Taking Care

by Joy Williams

  “Everybody is looped in that Starlight Lounge,” Jane said. Jane patted her hair with a hairbrush. Jane’s hair was full of tangles and she never brushed hard enough to get them out. She looked at Dan by looking in the mirror. “Why were you crying?”

  “I was thinking about your grandma,” Dan said. “She said that one year she left the Christmas tree up until Easter.”

  “Why were you thinking about my grandma!” Jane yelled.

  “I was thinking about her singing,” Dan said, startled. “I like her singing.”

  In her head, Dan could hear Jane’s grandmother singing about Death’s dark waters and sinking souls, about Mercy Seats and the Great Physician. She could hear the voice rising and falling through the thin walls of the Maine house, borne past the dark screens and into the night.

  “I don’t want you thinking about my grandma,” Jane said, pinching Dan’s arm.

  Dan tried not to think of Jane’s grandma. Once, she had seen her fall coming out of the water. The beach was stony. The stones were round and smooth and slippery. Jane’s grandmother had skinned her arm and bloodied her lip.

  The girls went into the corridor and saw Mrs. Muirhead standing there. Mrs. Muirhead was deeply tanned. She had put her hair up in a twist and a wad of cotton was noticeable in her left ear. The three of them stood together, bouncing and nudging against one 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 street light, 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 Vietnam 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 Anderson’s fur when he had been rained upon. There were smells that could make you follow them, certainly.

  Jane stared at the woman, tipping forward slightly in her seat.

  “Relax, will you, Crystal, you’re just a child. You don’t even have a smell yet,” the woman said. “I test all sorts of things. Sometimes I’m part of a control group and sometimes I’m not. You never know. If you’re part of the control group, you’re just given a placebo. A placebo, Crystal, is something that is nothing, but you don’t know it’s nothing. You think you’re getting something that will change you or make you feel better or healthier or more attractive or something, but you’re not really.”

  “I know what a placebo is,” Jane muttered.

  “Well that’s terriffic, Crystal, you’re a prodigy.” The woman removed a book from her handbag and began to read it. The book had a denim jacket on it which concealed its title.

  “Ha!” Jane said, rising quickly and attempting to knock over a glass of water. “My name’s not Crystal!”

  Dan grabbed the glass before it fell and hurried after her. They returned to the Starlight Lounge. Mr. Muirhead was sitting with another young man. This young man had a blond beard and a studious manner.

  “Oh, this is a wonderful trip!” Mr. Muirhead said exuberantly. “The wonderful people you meet on a trip like this! This is the most fascinating young man. He’s a writer. Been everywhere. He’s putting together a book on cemeteries of the world. Isn’t that some subject? I told him anytime he’s in our town, stop by our restaurant, be my guest for some stone crab claws.”

  “Hullo,” the young man said to the girls.

  “We were speaking of Père-Lachaise, the legendary Parisian cemetery,” Mr. Muirhead said. “So wistful. So grand and romantic. Your mother and I visited it, Jane, when we were in Paris. We strolled through it on a clear crisp autumn day. The desires of the human heart have no boundaries, girls. The mess of secrets in the human heart are without number. Witnessing Père-Lachaise was a very moving experience. As we strolled, your mother was screaming at me, Jane. Do you know why, honey-bunch? She was screaming at me because back in New York, I had garaged the car at the place on East 84th Street. Your mother said that the people in the place on East 84th Street never turned the ignition all the way off to the left and were always running down the battery. She said that there wasn’t a soul in all of New York City who didn’t know that the people running the garage on East 84th Street were idiots who were always ruining batteries. Before Père-Lachaise, girls, this young man and I were discussing the Panteón, just outside of Guanajuato in Mexico. It so happens that I am also familiar
with the Panteón. Your mother wanted some tiles for the foyer so we went to Mexico. You stayed with Mrs. Murphy, Jane. Remember? It was Mrs. Murphy who taught you how to make egg salad. In any case, the Panteón is a walled cemetery, not unlike the Campo Santo in Genoa, Italy, but the reason everybody goes there is to see the mummies. Something about the exceptionally dry air in the mountains has preserved the bodies and there’s a little museum of mummies. It’s grotesque of course, and it certainly gave me pause. I mean it’s one thing to think we will all gather together in a paradise of fadeless splendor like your grandma thinks, lamby-lettuce, and it’s another thing to think as the Buddhists do that latent possibilities withdraw into the heart at death, but do not perish, thereby allowing the being to be reborn, and it’s one more thing, even, to believe like a Goddamn scientist in one of the essential laws of physics which states that no energy is ever lost. It’s one thing to think any of those things, girls, but it’s quite another to be standing in that little museum looking at those miserable mummies. The horror and indignation were in their faces still. I almost cried aloud, so vivid was my sense of the fleetingness of this life. We made our way into the fresh air of the courtyard and I bought a package of cigarettes at a little stand which sold postcards and film and such. I reached into my pocket for my lighter and it appeared that my lighter was not there. It seemed that I had lost my lighter. The lighter was a very good one that your mother had bought me the Christmas before, Jane, and your mother started screaming at me. There was a very gentle, warm rain falling, and there were bougainvillea petals on the walks. Your mother grasped my arm and reminded me that the lighter had been a gift from her. Your mother reminded me of the blazer she had bought for me. I spilled buttered popcorn on it at the movies and you can still see the spot. She reminded me of the hammock she bought for my fortieth birthday, which I allowed to rot in the rain. She recalled the shoulder bag she bought me, which I detested, it’s true. It was somehow left out in the yard and I mangled it with the lawnmower. Descending the cobbled hill into Guanajuato, your mother recalled every one of her gifts to me, offerings both monetary and of the heart. She pointed out how I had mishandled and betrayed every one.”

