The Visiting Privilege (51 page)

L
illian was telling her daughter about the period in her life when she killed cats.

“I had a system going. I would bait a Havahart trap with a bit of sardine on a saucer and put it out in the yard just before retiring. In the morning, I would hurry out in my bathrobe, and if I was successful, which I almost always was, I'd place the trap with its disbelieving victim on the step at the shallow end of the swimming pool and in less than thirty seconds, maybe twenty, that would be that.”

Toby was barely listening to her. She was looking at her mother's permed hair, which resembled molded plastic.

“Most of them seemed pretty blasé in the moment before I dunked them,” her mother said. “As though they'd been in Havahart traps before and expected delightful and challenging futures, a refreshing change of venue, maybe the country, or even the challenges of a shopping center. My last cat, though, looked much like the first. Nothing changes them. That's their nature. I began to feel I was catching and disposing of the same cat over and over. I lost the necessary ambition. I wasn't getting anywhere, you see.”

“You shouldn't keep telling that story, Mama,” Toby said. “Aren't you afraid there's going to be an accounting?”

“Oh, you,” her mother said vaguely. “You're just needling me.”

“You want to go over and see Daddy? Let's go over and see Daddy for a while, then I have to go.”

“My first stroke,” her mother said. “I remember it as though it were yesterday.”

“Well,” Toby said, “it wasn't.”

“There was a sound like cloth ripping. The thing zigged through me just like that and then I was on the floor for no one knew how long before anybody came.”

It was Halloween in the twin assisted-living facilities; her mother was in one, and across the courtyard her father was in the other. Both buildings were decorated with orange and black bunting, and cardboard witches and ghosts tacked to the walls. There was a mound of plastic pumpkins by the receptionist's desk. What a place to be observing Halloween! Staff was crazy in here. That's what they called themselves. They were undoubtedly hitting the pharmacy day and night in order to maintain their gay demeanor.

“Where are you now,” Lillian asked. “Whatcha up to?”

Toby sighed. “You don't know who I am, do you?”

“That is not entirely true,” Lillian said. This woman before her who suddenly seemed angry was like everybody, anybody who had ever lived.

“I told you before, Mama, if you keep not knowing who I am, I'm going to stop coming here.”

“You're my child,” Lillian said. She hoped she didn't sound bewildered. She wanted to sound affirmative, torrentially affirmative, like a great artist.

Toby was not appeased. She felt distracted by Staff, who was spraying cobwebs from a can onto the windows.

“I sold the house today,” Toby said loudly. “I just closed on it, right before I came over here.”

Her mother frowned. “We've discussed that,” she said. “Was it fun?”

“A young couple bought it.”

“Why did a young couple buy it?”

“Let's go over and see Daddy before you drive me out of my mind.”

Toby nudged the brake off the wheelchair with her sandaled foot and they proceeded down the corridor and into the courtyard. There were several benches, unoccupied, and two trees whose limbs looked smooth and severed like human stumps, with the skin drawn tightly forward and folded over into a tight tuck. Yet on the tips of these eerie branches were lovely white and still-fragrant flowers. And these trees were not at all uncommon at this latitude.

Toby had made a good profit on the house, the last one her parents had lived in together. She had capitalized on something legally exotic. Her mother and father had been in the house less than six months when they learned from a neighbor that a murder had taken place there, just one, but involving almost every room, upstairs and down, in what could only have been a long, drawn-out process. Toby took advantage of a gray area in the law and sued the real-estate agents for selling them a stigmatized property. The lawyer had been delighted by the largeness and grayness of the area. The house appeared to be making every effort to be charming and forthright, but in a court of law it was considered psychologically impacted and the real-estate company was found liable for not informing the buyers of its past. The money involved was not considerable but it was still amusing to have. After her mother's stroke and her father's tumble, Toby had put the house on the market herself with full disclosure and it sold eventually to a couple who'd had a loved one murdered (the relationship here was blurry) and required intensive counseling. Now they could accept sudden and untoward death, even reside with it. They made their money in video.

