Taking Care (22 page)

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!

Otilla was picking through the remaining maps when the baby tipped off her lap and into Lavinia’s side. Lavinia stomped on the brakes and beat at him with her hand. “Get away,” she shrieked, “You’ll break my hip!” She tried to pull her waist in from the weight of his head. His smell was sweet, fertile, like an anesthetic and she felt frightened as though someone had just removed something from her in a swift neat operation. She saw the dust motes settling like balloons upon the leather dashboard and white thread tangled in the baby’s fingers.
Slow Down You’re Almost There Only 2000 Yds.
The baby’s face was wrinkling her linen and his hand was fastened around the bottom of the steering wheel.

“Lavinia, you’ll frighten him,” Otilla said, pulling the baby back across the seat. She arranged him in her lap again and he instantly fell asleep. The Mercedes was almost at a standstill. Lavinia pressed on the gas and the car labored forward, out of gear, past an empty burnt-out shack.
Six Lbs For $1 Free Slushies For The Kiddies.
The door to the place was lying in the weeds.

“That’s all right, that’s all right,” Lavinia said. She took off her sunglasses and rubbed the bridge of her nose. The fingers of her gloves were wet. The engine was skipping, the tachometer needle fluttered on o. She stopped the car completely, shifted into first and resumed.
You’ve Gone Too Far!
a sign said. She felt like spitting at it. Otilla had fallen asleep now too, her head slightly out the window, her small mouth shining in the side-view mirror. Lavinia picked up a piece of bread, folded it into an empty sandwich and ate it.

When Otilla woke, it was almost dark. The baby had his fingers jammed into his mouth and sucked on them loudly. Otilla unscrewed the top of the mason jar and pushed the lip toward him. He took it eagerly, sucking. Then he chewed, then he lapped. Enough drops went down his throat for him to think it was worthwhile to continue. He settled down to eating the milk that was slapping his cheeks and sliding down his chin back into the jar.

They were on a narrow soft road just wide enough for the car. Close on either side were rows and rows of orange trees, all different shades of darkness in the twilight.

“It’s like riding through the parted waters, Lavinia.”

Her sister’s voice startled her and Lavinia gave a little jump. Her stylish dress was askew and her large faded eyes were watering.

“You woke up to say an asinine thing like that!” she exclaimed. All the while Otilla and the infant had been sleeping, she had driven with an empty mind and eye. She had truly not been thinking of a thing, and though she was lost and indignant and frustrated she did not feel this. She had driven, and the instructions she had received cautiously from the few people she had seen she wrote down on the back of a pocket calendar. When she left the people, they became bystanders, not to be trusted, and she drove on without reference. And the only sounds she heard were the gentle snappings somewhere in her head of small important truths that she had got along with for years—breaking.

She had not looked at the car’s equipment, at its dials and
numbers for a long time because when she had last done so, the odometer showed her that they had driven 157 miles.

“How long have we been traveling, Lavinia?”

“I don’t know.” She remembered that when she had bought the Mercedes, the engine had shone like her silver service. She remembered that there had been one mile on the odometer then. Sitting in the showroom on a green carpet, her automobile had one mile on it and she had been furious. No one could tell her why this was. No one could explain it to her satisfaction.

“Well,” Otilla said, “I suppose Louisa and Marjorie have eaten by now.” She looked out the window. A white bird was hurrying off through the groves. “This is an awfully good baby,” she said, “waiting so long and being so patient for his meal. And this being not the way he’s accustomed to getting it besides.” She looked behind her. “My, they certainly make these roads straight. It seems like if we had intended to, we could be halfway to New Jersey by now, on our way to seeing all those interesting things. We could stay in a New Jersey motel, Lavinia, and give the baby a nice bath and send out for supper and I’ve even heard that some of those motels are connected with drive-in theaters and we could see a film directly from our room.”

The soft sand tugged at the car’s wheels. The stars came out and Lavinia pulled on the headlights.

“Lavinia,” Otilla said softly. “I have twelve hundred dollars sitting in the teeth of my mouth alone. I am a wealthy woman though not as wealthy as you and if you want to get there, I don’t understand why we just don’t stop as soon as we see someone and hire us a car to Pridesup.”

“I have no respect for you at all,” Lavinia said.

Otilla paused. She ran her fingers over the baby’s head, feeling the slight springy depression in his skull where he was still growing together. She could hear him swallowing. A big moth blundered against her face and then fell back into the night. “If you would just stop for a moment,” she said brightly, “I could change the baby and freshen up the air in here a bit.”

“You don’t seem to realize that I know all about you, Otilla. There is nothing you could ever say to me about anything. I happen to know that you were born too early and mother had you in a chamber pot. So just shut up Otilla.” She turned to her sister and smiled. Otilla’s head was bowed and Lavinia poked her to make sure that she was paying attention. “I have wanted to let you know about that for a long long time so just don’t say another word to me, Otilla.”

The Mercedes bottomed out on the sand, swerved and dropped into the ditch, the grille half-submerged in muddy water and the left rear wheel spinning in the air. Lavinia still was steering and smiling and looking at her sister. The engine died and the lights went out and for an instant they all sat speechless and motionless as though they were parts of a profound photograph that was still in the process of being taken. Then the baby gagged and Otilla began thumping him on the back.

Lavinia had loved her car. The engine crackled and hissed as it cooled. The windshield had a long crack in it and there was a smell of gasoline. She turned off the ignition.

Lavinia had loved her car and now it was broken to bits. She didn’t know what to think. She opened the door and climbed out onto the road where she lay down in the dust. In the middle of the night, she got back into the car because the mosquitoes were so bad. Otilla and the baby were stretched out in the back so Lavinia sat in the driver’s seat once more, where she slept.