Free Taking Care by Joy Williams Page A

weeks and three days ago. They were going to be married in four days. Time is breath, the girl thought.
    The girl sat on a rusted glider with faded cushions and drank bourbon from a glass printed with orange suns and pink flamingos. She wore skimpy flowered shorts and a black T-shirt. Tears ran down her face.
    The shepherd was brown and black with a blunt, fabulous face. He had a famous trick. When the girl said, “Do you love me?” he would leap up, all fours, into her arms. And he was light, so light, containing his great weight deep within himself, like a dream of weight.
    The shepherd had been five years old when he drowned. The girl had had him since he was two months old. She had bought him from a breeder in Miami, a man who had once been a priest. The girl’s shepherd came from a litter of five with excellent bloodlines. The mother was graceful and friendly, the father more solemn and alert. The breeder who had once been a priest made the girl spend several minutes alone with each puppy and asked her a great many questions about herself. The girl didn’t know what she was doing actually. She had never thought about herself much. When she had finally selected her puppy, she sat in the kitchen with the breeder and drank a Pepsi. The puppy stumbled around her feet, nibbling at the laces of her sneakers. The breeder smoked and talked to the girl with a great deal of assurance. The girl had been quite in awe of him.
    He said, “We are all asleep and dreaming, you know. If we could ever actually comprehend our true position, we would not be able to bear it, we would have to find a way out.”
    The girl nodded and sipped her warm Pepsi. She was embarrassed. People would sometimes speak to her in this way, in this intimate, alarming way as though she were passionate orthoughtful or well-read. The puppy smelled wonderful. She picked him up and held him.
    “We deceive ourselves. All we do is dream. Good dreams, bad dreams …”
    “The ways that others see us is our life,” the girl said.
    “Yes!” the breeder exclaimed.
    The girl sat slowly moving on the glider. She imagined herself standing laughing, younger and much nicer, the shepherd leaping into her arms. Her head buzzed and rustled. The bourbon bobbed around the flamingo’s lowered head on the gaudy glass. She stood up and walked from one end of the porch to the other. The shepherd’s drowned weight in her arms had been a terrible thing, a terrible thing. She and Chester were both dressed rather elaborately because they had just returned from dinner with two friends, a stockbroker and his girl friend, an art dealer. The art dealer was very thin and very blond. There were fine blond hairs on her face. The small restaurant where they ate appeared much larger than it was by its use of mirrored walls. The girl watched the four of them eating and drinking in the mirrors. The stockbroker spoke of money, of what he could do for his friends. “I love my work,” he said.
    “The art I handle,” his girl friend said, “is intended as a stimulus for discussion. In no way is it to be taken as an aesthetic product.”
    As the evening wore on, the girl friend became quite drunk. She had a large repertoire of light-bulb jokes.
    The girl had asked the woman for her untouched steak tournedos. The waiter had wrapped it for her in aluminum foil, the foil twisted into the shape of a swan. The girl remembered carrying the meat into the house for the shepherd and seeing the torn window screen. She remembered feeling the stillness in her house as it flowed into her eyes.
    The girl looked at the Gulf. It was a dazzling day with no surf. The beach was deserted. The serious tanners were in tanning parlors, bronzing evenly beneath sun lamps, saving time.
    The girl wished the moment were still to come, that shewere there, then, waiting, her empty arms outstretched, saying, “Do you love me?” Dogs hear sounds that we cannot, thought the girl. Dogs hear callings.
    Chester had dug a