Taking Care

Building

REMODELING their house is Peter’s idea, Katherine likes it the way it is. It is an old sprawling wooden house with small dark rooms. The plantings around it are old too, obvious from their type as well as their size. There are huge travelers’-trees, which aren’t popular any more, lining the driveway. This is on a key on the west coast of Florida, a key upon which the population has quadrupled in the last four years. Katherine has lived on the key for eight years and is forever finding herself telling new acquaintances how much everything has changed. These people all live in condos on the beach and are unapologetic, articulate and drink in moderation. Katherine hasn’t made a friend out of a new acquaintance in a long time.

Katherine first saw their house, and Peter, with her friend Annie, who was house-hunting. Peter is in real estate. He’s very successful now and has his own business, but then he was just getting started, working for someone else, and he was showing this house for sale on a Sunday afternoon. Peter grinned at Katherine as though he had met her before, which he had not. Annie thought the house was too dark, which it was, but Katherine liked it, although she was not in the position to buy anything. The house was a relic of the recent past in a neighborhood that had grown up around it. Peter told Katherine that he was thinking of buying it himself, it was such a good investment. Then he asked her to dinner and three months after that, they got married.

It is Katherine who has prevented Peter from improving their house before this. But the house had dry rot, it needed a new roof, new wiring. Really, remodeling was inevitable. Actually, little of the old house will remain. Now that Peter has convinced Katherine of the need to remodel, he encourages her to debate the decisions he makes.

“I want to lose an argument with you every so often,” he says, “that way the house will be more the way we both want it.”

But Katherine doesn’t have arguments with Peter, Peter never argues with anyone. All their friends are amazed, for example, at how well he gets along with the workmen involved in the remodeling. It’s unusual, their friends say, not to get upset with some, if not most, of these people in the long run, but Peter gets along with them all, the carpenter, the electrician, the plumber, the dry-wall and insulation man, the mason, the back-hoe operator, the roofer, whereas Katherine finds it difficult to converse with any of these people. Her jaws ache from projecting the illusion of concern. There is a basic misunderstanding between Katherine and all of them. They think she is interested in what is going to happen and she’s not.

“This is a house that will tell your story the way you want your story told,” the architect says.

“Heart-side up, heart-side out. Always,” the carpenter says. He is referring to boards.

The plumber says, “This is a beautiful tub. You should take good care of this tub.”

The dry-wall man says, “You were smart not to make square rooms. A square room is an acoustical prison.”

The electrician, a tall gaunt boy, says nothing. He looks like someone Katherine knew once, but she doesn’t think she’s actually met him before. Once all the young men she knew looked like him.

Peter and Katherine’s friends have told them that they “complement” one another by which they mean that Katherine is dark and rather glum and retiring and Peter is pale and energetic and gregarious. They’ve been married for five years. Katherine has heard that this is a dangerous time, statistically speaking, however she was married to her first husband for only ten months so she feels she has done her part to make statistics meaningless. Katherine’s first husband’s name was Peter also, although everyone called him by his middle name which was Travis. Even so, Katherine finds that she doesn’t call Peter by his name very often. She sometimes calls him “babe” as in “Here’s looking at you, babe,” when the first drink of the evening is about to be drunk. She isn’t aware that Peter uses her name very often either. Katherine suspects that, more or less, this is the way married people are with one another.

Peter and Katherine have rented a house to live in while the remodeling is going on. Katherine has arranged for this — it is the same beach house on the southernmost end of the key where she lived before she met Peter, after her divorce from Travis. She was thrilled when she learned from the elderly owner of the property, Dewey Dobbs, that the house was still cheap and available. Over the years, Dewey has driven a succession of developers half mad with lust and exasperation by refusing to sell his large unkempt holdings on the Gulf of Mexico. There are condominiums to both the south and east of him, pressed against his boundaries, towering high above the tall pine trees that shade his lowly buildings — the house that Peter and Katherine have rented, Dewey’s own, and a converted boat shed that Dewey rents to two surfers.

