Joy Williams - Taking Care

Tommy stood in the doorway and stared at Sarah. “Why did you lock the door?” he asked again.

Sarah imagined seeing herself, naked. She said, “There are robbers.”

Tommy said, “If you don’t feel safe here, we’ll move. I’ve been looking at a wonderful place about twenty miles from here, on a cove. It only needs a little work. It will give us more room. There’s a barn, some fence. Martha could have a horse.”

Sarah looked at him with an intent, halted expression, as though she were listening to a dialogue no one present was engaged in. Finally, she said, “There are robbers. Everything has changed.”

T HE phone rang at five in the morning. Clem woke with a grunt. Liberty rolled away from Willie’s arms and went into the kitchen and picked up the phone.

“Hello, Mother,” she mumbled. Clem, a large white Alsatian with one blind eye, took a long noisy drink from his water dish.

“I want to explain some of the incidents in my life,” her mother said. Her voice was clear and determined.

“Everything is all right, Mother. I love you. Daddy loves you.”

“I had a terrible dream about penguins tonight, Liberty.”

“Penguins are nice, Mother. They don’t do anyone any harm.”

“There were hundreds of penguins on this beautiful beach and they were all standing so straight, like they do, like children wearing little aprons.”

What can she do about her mother? Liberty thinks. Drive up and take her out to lunch? Send her tulips by wire?

“That sounds nice, Mother. It sounds sort of cheerful.”

“They were being clubbed to death, Liberty. They were all being murdered by an unseen hand.”

“You’re all right, Mother. It was just a dream and it’s gone now. It’s left you and I’ve got it.” Liberty rubbed Clem’s hard skull.

“Liberty, I have to tell you that I had another child, a child before you, a child before Daddy. She was two years old. I lost her, Liberty. I lost her on purpose.”

“Oh Mother,” begged Liberty, “I don’t want to know.”

“Can you remember yourself as a child, Liberty? You used to limp for no reason and sprinkle water on your forehead to give the appearance of fevers. You used to squeeze the skin beneath your eyes to make bruises.”

“Mother, I didn’t.”

“You were suicidal. You were always asking me suicide riddles like, What would happen if a girl was tied up in a rug and thrown off the roof?’ ‘What would happen if you put a girl in a refrigerator alongside the eggs and the cheese?’”

“None of those things are true,” Liberty said uncertainly.

“I believe that one can outwit Time if one pretends to be what one is not. I think I read that.”

Clem took a few disinterested laps from his water bowl. He drank to keep Liberty company.

“It’s almost Thanksgiving, Liberty. What are you and Willie going to do for Thanksgiving? I think it would be nice if you had turkey and made oyster stuffing and cranberry sauce. It broke my heart when you said you ate mullet last year. I don’t think you can do things like that, Liberty. Life doesn’t go on forever, you know. Your sister was born on Thanksgiving Day. She weighed almost nine pounds.”

Liberty was getting confused. The fluorescent light in the kitchen dimmed and brightened, dimmed and brightened. She turned it off.

“I fell so in love with Daddy, I just couldn’t think,” Liberty’s mother said. “He was so free and handsome and I just wanted to be with him and have a love that would defy the humdrum. He didn’t know anything about Brouilly. I had kept Brouilly a secret from him.”

“Brouilly?” Liberty asked, not without interest. “That was my sister’s name?”

“It’s a wine. A very good wine actually. She was cute as the dickens. I was living in New York then and when I fell in love with Daddy, I drove Brouilly eighty-seven miles into the state of Connecticut, enrolled her in an Episcopalian day-care center under an assumed name and left her forever. Daddy and I sailed for Europe the next day. Love, I thought it was! For the love of your father, I abandoned my first-born! Time has a way, Liberty, of thumping a person right back into the basement.”

“You’ve never mentioned this before, Mother.”

“Do you know what your father says when I tell him I’m going to tell you? He says, ‘Don’t start trouble.’”

Liberty didn’t say anything. She could hear a distant conversation murmuring across the wires.

“I chose the Episcopalians,” her mother was saying tiredly, “because they are aristocrats. Do you know, for instance, that they are thinner than any other religious group?”

“I don’t know what to say, Mother. Do you want to try and find her?”

“What could I possibly do for her now, Liberty? She probably races Lasers and has dinner parties for twenty-five or something. Her husband probably has a tax haven in Campione.”

“Who was her father?” Liberty asked.

“He made crêpes,” her mother said vaguely. “I’ve got to go now, honey. I’ve got to go to the bathroom. Bye-bye.”

Liberty hung up. The room’s light was now grey and Clem glowed whitely in it. A particularly inappropriate image crept open in her mind like a waxy cereus bloom: little groups of Hindus sitting around a dying man or woman or child on the river bank, waiting for death to come, chatting, eating, behaving in fact as though life were a picnic.

Liberty opened the refrigerator door. There was a jug of water aerating there, and a half-empty can of Strongheart. She poured herself a glass of water and spooned the Strongheart, a horse’s most paranoid imaginings, into Clem’s food bowl.

The phone rang. “I just want you to know,” her mother said, “that I’m leaving your father.”

“Don’t pay any attention to this, Liberty,” her father said on another extension. “As you must know by now, she says once a month that she’s going to leave me. Once a month for twenty-nine years. Even in the good years when we had friends and ate well and made love a dozen times a week she’d still say it.”

Liberty could hear her mother breathing heavily. They were both over five hundred miles away. The miracle of modern communication made them seem as close to Liberty as the kitchen sink.

“Once,” Daddy said, “why it couldn’t have been more than six months ago, she threw her wedding ring out into the pecan grove and it took a week and a half to find it. Once she tore up every single photograph in which we appeared together. Often, she gathers up all her clothes, goes down to the A&P for cartons, or worse, goes into Savannah and buys costly luggage, boxes her books and our French copper, makes a big bitch of a stew which is supposed to last me the rest of my days and cleans the whole damn place with a vacuum cleaner.”

“It’s obviously a cry for help, wouldn’t you say, Liberty?” her mother said.

“I don’t know why you’d want to call Liberty up and pester her and worry her sick,” Daddy said. “She has her own life.”

“That’s right,” her mother said, “excuse me, everything’s fine here. I made some peach ice cream yesterday.”

“Damn good peach ice cream,” Daddy said. “So, Liberty, how’s your own life. How’s that Willie treating you?”

“Fine,” Liberty said.

“Never could get anything out of Liberty,” her mother chuckled.

“You’re getting to be old married folks yourselves,” Daddy said. “What is it now, going on almost four years?”

“That’s right,” Liberty said.