The Books: “Breaking and Entering” (Joy Williams)

Daily Book Excerpt: Adult fiction:

Breaking and Entering, by Joy Williams

Wonderful book! It’s amazing to me how many voices Joy Williams can assume. In this book, people talk and talk and talk. It’s a book about drifters, and the people they encounter along the way. These people have stories to tell, and sometimes they talk for 2 or 3 pages. The voices are all completely distinct – you would never mistake one for another. Joy Williams is channeling, basically. The chorus of different voices is one of the best things about this book.

Liberty and Willie are a couple. They have been together since high school, and they are now married. They live in the Florida Keys. For “fun” (although it doesn’t seem really fun – it seems more like a compulsion), they break into people’s houses when those people are assumed to be away (mail piled up, cars gone, etc.) – and live there for a week or so. They never stay in one house for long. Willie is in charge of the timing. He’s the one who looks around and decides, time to be moving on now. Liberty seems rather passive. Somewhat sad. We don’t know why yet. She is connected to Willie – not just because of a marriage license but because of their shared history – much of which is quite dark (it unfolds slowly throughout the book). At times, it is not clear why Liberty stays with Willie. But Willie is not a loser. He has a glitter about him. He’s handsome. People are attracted to him. When they break into people’s houses – he likes to take even more risks: living in a house that is not theirs, picking up an invite out of the piled-up mail to some dinner party – and he and Liberty will go, saying they know so-and-so, cousins from out of town, whatever … They do not worry about covering their tracks. Willie wants the people to KNOW that “they” were there when they return. He makes sure to leave their head dents in the pillow. He takes photographs of Liberty with their camera, and leaves the film inside, undeveloped. It’s a risk-filled life. It seems to fill some abyss of emptiness. Liberty is a follower. She doesn’t try to put the brakes on Willie, because what would be the point of that. Liberty has a dog – a big huge white dog with creepy eyes the color of ice cubes. The dog’s name is Clem. Clem is a conversation-starter. People see him and stop in their tracks. Nobody wants to pet him. People are almost afraid of him. What he represents is dependent upon the person looking at him. It’s like he’s a blank screen onto which people project their longings, fears.

Willie and Liberty do this breaking and entering thing almost as a vacation. It’s not that they are homeless. They have a home. It’s a small home, nothing fancy – but a home nonetheless. It’s that there’s something between them – an abyss – something – that makes it difficult to just sit on the couch at night and be together. There is no ease between them. Over the course of the book you realize what it is that has gone down … Liberty is a depressive, that much is obvious … and Willie appears to look upon his role as caretaker. He leads her around. Perhaps because he feels he owes her that much, who knows.

I love this book. I love every word. I love all the crazy people they meet – the nightguards, the neighbors … I love the mystery in the prose, how it doesn’t reveal all … I love the deep sadness that is apparent in the book, only Williams never comes out and states it openly. It’s just a mood. A sense. There’s a lot of talk in the book – like I said, most of the book is long conversation … There’s something about Liberty and Willie that makes people open up, and want to divulge all. Especially Willie. People look at Willie and somehow feel that he might save them. But from what? Willie senses this trend as well and figures he should go with it, and inhabit whatever it is that people want to see … If people look at him and see a savior (not in a religious sense – but a moral sense, perhaps even a physical sense) … then who is he to deny them that? Liberty stands back, watching how people are drawn to Willie, and she loves him, too … but from her perspective, perhaps she sees more of a con artist at work. Who knows. The irony is that Willie, even though he knows her best, cannot save her. He failed her. This is his greatest tragedy, and I’m not sure he can forgive himself.

This is a wonderful book – hauntingly written, at times quite funny – and also nervewracking. They hang out in these houses, taking baths, having sex, walking around, trying on the people’s clothes … and you want to tell them to knock this shit OFF – you could get caught!!

I suppose that is the point, for them.

Highly recommended book, my favorite (so far) of all of Williams’ stuff.

EXCERPT FROM Breaking and Entering, by Joy Williams

The Umbertons had many possessions. The house was heavily furnished. They had glass torcheres, leather couches, massive sideboards, thick carpets. And then the house was cluttered with small objects. The objects were of a different quality, as though the Umbertons had bought them for somebody else and then took them back after a quarrel. The kind of objects intended for a recipient who died before the occasion of giving.

On the leather-topped desk in the living room was a framed photograph of the Umbertons on their wedding day. They were standing on marble steps, he one step above her. He had a crew cut, her dress a long train. On the desk too was a picture of a large orange cat in front of a Christmas tree. It was obvious that a superior choice had been made that year in the selection of the tree, for in an album photos of many previous Christmas trees were mounted. The kitchen cupboards were filled with an assortment of nourishing and sensible canned goods. Large clothes hung in the closets in predominant colors of blue and beige. There was a cabinet off the bath that was filled with nothing but toilet paper.

“This is how some people prepare for nuclear attack,” Willie said, staring in at the treasure of white two-ply.

The Umbertons could be imagined as tall. The sinks and counters were set several inches higher than usual. Perhaps they had even become giants since their wedding day. The beds were oversized, the coffee mugs. Everything was heavy duty.

The Umbertons could be imagined as loving games. In one of the roofs was a pool table and a pinball machine. On the walls of this room hung a series of coconut shell heads, loonily embellished. An entire community of coconuts, masculine and feminine, mean and happy, hanging on the wall, contemplating the Umbertons’ life of leisure. In the kitchen it was clear that the Umbertons loved their Cuisinart, for which they had many attachments, and their orange cat, who had a box full of toys. Clem looked the box over. He selected a rubber pig, which squealed, and went off with it.

