Taking Care

Summer

CONSTANCE and Ben and their daughters by previous marriages, Charlotte and Jill, were sharing a summer house for a month with their friend Steven. There were five weekends that August, and for each one of them Steven invited a different woman up — Patsy, Teddy, Mercedes, Annie and Gloria. The women made a great deal of fuss over Charlotte and Jill, who were both ten. They made the girls nachos and root-beer floats, and bought them latch-hook sets and took them out to the moors to identify flowers. They took them to the cemeteries, from which the children would return with rubbings which Constance found depressing—

This beautiful bud to us was given

To unfold here but bloom in heaven

or worse!

Here lies Aimira Rawson

Daughter Wife Mother

She has done what she could

The children affixed the rubbings to the side of the refrigerator with magnets in the shape of broccoli.

The women would arrange the children’s hair in various elaborate ways that Constance hated. They knew no taboos; they discussed everything with the children — love, death, Japanese whaling methods. Each woman had habits and theories and stories to tell, and each brought a house present and stayed seventy-two hours. They all spent so much time with the children because they could not spend it with Steven, who appeared after five P.M. only. Steven was writing a book that summer; he was, in his words, “writing an aesthetically complex response to hermetic currents in modern life.” This took time.

Ben was recovering from a heart attack he had suffered in the spring. He and Constance had been in a restaurant, arguing, and he had had a heart attack. She remembered the look of absolute attentiveness that had crossed his face. At the time, she had thought he was looking at a beautiful woman behind her and on the other side of the room. The memory, which she recalled frequently, mortified her. What she couldn’t remember was what they had been arguing about.

Ben was thin with dark hair. He was twelve years older than Constance, yet they looked about the same age. He was the love of Constance’s life, but they quarreled a lot; it was a small tragedy, really, how much they had quarreled before his heart attack. Without their arguments they were a little shy with one another. Things appeared different now to Constance: objects seemed to have more presence, people seemed more vivid, the sky seemed brighter. Her nightmares’ messages were far less veiled. Constance was embarrassed at having these feelings, for it had been Ben’s heart attack, after all, not hers. He had always accused her of taking things too personally.

Constance and Ben had been married for five years. Charlotte was Constance’s child from her marriage with David, and Jill was Ben’s from his marriage with Susan. The children weren’t crazy about one another, but they got along. It was all right, really, with them. Here in the summer house they slept in the attic; in Constance’s opinion, the nicest room in the house. It had two iron beds, white beaverboard walls and a small window from which one could see three streets converging. Sometimes Constance would take a gin and tonic up to the attic and lie on one of the beds and watch people place their postcards in the mailbox at the intersection. Constance didn’t send postcards herself. She really didn’t want to get in touch with anybody but Ben, and Ben lived in the same house with her, as he had in whatever house they’d been in ever since they’d gotten married. She couldn’t very well send a postcard to Ben.

August was hot and splendid for the most part, but those who stayed for the entire season claimed it was not as nice as July. The gardens were blown. Pedestrians irritably swatted bicyclists who used the sidewalks. There was more weeping in bars, and more jellyfish in the sea.

On the afternoon of the first Friday in August, Constance was in the attic room observing an elderly couple place their postcards in the mailbox with great deliberation. She watched a woman about her own age drop a card in the box and go off with a mean, satisfied look upon her face. She watched an older woman throw in at least a dozen cards with no emotion whatever.

Charlotte came upstairs and told her mother, “A person drowning imagines there’s a ladder rising vertically from the water, and he tries to climb that ladder. Did you know that? If he would only imagine that the ladder was horizontal he wouldn’t drown.”

Charlotte left. Constance sat on a bed and looked around the room. On the bureau mirror were photographs of two little boys, Charlotte’s and Jill’s boyfriends. Their names were Zack and Pete. They were just little boys but there they were. It worried Constance that the children should already have boyfriends. Another photograph, which Constance had not seen before, showed a large yellow dog grinning in front of a potted evergreen. Constance was not acquainted with either him or his name. She got up and began picking up candy wrappers that were scattered around the room and putting them in her empty glass. She was thirty-three years old. She thought of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s line that American lives have no second act.

Constance went downstairs to the kitchen where Patsy was drinking some champagne she had brought, and waiting for Steven to appear at five o’clock.

