Taking Care (2 page)

The man has many friends whom he is devoted to. They are clever and well-off; good-natured, generous people, confident in their prolonged affairs. They have known each other for years. This is discomforting to the girl, who has known no one for years. The girl fears that each has loved the other at one time or another. These relationships are so complex, the girl cannot understand them! There is such flux, such constancy among them. They are so intimate and so calm. She tries to imagine their embraces. She feels that theirs differ from her own. One afternoon, just before dusk, the girl and man drive a short way into the Everglades. It is very dull. There is no scenery, no prospect. It is not a swamp at all. It is a river, only
inches deep! Another couple rides in the back of the car. They have very dark tans and have pale yellow hair. They look almost like brother and sister. He is a lawyer and she is a lawyer. They are drinking gin and tonics, as are the girl and the man. The girl has not met these people before. The woman leans over the back seat and drops another ice cube from the cooler into the girl’s drink. She says, “I hear that you have a little daughter.” The girl nods. She feels funny, a little frightened. “The child is very
sortable,
” the girl’s lover says. He is driving the big car very fast and well but there seems to be a knocking in the engine. He wears a long-sleeved shirt buttoned at the wrists. His thick hair needs cutting. The girl loves to look at him. They drive, and on either side of them, across the slim canals or over the damp saw grass, speed airboats. The sound of them is deafening. The tourists aboard wear huge earmuffs. The man turns his head toward her for a moment. “I love you,” she says. “Ditto,” he says loudly, above the clatter of the airboats. “Double-ditto.” He grins at her and she begins to giggle. Then she sobs. She has not cried for many months. Everyone is astounded. The man drives a few more miles and then pulls into a gas station. The girl feels desperate about this man. She would do the unspeakable for him, the unforgivable, anything. She is lost but not in him. She wants herself lost and never found, in him. “I’ll do anything for you,” she cries. “Take an aspirin,” he says. “Put your head on my shoulder.”

The girl is sleeping alone in her apartment. The man has gone on a business trip. He assures her he will come back. He’ll always come back, he says. When the girl is alone she measures her drink out carefully. Carefully, she drinks twelve ounces of bourbon in two and a half hours. When she is not with the man, she resumes her habit of listening to the radio. Frequently, she hears only the replies of
Action Line.
“Yes,” the Answer Man says, “in answer to your question, the difference between rising every morning at six or at eight in the course of forty years amounts to twenty-nine thousand two hundred hours or three years, two hundred twenty-one days and sixteen hours, which are equal to eight hours a day for ten years. So
that rising at six will be the equivalent of adding ten years to your life.” The girl feels, by the Answer Man’s tone, that he is a little repulsed by this. She washes her whiskey glass out in the sink. Balloons are drifting around the kitchen. They float out of the kitchen and drift onto the balcony. They float down the hall and bump against the closed door of the child’s room. Some of the balloons don’t float but slump in the corners of the kitchen like mounds of jelly. These are filled with water. The girl buys many balloons and is always blowing them up for the child. They play a great deal with the balloons; breaking them over the stove or smashing the water-filled ones against the walls of the bathroom. The girl turns off the radio and falls asleep.

The girl touches her lover’s face. She runs her fingers across the bones. “Of course I love you,” he says. “I want us to have a life together.” She is so restless. She moves her hand across his mouth. There is something she doesn’t understand, something she doesn’t know how to do. She makes them a drink. She asks for a piece of gum. He hands her a small crumpled stick, still in the wrapper. She is sure that it is not the real thing. The Answer Man has said that Lewis Carroll once invented a substitute for gum. She fears that this is that. She doesn’t want this! She swallows it without chewing. “Please,” she says. “Please what?” the man replies, a bit impatiently.

Her former husband calls her up. It is autumn and the heat is unusually oppressive. He wants to see the child. He wants to take her away for a week to his lakeside house in the middle of the state. The girl agrees to this. He arrives at the apartment and picks up the child and nuzzles her. He is a little heavier than before. He makes a little more money. He has a different watch, wallet and key ring. “What are you doing these days?” the child’s father asks. “I am in love,” she says.

The man does not visit the girl for a week. She doesn’t leave the apartment. She loses four pounds. She and the child make Jell-O and they eat it for days. The girl remembers that after the baby was born, the only food the hospital gave her was Jell-O. She thinks of all the water boiling in hospitals everywhere
for new mothers’ Jell-O. The girl sits on the floor and plays endlessly with the child. The child is bored. She dresses and undresses herself. She goes through everything in her small bureau drawer and tries everything on. The girl notices a birthmark on the child’s thigh. It is very small and lovely, in the shape, the girl thinks, of a wineglass. A doll’s wineglass. The girl thinks about the man constantly but without much exactitude. She does not even have a photograph of him! She looks through old magazines. He must resemble someone! Sometimes, late at night, when she thinks he might come to her, she feels that the Answer Man arrives instead. He is like a moving light, never still. He has the high temperature and metabolism of a bird. On
Action Line,
someone is saying, “And I live by the airport, what is this that hits my house, that showers my roof on takeoff? We can hear it. What is this, I demand to know! My lawn is healthy, my television reception is fine but something is going on without my consent and I am not well, my wife’s had a stroke and someone stole my stamp collection and took the orchids off my trees.” The girl sips her bourbon and shakes her head. The greediness and wickedness of people, she thinks, their rudeness and lust. “Well,” the Answer Man says, “each piece of earth is bad for something. Something is going to get it on it and the land itself is no longer safe. It’s weakening. If you dig deep enough to dip your seed, beneath the crust you’ll find an emptiness like the sky. No, nothing’s compatible to living in the long run. Next caller, please.” The girl goes to the telephone and dials hurriedly. It is very late. She whispers, not wanting to wake the child. There is static and humming. “I can’t make you out,” the Answer Man shouts. The girl says more firmly, “I want to know my hour.” “Your hour came, dear,” he says. “It went when you were sleeping. It came and saw you dreaming and it went back to where it was.”