  No one said anything. “Then,” Mr. Muirhead continued, “there was the Modena Cemetery in Italy.”

  “That hasn’t been completed yet,” the young man said hurriedly. “It’s a visionary design by the architect Aldo Rossi. In our conversation, I was just trying to describe the project to you.”

  “You can be assured,” Mr. Muirhead said, “that when the project is finished and I take my little family on a vacation to Italy, as we walk, together and afraid, strolling through the hapless landscape of the Modena Cemetery, Jane’s mother will be screaming at me.”

  “Well, I must be going,” the young man said. He got up.

  “So long,” Mr. Muirhead said.

  “Were they really selling postcards of the mummies in that place?” Dan asked.

  “Yes they were, sweetie-pie,” Mr. Muirhead said. “In this world there is a postcard of everything. That’s the kind of world this is.”

  The crowd was getting boisterous in the Starlight Lounge. Mrs. Muirhead made her way down the aisle toward them and with a deep sigh, sat beside her husband. Mr. Muirhead gesticulated and formed words silently with his lips as though he was talking to the girls.

  “What?” Mrs. Muirhead said.

  “I was just telling the girls some of the differences between men and women. Men are more adventurous and aggressive with greater spatial and mechanical abilities. Women are more consistent, nurturent and aesthetic. Men can see better than women, but women have better hearing,” Mr. Muirhead said.

  “Very funny,” Mrs. Muirhead said.

  The girls retired from the melancholy regard Mr. and Mrs. Muirhead had fixed upon one another, and wandered through the cars of the train, occasionally returning to their seats to fuss in the cluttered nests they had created there. Around midnight, they decided to revisit the game car where earlier, people had been playing backgammon, Diplomacy, anagrams, crazy eights and Clue. They were still at it, variously throwing down queens of diamonds, moving troops through Asia Minor and accusing Colonel Mustard of doing it in the conservatory with a wrench. Whenever there was a lull in the playing, they talked about the accident.

  “What accident?” Jane demanded.

  “Train hit a Buick,” a man said. “Middle of the night.” The man had big ears and a tattoo on his forearm.

  “There aren’t any good new games,” a woman complained. “Haven’t been for years and years.”

  “Did you fall asleep?” Jane said accusingly to Dan.

  “When could that have happened?” Dan said.

  “We didn’t see it,” Jane said, disgusted.

  “Two teenagers escaped without a scratch,” the man said. “Lived to laugh about it. They are young and silly but it’s no joke to the engineer. The engineer has a lot of paperwork to do after he hits something. The engineer will be filling out forms for a week.” The man’s tattoo said MOM AND DAD.

  “Rats,” Jane said.

  The children returned to the darkened dining room where Superman was being shown on a small television set. Jane instantly fell asleep. Dan watched Superman spin the earth backward so he could prevent Lois Lane from being smothered in a rock slide. The train shot past a group of old lighted buildings, SEWER KING, a sign said. When the movie ended, Jane woke up.