They signed all the papers at the house on the hood of the couple's car. It had been hand-painted with images of fish, following one of the customs of the town to fancifully paint old cars with complex, detailed scenes of virtually vanished worlds. The fish had inaccessible startled faces and curving silver bodies. Each scale, carefully delineated, shone. It was all carefully, glowingly done; the water was rendered crystalline. The vehicle itself, however, had bald tires, a cracked windshield and a dragging tailpipe.

“Video pays the bills,” the girl said. Her name was Jennifer. “But it's our nutty money that makes life worth living. Boyfriend sells his sperm to fertility clinics. He has the highest IQ in the business, practically.”

“Of course the doctors make a lot more,” boyfriend said.

“I can't believe people would freak out just because this lovely home hosted a sad event,” Jennifer said. “People get so unnecessarily freaked. We're on this earth with a part to play but instead of playing the part as an actor does, some people think the part is really
them
and they freak out all the time. Listen, you can hear the ocean from here.”

“That's the freeway, I think,” boyfriend said.

“It sounds OK, though. I mean, if they can make a freeway sound like an ocean, so much the better.”

Toby had never lived in this house. It meant nothing to her. Even if she had lived in it, its sale would have been of minor significance. She didn't consider a house as a large cradle or nest. For the last several years she had moved around a number of properties her father had bought for back taxes at the courthouse when the owners could not be located; he had busied himself in his retirement by acquiring houses in this fashion. They were all dumps and Toby was in the process of disposing of them in an accelerated manner. She was at present occupying an oddity built decades before that had never been remodeled. Its roofline was angled like wings. The ceilings were crazed and water-stained, an avocado green shag covered the plywood floors, the bathroom wallpaper depicted toreadors and bulls, rather a single toreador and a single bull over and over again. The wood was biscuit-colored and flimsy, the rooms small, the foundation cracked, the malfunctioning kitchen appliances a grotesque shade of ruby. The yard was large. There had once been flower beds, all in ruin now, and a small pond was spanned by a concrete arch from which a concrete fisherperson “fished.” The place was a hoot, though Toby felt it worsened her sinus condition.

This house, though, her parents' last house, was proper, formal, clean and patient, even though it was unlucky. It was aware that it was unlucky. It had been sold with all furnishings, dishware, linens, even the Oldsmobile in the garage.

“What's the first thing you're going to do,” Toby asked.

They looked at her blankly.

“To the house.”

“Oh, tear it down,” boyfriend said. “We really wanted more of a yurt.”

“He's kidding,” Jennifer said.

“It's entirely up to you, of course,” Toby said.

“He's kidding!”

“Maybe we'll slap some paint on the Olds, though. Coral reef.”

“Pretty, pretty,
pretty,
” Jennifer enthused. She carried a child's lunch box as a purse and from it she pulled a money order made out for the full purchase amount as well as three small cupcakes with orange frosting, which she distributed.

Toby swallowed hers without thinking, then said, “Oh, I…is there something in this?”

“Just a little celebratory weed,” boyfriend said.

“Chink, chink,” Jennifer said, swallowing. She flung her arms wide, almost clipping Toby with the lunch box. “I'm going to plant stuff all around here. My granddad had a wisteria vine and he said that when he went out to look at it, it would lean forward and lay its head on his shoulder, it liked him so much. That thing was
huge.
Once, when he wasn't around, I hit it with a croquet mallet. I was pissed at Granddad because he put my favorite sweater in the dryer and ruined it. It was, like, the size of a chinchilla's sweater.”

“A Chihuahua's, I think,” boyfriend said.

“Kids today would've taken the mallet to Granddad,” Jennifer went on, “but I took it to that vine—oh, did I. It flew away in big green and purple chunks and never came back. I was such a bad girl then, a demon!”

“But then you found Jesus,” boyfriend said.

