Katherine is currently unemployed. In the past she has made jewelry or elaborate wooden puzzles that she sold at crafts fairs. She has made pastry for a catering service. She has taught classes at a botanical garden in town. She is good at cards and once she wanted to be a croupier on a cruise ship to the Bahamas, but she has never done that. When she had been married to Travis, she had done yard work. The two of them specialized in cleaning and trimming trees and palms. They had conscientiously refused those jobs where they were required to take down trees they thought were beautiful. About once a month, someone would want them to remove a one-hundred-year-old live oak on the assumption that a situation would arise in which a fiercely singular wind would come up in the night and tear off one of the tree’s massive limbs and send it through the roof of their aluminum gardening shed. Katherine and Travis would try to convince such people of the stupidity of what they wanted to do and sometimes they were successful, but more often they were not. They would drive by later and the tree would be gone. There would be a small rosebush in its place and bright sun would be streaming down everywhere. Then at the dump (this was when the dump was still small and new arrivals were quickly noted) the tree would be there, chopped and scattered, its branches still green in the refuse.
There had been a beautiful live oak in front of the house she had lived in with Travis in the days of their brief marriage. Neither the house nor the tree exist now, both having recently been leveled so that a cement-block Rent-a-Closet could be built on the site. People rent their condominiums during the height of the season and store their personal belongings in a Rent-a-Closet. Some of the people that Katherine now knows do that very thing. When she had been married to Travis and they had had one of their frequent quarrels and he had left the house, Katherine would often climb high up into the live oak and stay there until he returned. After he had been in the house for awhile, she would climb back down and saunter through the door, trying to give the impression that she had been someplace else, at a bar or with friends or even with a stranger, talking. She wanted him to think that she had someplace to go, away from him, and had gone there.
After their divorce, Katherine got the job at the botanical garden and rented Dewey’s beach shack. The retirees who attended her classes at the garden were primarily interested in plants that took little care and they were crazy about bromeliads which are able to flourish in deficient environments. Katherine told them how to force blooms by placing the plant and an apple in a plastic bag and they seemed to be thrilled with this information. After an hour of classes, Katherine conducted tours through the garden. It was boring work and she didn’t make much money, but she hadn’t needed much money then, and the job gave her time to think and imagine the kind of life that would be hers, eventually, now that she was free from a marriage she had found disappointing. She thought of taking flying lessons and maybe getting a pilot’s license. At night, in the beach shack, she stayed up late, listening to the soft thud and rush of the waves upon the sand. She could have enjoyed that time more if she had not been brooding so about Travis.
Four months after their divorce, Travis had gone camping on Cumberland Island and been bitten by ants and gone into anaphylactic reaction and died. The ranger who found him thought he’d had a heart attack but the doctor at the hospital saw the small red welts on his ankles. “It was only a few ants,” Travis’s mother had written Katherine. Travis was smart and sentimental, he had curly hair and often wore suspenders. He did not seem the kind of person to whom such a weird sad death would happen. As far as Katherine knew, he had not even had any allergies. Katherine felt that everyone had a certain closed circle of happenings that happened to them, certain kinds of things, and that somehow Travis had exchanged circles with someone else. Thinking about Travis troubled and baffled Katherine. Even now, she seems to stumble on the fact that she would not still be married to him even if he had not died.
When Travis and Katherine got their divorce, his mother had been very upset. “Why are you doing this!” she exclaimed to Katherine in a letter. “I don’t understand. Thank goodness there are no little babies to suffer.” Katherine rather wished there had been a baby. Of course he would not have suffered. Why would he? Katherine feels that if she had had an earlier child, it would be easier for her to have one now. She feels that she doesn’t have the instincts now to understand a child, and Peter doesn’t mind this, but if she’d like to have a child, it would be fine, he’d approve of such an idea, really. But there is no child that Katherine has with Peter and there was no child she had with Travis. When she had been with Travis she had an old black Jaguar XK-150 convertible and a toucan. With Peter, she has a new Volvo station wagon and a turkey.
Peter and Katherine have a turkey because they went to a communal feast on Thanksgiving Day and the live turkey was the grand prize in a dart game. The host, a wealthy man who has made a fortune in swimming pool construction, is a good friend of Peter’s. He is going to install a caged pool for them at cost as part of their remodeling project. The host always gives fabulous parties. On Halloween, he gave a party where he had an open casket on the lanai filled with Big Macs. On Thanksgiving, there were large quantities of meat, pies, watermelon and liquor. Neither Katherine nor Peter won at darts, but the winner didn’t want the turkey and the runners-up didn’t want it either, so at the end of the evening, Peter and Katherine loaded the turkey into the Volvo and took it home. It seemed an amusing thing to do at the time.
There are three things that Katherine feels are very nice about the turkey. One is the way sunlight falls through his red wattles, making them almost transparent. Two are the sounds he makes which are a cross between an electronic game and a mourning dove. And the third is that Katherine likes his feet very much. They are immense, gruesome, Baba Yaga feet. Fairy-tale feet in a story in which the hero declares at the very beginning — I will go I know not where, I shall bring back I know not what—
It is a bit eccentric to have a turkey. All their friends say this, but Katherine doesn’t mind being considered a little eccentric. On Thanksgiving, Katherine walked around the party collecting watermelon rinds to take home and use in a pickling recipe that Travis’s mother had once sent to her. Katherine had never had the opportunity to try the recipe before because it called for such large quantities. “Isn’t she a little young to be so eccentric?” the hostess asked Peter, laughing, as Katherine dropped half-eaten watermelon in a plastic bag. Katherine took the remark as a compliment.
“What on earth are you going to do with a turkey?” Travis’s mother writes. “Julia Child says that Americans should grow their own vegetables and raise rabbits to cut down on their food bills. Is something like that your intention?”
Travis’s mother is discreet. For example, she never mentions her son, but if she wasn’t always thinking about him, why would she continue to correspond with Katherine? When they were first married, she gave Katherine some photographs of Travis as a little boy, and when they were divorced, Katherine returned them to her. Katherine told her that they were breaking up because they had different dreams. This wasn’t exactly true, but the explanation seemed vague enough to be inarguable. When Travis realized that Katherine was serious about wanting a divorce, he accused her of having no conception of the real world. “The real world is hidden by your imagination,” he said.
Katherine doesn’t think she has much of an imagination. She had never imagined for instance that she would have stopped loving Travis and that he would have died and that she would spend so much of her time now remembering him.