Taking Care

by Joy Williams

  The Wedding

  ELIZABETH always wanted to read fables to her little girl but the child only wanted to hear the story about the little bird who thought a steam shovel was its mother. They would often argue about this. Elizabeth was sick of the story. She particularly disliked the part where the baby bird said, “You are not my mother, you are a snort, I want to get out of here!” Elizabeth was thirty and the child was five. At night, at the child’s bedtime, Sam would often hear them complaining bitterly to one another. He would preheat the broiler for dinner and freshen his drink and go out and sit on the picnic table. In a little while, the screen door would slam and Elizabeth would come out, shaking her head. The child had frustrated her again. The child would not go to sleep. She was upstairs, wandering around, making “cotton candy” in her bone-china bunny mug. “Cotton candy” was Kleenex sogged in water. Sometimes Elizabeth would tell Sam the story that she had prepared for the child. The people in Elizabeth’s fables were always looking for truth or happiness and they were always being given mirrors or lumps of coal. Elizabeth’s stories were inhabited by wolves and cart horses and solipsists.

  “Please relax,” Sam would say.

  At eleven o’clock every night, Sam would take a double Scotch on the rocks up to his bedroom.

  “Sam,” the child called, “have some of my cotton candy. It’s delicious.”

  Elizabeth’s child reminded Sam of Hester’s little Pearl even though he knew that her father, far from being the “Prince of the Air,” was a tax accountant. Elizabeth spoke about him often. He had not shared the 1973 refund with her even though they had filed jointly and half of the year’s income had been hers. Apparently the marriage had broken up because she often served hamburgers with baked potatoes instead of French fries. Over the years, astonishment had turned to disapproval and then to true annoyance. The tax accountant told Elizabeth that she didn’t know how to do anything right. Elizabeth, in turn, told her accountant that he was always ejaculating prematurely.

  “Sam,” the child called, “why do you have your hand over your heart?”

  “That’s my Scotch,” Sam said.

  Elizabeth was a nervous young woman. She was nervous because she was not married to Sam. This desire to be married again embarrassed her, but she couldn’t help it. Sam was married to someone else. Sam was always married to someone.

  Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly, there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that reminded the lonely blackly of the darkness. They met at the wedding dinner of the daughter of a mutual friend. Delicious food was served and many peculiar toasts were given. Sam liked Elizabeth’s aura and she liked his too. They danced. Sam had quite a bit to drink. At one point, he thought he saw a red rabbit in the floral centerpiece. It’s true, it was Easter week, but he worried about this. They danced again. Sam danced Elizabeth out of the party and into the parking lot. Sam’s car was nondescript and tidy except for a bag of melting groceries.

  Elizabeth loved the way he kissed. He put his hand on her throat. He lay his tongue deep and quiet inside her mouth. He filled her mouth with the decadent Scotch and cigarette flavor of the tragic middle class. On the other hand, when Sam saw Elizabeth’s brightly flowered scanty panties, he thought he’d faint with happiness. He was a sentimentalist.

  “I love you,” Elizabeth thought she heard him say.

  Sam swore that he heard Elizabeth say, “Life is an eccentric privilege.”

  This worried him but not in time.

  They began going out together frequently. Elizabeth promised to always take the babysitter home. At first, Elizabeth and Sam attempted to do vile and imaginative things to one another. This was culminated one afternoon when Sam spooned a mound of pineapple-lime Jell-O between Elizabeth’s legs and began to eat. At first, of course, Elizabeth was nervous. Then she stopped being nervous and began watching Sam’s sweating, good-looking shoulders with real apprehension. Simultaneously, they both gave up. This seemed a good sign. The battle is always between the pleasure principle and the reality principle is it not? Imagination is not what it’s cracked up to be. Sam decided to forget the petty, bourgeois rite of eating food out of one another’s orifices for a while. He decided to just love Elizabeth instead.

  “Did you know that Charles Dickens wanted to marry Little Red Riding Hood?”

  “What!” Sam exclaimed, appalled.

  “Well, as a child he wanted to marry her,” Elizabeth said.

