Taking Care (13 page)

Later, the man goes out to the pool. Jenny hates the baths, but they come here several times a week on the man’s insistence. She dresses and goes out to the side of the pool and watches the man swim back and forth. There are many people here, naked or nearly so, tossing miniature footballs back and forth. She sees the man grasp the ankles of a woman and begin to tow her playfully through the water. The woman wears silver earrings. Her hair is silver, her pubic hair is silver. Her mouth is a thickly frosted white. The water foams on her skin in tiny translucent bubbles. The woman laughs and moves her legs up in a scissors grip around the man’s waist. Jenny sees him kiss her.

Another man, a Mexican, comes up to Jenny. He is bare-chested and wears white trousers and tall, yellow boots. He absently plucks at his left nipple while he looks at her.

“Ford Galaxie,” he says at last. He takes a ring of car keys from his pocket and jerks his head toward the mountains.

“No,” Jenny says.

“Galaxie,” the Mexican says. “Galaxie.
Rojo.”

Jenny sees the car, its red shell cold in the black mountains, drawn through the landscape of rock and mutilated maguey. Drawn through, with her inside, quietly transported.

“No,” she says. She hates the baths. The tile in the bottom of the pool is arranged in the shape of a bird, a heron with thin legs and a huge, flat head. Her lover stands still in the water now, looking at her, amused.

“Jenny,” her mother laughs. “You’re such a dreamer. Would you like to go out for supper? You and Daddy and I can go to the restaurant that you like.”

For it is just the summer. That is all it is, and Jenny is only five. In the house which they are renting on Martha’s Vineyard, there is a dinghy stored in the rafters of the living room. The landlord is supposed to come for it and take it down, but
he does not. Jenny positions herself beneath the dinghy and scatters her shell collection over her legs and chest. She pretends that she has been cast out of it and floated to the bottom of the sea.

“Jenny-cake, get up now,” her mother says. The child rises heavily from the floor. The same sorrow undergone for nothing is concluded. Again and again, nothing.

“Oh Jenny-cake,” her mother says sadly, for Jenny is so quiet, so pale. They have come to the island for the sunshine, for play, to offer Jenny her childhood. Her childhood eludes them all. What is the guide which Jenny follows?

“Let’s play hairdresser,” her mother says. “I’ll be the hairdresser and you be the little girl.”

Jenny lets her comb and arrange her hair.

“You’re so pretty,” her mother says.

But she is so melancholy, so careless with herself. She is bruised everywhere. Her mother parts her hair carefully. She brings out a dish of soapy water and brushes and trims Jenny’s nails. She is put in order. She is a tidy little girl in a clean dress going out to supper on a summer night.

“Come on Jenny,” her mother urges her. “We want to be back home while it’s still light.” Jenny moves slowly to the door that her father is holding open for them.

“I have an idea,” her mother says, “I’ll be a parade and you be the little girl following the parade.”

Jenny is so far away. She smiles to keep her mother from prattling so. She is what she will be. She has no energy, no talent, not even for love. She lies face down, her face buried in a filthy sheet. The man lies beside her. She can feel his heart beating on her arm. Pounding like something left out of life. A great machine, a desolate engine, taking over for her, moving her. The machine moves her out the door, into the streets of the town.

There is a dance floor in the restaurant. Sometimes Jenny dances with her father. She dances by standing on top of his shoes while he moves around the floor. The restaurant is quite expensive. The menu is written in chalk on a blackboard which
is then rolled from table to table. They go to this restaurant mostly because Jenny likes the blackboard. She can pretend that this is school.

There is a candle on each table, and Jenny blows it out at the beginning of each meal. This plunges their table into deep twilight. Sometimes the waitress relights the candle, and Jenny blows it out again. She can pretend that this is her birthday over and over again. Her parents allow her to do this. They allow her to do anything that does not bring distress to others. This usually works out well.

Halfway through their dinner, they become aware of a quarrel at the next table. A man is shouting at the woman who sits beside him. He does not appear angry, but he is saying outrageous things. The woman sits very straight in her chair and cuts into her food. Once, she puts her hand gently on the side of his head. He does not shrug it off nor does it appear that he allows the caress. The woman’s hand falls back in her lap.

“Please don’t,” the woman says. “We’re spoiling the others’ dinner.”

“I don’t care about the others,” the man says. “I care about you.”

The woman’s laugh is high and uneasy. Her face is serene, but her hands tremble. The bones glow beneath her taut skin. There is a sense of blood, decay, the smell of love.

“Nothing matters except you,” the man says again. He reaches over and picks up the food from her plate. It is some sort of creamed fish. He squeezes it in his hand and lets it drop on the table between them. It knocks over the flowers, the wine. “What do you care what others think?” he says.

“I don’t know why people go out if they’re not intending to have a nice time,” Jenny’s mother whispers. Jenny doesn’t speak. The man’s curses tease her ears. The reality of the couple, now gone, cheats her eyes. She gazes fixedly at the abandoned table, at the garbage there. Everywhere there is disorder. Even in her parents’ eyes.

“Tomorrow we’re going sailing,” her father says. “It’s going to be a beautiful day.”

“I would say that woman had a problem there,” Jenny’s mother says.

Outside, the sunset has dispersed the afternoon’s fog. The sun makes long paddle strokes through the clouds. At day’s end, the day creaks back to brightness like a swinging boom. Jenny walks down the street between her parents. At the curb, as children do, she takes a little leap into space, supported, for the moment, by their hands.

And now gone for good, this moment. It is night again.

“It’s been night for a long time,” the man says. He is shaving at the basin. His face, to about an inch below his eyes, is a white mask of lather. His mouth is a dark hole in the mask.

