Joy Williams - Taking Care

“They’ve been tampering with the atmosphere,” Lavinia said. “They don’t have the sense to leave things alone.” Lavinia was a strong-willed, impatient woman. She thought about what she had just said and threw her spoon down irritably at the truth of it. Lavinia was no longer serene about anything. That presumption had been for her youth, when she had time. Now everything was pesky to her and a hindrance.

“Good morning,” Otilla said. She walked to the wicker chair and sat down. The baby lay in her arms, short and squat like a loaf of bread.

Lavinia’s eyes didn’t change, nor her mouth nor the set of her jaw. Outside some mockingbirds were ranting. The day had gotten so bright it was as if someone had just shot it off in her face.

“Put it back where you got it,” she said slowly.

“I can’t imagine where this baby’s from,” Otilla said.

The baby’s eyes were open now and were locked on the old woman’s face. Lavinia spoke in a low, furious voice. “Go on out with it, Otilla.” She raised her fingers distractedly, waving at the baby as though greeting an old friend.

Otilla picked the baby up and held it out away from her and looked cheerfully at it. “You’re wetting.”

“My God,” Marjorie said, noticing the affair for the first time.

Otilla shook the baby up and down. Her arms were skinny and pale and they trembled a bit with the weight. The baby opened its mouth and smiled noiselessly. “You’re hollow inside,” Otilla said. “Hollow as a bamboo. Bam Boo To You Kangaroo.” She joggled the baby whose face was static and distant with delight. “Bamboo shampoo. Bamboo cockatoo stew.”

“My God,” Marjorie said. She and Louisa got up and scraped off their plates and rinsed them in the sink. They went into the front room and sat on the sofa.

Otilla held the baby a little awkwardly. Its head flopped back like a flower in the wind when she got up. She had never touched a baby before and she had never thought about them either. She went to the drainboard and laid the baby down and unpinned its diaper. “Isn’t that cute, Lavinia, it’s a little boy.”

“You are becoming senile,” Lavinia said. Her fingers were still twitching in the air. She wrapped them in her napkin.

“I didn’t make him up. Someone left him here, hanging off the postbox.”

“Senile,” Lavinia repeated. “Who knows where this baby has been? You shouldn’t even be touching him. Perhaps you are just being ‘set up’ and we will all be arrested by the sheriff.”

Otilla folded a clean dishtowel beneath the baby and pinned it together. She took the dirty diaper and scrubbed it out in the sink with a bar of almond soap and then took it outside and hung it on the clothesline. When she came back into the kitchen, she picked the baby off the drainboard and went back to her chair by the window. “Now isn’t that nice, Lavinia?” She didn’t want to talk but she was so nervous that she couldn’t help herself. “I think they should make diapers in bright colors. Orange and blue and green…. Deep bright colors for a little boy. Wouldn’t that be nice, Lavinia?”

“The dye would seep into their skin and kill them,” Lavinia said brusquely. “They’d suffocate like a painted Easter chick.”

Otilla was shocked.

“You accept things too easily, Otilla. You have always been a dope. Even as a child, you took anything anyone chose to give you.” She got up and took the distributor wire of the Mercedes out of the silverware tray. She clumped down the steps to the automobile, banging the screen door behind her. A spider dropped from the ceiling and fell with a snap on the stove. Otilla heard the engine turn over and drop into idle. The screen door banged again and Lavinia was shouting into the darkened living room.

“We are going in town to the authorities and will be back directly.”

There was a pause in which Otilla couldn’t hear a thing. Her arm was going to sleep. She shifted the baby about on her lap, banging his head against her knee bone. The baby opened his mouth but not his eyes and gummed on the sleeve of his shirt.

“Excuse me,” she whispered.

“No, no,” Lavinia shouted at the living room. “I can’t imagine how it happened either. Someone on their way somewhere. Long gone now. Pickers, migrants.”

She came back into the kitchen, pulling on a pair of black ventilated driving gloves. Lavinia was very serious about the Mercedes. She drove slowly and steadily and not particularly well, looking at the dials and needles for signs of malfunction. The reason for riding was in the traveling, she always said, for the sisters never had the need to be anyplace. Getting there was not the object. Arrival was not the point. The car was elegant and disheartening and suited to this use.

“Where are we going?” Otilla asked meekly.

“Where are we going,” Lavinia mimicked in a breathless drawl that was not at all like Otilla’s voice. Then she said normally, “We are going to drop this infant off in Pridesup. I am attempting not to become annoyed but you are very annoying and this is a very annoying situation.”

“I think I would like to keep this baby,” Otilla said. “I figure we might as well.” The baby was warm and its heart was beating twice as fast as any heart she had ever heard as though it couldn’t wait to get on with its living.

Lavinia walked over to her sister and gave her a yank.

“I could teach him to drink from a cup,” Otilla said, close to tears. “They learn how to do that. When he got older he could mow the lawn and spray the midge and club-gall.” She was on her feet now and was being pushed outside. She put out her free hand and jammed it against the door frame. “I have to get some things together, then, please Lavinia. It’s twenty miles to Pridesup. Just let me get a few little things together so that he won’t go off with nothing.” Her chin was shaking. She was hanging fiercely onto the door and squinting out into the sunlight, down past the rumbling Mercedes into the pit where the rock had fallen and where the seedlings, still rooted, bloomed in the spring. She felt a little fuddled. It seemed that her head was down in the cool sinkhole while the rest of her wobbled in the heat. She jammed the baby so close to her that he squealed.

“I can’t imagine what you’re going to equip him with,” Lavinia was saying. “He can’t be more than a few months old. We don’t have anything for that.” She had stopped pushing her sister and was looking at the car, trying to remember the route to Pridesup, the county seat. It had been five years since she had driven there. Somewhere, on the left, she recollected a concentrate canning factory. Somewhere, also, there was a gas station in the stomach of a concrete dinosaur. She remembered stopping. Otilla had used the rest room and they had all bought cold barbeque. No one ever bought his gasoline, the owner said. They bought his snacks and bait and bedspreads. Lavinia had not bought his gasoline either. She doubted if the place was there now. It didn’t look as though it had five years left in it.

“Oh just a little apple juice and a toy or something.”

“Well, get it then,” Lavinia snapped. She couldn’t remember if she took a right or a left upon leaving the driveway; if she kept Cowpen Slough on her west side or her east side. The countryside looked oddly without depth and she had difficulty imagining herself driving off into it. She went into a small bathroom off the kitchen and took off her gloves and rinsed her face, then she went out to the Mercedes. She sat behind the wheel and removed some old state maps from the car’s side pocket. They were confusing, full of blank spaces. Printed on the bottom of the first one were the words Red And Blue Roads Are Equally Good. She refolded them, fanned herself with them and put them on the seat.