Taking Care (20 page)

Katherine is startled one morning to see the electrician’s name in Dewey’s newspaper. The article she notices says that his car was stolen outside a local bar and driven to another bar where it remained locked, its windows rolled up tightly, in the parking lot for several days before it was discovered by police. The electrician’s mongrel dog was found dead in the car from asphyxiation. The thought of the dog waiting in the car in the rising heat makes Katherine feel panicky. The bar where the car was found has a package store where Katherine buys their liquor and she wonders why it was that she did not go down for wine or bourbon during those days that the car was there. But if she had driven into the parking lot beside the package store, would she have been aware of the situation? She doesn’t know, probably not.

Katherine buys a sympathy card, a card that shows a tree on a riverbank, looks up the electrician’s name in the phone book
and sends it to him. When Travis died, some of Katherine’s friends sent her sympathy cards and some, not knowing the etiquette of the situation, did not. Katherine has never sent a sympathy card in her life before but she does now to the hippie electrician whose dog has died, and weeps as she signs her name. She never knows if he receives it or not. Peter tells her that he never returned to work on the house and it was necessary to hire someone else.

In two weeks, just before Christmas, Katherine will be thirty. Annie’s daughter, Genevieve, and Katherine have the same birthdate, eighteen years apart. Katherine is Gen’s godmother. The child’s godfather is a Yale professor whom Katherine has never met. If something happened to Annie and her husband, if their house blew up, say, while Genevieve was at a slumber party somewhere else, would Katherine and the Yale professor be responsible for raising Gen? Katherine doesn’t know how this could be done within the constructs of a family situation, but she never mentions this to Annie.

Katherine visits Annie to ask Gen what she would like for her birthday.

“For my birthday,” Gen says, “I would like a pure white cockatoo and my own toaster.”

“Ha,” her mother says.

“I want a cockatoo because they talk,” Gen says, unperturbed. “You can teach them a lot of different words.”

“I think a cockatoo is a wonderful idea,” Annie says. She is joking. “You could teach it to say, ‘Have you brushed your teeth, Gen?’, ‘Have you put out the bathroom light, Gen?’, ‘Have you hung up your towel, Gen?’ You could teach it to say all those things and then I wouldn’t have to. We could talk about more important things.”

“What things?” Gen asks.

“We could talk and talk,” Annie says.

“About what?” Gen insists.

“We could discuss why you can’t cut the end off a piece of string,” Annie says.

“Why can’t you?” Gen asks.

“It’s a philosophical question,” Annie says, “we could talk about it forever.”

“We wouldn’t talk,” Gen says.

Her mother looks hurt. She pushes her hair up and off her neck, which makes her look younger and sadder.

“How is your turkey?” Gen asks Katherine. “What does he like to do?”

Katherine tells her that the turkey likes corn and egg shells and bagels and then finds herself telling a long Baba Yaga story. She tells Gen that the turkey reminds her of Baba Yaga, a Russian witch who lived in a house on chicken legs. Whenever anyone came along that Baba Yaga did not want to see, the chicken legs would move the house around so that the visitor couldn’t find the front door.

Gen had never heard of Baba Yaga.

“Do you like fairy tales?” Katherine asks her.

“I like science fiction,” Gen says and wanders from the room, smelling the way Annie would smell if she ever had the opportunity to use her own perfume.

“Have some wine,” Annie urges Katherine, “tell me what you’re thinking.”

“Actually,” Katherine says, “I was thinking about how I used to climb trees so a certain person would think I wasn’t home.”

Annie thinks Katherine is referring to her childhood. “Children are different today,” she sighs. “They’re entirely different from the way we used to be.”

A week before Katherine’s birthday, a long envelope arrives from Travis’s mother. Each year she sends a birthday card to Katherine one week ahead of time. She must have put the date down wrong on her calendar years ago and transferred it incorrectly to each succeeding year. Katherine opens the envelope and there is a birthday card and a long red and white automobile bumper sticker inside.
I LOVE MY VOLVO
the sticker says. Travis’s mother has a Volvo too, but an old one, a bulbous sedan painted a cheery Coca-Cola red. Katherine doesn’t put the sticker on her car. Actually, Katherine doesn’t love her
Volvo. She’s surprised that Travis’s mother doesn’t realize that.

