Taking Care

The Farm

IT was a dark night in August. Sarah and Tommy were going to their third party that night, the party where they would actually sit down to dinner. They were driving down Mixtuxet Avenue, a long black avenue of trees that led out of the village, away from the shore and the coastal homes into the country. Tommy had been drinking only soda that night. Every other weekend, Tommy wouldn’t drink. He did it, he said, to keep trim. He did it because he could.

Sarah was telling a long story as she drove. She kept asking Tommy if she had told it to him before, but he was noncommittal. When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah talked and talked. She was telling him a terrible story that she had read in the newspaper about an alligator at a jungle farm attraction in Florida. The alligator had eaten a child who had crawled into its pen. The alligator’s name was Cookie. Its owner had shot it immediately. The owner was sad about everything, the child, the parents’ grief, Cookie. He was quoted in the paper as saying that shooting Cookie was not an act of revenge.

When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah felt cold. She was shivering in the car. There were goosepimples on her tanned, thin arms. Tommy sat beside her smoking, saying nothing.

There had been words between them earlier. The parties here had an undercurrent of sexuality. Sarah could almost hear it, flowing around them all, carrying them all along. In the car, on the night of the accident, Sarah was at that point in the evening when she felt guilty. She wanted to make things better, make things nice. She had gone through her elated stage, her jealous stage, her stubbornly resigned stage and now she felt guilty. Had they talked about divorce that night, or had that been before, on other evenings? There was a flavor she remembered in their talks about divorce, a scent. It was hot, as Italy had been hot when they had been there. Dust, bread, sun, a burning at the back of the throat from too much drinking.

But no, they hadn’t been talking about divorce that night. The parties had been crowded. Sarah had hardly seen Tommy. Then, on her way to the bathroom, she had seen him sitting with a girl on a bed in one of the back rooms. He was telling the girl about condors, about hunting for condors in small, light planes.

“Oh, but you didn’t hurt them, did you?” the girl asked. She was someone’s daughter, a little overweight but with beautiful skin and large green eyes.

“Oh no,” Tommy assured her, “we weren’t hunting to hurt.”

Condors. Sarah looked at them sitting on the bed. When they noticed her, the girl blushed. Tommy smiled. Sarah imagined what she looked like, standing in the doorway. She wished that they had shut the door.

That had been at the Steadmans’. The first party had been at the Perrys’. The Perrys never served food. Sarah had had two or three drinks there. The bar had been set up beneath the grape arbor and everyone stood outside. It had still been light at the Perrys’ but at the Steadmans’ it was dark and people drank inside. Everyone spoke about the end of summer as though it were a bewildering and unnatural event.

They had stayed at the Steadmans’ longer than they should have and they were going to be late for dinner. Nevertheless, they were driving at a moderate speed, through a familiar landscape, passing houses that they had been entertained in many times. There were the Salts and the Hollands and the Greys and the Dodsons. The Dodsons kept their gin in the freezer and owned two large and dappled crotch-sniffing dogs. The Greys imported Southerners for their parties. The women all had lovely voices and knew how to make spoon bread and pickled tomatoes and artillery punch. The men had smiles when they’d say to Sarah, “Why, let me get you another. You don’t have a thing in that glass, ah swear.” The Hollands gave the kind of dinner party where the shot was still in the duck and the silver should have been in a vault. Little whiskey was served but there was always excellent wine. The Salts were a high-strung couple who often quarreled. Jenny Salt was on some type of medication for tension and often dropped the canapés she attempted to serve. Jenny and her husband, Pete, had a room in which there was nothing but a large doll house where witty mâché figures carried on assignations beneath tiny clocks and crystal chandeliers. Once, when Sarah was examining the doll house’s library where two figures were hunched over a chess game which was just about to be won, Pete had always said, on the twenty-second move, Pete told Sarah that she had pretty eyes. She had moved away from him immediately. She had closed her eyes. In another room, with the other guests, she had talked about the end of summer.

On that night, at the end of summer, the night of the accident, Sarah was still talking as they passed the Salts’ house. She was talking about Venice. She and Tommy had been there once. They had drunk in the Plaza and listened to the orchestras. Sarah quoted D. H. Lawrence on Venice … “Abhorrent green and slippery city …” But she and Tommy had liked Venice. They drank standing up at little bars. Sarah had had a cold and she drank grappa and the cold had disappeared for the rest of her life.

