The Visiting Privilege Read Online Free PDF Page A

girl, living alone with her child. “I love you,” she says to the child. “Mommy loves me,” the child murmurs, “and Daddy loves me and Grandma loves me and Granddaddy loves me and my friend loves me.” The girl corrects her. “Mommy loves you,” she says. The child is growing. In not too long the child will be grown. When is this happening! She wakes the child in the middle of the night. She gives her a glass of juice and together they listen to the radio. A woman is speaking on the radio. She says, “I hope you will not think me vulgar.” “Not at all,” the Answer Man replies. “He is never at a loss,” the girl whispers to the child. The woman says, “My husband can only become excited if he feels that some part of his body is missing.” “Yes,” the Answer Man says. The girl shakes the sleepy child. “Listen to this,” she says. “I want you to know about these things.” The unknown woman’s voice continues, dimly. “A finger or an eye or a leg. I have to pretend it’s not there.”
    “Yes,” the Answer Man says.

Summer
    C onstance and Ben and their daughters by previous marriages, Charlotte and Jill, were sharing a summerhouse for a month with their friend Steven. There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up—Tracy, India, Yvette, Aster and Bronwyn. The women made a great deal of fuss over Charlotte and Jill, who were both ten. They made the girls nachos and root-beer floats, and bought them latch-hook sets and took them out to the moors to identify flowers. They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—
This beautiful bud to us was given
    To unfold here but bloom in heaven
    or worse!
Here lies Aimira Rawson
    Daughter Wife Mother
    She has done what she could
    The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.
    The women would arrange the children’s hair in various elaborate styles that Constance hated. They knew no taboos; they discussed everything with the children—love, death, Japanese whaling methods. Each woman had habits and theories and stories to tell, and each brought a house present and stayed seventy-two hours. They all spent so much time with the children because they could not spend it with Steven, who appeared after 5:00 p.m. only. Steven was writing a book that summer; he was, in his words, “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” This took time.
    Ben was recovering from a heart attack he had suffered in the spring. He and Constance had been in a restaurant, and he had had a heart attack. She remembered the look of absolute attentiveness that had crossed his face. At the time, she had thought he was looking at a beautiful woman behind her and on the other side of the room. The memory, which she recalled frequently, mortified her.
    Things appeared different now to Constance: objects seemed to have more presence, people seemed more vivid, the sky seemed brighter. Her nightmares’ messages were far less veiled. Constance was embarrassed at having these feelings, for it had been Ben’s heart attack, after all, not hers. He had always accused her of taking things too personally.
    Constance and Ben had been married for five years. Charlotte was Constance’s child from her marriage with Paul, and Jill was Ben’s from his marriage with Susan. The children weren’t crazy about each other, but they got along. It was all right, really, with them. Here in the summerhouse they slept in the attic; in Constance’s opinion, the nicest room in the house. It had two iron beds, white beaverboard walls and a small window, from which one could see three streets converging. Sometimes Constance would take a gin and tonic up to the attic and lie on one of the beds and watch people place their postcards in the mailbox at the intersection. Constance didn’t send