Taking Care (24 page)

“My wife,” Tommy told the police, “was not feeling well. My wife,” Tommy said, “was in the passenger seat.”

Sarah stopped drinking immediately after the accident. She felt nauseated much of the time. She slept poorly. Her hands hurt her. The bones in her hands ached. She remembered that this was the way she felt the last time she had stopped drinking. It had been two years before. She remembered why she had stopped and she remembered why she had started again. She had stopped because she had done a cruel thing to her little Martha. It was spring and she and Tommy were giving a dinner party. Sarah had two martinis in the late afternoon when she was preparing dinner and then she had two more martinis with her guests. Martha had come downstairs to say a polite goodnight to everyone as she had been taught. She had put on her nightie and brushed her teeth. Sarah poured a little more gin in her glass and went upstairs with her to brush out her hair and put her to bed. Martha had long, thick blond hair of which she was very proud. On that night she wore it in a pony tail secured by an elasticized holder with two small colored balls on the end. Sarah’s fingers were clumsy and she could not get it off without pulling Martha’s hair and making her cry. She got a pair of scissors and carefully began snipping at the stubborn elastic. The scissors were large, like shears, and they had been difficult to handle. A foot of Martha’s gathered hair had abruptly fallen to the floor. Sarah remembered trying to pat it back into place on the child’s head.

So Sarah had stopped drinking the first time. She did not feel renewed. She felt exhausted and wary. She read and cooked.
She realized how little she and Tommy had to talk about. Tommy drank Scotch when he talked to her at night. Sometimes Sarah would silently count as he spoke to see how long the words took. When he was away and he telephoned her, she could hear the ice tinkling in the glass.

Tommy was in the city four days a week. He often changed hotels. He would bring Martha little bars of soap wrapped in the different colored papers of the hotels. Martha’s drawers were full of the soaps scenting her clothes. When Tommy came home on the weekends he would work on the house and they would give parties at which Tommy was charming. Tommy had a talent for holding his liquor and for buying old houses, restoring them and selling them for three times what he had paid for them. Tommy and Sarah had moved six times in eleven years. All their homes had been fine old houses in excellent locations two or three hours from New York. Sarah would stay in the country while Tommy worked in the city. Sarah did not know her way around New York.

For three weeks, Sarah did not drink. Then it was her birthday. Tommy gave her a slim gold necklace and fastened it around her neck. He wanted her to come to New York with him, to have dinner, see a play, spend the night with him in the fine suite the company had given him at the hotel. They had got a babysitter for Martha, a marvelous woman who polished the silver in the afternoon when Martha napped. Sarah drove. Tommy had never cared for driving. His hand rested on her thigh. Occasionally, he would slip his hand beneath her skirt. Sarah was sick with the thought that this was the way he touched other women.

By the time they were in Manhattan, they were arguing. They had been married for eleven years. Both had had brief marriages before. They could argue about anything. In mid-town, Tommy stormed out of the car as Sarah braked for a light. He took his suitcase and disappeared.

Sarah drove carefully for many blocks. When she had the opportunity, she would pull to the curb and ask someone how to get to Connecticut. No one seemed to know. Sarah thought
she was probably phrasing the question poorly but she didn’t know how else to present it. After half an hour, she made her way back to the hotel where Tommy was staying. The doorman parked the car and she went into the lobby. She looked into the hotel bar and saw Tommy in the dimness, sitting at a small table. He jumped up and kissed her passionately. He rubbed his hands up and down her sides. “Darling, darling,” he said, “I want you to have a happy birthday.”

Tommy ordered drinks for both of them. Sarah sipped hers slowly at first but then she drank it and he ordered others. The bar was subdued. There was a piano player who sang about the lord of the dance. The words seemed like those of a hymn. The hymn made her sad but she laughed. Tommy spoke to her urgently and gaily about little things. They laughed together like they had when they were first married. They had always drunk a lot together then and fallen asleep, comfortably and lovingly entwined on white sheets.

They went to their room to change for the theater. The maid had turned back the beds. There was a fresh rose in a bud vase on the writing desk. They had another drink in the room and got undressed. Sarah awoke the next morning curled up on the floor with the bedspread tangled around her. Her mouth was sore. There was a bruise on her leg. The television set was on with no sound. The room was a mess although Sarah could see that nothing had been really damaged. She stared at the television where black-backed gulls were dive-bombing on terrified and doomed cygnets in a documentary about swans. Sarah crept into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She sat in the tub while the water beat upon her. Pinned to the outside of the shower curtain was a note from Tommy, who had gone to work. “Darling,” the note said, “we had a
good
time on your birthday. I can’t say I’m sorry we never got out. I’ll call you for lunch. Love.”

Sarah turned the note inward until the water made the writing illegible. When the phone rang just before noon, she did not answer it.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance. And the way one witnesses things when one is drunk is different as well. It is like putting a face mask against the surface of the sea and looking into things, into their baffled and guileless hearts.

When Sarah had been a drinker, she felt that she had a fundamental and inventive grasp of situations, but now that she drank no longer, she found herself in the midst of a great and impenetrable silence which she could in no way interpret.

It was a small village. Many of the people who lived there did not even own cars. The demands of life were easily met in the village and it was pretty there besides. It was divided between those who always lived there and who owned fishing boats and restaurants and the city people who had more recently discovered the area as a summer place and winter weekend investment. On the weekends, the New Yorkers would come up with their houseguests and their pâté and cheeses and build fires and go cross-country skiing. Tommy came home to Sarah on weekends. They did things together. They agreed on where to go. During the week she was on her own.

Once, alone, she saw a helicopter carrying a tree in a sling across the Sound. The wealthy could afford to leave nothing behind.

