The Visiting Privilege by Joy Williams

another with the motion of the train.
    “My ear is killing me,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I think there’s something they’re not telling me. It crackles and snaps in there. It’s like a bird breaking seeds in there.” She touched the bone between cheekbone and ear. “I think that doctor I was seeing should lose his license. He was handsome and competent, certainly, but on my last visit he was vacuuming my ear and his secretary came in to ask him a question and she put her hand on his neck. She stroked his neck, his secretary! While I was sitting there having my ear vacuumed!” Mrs. Muirhead’s cheeks were flushed.
    The three of them gazed out the window. The train must have been clipping along, but things outside, although gone in an instant, seemed to be moving slowly. Beneath a streetlight, a man was kicking his pickup truck.
    “I dislike trains,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “I find them depressing.”
    “It’s the oxygen deprivation,” Jane said, “coming from having to share the air with all these people.”
    “You’re such a snob, dear.” Mrs. Muirhead sighed.
    “We’re going to supper now,” Jane said.
    “Supper,” Mrs. Muirhead said. “Ugh.”
    The children left her looking out the window, a disconsolate, pretty woman wearing a green dress with a line of frogs dancing around it.
    The dining car was almost full. The windows reflected the eaters. The countryside was dim and the train pushed through it.
    Jane steered them to a table where a man and woman silently labored over their meal.
    “My name is Crystal,” Jane offered, “and this is my twin sister, Clara.”
    “Clara!” Dan exclaimed. Jane was always inventing drab names for her.
    “We were triplets,” Jane went on, “but the other died at birth. Cord got all twisted around his neck or something.”
    The woman looked at Jane and smiled.
    “What is your line of work?” Jane persisted brightly.
    There was silence. The woman kept smiling, then the man said, “I don’t do anything, I don’t have to do anything. I was injured in a peacetime accident and they brought me to the base hospital and worked on reviving me for forty-five minutes. Then they gave up. They thought I was dead. Four hours later, I woke up in the mortuary. The Army gives me a good pension.” He pushed his chair away from the table and left.
    Dan looked after him, astonished, a cold roll raised halfway to her mouth. “Was your husband really dead for all that while,” she asked.
    “My husband, ha!” the woman said. “I’d never laid eyes on that man before the six-thirty seating.”
    “I bet you’re a professional woman who doesn’t believe in men,” Jane said slyly.
    “Crystal, how did you guess! It’s true, men are a collective hallucination of women. It’s like when a group of crackpots get together on a hilltop and see flying saucers.” The woman picked at her chicken.
    Jane looked surprised, then said, “My father went to a costume party once wrapped from head to foot in aluminum foil.”
    “A casserole,” the woman offered.
    “No! A spaceman, an alien astronaut!”
    Dan giggled, remembering when Mr. Muirhead had done that. She felt that Jane had met her match with this woman.
    “What do you do!” Jane fairly screamed. “You won’t tell us!”
    “I do drugs,” the woman said. The girls shrank back. “Ha,” the woman said. “Actually, I test drugs for pharmaceutical companies. And I do research for a perfume manufacturer. I am involved in the search for human pheromones.”
    Jane looked levelly at the woman.
    “I know you don’t know what a pheromone is, Crystal. To put it grossly, a pheromone is a smell that a person has that can make another person do or feel a certain thing. It’s an irresistible signal.”
    Dan thought of mangrove roots and orange groves. Of the smell of gas when the pilot light blew out on Jane’s grandmother’s stove. She liked the smell of the Atlantic Ocean when it dried upon your skin and the smell of Jim