After the Salts’ house, the road swerved north and became very dark. There were no lights, no houses for several miles. There were stone walls, an orchard of sickly peach trees, a cider mill. There was St. James Episcopal Church where Tommy took their daughter, Martha, to Sunday school. The Sunday school was highly fundamental. There were many arguments among the children and their teachers as to the correct interpretation of Bible story favorites. For example, when Lazarus rose from the dead, was he still sick? Martha liked the fervor at St. James. Each week, her dinner graces were becoming more impassioned and fantastic. Martha was seven.

Each Sunday, Tommy takes Martha to her little classes at St. James. Sarah can imagine the child sitting there at a low table with her jars of colors. Tommy doesn’t go to church himself and Martha’s classes are two hours long. Sarah doesn’t know where Tommy goes. She suspects he is seeing someone. When they come home on Sundays, Tommy is sleek, exhilarated. The three of them sit down to the dinner Sarah has prepared.

Over the years, Sarah suspects, Tommy has floated to the surface of her. They are swimmers now, far apart, on the top of the sea.

Sarah at last fell silent. The road seemed endless as in a dream. They seemed to be slowing down. She could not feel her foot on the accelerator. She could not feel her hands on the wheel. Her mind was an untidy cupboard filled with shining bottles. The road was dark and silvery and straight. In the space ahead of her, there seemed to be something. It beckoned, glittering. Sarah’s mind cleared a little. She saw Martha with her hair cut oddly short. Sarah gently nibbled on the inside of her mouth to keep alert. She saw Tommy choosing a succession of houses, examining the plaster, the floorboards, the fireplaces, deciding where windows should be placed, walls knocked down. She saw herself taking curtains down from a window so that there would be a better view of the sea. The curtains knocked her glass from the sill and it shattered. The sea was white and flat. It did not command her to change her life. It demanded of her, nothing. She saw Martha sleeping, her paint-smudged fingers curled. She saw Tommy in the city with a woman, riding in a cab. The woman wore a short fur jacket and Tommy stroked it as he spoke. She saw a figure in the road ahead, its arms raised before its face as though to block out the sight of her. The figure was a boy who wore dark clothing, but his hair was bright, his face was shining. She saw her car leap forward and run him down where he stood.

Tommy had taken responsibility for the accident. He had told the police he was driving. The boy apparently had been hitchhiking and had stepped out into the road. At the autopsy, traces of a hallucinogen were found in the boy’s system. The boy was fifteen years old and his name was Stevie Bettencourt. No charges were filed.

“My wife,” Tommy told the police, “was not feeling well. My wife,” Tommy said, “was in the passenger seat.”

Sarah stopped drinking immediately after the accident. She felt nauseated much of the time. She slept poorly. Her hands hurt her. The bones in her hands ached. She remembered that this was the way she felt the last time she had stopped drinking. It had been two years before. She remembered why she had stopped and she remembered why she had started again. She had stopped because she had done a cruel thing to her little Martha. It was spring and she and Tommy were giving a dinner party. Sarah had two martinis in the late afternoon when she was preparing dinner and then she had two more martinis with her guests. Martha had come downstairs to say a polite goodnight to everyone as she had been taught. She had put on her nightie and brushed her teeth. Sarah poured a little more gin in her glass and went upstairs with her to brush out her hair and put her to bed. Martha had long, thick blond hair of which she was very proud. On that night she wore it in a pony tail secured by an elasticized holder with two small colored balls on the end. Sarah’s fingers were clumsy and she could not get it off without pulling Martha’s hair and making her cry. She got a pair of scissors and carefully began snipping at the stubborn elastic. The scissors were large, like shears, and they had been difficult to handle. A foot of Martha’s gathered hair had abruptly fallen to the floor. Sarah remembered trying to pat it back into place on the child’s head.

So Sarah had stopped drinking the first time. She did not feel renewed. She felt exhausted and wary. She read and cooked. She realized how little she and Tommy had to talk about. Tommy drank Scotch when he talked to her at night. Sometimes Sarah would silently count as he spoke to see how long the words took. When he was away and he telephoned her, she could hear the ice tinkling in the glass.

Tommy was in the city four days a week. He often changed hotels. He would bring Martha little bars of soap wrapped in the different colored papers of the hotels. Martha’s drawers were full of the soaps scenting her clothes. When Tommy came home on the weekends he would work on the house and they would give parties at which Tommy was charming. Tommy had a talent for holding his liquor and for buying old houses, restoring them and selling them for three times what he had paid for them. Tommy and Sarah had moved six times in eleven years. All their homes had been fine old houses in excellent locations two or three hours from New York. Sarah would stay in the country while Tommy worked in the city. Sarah did not know her way around New York.

