Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

*

In the morning, Ned wanted to talk.

“Let’s not talk about this now,” Isabel said. “Aren’t you tired of it? We have two more weeks with nothing asked of us. We should be nice to each other and work.” She walked away from where he sat at the edge of the bed. Downstairs in the kitchen the sensible sound of public radio put her in her place — and sure enough: another tornado in the poor flat states where so much weather seemed to happen.

“Who was bleeding?” Dinah asked Clive. “You or me?” She had found a bloodstain, surely oral, on the sheets, but whose? Their wanton, close sleep! Most likely his, his mouth, the older, though he didn’t feel any pain.

“You’re welcome to look,” he said, opening his mouth.

So the day came on, another day with a sky blue enough to put the sun in its place, a sky as hard to look at as the sun, although she looked up after the incongruously sweet sound of the ospreys. Straight through the afternoon she squinted and still she didn’t see them until they were a dash, then out of sight. She wrote about the frog she had stared at the other day, the cold hysteria in his eyes, but frogs seemed too enervated for hysteria; they seemed lazy. The sound they made was a plucked string, the start of down-home Delta, slow. The afternoon went on and on and she worked on her geraniums — all firecracker reds in clay pots of different sizes, some atop an old blue box, all packed close. Maine classic. Clive was with Isabel on the bench outside the barn; the bench, once soldier blue, had faded to something like oyster, a color she liked. It did not need repainting, not yet. When the wood looked dried out and splintery then she would paint.

But here was a change she wanted to make next year no doubt — next year, would Isabel be in the picture? — next year she wanted to paint the bench on the screen porch black, eschew geraniums for a good leaf, no blossoms necessary. A part of her was sick of the drawn-out dying about the geraniums. From so little a rain as a shower they seemed to emerge sopped and spotted black and brown; they only looked durable; their lives were short. What bewildered her was how much she had loved them and for so long. Her high-school sweetheart, her first love, her young husband, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card, a rhyme — did he know she still loved him from time to time? Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. Endure was a word in another song. She didn’t always have to be in Isabel Bourne’s company; it was easier to lunch alone. What did Ned Bourne do for lunch? She had seen him the other day at Trade Winds shucking ears of corn to check the kernels, shucking fast and looking guilty about it. She had avoided him then, “glad to escape beguilement and the storm. .” Did Robert Lowell know how much she loved him? A bit of a bully, like Clive, only madder. No, it wasn’t madness in Clive, Clive wasn’t mad — he was selfish, which was a fault, but a fault a person could live with. The word endure again. Ned Bourne squeezing avocados at Trade Winds, poking the vegetables, no, poking the meat, “and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Patchwork poems while she waited for Clive, who had said the tide was high at four. She was ready to swim when he was and he was at four thirty, which really wasn’t late. Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. That didn’t mean she had to be in the model’s company. Clive knew this much and they went to the cove alone without Isabel.

Ah! The water was a gasp and Clive swam loudly in it — a splashy stroke — while Dinah, in sunglasses, treaded in a hot spot, hung, froggylike, which was not attractive, but her aim was to stay warm with her head up and out of the water and her face dry. She was from the middle of the country; she was used to lakes and had never grown used to saltwater in her eyes. Not to say she didn’t enjoy paddling in the ocean — she did — she almost didn’t want to leave, so soothing was it and the air today, so cold. He promptly put a towel over her shoulders as she emerged. “Here,” he said, and he put into her hand a stone he had found on the rubbly beach. The stone was bone worn and warm, not heavy, but rather light, and she turned it over in her hands, and thought of Sally, who liked to look for stones on the beach. Dinah kept them, the nicest of them, Sally’s presents, on the sills of the tool shed. Now Clive was offering her a stone because, she guessed, he knew how she missed Sally. He knew she wanted company. He knew she wanted to see his daughter, but he was not up for it.

*

He pushed what Dinah had set before him away. “Why would you expect me to be sunny? I’ve never much liked anybody in the morning.”

“I’m sorry,” Dinah said, and she took up the plate of fruit she had just put before him. “How would you like your eggs?”

Dinah jiggered vodka in her juice. Vodka, blue sky, birds. Clive was almost always nicer in the afternoon. (Sally, on the telephone: “Would everyone start behaving if I had cancer?”) But she had read somewhere statistics that prisoners were more likely granted parole if their hearing was in the afternoon. One explanation was people were generally happier in the afternoon.

“Sally wants to visit.” This, over a late, late lunch that would serve as dinner, just the two of them, a picnic, a bully bread with a leather crust and other hard food, like salami, and iced coffee — bitter and no cream to cut it, no sugar.

“Sally wants to visit.”

His response to the whistling-out-of-nowhere speed of her announcement was no response.

“She doesn’t mind about the house — though it was abrupt. She just wants to see us,” Dinah said. “Don’t be this way. Please. Whatever it is you’re fighting about. . ” Dinah hesitated because, in truth, she didn’t know quite why he would not talk to Sally. Undoubtedly, the cause was trivial.

“I miss her,” Dinah said. “I miss Sally.”

“You shouldn’t drink in the morning, Dinah. It makes you sentimental.”

Sally, long ago, a large and unwashed girl on her way to camp, she needed a bra, but no one, it seemed, had told her. No one had told Sally about Dinah either; not until Clive and Dinah were married was Sally introduced to Dinah — whose idea was that? Sally’s arms were shapeless even then, and the pallid skin up close was pimpled — some kind of rash. Sally’s arms — most of what Dinah remembers from that time: that, and her impulse to hug the girl. Stepdaughter? The word was too harsh for such a big, gentle soul.

“You talk about Sally as if she were a Saint Bernard.”

“Oh, Clive, please!”

Sally stretched out along the picnic cloth was long, nearly as tall as Clive — six feet — and her backside, monumental.

“I know Sally can be needy, has been — is!” Dinah didn’t want to yell. Who was she to scold?

When Dinah woke from her nap, she saw the meadow had been mown. The fieldstones were visible again. They looked like lumpish animals in the muddy embankment, and Clive, at the shed, appraising, seemed pleased — pleased with the appearance of everything, himself included, and why not? The smooth movable parts of him — nothing caved in or stiff or dry about Clive, nothing barreled but his chest was russet colored, ardent — all worked, and the whole of him turned to her now, welcoming. Up close, he smelled grassy. Was it any wonder what she did, what she had done, and would do again for the attentions of this man? Years ago Dinah had left the young husband — known long but married shortly — for this man, Clive Harris, older but not by so many years anymore. Left a husband, a hometown, and friends for a man who openly cheated on her even then. Oh, pride was overrated; she had learned how to put it aside. Drinking a little helped and the days when she fancied she had written a good line, which sometimes turned into a poem and a good one at that.