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Taking Care
Stories by Joy Williams
Reviewed by Linda Woolford

Taking Care : Page 1, 2

"Woods" is the signature story in this collection, the one in which Williams' dark vision is most disturbingly expressed. Exquisite detail, careful action and the assumption of an ordinary life are slim barriers against the creeping apprehension that there is no protection against the void. The protagonist, Lola, is married to Jim, a newscaster who has taken a job in the state capital. Unable to rent a house in town, Jim has ensconced Lola in a flimsy trailer on a lonely dirt road surrounded by woods. Isolated from her previous life, its "controllable circumstances" and attentive friends, Lola begins to journey from her falsely constructed notions of safety into existential terror. The focus of her terror, the threat she can name, is the woods—deep and bruised and deceptively static. Branches fall on the roof and tap against the side of the trailer, lizards and leaves destroy the mechanisms of the shutters, and every time Lola turns her eyes away, she senses the trees moving closer, "like something out of Macbeth."

While Jim works in town, Lola shutters the windows and drinks, takes hot baths and never ventures out. She dreams of corrupt carnival cities where "tattooed children were being sold, and tiny dead songbirds, clustered like grapes." Unable to bear Lola's condition, Jim accepts a job in Atlanta, and the couple prepares to move.

Escape, however, is not possible, and the moment that Lola and the reader have been dreading arrives when two hunters invade her trailer looking for their lost dogs: "Even before she saw them, she could smell the cold air of the woods and their muddy woolen clothes." Inevitability is everywhere: in the shotguns prominently displayed in their pickup truck; in a crust of red, like a scab on the sleeve of one hunter's jacket; in the eyes of the other that look crayoned in and assess Lola so carelessly she feels inhuman.

When the threat of the hunters turns out to be benign and they leave, truly only interested in finding their dogs, Lola's distress increases as she realizes that her alarm and dysfunction have never been the result of something external. Surrendering herself to this knowledge she goes outside:

The woods were wild at nightfall. She heard dim crashing and splashes and the bark of a dog, and through the gaps in the trees was a mottled sky of fading pink and grey discs, microbes moving toward the west. She had almost gotten away but not in time and now leaving wouldn't save her. She lay down on the deck with the woods all around her.

"Woods," like other stories in the collection, is told with the universal remove of a fairy tale, and one suspects that this distance may be protection for the author as well as the reader. But Williams' characters' disturbing journeys rarely end in safety, and the "dear things," the odd and wondrous details they encounter are transparent talismans, only briefly obscuring their view of the woods. She creates extreme situations, the dangerous moment when the ordinary and familiar begin to break apart, revealing a world of slanted, disquieting beauty. This is not material for the squeamish. Williams is an unsparing writer compelled by honesty and artistry, and her stories will continue to haunt long after you've put the book down.

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