Taking Care

by Joy Williams

  She flung herself on the bed and wept for an hour, and nothing her husband could do would stop her. Finally, she took a hot bath and drank three martinis. The otters were the same otters which had terrified her as a child when they were in a color plate, swimming in the Book of Knowledge. She had never been able to remember what volume they were in and was therefore always coming across them. It became a dangerous thing to do her homework. Even when her father had cut the picture out, she would see other things that resembled the otters and she felt that her entire childhood had been ruined. She told this all to her husband. He didn’t know what to say. He kissed her and held her on his lap and covered them both with a quilt.

  Her name was Lola and she was young and had a pretty face. Her husband Jim had a pretty face too, which was why he was a television newscaster rather than being just another newsman. He had brown heavy hair, carefully cut and combed, and was tall and thirty years old. He would look thirty for the next two decades, which worried Lola.

  Jim worked in the capital. It wasn’t much of a town but it was crowded with state office buildings and two colleges and an agricultural school, and when he had started to look for a house late in the summer, there wasn’t anything to rent. Each day he drove further and further from the town on some realtor’s suggestion, Lola by his side, biting her nails and occasionally giving a little cry as though she had been pinched. All they passed were pines and careless farms and an occasional house with a dirt yard and a sign advertising yard eggs and crickets and rabbits. Lola wouldn’t look any more. She put her head on his lap and listened to the radio.

  The day he finally found the trailer and paid the rent, she wasn’t with him. She had a headache pain and was staying behind in the motel room, calling all their friends in the town they had left behind, remembering good times together. The trailer was thirty miles from the capital on blacktop and then another four down a logging road, and was in the next state. He told her that it didn’t have a phone but it had a CB radio and an air-conditioner, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, conversation pit and wall-to-wall carpeting. When she arrived, there was half a watermelon in the refrigerator, two jars of cane syrup beneath the sink, and an unflushed toilet. There was a little lawn, a mangled garden within a square of sticks and string, and then the deep bruised woods, thick as a velvet curtain. The ground all around the trailer was red. Lola felt that it looked idiotic, as though someone had tried to pretty the place up.

  There were deer, bear, coon, possum, boar and turkey. Up the river, in the spring, men brought skiffs full of bees to the tupelo trees in the swamp.

  “That would be something to watch for, love,” Jim said. “Once I saw a man covered with bees. They hung off his clothes and all over his face. He walked by my house, going home. He had lost the queen but had found her again and he was covered with black bees, hardly able to see his way.”

  Lola looked vacantly at him for a long time and then began to drum her knees with her fists. “I don’t want to see anything like that! I want to be out of here before Christmas!”

  Down the river, eight or so miles, was the Gulf of Mexico. He assured her it was there, but she went to sleep and dreamed that she followed the river and it ended only in a fourteenth-century European town of freaks and circuses. Everything was violent or deformed. Tattooed children were being sold, and tiny dead songbirds, clustered like grapes. The river was green and full of animals, stopping abruptly at the town and never appearing again, as though it were painted on, an apron of a stage. Ballistas were mounted on the walls and hides were drying in the sun and everyone was calling to her.

  Whimpering, she woke him up. In the night, something screamed. She could not tell if it was an animal or a bird or whether the process was of slaughter or slaughtering. She kept plucking at her husband’s arm, long after he had awakened and turned on the light. He was a very handsome young man with clear untroubled eyes. People depended upon him to dispense events. Lola saw it simply. Without his telling, it did not exist, and after he had related it, it became harmless verbiage. Everything could be reduced by the mentioning of it. She had married him because he made her feel secure. Sometimes, when he was narrating a television special and the show had been pre-taped, he was both on the screen and by her side, and she was dizzy with relief. Those were the times when she understood best her love for him.