For three weeks, Sarah did not drink. Then it was her birthday. Tommy gave her a slim gold necklace and fastened it around her neck. He wanted her to come to New York with him, to have dinner, see a play, spend the night with him in the fine suite the company had given him at the hotel. They had got a babysitter for Martha, a marvelous woman who polished the silver in the afternoon when Martha napped. Sarah drove. Tommy had never cared for driving. His hand rested on her thigh. Occasionally, he would slip his hand beneath her skirt. Sarah was sick with the thought that this was the way he touched other women.

By the time they were in Manhattan, they were arguing. They had been married for eleven years. Both had had brief marriages before. They could argue about anything. In mid-town, Tommy stormed out of the car as Sarah braked for a light. He took his suitcase and disappeared.

Sarah drove carefully for many blocks. When she had the opportunity, she would pull to the curb and ask someone how to get to Connecticut. No one seemed to know. Sarah thought she was probably phrasing the question poorly but she didn’t know how else to present it. After half an hour, she made her way back to the hotel where Tommy was staying. The doorman parked the car and she went into the lobby. She looked into the hotel bar and saw Tommy in the dimness, sitting at a small table. He jumped up and kissed her passionately. He rubbed his hands up and down her sides. “Darling, darling,” he said, “I want you to have a happy birthday.”

Tommy ordered drinks for both of them. Sarah sipped hers slowly at first but then she drank it and he ordered others. The bar was subdued. There was a piano player who sang about the lord of the dance. The words seemed like those of a hymn. The hymn made her sad but she laughed. Tommy spoke to her urgently and gaily about little things. They laughed together like they had when they were first married. They had always drunk a lot together then and fallen asleep, comfortably and lovingly entwined on white sheets.

They went to their room to change for the theater. The maid had turned back the beds. There was a fresh rose in a bud vase on the writing desk. They had another drink in the room and got undressed. Sarah awoke the next morning curled up on the floor with the bedspread tangled around her. Her mouth was sore. There was a bruise on her leg. The television set was on with no sound. The room was a mess although Sarah could see that nothing had been really damaged. She stared at the television where black-backed gulls were dive-bombing on terrified and doomed cygnets in a documentary about swans. Sarah crept into the bathroom and turned on the shower. She sat in the tub while the water beat upon her. Pinned to the outside of the shower curtain was a note from Tommy, who had gone to work. “Darling,” the note said, “we had a good time on your birthday. I can’t say I’m sorry we never got out. I’ll call you for lunch. Love.”

Sarah turned the note inward until the water made the writing illegible. When the phone rang just before noon, she did not answer it.

There is a certain type of conversation one hears only when one is drunk and it is like a dream, full of humor and threat and significance, deep significance. And the way one witnesses things when one is drunk is different as well. It is like putting a face mask against the surface of the sea and looking into things, into their baffled and guileless hearts.

When Sarah had been a drinker, she felt that she had a fundamental and inventive grasp of situations, but now that she drank no longer, she found herself in the midst of a great and impenetrable silence which she could in no way interpret.

It was a small village. Many of the people who lived there did not even own cars. The demands of life were easily met in the village and it was pretty there besides. It was divided between those who always lived there and who owned fishing boats and restaurants and the city people who had more recently discovered the area as a summer place and winter weekend investment. On the weekends, the New Yorkers would come up with their houseguests and their pâté and cheeses and build fires and go cross-country skiing. Tommy came home to Sarah on weekends. They did things together. They agreed on where to go. During the week she was on her own.

Once, alone, she saw a helicopter carrying a tree in a sling across the Sound. The wealthy could afford to leave nothing behind.

Once, with the rest of the town, she saw five boats burning in their storage shrouds. Each summer resort has its winter pyromaniac.

Sarah did not read any more. Her eyes hurt when she read and her hands ached all the time. During the week, she marketed and walked and cared for Martha.

It was three months after Stevie Bettencourt was killed when his mother visited Sarah. She came to the door and knocked on it and Sarah let her in.

Genevieve Bettencourt was a woman Sarah’s age although she looked rather younger. She had been divorced almost from the day that Stevie was born. She had another son named Bruce who lived with his father in Nova Scotia. She had an old powder-blue Buick parked on the street before Sarah’s house. The Buick had one white door.

The two women sat in Sarah’s handsome, sunny living room. It was very calm, very peculiar, almost thrilling. Genevieve looked all around the room. Off the living room were the bedrooms. The door to Sarah’s and Tommy’s was closed but Martha’s door was open. She had a little hanging garden against the window. She had a hamster in a cage. She had an enormous bookcase filled with dolls and books.

Genevieve said to Sarah, “That room wasn’t there before. This used to be a lobster pound. I know a great deal about this town. People like you have nothing to do with what I know about this town. Do you remember the way things were, ever?”