  “When we lived in New York,” she said muzzily, “I was sitting in the kitchen one afternoon doing my homework and this girl came in and sat down at the table. Did I ever tell you this? It was the middle of the winter and it was snowing. This person just came in with snow on her coat and sat right down at the table.”

  “Who was she?” Dan asked.

  “It was me, but I was old. I mean I was about thirty years old or something.”

  “It was a dream,” Dan said.

  “It was the middle of the afternoon, I tell you! I was doing my homework. She said, ‘You’ve never lifted a finger to help me.’ Then she asked me for a glass with some ice in it.”

  After a moment, Dan said, “It was probably the cleaning lady.”

  “Cleaning lady! Cleaning lady for Godssakes, what do you know about cleaning ladies!”

  Dan felt her hair bristle as though someone were running a comb through it back to front, and realized she was mad, madder than she’d been all summer, for all summer she’d only felt humiliated when Jane was nasty to her.

  “Listen up,” Dan said, “don’t talk to me like that any more.”

  “Like what,” Jane said coolly.

  Dan stood up and walked away while Jane was saying, “The thing I don’t understand is how she ever got into that apartment. My father had about a dozen locks on the door.”

  Dan sat in her seat in the quiet, dark coach and looked out at the dark night. She tried to recollect how it seemed dawn happened. Things just sort of rose out, she guessed she knew. There was nothing you could do about it. She thought of Jane’s dream in which the men in white bathing caps were pushing all her grandma’s things out of the house and into the street. The inside became empty and the outside became full. Dan was beginning to feel sorry for herself. She was alone, with no friends and no parents, sitting on a train between one place and another, scaring herself with someone else’s dream in the middle of the night. She got up and walked through the rocking cars to the Starlight Lounge for a glass of water. After four A.M. it was no longer referred to as the Starlight Lounge. They stopped serving drinks and turned off the electric stars. It became just another place to sit. Mr. Muirhead was sitting there, alone. He must have been on excellent terms with the stewards because he was drinking a Bloody Mary.

  “Hi, Dan!” he said.

  Dan sat opposite him. After a moment she said, “I had a very nice summer. Thank you for inviting me.”

  “Well, I hope you enjoyed your summer, sweetie,” Mr. Muirhead said.

  “Do you think Jane
and I will be friends forever?” Dan asked.

  Mr. Muirhead looked surprised. “Definitely not. Jane will not have friends. Jane will have husbands, enemies and lawyers.” He cracked ice noisily with his white teeth. “I’m glad you enjoyed your summer, Dan, and I hope you’re enjoying your childhood. When you grow up, a shadow falls. Everything’s sunny and then this big Goddamn wing or something passes overhead.”

  “Oh,” Dan said.

  “Well, I’ve only heard that’s the case actually,” Mr. Muirhead said. “Do you know what I want to be when I grow up?” He waited for her to smile. “When I grow up I want to become an Indian so I can use my Indian name.”

  “What is your Indian name?” Dan asked, smiling.

  “My Indian name is ‘He Rides a Slow Enduring Heavy Horse.’”

  “That’s a nice one,” Dan said.

  “It is, isn’t it?” Mr. Muirhead said, gnawing ice.

  Outside, the sky was lightening. Daylight was just beginning to flourish on the city of Jacksonville. It fell without prejudice on the slaughterhouses, Dairy Queens and courthouses, on the car lots, sabal palms and a billboard advertisement for pies.

  The train went slowly around a long curve, and looking backward, past Mr. Muirhead, Dan could see the entire length of it moving ahead. The bubble-topped cars were dark and sinister in the first flat and hopeful light of the morning.

  Dan took the three postcards she had left out of her bookbag and looked at them. One showed Thomas Edison beneath a banyan tree. One showed a little tar-paper shack out in the middle of the desert in New Mexico where men were supposed to have invented the atomic bomb. One was a “quicky” card showing a porpoise balancing a grapefruit on the top of his head.

  “Oh, I remember those,” Mr. Muirhead said, picking up the “quicky” card. “You just check off what you want.” He read aloud, “How are you? I am fine ( ) lonesome ( ) happy ( ) sad ( ) broke ( ) flying high( )” Mr. Muirhead chuckled. He read, “I have been good( ) no good ( ). I saw The Gulf of Mexico ( ) The Atlantic Ocean ( ) The Orange Groves ( ) Interesting Attractions ( ) You in My Dreams ( ).”