Taking Care (25 page)

Sarah stopped looking at Tommy’s tie. She moved her eyes to the potatoes she had peeled and put in a bowl of water.

Martha came into the kitchen and held on to her father’s arm. Her hair was long and thick, but it was getting darker. It was as though it had never been cut.

After they left, Sarah put the roast in the oven and went into the living room. The large window was full of the day, a colorless windy day without birds. Sarah sat on the floor and ran her fingers across the smooth, varnished wood. Beneath the expensive flooring was cold cement. Tanks had once lined the walls. Lobsters had crept back and forth across the mossy glass. The phone rang. Sarah didn’t look at it, suspecting it was Genevieve. Then she picked it up.

“Hello,” said Genevieve, “I thought I might drop by. It’s a bleak day, isn’t it. Cold. Is your family at home?”

“They go out on Sunday,” Sarah said. “It gives me time to think. They go to church.”

“What do you think about?” The woman’s voice seemed far away. Sarah strained to hear her.

“I’m supposed to cook dinner. When they come back we eat dinner.”

“I can prepare clams in forty-three different ways,” Genevieve said.

“This is a roast. A roast pork.”

“Well, may I come over?”

“All right,” Sarah said.

She continued to sit on the floor, waiting for Genevieve, looking at the water beneath the sky. The water on the horizon was a wide, satin ribbon. She wished that she had the courage to swim on such a bitter, winter day. To swim far out and rest, to hesitate and then to return. Her life was dark, unexplored. Her abstinence had drained her. She felt sluggish, robbed. Her body had no freedom.

She sat, seeing nothing, the terrible calm light of the day around her. The things she remembered were so far away,
bathed in a different light. Her life seemed so remote to her. She had sought happiness in someone, knowing she could not find it in herself and now her heart was strangely hard. She rubbed her head with her hands.

Her life with Tommy was broken, irreparable. Her life with him was over. His infidelities kept getting mixed up in her mind with the death of the boy, with Tommy’s false admission that he had been driving when the boy died. Sarah couldn’t understand anything. Her life seemed so random, so needlessly constructed and now threatened in a way which did not interest her.

“Hello,” Genevieve called. She had opened the front door and was standing in the hall. “You didn’t hear my knock.”

Sarah got up. She was to entertain this woman. She felt anxious, adulterous. The cold rose from Genevieve’s skin and hair. Sarah took her coat and hung it in the closet. The fresh cold smell lingered on her hands.

Sarah moved into the kitchen. She took a package of rolls out of the freezer.

“Does your little girl like church?” Genevieve asked.

“Yes, very much.”

“It’s a stage,” said Genevieve. “I’m Catholic myself. As a child, I used to be fascinated by the martyrs. I remember a picture of St. Lucy, carrying her eyes like a plate of eggs, and St. Agatha. She carried her breasts on a plate.”

Sarah said, “I don’t understand what we’re talking about. I know you’re just using these words, that they mean other words, I …”

“Perhaps we could take your little girl to a movie sometime, a matinee, after she gets out of school.”

“Her name is Martha,” Sarah said. She saw Martha grown up, her hair cut short once more, taking rolls out of the freezer, waiting.

“Martha, yes,” Genevieve said. “Have you wanted more children?”

“No,” Sarah said. Their conversation was illegal, unspeakable. Sarah couldn’t imagine it ever ending. Her fingers tapped
against the ice-cube trays. “Would you care for a drink?”

“A very tall glass of vermouth,” Genevieve said. She was looking at a little picture Martha had made, that Sarah had tacked to the wall. It was a very badly drawn horse. “I wanted children. I wanted to fulfill myself. One can never fulfill oneself. I think it is an impossibility.”

Sarah made Genevieve’s drink very slowly. She did not make one for herself.

“When Stevie was Martha’s age, he knew everything about whales. He kept notebooks. Once, on his birthday, I took him to the whaling museum in New Bedford.” She sipped her drink. “It all goes wrong somewhere,” she said. She turned her back on Sarah and went into the other room. Sarah followed her.

“There are so many phrases for ‘dead,’ you know,” Genevieve was saying. “The kids think them up, or they come out of music or wars. Stevie had one that he’d use for dead animals and rock stars. He’d say they’d ‘bought the farm.’”

Sarah nodded. She was pulling and peeling at the nails of her hands.

“I think it’s pretty creepy. A dark farm, you know. Weedy. Run-down. Broken machinery everywhere. A real job.”

Sarah raised her head. “You want us to share Martha, don’t you,” she said. “It’s only right, isn’t it?”

“… the paint blown away, acres and acres of tangled, black land, a broken shutter over the well.”

Sarah lowered her head again. Her heart was cold, horrified. The reality of the two women, placed by hazard in this room, this bright functional tasteful room that Tommy had created, was being tested. Reality would resist, for days, perhaps weeks, but then it would yield. It would yield to this guest, this visitor, for whom Sarah had made room.

“Would you join me in another drink?” Genevieve asked. “Then I’ll go.”

“I mustn’t drink,” Sarah said.

“You don’t forget,” Genevieve said, “that’s just an old saw.” She went into the kitchen and poured more vermouth for
herself. Sarah could smell the meat cooking. From another room, the clock chimed.

“You must come to my home soon,” Genevieve said. She did not sit down. Sarah looked at the pale green liquid in the glass.

“Yes,” Sarah said, “soon.”

“We must not greet one another on the street, however. People are quick to gossip.”

“Yes,” Sarah said. “They would condemn us.” She looked heavily at Genevieve, full of misery and submission.

There was knocking on the door. “Sarah,” Tommy’s voice called, “why is the door locked?” She could see his dark head at the window.

“I must have thrown the bolt,” Genevieve said. “It’s best to lock your house in the winter, you know. It’s the kids mostly. They get bored. Stevie was a robber once or twice, I’m sure.” She put down her glass, took her coat from the closet and went out. Sarah heard Martha say, “That’s Mommy’s friend.”

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.”