Lavinia had loved her car. The engine crackled and hissed as it cooled. The windshield had a long crack in it and there was a smell of gasoline. She turned off the ignition.
Lavinia had loved her car and now it was broken to bits. She didn’t know what to think. She opened the door and climbed out onto the road where she lay down in the dust. In the middle of the night, she got back into the car because the mosquitoes were so bad. Otilla and the baby were stretched out in the back so Lavinia sat in the driver’s seat once more, where she slept.
In the morning, they ate the rest of the bread and Otilla gave the baby the last of the milk. The milk had gone sour and he spit most of it up. Otilla waded through the ditch and set the baby in a field box beneath an orange tree. The fruit had all been picked a month ago and the groves were thick and overgrown. It was hard for Otilla to clear out a place for them to rest. She tried to fan the mosquitoes away from the baby’s face but by noon the swarms had gotten so large and the bugs so fat and lazy that she had to pick them off individually with her fingers. Lavinia stayed in the Mercedes until she felt fried, then she limped across the road. The sun seemed waxed in the same position but she knew the day was going by. The baby had cried hard for an hour or so and then began a fitful wail that went on into the afternoon.
Every once in awhile, Lavinia saw Otilla rise and move feverishly through the trees. The baby’s weeping mingled with the rattle of insects and with Otilla’s singsong so that it seemed to Lavinia, when she closed her eyes, that there was a healthy community working out around her and including her in its life. But when she looked there was only green bareness and an armadillo plodding through the dust, swinging its outrageous head.
Lavinia went to the Mercedes and picked up the can of Coca-Cola, but she couldn’t find an opener. The can burnt in her hand and she dropped it. As she was getting out of the car, she saw Otilla walk out of the grove. She stopped and watched her shuffle up the road. She was unfamiliar, a mystery, an event. There was a small soiled bundle on her shoulder. Lavinia couldn’t place the circumstances. She watched and wrung her hands. Otilla swerved off into the grove again and disappeared.
Lavinia followed her giddily. She walked hunched, on tiptoe. When she came upon Otilla, she remained stealthily bent, her skirt still wadded in her hand for silence. Otilla lay on her back in the sand with the baby beside her, his bug-bitten eyelids squeezed against a patch of sky that was shining on them both. The baby’s mouth was moving and his arms and legs were waving in the air to some mysterious beat but Otilla lay motionless as a stick. Lavinia was disgusted to see that the top of Otilla’s dress was unbuttoned, exposing her grey stringy breasts. She picked up a handful of sand and tried to cover up her chest.
The baby’s diaper was heavy with filth. She took it off and wiped it as best she could on the weeds and then pinned it around him again. She picked him up, holding him carefully away from her, and walked to the road. He was ticking from someplace deep inside himself. The noise was deafening. The noises that had seemed to be going on in her own head earlier had stopped. When she got to the car, she laid him under it, where it was cool. She herself stood up straight to get a breath, and down the road saw a yellow ball of dust rolling toward her at great speed. The ball of dust stopped alongside and a young man in faded jeans and shirt, holding a bottle of beer, got out and stared at her. Around his waist he wore a wide belt hanging with pliers and hammers and cords.
“Jeez,” he said. He was a telephone lineman going home for dinner, taking a shortcut through the groves. The old lady he saw looked as though she had come out of some Arabian desert. She had cracked lips and puffy eyes and burnt skin. He walked toward her with his hand stretched out, but she turned away and to his astonishment, bent down and scrabbled a baby up from beneath the wrecked car. Then she walked past him and clambered into the cab of his truck by herself and slammed the door.
The young man jumped into the truck and smiled nervously at Lavinia. “I don’t have nothing,” he said excitedly, “but a chocolate bar, but there’s a clinic no more’n ten miles away, if you could just hold on until then. Please,” he said desperately. “Do you suppose you want this?” he asked, holding out the bottle of beer.
Lavinia nodded. She took the chocolate and put it in the baby’s fist. He cried and pushed it toward his mouth and moved his mouth around it and cried. Lavinia pressed the cool bottle of beer against her face, then rolled it back and forth across her forehead.
The truck roared through the groves and in an instant, it seemed, they were out on the highway, passing a sign that said WORSHIP IN PRIDESUP, 11 MILES. Beyond the sign was a field with a carnival in it. Lavinia could hear the sweet cheap music of the midway and the shrieks of people on the Ferris wheel. Then the carnival fell behind them and there was just field, empty except for a single, immense oak, a sight that so irritated Lavinia that she shut her eyes. The oak somehow seemed to give meaning to the field, a notion she found abhorrent.
She felt a worried tapping at her shoulder. When she looked at the young man, he just nodded at her, then he said, an afterthought, “What’s that baby’s name? My wife just had one and his name is Larry T.”
Lavinia looked down at the baby who glared blackly back at her, and the recognition that her life and her long, angry journey through it, had been wasteful and deceptive and unnecessary, hit her like a board being smacked against her heart. She had a hurried sensation of being rushed forward but it didn’t give her any satisfaction, because at the same time she felt her own dying slowing down some, giving her an instant to think about it.
“It’s nameless,” she whispered.
The Farm
IT was a dark night in August. Sarah and Tommy were going to their third party that night, the party where they would actually sit down to dinner. They were driving down Mixtuxet Avenue, a long black avenue of trees that led out of the village, away from the shore and the coastal homes into the country. Tommy had been drinking only soda that night. Every other weekend, Tommy wouldn’t drink. He did it, he said, to keep trim. He did it because he could.
Sarah was telling a long story as she drove. She kept asking Tommy if she had told it to him before, but he was noncommittal. When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah talked and talked. She was telling him a terrible story that she had read in the newspaper about an alligator at a jungle farm attraction in Florida. The alligator had eaten a child who had crawled into its pen. The alligator’s name was Cookie. Its owner had shot it immediately. The owner was sad about everything, the child, the parents’ grief, Cookie. He was quoted in the paper as saying that shooting Cookie was not an act of revenge.
When Tommy didn’t drink, Sarah felt cold. She was shivering in the car. There were goosepimples on her tanned, thin arms. Tommy sat beside her smoking, saying nothing.
There had been words between them earlier. The parties here had an undercurrent of sexuality. Sarah could almost hear it, flowing around them all, carrying them all along. In the car, on the night of the accident, Sarah was at that point in the evening when she felt guilty. She wanted to make things better, make things nice. She had gone through her elated stage, her jealous stage, her stubbornly resigned stage and now she felt guilty. Had they talked about divorce that night, or had that been before, on other evenings? There was a flavor she remembered in their talks about divorce, a scent. It was hot, as Italy had been hot when they had been there. Dust, bread, sun, a burning at the back of the throat from too much drinking.