Read Online Honored Guest (Vintage Contemporaries) by Joy Williams - Free Book Online Page B

She, too, looked delighted. She and Donna beamed at each other. “He’s a good dog, a watchdog.”
    “I didn’t see him when I was there,” Donna admitted.
    “He wasn’t watching you,” the old lady said.
    “What breed of dog is he?” Donna asked.
    She suddenly looked concerned. “He’s something you plug in.”
    “Oh,” Donna said, disappointed. “I think I did notice him.” He looked like a stereo speaker. She thought they’d been talking more along the lines of Cerberus, the dog that guarded the gates of hell. Those Greeks! It wasn’t that you couldn’t get in, it was that you couldn’t get out. And that honey-cake business … Actually, she had never grasped the honey-cake business.
    “He detects intruders up to thirty feet and he barks. He can detect them through glass, brick, wood and cement. The closer they get, the louder and faster he barks. He’s just a little individual but he sounds ferocious. I always liked him better than Safe-T-Man. I got them at the same time.”
    “But he’d be barking all the time here,” Donna said. “You have to consider that,” she added.
    “He can be quiet,” the woman said. “He can be good.”
    “I’ll get him for you then,” Donna said as though she had just made a difficult decision.
    As she was leaving Pond House she passed a man dressed all in red yelling into the telephone. There was a pay phone at the very heart of Floor Three and it was always in use. “What were you born with, an ax in your hand?” he shouted. “You’re so destructive.”
    Donna returned the next day with the old lady’s dog,which she carried in a smart brown and white Bendel’s shopping bag she’d been saving. She arrived just about the time the group meeting was coming to a close. Lingering near the door, she saw the fat teenagers and Cynthia’s round neat head with its fashionable haircut. A male patient she had not seen before was saying, “Hey, if it looks, walks, talks, smells and feels like the anima, then it is the anima.” Donna thought this very funny and somewhat obscene. “Miss!” someone called to her. “You are not allowed in these meetings!” She went back to Cynthia’s room and sat on her bed. The old woman’s bed was stripped down to the ticking. She sat and looked at it vacantly.
    When Cynthia came in, she said, “Donna, that old lady died, honest to God. We were all sitting around after dinner eating our goddamn Jell-O and she just tipped over.”
    “I have something she wanted here,” Donna said, raising the bag. “This is hers, it’s from her house.”
    “Get rid of it,” Cynthia said. “Listen, act quickly and positively.” She began to cry.
    Donna thought her friend’s response somewhat peculiar, but that was probably why she was in Pond House.
    As the day wore on, it was disclosed that the woman had no family. There was no one.
    “There wouldn’t have been any Festive Chicken either,” Cynthia said, “that’s for sure.” She had her old mouth back on her, Donna noticed.
    There was discussion in the room about what had happened. The old lady had been eating the Jell-O. She hadn’t said a word. She’d expressed no dismay.
    “She was clueless,” one of the fat girls said.
    “Were you friends before you came here or did you become friends here?” Donna asked them.
    They looked at her with hatred. “She’s a nut fucker, I think,” one of them said.
    They looked so much alike Donna couldn’t be sure which of them had struck her in the hallway. She thought of them as Dum and Dee. She pretended she was a docent leading tours. The neuroses of these two, Dum and Dee, are so normal they’re of little concern to us, she would say, indicating the fat girls. Then she pretended they were her jailers over whom she held indisputable moral sway.
    The barking-dog alarm had not worked at the old lady’s house. It was a simple enough thing, with few adjustments that could be made to it; its function would either be realized or it