Joy Williams - Taking Care

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 feel 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.”

“What things?” Gen asks.

“We could talk and talk,” Annie says.

“About what?” Gen insists.

“We could discuss why you can’t cut the end off a piece of string,” Annie says.

“Why can’t you?” Gen asks.

“It’s a philosophical question,” Annie says, “we could talk about it forever.”

“We wouldn’t talk,” Gen says.

Her mother looks hurt. She pushes her hair up and off her neck, which makes her look younger and sadder.

“How is your turkey?” Gen asks Katherine. “What does he like to do?”

Katherine tells her that the turkey likes corn and egg shells and bagels and then finds herself telling a long Baba Yaga story. She tells Gen that the turkey reminds her of Baba Yaga, a Russian witch who lived in a house on chicken legs. Whenever anyone came along that Baba Yaga did not want to see, the chicken legs would move the house around so that the visitor couldn’t find the front door.

Gen had never heard of Baba Yaga.

“Do you like fairy tales?” Katherine asks her.

“I like science fiction,” Gen says and wanders from the room, smelling the way Annie would smell if she ever had the opportunity to use her own perfume.

“Have some wine,” Annie urges Katherine, “tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Actually,” Katherine says, “I was thinking about how I used to climb trees so a certain person would think I wasn’t home.”

Annie thinks Katherine is referring to her childhood. “Children are different today,” she sighs. “They’re entirely different from the way we used to be.”

A week before Katherine’s birthday, a long envelope arrives from Travis’s mother. Each year she sends a birthday card to Katherine one week ahead of time. She must have put the date down wrong on her calendar years ago and transferred it incorrectly to each succeeding year. Katherine opens the envelope and there is a birthday card and a long red and white automobile bumper sticker inside. I LOVE MY VOLVO the sticker says. Travis’s mother has a Volvo too, but an old one, a bulbous sedan painted a cheery Coca-Cola red. Katherine doesn’t put the sticker on her car. Actually, Katherine doesn’t love her Volvo. She’s surprised that Travis’s mother doesn’t realize that.