Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

The unmanning memory of the Clam Box. The Clam Box on the dock, that lidded, sunken, mossy place, hurried, humid, steaming tubs of shellfish, small orange light; it was here they all sat — two, three nights ago.

“Don’t,” Isabel had advised Ned behind their menus.

“Don’t what?”

“Oh, to hell with it. Do what you want.”

He had shown off. Good schoolboy, having done his homework and up to date on Clive’s opinions, full of praise for de Kooning: “firsthand, deep and clear.” He, Ned, wanted to be intense like de Kooning’s colors and intense, intensely himself. Homer, Marin? The muddy sea? And why not? No doubt, he was a bore. “I really can’t remember a fucking thing,” he said.

Oh, God! Turning from these considerations, he makes his way across a room of shirtfronts and bare arms. He is looking for Isabel, who has disappeared. Light fizzes. Someone taps his shoulder and he turns and sees the only crone in the room with skin as luminous as coal, dry patches, and above her upper lip, small hairs.

This old woman with the mustache keeps turning up.

“I’m spooked,” he says, relieved to see the woman at the window is Isabel, shoulder blades sawing, skeletally illustrative of the puppet body. There are many reasons Isabel does not eat; she has told him a few. At the Clam Box, for instance, there had been no green on the table that Isabel could see. First the gray steamers, then the lobsters, looking maniacal next to the alarming corn.

Ned had been all right until he saw him. Ned had muddled the face of the handsome old man, Clive Harris, high color and white hair, hair curled over his collar, puffed out, sort of wild. The hair and the faded clothes Harris wore and the way he stood made him out to be unusually hardy at seventy-some years old. How had Ned forgotten this man, Ben Harris’s uncle, but Ned had been looking at Phoebe. Didn’t everyone look at the bride? Now, it seemed, everyone looked at Clive Harris, the best known of well-known painters on the peninsula — sure, showy, famous. Famous? No. Isabel was wrong about that. The tourists didn’t really turn around to see Clive Harris. Clive Harris and his wife, just behind, in frantic colors, passing.

“I hope we had fun” is the best Ned can do, standing behind her. He unties her bows. After he has unbraided her hair, he tries to braid it and then unbraids it again.

Isabel says, “You could do more than hairdressing.”

But it is hard to sustain his interest here in the bare room they have found for themselves. He says, “We should do it, we should make a baby.”

Poor Ned. His favorite word these days is fuck, though he can’t do it. Fuck.

“What’s the matter now?” Isabel asks. Common as a kitchen cut, her question starts a fight.

“Did I blow it?” Ned asks.

“What do you care? You were in no hurry to be liked.”

“Please,” Ned says. “I wasn’t entirely uncharming was I?”

“No. You were very flattering about Clive’s hair.”

“Please.”

“No,” Isabel says. “I mean it.”

He decides to believe her.

“What else?”

Isabel says, “You were fine.”

“Turn around and tell me you mean what you just said.”

Perversely, she doesn’t. “Fuck off,” Isabel says. “Why do you even bother getting out of bed?”

Just before she leaves the house for a walk, Isabel’s manner changes with his, both of them chastened — by what? “You should come with me, Ned,” she says. “Take a walk with me. It’s a pretty cemetery.”

No, he wants to think of pleasanter times. So does she but uglier thoughts intrude. The chocolaty laxatives she chewed after every meal — crapping over a hole in some Italian hill town while Fife and Ned drank under an awning sagged with rain. Why did her thoughts wend this way? She is here, now — look up! The oaks in the Seaside Cemetery rattle; the sky is near.

Here, with these sleepers, how easy it is to fall onto a path that should be familiar but is not. The Seaside Cemetery will never be known entirely. Today’s new names are Zilpah Means and Isophene; Helen, at Rest; and Minnie. The last two are small stones. Minnie’s has a rose; Helen’s, nothing. Zilpah Means is buried with her husband under a twelve-foot obelisk. Isophene is all by herself, a name on a stone separated from family, a child, but whose?

Isabel’s maiden name — and her professional name — is Stark. Bourne is sometimes socially expedient; thus, Dinah must think of her now as Isabel Bourne, and what is that but a foolish heart?

Speared on a pike of the wrought-iron fence are gouts of melons — watermelons — squashed troughs for flies she nears to see. Kid mischief, must be; mostly no one’s here to hear the steady lobstermen at sea coughing through the fog and brushfire blue before first light every morning. Lobstermen because this is still a fishing village; but there are also — count them — three art galleries, a few bric-a-brac shops, the Trade Winds, and an older grocery that sells liquor. Across the street from the older grocery is the town hall and, up the street, the high school. Most of the town is white; the darker, waterlogged-looking places, watering holes like the Clam Box, are on the dock. A small post office — very friendly — a library, two banks, the famous Wish Nursery, two competing hardware stores, The Bay Bookstore, and the other one, for tourists, that sells puzzles and calendars and toys. A town the way a town should be, straightforward and simple as Grover’s Corners with a historical society and historical sites, homesteads, deeds, seals, the picture of Amos Weed’s funeral. June 1895. A windowed box of smoke on wheels, a horse-drawn summer hearse posed before the open gates of the Seaside Cemetery. The horse looks nearly dead himself though the coachman sits upright. Someone there is always brave.

*

The malign eye and the nasty snout repelled her and she couldn’t set the trap. That’s when Floyd and Floyd’s PestGo came over — well, really, only the younger Floyd, called Pete, came over and advised against catch and release. “The darn things come back like as not”: this from Pete who bent to a hole in the house. “Here’s one way them squirrels get in.”

Sure enough, Isabel saw this and other fissures as she followed Pete on the investigation of the Bridge House. And after Pete from Floyd and Floyd’s PestGo left, she walked around the house, picking off conspicuous splinters of paint; she liked the faded yellow side of the house; the dank side, north and cold, was far less welcoming although the paint was vibrantly yellow. If the Bridge House were hers, she would paint it white: a white house made rodentless with the help of PestGo. No more acorn shards in the kitchen drawers; no more fear of finding squirrel turds in corners. When she thought of their tiny paws, she saw a bird claw, something basic that looked like a symbol of dissolution. “Am I making too much of the squirrels?”

“Yes” was Ned’s answer. “You are making too much of the fucking squirrels. And you,” he said, “whoever would have thought you with an exterminator?”

“I know,” she said. “It’s a contradiction. What can I say? Some things just don’t mean as much to me. Animals with snouts, pointy faces — ferrets, minks. .”

“And your mouse?”

“It wasn’t a mouse to me.”

*

For the first week, every day, Isabel drove to the long white house where Clive and Dinah lived and there modeled for Clive in his studio. Ned had seen the studio from the outside; he had not been invited in the house or entertained. Isabel had lunch with Dinah and Clive once; always she was home by early afternoon to work at the kitchen table on something of her own. “Don’t ask,” she said, and Ned didn’t. Was it rain that kept her at the Bridge House the second week? The dining table didn’t work then and she moved upstairs to the tiny bedroom with its single tiny window painted shut — stuck — she used an oscillating fan and paced the hall. Isabel did not return to Clive’s studio but three or four times after the rain; after the rain — what happened? A migraine — poor woman. However, she slept; she slept somewhere else, lived on warm Coke and horse pills for headaches like hers; the smell of cooking made her sick, so Ned ate out at the Clam Box and made friends with the waitress. Well again, Isabel walked very carefully and quietly so that her head would not clatter — her word, clatter.