Taking Care by Joy Williams Page A

ambivalent gesture.
    “What?” Lola said, patting at her hair, looking at the woods again. “What?”
    Jim turned to her, shifting into second. “I didn’t say anything, love.”
    She noticed that he was wearing a bright blue shirt, suitable for color broadcast.
    In town they had lunch together and she went shopping while he taped interviews with cabinet members at the state-house. The day was cloudy and people walked fiercely down the sidewalk, three abreast. In the window of a toy store was a wooden man. There were beggars in the streets, small boys with trays of boiled peanuts, girls behind tables selling cakes. Outside a grocery, a blind man sat crosslegged on a mat, a round brown and white dog leashless by his side gripping a child’s plastic bucket in its mouth. The man’s eyes looked like clots of boiled grits. The bucket was half full of coins. Lola lingered in front of them, her fingers moving nervously across her throat. The dog glanced mildly at her, the bucket unmoving in the slick, stern jaws. The blind man seemed asleep. Lola patted the dog swiftly on the head and walked away without opening her pocketbook. Later, she thought worriedly that the man might not have been blind at all.
    She bought some blouses and a potted plant and returned to the capitol where she waited for Jim in a basement coffee shop. Instead of staircases, there were wide ramps leading to the floor above and the halls smelled damp and peculiar, an odor of disinfectant, airlessness and the rotting canvas of coiled fire hoses. There were machines dispensing tuna sandwiches, combs, coffee and nylon stockings, and over it all was the rattle and rap of the pressmen’s Telex machines and typewriters.
    She put her packages in a corner booth and ordered a soft drink. A young man with a withered arm brought it cautiously to her in a paper cup. There was a black speck making its way through the ice cubes. Lola put a napkin over the cup and pushed it away, beside her plant. The plant was wrapped inpink foil and had drooping striped leaves, a remote hothouse look. She couldn’t believe that she had actually bought it. She might just as well open the two doors of the trailer and let the woods fall in if she started filling up the rooms with growing junk. The forest was so thick it seemed static, but she had seen leaves and lizards fouling the mechanisms of the jalousies and she heard branches falling on the roof and tapping against the aluminum siding. The first week she had watched the woods a great deal but had stopped when she began sensing that the trees were moving closer to the windows every time she turned her eyes away, like something out of
Macbeth.
Now, after Jim left, she closed the curtains and put the lights on.
    She picked up the plant and put it on the other side of the table behind the salt and pepper shakers.
    Five secretaries came into the coffee shop and sat at a round table in the middle of the floor. They all wore bright short dresses and ash-blond wigs and each looked like the one that sat beside her, except a little less so. Other than the secretaries, there was no one in the place but the help, who were all handicapped in one way or another. The woman behind the orange drink machine polished a glass beatifically and occasionally burst into song. She had the widest, whitest, smoothest face Lola had ever seen. It resembled a custard pie.
    Lola chewed on her fingernail. She would have gone to the car and waited there but she did not know where Jim had parked it. Her head began to ache, and to calm herself, she tried to think of the last city where Jim had worked, but this only made her more upset and unhappy. They had had many friends and she had always known where she was and where she was going and she always had someone to accompany her there. With her friends, she had chatted about controllable circumstances and about Jim and herself and everyone had shown great interest in this.
    When at last her husband came over to the