Katherine is happy about living in the beach house. It is little more than a shack really, small, hot, and gummy with salt spray. On the living room wall is a twenty-pound snook that Dewey’s son caught in 1947. There are straw mats on the floor and mildew on the ceiling. The water has a highly sulfurous odor and there is a leak beneath the sink which drains into a 7-Eleven Elvis Presley cup. The plastic cup describes the childhood of The King and must be emptied daily. Katherine takes a few clothes, a few books, a tube of zinc oxide, and moves in.

Peter doesn’t share Katherine’s enthusiasm for the shack. Actually, he hates it, but it doesn’t matter, he’s seldom there. He works very hard, and he comes home late. When he has any spare time, he spends it at their “real” house as he refers to it, watching the construction. He and Katherine are being exceptionally nice with one another. It is a difficult time, their friends say — the disruptions, the decisions — but everything, thanks to Peter, moves along smoothly. Katherine is not hurt that he has involved them in something that doesn’t engage her, and Peter is not offended by her non-involvement. Katherine feels that she must have learned something about marriage from being married before that is now working to her benefit. However, she doesn’t know quite what it is, or how, actually, it works.

Katherine is currently unemployed. In the past she has made jewelry or elaborate wooden puzzles that she sold at crafts fairs. She has made pastry for a catering service. She has taught classes at a botanical garden in town. She is good at cards and once she wanted to be a croupier on a cruise ship to the Bahamas, but she has never done that. When she had been married to Travis, she had done yard work. The two of them specialized in cleaning and trimming trees and palms. They had conscientiously refused those jobs where they were required to take down trees they thought were beautiful. About once a month, someone would want them to remove a one-hundred-year-old live oak on the assumption that a situation would arise in which a fiercely singular wind would come up in the night and tear off one of the tree’s massive limbs and send it through the roof of their aluminum gardening shed. Katherine and Travis would try to convince such people of the stupidity of what they wanted to do and sometimes they were successful, but more often they were not. They would drive by later and the tree would be gone. There would be a small rosebush in its place and bright sun would be streaming down everywhere. Then at the dump (this was when the dump was still small and new arrivals were quickly noted) the tree would be there, chopped and scattered, its branches still green in the refuse.

There had been a beautiful live oak in front of the house she had lived in with Travis in the days of their brief marriage. Neither the house nor the tree exist now, both having recently been leveled so that a cement-block Rent-a-Closet could be built on the site. People rent their condominiums during the height of the season and store their personal belongings in a Rent-a-Closet. Some of the people that Katherine now knows do that very thing. When she had been married to Travis and they had had one of their frequent quarrels and he had left the house, Katherine would often climb high up into the live oak and stay there until he returned. After he had been in the house for awhile, she would climb back down and saunter through the door, trying to give the impression that she had been someplace else, at a bar or with friends or even with a stranger, talking. She wanted him to think that she had someplace to go, away from him, and had gone there.

After their divorce, Katherine got the job at the botanical garden and rented Dewey’s beach shack. The retirees who attended her classes at the garden were primarily interested in plants that took little care and they were crazy about bromeliads which are able to flourish in deficient environments. Katherine told them how to force blooms by placing the plant and an apple in a plastic bag and they seemed to be thrilled with this information. After an hour of classes, Katherine conducted tours through the garden. It was boring work and she didn’t make much money, but she hadn’t needed much money then, and the job gave her time to think and imagine the kind of life that would be hers, eventually, now that she was free from a marriage she had found disappointing. She thought of taking flying lessons and maybe getting a pilot’s license. At night, in the beach shack, she stayed up late, listening to the soft thud and rush of the waves upon the sand. She could have enjoyed that time more if she had not been brooding so about Travis.

