Taking Care (6 page)

When Sam returned to the table in the Hot Shoppe on the New Jersey Turnpike after learning about his divorce, Elizabeth didn’t look at him.

“I have been practicing different expressions, none of which seem appropriate,” Elizabeth said.

“Well,” Sam said.

“I might as well be honest,” Elizabeth said.

Sam bit into his egg. He did not feel lean and young and unencumbered.

“In the following sentence, the same word is used in each of the missing spaces, but pronounced differently.” Elizabeth’s head was bowed. She was reading off the place mat. “Don’t look at yours now, Sam,” she said, “the answer’s on it.” She slid his place mat off the table, spilling coffee on his cuff in the
process.
“A prominent _____and man came into a restaurant at the height of the rush hour. The waitress was_____to serve him immediately as she had_____.”

Sam looked at her. She smiled. He looked at the child. The child’s eyes were closed and she was moving her thumb around in her mouth as though she were making butter there. Sam paid the bill. The child went to the bathroom. An hour later, just before the Tappan Zee Bridge, Sam said,
“Notable.”

“What?” Elizabeth said.

“Notable.
That’s the word that belongs in all three spaces.”

“You looked,” Elizabeth said.

“Goddamn it,” Sam yelled. “I did not look!”

“I knew this would happen,” Elizabeth said. “I knew it was going to be like this.”

It is a very hot night. Elizabeth has poison ivy on her wrists. Her wrists are covered with calamine lotion. She has put Saran Wrap over the lotion and secured it with a rubber band. Sam is in love. He smells the wonderfully clean, sun-and-linen smell of Elizabeth and her calamine lotion.

Elizabeth is going to tell a fairy story to the child. Sam tries to convince her that fables are sanctimonious and dully realistic.

“Tell her any one except the ‘Frog King,’” Sam whispers.

“Why can’t I tell her that one,” Elizabeth says. She is worried.

“The toad stands for male sexuality,” Sam whispers.

“Oh Sam,” she says. “That’s so superficial. That’s a very superficial analysis of the animal-bridegroom stories.”

“I am an animal,” Sam growls, biting her softly on the collarbone.

“Oh Sam,” she says.

Sam’s first wife was very pretty. She had the flattest stomach he had ever seen and very black, very straight hair. He adored her. He was faithful to her. He wrote both their names on the flyleaves of all his books. They were married for six years. They
went to Europe. They went to Mexico. In Mexico they lived in a grand room in a simple hotel opposite a square. The trees in the square were pruned in the shape of perfect boxes. Each night, hundreds of birds would come home to the trees. Beside the hotel was the shop of a man who made coffins. So many of the coffins seemed small, for children. Sam’s wife grew depressed. She lay in bed for most of the day. She pretended she was dying. She wanted Sam to make love to her and pretend that she was dying. She wanted a baby. She was all mixed up.

Sam suggested that it was the ions in the Mexican air that made her depressed. He kept loving her but it became more and more difficult for them both. She continued to retreat into a landscape of chaos and warring feelings.

Her depression became general. They had been married for almost six years but they were still only twenty-four years old. Often they would go to amusement parks. They liked the bumper cars best. The last time they had gone to the amusement park, Sam had broken his wife’s hand when he crashed head-on into her bumper car. They could probably have gotten over the incident had they not been so bitterly miserable at the time.

In the middle of the night, the child rushes down the hall and into Elizabeth and Sam’s bedroom.

“Sam,” the child cries, “the baseball game! I’m missing the baseball game.”

“There is no baseball game,” Sam says.

“What’s the matter? What’s happening!” Elizabeth cries.

“Yes, yes,” the child wails. “I’m late, I’m missing it.”

“Oh what is it!” Elizabeth cries.

“The child is having an anxiety attack,” Sam says.

The child puts her thumb in her mouth and then takes it out again. “I’m only five years old,” she says.

“That’s right,” Elizabeth says. “She’s too young for anxiety attacks. It’s only a dream.” She takes the child back to her
room. When she comes back, Sam is sitting up against the pillows, drinking a glass of Scotch.

“Why do you have your hand over your heart?” Elizabeth asks.

“I think it’s because it hurts,” Sam says.

Elizabeth is trying to stuff another fable into the child. She is determined this time. Sam has just returned from setting the mooring for his sailboat. He is sprawled in a hot bath, listening to the radio.

Elizabeth says, “There were two men wrecked on a desert island and one of them pretended he was home while the other admitted …”

“Oh Mummy,” the child says.

“I know that one,” Sam says from the tub. “They both died.”

“This is not a primitive story,” Elizabeth says. “Colorless, anticlimactic endings are typical only of primitive stories.”

Sam pulls his knees up and slides underneath the water. The water is really blue. Elizabeth had dyed curtains in the tub and stained the porcelain. Blue is Elizabeth’s favorite color. Slowly, Sam’s house is turning blue. Sam pulls the plug and gets out of the tub. He towels himself off. He puts on a shirt, a tie and a white summer suit. He laces up his sneakers. He slicks back his soaking hair. He goes into the child’s room. The lights are out. Elizabeth and the child are looking at each other in the dark. There are fireflies in the room.

“They come in on her clothes,” Elizabeth says.

“Will you marry me?” Sam asks.

“I’d love to,” she says.

Sam calls his friends up, beginning with Peter, his oldest friend. While they have been out of touch, Peter has become a soft contact lenses king.

“I am getting married,” Sam says.

There is a pause, then Peter finally says, “Once more the boat departs.”

