Christine Schutt - Florida

When did Uncle Billy sell the boat, I wonder, and what is in the boathouse now? Who lives in Uncle Billy’s house, and how have they changed it?

That house. I never thought the last time I saw the house would be the last. The felt-lined, felt-protected feel of the house, how softly every light switch went on. More than the collections themselves — the seashells, arrowheads, bullets from the desert — the underlit glass cases of Uncle Billy’s collections, the very glass itself, sobered me. I walked past with my arms crossed to quell the urge to kiss it, the glass, to feel it warm against my lips and see my lips’ wrinkly impress.

I think I will not talk anymore about Mother.

“You’re to enjoy yourself, Alice,” Aunt Frances says, straightening my place mat, saying, “Sit down for dessert and enjoy yourself.”

I enjoy the light, the enticement of the sunset when the desert is a softness that in noon-light was revealed as hooked and dangerous.

“I am not going to see her anymore,” I say — I blurt really.

Aunt Frances says, “No more now, Alice, please.”

“I am no help. I upset the nurses. I sit on the edge of Mother’s bed and trip its alarm.”

I am about to say more when the lights dim and the swing doors to the kitchen swing open, and here comes the cook with dessert on a cart. “Surprise!” says Uncle Billy.

“Occasion?” Aunt Frances says, “Must there be an occasion? No occasion. “We are happy you are here is all, Alice.”

Do they love me? Are we home?

Aunt Frances leans in, and Uncle Billy says, “Look,” and the cook puts a match to the dessert.

Clouds blow up in the late afternoons. I read. I nap.

I walk in the desert carefully. I know about snakes.

I take a late-night swim in the lap pool and astonish myself with the color of my skin. My hair is not long; it dries quickly. I don’t need a towel for anything, and I am not afraid of being seen. I am far away from the master-expanse of the house, and the house is asleep, and Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances are asleep. They are all nearly all asleep — poor Mother.

How did you get here? is Mother’s question of me whenever I visit, and I wonder, how did I? Mother thinks I swam. Mother thinks she will swim, or else Arthur will drive her to Florida.

Aunt Frances has the new man drive us to the mountains in the jeep. Uncle Billy stays at home wheezing breaths and watching old TV. The cowboys skid their horses to a stop; the popgun action is fast. Uncle Billy is slow; nothing left fast about him. Uncle Billy must attend to his breathing, and so we are leaving him home and driving into the mountains in the jeep. The jeep is common; it has no name, is no Emerald Gem, no Mouse. My mother’s names, all; maybe Mother is me poet? Aunt Frances is no mother, never was a mother, doesn’t know. Aunt Frances is looking westward when, “What do you say to our view?” she asks. This has happened before to me: Two women, disparate ages, look out and smile at what they see, but so much of what I see turns into what is missing. Now it is Mother in the Rapunzel shirt when I am in the desert with Aunt Frances and watching where we walk because of hedgehog cactus, brittlebush, cholla; we walk into the desert to a bouldered clearing high enough to see … what? The distances remind me of the city. Two hundred acres Aunt Frances owns. She is philosophic: She says it really isn’t hers, but when she grinds her cane against the ground, I expect it to bleed.

“I was a snowbird,” she says. “I never thought to be here, but here I am in the desert, and I am happy.”

Back at the jeep is the new man waiting in his uninspired clothes. Duane, Dale, Dan, Don, the new man is a kind of Arthur or that’s what it seems until he drives us north and speeds. Aunt Frances says to him, “Not so fast, please. We want to see.” But the road invites it, his speeding. “Please,” she says, and he does slow down, but the road teases him forward, and he drives fast again, and then he is not an Arthur but one of those nameless unreliables, and Aunt Frances is yelling at him, the same way she yelled at all those other unreliables who balked and complained and stole from her. One of them stole the old jeep. The jeep we ride in now is sturdier; the drive isn’t a clatter, but the speed is a problem. Why? Who is this? Who is our driver and how did he come by the keys? Aunt Frances is crying! She could be embarrassed. We are driving in a sheer way. “I miss your Uncle Billy,” she says, and Aunt Frances is crying, and I am surprised by her crying. How dependent she is — and in love? All these years I have believed what Mother said was true. I can hear Mother in her brute voice saying, men are treacherous, love is petty, everyone cheats.

When we get home, the driver says, “I got you home.”

“So you did”: from Aunt Frances. Her hair is confused; her clothes look misbuttoned and odd.

Uncle Billy and Aunt Frances sit across from each other in the glassed-in patio. Their bodies, plump commas, are slumped in easy chairs. The sunset, too, is mushy. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy look at each other, bemused, happily exhausted. “What a day!” Aunt Frances says, and Uncle Billy agrees, and I wonder, will Aunt Frances tell him what the new driver did? They talk in code about the house and the desert: And the garden? Called Mellon What did he say? The same. How much? One fifty. Only? Yes. When? Their patter! Aunt Frances says nothing about the drive home through the desert; she smiles right past the subject, leans forward, and takes up Uncle Billy’s hand. “I think Alice was surprised,” she says, and then to me, “weren’t you, Alice? You didn’t expect to see so much land.” I am sitting between them at their feet, level with the coffee table, near the tea and crackers. Aunt Frances is petting Uncle Billy’s hand as she speaks, keeping him in the room and awake. With some surprise I see again how she loves him. “Want a cracker, Bill,” she says. (This, too, has happened before only with Nonna and a parrot.) Aunt Frances pours the still-warm sun tea over glasses brimmed with ice. The ice cracks and pops and is the only sound in the glassed-in patio. If I had any paper I would draw it, this scene — their hands, the glasses — but I would want to get it right.

“I CAN LIVE ANYWHERE easily — have done.” Said often. What a shrugged tough I am, a spoiled pouter at seventeen and eighteen and so on — me, insisting, “I can live anywhere easily — have done.” Some of the bluster sounds like Mother, but this much is true: I am no stranger to working on my knees. I show up on time; I earn money. I wish Arthur were here and Mr. Early, too: just to see me! Still a kid! I miss them all, all the fathers.

HE WINKS WHEN HE sees me; he rubs his bristled face against my hand. Next he is driving away. Implacable wind snakes the grasses, storming. Upset sky! I am standing under it, but he is not. How is it then he can rub his bristled face against my hand? Against my hand and the inside of my wrist, my arm.

My mother, alive in the waked world, is much farther away.

HE IS DANCING ON his toes, springing sprung rhythm, whoop-whooping over the sound the poet makes:

Pitched past pitch of grief,

More pangs will, schooled at forepangs, wilder wring.

I read some of the same poems Mr. Early once read to us. The death-parts pinch more, and I have cried. I do not think Mr. Early ever cried, although he stood on his desk when he wanted our attention. I saw him jump around the room when the answer he wanted was wrong, yet he went on urging, “Come on, come on.” And when I got it right: “Buy this girl whatever she wants!”