  “Oh,” Sam said, curiously relieved.

  Elizabeth had a house and her little girl. Sam had a house and a car and a Noank sloop. The houses were thirteen hundred miles apart. They spent the winter in Elizabeth’s house in the South and they drove up to Sam’s house for the summer. The trip took two and one-half days. They had done it twice now. It seemed about the same each time. They argued on the Baltimore Beltway. They bought peaches and cigarettes and fireworks and a ham. The child would often sit on the floor in the front seat and talk into the air-conditioning vent.

  “Emergency,” she’d say. “Come in please.”

  On the most recent trip, Sam had called his lawyer from a Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike. The lawyer told him that Sam’s divorce had become final that morning. This had been Sam’s third marriage. He and Annie had seemed very compatible. They tended to each other realistically, with affection and common sense. Then Annie decided to go back to school. She became interested in animal behaviorism. Books accumulated. She was never at home. She was always on field trips, in thickets or on beaches, or visiting some ornithologist in Barnstable. She began keeping voluminous notebooks. Sam came across the most alarming things written in her hand.

  Mantids are cannibalistic and males often literally lose their heads to the females. The result, as far as successful mating is concerned, is beneficial, since the suboesophageal ganglion is frequently removed and with it any inhibition on the copulatory center; the activities of male abdomen are carried out with more vigor than when the body was intact.

  “Annie, Annie,” Sam had pleaded. “Let’s have some people over for drinks. Let’s prune the apple tree. Let’s bake the orange cake you always made for my birthday.”

  “I have never made an orange cake in my life,” Annie said.

  “Annie,” Sam said, “don’t they have courses in seventeenth-century romantic verse or something?”

  “You drink too much,” Annie said. “You get quarrelsome every night at nine. Your behavior patterns are severely limited.”

  Sam clutched his head with his hands.

  “Plus you are reducing my ability to respond to meaningful occurrences, Sam.”

  Sam poured himself another Scotch. He lit a cigarette. He applied a mustache with a piece of picnic charcoal.

  “I am Captain Blood,” he said. “I want to kiss you.”

  “When Errol Flynn died, he had the body of a man of ninety,” Annie said. “His brain was unrealistic from alcohol.”

  She had already packed the toast rack and the pewter and rolled up the Oriental rug.

  “I am just taking this one Wanda Landowska recording,” she said. “That’s all I’m taking in the way of records.”

  Sam, with his charcoal mustache, sat very straight at his end of the table.

  “The variations in our life have ceased to be significant,” Annie said.

  Sam’s house was on a hill overlooking a cove. The cove was turning into a saltwater marsh. Sam liked marshes but he thought he had bought property on a deep-water cove where he could take his boat in and out. He wished that he were not involved in the process of his cove turning into a marsh. When he had first bought the place, he was so excited about everything that he had a big dinner party at which he served soupe de poisson using only the fish he had caught himself from the cove. He could not, it seems, keep himself from doing this each year. Each year, the soupe de poisson did not seem as nice as it had the year before. About a year before Annie left him, she suggested that they should probably stop havin
g that particular dinner party. Sam felt flimflammed.

  When Sam returned to the table in the Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike after learning about his divorce, Elizabeth didn’t look at him.

  “I have been practicing different expressions, none of which seem appropriate,” Elizabeth said.

  “Well,” Sam said.

  “I might as well be honest,” Elizabeth said.

  Sam bit into his egg. He did not feel lean and young and unencumbered.

  “In the following sentence, the same word is used in each of the missing spaces, but pronounced differently.” Elizabeth’s head was bowed. She was reading off the place mat. “Don’t look at yours now, Sam,” she said, “the answer’s on it.” She slid his place mat off the table, spilling coffee on his cuff in the process. “A prominent _____and man came into a restaurant at the height of the rush hour. The waitress was_____to serve him immediately as she had_____.”

  Sam looked at her. She smiled. He looked at the child. The child’s eyes were closed and she was moving her thumb around in her mouth as though she were making butter there. Sam paid the bill. The child went to the bathroom. An hour later, just before the Tappan Zee Bridge, Sam said, “Notable.”

