Joy Williams, "Taking Care"

sunken souffles & sentient snow

“Jones sees something moving across the snow, a part of the snow itself, running.”

Occasionally in each of us — it can happen while we’re falling asleep, or walking alone across a field, or standing waiting for the coffee machine — there arises a soufflé of rare and delicate perception. We understand, for as long as this soufflé remains inflated, that the life we’re living, with all its irritations and complications and intricate patterns, is a kind of dream, and so is the life that everyone else is (or seems to be) living — how funny that we’d failed to see this! And how funny that we’d been taking everything so seriously all this time! We are, for a few seconds, silent with simple wonder.

And then (particularly if we happen to be writers) we think: this is too good to keep to myself. So we race the soufflé to the table (I’m going to put this into the climax of my novel! I’m going to start a religion!). But as soon as we arrive, we make a dismaying discovery — the soufflé has collapsed. We no longer remember quite what we were talking about. We doubt we really perceived anything important at all — we were probably just dehydrated. How embarrassing. Let’s just toss out this sad sunken thing and open a pint of ice cream.

But there is, down in Florida, a woman churning out soufflés that — due to some mystery of kitchen knowhow or atmospheric pressure — never sink. You can take them home and marvel at their airy miraculousness, spoon in hand, for as long as you like. Her name is Joy Williams.

Williams is the author of a handful of sedately bizarre books (her short stories are, rightly, what she’s best known for), most of them involving the environment, and animals, and people who experience life as a kind of long bewilderment. She’s often lumped — not very informatively — with writers like Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver and Jay McInerney, but she’s much weirder than they are. She writes like Marilynne Robinson but with a deep tan and sunglasses, or like a spacier, kinder Joan Didion. You want to take a walk after finishing one of her stories. You feel that you’ve experienced something you don’t quite know how to talk about.

My favorite of her stories — the soufflé with the most impressive loft — is “Taking Care.” It’s about a rural preacher named Jones who finds himself tending simultaneously to his infant granddaughter and his terminally ill wife. Jones shuttles between the hospital and his pastoral duties, bombarded with grim medical data (“slides and charts of normal and pathological blood cells which look to Jones like canapés,”) and elaborate feeding instructions (“a bottle of milk, eight ounces, and a portion of strained vegetables.”) Jones has every reason to be miserable — and “Taking Care” has every reason to be a miserable story. But it isn’t. Reading it is a spacious sort of bliss.

From the beginning, we sense something peculiarly innocent — almost drugged — in Jones’s way of experiencing the world:

This part of the hospital is like a motel. One may wear one’s regular clothes. The rooms have ice-buckets, rugs and colorful bedspreads… A nurse comes in with a tiny cup full of pills… The cup is the smallest of its type that Jones has ever seen.

This is the sound of someone piecing the world together bit by bit, as if just awakening from a long nap.

Jones is writing to his daughter. He received a brief letter from her this morning, telling him where she could be reached… She did not mention either her mother or the baby, which makes Jones feel peculiar. His life seems increated as his God’s life, perhaps even imaginary.

The point of all this spaciness — this weird marveling distance — becomes clear when Jones and his granddaughter are out driving during the first snow of the year. The baby, riding high in her car-seat, is delighted by the falling snowflakes.

Sometimes the baby reaches out for them. Sometimes she gives a brief kick and cry of joy.

And then this happens:

Jones sees something moving across the snow, a part of the snow itself, running. Although he is going slowly, he takes his foot completely off the accelerator. “Look, darling, a snowshoe rabbit.”

This quiet moment (don’t you miss snow, incidentally?) is for me the key to the story, and to Williams’s curious magic. What we have here, at the dullest, most literal level, is a standard perceptual error. A man sees something odd (what is going on with that hunk of snow?) and then figures it out. But by treating it with her customary oddball plainness, Williams turns it into something miraculous. A part of the snow itself, running. Such simple seeing — the visual system briefly slipping the reins of conceptual categories.

And this is not prettiness for prettiness’s sake — it’s a peek at the workings behind this whole astonishing story.

Because we are, each of us, at birth bombarded with a snowstorm of sensory data — the blooming buzzing confusion out of which we haven’t even yet carved a we. And slowly we learn to draw circles around certain patches of that snow: That blur of color and sounds and feelings, I’m going to call my mom. That constellation of thought and tingling and pain, I’m going to call me.

What Williams manages in the snow with that rabbit is to make tangible that the blooming buzzing confusion never goes away. A part of the snow is itself, running — and another part of the snow is itself, driving while another part is itself, giggling in its car seat. We have, for the duration of the story, one foot back in the undifferentiated perceptual roar of babyhood. It’s as if Williams turns up some visual-fuzz-enhancing knob on the TV just enough for us to be reminded that everything we see, and everything we’ve ever seen, is all humming pixels — but not so much that we lose the story. Instead we experience the standard parade of incidents and interstices — the hospital waiting rooms and snowy roadsides — with a new sort of lightness and fizz. Reality, gone flat from sitting out too long, has been re-carbonated.

And this is why the story is fundamentally a religious story. It isn’t that Jones happens to be a preacher; it’s that the story manages to do what religion only promises. We are reincarnated every time we recall that we could just as well draw the circle we call me around a rabbit, or a baby, or a stranger. And we are resurrected every time we return, after a hiatus in the undrawn, to the familiar and arbitrary boundaries of ourselves. Merry Christmas.