  “I hate this place,” she said shrilly, releasing his arm now and squeezing the bedclothes around her fingers. “I hate it! I hate the river and this awful trailer. I hate these woods!” She watched him with large indignant eyes, the dream already relaxing its grip on her mind, the reason for waking up and needing him going further and further away, almost lost. She was sleepy again. The bed was so warm where he lay. “Hate,” she said. “I’m full of hate.” He laughed and kissed her on the mouth. Both knew she could not concentrate on anything for very long.

  The next morning, she scrubbed at a pot she had left soaking in the sink. Two mice had fallen into the grey water and drowned. She groped at them, thinking they were loosened noodles, screamed and returned to bed. Jim coaxed her up and took her into town with him, the car lurching toward the paved road in the ruts of the logging trucks. They swam through soft hollows, butterflies caroming softly across the windshield.

  “If we had a little rain,” Jim said, “it would fix up this road.”

  In the brown grass were wooden barrels of turpentine gum. They came upon a group of Negroes prying the tin pans off the trees and emptying them into the barrels. They wore wide green trousers and denim jackets and shoveled the gum out of the pans with thick sticks. They all stopped working as the car approached and stared at it expressionlessly as it lumbered past. Lola pressed her foot against the floorboards of the car, beating on an imaginary throttle. The car hung in the space before the men and then left them slowly behind, dusting their boots. In the bullet-shaped mirror on the fender, two wide hands rose in an ambivalent gesture.

  “What?” Lola said, patting at her hair, looking at the woods again. “What?”

  Jim turned to her, shifting into second. “I didn’t say anything, love.”

  She noticed that he was wearing a bright blue shirt, suitable for color broadcast.

  In town they had lunch together and she went shopping while he taped interviews with cabinet members at the state-house. The day was cloudy and people walked fiercely down the sidewalk, three abreast. In the window of a toy store was a wooden man. There were beggars in the streets, small boys with trays of boiled peanuts, girls behind tables selling cakes. Outside a grocery, a blind man sat crosslegged on a mat, a round brown and white dog leashless by his side gripping a child’s plastic bucket in its mouth. The man’s eyes looked like clots of boiled grits. The bucket was half full of coins. Lola lingered in front of them, her fingers moving nervously across her throat. The dog glanced mildly at her, the bucket unmoving in the slick, stern jaws. The blind man seemed asleep. Lola patted the dog swiftly on the head and walked away without opening her pocketbook. Later, she thought worriedly that the man might not have been blind at all.

  She bought some blouses and a potted plant and returned to the capitol where she waited for Jim in a basement coffee shop. Instead of staircases, there were wide ramps leading to the floor above and the halls smelled damp and peculiar, an odor of disinfectant, airlessness and the rotting canvas of coiled fire hoses. There were machines dispensing tuna sandwiches, combs, coffee and nylon stockings, and over it all was the rattle and rap of the pressmen’s Telex machines and typewriters.

  She put her packages in a corner booth and ordered a soft drink. A young man with a withered arm brought it cautiously to her in a paper cup. There was a black speck making its way through the ice cubes. Lola put a napkin over the cup and pushed it away, beside her plant. The plant was wrapped in pink foil and had drooping striped leaves, a remote hothouse look. She couldn’t believe that she had actually bought it. She might just as well open the two doors of the trailer and let the woods fall in if she sta
rted filling up the rooms with growing junk. The forest was so thick it seemed static, but she had seen leaves and lizards fouling the mechanisms of the jalousies and she heard branches falling on the roof and tapping against the aluminum siding. The first week she had watched the woods a great deal but had stopped when she began sensing that the trees were moving closer to the windows every time she turned her eyes away, like something out of Macbeth. Now, after Jim left, she closed the curtains and put the lights on.

  She picked up the plant and put it on the other side of the table behind the salt and pepper shakers.

  Five secretaries came into the coffee shop and sat at a round table in the middle of the floor. They all wore bright short dresses and ash-blond wigs and each looked like the one that sat beside her, except a little less so. Other than the secretaries, there was no one in the place but the help, who were all handicapped in one way or another. The woman behind the orange drink machine polished a glass beatifically and occasionally burst into song. She had the widest, whitest, smoothest face Lola had ever seen. It resembled a custard pie.

