Taking Care

by Joy Williams

The electrician, a tall gaunt boy, says nothing. He looks like someone Katherine knew once, but she doesn’t think she’s actually met him before. Once all the young men she knew looked like him.

  Peter and Katherine’s friends have told them that they “complement” one another by which they mean that Katherine is dark and rather glum and retiring and Peter is pale and energetic and gregarious. They’ve been married for five years. Katherine has heard that this is a dangerous time, statistically speaking, however she was married to her first husband for only ten months so she feels she has done her part to make statistics meaningless. Katherine’s first husband’s name was Peter also, although everyone called him by his middle name which was Travis. Even so, Katherine finds that she doesn’t call Peter by his name very often. She sometimes calls him “babe” as in “Here’s looking at you, babe,” when the first drink of the evening is about to be drunk. She isn’t aware that Peter uses her name very often either. Katherine suspects that, more or less, this is the way married people are with one another.

  Peter and Katherine have rented a house to live in while the remodeling is going on. Katherine has arranged for this—it is the same beach house on the southernmost end of the key where she lived before she met Peter, after her divorce from Travis. She was thrilled when she learned from the elderly owner of the property, Dewey Dobbs, that the house was still cheap and available. Over the years, Dewey has driven a succession of developers half mad with lust and exasperation by refusing to sell his large unkempt holdings on the Gulf of Mexico. There are condominiums to both the south and east of him, pressed against his boundaries, towering high above the tall pine trees that shade his lowly buildings—the house that Peter and Katherine have rented, Dewey’s own, and a converted boat shed that Dewey rents to two surfers.

  Katherine is happy about living in the beach house. It is little more than a shack really, small, hot, and gummy with salt spray. On the living room wall is a twenty-pound snook that Dewey’s son caught in 1947. There are straw mats on the floor and mildew on the ceiling. The water has a highly sulfurous odor and there is a leak beneath the sink which drains into a 7-Eleven Elvis Presley cup. The plastic cup describes the childhood of The King and must be emptied daily. Katherine takes a few clothes, a few books, a tube of zinc oxide, and moves in.

  Peter doesn’t share Katherine’s enthusiasm for the shack. Actually, he hates it, but it doesn’t matter, he’s seldom there. He works very hard, and he comes home late. When he has any spare time, he spends it at their “real” house as he refers to it, watching the construction. He and Katherine are being exceptionally nice with one another. It is a difficult time, their friends say—the disruptions, the decisions—but everything, thanks to Peter, moves along smoothly. Katherine is not hurt that he has involved them in something that doesn’t engage her, and Peter is not offended by her non-involvement. Katherine feels that she must have learned something about marriage from being married before that is now working to her benefit. However, she doesn’t know quite what it is, or how, actually, it works.

  Katherine is currently unemployed. In the past she has made jewelry or elaborate wooden puzzles that she sold at crafts fairs. She has made pastry for a catering service. She has taught classes at a botanical garden in town. She is good at cards and once she wanted to be a croupier on a cruise ship to the Bahamas, but she has never done that. When she had been married to Travis, she had done yard work. The two of them specialized in cleaning and trimming trees and palms. They had conscientiously refused those jobs where they were required to take down trees they thought were beautiful. About once a month, someone would want them to remove a one-hundred-year-old live oak on the assumption that a situation would arise in which a fiercely singular wind would come up in the night and tear off one of the tree’s massive limbs and send it through the roof of their aluminum gardening shed. Katherine and Travis would try to convince such people of the stupidity of what they wanted to do and sometimes they were successful, but more often they were not. They would drive by later and the tree would be gone. There would be a small rosebush in its place and bright sun would be streaming down everywhere. Then at the dump (this was when the dump was still small and new arrivals were quickly noted) the tree would be there, chopped and scattered, its branches still green in the refuse.