“You found him?” Toby said. “Where?”

“What he means is Jesus found
me,
” Jennifer said kindly, “and I take comfort now in knowing,
knowing,
that in my granddad's heaven a wisteria vine grows.”

“That is so unlikely,” Toby said.

“Say?”

“Unlikely,” Toby said. “Doubtful. No way.”

Jennifer removed her sunglasses and looked at Toby coldly.

“Maybe you should leave now,” boyfriend said.

“Certainly,” Toby said. She felt somewhat woozy from the cupcake. “Our transaction is complete,” she said, in a simper she was aware was taking up entirely too much of her face.

“She can still pack a heck of a wallop,” boyfriend warned her.

So had the sale ended on its awkward note.

Still, the cupcake had managed to whisk her in gleeful transit to the convalescent home—a distance of some twenty miles through normally aggravating traffic—before it dumped her without warning behind her mother's wheelchair on the back of which some impish Staff had affixed the sticker
THIS IS NOT AN ABANDONED VEHICLE
.

“Look!” Lillian cried. Her heart was beating eagerly, stupefied. “Look!” But she then realized it was no more than water from a lawn sprinkler fanning lightly back and forth across the grass.

“What!” Toby said. “You're not going to get wet. Are you afraid of getting wet?”

Lillian remembered a green umbrella, furled, in the vestibule when she had been young. She feared umbrellas. “I'm afraid of umbra…umbra…umbrellas,” she said shyly.

“Don't be foolish,” Toby said.

They found Robert in the reading room, alone at a large table, staring at a book on ancient Egypt. Here was her
father,
Toby thought. She waited for the next thought but nothing immediately arose.

“Hi, Daddy,” Toby said. She always expected something, but what?

He ignored her and addressed his wife. “Are you aware of this Osiris?”

Lillian studied the highly illustrated page. “Well, that's not him, the one with the jackal's head, he doesn't look like that.”

“She was always the smart one, your mother,” Robert said. “Could always count on her.”

Toby scanned the text. Sibling drowned Osiris. Then chopped up body into fourteen parts and scattered them all over the place, all over Egypt. Someone found everything except for the penis, which had been eaten by fish, then put him back together again and made him king of the underworld.

“They shouldn't have books like this lying around here,” Toby said. “Here, of all places.”

“Those Egyptians had to worry that their own hearts might testify against them after death,” Robert said. “Isn't that something? That was one of the things those people had to worry about.”

“They worried that their own hearts would turn them in?”

“That's right, Mother.”

“Like they were criminals?”

“I don't understand,” Toby said without curiosity.

Robert looked at her with disapproval, though he had harbored no preference for a son. They'd had Toby when they were quite along in years. She was their wan surprise.

“You're the one who said there was going to be an accounting,” her mother reminded her.

“I came close to saying that,” Toby admitted, “but I never did.”

They sat silently around the table, the great book of Egypt open before them.

“What are you having for dinner, Daddy? What are they serving?”

“Some sort of meat you can eat with a spoon,” he said moodily, “and orange sherbet. It's Halloween.”

“She never liked Halloween,” her mother said. “She was never formidable enough for it.”

“Ahh, Mama,” Toby whined.

“What's the weather out,” her father asked.

“It's…” Toby couldn't remember. What difference did it make? The days were mostly bright as blazes, this being Florida.

“We had a good life together, didn't we, Mother?” Robert said.

This could go either way in Toby's experience, and she wasn't about to hold her breath.

“I don't think so,” Lillian said. She was choosing not to be torrentially affirmative at the moment.

The reply, whatever it was, usually marked the moment when Toby would look at her watch and express dismay at the lateness of the hour. It was just a little sign she had taken to relying on.

“All right, Mama, Daddy, I'm going to leave now. Mama, why don't you have supper here with Daddy, and Staff can take you back to your own room afterwards.”

“Leave me here, leave me here,” her mother said. “It's perfectly all right. I'm just waiting my turn.”