Christine Schutt - A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer - Stories

“Poppie!” she said and then piping sounds into the phone.

“Get off the phone, Charlotte. Now,” he said and he was standing. He was looking right at her and she was smiling.

She hung up the phone and waved a notepad and said, “This is my trip to Boston, Granmum. I’ll leave it here for now.”

He knew the kind of Kleenex crud a crying girl left behind. Notepads and numbers on notepads, numbers turned fat with writing over and over them, and over names and other numbers, cars, flights, addresses. He had found such wreckage before and called to his wife, “What is this?”

1986

ONCE THEIR FACES easily pinked in the Christmas gaudy. Toy-mad and dithered, the boys at Christmas, running out of close parties and open to the wind. We crossed to walk the park side and looked up through the trees to see the sky was turned to firmament; the stars to ancient purpose; nothing was as it was, but indwelling spirit swelled and fat with Christmas. Mother buttered strudel and cried for no occasion except that they were gone, NettaandDaddy, her own, who used to have, who used to do, who always something-something at this time of year. Mother cried for me and for the boys and for my sister (who would not forgive her).

“But what have I done?” In the tunnels of tree stands, she cried, and at the first snow, and sometimes when the boys brushed against her, and always when the boys sang. Her tears delighted them. “Nana’s crying! Nana’s crying! Nana’s crying, Mother!”

“Mother,” I said, “come help me,” and she watched from a stool as I toothbrushed the silver.

“Who besides us is coming?” she asked.

“No one, no; and no to that question, too.” No, I am not. He did not, we never. She did not understand why I didn’t take him to court or why my in-laws kept their money or why I bothered to bake. What did she raise in me, my mother, except such disappointment that all I could do was rush from the kitchen and put on the music that made me feel holy and sad and slightly foolish? “Personent Hodie,” thumped and vigorous, embarrassed me, but “See amid the Winter’s Snow” was quieting, and Mother sipped her drink. I didn’t mind then the hard light, bright as any snowfield and flaring off the buildings our windows faced; I could stand to look hearing little-boy church voices vaulted in the background.

The boys were in the background, too; my own, and Mother’s, these boys talking for the toys they moved in battles sounded through the afternoon. The pursed, soured, shrunk about our lives, Mother’s as much as mine, fell away when the radiators shushed and spit and we were safe.

Where were the boys then just before Christmas?

Who would sugar the cookies?

Mother lay in bed and read whatever had taken her fancy in the airport: the royals this Christmas with their corgis at Balmoral — look! Mother wanted to live in a castle just like that — and why not? Didn’t she deserve it? Mother using up the bubbles in her afternoon ablutions. Mother was a red fragrance, profligately splashed. Her suitcase and the silky lingerie she packed were acrid with the mixed-up smell of her and her perfume and what she drank.

What did she bring that was new this time?

Less and less, the same and the favorites, lace ripped and straps thinned. Nothing to borrow…single earrings and unstrung pearls, dulled rings home mended with Band-Aids…grit in the boxes she used to case them, her jewels, as Mother called them. Her jewels or her sparkles…“Oh, what a Sparkle Plenty you are! Darling!” Mother was belling the cat with us now for how many Christmases? “Count,” and Mother did. “That was the year your father, your husband, my ex-husband, your ex-husband, the ugly boyfriend — who was he?”

“Mother, please, can we talk of something else, please.”

The snow tracks fast filling in with falling snow, winter solstice in the Sheraton Avenue house, where she sat at the top of the staircase and saw her handsome brothers off. Black mufflers, camel coats, lustrous patent leather dancing shoes, her brothers in formal dress. Mother said she saw them from the staircase and from the landing’s window sliding on those shoes, boys still, in and out of light. Good-bye! She huffed at the window to make a smoke to draw in, but the ring came out small and her mark disappeared.

“You dasn’t” was how the maid said no to Mother. “You dasn’t go in your brothers’ rooms when they are out.” My mother went in anyway, but looking for what?

“I wanted to be surprised,” Mother said. “I was nosy. Even when I knew what it was in a drawer, I opened it.”

I was also that way. For a long time, even after I knew the contents, I opened Mothers house; but she didn’t bother to look through my rooms anymore. In powdered undress she sat on the edge of my bed and said, “So this is Christmas.”

My sentiments exactly when the boys were gone, although there was tonight with the boys at the theater — her treat. “Remember?”

She had almost forgotten.

She said, “I don’t feel well today,” and she went back to bed with a littleglassofsomething, as she called it. She wanted to take advantage of the quiet and for a while to shut her eyes, to clear her head, to think of other things besides Christmas. Mother said, “I have no business buying theater tickets, but I’m glad I did, of course, for the boys. The boys should get to see good theater — only the expense of it!” Money, money, money, the icy blast of Christmas through the rotted sash. I had felt that chill before and longed for bed.

“Want more to drink?” I asked.

“You are so much like me,” Mother said, holding out her glass.

I hoped not, but I was.

I was rushing bacon and using too much soap on pans; whatever I cooked in them came out tasting soapy. “I can’t eat this, Mom,” from a boy. Me, forgetting and forgetting or getting there late. “Mom!” I was full of apology but unprepared. Whoever carried safety pins and never got lost? “I will make it work, I will make it work, be patient.” The boys did not believe me any more than I believed my mother when she said, “I promise.” Mother promised Rollerblades for Christmas; for the other boy, Australia. Mother said to me, “When he is twenty-one, I am taking him.”

“Does it snow in Australia?” he asked, come home and out of the sky’s new falling and already anxious to be gone again and released and dangerous and loud.

“Be quiet,” I said. “Both of you. Nana is resting.”

But Nana was calling to them, and if she was resting, then why was she talking?

They went on asking, “Nana?” walking into her room, trailing gifts from Dad to show but running out before they did.

“Nana’s crying, Mother!” from both boys in excited voices. “Nana’s crying!”

The stink of old-lady perfume, and Mother, an old lady, crying over it. “Not broken, only spilled,” I assured her, “and only a little spilled, all right then, enough to wear and not to cry over, Mother.” I righted the empty glass and set the clock back so she could better see it.

“Your sister has always been so angry,” Mother said to me, and she was crying again because we should have been together. “We’re too few as it is,” she said. “She should be here and her husband and those children. They don’t even know me. What are their names? You see, I forget. This is not my idea of Christmas.”

I reminded her about the theater and said tomorrow Frannie would call.

But NettaandDaddy, NettaandDaddy doused the plum pudding and put it aflame.

I said, “Your drink, Mother, here.”

“Your sister,” she said, sipping. “I don’t dare around her.”