  There had been a beautiful live oak in front of the house she had lived in with Travis in the days of their brief marriage. Neither the house nor the tree exist now, both having recently been leveled so that a cement-block Rent-a-Closet could be built on the site. People rent their condominiums during the height of the season and store their personal belongings in a Rent-a-Closet. Some of the people that Katherine now knows do that very thing. When she had been married to Travis and they had had one of their frequent quarrels and he had left the house, Katherine would often climb high up into the live oak and stay there until he returned. After he had been in the house for awhile, she would climb back down and saunter through the door, trying to give the impression that she had been someplace else, at a bar or with friends or even with a stranger, talking. She wanted him to think that she had someplace to go, away from him, and had gone there.

  After their divorce, Katherine got the job at the botanical garden and rented Dewey’s beach shack. The retirees who attended her classes at the garden were primarily interested in plants that took little care and they were crazy about bromeliads which are able to flourish in deficient environments. Katherine told them how to force blooms by placing the plant and an apple in a plastic bag and they seemed to be thrilled with this information. After an hour of classes, Katherine conducted tours through the garden. It was boring work and she didn’t make much money, but she hadn’t needed much money then, and the job gave her time to think and imagine the kind of life that would be hers, eventually, now that she was free from a marriage she had found disappointing. She thought of taking flying lessons and maybe getting a pilot’s license. At night, in the beach shack, she stayed up late, listening to the soft thud and rush of the waves upon the sand. She could have enjoyed that time more if she had not been brooding so about Travis.

  Four months after their divorce, Travis had gone camping on Cumberland Island and been bitten by ants and gone into anaphylactic reaction and died. The ranger who found him thought he’d had a heart attack but the doctor at the hospital saw the small red welts on his ankles. “It was only a few ants,” Travis’s mother had written Katherine. Travis was smart and sentimental, he had curly hair and often wore suspenders. He did not seem the kind of person to whom such a weird sad death would happen. As far as Katherine knew, he had not even had any allergies. Katherine felt that everyone had a certain closed circle of happenings that happened to them, certain kinds of things, and that somehow Travis had exchanged circles with someone else. Thinking about Travis troubled and baffled Katherine. Even now, she seems to stumble on the fact that she would not still be married to him even if he had not died.

  When Travis and Katherine got their divorce, his mother had been very upset. “Why are you doing this!” she exclaimed to Katherine in a letter. “I don’t understand. Thank goodness there are no little babies to suffer.” Katherine rather wished there had been a baby. Of course he would not have suffered. Why would he? Katherine feels that if she had had an earlier child, it would be easier for her to have one now. She feels that she doesn’t have the instincts now to understand a child, and Peter doesn’t mind this, but if she’d like to have a child, it would be fine, he’d approve of such an idea, really. But there is no child that Katherine has with Peter and there was no child she had with Travis. When she had been with Travis she had an old black Jaguar XK-150 convertible and a toucan. With Peter, she has a new Volvo station wagon and a turkey.

  Peter and Katherine have a turkey because they went to a communal feast on Thanksgiving Day and the live turkey was the grand prize in a dart game. The host, a wealthy man who has made a fortune in swimming pool construction, is a good friend of Peter’s. He is go
ing to install a caged pool for them at cost as part of their remodeling project. The host always gives fabulous parties. On Halloween, he gave a party where he had an open casket on the lanai filled with Big Macs. On Thanksgiving, there were large quantities of meat, pies, watermelon and liquor. Neither Katherine nor Peter won at darts, but the winner didn’t want the turkey and the runners-up didn’t want it either, so at the end of the evening, Peter and Katherine loaded the turkey into the Volvo and took it home. It seemed an amusing thing to do at the time.