“I just love it here,” Patsy said. “I love it, love it, love it.”

Her eyes were shining. She was a good sport but she had rather bad skin. She was a vegetarian; for three days after she left, the children demanded bean curd. She was Steven’s typist in the city, where she and her epileptic golden retriever Scooter lived in the same apartment building as Jill’s aunt.

“You were in my apartment a long, long time ago,” Patsy told Jill, “when you were a little tiny girl, and you pulled Scooter’s tail and he growled at you and you said, ‘Stop that at once,’ and he did.”

“I can’t remember that,” Jill said.

“It’s a small world,” Patsy said, pouring herself more champagne. She sighed. “Scooter’s getting along now.”

Charlotte and Jill were sitting on either side of Patsy at the kitchen table, making lists of the names they wanted to call their children. Charlotte had Victoria, Grover and Christopher; Jill had Beatrice, Travis and Cone.

“Cone?” Patsy asked. “How can you name a child Cone?”

Constance looked at the ornately lettered names. The future yawned ahead, filled with individuals, each expecting to be found.

“Do you swim?” Constance asked Patsy.

“I do,” Patsy said solemnly. “I just gave the girls a few pointers about panic in the water.”

“Would you like to go swimming?” Constance asked.

“It’s almost five,” Patsy said. “Steven will be coming down any moment.”

“‘Cone’ is both a nice shape and a nice name,” Jill said.

“Would you like to go swimming?” Constance asked the girls.

“No thanks,” they said.

Ben came in the kitchen door, chewing gum. Since his heart attack, he had given up smoking and chewed a great deal of gum. He was tanned and smiling, but he moved a little oddly, as though he were carrying something awkward. Constance got a little rush every time she saw Ben.

“Would you like to go swimming with me?” Constance asked.

“Sure,” Ben said.

They drove out to the beach and went swimming. On the bluff above the beach was the white silo of a loran station which sent out signals that enabled navigators to determine their position by time displacement. Constance and Ben swam without touching or talking. Then they went home.

Teddy came the next weekend. Patsy’s champagne bottle held a browning mum. Teddy was secretive and feminine. She brought two guests of her own, Fred and Miriam. They all lived on a farm in South Woodstock, Vermont, not far from the huge quartz testicle stones there. “There are megalithic erections all over our farm,” Teddy told Constance.

A terrible thing had happened to Fred — his wife had just died. A mole on her waist had turned blue and in six weeks she was dead.

Fred told Constance, “The last words she said to me were, ‘Life goes on long enough. Not too long, but long enough.’” Fred’s eyes would glass up but he did not cry. He had brought a tape of Blind Willie Johnson singing “Dark Was the Night,” which he frequently played.

On Saturday they had a large lunch of several dozen ears of fresh corn and a gallon of white wine. Miriam said to Constance, “It wasn’t Rose that died, it was Lu-Ellen. Doesn’t Fred just wish it was Rose! Lu-Ellen was just a girl in the office he was crazy for.”

Miriam whispered this so Fred would not hear. She had corn kernels in her teeth, but apart from that she was the very picture of an exasperated woman. Was she in love with Fred? Constance wondered. Or Steven? Actually, it was Edward she spoke to constantly on the phone. Miriam would say things to Teddy like, “Edward said he got in touch with Jimmy and everything’s all right now.”

After lunch, there was a long moment of silence while they all listened to the sound of Steven’s typewriter. Steven did not eat lunch; he was bringing together the cosmic and the personal, the poetic and the expository. During working hours, he was fueled by grapefruit juice only.

Teddy had brought four quarts of Vermont raspberries to Constance and Ben. The berries had been bruised a little during their passage across the Sound. She had brought Steven a leather-bound book with thick creamy blank pages upon which to record his thoughts.

“Nothing gets past Steven, not a single thing,” Teddy said.

“I’ve never known a cooler intelligence,” Miriam said.

“You know,” Fred said, “Vermont really has somewhat of a problem. A lot of things that people think are ancient writings on stones are actually just marks left by plows, or the roots of trees. Some of these marks get translated anyway, even though they’re not genuine.”

Teddy lowered her eyes and giggled.

