Christine Schutt - Florida

SHE WAS ON HER knees and rubbing her back against parts of the house and backing into corners and sliding out from under curtains, rump polishing the floor, and she was saying, “Sit with me, Alice.” She was saying, “Talk to me. Be a daughter. Tell me what you’ve been doing.” She spoke uninflectedly, as if thinking of something else — the dishes to do, drawers to line, clotted screens to clean out with a toothpick. Handles missing, silver gone, and a Walter in the next room unwilling to leave!

Bitch, bitch, bitch, the sound the broomsticks made against the floor in Mother’s nettled cleaning and talking to herself, asking, “What am I doing? What does it look like I am doing?”

“You are stupid,” I overheard Walter say to my mother. “You’d be better off dead.”

And Walter was as smart as any professor; he was the first to admit it, saying to my mother, “Why are you so stupid?” Stupid about composers and who was playing. Stupid about motherhood and about how much money she had. Why didn’t she know, why didn’t she plan ahead? Why was it always up to him to think it out for her? Walter sat in the armchair and sipped at his whiskey and held out a hand no one took.

All day he sipped warm whiskey from a highball glass. He smoked cigarettes; he listened to his records on Mother’s stereo — crashing, oppressive, classical sound. If Walter spoke, it was to shout for it, “Louder!” when I was thinking the music was already too loud. Enough, I was thinking, creeping nearer to the stereo myself with other ideas for music. The composer’s portrait on the long-playing album cover looked, I thought, like Walter. They shared a melancholy nose and disappointed mouth, old-fashioned eyeglasses, Einstein hair.

I never saw him in the sun or on a sidewalk, never at the porch or beside the car about to open a door for Mother. I never saw Walter laughing. The brown yolks of his eyes had broken and smeared to a dog-wild and wounded gaze. He was not handsome; yet I looked long at the length of him slant in a chair with his drink.

No man Mother knows seems to work. They go away sometimes in the day and come back wrinkled. They come back to us and sit half the night half concealed by the wing chair’s wings. They drink and listen to music.

“The Germans,” Walter said. “Schubert.”

Sometimes I found Walter crying in the chair, and once I found him in the morning on the downstairs couch in a twisted sheet with Mother.

With my father it had been different.

At the restaurant one winter afternoon, months before he died, we made a scene; we dragged the waiter into our story; we were the last to leave. I danced around the heavy black tables and the matching chairs; I spun on the barstools and watched the TV. Mother cried, and she let herself be kissed.

“We’re drunk,” Mother said. “We are.”

“Open wide,” my father was saying to her and then to me, “open wider.”

One winter afternoon — an entire winter — it was my father who was taking us. Father and Mother and I, we were going to Florida — who knew for how long? I listened in at the breakfast table whenever I heard talk of sunshine. I asked questions about our living there that made them smile. We all smiled a lot at the breakfast table. We ate sectioned fruit capped with bleedy maraschinos — my favorite! The squeezed juice of the grapefruit was grainy with sugar and pulpy, sweet, pink. “Could I have more?” I asked, and my father said sure. In Florida, he said it was good health all the time. No winter coats in Florida, no boots, no chains, no salt, no plows and shovels. In the balmy state of Florida, fruit fell in the meanest yard. Sweets, nuts, saltwater taffies in seashell colors. In the Florida we were headed for the afternoon was swizzled drinks and cherries to eat, stem and all: “Here’s to you, here’s to me, here’s to our new home!” One winter afternoon in our favorite restaurant, there was Florida in our future while I was licking at the foam on the fluted glass, biting the rind and licking sugar, waiting for what was promised: the maraschino cherry, ever-sweet every time.

A DIFFERENT WINTER AND a different kind of winter, the air peated with dark and me swimming through it, I saw, or thought I saw, the car’s red lights receding: good-bye, good-bye. By then Mother’s nose had been broken, so that whenever she spoke, she sounded stuffed up. “Good-bye, good-riddance,” she was saying to Walter when we were caught up in our Florida.

Mother promised that in our Florida, hers and mine, we would get a bird, a large, showy bird, a talker, someone who could say more than “hiya” and his name, but a sleek and brightly beaked bird — a talker, excited, scrabbling on the bar, saying, “Alice, Alice”—a bird that would live on and on, not some dumb Polly.

Mother promised that in Florida I could hold the hand mirror to the sun to start a fire; in Florida there would be no need of matches. “The heat,” she said, “the steamy heat, the pink sand. Try to imagine.”

Mother’s toenails winked in the foil bed we knew for Florida. Her toenails were polished in a black-red put on thick. Her fingernails she wore as they were: skin-colored, square-cut, clear. The ragged moons on some nails she showed me signaled deprivations — not enough milk or an unrelieved fever — such losses, experienced in a mother’s womb, could be read on the teeth, Mother told me, when the teeth were discolored. She said, “Look at Walter.” Mother’s terrible Walter had grown up in a place always warm and yet his smile, Mother said, revealed his sorrows.

He covered up his teeth when he was smiling; he hid behind his hands. Caught chewing, he looked caught. He looked angry or dismayed. Walter frowned at me a lot, or that was how it seemed to me when Mother wasn’t home. With this Walter there were no foam drinks, no maraschino cherries, no promises and kisses. He brooded, he swore, he drank.

The day Walter left, the phone was ringing and the TV was never shut off. Lights came on. There was crying. Car doors slammed, cars started, high beams swept the drive. We might have been a TV show was how it looked to me from the window where I saw a woman in a nightgown prepared to stop the car by merely standing in front of it. Mother held out her arms and was, I thought, pleading please to stay or to take her, too, but please, not on any account, please not to leave. “No, no, no, no, no,” she was crying. “Please!”

Then Walter was yelling from the car at me, saying, “Your mother’s the one. She’s a crazy, bloody woman! She wants all of my money!”

“Get out!” I shouted, and then Mother shouted, too, “Get out, get out! Leave us alone!”

WAVY GROUNDS, OLD TREES, floating nurses. Mother called it “the San.” I visited only once — too scared to go again — and remember that Mother’s shirtwaist dress no longer fit and strained the pin that pinned her. “Ouchie,” she said, a baby-voiced girl, and she fiddled off the pinhead then started to cry, saying, “Now I can’t stand up!” speaking as if to someone else though there was no one else but me in her room at the time. “I can’t see my little girl off. My skirt will fall down and my Alice will be embarrassed.” I was embarrassed by her and glad to leave Mother behind and took the stairs, which were faster, to the car where Aunt Frances was talking to a doctor, and Arthur was waiting to drive us away.

Arthur had, as part of his job, driving to do. Arthur did the errand-driving in any-old-day clothes, but he dressed in a coat when he drove Aunt Frances anywhere. With me he wore his leather jacket — smelly, cracked, collared in a matted yarn, brown. I don’t remember what he was wearing that day when he drove Mother to the San. It was cold, I remember.