Christine Schutt - Florida

“What was it about his heart, I wondered, when his hair was yet so black?

“Is it time already?”

“Do you have to leave now?” I had asked this of my mother, of Uncle Billy, of Arthur. Maybe even of my father I had asked as much, if I had known him, as once I must have known him: Father: side-part, bow tie, a voice radio-soothing when I thought of him. Now I had a car and rising water, a picture of a man driving willfully and fast. … which didn’t sound to me like him at all. If it wasn’t an accident, it could not have happened, which meant my father was alive and living somewhere.

“I have never been,” I said to my Uncle Billy; and “I have never been,” I answered that first time Uncle Billy asked if I would like to spend spring in the desert, “but I like to travel. I want to travel.” I made that known to them all, to the only living grandmother, even to such a grandmother as she, to Nonna, stroked speechless, I said what was purely true: “I want to see all of the country.”

I went to Tucson again. “While Arthur was at home with his trembling heart, I was riding horses. I was riding Patches in a stony river bed; I was swimming in the pool with Uncle Billy’s full attention.

“Aren’t you glad you kept your hair short?” Aunt Frances asked. “Would you like to go to town? Would you like to go to the cactus garden?” Every day promised some addition, more Apache tears for the tumbler, more stones for the jewelry we were making. Aunt Frances said, “I hope you know, Alice, that we love you.” Aunt Frances and Uncle Billy both said, “We love your mother, too. You believe that, don’t you?”

I didn’t. I was making rings with Apache tears. I was pulling clear glue like skin off my thumbs.

Poor thumbs, my mother’s, so evidently picked-at, sore. Her lipstick smeared on fast. One shoe, one earring, one glove, one of a pair always missing, she had said so a million years ago when I leaned under her crooked roof of arm, and she cried. Later she got mad; she threw an ashtray at Uncle Billy and rushed to hit him, and when he held her off, she ran to the glass porch doors and kicked in a pane and hobbled through the house tracking blood; but Mother wasn’t afraid of blood or of dying or that was how it had seemed to me when I saw her leaned up against the front-yard elm in just her negligee, and crying, “He left without me.”

Mother was so dramatic!

Mother was an embarrassment, a threat, a woman in a sweater dress and white bubble wig who had barged into Uncle Billy’s house with me, her daughter, a million years ago. I was along — was almost always along — on Mother’s sudden decisions to turn the car around and pay a visit. “What’s this I hear,” Mother had said that time at Uncle Billy’s when she was in the bubble wig. “What’s this you’re saying?” with no other greeting, “what’s all this I-can’t-take-care-of-my-daughter shit?” Then that time we were driving with Arthur in my Uncle Billy’s car, Mother had said it was true, Uncle Billy was right, she couldn’t take care of me — not without a man anyhow, and the men she was picking weren’t men. She was tired. She was sick of the snow. “Just look!” she said, and she pointed to fields of it washed against fences. We were driving in the Emerald Gem, passing shores of snow; and Mother, next to me, had her sad face on when she said, “You’ll like it in a warm place in the middle of winter.” Mother staring out the window at that hurtful brightness, saying, “Uncle Billy tells me the San has a beach — ha, ha. Now don’t you wish you were going there with me?” But I was going to live with Uncle Billy; and I was going to visit his springtime house, the one he had built in the Arizona desert. The desert in the spring was tonic, the early morning hours and the late, red afternoons. The rim of mountains just beyond his desert house turned all kinds of red, and I tried and tried to reach them. They were farther away than they looked, and the desert was hard to walk for its unevenness, its cactus. Jumping cholla threatened everywhere; but I walked it, walked heedlessly against the bleaching sun in the morning, or walked in the afternoon through the glaucous paloverde trees. I walked in the bed of a dry creek where the stones powdered beneath my feet, and I thought I was grinding bone. The clack, clack of loose stone. Heavy, heavy me!

On almost any day, I was on my way to the mountains grinding bone and singing my story. It was my hobo’s bindle. I carried it to anyone, to win friends and get attention from the teachers.

“OH, OH, OH, OH!” Mother, on our melodramatic visit, our only visit to see her, was crying to Aunt Frances, “Why do you…,” and her lashes were coming unglued, so that she pulled them off, and her eyes, I saw, poor, lashless eyes, looked palely small. Her perfume was too strong; she smelled sour. She sat on the couch, dragged off her yellowed bubble wig and shook her head in a dog’s kind of shudder, said don’t, said you don’t understand, said so much bad has happened. Mother scraped at her nails with her nails, which were also glued on; she took herself apart in front of Aunt Frances and me; she spoke of Father and the past.

“Why do you think?” Aunt Frances began.

The word custody was used, and Mother, I learned, had lost it.

“Oh, please.”

But Aunt Frances went on: “Who else was there?”

“You wrecked it,” Mother shouted.

“And that Walter?” she asked.

“I tried,” Mother said.

Mother was crying at Aunt Frances on that shameful visit, when I thought everyone, everyone must be looking at us. Mother, grown too fat for her dress, was crying and shouting at Aunt Frances, “Then where are all my beautiful, beautiful clothes?”

“I gave them to the school,” Aunt Frances said and told Mother how she had taken only the raggedy clothes, nothing very good.

In the serious plays, I had seen them — the good clothes, too — the falling-leaves coat in falling-leaf colors on a girl, just the ghost of my mother, pacing the stage, erratic and grand, saying, “We can afford it, surely!”

The cost of Mother’s flowers, I remembered; how the tulips, got in winter, stood up starched and clean as collars. Candles, candles — Mother had them burning everywhere after my father died. I remembered the candles and the Turkey-red carpeting, the nailheads in the leather seats. Everything was wrong for the town we lived in — not a neighbor knew what it meant, trompe l’oeil, though my mother had said it. Us, in the grocery, and stacking bloody wraps of meat. “Give me a million bucks,” Mother said, “I would know how to spend it.”

Mother had spent a lot of money on clothes, although many of the most expensive came from someone else. Walter had bought her the painted blouse, vines up the bodice, the Rapunzel shirt, she called it — light silk, easily ruffled.

Mother, I remember, in the Rapunzel shirt. Late May and the breeze made the garden blowzy — this way, that way — enthusiastic, and I could see straight-ahead to the pleasure of July, to the cut-grass green days of dewy midsummer. My mother could see it, too, days of it, from where we were sitting on the stoop together, she ruffled up in the Rapunzel shirt and the breeze that was blowing along Main, Lawn, School, White — our streets in the leafy splatter of late May noon light. I was happy, and it seemed to me that Mother was happy, too, in a purely quiet way — no talking.

Even when her company promised no pleasure, I went looking for my mother. She was, as often, looking for whichever man was making up her life. My mother made up a tramp’s sack of the silver and shouldered it to carry to a lover as a gift. I saw her leaving, and later, on the lawn, I stood where she might have stood, and I called after her.