The girl’s lover comes to the apartment. She throws herself into his arms. He looks wonderful. She would do anything for him! The child grabs the pocket of his jacket and swings on it with her full weight. “My friend,” the child says to him. “Why
yes,” the man says with surprise. They drive the child to the nursery and then go out for a wonderful lunch. The girl begins to cry and spills the roll basket on the floor.

“What is it?” he asks. “What’s wrong?” He wearies of her, really. Her moods and palpitations. The girl’s face is pale. Death is not so far, she thinks. It is easily arrived at. Love is further than death. She kisses him. She cannot stop. She clings to him, trying to kiss him. “Be calm,” he says.

The girl no longer sees the man. She doesn’t know anything about him. She is a gaunt, passive girl, living alone with her child. “I love you,” she says to the child. “Mommy loves me,” the child murmurs, “and Daddy loves me and Grandma loves me and Granddaddy loves me and my friend loves me.” The girl corrects her, “Mommy loves you,” she says. The child is growing. In not too long the child will be grown. When is this happening! She wakes the child in the middle of the night. She gives her a glass of juice and together they listen to the radio. A woman is speaking on the radio. She says, “I hope you will not think me vulgar.” “Not at all,” the Answer Man replies. “He is never at a loss,” the girl whispers to the child. The woman says, “My husband can only become excited if he feels that some part of his body is missing” “Yes,” the Answer Man says. The girl shakes the sleepy child. “Listen to this,” she says. “I want you to know about these things.” The unknown woman’s voice continues, dimly. “A finger or an eye or a leg. I have to pretend it’s not there.”

“Yes,” the Answer Man says.

C
ONSTANCE
and Ben and their daughters by previous marriages, Charlotte and Jill, were sharing a summer house for a month with their friend Steven. There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up—Patsy, Teddy, Mercedes, Annie and Gloria. The women made a great deal of fuss over Charlotte and Jill, who were both ten. They made the girls nachos and root-beer floats, and bought them latch-hook sets and took them out to the moors to identify flowers. They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—

or worse!

The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.

The women would arrange the children’s hair in various elaborate ways that Constance hated. They knew no taboos;
they discussed everything with the children—love, death, Japanese whaling methods. Each woman had habits and theories and stories to tell, and each brought a house present and stayed seventy-two hours. They all spent so much time with the children because they could not spend it with Steven, who appeared after five
P.M
. only. Steven was writing a book that summer; he was, in his words, “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” This took time.

Ben was recovering from a heart attack he had suffered in the spring. He and Constance had been in a restaurant, arguing, and he had had a heart attack. She remembered the look of absolute attentiveness that had crossed his face. At the time, she had thought he was looking at a beautiful woman behind her and on the other side of the room. The memory, which she recalled frequently, mortified her. What she couldn’t remember was what they had been arguing about.

Ben was thin with dark hair. He was twelve years older than Constance, yet they looked about the same age. He was the love of Constance’s life, but they quarreled a lot; it was a small tragedy, really, how much they had quarreled before his heart attack. Without their arguments they were a little shy with one another. Things appeared different now to Constance: objects seemed to have more presence, people seemed more vivid, the sky seemed brighter. Her nightmares’ messages were far less veiled. Constance was embarrassed at having these feelings, for it had been Ben’s heart attack, after all, not hers. He had always accused her of taking things too personally.

Constance and Ben had been married for five years. Charlotte was Constance’s child from her marriage with David, and Jill was Ben’s from his marriage with Susan. The children weren’t crazy about one another, but they got along. It was all right, really, with them. Here in the summer house they slept in the attic; in Constance’s opinion, the nicest room in the house. It had two iron beds, white beaverboard walls and a small window from which one could see three streets converging. Sometimes Constance would take a gin and tonic up to the
attic and lie on one of the beds and watch people place their postcards in the mailbox at the intersection. Constance didn’t send postcards herself. She really didn’t want to get in touch with anybody but Ben, and Ben lived in the same house with her, as he had in whatever house they’d been in ever since they’d gotten married. She couldn’t very well send a postcard to Ben.

August was hot and splendid for the most part, but those who stayed for the entire season claimed it was not as nice as July. The gardens were blown. Pedestrians irritably swatted bicyclists who used the sidewalks. There was more weeping in bars, and more jellyfish in the sea.

On the afternoon of the first Friday in August, Constance was in the attic room observing an elderly couple place their postcards in the mailbox with great deliberation. She watched a woman about her own age drop a card in the box and go off with a mean, satisfied look upon her face. She watched an older woman throw in at least a dozen cards with no emotion whatever.

Charlotte came upstairs and told her mother, “A person drowning imagines there’s a ladder rising vertically from the water, and he tries to climb that ladder. Did you know that? If he would only imagine that the ladder was horizontal he wouldn’t drown.”