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Pif Magazine
Pif Magazine |
Taking Care
Commenting on her story, "Honored Guest," which appeared in the 1995 volume of Best American Short Stories, Joy Williams wrote:
The threat of nothingness—our unwelcome and veiled knowledge of it—pervades many of the stories in Williams' collection, Taking Care, first published in 1972. Facing the void is a heroic and perhaps useless task, and Williams' characters, like most of us, would rather look elsewhere. They seek refuge in love, marriage, kids—an ordinary life. But the sinister and disorderly lurk at the corner of the eye and thwart solace. Fueled with the peculiar tension of trying not to know, Williams' characters traverse dangerous territory, hoping that fierce concentration on the cracks will spare them from the chasm. While dread pumps the heart of these fictions, they also abound in pleasures. Wry wit circulates throughout, often surprising us into laughter. We watch a situation being built sentence by sentence, anticipating the whole, until the final sentence recasts the entire image into the darkly humorous—we have not arrived at the place where we expected to be: "A cat seems to be murdering a baby bird in a nest outside the girl's window. The girl is listening to the child sleep. The child lies in her varnished crib clutching a bear. The bear has no tongue. Where there should be a small piece of red felt there is nothing. Apparently, the child had eaten it by accident." In another story, swift sentences reveal the nature of a husband's "concern" for his wife: "He wears saddle shoes and a wedding ring. His clothes are poor but he has well-shaped hands and nails. Jane is usually asleep when Jackson gets in bed beside her. He goes at her without turning on the light. ‘I don't want to wake you up,' he says." Williams' prose is precise and lean, her compressed sentences almost hypnotic in their cumulative power. Unexpected adjectives and similes create arresting images and make the familiar deliciously odd: sunlight is second-hand and shabby, woods turn black and flaky, ears look like Parker rolls. With the instinct of a poet, Williams uses language to seduce us into charged, vivid landscapes. Love twines round death in many stories, offering the possibility of escape from the self and its fate. Attempts to connect with another meet with greater or lesser degrees of success. In "The Wedding," the promise of love is illusory, ultimately casting the would-be lovers back into the void. "Sam and Elizabeth met as people usually meet. Suddenly there was a deceptive light in the darkness. A light that reminded the lonely blackly of the darkness." In the ironically titled "The Lover," the nameless protagonist's face is "thin with the thinness of a failed lover." She can barely remember her ex-husband, although they have been divorced less than a year. At the birth of their daughter, the husband says, "Now you're going to have to learn how to love something," yet seeing her young daughter on the playground of the child's daycare center, the mother cannot recognize her. Love is less illusory in "Summer," and death's brief visit strengthens, rather than severs the connection between a married couple. The husband has suffered a near-fatal heart attack, and the shock of mortality becomes the brooding divide between them. Where once they had been spirited and quarrelsome, now they are careful and silent. Their dilemma is how to re-construct communication in their newly fragile, threatened marriage. Williams tells this tale obliquely, providing a dazzling setting and a flock of manic secondary characters who seize our attention and distract us with their peculiar and often hilarious takes on love and death. (These feature erectile rock megaliths in Maine, the proper way to grasp a ladder if drowning, an eight-year-old with a bra and the raspy voice of a drunken chanteuse, and calling cards showing Jesus knocking on the door of a heart.) But beneath the entertaining surface, the troubled Constance and Ben stumble towards each other, away from bewilderment. "Our salvation lies in learning to communicate with alien intelligences," says one character, speaking of whales. But for Constance and Ben, salvation lies in the hopefulness of communication with each other, and as Constance's name suggests, it is through an act of patient faithfulness that they are able to reconnect. |
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