Later, Teddy and Miriam and Fred took Charlotte and Jill to the cliff which was considered the highest point on the island, and they all jumped off. This was one of the girls’ favorite amusements. They loved jumping off the cliff and springing in long leaps down the rosy sand to the beach below, but they hated the climb back up.

The next day it rained. In the afternoon, the girls went with the houseguests to a movie, and Constance went up to their room. The rain had blown in the open window and an acrostic puzzle was sopping on the sill. Constance shut the window and mopped up. She sat on one of the beds and thought of two pet rabbits Charlotte and Jill had had the summer they were eight. Ben would throw his voice into the rabbits and have them speak of the verities in a pompous and irascible tone. Constance had always thought it hilarious. Then the rabbits had died, and the children hadn’t wanted another pair. Constance stared out the window. The rain pounded the dark street silver. There was no one out there.

That night, the house was quiet. Constance lay behind Ben on their bed and nuzzled his hair. “Talk to me,” Constance said.

“William Gass said that lovers are alike as light bulbs,” Ben said.

“That’s just alliteration,” Constance said. “Talk to me some more.” But Ben didn’t say much more.

Mercedes arrived. She had fine features and large, grey eyes, but she looked anxious, and her hair was always damp “from visions and insomnia” she told Constance. She entertained Charlotte and Jill by telling them the entire plot line from General Hospital She read the palms of their grubby hands.

“Constitutionally, I am more or less doomed to suffer,” Mercedes said, pointing to deep lines running down from the ball of her own thumb. But she assured the girls that they would be happy, that they would each have three husbands and be happy with them all. The girls made another list. Jill had William, Daniel and Jean-Paul. Charlotte had Eric, Franklin and Duke.

Constance regarded the lists. She did not want to think of her little girls as wives in love.

“Do you think Mercedes is beautiful?” Constance asked Ben.

“I don’t understand what she’s talking about,” Ben said.

“You don’t have to understand what she’s talking about to think she’s beautiful,” Constance said.

“I don’t think she’s beautiful,” Ben said.

“She told me that Steven said that the meanings of her words were not philogistic, but telepathic and cumulative.”

“Let’s go downtown and get some gum,” Ben said.

The two of them walked down to Main Street. Hundreds of people thronged the small town. “Jerry!” a woman screamed from the doorway of a shop. “I need money!” There was slanted parking on the one-way street, the spaces filled with cars that were either extremely rusted or highly waxed and occupied by young men and women playing loud radios.

“What a lot of people,” Constance said.

“There’s a sphere of radio transmissions about thirty light-years thick expanding outward at the speed of light, informing every star it touches that the world is full of people,” Ben said.

Constance stared at him. “I’ll be glad when the summer’s over,” she said.

“I can’t remember very many Augusts,” Ben said. “I’m really going to remember my Augusts from now on.”

Constance started to cry.

“I can’t talk to you,” Ben said. They were walking back home. A group of girls wearing monogrammed knapsacks pedaled past on bicycles.

“That’s not talking,” Constance said. “That’s shorthand, just a miserable shorthand.”

In the kitchen, Mercedes was making the girls popcorn as she waited for Steven. She chattered away. The girls gazed at her raptly. Mercedes said, “I love talking to strangers. As you grow older, you’ll find that you enjoy talking to strangers far more than to your friends.”

Late that night, Constance woke to hear music from Steven’s tape deck in the next room. The night was very hot. Beyond the thin curtains was a fat bluish moon.

“That’s the saddest piece of music I’ve ever heard,” Constance said. “What is that music?”

“Beethoven,” Ben said. “It’s pretty sad all right.”

The children came into the room and shook Constance’s shoulder. “Mummy,” Jill said, “we can’t sleep. Mercedes told us that last year she tried to kill herself with a pair of scissors.”

“Oh!” cried Constance, disgusted. She took the girls back to their room. They all sat on a bed and looked out the window at the moon.

“Mercedes said that if the astronaut Gus Grissom hadn’t died on the ground in the Apollo fire, he would probably have died on the moon of a heart attack,” Charlotte told Constance. “Mercedes said that Gus Grissom’s arteries were clogged with fatty deposits, and that he carried within himself all the prerequisites for tragedy. Mercedes said that if Gus Grissom had had a heart attack on the moon, nobody in the whole world would be able to look up into the sky with the same awe and wonder as before.”

