Joy Williams - Taking Care

Julep shrugged. “We don’t know anything about those things.” She looked at the black worn Bible on her bedside table. She had read there that the sun would someday become black as a sackcloth of hair and the moon would turn red as blood. This was because of the evil in people, and Julep worried that this would happen to the sun before she had a chance to get back to where it was again.

“You don’t know anything is all.” Judy plucked at her sweater and smiled the bittersweet smile she found so crushing on the lips of the girl models of the fashion magazines. Her new breasts rose and fell eerily beneath a sweater of puce.

“I know that someday you’re gonna poke someone’s eye out with those things,” Julep said pointing at her friend’s chest. “If I were you, I’d be worried sick.”

Judy yawned. Julep stared out the window. The sun was still up but nowhere in sight. The air was blue and the snow falling through it was blue, and the trees were as black as though they had been burned.

“I’m leaving,” Judy said abruptly and swept out of Julep’s bedroom and downstairs to the kitchen.

Julep rubbed at the frost forming inside the windowpane with a thin grey nail which was bleeding beneath the quick. She felt her head sweating. If she pressed her hands to it, it would pop like a too heavy tick on a dog. If Hell were hot then Heaven must be freezing cold. She backed away from the window and thudded down the stairs.

Judy had drawn on her boots and coat. She waved coyly at Julep.

“Well, aren’t we going over there tonight to watch him?” Julep asked nervously, swinging her eyes heavily toward her friend. Looking often cost Julep a great deal of effort as though her eyes were boxes of bricks she had to push around in front of her.

“No,” Judy said, for she wanted to punish Julep for her dullness. Her books were lying on the kitchen table beside a small dish that said LET ME HOLD YOUR TEABAG. Judy rolled her eyes and then shook her head at Julep. Julep’s father owned a little grocery and variety store down the street, and in the window of it was a hand-lettered sign.

WHY MAKE THE RICH RICHER

PATRONIZE THE POOR

THANK YOU

“How can you stand to live in such a dump?” she asked. “With such dummies?” Julep didn’t know. Judy left and walked through the heavy snow to dumb Julep’s father’s dumb store where she bought a package of gum and lifted a mascara and eyeliner set.

Julep ate supper. Chowder, bread, two glasses of milk and three pieces of cake. She felt that she was feeding something inside her that belonged in a pen in the zoo. A plow traveled up the street, its orange light chopping through the blackness. She went to bed early, for she had tests and a basketball game the next day. She thought of the tropical ocean, of enormous white flowers on yellow stalks motionless in the sun. Things would carry distantly over the water there. Things would start out from ugly places and never reach Julep at all.

Judy Cushman and Julep Lee had become friends the summer before when they were on the beach. It was a bitter, shining Maine day and they were alone except for two people drowning just beyond the breaker line. The two girls sat on the beach, eating potato chips, unable to decide if the people were drowning or if they were just having a good time. Even after they disappeared, the girls could not believe they had really done it. They went home and the next day read about it in the newspapers. From that day on, they spent all their time together, even though they never mentioned the incident again.

Debevoise was thirty-four and took no part in adventure. He didn’t care for women and he couldn’t care for men. He lived in a corner second-story room of a rambling boarding house. The room had two windows, one of which overlooked the field and the other, the sea. There were no curtains on the windows and he never pulled the shades. He ate breakfast with the elderly owners, lunch every noon at the high school and drove to a hotel in the next town for dinner every night. He was stern and deeply tanned and exceptionally good-looking. As for the teaching, he barely recognized his students as human beings, considering them all mentally bludgeoned by the unremitting landscape. He couldn’t imagine chemistry doing any better or worse by them than anything else.

And the girls felt hopeless, stubborn and distraught, for they had come a long way on just a whisper more than nothing.

They could approach the house either by walking up the beach, climbing the metal rungs welded into the rock, which was dangerous and gave them no cover, or they could walk through the little town and across the field. Their post was a small depression beside an enormous pine, the branches of which swept the ground. Further away was a rim of rocks which they had assembled as another hiding place. Every night they could see everything from either one of these locations.

Every night the chemistry teacher was projected brightly behind the square window glass and watching him was like watching a museum. The girls would often close their eyes and even doze off for a time, and the snow would fall on them and freeze in their hair. Sometimes he would take off all his clothes and walk around the room, punching at the wall but never hitting it. Seeing him naked was never as exciting as the girls kept on imagining it would be since no one had ever told them what to feel about this.

Even so, Julep would come back to the house smiling, as though someone had made a very exciting promise to her. No one was there to notice this, for her mother was always locked in her room, powdered and rouged and in a lacy bed jacket like an invalid, watching TV and eating ice cream from the store, and her father had been sleeping for hours, twitching and suicidal, dreaming of meat going bad in faulty freezers.

On the nights when the girls saw the chemistry teacher without his clothes, Judy pretended to swoon with delight but actually felt hostile toward this vision which was both improbable and irresistible. His body was brown all over and did not seem real. The boys she knew were so comprehensible. Of Debevoise, she understood nothing. She could pretend he was a movie star, beside her, naked, about to press his tongue against her teeth. Mr. Debevoise was going to put a bruise on her neck! He was going to take her hand and place it on his belt!! But she could not really believe these things.

The morning after Judy had refused to go spying, Julep woke with a headache and a terrible thirst. She thought for a moment that she had taken up the watch all by herself and something awful had happened to her. As soon as she stepped outside, someone was going to tell her about it.

The sky was grey with pieces of black running through it like something that had died during the night. Walking to school, Julep suddenly started to cry. Her throat ached and her head felt heavy. She pulled savagely at her colorless hair, arranging it so that it fell more directly into and around her eyes. She stood in front of the school, her arms dangling, looking at her feet. She looked and looked, shocked. There she began. There were her boots, tall scuffed riding boots, her only winter footwear, which let in the damp, staining her feet each day the color of her socks. Then came her chapped knees, yellow and grey from spills on the gymnasium floor. Then her frayed and ugly coat. Her insides, too, were not what she would wish, for she knew that she was convulsively arranged — a steaming mess of foods and soft scarlet parts, Bible quotes, chemistry equations and queer bumpings and pains as though there was something down in her frantic to get out.

Debevoise, she knew, was pure and warm with not a speck of debris about him.