Joy Williams - Taking Care

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 going 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.