The sofas had pads under the legs to protect the rugs. The toilets had deodorant sticks to protect the integrity of the bowls. There was plastic on the lamp shades to protect them from dust and on the mattresses to shield them from nocturnal emissions. The Umbertons were waging a sprightly war against decline. They protected their possessions as though they had given birth to them.

“How about cutting my hair?” Willie asked Liberty. “Just a trim.”

She knew his intention and shook her head. He would gather the hair up and put it in the middle of the rug when they left, or on the table, in the center of something. Nothing would be missing, nothing out of place, but addressing the Umbertons when they returned, would be a mass of hair.

“You can’t read my mind,” Willie said. “I just wanted my hair cut.”

“It doesn’t need it,” Liberty said. “It’s fine the way it is, it looks good, I like it.”

“I could write your diary,” Willie said.

“That’s a terrible thing to say,” Liberty said. Then she said, “That’s not true.” Finally she said, “I wouldn’t keep a diary.”

Beyond the windows the bay winked greenly. It was sick, filling up with silt. Each day there was less oxygen in the water than the day before. It labored against the cement wall the Umbertons had erected between them and it.

Liberty went into a sewing room off the kitchen. There were patterns and folds of fabric, a sewing machine and a dressmaker’s dummy. The room was snug and painted a placid peace. A calendar on the wall showed tittering bunnies and kittens playing musical chairs in a wholesome meadow. The room was obviously Mrs. Umberton’s tender retreat from the large life she shared with Mr. Umberton. Liberty sat on a hassock covered with a cheerful chintz and felt the top slip slightly. Removing the lid, she found inside a well-thumbed paperback with a torn cover. He plunged his head between her spread thighs, Liberty read. Lunging and licking, he thrust his tongue in her sea-smelling channels and velvet whorls tasting the wine which is fermented by desire. He drew back and she whined in pleasure as she saw his glistening shaft …

Liberty threw the book back into the hassock and went into the living room. Willie was holding his hands above a spray of plastic flowers in a bud vase as though he were warming them there.

“What are we looking for here,” Liberty asked, “just in general?”

“You know, when anesthesia was first invented, many doctors didn’t want to use it,” Willie said. “They felt it would rob God of the earnest cries for help that arose from those in time of trouble.”

“Anesthesia,” Liberty said. “You can’t rob God.”

“I keep having this dream,” Willie said. “It’s a typical prison dream. I’m wandering around, doing what I please, choosing this, ignoring that. And then I realize I’m locked up.”

Liberty looked at Willie, who was turning and folding his hands. Her own hands were trembling, and her mind darted, this way and that. Once, on a sunny day, much like this day, she had been driving down the road in their truck and she had seen a male cardinal that had just been struck by a car. It lay rumpled, on the road’s shoulder, and the female rose and dipped in confusion and fright about it, urging it to continue, to go on with her. Liberty’s mind moved like that, like that wretched, bewildered bird.

***

During the night, it rained. The rain came down in warm, rattling sheets. It pounded the beach sand smooth, it dimpled the bay, it clattered the brown fronds of palms where rats lived. It entered the lagoons and aquifers and passed through the Umbertons’ screens. Willie was playing pinball. Liberty could hear the flap of the paddles and the merry bells. She lay on her stomach on a rug in another room, glancing through the only other reading material in the house, a newspaper, several weeks old.

The local paper was highly emotional and untrustworthy. Trust was not a guarantee made to the paper’s readers, but certain things could be counted upon. One could expect, on any given day, a picture of a lone, soaring gull, a naked child holding a garden hose, or a recipe for a casserole containing okra. The editors took paragraphs from the wires for international affairs and concentrated on local color and horror – the migrant worker who killed his five children by sprinkling malathion on their grits; the seven-car pile-ups; the starving pet ponies with untrimmed hooves the size of watermelons. In this particular edition, there was one article of considerable interest, Liberty thought. It was an article about babies, babies in some large, northern city.

A nurse had made the first mistake. She had mixed up two newborn babies and given them to the wrong mothers for nursing. A second nurse on a different shift switched them back again. The first nurse, realizing her initial error, switched them a third time, switched the little bracelets on their wrists, switched the coded, scribbled inserts on their rolling baskets. At this point, the situation had become hopelessly scrambled. Three days passed. The mothers went home with the wrong babies. This was not a Prince and Pauper-type story. Both mothers had nice homes and fathers and siblings for the baby. Four months later the hospital called and told the mothers they had the wrong babies. They had proof. Toe prints and blood types. Chemical proof. They had done the things professionals do to prove that a person was the person he was supposed to be. The mothers were hysterical. They had fallen in love with the wrong babies and now they didn’t want to give their wrong babies up. But apparently it had to be done. It seemed to be the law.

Liberty put the paper aside, closed her eyes and listened to the rain. It rang against the glass like voices, like the voices of children screaming in a playground. Children’s voices sounded the same everywhere, a murmurous growth, a sweet hovering, untranslatable, like wind or water, moving.

Liberty and Willie were wanderers, they were young but they had wandered for years, as though through a wilderness, staying for days or weeks or months in towns with names like Coy or Peachburg or Diamondhead or Hurley. Then larger towns, cities, still as though through a wilderness, for there was no path for them or way – West Palm, Jacksonville, Sarasota. There was always a little work, a little place to stay, and then there was this other thing, this thing that was like an enchantment, this energy that kept them somehow going, this adopted, perverse skill of inhabiting the space others had made for themselves. For they themselves were not preparing for anything, they were not building anything, they were just moving along, and Liberty was aware that this house thing, this breaking and entering thing – time for the thing, they’d say, let’s do the thing – became more frequent, accelerated, just before they left a town.

The rain increased, it fell in shapes, its voice children’s voices.