Four months after their divorce, Travis had gone camping on Cumberland Island and been bitten by ants and gone into anaphylactic reaction and died. The ranger who found him thought he’d had a heart attack but the doctor at the hospital saw the small red welts on his ankles. “It was only a few ants,” Travis’s mother had written Katherine. Travis was smart and sentimental, he had curly hair and often wore suspenders. He did not seem the kind of person to whom such a weird sad death would happen. As far as Katherine knew, he had not even had any allergies. Katherine felt that everyone had a certain closed circle of happenings that happened to them, certain kinds of things, and that somehow Travis had exchanged circles with someone else. Thinking about Travis troubled and baffled Katherine. Even now, she seems to stumble on the fact that she would not still be married to him even if he had not died.

When Travis and Katherine got their divorce, his mother had been very upset. “Why are you doing this!” she exclaimed to Katherine in a letter. “I don’t understand. Thank goodness there are no little babies to suffer.” Katherine rather wished there had been a baby. Of course he would not have suffered. Why would he? Katherine feels that if she had had an earlier child, it would be easier for her to have one now. She feels that she doesn’t have the instincts now to understand a child, and Peter doesn’t mind this, but if she’d like to have a child, it would be fine, he’d approve of such an idea, really. But there is no child that Katherine has with Peter and there was no child she had with Travis. When she had been with Travis she had an old black Jaguar XK-150 convertible and a toucan. With Peter, she has a new Volvo station wagon and a turkey.

Peter and Katherine have a turkey because they went to a communal feast on Thanksgiving Day and the live turkey was the grand prize in a dart game. The host, a wealthy man who has made a fortune in swimming pool construction, is a good friend of Peter’s. He is going to install a caged pool for them at cost as part of their remodeling project. The host always gives fabulous parties. On Halloween, he gave a party where he had an open casket on the lanai filled with Big Macs. On Thanksgiving, there were large quantities of meat, pies, watermelon and liquor. Neither Katherine nor Peter won at darts, but the winner didn’t want the turkey and the runners-up didn’t want it either, so at the end of the evening, Peter and Katherine loaded the turkey into the Volvo and took it home. It seemed an amusing thing to do at the time.

There are three things that Katherine feels are very nice about the turkey. One is the way sunlight falls through his red wattles, making them almost transparent. Two are the sounds he makes which are a cross between an electronic game and a mourning dove. And the third is that Katherine likes his feet very much. They are immense, gruesome, Baba Yaga feet. Fairy-tale feet in a story in which the hero declares at the very beginning — I will go I know not where, I shall bring back I know not what—

It is a bit eccentric to have a turkey. All their friends say this, but Katherine doesn’t mind being considered a little eccentric. On Thanksgiving, Katherine walked around the party collecting watermelon rinds to take home and use in a pickling recipe that Travis’s mother had once sent to her. Katherine had never had the opportunity to try the recipe before because it called for such large quantities. “Isn’t she a little young to be so eccentric?” the hostess asked Peter, laughing, as Katherine dropped half-eaten watermelon in a plastic bag. Katherine took the remark as a compliment.

“What on earth are you going to do with a turkey?” Travis’s mother writes. “Julia Child says that Americans should grow their own vegetables and raise rabbits to cut down on their food bills. Is something like that your intention?”

Travis’s mother is discreet. For example, she never mentions her son, but if she wasn’t always thinking about him, why would she continue to correspond with Katherine? When they were first married, she gave Katherine some photographs of Travis as a little boy, and when they were divorced, Katherine returned them to her. Katherine told her that they were breaking up because they had different dreams. This wasn’t exactly true, but the explanation seemed vague enough to be inarguable. When Travis realized that Katherine was serious about wanting a divorce, he accused her of having no conception of the real world. “The real world is hidden by your imagination,” he said.

Katherine doesn’t think she has much of an imagination. She had never imagined for instance that she would have stopped loving Travis and that he would have died and that she would spend so much of her time now remembering him.