“No,” Sarah said.

Genevieve sighed. “Does your daughter look like you or your husband?”

“No one’s ever told me she looked like me,” Sarah said quietly.

On the glass-topped table before them there was a little wooden sculpture cutout that Tommy had bought. A man and woman sat on a park bench. Each wore a startled and ambiguous expression. Each had a terrier on the end of a string. The dogs were a puzzle. One fit on top of the other. Sarah was embarrassed about it being there. Tommy had put it on the table during the weekend and Sarah hadn’t moved it. Genevieve didn’t touch it.

“I did not want my life to know you,” Genevieve said. She removed a hair from the front of her white blouse and dropped it to the floor. She looked out the window at the sun. The floor was of a very light and varnished pine. Sarah could see the hair upon it.

“I’m so sorry,” Sarah said. “I’m so very, very sorry.” She stretched her neck and put her head back.

“Stevie was a mixed-up boy,” Genevieve said. “They threw him off the basketball team. He took pills. He had bad friends. He didn’t study and he got a D in geometry and they wouldn’t let him play basketball.”

She got up and wandered around the room. She wore green rubber boots, dirty jeans and a beautiful, hand-knit sweater. “I once bought all my fish here,” she said. “The O’Malleys owned it. There were practically no windows. Just narrow high ones over the tanks. Now it’s all windows, isn’t it? Don’t you feel exposed?”

“No, I …” Sarah began. “There are drapes,” she said.

“Off to the side, where you have your garden, there are whale bones if you dig deep enough. I can tell you a lot about this town.”

“My husband wants to move,” Sarah said.

“I can understand that, but you’re the real drinker, after all, aren’t you, not him.”

“I don’t drink any more,” Sarah said. She looked at the woman dizzily.

Genevieve was not pretty but she had a clear, strong face. She sat down on the opposite side of the room. “I guess I would like something,” she said. “A glass of water.” Sarah went to the kitchen and poured a glass of Vichy for them both. Her hands shook.

“We are not strangers to one another,” Genevieve said. “We could be friends.”

“My first husband always wanted to be friends with my second husband,” Sarah said after a moment. “I could never understand it.” This had somehow seemed analogous when she was saying it but now it did not. “It is not appropriate that we be friends,” she said.

Genevieve continued to sit and talk. Sarah found herself concentrating desperately on her articulate, one-sided conversation. She suspected that the words Genevieve was using were codes for other words, terrible words. Genevieve spoke thoughtlessly, dispassionately, with erratic flourishes of language. Sarah couldn’t believe that they were chatting about food, men, the red clouds massed above the sea.

“I have a friend who is a designer,” Genevieve said. “She hopes to make a great deal of money someday. Her work has completely altered her perceptions. Every time she looks at a view, she thinks of sheets. “Take out those mountains,’ she will say, ‘lighten that cloud a bit and it would make a great sheet.’ When she looks at the sky, she thinks of lingerie. Now when I look at the sky, I think of earlier times, happier times when I looked at the sky. I have never been in love, have you?”

“Yes,” Sarah said, “I’m in love.”

“It’s not a lucky thing, you know, to be in love.”

There was a soft scuffling at the door and Martha came in. “Hello,” she said. “School was good today. I’m hungry.”

“Hello, dear,” Genevieve said. To Sarah, she said, “Perhaps we can have lunch sometime.”

“Who is that?” Martha asked Sarah after Genevieve had left.

“A neighbor,” Sarah said, “one of Mommy’s friends.”

When Sarah told Tommy about Genevieve coming to visit her, he said, “It’s harassment. It can be stopped.”

It was Sunday morning. They had just finished breakfast and Tommy and Martha were drying the dishes and putting them away. Martha was wearing her church-school clothes and she was singing a song she had learned the Sunday before.

“… I’m going to the Mansion on the Happy Days’ Express …” she sang.

Tommy squeezed Martha’s shoulders. “Go get your coat, sweetie,” he said. When the child had gone, he said to Sarah, “Don’t speak to this woman. Don’t allow it to happen again.”

“We didn’t talk about that.”

“What else could you talk about? It’s weird.”

“No one talks about that. No one, ever.”

Tommy was wearing a corduroy suit and a tie Sarah had never seen before. Sarah looked at the pattern in the tie. It was random and bright.

“Are you having an affair?” Sarah asked.

“No,” he said easily. “I don’t understand you, Sarah. I’ve done everything I could to protect you, to help you straighten yourself out. It was a terrible thing but it’s over. You have to get over it. Now, just don’t see her again. There’s no way that she can cause trouble if you don’t speak to her.”

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.”