  “What?” Elizabeth said.

  “Notable. That’s the word that belongs in all three spaces.”

  “You looked,” Elizabeth said.

  “Goddamn it,” Sam yelled. “I did not look!”

  “I knew this would happen,” Elizabeth said. “I knew it was going to be like this.”

  It is a very hot night. Elizabeth has poison ivy on her wrists. Her wrists are covered with calamine lotion. She has put Saran Wrap over the lotion and secured it with a rubber band. Sam is in love. He smells the wonderfully clean, sun-and-linen smell of Elizabeth and her calamine lotion.

  Elizabeth is going to tell a fairy story to the child. Sam tries to convince her that fables are sanctimonious and dully realistic.

  “Tell her any one except the ‘Frog King,’” Sam whispers.

  “Why can’t I tell her that one,” Elizabeth says. She is worried.

  “The toad stands for male sexuality,” Sam whispers.

  “Oh Sam,” she says. “That’s so superficial. That’s a very superficial analysis of the animal-bridegroom stories.”

  “I am an animal,” Sam growls, biting her softly on the collarbone.

  “Oh Sam,” she says.

  Sam’s first wife was very pretty. She had the flattest stomach he had ever seen and very black, very straight hair. He adored her. He was faithful to her. He wrote both their names on the flyleaves of all his books. They were married for six years. They went to Europe. They went to Mexico. In Mexico they lived in a grand room in a simple hotel opposite a square. The trees in the square were pruned in the shape of perfect boxes. Each night, hundreds of birds would come home to the trees. Beside the hotel was the shop of a man who made coffins. So many of the coffins seemed small, for children. Sam’s wife grew depressed. She lay in bed for most of the day. She pretended she was dying. She wanted Sam to make love to her and pretend that she was dying. She wanted a baby. She was all mixed up.

  Sam suggested that it was the ions in the Mexican air that made her depressed. He kept loving her but it became more and more difficult for them both. She continued to retreat into a landscape of chaos and warring feelings.

  Her depression became general. They had been married for almost six years but they were still only twenty-four years old. Often they would go to amusement parks. They liked the bumper cars best. The last time they had gone to the amusement park, Sam had broken his wife’s hand when he crashed head-on into her bumper car. They could probably have gotten over the incident had they not been so bitterly miserable at the time.

  In the middle of the night, the child rushes down the hall and into Elizabeth and Sam’s bedroom.

  “Sam,” the child cries, “the baseball game! I’m missing the baseball game.”

  “There is no baseball game,” Sam says.

  “What’s the matter? What’s happening!” Elizabeth cries.

  “Yes, yes,” the child wails. “I’m late, I’m missing it.”

  “Oh what is it!” Elizabeth cries.

  “The child is having an anxiety attack,” Sam says.

  The child puts her thumb in her mouth and then takes it out again. “I’m only five years old,” she says.

  “That’s right,” Elizabeth says. “She’s too young for anxiety attacks. It’s only a dream.” She takes the child back to her room. When she comes back, Sam is sitting up against the pillows, drinking a glass of Scotch.

  “Why do you have your hand over your heart?” Elizabeth asks.

  “I think it’s because it hurts,” Sam says.

  Elizabeth is trying to stuff another fable into the child. She is determined this time. Sam has just returned from setting the mooring for his sailboat. He is sprawled in a hot bath, listening to the radio.

  Elizabeth says, “There were two men wrecked on a desert island and one of them pretended he was home while the other admitted …”

  “Oh Mummy,” the child says.

  “I know that one,” Sam says from the tub. “They both died.”

  “This is not a primitive story,” Elizabeth says. “Colorless, anticlimactic endings are typical only of primitive stories.”

  Sam pulls his knees up and slides underneath the water. The water is really blue. Elizabeth had dyed curtains in the tub and stained the porcelain. Blue is Elizabeth’s favorite color. Slowly, Sam’s house is turning blue. Sam pulls the plug and gets out of the tub. He towels himself off. He puts on a shirt, a tie and a white summer suit. He laces up his sneakers. He slicks back his soaking hair. He goes into the child’s room. The lights are out. Elizabeth and the child are looking at each other in the dark. There are fireflies in the room.

