Christine Schutt - Florida

“Miss Alice,” Arthur had called to Mother, “please get in.”

Mother was wearing the falling-leaves coat in the falling-leaf colors, a thing blown it was she seemed, past its season, a brittle skittering across the icy snow to where Arthur stood by the car, fogged in.

I attended to the drama of Mother’s clothes, the smoke-thin nightgown she wore before Arthur came; I wanted it. She wisped through the house in this nightgown and eschewed electric light and carried candles. “Go to sleep,” she had said, come upon me spying, and I said to her, “You, too!” but Mother was awake and moving through the house and out across the snow — Mother shouting back at me, “You’re not invited!” Later she cried, and I sat under the crooked roof of her arm and felt her gagged and heaving sorrow. “If your father were here …”

But my father was dead and my name was hers and everyone said I was surely her daughter, so why did she leave me except that she did? The next day she was off to her Florida, and I was off to mine.

THE COILED TRAIL OF the car lighter in the dark reminded me of Mother when Uncle Billy was smoking and supervising Arthur as he carried to the backdoor and into the kitchen roped boxes from Mother’s house. Suitcases, clocks, chiming clocks, more boxes. Uncle Billy held out the fur hat to me. “Where she is now,” he said, “your mother won’t need it.” The hat in my hand came alive; I felt it warm and breathing and felt the weak heat hushing from the baseboards against my ankles, my feet.

Arthur was driving again. He was driving past shapes crouched in sleeping fields, past unplowed snows and smokeless chimneys. Grimaced light and hard snow, loose doors, abandonment. “Is it time to go to Uncle Billy’s?” I asked. “Are we here already?” Here at Arlette’s, at Nonna’s, at Uncle Billy’s, at Nonna’s, no logic to the rotation, no meaning I could figure except to know the first house and the last at different ends of the lake. Uncle Billy’s house was first — brick walk, cold wind, water, water roughing against the shore. I saw the water’s darkness in the distance when so much else was under snow. But the ledges from the rock gardens jutted out like tongues; and the trees, standing before the moon, were reprimanded. The moon was a scold.

“Outside after dark is for animals,” Aunt Frances said. “Come inside where it is warm.”

Hardly warm! The old sashes rattled in the windows — hundreds, all sides — so that a cold air rimmed the rooms and rooms and rooms of Uncle Billy’s house. “There!” someone pointed: Great-Granddaddy in an accomplished pose, painted a year shy of his dying. I looked at his eyes, and it seemed to me he did not want to live and that Mother was right: Great-Granddaddy had rushed into his dying.

Uncle Billy said to Aunt Frances, “That sounds like something my sister would say,” and Aunt Frances said to me, “I don’t know what your mother allowed, but here we talk only of living,” and she took away my picture books of pyramids of rings and shoes. “Depressing photographs,” she said, and she gave me books on animals instead. I liked these, too, and I liked the new haircut; it was better than what Mother usually did. Mother who would never fix me. “I can’t do French braids,” Mother had once confessed. “Look at me! Wear a hat!”

Aunt Frances, holding up clothes from my suitcase — socks, shirt, the same hat — said, “Why aren’t these name tagged?” And she gave my clothes to Arlette. Dragged hems, belts broken, Arlette could fix almost anything provided I helped.

“Hold still!” Arlette said, or “we’ll go to Miss Pearl. Hold still!” Little wiggler, little bungler, always dirtying herself! “I remember,” Arlette said, and then she told such stories I had just as soon forget.

On any day in the week, I wanted to be away from Uncle Billy’s and in the car with Arthur driving past where I once lived. Down Lawn and across School was how I had walked for all of my life; I had walked to where a far-below, mean-looking river dropped at my feet: Main Street, the original. Walked north, away from water and local business, Main Street was houses: Sloane’s and Doctor Humber’s and Miss Pearl’s — old, old Miss Pearl’s, with her pointy tongue for sewing, who crawled below my skirts and never pricked me. Her porch windows snapped in the cold; I heard them despite passing fast, and I ducked, not wanting to be seen in Uncle Billy’s gem-like car. I did not want my old block to see me. I was avoiding the scalded daughter with the patched-over face. Friends once, and friendless, we had walked far apart through the fields behind our houses on the small side streets.

“My street!” I called after, going Arthur’s way to school, airport, Arlette’s — wherever it was he was taking me.

“Pull over there,” I sometimes said rudely. “Park there and wait, Arthur. No one will see me. I just want to look.”

My old house, the original.

The window I looked through showed open doors and light from windows unseen, and I wondered what the rooms were like upstairs. Had the upstairs been emptied, too, and would I never again see our house?

UNCLE BILLY WAS GOING to the desert — again! We were all going to the desert, all except Arthur. And Arlette, too, was staying behind. Arlette was minding the lake house, the one Aunt Frances loved best. Aunt Frances did not like the desert. “I’m a snow bird,” she said; nevertheless, Aunt Frances packed. She ordered sleeveless shirts for me with my initials on the collars. Sleeveless shirts in March — imagine! “We were shucking off our winter coats; we were traveling light: “Good-bye, Arthur, (good-riddance, Arlette), good-bye.”

The desert was a vacation Uncle Billy paid for — no bargains, no deals — but here Uncle Billy hoped to make money, more money, unusually, of course, in the desert.

In the desert Uncle Billy carried a gun. The desert birds were a spring green or dirt color, I remember this, and Uncle Billy’s gun and the mountains and the trek we took after the Dutchman’s lost mine. I was ten — ten was my age when Mother left for good, and this sleep-over life began. I was sleeping at my Uncle Billy’s desert house that time we took the Dutchman’s trek, and I drank my water early, and Uncle Billy would not share his. He said, “Let that be a lesson to you, sweetie.”

I swam and swam in Uncle Billy’s pool.

I wrote to Arthur. I asked about the snow. I told him maybe I wouldn’t come back Spring after spring, I wrote this same message: I love it here. Maybe I won’t come back.

But Arthur was waiting in the car for me.

Arthur was waiting, was paid to be waiting to drive me from house to house, to Uncle Billy’s winter house and then to Arlette’s shack, to Nonna’s, Uncle Billy’s again, Nonna’s, Uncle Billy’s — Arthur was stoutly, conspicuously waiting for me, and I was embarrassed to be seen with him. Standing outside of the car, simply taking up my luggage, Arthur looked uglier than when even Mother left. His teeth, his nose. “Hello,” I said with a brushed-past hug. “Arthur,” I said, insisting on his name. I was ashamed of my cool behavior, yet I didn’t want anyone to see Arthur and to think he was my father. My father was handsome!

Arthur was waiting in the car for me; in front of school or after lessons, Arthur was waiting in Uncle Billy’s formal car, a blue-black, deep green, the same color as the stone Aunt Frances wore on her wedding-ring finger, a color stippled in the light, expensive.

Arthur called the car the Emerald Gem, and he washed the car weekly and dried it with a chamois. I helped.