  There are three things that Katherine feels are very nice about the turkey. One is the way sunlight falls through his red wattles, making them almost transparent. Two are the sounds he makes which are a cross between an electronic game and a mourning dove. And the third is that Katherine likes his feet very much. They are immense, gruesome, Baba Yaga feet. Fairy-tale feet in a story in which the hero declares at the very beginning—I will go I know not where, I shall bring back I know not what—

  It is a bit eccentric to have a turkey. All their friends say this, but Katherine doesn’t mind being considered a little eccentric. On Thanksgiving, Katherine walked around the party collecting watermelon rinds to take home and use in a pickling recipe that Travis’s mother had once sent to her. Katherine had never had the opportunity to try the recipe before because it called for such large quantities. “Isn’t she a little young to be so eccentric?” the hostess asked Peter, laughing, as Katherine dropped half-eaten watermelon in a plastic bag. Katherine took the remark as a compliment.

  “What on earth are you going to do with a turkey?” Travis’s mother writes. “Julia Child says that Americans should grow their own vegetables and raise rabbits to cut down on their food bills. Is something like that your intention?”

  Travis’s mother is discreet. For example, she never mentions her son, but if she wasn’t always thinking about him, why would she continue to correspond with Katherine? When they were first married, she gave Katherine some photographs of Travis as a little boy, and when they were divorced, Katherine returned them to her. Katherine told her that they were breaking up because they had different dreams. This wasn’t exactly true, but the explanation seemed vague enough to be inarguable. When Travis realized that Katherine was serious about wanting a divorce, he accused her of having no conception of the real world. “The real world is hidden by your imagination,” he said.

  Katherine doesn’t think she has much of an imagination. She had never imagined for instance that she would have stopped loving Travis and that he would have died and that she would spend so much of her time now remembering him.

  Katherine has difficulty imagining her life at all, not that she has to, she thinks, after all it is happening to her, her life, she doesn’t have to imagine it, and trying to imagine the way her life had been with Travis always makes her feel as though a bone were caught in her throat. The things they possessed together have vanished. The Jag had gone through two transmissions, a gas tank and a brake overhaul and had to be sold, and after they decided upon the divorce, it seemed only sensible to give the toucan up too. Travis used to buy ping-pong balls and baby squeak toys for the toucan to play with. He kept grapes in his shirt pocket for the toucan to pluck out. They had bought the bird in a pet store for forty-five dollars which had been a terrific extravagance for them. Now, Katherine has heard that they cost two thousand dollars. They are smuggled into the country by men wearing panty-hose beneath their trousers. The panty-hose holds the baby birds secure but allows them to breathe. No one that Katherine knows has a toucan, but their image frequently appears on shirts, and hanging from the ceiling in an elegant little shop that her friend Annie runs, there is a larger-than-life silk toucan on a macramé swing.

  Times have changed, Katherine thinks, and when she thinks of the words, they appear like one of Peter’s realty computer print-outs in her brain—TIMES HAVE CHANGED—and she thinks she is still a little young to be thinking like this.

  During the remodeling, Katherine spends all her time on the beach and in the shack there. She goes to the other house only to feed the turkey. Peter could feed it but Katherine feels responsible for this peculiarity in their lives. She tries to avoid looking at the house, but that is difficult. It is becoming larger and is about to make a statement of some sort—an expensive, sleek, convivial statement. Katherine prefers studying the turkey, its amazing feet, its warty naked neck of astonishing cerulean.

  Every morning, Katherine visits Dewey. Nothing has changed in his house. He is old, but he has always been old. Even the plastic rectangle electric “environment” that Katherine remembers from years before still sits on top of the television set. The rectangle is full of colored turquoise water which flows and falls in a simulation of rolling surf. It reminds her of Travis, Katherine doesn’t know why. Travis had never seen it.

  One day, Katherine notices that there is no longer a pan of water outside Dewey’s door.

  “Don’t you still put out water for the snakes?” Katherine asks.

  The old man looks baffled.

  “You used to put out water for the snakes and the rabbits and they’d come right up to the door.”

  “I can’t remember that,” Dewey says.

  Dewey is a cripple who scoots around on crutches. One night, years before, he was walking home from the grocery with a pint of coconut ice cream, when a car struck him down, crushing his legs. The woman kept right on driving. When the police later found her, she told them she had heard a noise but she thought she had just knocked over a garbage can.