  “They come in on her clothes,” Elizabeth says.

  “Will you marry me?” Sam asks.

  “I’d love to,” she says.

  Sam calls his friends up, beginning with Peter, his oldest friend. While they have been out of touch, Peter has become a soft contact lenses king.

  “I am getting married,” Sam says.

  There is a pause, then Peter finally says, “Once more the boat departs.”

  It is harder to get married than one would think. Sam has forgotten this. For example, what is the tone that should be established for the party? Elizabeth’s mother believes that a wedding cake is very necessary. Elizabeth is embarrassed about this.

  “I can’t think about that, Mother,” she says. She puts her mother and the child in charge of the wedding cake. At the child’s suggestion, it has a jam center and a sailboat on it.

  Elizabeth and Sam decide to get married at the home of a justice of the peace. Her name is Mrs. Custer. Then they will come back to their own house for a party. They invite a lot of people to the party.

  “I have taken out ‘obey,’” Mrs. Custer says, “but I have left in ‘love’ and ‘cherish.’ Some people object to the ‘obey.’”

  “That’s all right,” Sam says.

  “I could start now,” Mrs. Custer says. “But my husband will be coming home soon. If we wait a few moments, he will be here and then he won’t interrupt the ceremony.”

  “That’s all right,” Sam says.

  They stand around. Sam whispers to Elizabeth, “I should pay this woman a little something, but I left my wallet at home.”

  “That’s all right,” Elizabeth says.

  “Everything’s going to be fine,” Sam says.

  They get married. They drive home. Everyone has arrived, and some of the guests have brought their children. The children run around with Elizabeth’s child. One little girl has long red hair and painted green nails.

  “I remember you,” the child says. “You had a kitty. Why didn’t you bring your kitty with you?”

  “That kitty bought the chops,” the little girl says.

  Elizabeth overhears this. �
�Oh my goodness,” she says. She takes her daughter into the bathroom and closes the door.

  “There is more than the seeming of things,” she says to the child.

  “Oh Mummy,” the child says, “I just want my nails green like that girl’s.”

  “Elizabeth,” Sam calls. “Please come out. The house is full of people. I’m getting drunk. We’ve been married for one hour and fifteen minutes.” He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the door. Miraculously, he enters. The closed door is not locked. The child escapes by the same entrance, happy to be freed. Sam kisses Elizabeth by the shower stall. He kisses her beside the sink and before the full length mirror. He kisses her as they stand pressed against the windowsill. Together, in their animistic embrace, they float out the window and circle the house, gazing down at all those who have not found true love, below.

  Woods

  THE trailer was sitting on ten ruined tires in the middle of the woods. There was a river fifty feet away but after what it had done to her, she hardly ever looked at it.

  The day after they moved in, she had walked down there and stood on the little dock, looking up and down as though she were waiting for a bus. The woods were thick and purplish and ran right into the water. There wasn’t any shore. There was the high land and then a line of ropy contorted trees with all the roots exposed like the tendons in an arm, and then the water. And there wasn’t any sun. Although it was noon, the light was second-hand and shabby. The sun was enmeshed in a high tree, tangled in the hanging moss, beating feebly or not at all, like something subject to wind or exhaustion. She looked upstream and there was a gentle wide turn to the river and the woods turned black and flaky. White birds were milling, falling down to the water and then being sucked up again, as though by a draft, with no wingbeat and no cry.

  Nothing looked as though it were about to change from one week to the next. She bent slightly at the waist and looked straight down. The river bottom was red and the water was different colors at different depths—saffron, red, black. Fish hung ornamentally above a rusting can. A steering wheel from a car was wedged between two logs. She lay down on her stomach and poked at the water with her hand. Bored, she splashed and patted the surface. Two otters erupted for air a foot beyond her lowered head, sleek and toothy with a sound like escaping gas. She shrieked, and ran back to the trailer.