Christine Schutt - Prosperous Friends

Stupid.

The Bridge House, 1858, yellow clapboard, the yellow almost all worn away. Old trees. Old windows, wiggly glass. No bridge figured into it; the first owner’s name was Gray, and after him, a spinster daughter, Margaret. Occupied for more than a hundred years by the same family, a New England farmhouse not so far from the road, a winter house, austere and brave, high elevation, hard on a hill overlooking the bay! The bay and, but for Mr. Weed and his establishment, open meadow, pines, outcroppings. But Mr. Weed, the menacing Mr. Weed, lived at the bend in the road in a warren of outbuildings, where he serviced lawn mowers, sold parts. She had introduced herself — she had seen the photo of his ancestor and seen his ancestors’ graves at the Seaside Cemetery. Mr. Weed was on his knees and too old to get up quickly.

“Please don’t!” she had said even as he stood.

On clear days Isabel could see Acadia in the distance.

*

Sally said to her father, “You think I’m staying forever. I know what you’re thinking.”

“You do, do you?” Clive asked.

Dinah was out of the door with her arms open, bumping past him and into the cushion of Sally in slacks. Dinah, no bigger than a darning needle, put her arms around Sally’s waist and hugged, exuberant. As long as they keep it to themselves, why shouldn’t he suffer his daughter’s visit? Dinah wanted company, whereas he was no sooner in company than he wanted to be out of it and back in the barn. Not that he was always productive, Christ, no. A lot of looking went into what he was doing. For a time he had liked to look at Isabel, bony as she was, but he was looking elsewhere now. A fox, a fox and her kits, had come upon him from time to time when he had set up in the field to paint early in the morning, and he was smitten. Mama fox, lighthearted in the high grass, when her focus turned on him, she held still; she stood self-possessed and cool and looked right through him. Mama fox. The kits were merely foolish.

“I’m happy to see you, too, Dad,” Sally said and she made an affectionate move toward him as she dragged what looked like camping gear behind her.

“Smells syrupy in here. Did you make waffles this morning, Dinah?”

Had she? He didn’t remember. “No one tells me anything,” Clive said, more to himself than to anyone listening, moving out of the kitchen to the back porch. Dinah already at the disaster site, saying, “Shared custody is often not shared.” He wished there were some other story. People were moving about him even as he moved away. Dinah, last glimpsed with branches of weigela in a Ball jar. He remembered that part of breakfast at least.

*

The last corner before the last so sharply inclined to the shore that Ned’s car, now Isabel’s car, fishtailed off the road — an accident! The tree broke the car’s fall, or who knows how far down the hill she might have gone. Isabel was unhurt, but when she dared to see how far down was down, she got sick. And this fuck-up after all she had accomplished in asking Mr. Weed to help her get her car — on Pearl near the Clam Box, where else? She must have forgotten she was driving or something equally stupid — a dumb accident might explain her accident. Embarrassed, wiping her mouth, not quite relieved. The back window of the car was a blown-out sheet of glass — green diamond edges beguiling as a gemstone. The back door was dented, half-open. Otherwise the car worked.

“My God!”

The policeman did not remind her of any person in authority.

“It was so easy,” she said, “in slow motion and so much damage, but I’m all right, thank you, really. That such a tiny accident should cause so much damage. The car’s worth nothing now, I guess. Not even trade-in. Scrap.”

Once home, she sat on the granite step looking out at the bay. It took a while before the sensation of falling ceased.

She talked to her mother for a time and was comforted by her terrorized reaction. “Why?” Her mother said, “You have to ask me why I’m so upset? After this whole shameful business. .” The sentence was abandoned. “Please,” her mother said, “if it’s about Ned, I don’t want to know.”

*

“Ned was hoping for guests,” Isabel said when Dinah and Sally arrived. “We’ve got rum and vodka, gin, six or seven bottles of modest house red. I’m leaving it here with you, if that’s okay.”

“No,” Sally said. “Don’t you want it?”

“I’ll take it,” Dinah said, “but Isabel don’t drive back to New York right away, at least stay through the weekend.”

“I hadn’t planned staying longer,” Isabel said. She thanked them for the surprise of the sweet peas, and then she was crying. She was crying, and Dinah and Sally led her out of the kitchen into a front room with sun. They sat on either side of her on the sofa.

They didn’t know about the car. Clive had not told them, but they wanted to know, animated by talk about accidents with machines and people: the surprising force of slight collisions and accident lore. How once, Dinah remembered, a not-so-large tree limb overloaded with wet snow fell on the tool shed and crushed it.

The usual disaster commiserations brought the women together: They had all dinged some car, lost keys, forgotten gas; they had surprised themselves with their own fragility: falling on a street, banging into something with an edge. Tables!

“I don’t remember there being so little furniture,” Sally said, “but you put in new screens?”

“No,” Dinah said. “I sent Nan Black to clean before Isabel. .”

Isabel was apologizing for the mess. She planned on cleaning as soon as she knew what she was doing; she was weepy about the car, the shock and expense of it, and then she was speaking about Ned: How often she had heard herself asking, “But you’re not a fuck, are you?” And his answering, “Yes, I am.”

Isabel said, “Dinah, I’m so sorry.”

“I know,” Dinah said, and she looked around the room and appeared delighted and surprised at her own foresight: “I sent Nan.”

“New screens?” Sally asked.

“Just Nan, Nan Black.”

“It’s so bright,” Sally said. “I don’t remember its being so bright.”

Isabel pushed herself out from the couch, saying, “I’ve been throwing away a lot of Ned’s crap.” Why did she always pick mean words? “Some clothes are nice and a few books.”

“Don’t give away his books,” Dinah said. “He should have them.”

The three women on the stairs — Sally held the banister as if it were the handle to a suitcase — ostensibly to look over whatever Isabel had labeled nice. At the landing, Isabel watched as what seemed dank and threatening, oppressively wallpapered on the sunless side of the house dried, darkened, and turned softly old in Dinah’s company. The wide-board floors painted gray were smooth enough to walk on barefoot, but Isabel was in the habit of slipping off her slippers at the edge of the bed and otherwise wearing them. Now she saw what Clive meant but Sally wasn’t too tall for the Bridge House. She walked through the house comfortably, seeming happy in the fact that the house worked: Lights, door handles, locks; room to room she walked until she reached the room Ned had seized to work in — and why not? No one ever said he wasn’t selfish. Isabel stood with Sally and Dinah at the opened windows. The clamorous brilliancy of the bay was not tamed even at this distance from this height. The height made Isabel dizzy and she stepped back just as Sally sat on the table, the same Ned used for work. “Ah, hah!” Sally said. “Where the magic happens?” and she used her arm as a dust rag over the powdered surface. “Was he working here?” Sally asked.

The house faltered. “I thought,” Isabel said, and she steadied herself on the desk edge and wondered that the time Ned had spent in this wide room with all its light should yield up the parts he had read her, indulgences, lugubrious and trite — except that Carol Bane had approved. In consideration of events in the world the only noble calling was to report on them. Where were the orphans in Ned’s work but he was sitting under an umbrella table with a silly woman feeding table scraps to dogs? What did a person say to such audacity as Ned’s? To write a memoir didn’t a person have to suffer a little?