Katherine’s birthday finally arrives. She has given Gen a tape recorder. As for herself, she and Peter decide to drink champagne all day. She would like to forget this birthday in a fashionable manner. Peter borrows a friend’s sailboat and they sail around in the morning drinking champagne. In the afternoon, they return the boat, change their clothes and go to an art opening at a local gallery where there is lots of champagne being served. The artist says that his paintings, which are mathematical and precise, are based on Gestalt principles of illusion. Katherine likes the paintings which give the impression that they have solved something, that something is settled and finished. They don’t remind her of anything. The artist is a fat jolly man dressed in black. His wife is beautiful and a smoker and since smoking is not allowed in the gallery, she stands outside mostly, smoking. Peter is a smoker too and he and the artist’s wife stand outside beneath the palms and smoke and drink champagne. She smokes Gauloises and he smokes Camels. They are the last smokers left in the world. When Katherine walks outside to join them, she finds herself telling the woman how much everything has changed, how only a few years ago there were pileated woodpeckers and tarpon and sea turtles, but there aren’t any more. Peter begins fiddling with a long silk scarf the artist’s wife is wearing. He holds a tasseled end in his hand and runs it through his fingers. He rocks back and forth on his heels and tosses one end of the scarf softly around the woman’s neck. Katherine walks away, down the street to the Volvo. Just as she is putting the key in the ignition, Peter runs up. She puts the car in gear and Peter jumps into the back seat as the car moves off.

“I’m sorry,” he says, “I was being a little ebullient.”

“Ebullient?” Katherine says. “Is that how you pronounce that?”

“Yes,” Peter says. “Honk the horn on your birthday.” He kisses her and climbs into the front seat. “Just honk the horn like you normally would.”

Katherine taps the horn and there is a loud blast which
makes her jump in her seat. It’s the sound of an ocean liner.

“I could have bought one that had eighty-one different sounds,” Peter says. “It was a synthesizer that mixed tone, bass, treble and frequency. You could make zoo sounds, UFO sounds, animal yelps, ambulance and police siren sounds, everything.”

“I love this,” Katherine says, and she does, but she will have to get used to hitting the horn. She never uses the horn. She is not that kind of a driver. She taps the horn again.

“Do you love me?” Peter asks.

“Yes,” Katherine says.

On New Year’s Day, Katherine goes to the house with Peter. He is going to plant four citrus trees and a Jacaranda. Katherine is going to poison the ants. She measures everything carefully and pours the poison through a funnel into the hills.

“There goes their breakfast nook!” Peter calls to her encouragingly. “There goes their fandango room!”

Katherine measures and mixes. She moves from one end of the property to the other, pouring the smoky green liquid into the mounds.

“There goes their ball game,” Peter says. He sets a lemon tree firmly in a hole, taps the earth down around it, sprays the green leaves lightly with a hose. The Jacaranda will grow high above the citrus and losing its leaves in winter, allow the sun to shine through its bare branches and ripen the fruit below. In the springtime, when the citrus is in neither fruit nor flower, the Jacaranda will be in full color. Katherine watches Peter as he works. She tries to remember the last words Travis ever said to her, the very last words. She can’t. She wraps the empty bottle of poison tightly in newspaper and stuffs it in the trash, then runs water from an outside spigot and washes her hands. She goes over to the turkey’s pen. The turkey looks at her with vacant dignity. She feeds it pieces of bread and grass through the wire.

“We’ll have a big party when this is all finished,” Peter says. “We’re going to have a wonderful time in this house.

“In the lot next door, behind a fence, someone starts a chain
saw. The turkey shrieks wildly in response. The turkey loves the sound of chain saws, motorcycles and sudden laughter.

“That’s new,” Katherine says, pointing through the trees at the shine of a distant roof. “We were never able to see a house over there before.”

“They’re building too,” Peter says. “They’ve subdivided the land.”

“Everything’s changing,” Katherine says.

“We won’t notice them,” Peter says, “we’ll plant some more trees.” When Katherine doesn’t reply, Peter says, “I know things change now and I do not care. It’s all been changed for me. Let it all change. We’ll be gone before it’s changed too much. I found that if you took a drink it got very much the same as it was always.”

Katherine looks at him.