Jill said, “Mercedes said all things happen because they must happen.”

“I’d like to sock Mercedes in the teeth,” Constance said.

Constance had not seen Steven for days. She had only heard the sound of his typewriter, and sometimes there was a glass in the sink that might have been his. Constance had an image in her mind of the Coke bottle caught in the venetian-blind cord tapping out incoherent messages at the end of On the Beach. She finally went up to his room and knocked on the door.

“Yo!” Steven yelled.

Constance was embarrassed about disturbing him, and slipped away without saying anything. She went upstairs to the girls’ room and looked out the window. A man stood by the mailbox, scrutinizing the pickup hours posted on the front and shaking his head.

Annie came with her child, Nora. Nora was precocious. She was eight, wore a bra, had red hair down to her kneecaps and knew the genuine and incomprehensible lyrics to most of the New Wave tunes. She sang in a rasping, wasted voice and shook her little body back and forth like a mop. Annie looked at Nora as she danced. It was an irritated look, such as a wife might give a husband. Constance thought of David. She had been so bored with David, but now she wondered what it had been, exactly, that was so boring. It was difficult to remember boring things. David had hated mayonnaise. The first thing he had told Constance’s mother when they met was that he had owned forty cars in his life, which was true.

“Do you ever think about Susan?” Constance asked Ben.

“She’s on television now,” Ben said. “It’s a Pepsi-Cola commercial but Susan is waving a piece of fried chicken.”

“I’ve never seen that commercial,” Constance said sincerely, wishing she had never asked about Susan.

Annie was an older woman with thick, greying hair. She seemed more impatient than the others for Steven to knock off and get on with it.

“He’s making a miraculous synthesis up there, is he?” Annie said wryly. “Passion, time? Inside, outside?”

“Are you in love with Steven?” Constance asked.

“I’ve found,” Annie said, “that Love seldom serves one’s purposes.”

Constance thought about this. Perhaps Love was neither the goal nor the answer. Constance loved Ben and what good did that do him? He had just almost died from her absorption in him. Perhaps understanding was more important than Love, and perhaps the highest form of understanding was the understanding of oneself, one’s motives and desires and capabilities. Constance thought about this but the idea didn’t appeal to her much. She dismissed it.

Annie and Nora were highly skilled at a little parlor game in which vowels, numbers and first letters of names would be used by one person, in a dizzying polygamous travelogue, to clue the other as to whispered identities.

“I went,” Annie would say, “to Switzerland with Tim for four days and then I went to Nome with Ernest.”

“Mick Jagger!” Nora would yell.

Jill, glaring at Nora, whispered in Annie’s ear.

“I went,” Annie said, “to India with Ralph for a day before I met Ned.”

“The Ayatollah Khomeini!” Nora screamed.

Charlotte and Jill looked at her, offended.

That evening, everyone went out except Constance, who stayed home with Nora.

“You know,” Nora told her, “you shouldn’t drink quinine. They won’t let airline pilots drink quinine in their gin. It affects their judgment.”

That afternoon, downtown with Annie, Nora had bought a lot of small candles. Now she placed them all around the house in little saucers and lit them. She and Constance turned off all the lights and walked from room to room enjoying the candles.

“Aren’t they pretty!” Nora said. She had large white feet and wore a man’s shirt as a nightie. “I think they’re so pretty. I don’t like electrical lighting. Electrical lighting just lights the whole place up at once. Everything looks so dead, do you know what I mean?”

Constance peered at Nora without answering. Nora said, “It’s as though nothing can happen when it’s all lit up like that. It’s as though everything is.”

Constance looked at the wavering pools of light cast by the little candles. She had never known a mystic before.

“I enjoy things best that I don’t have to think about,” Nora said. “I mean, I get awfully sick of using my brain, don’t you? When you think of the world or of God, you don’t think of this gigantic brain, do you?”

“Certainly not,” Constance replied.

“Of course you don’t,” Nora said nicely.

The candles had different aromas. Finally, more or less in order, one after another, they went out. On Sunday, after Nora left with her mother, Constance missed her.

