Joy Williams - Taking Care

Katherine first saw their house, and Peter, with her friend Annie, who was house-hunting. Peter is in real estate. He’s very successful now and has his own business, but then he was just getting started, working for someone else, and he was showing this house for sale on a Sunday afternoon. Peter grinned at Katherine as though he had met her before, which he had not. Annie thought the house was too dark, which it was, but Katherine liked it, although she was not in the position to buy anything. The house was a relic of the recent past in a neighborhood that had grown up around it. Peter told Katherine that he was thinking of buying it himself, it was such a good investment. Then he asked her to dinner and three months after that, they got married.

It is Katherine who has prevented Peter from improving their house before this. But the house had dry rot, it needed a new roof, new wiring. Really, remodeling was inevitable. Actually, little of the old house will remain. Now that Peter has convinced Katherine of the need to remodel, he encourages her to debate the decisions he makes.

“I want to lose an argument with you every so often,” he says, “that way the house will be more the way we both want it.”

But Katherine doesn’t have arguments with Peter, Peter never argues with anyone. All their friends are amazed, for example, at how well he gets along with the workmen involved in the remodeling. It’s unusual, their friends say, not to get upset with some, if not most, of these people in the long run, but Peter gets along with them all, the carpenter, the electrician, the plumber, the dry-wall and insulation man, the mason, the back-hoe operator, the roofer, whereas Katherine finds it difficult to converse with any of these people. Her jaws ache from projecting the illusion of concern. There is a basic misunderstanding between Katherine and all of them. They think she is interested in what is going to happen and she’s not.

“This is a house that will tell your story the way you want your story told,” the architect says.

“Heart-side up, heart-side out. Always,” the carpenter says. He is referring to boards.

The plumber says, “This is a beautiful tub. You should take good care of this tub.”

The dry-wall man says, “You were smart not to make square rooms. A square room is an acoustical prison.”

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.