Joy Williams - Taking Care

Otilla got into the car with the baby and a paper bag. The baby’s head was very large compared to the rest of him. It looked disabling and vulnerable. Lavinia couldn’t understand how anything could start out being that ugly and said so. His ears looked like two Parker rolls. She moved the car down the drive and unhesitatingly off onto the blacktop. They drove in silence for a few minutes. It was hot and green out with a smell of sugar on the air.

“Well,” Otilla said, “it doesn’t seem as though he wants anything yet.”

Lavinia wore a pair of enormous black sunglasses. She drove and didn’t say anything.

“Look out the window here at that grey and black horse,” Otilla said. She lifted the baby up. He clawed at her chin with his hand. “Look out thataway at those sandhill cranes. They’re just like storks. Maybe they’re the ones that dropped you off at our house.”

“Oh shut up. You’ll addle the little bit of brain he has,” Lavinia yelled.

“It’s just a manner of speaking, Lavinia. We both know it isn’t so.” She opened the bag and took out a piece of bread and began to eat it. The baby pushed his hand into the bread and Otilla broke off a piece of crust and gave it to him. He gnawed on it intently without diminishing it. In the bag, Otilla had a loaf of bread, a can of Coca-Cola and a jar of milk. “I couldn’t find a single toy for him,” she said.

“He’ll have to do with the scenery,” Lavinia said. She herself had never cared for it. It had been there too long and she had been too long in it and now it seemed like an external cataract obstructing her real vision.

“Lookit those water hyacinths,” Otilla went on. “Lookit that piece of moon still up there in the sky.”

Lavinia gritted her teeth. There had not been a single trip they had taken that Otilla had not spoiled. She talked too much and squirmed too much and always brought along food that she spilled. The last time they had driven down this road, she had had a dish of ice cream that had been squashed against the dashboard when the car had gone over a bump. Lavinia braked suddenly and turned the Mercedes into a dirt side road that dropped like a tunnel through an orange grove. She backed up and reversed her direction.

“Where are we going now, Lavinia?”

“We’re going to the same place,” she said angrily. “This is simply a more direct route.” The baby burped softly. They passed the house again, planted white and well-to-do in the sunlight. Embarrassed, neither of them looked at it or remarked upon it.

“I think,” Otilla said formally, “that we are both accepting this very well and that you are handling it OK except that I think we could have kept this baby for at least a little while until we read in the paper perhaps that someone is missing him.”

“No one is going to be missing him.”

“You’re a little darlin’,” Otilla said to the baby, who was hunched over his bread crust.

“Please stop handling him. He might very well have worms or meningitis or worse.” The Mercedes was rocketing down the middle of the road through hordes of colorful bugs. Lavinia had never driven this fast. She took her foot off the accelerator and the car mannerly slowed. Lavinia was hot all over. Every decision she had made so far today seemed proper but oddly irrelevant. If she had gone down to the mailbox first as she had always done, there would have been no baby to find. She was sure of that. The problem was that the day had started out being Otilla’s and not hers at all. She gave a short nervous bark and looked at the baby who was swaying on her sister’s lap. “I imagine he hasn’t had a single shot.”

“He looks fine to me, Lavinia. He has bright eyes and he seems clean and cool enough.”

Lavinia tugged at the wheel as though correcting a personal injustice rather than the car’s direction. “It’s no concern to us what he’s got anyway. It’s the law’s problem. It’s for the orphanage to attend to.”

“Orphanage? You shouldn’t take him there. He’s not an orphan, he has us.” She looked at the pale brown veins running off the baby’s head and faintly down his cheeks.

“He doesn’t have us at all,” Lavinia shouted. She started to gag and gripped her throat with her left hand, giving it little pinches and tugs to keep the sickness down. There had never been a thing she’d done that hadn’t agreed with her and traveling had always been a pleasure, but the baby beside her had a strong pervasive smell that seemed to be the smell of the land as well, and it made her sick. She felt as though she were falling into a pan of bright and bubbling food. She took several breaths and said more calmly, “There is no way we could keep him. You must use your head. We have not had the training and we are all getting on and what would happen is that we would die and he’d be left.” She was being generous and conversational and instructive and she hoped that Otilla would appreciate this and benefit from it even though she knew her sister was weakheaded and never benefited from things in the proper way.

“But that’s the way it’s going to be anyway, Lavinia.”

The air paddled in Lavinia’s ears. The Mercedes wandered on and off the dusty shoulder. The land was empty and there wasn’t anything coming toward them or going away except a bright tin can which they straddled. “Of course it is,” she said. “You’ve missed the point.”

Lavinia had never cared for Otilla. She realized that this was due mostly to preconception, as it were, for she had been present at the awful moment of birth and she knew before her sister had taken her first breath that she’d be useless. And she had been. The only thing Otilla ever had was prettiness and she had that still, lacking the sense to let it go, her girlish features still moving around indecently in her old woman’s face. Sitting there now in a messy nest of bread crusts and obscure stains with the baby playing with her dress buttons, Otilla looked queerly confident and enthusiastic as though at last she were going off on her wedding day. It disgusted Lavinia. There was something unseasonal about Otilla. If she had been a man, Lavinia thought, they might very well have had a problem on their hands.

Otilla noisily shook out one of the road maps. Down one side of it was a colorful insert with tiny pictures of attractions — fish denoting streams, and women in bathing suits, and llamas representing zoos and clocks marking historical societies. All no bigger than a thumbnail. “Why this is just charming,” Otilla said. “Here we have a pictorial guide.” The baby looked at it grimly and something fell runny from his mouth onto a minute pink blimp. “This is the first time we have had a real destination, Lavinia. Perhaps we can see these things as well.” She rested her chin on the baby’s head and read aloud, “‘Route S40 through the Pine Barrens. Be sure to see the Produce Auction, Elephant House, State Yacht Basin Marine View Old Dutch Parsonage Pacing Racing Oxford Furnace Ruins.’ Why just look at all these things,” she said into the infant’s hair. “This is very helpful.”

The two regarded the map carefully. “See this,” Otilla said excitedly, pointing to a tiny ancient-looking baby with a gold crown on his head. “Baby Parade. August. That’s for us!” Then she fell silent and after a few miles she turned to Lavinia and said, “This is not for our region at all. This is for the state of New Jersey.”

Lavinia was concentrating on a row of garish signs advertising a pecan shop. She’d been seeing them for the last half hour. Free Ice Water one said Lettus Fill Your Jug. Neat Nuts one said. Ham Sandwiches Frozen Custard Live Turtles. She thought she’d stop and discreetly ask the way to Pridesup. Pecan Clusters Pecan Logs Pecan Pie Don’t Miss Us!