Jenny’s dizzy from drinking. The sheets are white, the walls are white. One section of the room has a raised ceiling. It rises handsomely to nothing but a single light bulb, shaded by strips of wood. The frame around the light is very substantial. It is as though the light were caged. The light is like a wild thing up there, pressed against the ceiling, a furious bright creature with slanty wings.

In the room there is a chair, a table, a bureau and a bed. There is a milkshake in a glass on a tin tray. On the surface of the milk, green petals of mold reach out from the sides toward the center.

“Clean yourself up and we’ll go out,” the man says.

Jenny moves obediently to the basin. She hangs her head over the round black drain. She splashes her hands and face with water. The drain seems very complex. Grids, mazes, avenues of descent, lacings, and webs of matter. At the very bottom of the drain she sees a pinpoint of light. She’s sure of it. Children lie there in that light, sleeping. She sees them so clearly, their small, sweet mouths open in the light.

“We know too much,” Jenny says. “We all know too much almost right away.”

“Clean yourself up better than that,” the man says.

“You go ahead. I’ll meet you there,” Jenny says. For she has plans for the future. Jenny has lived in nothing if not the future all her life. Time had moved between herself and the man, but
only for years. What does time matter to the inevitability of relations? It is inevitability that matters to lives, not love. For had she not always remembered him? And seen him rising from a kiss? Always.

When she is alone, she unties the rope that ties her luggage together. The bag is empty. She has come to this last place with nothing, really. She has been with this man for a long time. There had always been less of her each time she followed him. She wants to do this right, but her fingers fumble with the rope. It is as though her fingers were cold, the rope knotted and soaked with sea water. It is so difficult to arrange. She stops for a moment and then remembers in a panic that she has to go to the bathroom. That was the most important thing to remember. She feels close to tears because she almost forgot.

“I have to go to the bathroom,” she cries.

Her mother leads her there.

“This is not a nice bathroom,” her mother says. Water runs here only at certain times of the day. It is not running now. There are rags on the floor. The light falling through the window is dirty.

“Help me Mother,” Jenny says.

Her stomach is so upset. She is afraid she will soil herself. She wants to get out in the air for a moment and clear her head. Her head is full of lies. Outside the toilet, out there, she remembers, is the deck of the motor sailer. The green sails which have faded to a style of blue are luffing, pounding like boards in the wind. She closes the door to the toilet. Out here is the Atlantic, rough and blue and cold. Of course there is no danger. The engines are on; they are bringing the people back to the dock. The sails have the weight of wood. There is no danger. She is all right. She is just a little girl. She is with her mother and father. They are on vacation. They are cruising around the island with other tourists. Her father has planned an excursion for each day of their vacation. Now they are almost home. No one is behaving recklessly. People sit quietly on the boat or move about measuredly, collecting tackle or coiling lines or helping children into their sweaters.

Jenny sees the man waiting on the dock. The boat’s engines whine higher as the boat is backed up, as it bumps softly against the canvas-wrapped pilings. The horrid machine whines higher and higher. She steps off into his arms.

He kisses her as he might another. She finds him rough, hurtful at first, but then his handling of her becomes more gentle, more sure in the knowledge that she is willing.

His tongue moves deeply, achingly in her mouth. His loving becomes autonomous now. It becomes, at last, complete.

T
HE
yard boy was a spiritual materialist. He lived in the Now. He was free from the karmic chain. Being enlightened wasn’t easy. It was very hard work. It was manual labor actually.

The enlightened being is free. He feels the sorrows and sadness of those around him but does not necessarily feel his own. The yard boy felt that he had been enlightened for about two months, at the most.

The yard boy had two possessions. One was a pickup truck. The other was a plover he had stuffed and mounted when he thought he wanted to be an ornithologist, in the days before he had become a spiritual materialist. The bird was in the room he rented. The only other thing in the room was a bed. The landlady provided sheets and towels. Sometimes when he came back from work hot and sweaty with little bits of leaves and stuff caught in his hair, the landlady would give him a piece of key lime pie on a blue plate.

The yard boy was content. He had hard muscular arms and a tanned back. He had compassion. He had a girl friend. When he thought about it, he supposed that having a girl friend was a cop-out to the security which he had eschewed. This was a preconception however and a preconception was the worst form of all the forms of security. The yard boy believed he was in balance on this point. He tried to see things the way they were from the midst of nowhere, and he felt that he had worked out this difficulty about the girl friend satisfactorily.
The important thing was to be able to see through the veils of preconception.

The yard boy was a handsome fellow. He seldom spoke. He was appealing. Once he had run over an old lady and had broken her leg, but no one had gotten mad at him about it. Now that he was a yard boy his hands smelled of 6-6-6. His jeans smelled of tangelos. He was honest and truthful, a straightforward person who did not distinguish between this and that. For the girl friend he always had a terrific silky business which was always at the ready.

The yard boy worked for several very wealthy people. In the morning of every day he got into his pickup and drove over the causeways to the Keys where he mowed and clipped and cut and hauled. He talked to the plants. He always told them what he was going to do before he did it so that they would have a chance to prepare themselves. Plants have lived in the Now for a long time but they still have to have some things explained to them.

At the Wilsons’ house the yard boy clips a sucker from an orange tree. It is February. Even so, the orange tree doesn’t like it much. Mrs. Wilson comes out and watches the yard boy while he works. She has her son with her. He is about three. He doesn’t talk yet. His name is Tao. Mrs. Wilson is wealthy and can afford to be wacky. What was she supposed to do after all, she asked the yard boy once, call her kid George? Fred? For Godssakes.