Once, with the rest of the town, she saw five boats burning in their storage shrouds. Each summer resort has its winter pyromaniac.

Sarah did not read any more. Her eyes hurt when she read and her hands ached all the time. During the week, she marketed and walked and cared for Martha.

It was three months after Stevie Bettencourt was killed when his mother visited Sarah. She came to the door and knocked on it and Sarah let her in.

Genevieve Bettencourt was a woman Sarah’s age although she looked rather younger. She had been divorced almost from the day that Stevie was born. She had another son named Bruce who lived with his father in Nova Scotia. She had an old
powder-blue Buick parked on the street before Sarah’s house. The Buick had one white door.

The two women sat in Sarah’s handsome, sunny living room. It was very calm, very peculiar, almost thrilling. Genevieve looked all around the room. Off the living room were the bedrooms. The door to Sarah’s and Tommy’s was closed but Martha’s door was open. She had a little hanging garden against the window. She had a hamster in a cage. She had an enormous bookcase filled with dolls and books.

Genevieve said to Sarah, “That room wasn’t there before. This used to be a lobster pound. I know a great deal about this town. People like you have nothing to do with what I know about this town. Do you remember the way things were, ever?”

“No,” Sarah said.

Genevieve sighed. “Does your daughter look like you or your husband?”

“No one’s ever told me she looked like me,” Sarah said quietly.

On the glass-topped table before them there was a little wooden sculpture cutout that Tommy had bought. A man and woman sat on a park bench. Each wore a startled and ambiguous expression. Each had a terrier on the end of a string. The dogs were a puzzle. One fit on top of the other. Sarah was embarrassed about it being there. Tommy had put it on the table during the weekend and Sarah hadn’t moved it. Genevieve didn’t touch it.

“I did not want my life to know you,” Genevieve said. She removed a hair from the front of her white blouse and dropped it to the floor. She looked out the window at the sun. The floor was of a very light and varnished pine. Sarah could see the hair upon it.

“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said. “I’m so very, very sorry.” She stretched her neck and put her head back.

“Stevie was a mixed-up boy,” Genevieve said. “They threw him off the basketball team. He took pills. He had bad friends. He didn’t study and he got a D in geometry and they wouldn’t let him play basketball.”

She got up and wandered around the room. She wore green rubber boots, dirty jeans and a beautiful, hand-knit sweater. “I once bought all my fish here,” she said. “The O’Malleys owned it. There were practically no windows. Just narrow high ones over the tanks. Now it’s all windows, isn’t it? Don’t you feel exposed?”

“No, I …” Sarah began. “There are drapes,” she said.

“Off to the side, where you have your garden, there are whale bones if you dig deep enough. I can tell you a lot about this town.”

“My husband wants to move,” Sarah said.

“I can understand that, but you’re the real drinker, after all, aren’t you, not him.”

“I don’t drink any more,” Sarah said. She looked at the woman dizzily.

Genevieve was not pretty but she had a clear, strong face. She sat down on the opposite side of the room. “I guess I would like something,” she said. “A glass of water.” Sarah went to the kitchen and poured a glass of Vichy for them both. Her hands shook.

“We are not strangers to one another,” Genevieve said. “We could be friends.”

“My first husband always wanted to be friends with my second husband,” Sarah said after a moment. “I could never understand it.” This had somehow seemed analogous when she was saying it but now it did not. “It is not appropriate that we be friends,” she said.

Genevieve continued to sit and talk. Sarah found herself concentrating desperately on her articulate, one-sided conversation. She suspected that the words Genevieve was using were codes for other words, terrible words. Genevieve spoke thoughtlessly, dispassionately, with erratic flourishes of language. Sarah couldn’t believe that they were chatting about food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.

“I have a friend who is a designer,” Genevieve said. “She hopes to make a great deal of money someday. Her work has completely altered her perceptions. Every time she looks at a
view, she thinks of sheets. “Take out those mountains,’ she will say, ‘lighten that cloud a bit and it would make a great sheet.’ When she looks at the sky, she thinks of lingerie. Now when I look at the sky, I think of earlier times, happier times when I looked at the sky. I have never been in love, have you?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, “I’m in love.”

“It’s not a lucky thing, you know, to be in love.”

There was a soft scuffling at the door and Martha came in. “Hello,” she said. “School was good today. I’m hungry.”

“Hello, dear,” Genevieve said. To Sarah, she said, “Perhaps we can have lunch sometime.”

“Who is that?” Martha asked Sarah after Genevieve had left.

“A neighbor,” Sarah said, “one of Mommy’s friends.”

When Sarah told Tommy about Genevieve coming to visit her, he said, “It’s harassment. It can be stopped.”

It was Sunday morning. They had just finished breakfast and Tommy and Martha were drying the dishes and putting them away. Martha was wearing her church-school clothes and she was singing a song she had learned the Sunday before.

“… I’m going to the Mansion on the Happy Days’ Express …” she sang.

Tommy squeezed Martha’s shoulders. “Go get your coat, sweetie,” he said. When the child had gone, he said to Sarah, “Don’t speak to this woman. Don’t allow it to happen again.”

“We didn’t talk about that.”

“What else could you talk about? It’s weird.”

“No one talks about that. No one, ever.”

Tommy was wearing a corduroy suit and a tie Sarah had never seen before. Sarah looked at the pattern in the tie. It was random and bright.

“Are you having an affair?” Sarah asked.

“No,” he said easily. “I don’t understand you, Sarah. I’ve done everything I could to protect you, to help you straighten yourself out. It was a terrible thing but it’s over. You have to
get over it. Now, just don’t see her again. There’s no way that she can cause trouble if you don’t speak to her.”