  Lola chewed on her fingernail. She would have gone to the car and waited there but she did not know where Jim had parked it. Her head began to ache, and to calm herself, she tried to think of the last city where Jim had worked, but this only made her more upset and unhappy. They had had many friends and she had always known where she was and where she was going and she always had someone to accompany her there. With her friends, she had chatted about controllable circumstances and about Jim and herself and everyone had shown great interest in this.

  When at last her husband came over to the booth, Lola was so relieved that she grasped his wrist and began to shake it as though she were meeting him for the first time.

  “Did you have a nice afternoon?” he asked.

  She grimaced. “There’s something odd about this town,” she said. “There seems to be something wrong with everyone in it.”

  “Government attracts strange types, love.” He stood and picked up her packages. “Is that your plant?”

  “No,” she said, “it must belong to the table.”

  They drove out of the city and settled along the dull road home at high speed. Nonetheless, they were passed by trucks and aged sedans. All the men drove ferociously, as though they had left something behind that was close to catching up to them. They were going by cropped flat fields that the paper companies had harvested and not replanted. There were no houses here, but a few trailers were set up on concrete blocks, and cows and ponies grazed over the unfenced land. The road ran straight and simple and at the end of it bubbled the sun.

  Up ahead on Lola’s side, a trailer was burning. First it was not and then it was. As she looked, it shuddered and a front panel blew out and bounced a few times on the ground like a rubber ball. She rolled down the window and rubbed her eyes. The trailer was definitely on fire. A man and a woman and three children fell out of it and scrambled away, the fire rolling down the length of the trailer and through the blown-out section after them, licking at the ground as though it were a pet lapping up scraps. The family settled down at a good distance and sat in a row, rubbing at their arms and at each other’s heads. The sides of the trailer were wrinkling like scorched paper and the windows were popping out.

  “My God,” Jim said. They shot past and Lola craned her neck to keep the incredible vision in sight. Behind them, cars were pulling off the road and people and dogs were running across the field.

  “Stop!” she said. “Look, people are stopping! You should stop.”

  “Terrible, terrible,” Jim said. The sun was down, the sky red and glazed. The flames hung like statues in the air. “Everyone stops for something like that,” he went on. “Too many people.” He looked at Lola, who was twisted awkwardly in the seat, staring behind them. There was a jog in the road and then the woods began again. In a moment, she wouldn’t be able to see it any more. He pressed on the accelerator.

  “Now I don’t want you to be worrying about this. That was a very old trailer and we live in a mobile home. Sixty feet long.”

  Lola shook her head and said weakly, “You’re a newscaster. You should have stopped if only because you’re a newscaster.”

  “Well now, honey, you know I don’t do that. I don’t gather it or write it. I know you know that. And besides, it’s not even the same state. I don’t want you to think about it any more. No one was hurt and I want you to forget it.” He gathered her toward him and drove with one hand.

  “I’m not going to accept this,” she said loudly.

  They were nearing their trailer. The Negroes were gone and the turpentine barrels were lined along the road, brimming, as though with dirty snow. A hawk settled on a tree branch that broke beneath his weight, rose again and dipped gracefully into the woods, banking on broad wings through what seemed an impenetrable maze.

  “The trees don’t touch his wings,” she said suddenly. “Imagine that.”

  Lola never went into town with Jim again. She wanted him to know how unhappy she was. The city seemed the carnival corrupt town of her dream, a place of soiled air, decadent architecture and wrongly made people. She was pretty. Aberration made her angry and confused and somewhat threatened. As a child, she feared that she would catch deafness from a distant grandmother and on her birthdays she would refuse to open any letter or gift the old woman sent. She was a clean, exact child, afraid of a great many things.