  “How much of life is like that, am I right?” Dewey says. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

  Dewey has immense shoulders and a high-pitched crackling voice, and his house smells of kerosene and flowers. He has a bouquet of flowers delivered to his house every week. He also has the newspaper delivered every morning and after he reads it, he puts it carefully back together again so that it looks like a completely fresh, unexamined paper and gives it to Katherine.

  Sometimes, Katherine has a drink with Dewey in the evening, before Peter comes home from work.

  “Where’s your husband?” Dewey asks. “I wish he’d come over and say hello sometime.”

  Katherine sips her drink and looks through Dewey’s greasy windows at the setting sun. She feels confused. “He’s very involved in our house,” she finally says, “but I’m sure he will.”

  “Have you met those boys, those surfer boys?” Dewey asks. “They’re good boys. The only book they own is the Bible. When they’re not surfing, they’re reading the Bible. They’re waiting for the Rapture.”

  “What’s the Rapture?” Katherine asks.

  “As I understand it,” Dewey says, “that’s when things get straightened out at last.”

  In the living room, Dewey has a large bureau which is full of games and tricks. He has cards in which a picture is concealed. When one first looks at it, it appears merely as a nonrepresentational design, but hidden, at a certain angle, using shadings of light and dark and depth perceptions, is the likeness of a cow or a helicopter or William Holden as he appeared in Sunset Boulevard. Once the shape becomes apparent, of course, it remains forever accessible to the eye. Katherine thinks that if she had a child, he would be fascinated with the contents of this bureau.

  Peter teases Katherine about the surfers who are muscular and tanned with short blond hair. When the boys see Katherine, they smile and converse with her politely in their surf-veggie language. Katherine doesn’t flirt with the surfers. She feels older than them, that’s all she feels.

  Katherine is startled one morning to see the electrician’s name in Dewey’s newspaper. The article she notices says that his car was stolen outside a local bar and driven to another bar where it remained locked, its windows rolled up tightly, in the parking lot for several days before it was discovered by police. The electrician’s mongrel dog was found dead in the car from asphyxiation. The thought of the dog waiting in the car in the rising heat makes Katherine fe
el panicky. The bar where the car was found has a package store where Katherine buys their liquor and she wonders why it was that she did not go down for wine or bourbon during those days that the car was there. But if she had driven into the parking lot beside the package store, would she have been aware of the situation? She doesn’t know, probably not.

  Katherine buys a sympathy card, a card that shows a tree on a riverbank, looks up the electrician’s name in the phone book and sends it to him. When Travis died, some of Katherine’s friends sent her sympathy cards and some, not knowing the etiquette of the situation, did not. Katherine has never sent a sympathy card in her life before but she does now to the hippie electrician whose dog has died, and weeps as she signs her name. She never knows if he receives it or not. Peter tells her that he never returned to work on the house and it was necessary to hire someone else.

  In two weeks, just before Christmas, Katherine will be thirty. Annie’s daughter, Genevieve, and Katherine have the same birthdate, eighteen years apart. Katherine is Gen’s godmother. The child’s godfather is a Yale professor whom Katherine has never met. If something happened to Annie and her husband, if their house blew up, say, while Genevieve was at a slumber party somewhere else, would Katherine and the Yale professor be responsible for raising Gen? Katherine doesn’t know how this could be done within the constructs of a family situation, but she never mentions this to Annie.

  Katherine visits Annie to ask Gen what she would like for her birthday.

  “For my birthday,” Gen says, “I would like a pure white cockatoo and my own toaster.”

  “Ha,” her mother says.

  “I want a cockatoo because they talk,” Gen says, unperturbed. “You can teach them a lot of different words.”

  “I think a cockatoo is a wonderful idea,” Annie says. She is joking. “You could teach it to say, ‘Have you brushed your teeth, Gen?’, ‘Have you put out the bathroom light, Gen?’, ‘Have you hung up your towel, Gen?’ You could teach it to say all those things and then I wouldn’t have to. We could talk about more important things.”