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

Mother grunted off her bathrobe and trembled down the hall in just her nylons and brassiere. She said, “What are you going to wear?” and she watched me dress and wondered when it happened she got old, and I was old, too, she assured me, and my sister was older than both of us. Mother said, “Daddy wasn’t so very old when he died, yet poor Daddy. They would not let me see him. They didn’t even call in time for me to see him. They just put him in the ground. I found out later.”

“Mother…”

“See how you like it. See what it feels like…lost, and now you have to worry.”

“Mother…”

She was trying on my perfumes and asking, “Local?”

“Cheap,” I answered. I said yesandno to everything else she asked me. It is not as it was with NettaandDaddy; we will never again. “Give me,” I said and took her drink and snuffed the fumes and thought I would catch fire.

“Outside,” I said, “it looks like Christmas,” and it did. The snow, expected but turned larger, sifted in the wind and worked its intimate diminishment. Only the sky was left to see and violet-colored, lavish flakes falling on our tongues. Aahhhhhhh at the heavens running backward and Mother repeating, “I don’t dare fall. If I fall…” The boys said they would catch her. Then the snow’s assaulting angle sharpened, and it stormed, and we couldn’t see the sky, and Mother was crying. She was very, very drunk by then, and it came as no surprise to me that she fell at a curb, almost at the theater, amidst a host of people. Mother fell on her knees, and I let strangers help her.

1996

Yes, I think, yes, we are smiling at the missing boy’s smile, my mother and I, in the last room, low, north facing, dark, with harsh, budget carpet and trunklike furniture that a janitor bangs into with his cart — ouch! Over the noise of running water and, later, the vacuum, I shout at Mother, and I pretend that he is here, sixteen and shirtless, straightened teeth, the missing boy my mother says isn’t a baby anymore, is he?

The next time we are smiling at a boy for real, a grandson bending to his grandmother’s chair. Heartbreaker is what he is, and my mother says, “Yes,” and she touches his wrist. That point of grace or seriousness or whatever the boy’s wrist bone suggests, it is there that she touches him.

The white band of skin is from his watch.

Why no watch? I wonder. Where is it?

“Hello, Nana.”

“Louder,” I instruct.

“Hello, Nana!”

His hand, his shapely hand, is a ruddy reminder of health against the pale summer blanket Mother wears like swaddling. He turns out his hands, and Mother takes them to her face and smells. June, the white-flower month, ripe privet greens the air, and the palm against my mother’s face, I guess, must smell as sweet. I listen to her breathe him in. Her breathing is a screechy hinge to a garden my mother would speak of, her own. The garden is behind and around my mother; sun patches the floor — and the light! But the sound she makes makes me think how clean the boy must smell in a season not yet noon when Mother will be — how old will Mother be? Where is she?

Today she is in school. Today the ambulatory are teachers, and Mother must apologize for being late — again! — with homework. This is a visit we make in the summer, when the boy’s school is not in session.

“I perused the books,” Mother says. Then in a voice that suggests there might be spies punitively near, Mother whispers how she misses, misses her children; but after lunch Mother says, “Why be so fussy!” Mother's eyes don’t go along with her smile. Is she in there looking out her eyeholes at me?

“Mother?”

“You are older,” Mother says to me. “Oh, but you look so old!”

I am surprised, too, surprised to be as old as women once hard for me to look at.

Dressed in a blanket at table 3, Mother says, “Surprise me,” and she lets herself be fed. “I know peas,” Mother says, now lighthearted. “I’m hungry.”

“You are older,” Mother says to me after what has just passed for lunch. “Oh, but you look so old!” To the boy, suddenly evident, she says, “Come closer,” and he does. He bends close enough for her to touch his shoulder.

His shoulder and his arms are firmly shaped, and as with every part of him — his teeth, his skin — he is unmarked and smooth. He might take anything on — he could carry his nana!

“So she can see you,” I say, and the boy is on his knees close enough for her to touch his shoulder, but she touches his nipple instead.

“Mom!” he says.

I keep my mouth shut so tightly my teeth hurt. Don’t ask me why. I say, “Take up her hand and squeeze it tight.”

When this boy frowns, he looks like his older brother.

Mother, in her chair, says she can drive around, too, and I curl on the floor at her feet like a dog and sleep. When I wake, Mother and I are at the top of a sloping lawn that meadows to a lake. Mother is talking to her mother about the rain: how the lake is high from it, rain and more rain. The rains bruise the ruffled flowers. The lake is black.

Now in our dream comes more rain; it peens the water colorless.

Now a white sky and commonly blue water, and now black water, choppy. I think I hear the neighbors jumping in off the dock.

“Agnes!” someone cries, and Mother startles. “It’s a bird.” The snake has eaten its eggs, she explains, and we must be careful. Mother says, “Be careful. These aren’t just grass snakes but something bigger,” and she holds up her little feet in immaculately white canvas sneakers.

Mother’s snakes, once they slither into her story, they stay, and their slime, she says, is like snot, and it sickens her, really, and she gags. She leans over the chair and spits up all the peas she ate.

I am glad the boy is not here to see the depressant clarity of the unused, the way they wipe down the rooms here and swipe at the blinds. I wonder, Does Mother notice? The tightly rigged bed bleeps alarm: just my purse against the pillow sets it off.

A nurse strides in and scolds, “Again!”

I am curled at Mother’s feet like a dog when here is a nurse asking, “What are you doing?”

“This is the safest place to sleep,” I say. “The bed rings.”

Oh, this is no birdcage, Mother’s nursing home, not the birdcage she liked in La Jolla, with its patio views of the ocean. That unobstructed tower in the sun, does she remember it, the one I think she planned on and often pointed to, saying, “That’s where the gray ladies perch.”

Thank heavens the boy is not here to hear us sighing into a gaze over something of his. Today I have the boy’s books, paperbacks mostly, but this one — look! Chemistry! The split spine has loosed its cover; the cover wags like a tooth from how he worried it. Clearly, the book has been handled; clearly, he worked. “Like you, Mother,” I say, “he wants to be a good student.”

Mother says, “I am.”

Mother turns the missing boy’s watch cap inside out to where the dark spice of his scalp is strongest. I know; I have smelled it and felt, too, the wet wool between my fingers and thought, How itchy it must be. And, Why does he wear it?

With the watch cap at her mouth, can Mother see him?

Hooded in a sweatshirt, he stands with his thumped fists pushing out his pockets. He rocks on his feet; his eyes are shut, water drips from his nose. The boy might be this way to her or in the back row of class, a goof-off with his watch cap on, captioning lewd drawings, or maybe she sees the long slide of his legs stuck out to trip up his friend.

“How did he get to be so unattractive!” she asks. “How did he?”

The boy? I am outraged. I am thinking, You, you are unattractive, Mother.