secret to blog readers how much I love Joy Williams. And I haven’t focused on a book of hers for a while, so I decided to put her under the spotlight again. It’s a truly wonderful book of stories if you’re so inclined. See you tomorrow.