Katherine has difficulty imagining her life at all, not that she has to, she thinks, after all it is happening to her, her life, she doesn’t have to imagine it, and trying to imagine the way her life had been with Travis always makes her feel as though a bone were caught in her throat. The things they possessed together have vanished. The Jag had gone through two transmissions, a gas tank and a brake overhaul and had to be sold, and after they decided upon the divorce, it seemed only sensible to give the toucan up too. Travis used to buy ping-pong balls and baby squeak toys for the toucan to play with. He kept grapes in his shirt pocket for the toucan to pluck out. They had bought the bird in a pet store for forty-five dollars which had been a terrific extravagance for them. Now, Katherine has heard that they cost two thousand dollars. They are smuggled into the country by men wearing panty-hose beneath their trousers. The panty-hose holds the baby birds secure but allows them to breathe. No one that Katherine knows has a toucan, but their image frequently appears on shirts, and hanging from the ceiling in an elegant little shop that her friend Annie runs, there is a larger-than-life silk toucan on a macramé swing.

Times have changed, Katherine thinks, and when she thinks of the words, they appear like one of Peter’s realty computer print-outs in her brain — TIMES HAVE CHANGED — and she thinks she is still a little young to be thinking like this.

During the remodeling, Katherine spends all her time on the beach and in the shack there. She goes to the other house only to feed the turkey. Peter could feed it but Katherine feels responsible for this peculiarity in their lives. She tries to avoid looking at the house, but that is difficult. It is becoming larger and is about to make a statement of some sort — an expensive, sleek, convivial statement. Katherine prefers studying the turkey, its amazing feet, its warty naked neck of astonishing cerulean.

Every morning, Katherine visits Dewey. Nothing has changed in his house. He is old, but he has always been old. Even the plastic rectangle electric “environment” that Katherine remembers from years before still sits on top of the television set. The rectangle is full of colored turquoise water which flows and falls in a simulation of rolling surf. It reminds her of Travis, Katherine doesn’t know why. Travis had never seen it.

One day, Katherine notices that there is no longer a pan of water outside Dewey’s door.

“Don’t you still put out water for the snakes?” Katherine asks.

The old man looks baffled.

“You used to put out water for the snakes and the rabbits and they’d come right up to the door.”

“I can’t remember that,” Dewey says.

Dewey is a cripple who scoots around on crutches. One night, years before, he was walking home from the grocery with a pint of coconut ice cream, when a car struck him down, crushing his legs. The woman kept right on driving. When the police later found her, she told them she had heard a noise but she thought she had just knocked over a garbage can.

“How much of life is like that, am I right?” Dewey says. “I was in the wrong place at the wrong time.”

Dewey has immense shoulders and a high-pitched crackling voice, and his house smells of kerosene and flowers. He has a bouquet of flowers delivered to his house every week. He also has the newspaper delivered every morning and after he reads it, he puts it carefully back together again so that it looks like a completely fresh, unexamined paper and gives it to Katherine.

Sometimes, Katherine has a drink with Dewey in the evening, before Peter comes home from work.

“Where’s your husband?” Dewey asks. “I wish he’d come over and say hello sometime.”

Katherine sips her drink and looks through Dewey’s greasy windows at the setting sun. She feels confused. “He’s very involved in our house,” she finally says, “but I’m sure he will.”

“Have you met those boys, those surfer boys?” Dewey asks. “They’re good boys. The only book they own is the Bible. When they’re not surfing, they’re reading the Bible. They’re waiting for the Rapture.”

“What’s the Rapture?” Katherine asks.

“As I understand it,” Dewey says, “that’s when things get straightened out at last.”

In the living room, Dewey has a large bureau which is full of games and tricks. He has cards in which a picture is concealed. When one first looks at it, it appears merely as a nonrepresentational design, but hidden, at a certain angle, using shadings of light and dark and depth perceptions, is the likeness of a cow or a helicopter or William Holden as he appeared in Sunset Boulevard. Once the shape becomes apparent, of course, it remains forever accessible to the eye. Katherine thinks that if she had a child, he would be fascinated with the contents of this bureau.

Peter teases Katherine about the surfers who are muscular and tanned with short blond hair. When the boys see Katherine, they smile and converse with her politely in their surf-veggie language. Katherine doesn’t flirt with the surfers. She feels older than them, that’s all she feels.

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.