Constance was having difficulty sleeping. She would go to bed far earlier than anyone else, sometimes right after supper, and lie there and not sleep. Once she slept for a little while and had a dream in which the cart she was wheeling through the aisles of the A&P was a crash cart, a complete mobile cardiopulmonary resuscitation unit, of the kind she had seen in the corridors of the intensive-care wing at the hospital. In the dream, she bit her nails as she pushed the cart down the endless aisles, agonizing over her selections. She reached for a box of Triscuits and placed it in the cart between a box of automatic rotating cuffs and a defibrillator. Constance woke up, her own heart pounding. She listened to Ben’s quiet breathing for a moment; then she rolled out of bed, dressed and walked downtown. It was just before dawn and the streets were cool and quiet and empty, but someone, during the night, had pulled all the flowers out of the window boxes in front of the shops. Clumps of earth and broken petals made a ragged trail before her. The wreckage rounded a corner. Constance wished Ben were with her. They could just walk along, they wouldn’t have to say anything. Constance returned to the house and went back to bed. She had another dream in which crews of workmen were cutting down all the trees around their home, back on the mainland, in another state.

The weekend that Gloria arrived was extremely foggy. Gloria was from the South. She was unsmiling and honest, a Baptist who had just left her husband for good. She had been in love with Steven since she was thirteen years old.

“My parents are Baptists,” Constance told her.

Fog slid through the screens. A voice from the street said, “Some dinner party, she served bluefish again!”

Gloria had little calling cards that showed Jesus knocking on the door of your heart. Jesus wore white robes and he had a neatly trimmed beard. He was rapping thoughtfully at the heavy wooden doors of a snug little vine-covered bungalow.

“I remember that picture!” Constance said. “When I was little, that picture just seemed to be everywhere.”

“Have one,” Gloria said.

The heart did not appear mean, it simply seemed closed. Constance wondered how long the artist had intended Jesus to have been standing there.

Gloria took Charlotte and Jill out to collect money to save marine mammals. They stood on the street and collected over thirty dollars in a Brim coffee can.

“Our salvation lies in learning to communicate with alien intelligences,” Gloria said.

Constance wrote a check.

“Whales and dolphins are highly articulate,” Gloria told Constance. “They know fidelity, play and sorrow.”

Constance wrote another check, made herself a gin and tonic and went upstairs. That night, from Steven’s room, she heard murmurs and moans in repetitive sequence.

The following day, Gloria asked, “Have you enjoyed sharing a house with Steven?”

“I haven’t seen much of him,” Constance said, “actually, at all.”

“Summer can be a difficult time,” Gloria said.

On the last day of August, Ben rented a bright red Jeep with neither top nor sides. Ben and Constance and Charlotte and Jill bounced around in it all morning, and at noon they drove on the beach to the very tip of the island, where the lighthouse was, to have their lunch. Approaching the lighthouse, Constance was filled with an odd excitement. She wanted to climb to the top. The steel door had been chained shut, but about four feet up from the base was a large hole knocked through the cement, and inside, beer cans, a considerable amount of broken glass and a lacy black wrought-iron staircase winding upward could be seen. Charlotte and Jill did not go in because they hadn’t brought their shoes, but Constance climbed through the hole and went up the staircase. There was a wonderful expectancy to the tight climb upward through the whitewashed gyre. She was a little breathless when she reached the top. Powering the light, in a maze of cables and connectors, were eighteen black, heavy-duty truck batteries. For a moment, Constance’s disappointment concealed her surprise. She saw the Atlantic fanning out without a speck on it, and her little family on the beach below, setting out food on a striped blanket. Constance inched out onto the catwalk encircling the light. “I love you!” she shouted. Ben looked up and waved. She went back inside and began her descent. She did not know, exactly, what it was she had expected, but it had certainly not been eighteen black, heavy-duty truck batteries.

In bed that night, Constance dreamed of people laughing. She opened her eyes. The clock beside her had large bright numbers which changed with an audible flap every minute. “Ben,” she whispered.

“Hi.” He was wide awake.

“I dreamed of laughing,” Constance said. “I want to laugh.”

“We’ll laugh tomorrow,” Ben said and grinned at his own joke. He turned her away from him and held her. She felt his mouth still smiling against her ear.