“Hemingway,” Peter says.

“Yes, let’s have a drink,” Katherine says.

Katherine sits at the kitchen table in the beach shack and writes out invitations for the party Peter’s planned. As she writes addresses on envelopes, she thinks of a T-shirt Travis wore all the time. The T-shirt said
THE FAINTING EGG
. It had something to do with a vegetarian restaurant where one of their friends worked as a waiter. The shirt was dark blue and had white lettering. She remembers it clearly.

On the table with the invitations is a letter from Travis’s mother, who writes that she has just won a black and white television set in a soft drink contest. “I pried this little plastic liner out of the bottle cap and there it was, a little picture of a TV! The first time in my life I have ever won anything! I am donating it to the church, however, as I already have a nice TV.”

Katherine and Travis’s mother have been keeping in touch now for seven years.

Katherine puts everything down on the invitation except the date which she’ll fill in later. She and Peter do not know the date of the party because the house isn’t finished yet. There
have been delays. The weather has been unusually cold and rainy and the carpenter has a lung infection and hasn’t been able to work. But even though the work is not completed, they will have to return to the house. For the last few years, Dewey has rented the beach shack for the month of February to a couple from Canada and they are arriving late tonight. After Katherine finishes the invitations, she will sweep the rooms and go home. She and Peter will live in their unfinished house and in a while it will be finished and they will be there.

Katherine walks out to the beach. It is very cold, the sky is grey, the water white with swells. Freezing temperatures are predicted for the night. Dewey has told her that thirty years ago, there was such a severe freeze that even the mangroves died. Katherine watches the boys surf in their black wet suits. They are waiting for the heavenly shout and the trumpet calls, and while they wait, they surf. Katherine watches them until she begins to shiver. Back in the shack, she calls Peter on the telephone and tells him she’s just finishing up. He doesn’t have to pick her up in the car, she’ll walk home.

“It’s too cold,” Peter says.

“No, I want to.”

“I’ll warm you up when you get home,” Peter says.

Katherine sweeps the shack carefully. She scours the sinks and takes all the silverware out of the tray and checks it to make sure it’s clean. The sun goes down, filling the rooms with red light. When she finally leaves, it’s dark. She walks north along the beach for a mile until she reaches a small parcel of land that hasn’t been developed yet and is still in cedars and cabbage palms. She passes through this to the harrowing three-lane road that bisects the key, crosses the road and enters their neighborhood, a Venetian labyrinth of streets which hum with the sounds of sprinkler systems and pool filters.

In their lot, Peter has covered the newly planted citrus with plastic sheeting to protect them from the cold. He has covered the elephant ears, the Dieffenbachia, the arecas. Katherine makes her way past the enshrouded plants to the house which is ablaze with lights, virtually held aloft and secure in space by
thousands of watts. The house is huge, all angles and pitch, bleached wood and glass. Katherine puts the bag of invitations she has been carrying down on the ground, and chews on her nails which smell of Comet. She knows she is worrying about something that has already happened, something in the past which she should resist worrying about. She stands outside in the cold dark and looks into the house at Peter who is making himself a drink. She watches him as he fills a second glass with ice. It is a plastic insulated glass with a felt pelican roosting between the walls of the vacuum seal. It is Katherine’s glass, the one she has indicated a preference for. Peter’s glass has a piece of knotted rope. There is a fire burning in the new limestone fireplace and Peter stands before it looking at it while Katherine looks into the room, at Peter. Furniture is pushed against the walls and lumber and rolls of screening are stacked in a corner. Some of the furniture is covered with sheets to protect it from dust.

Peter walks through the lighted rooms toward Katherine but doesn’t see her. He goes to the telephone and she can tell by the numbers he dials that he is calling the beach house. They both wait while the phone rings and rings. Katherine moves even further from the house and crouches by the turkey pen which Peter has covered with a piece of plastic which doesn’t quite reach to the ground. She remembers how she used to hide from Travis long ago, and wonders when it was exactly when all her dreams and attitudes about herself were reduced to the pervasive memory of a dead boy. She knows she will go into the house soon and be with Peter, on this, the coldest night in many years, but for the moment she waits outside, in the dark. Beside her, in the pen, only the turkey’s foolish legs are visible, its impossible feet being hidden in straw.