It is harder to get married than one would think. Sam has forgotten this. For example, what is the tone that should be established for the party? Elizabeth’s mother believes that a wedding cake is very necessary. Elizabeth is embarrassed about this.

“I can’t think about that, Mother,” she says. She puts her mother and the child in charge of the wedding cake. At the child’s suggestion, it has a jam center and a sailboat on it.

Elizabeth and Sam decide to get married at the home of a justice of the peace. Her name is Mrs. Custer. Then they will come back to their own house for a party. They invite a lot of people to the party.

“I have taken out ‘obey,’” Mrs. Custer says, “but I have left in ‘love’ and ‘cherish.’ Some people object to the ‘obey.’”

“That’s all right,” Sam says.

“I could start now,” Mrs. Custer says. “But my husband will be coming home soon. If we wait a few moments, he will be here and then he won’t interrupt the ceremony.”

“That’s all right,” Sam says.

They stand around. Sam whispers to Elizabeth, “I should pay this woman a little something, but I left my wallet at home.”

“That’s all right,” Elizabeth says.

“Everything’s going to be fine,” Sam says.

They get married. They drive home. Everyone has arrived, and some of the guests have brought their children. The children run around with Elizabeth’s child. One little girl has long red hair and painted green nails.

“I remember you,” the child says. “You had a kitty. Why didn’t you bring your kitty with you?”

“That kitty bought the chops,” the little girl says.

Elizabeth overhears this. “Oh my goodness,” she says. She takes her daughter into the bathroom and closes the door.

“There is more than the seeming of things,” she says to the child.

“Oh Mummy,” the child says, “I just want my nails green like that girl’s.”

“Elizabeth,” Sam calls. “Please come out. The house is full
of people. I’m getting drunk. We’ve been married for one hour and fifteen minutes.” He closes his eyes and leans his forehead against the door. Miraculously, he enters. The closed door is not locked. The child escapes by the same entrance, happy to be freed. Sam kisses Elizabeth by the shower stall. He kisses her beside the sink and before the full length mirror. He kisses her as they stand pressed against the windowsill. Together, in their animistic embrace, they float out the window and circle the house, gazing down at all those who have not found true love, below.

T
HE
trailer was sitting on ten ruined tires in the middle of the woods. There was a river fifty feet away but after what it had done to her, she hardly ever looked at it.

The day after they moved in, she had walked down there and stood on the little dock, looking up and down as though she were waiting for a bus. The woods were thick and purplish and ran right into the water. There wasn’t any shore. There was the high land and then a line of ropy contorted trees with all the roots exposed like the tendons in an arm, and then the water. And there wasn’t any sun. Although it was noon, the light was second-hand and shabby. The sun was enmeshed in a high tree, tangled in the hanging moss, beating feebly or not at all, like something subject to wind or exhaustion. She looked upstream and there was a gentle wide turn to the river and the woods turned black and flaky. White birds were milling, falling down to the water and then being sucked up again, as though by a draft, with no wingbeat and no cry.

Nothing looked as though it were about to change from one week to the next. She bent slightly at the waist and looked straight down. The river bottom was red and the water was different colors at different depths—saffron, red, black. Fish hung ornamentally above a rusting can. A steering wheel from a car was wedged between two logs. She lay down on her stomach and poked at the water with her hand. Bored, she splashed and patted the surface. Two otters erupted for air a
foot beyond her lowered head, sleek and toothy with a sound like escaping gas. She shrieked, and ran back to the trailer.

She flung herself on the bed and wept for an hour, and nothing her husband could do would stop her. Finally, she took a hot bath and drank three martinis. The otters were the same otters which had terrified her as a child when they were in a color plate, swimming in the
Book of Knowledge.
She had never been able to remember what volume they were in and was therefore always coming across them. It became a dangerous thing to do her homework. Even when her father had cut the picture out, she would see other things that resembled the otters and she felt that her entire childhood had been ruined. She told this all to her husband. He didn’t know what to say. He kissed her and held her on his lap and covered them both with a quilt.

Her name was Lola and she was young and had a pretty face. Her husband Jim had a pretty face too, which was why he was a television newscaster rather than being just another newsman. He had brown heavy hair, carefully cut and combed, and was tall and thirty years old. He would look thirty for the next two decades, which worried Lola.

Jim worked in the capital. It wasn’t much of a town but it was crowded with state office buildings and two colleges and an agricultural school, and when he had started to look for a house late in the summer, there wasn’t anything to rent. Each day he drove further and further from the town on some realtor’s suggestion, Lola by his side, biting her nails and occasionally giving a little cry as though she had been pinched. All they passed were pines and careless farms and an occasional house with a dirt yard and a sign advertising yard eggs and crickets and rabbits. Lola wouldn’t look any more. She put her head on his lap and listened to the radio.

The day he finally found the trailer and paid the rent, she wasn’t with him. She had a headache pain and was staying behind in the motel room, calling all their friends in the town they had left behind, remembering good times together. The trailer was thirty miles from the capital on blacktop and then
another four down a logging road, and was in the next state. He told her that it didn’t have a phone but it had a CB radio and an air-conditioner, washing machine, vacuum cleaner, conversation pit and wall-to-wall carpeting. When she arrived, there was half a watermelon in the refrigerator, two jars of cane syrup beneath the sink, and an unflushed toilet. There was a little lawn, a mangled garden within a square of sticks and string, and then the deep bruised woods, thick as a velvet curtain. The ground all around the trailer was red. Lola felt that it looked idiotic, as though someone had tried to pretty the place up.