Christine Schutt - Florida

Mr. Early said a teacher has license to be loopy, to shout out favorite lines and sing, “Because she knows in singing not to sing.” Mr. Early liked his Robert Frost.

I see myself at fourteen, still in the draught of father-loss, ashamed to forget, yet forgetting.

Mr. Early said the poets are forgiving.

I wander in bookstores; the fear of doing something ugly and private in front of everyone no longer seizes me. I have to summon it up for a fright, and I forget to summon it up. I am happy, happier. The newness of books for the young I teach, the way they read them as if no one before had ever rightly read them or understood them, the press and the pressure of loving books, a book, a book of poems, a poem and the poet who wrote it, and then the sorrow to discover the poet is dead! “We can only meet in air,” says the dead poet. We mourn them, my students and I; they live on in their verses. I am the go-between in this romance, stalled in the clogged hallway between classes, in the breakup between classes. Even before they speak to me, they are out of breath and urgent and surprised by an older face close up.

WHEELCHAIR FRIENDLY AND CONSOLATORY! Our weight triggers open the doors, and the walk to the ocean slopes through cared-for grounds: pond plants, sheafed grasses, and fanned things that sway. The trees at the shore are full of shade. The benches look out: blue solace and space. “Can you see the boats, Mother?” In the distance, boats, breasted, near the mark, then cruelly yank about. We are missing only their sound as they break against the water. “How?” Mother starts, then lapses into wonder.

I will begin with her father and his ever-polished trophies in their glass case: Yes, he was a sailor! and her mother from a family with old jewels in the vault, yet Nonna liked to be mistaken for the help whenever she was found in her garden with Arthur and his men, all of them on their knees in mud. “Deadheading,” she explained to strangers come looking for the Missus. … Yes, the president of the company’s wife looks like help, but this is her garden where one day her daughter will be wed. Will be? She was! At the top of the hill, Mother — my own — on her brother’s arm, started down the rock paths carpeted for the occasion all the way to where the garden leveled theatrically, spaciously, and twelve bridesmaids, and as many ushers, waited.

Frances is matron of honor and William, Junior — Billy to everyone — Billy is playing Mother’s father and talking of the gold to be found in the desert. He teases Mother. He tells a story on his sister.

Bad, bad girl, that Alice. What did she see?

Look at the matron of honor and guess. Frances, with her difference, her torch of hair, a red of such deep hue and thickness it forever inspires regret, Frances blushes. She will fade, they say. Surely she will, but on the day Mother marries, the lilt of bridesmaids in high color is a very garden itself, and the man my mother marries says so. He is a poet. He is a poet, and she is poetical, and they marry in Nonna’s white garden.

The underside of leaves, the slime and slugs — no, no snakes, not in any of the gardens.

One year Mother is married in her mother’s white garden and the next, in a different garden — shaggy, overgrown, more gingham than the damask of the Big House garden — a namesake, another Alice, is christened. Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy are godparents. They have no children of their own; but this child often visits.

Why?

Mother is tired sometimes.

And my father? What of him?

He looks like Ralph Marvell from the Wharton novel. He is fair and pretty; his profession is ambiguous.

I don’t know his part and my mother cannot help. The tangle of live-wires I think of as her brain cross and spark, misfire, smoke. This, and the salty, cold fumes rising off the sea, worries her face. She blinks and focuses intensely on the passing shapes. Her eye’s expression is as cruel as a parrot’s.

The spectacle of Mother in the Birdcage dying: I do and I do not want to see it.

“When I show her pictures of men I have loved, she says, “What a face!” and she frowns.

“Oh, Mother!”

Mother is a hitch, a terror, or an intermittent hurt. She is a black slot, a swallower, nearly out of money.

But what of this?

The wind is an assault and the sound of water bewilders her, and I wonder: What does she think? Does she think?

“I have to go home now, Mother.” Good-byes, those little deaths, rasp my throat, but I am not sure she has heard what I have said. I am not sure she understands what we are looking at: so much water and the line that is the other side. Mother is in the sun; she is in her Florida. Squinting in that tin box of refracted light, she has to frown to see, and what does it mean what she sees? The world is a comfort and then it is a discomfort. Mother is all thin hair and vacancy, tears and starts, a small clutch of bones, an old woman, grown innocent.

Who will forgive me if I do not come again?

“Alice,” she speaks, and she looks at me, and it has been a long time since Mother has used my name, which is also her name, as a good-bye, and I think she knows, as once she knew, what will happen to us. “Alice,” she repeats. It may be no other words will follow or it may be a downpour of speech.

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer . The former was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement . Schutt’s first novel, Florida , was a National Book Award finalist for fiction in 2004, and her second novel, All Souls , was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction in 2009. Her latest novel, Prosperous Friends , is out now from Grove Press.