The Quick & the Dead by Joy Williams Page B

passed her in the hall. Her new friends would consider Alice unwaxed, uncombed, and unpleasantly intense, but Annabel would be kind. She would say, “Well, you know the situation at home is really quite strange” or “She actually is quite smart.”
    She would quietly defend Alice, but she would no longer associate with her. It would be such a relief to escape Alice’s scrutiny. You couldn’t even show her a simple catalog. Annabel had been ordering stunning stuff from this place in Idaho—cobalt-and-brown mustang twirling skirts and zigzag summer storm vests and liquid necklaces, all made possible by one or another of Carter’s credit cards—and Alice hated the little catalog, was practically apoplectic over the manatee note cubes and the fake petroglyph rocks in velveteen pouches and the enameled plastic butterfly magnets, becoming particularly enraged over a photograph of awolf offered for, Annabel thought, the quite reasonable price of seventy-five dollars.
    “Listen to this!” Alice said. “ ‘Half-hidden yet clearly curious, the wolf gazes out from the framed, double-matted print intently, forever watching from the woods. Protected behind clear acrylic.’ Protected behind clear acrylic! That’s the only place it is protected. Everywhere else it’s trapped and poisoned and shot from planes and snowmobiles.”
    “These earrings on the next page are cute,” Annabel said. “Don’t you think they’re—”
    “This is despicable.”
    “But it’s not. Look. See, right over the eight hundred number it says they give a portion of their profits for wildlife habitat preservation and that they’d like to give to all the worthy causes. See, right here?”
    “You are not saving the earth by buying lizard earrings. And what does this mean? ‘This whimsical duo in sterling silver has a mirthful attitude that’s positively contagious.’ What does that mean!”
    “Why does it have to mean anything?” Annabel asked, pleased with the reasonableness of her retort. You just had to be sensible with Alice.
    A lizard darted past, part of another lizard dangling from its mouth. It was all so bright and violent out here. Nothing had any subtlety, not even the light. “Alice?” Annabel called. “Where are you?” For, while she had been momentarily distracted by the cannibalistic ingestion in progress, Alice had vanished somewhere with that awful slingshot. The wind fluttered dryly at Annabel’s face. She examined her toenails. They were perfect.
    Walking, she passed through one courtyard into another. The school had a courtyard for each student, practically. It was ridiculous. Then she was in a sort of amphitheater that was set apart by two dozen or so ragged cypresses. Alice had said that they put on a lot of plays at Marquise. Annabel would try out for all the plays for she liked the dramatic arts. She saw a woman threading a rather uncertain passage among the stone benches. She was wearing a red dress and appeared to be very pregnant. She was too far away to say hi to, otherwise Annabel certainly would have said hi. She’d say, Oh, you’re going to have a baby! Annabel wanted to have children, lots and lots of children. Eventually, of course.Maybe she could have quadruplets. But there had to be something wrong with you first, didn’t there? You couldn’t have quadruplets all on your own; a lot of pharmaceutical assistance and scientific intervention was required. Dishes, there were those special kinds of dishes …
    The woman hadn’t noticed Annabel. Her head was lowered, and she was just going back and forth around the benches as though she were trying to flow around them in a terribly natural way. Annabel was now very much hoping that it wouldn’t be necessary to say hi. If the woman started to have her baby and a foot or an arm started coming out, Annabel wouldn’t know what to do. The woman continued to steer her big body around the benches. What if she were a homeless person and lived here?