Christine Schutt - Florida

“Better,” I said.

“Let me see,” she said. “Did you ever hear of blend?”

My thumb on her lids, I tried to blend; but I could not make her what she was, and what we both thought she had been a long time ago — beautiful, beautiful.

This woman, who said she was my mother, was not beautiful.

This woman said, “I give up,” and then she drank. She liked grape drink and vodka mixed. She liked such food as made her retch and in this way was similar to the mother from before, the same who had said, “Think I care?” then used a razor on her wrist — too lightly but to bloody effect.

“Didn’t they teach you this in college?” she asked, steadying herself against the bathroom sink, wiping at her mouth. “A friend of mine told me that in college anorexics rot the plumbing.” She looked hard at me then. “All that acid,” she said.

“I should go home now,” I said.

“Why?” she asked. “We’re just having fun,” and she smoothed a part of the bed for me to lie on. She said, “Come here, I’ll scratch your back.”

The skin on my back was not yet loosening, and it was easy to be naked before her and lulled by her distracted scratching. We were watching TV, and the TV picture was growing larger, the set giving off heat. Even the show we watched, it seemed, was louder. But outside was quiet and closing in. The sky had clouded up; the sun surely had set, though we could not see the ocean. Soon it would be dark. Her touch grew repetitive and faint when the only light in the room was the fluttering light on TV.

“Shush, no talking.”

“Was I talking?” she asked and fell back to sleep.

Like me, she had to sleep near a glass of water.

Also, I noticed, our feet were alike — cracked heels and bunched toes. Nothing anyone would want to be in bed with, and a sign, I thought, those overlooked feet, that no one had kept company for a long time.

Mother fell into a sleep from which she yet kept speaking.

“What do you want?” I asked. She didn’t answer clearly but played with her lips.

“I should go home now,” I said.

At home, and witness to a clearer change of season, I saw my hair grow in — largely, darkly. Outside the foliage tendrilled, and the bees frenzied the playgrounds’ sweet refuse — apple cores and squeezed cartons of juice. The market stands were full of polished gourds and knotted ears of garnet corn. The ginkgos yellowed; the backyard gardens browned — blow-weed and thistle, late summer’s drift, and the swimsuits I had worn on the California beaches were packed away now, salt-dried. I was growing in. I was making lists and using the phone. I was letting people know I was home again and that the area rug, summer-stored and cleaned, could be delivered, the boxed blankets, newly banded, would soon be needed; I was home again and preparing for the record colds, for the short unlit days and suspending snows, for the frayed, iced wires, the shut-downs, the winds, the space heaters, the fires, the tireless coverage of the ravaging winter that is winter in the city.

The urge to loll in a warm place is the same wherever I go.

THE PALPABLE IMPERMANENCE OF the warm weather place we paid to get to — and never won in a raffle — Barbados, the Caribbean, all salt-white, wet, and chafing sand. It caught in the legs of my suit and burned. The terrible Walter, my own (more terrible than Mother’s), bobbed, ridiculous as cork, in the foamy surf; he floated on his back as he might have sat at home. His white feet stuck out, and he wore his silly hat. Surly, threatening man, Walter was yet intent on being happy; but with his mouth open, he gagged on the water that washed over his head, and he draggled himself to shore. Blear, sore face, water rivering off his arms and legs — he was a disappointed traveler ready to go home.

“But we just got here,” I said, and we were fighting at the floating bar, swimming awkwardly around, treading water.

He wanted a real drink — no fruit in it.

He wanted a steak. “Fuck this fufu shit,” he said. “Everything here is skewered on a stick.”

Then I was down the beach away from him and scoring dope.

He said, “You stupid bitch.”

He said, “I hope you get sick.”

Our bedroom was sealed, drawn against the flickering sea.

Cold floor and filmy curtains, stony bed — I couldn’t fall asleep here and smoked my way to somewhere else.

All the time the terrible Walter was counting his money. He was figuring the tips.

He was sipping whiskey in the sealed room after dinner, near the window, in the dark; and because the room was very cold, I left him alone and opened the bathroom windows to let in the warm, wet air. I took a hot shower, which calmed me — but not for long. The sealed room where we slept was very cold and dark, and Walter was in the corner, without his shorts on, drinking, and his body, I saw, was wildly hairy. He saw me looking at him, and he said, “I hate you, too.”

All of the nights on that island, he sat in the bedroom and drank, and I sat in the bathroom and smoked, and we yelled out at each other horrible names. We cried.

I said someone else’s name over and over, and he said someone else’s name, too.

I said, “I want to go home,” and he said, he did, too.

“But where the fuck is my home?” he asked. “Why the fuck did I move in with you?” he yelled, yet he would not leave the brownstone once we were home again and living through the city’s spring arrived while we were gone.

A second spring passed before he died, the terrible Walter, still in the phonebook, at my address.

THAT DOG! HE USED to eat his own poo, and you’d kiss him! Remembering an Arlette story made me rueful when in the next room Walter retched whatever was left besides what he had been drinking. Walter’s lips were sausage-mottled, fat grubs I had long ago ceased to kiss, but why had I kissed him to start with?

I had been late, over an hour late, to where we met at a restaurant called Billy’s — loud, close, dark, full of manly hands handling money. He ordered for us old-fashioned, expensive food which he paid for with an aggressive signature. I thought his illegible hand meant he was powerful. Also, importantly, he was older by almost twenty years. Hailing me a separate cab, he said, “I don’t wait longer than ten minutes for anyone, but I did for you tonight. I will never wait for you again.”

No man had reprimanded me in years, but this sweet-sour scolding I remembered — Mother’s Walter, especially — and the charged feeling was the same, so I said yes when he called again, and I was not late.

The terrible Walter wanted children. Insisting on what we had and what we could have together, he said, “I’m not so old we couldn’t try. We could have children.”

“Why not?” I said. I wanted company, but by the time Walter moved into the brownstone not a week in some warm place or chops at Billy’s Friday nights could make us happy. We argued and drank; we wept for being lonely; children were out of the question; children would never have helped.

The terrible Walter introduced me to a man named Carter who was married to a Mitten on the board of a best school. After the evening with Carter and Mitten, the terrible Walter asked me, “Now do you think you’re important?”

Not since my mother had anyone hurt me with my own hurtful thoughts, and I felt sobered.

Walter was homely and heavy and old; he was coarse and lurid and prurient.

We did not like each other and yet perversely made plans for Barbados while he bossed me around and I lumped it being sullen. I liked and I didn’t like being told what to do; I thought, Walter knew how the city worked, and then I thought, he didn’t; but he knew about fucking hard, and he was crude and risky. He took me to unlikely corners where girls could be bought, but I didn’t, I couldn’t, would never although girls are my favorites. I thought, I deserve a Walter, and he must have thought he deserved me, or else why did we stay together, a year, another year until he died? Fucking was why. Fucking was respite from meanness.