Joy Williams - Taking Care

A buzzer sounded in the beach house. Chester had had the whole house wired. In the week he had owned it, he had put in central air conditioning, replaced all the windows with one-way glass and installed an elaborate infrared alarm system. The buzzer, however, was just a local signal. It stopped. It had been just the door opening, just Chester coming home. Chester activated the total system when they were out or when they were sleeping. The girl thought of invisible frequencies monitoring undisturbed air. The girl found offensive the notion that she could be spared pain, humiliation, or loss by microwaves. She contemplated for a moment the desire Chester had for a complete home security system. There wasn’t anything in the house worth stealing. Chester was protecting space. For a moment, the girl found offensive the touch of Chester’s hand on her hair.

“Why aren’t you dressed?” he asked.

The girl looked at him, and then down at herself, at the thin T-shirt and hibiscus-flowered shorts. I am getting too old to wear this shit, the girl thought. The porch was cooling down fast in the twilight. She shivered and rubbed her arms.

“Why?” the girl said.

Chester sighed. “We’re going out to dinner with the Tynans.”

“I don’t want to go out to dinner with the Tynans,” the girl said.

Chester put his hands in his pockets. “You’ve got to snap out of this,” he said.

“I’m flying,” the girl said. “I have flown.” She thought of the shepherd leaping, the lightness. He had escaped from her. She hadn’t gotten anyplace.

“I’ve been very sympathetic,” Chester said. “I’ve consoled you the best I can.”

“There is no consolation,” the girl said. “There is no recovery. There is no happy ending.”

“We’re the happy ending,” Chester said. “Give us a break.”

The sky was red, the water a dull silver. “I can’t bear to see the Tynans again,” the girl said. “I can’t bear to go to another restaurant and see the sneeze guard over the salad bar.”

“Don’t scream at me, darling. Doesn’t any of that stuff you take ever calm you down? I’m not the dog that you can scream at.”

“What?” the girl said.

Chester sat down on the glider. He put his hand on her knee. “I love you,” he said. “I think you’re wonderful, but I think a little self-knowledge, a little realism is in order here. You would stand and scream at that dog, darling.”

The girl looked at his hand, patting her knee. It seemed an impossibly large, ruddy hand.

“I wasn’t screaming,” she said. The dog had a famous trick. The girl would ask, “Do you love me?” and he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. Everyone had been amazed.

“The night it happened, you looked at the screen and you said you’d kill him when he got back.”

The girl stared at the hand stroking and rubbing her knee. She felt numb. “I never said that.”

“It was a justifiable annoyance, darling. You must have repaired that screen half a dozen times. He was becoming a discipline problem. He was adopting ways that made people feel uncomfortable.”

“Uncomfortable?” the girl said. She stood up. The hand dropped away.

“We cannot change any of this,” Chester said. “God knows if it were in my power, I would. I would do anything for you.”

“You didn’t stay with me that night, you didn’t lie down beside me!” The girl walked in small troubled circles around the room.

“I stayed for hours, darling. But nobody could sleep on that bed. The sheets were always sandy and covered with dog hairs. That’s why I bought a house, for the beds.” Chester smiled and reached out to her. She turned and walked through the house, opening the door, tripping the buzzer. “Oh you’ve got to stop this!” Chester shouted.

When she reached her own house, she went into the bedroom and lay down there. There was a yawning silence all around her, like an enormous hole. Silence was a thing entrusted to the animals, the girl thought. Many things that human words have harmed are restored again by the silence of animals.

The girl lay on her side, turned, onto her back. She thought of the bougainvillea, of the leaves turning into flowers over the shepherd’s grave. She thought of the shepherd by her bed, against the wall, sleeping quietly, his faith in her at peace.

There was a pop, a small explosion in her head that woke her. She lurched up, gasping, from a dream that the shepherd had died. And for an instant, she hovered between two dreams, twice deceived. She saw herself leaping, only to fall back. The moonlight spilled into the clearing.

“I did love you, didn’t I?” the girl said. She saw herself forever leaping, forever falling back. “And didn’t you love me?”

I NSIDE, the Auto-Train was violet. Both little girls were pleased because it was their favorite color. Violet was practically the only thing they agreed on. Danica Anderson and Jane Muirhead were both ten years old. They had traveled from Maine to Washington, D.C., by car with Jane’s parents and were now on the train with Jane’s parents and one hundred nine other people and forty-two automobiles on the way to Florida where they lived. It was September. Danica had been with Jane since June. Danica’s mother was getting married again and she had needed the summer months to settle down and have everything nice for Dan when she saw her in September. In August, her mother had written Dan and asked what she could do to make things nice for Dan when she got back. Dan replied that she would like a good wall-hung pencil sharpener and satin sheets. She would like cowboy bread for supper. Dan supposed that she would get none of these things. Her mother hadn’t even asked her what cowboy bread was.

The girls explored the entire train, north to south. They saw everyone but the engineer. Then they sat down in their violet seats. Jane made faces at a cute little toddler holding a cloth rabbit until he started to cry. Dan took out her writing materials and began writing to Jim Anderson. She was writing him a postcard.

“Jim,” she wrote, “I miss you and I will see you any minute. When I see you we will go swimming right away.”

“That is real messy writing,” Jane said. “It’s all scrunched together. If you were writing to anyone other than a dog, they wouldn’t be able to read it at all.”

Dan printed her name on the bottom of the card and embellished it all with X’s and O’s.

“Your writing to Jim Anderson is dumb in about twelve different ways. He’s a golden retriever, for Godssakes.”

Dan looked at her friend mildly. She was used to Jane yelling at her and expressing disgust and impatience. Jane had once lived in Manhattan. She had developed certain attitudes. Jane was a treasure from the city of New York currently on loan to the state of Florida where her father, for the last two years, had been engaged in running down a perfectly good investment in a marina and dinner theater. Jane liked to wear scarves tied around her head. She claimed to enjoy grapes and brown sugar and sour cream for dessert more than ice cream and cookies. She liked artichokes. She adored artichokes. She adored the part in the New York City Ballet’s Nutcracker Suite where the Dew Drops and the candied Petals of Roses dance to the “Waltz of the Flowers.” Jane had seen the Nutcracker four times, for Godssakes.

Dan and Jane and Jane’s mother and father had all lived with Jane’s grandmother in her big house in Maine all summer. The girls hadn’t seen that much of the Muirheads. The Muirheads were always “cruising.” They were always “gunk-holing,” as they called it. Whatever that was, Jane said, for Godssakes. Jane’s grandmother had a house on the ocean and knew how to make pizza and candy and sail a canoe. She called pizza ‘ za. She sang hymns in the shower. She sewed sequins on their jeans and made them say grace before dinner. After they said grace, Jane’s grandmother would ask forgiveness for things done and left undone. She would, upon request, lie down and chat with them at night before they went to sleep. Jane was crazy about her grandmother and was quite a nice person in her presence. One night, at the end of summer, Jane had had a dream in which men dressed in black suits and white bathing caps had broken into her grandmother’s house and taken all her possessions and put them in the road. In Jane’s dream, rain fell on all her grandmother’s things. Jane woke up weeping. Dan had wept too. Jane and Dan were friends.