  Jim brought home the groceries and did all the buying. He had the six o’clock broadcast every evening and was back before eight. Lola played the part of an invalid. She took many baths, listened to the radio and slept in the afternoons. She sometimes sat on the trailer’s deck and looked through the thinning trees. The woods had become lean and haunted; only the magnolia trees stayed green and waxy like something into and past death. Fishermen drifted past on the river, flicking their long cane poles, drawing in panfish no bigger than a fist. They waved to Lola. She moved the pages of a book hastily and went inside. The place smelled of cigarettes and mice that wouldn’t be trapped. The paneled walls bent to the touch. She felt vulnerable, weakened, as though she were losing something day by day to the outside. She could be shattered. She could be broken. She tried never to go out there, but felt that there was no safety in the fragile trailer. In a storm, the woods creaked and the rain spun down on the roof like hail. She dressed carefully and watched her husband on television and drank wine until he came home. There was nothing to talk about.

  “Driving home tonight,” he said, “I saw a dog trotting along the road with a loaf of bread in his mouth.”

  One night in November, he told her that they were going to move to Atlanta two weeks before Christmas. “A new station, looking for new talent. A great opportunity,” he said. He had brought home champagne, shrimp and steak. He would make her happy again.

  Lola was pale and her face had become rounder and all her muscles ached as though she had been doing violent exercise. She felt as though she were going to fall, even though she was already sitting down. Jim poured her a glass of champagne and went outside to grill the steaks.

  That night, she couldn’t sleep. Their bedroom had one small window, useless because blocked by the branches of a sweet gum. It was imprisonment, like living in a cell. Lola heard the animals moving, the earth turning below her until just before dawn and then everything stopped. She walked down the narrow hall and saw the mist moving along the river toward the Gulf and a thin lemon lake of brightness rising from the crimson ground.

  Three days later, on Thanksgiving, the hunting season began, with a terrific roar of shotguns throughout the woods around them. It was just after daybreak. Lola trembled and pressed her head beneath the pillow.

  “If I go outside,” she said, “they’ll shoot at me. Just for sport.”

  Jim was horrified. “Don’t be ridiculous. What a terrible thing to say!” He pulled away the pillow and stroked her face. “They’re not allowed to shoot across a road,” he said.

/>   “They hit pets and automobiles and clothes drying on the line and the women hanging up the clothes,” she said calmly. “You hear about it all the time.”

  “Lola, they are not going to shoot at you!”

  She shook her head and watched him, waiting for something else. When he didn’t say anything right away, she got up and began to dress. The firing became more insistent and varied, rhythmless and roaming. The woods were foggy and like stone, and she imagined them calm and gaining strength from the hammering, converting it to a black and surly energy of their own that would be deployed someday, against her, against everyone.

  Jim said, “It’s always bad on opening day. It won’t be like this again. The boys get bored or discouraged and the hunting slacks off, you’ll see.”

  Beyond the trees, the river smoked. “I don’t care,” she shrugged. “It doesn’t bother me. I never go outside.” The woods had no power and made no sense. One could always cut everything down.

  Of course, Jim had told her the truth. In the days that followed there were only scattered shots early in the morning and then a silence so intense that Lola felt she would never recover from it, not even in Atlanta.

  Early in December, she began boxing dishes and cleaning out drawers, trying to throw away as much as possible. She wanted to abandon everything that had had anything to do with their life in the trailer but she knew that this was preposterous and that they couldn’t afford it. She gathered up an armload of clothes and plates and paperback books and, opening the door with her elbow, stepped out onto the deck. Parked in front of her was a red, sprung pickup truck with a large wooden box in the back for dogs. The box was unlatched and there wasn’t anything inside except some dirty straw and a plastic dish. Two boys were sitting on the hood of the truck with their backs to Lola, and when they heard the noise behind them, they jumped to the ground and faced her, crouching, with long grins that turned instantly into disappointed frowns. Their faces then gyrated wildly before collectively settling into detached somnolence. One boy rubbed at his eyelid as though he were shining up an apple. “Yo,” he said, nodding to Lola. He was bony, with thin dirty hands and close-cropped tan hair that clung to his head like a cap made out of a pecan shell.