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

What did she expect? Of course, this is not the boy who ran steeply in circles on the field that was the beach when the tide was out, but he is still a pleasure to look at.

Take up the hankie weight of his shapely T-shirt, the washed sock, the sticky handle to his racket, and he might be seen as he was some afternoons when he skidded on the court or, later, when his wet hair was combed back and blackly curling at his ear.

Take up the hoop he wears. Is the post still warm, or the strap to his watch? (His watch, at least, is not lost!) The graduation gifts, see them? The watch again, the pen, the unpolished buckle decoratively scored and darkly initialed. A girl’s name gouged in his journal cover, the journal from the suitcase I have brought of things to show Mother because he will not come, not today at least. Here is a braided bracelet from the summer, a stained bandanna. What does Mother know of him, the boy who is missing, except what I put into her hands? The boy’s blue shirt, ironed spineless as a towel, I put the boy’s shirt into Mother’s hands.

All the missing boys, we miss them.

“He is not a baby anymore,” Mother says.

“No, no,” and not so young, and hardly dutiful, though I have wished. I have wished for his company through the watery heat I have had to wade through just to get here.

Mother’s room is north facing; the inside air is cold.

2000

Our mother is living in the home state again in the deadend part of one of those places for when there are no other places but this, a tiled corridor bristling with obstruction, idlers in slippers, uncomfortable chairs, carts, screens, trays, lids. Every door is open, even to the lady who shouts.

Mother, I don’t think, shouts; but Faye on the night shift says that she hits. In the last few days Mother has grown more bewildered, and she doesn’t want to go to bed. Faye has told me Mother says she has given up looking for us. Mother says her girls are with Netta and Daddy at the lake. Netta and Daddy are taking care of us.

I saw our mother in June, my sister saw her in October, but both times all our mother talked about was home, the one Mother had with Netta and Daddy on the lake. Our mother talks of the lake; she talks of lawns and elms around her — elms not yet sick. Mother grew up in the shade of these in a house with help, a cook, a baker, a laundress, old Peter, who just raked the leaves. The house looked out to the lake, the one she talks about now, asking, “Are you out at the lake? Have you seen Netta and Daddy?”

We don’t understand it. Why, if our mother has released herself to wander, can’t Mother wander near the ocean? The ocean brought skies that soothed her. “Oh, look at the size of those clouds!” Mother would say. “Will you look at the size of those clouds!” Spacious, God-blown clouds they were, and we spent a lot of time looking up.

So why did we bring Mother to the downward look of home, except that she is nearer home? Our mother is back in the home state, where the winters are so long. The sky, too, is not much to look at; and the lake, Mother's lake, is severe — very deep. Her lake, we remember, is silty, unusually dark, a green almost blue, and in no way like the lakes across the road. Those lakes in this land of lakes are shallow enough to be yellow. Some are swamps; mosquitoes appear on the first warm breath. September, October, November. Mosquitoes dangling over the pumpkin gore, Indian summer, it is easy to be stung then. Common in March and April to see the insects’ soft appearance, or to walk through snows and snow fogs in May, to fan our underarms in August heat come in early June. Spring in the home state is often no spring at all. Summer is changeable, humid as a mouth sometimes or parched.

Look out the window. See for yourself.

“Look out the window, Agnes!” is what Faye says she says to our mother, but our mother stares at her lap. Her head, Mother says, is too heavy to lift. Besides, she has seen it. She knows where she is. Mother is belted in her chair and slumped. The nurses keep her parked near the station, where she hides behind her hair and barks. She will talk only in her room. She will talk about the lake. She will cry. “Tell Netta and Daddy we are never to be apart again. Camp is almost over.”

A ringing phone confuses her unless it’s held against her ear, then Mother knows to talk. She asks, “Are you out at the lake? Will you send old Peter for me? I want to go out with Daddy in the Shepherd and watch the race.”

This Mother is sixteen again and rocking in the mahogany chest Daddy calls the Shepherd. The warmed leather seat where she sits in the back puts her to sleep, that and the rocking motion of the boat against the pier, because Daddy is not yet ready to let Agnes’s older brother cast off.

“What the hell do you think you’re doing?” Daddy is always mad at the grown-up sons, the brothers; but Agnes, Daddy adores. She is only Daddy’s no matter what that Netta says. Netta is the one who doesn’t belong. She is jealous of what Agnes can do. Agnes can swim and so be with Daddy; poor Netta never learned how.

On the porch and sitting sternly, Netta does needlework that strains her eyes; she sits with her back to the pier, preferring a view of the garden.

The pier, the lake, that part of the estate removed from Netta, is where Agnes spends most of her time. The pier is not so long as it is wide. There is a floating dock Agnes swims to, or else on the pier she puts a project between her legs and glues or paints. Agnes starts before the pier is in the sun, when it is cold yet and wet underfoot; the water soaks the first layer of newspaper she lays to work on. The backs of her oiled legs are inky, and her sticky fingertips catch in her hair. Her hair! Her hair is a spun sugar, a matter of light, fine as glass and a white blond — even between her legs.

Oh, put your hand to it now, feel!

Agnes is aflame, and flammable with such fair skin, she uses an umbrella in the sun.

Is it any wonder then that Daddy wants her in his boat? To keep an eye on her and hold off boys.

Agnes’s spun-sugar hair, her white-blond hair, whiskers her breasts when she bends to her work. “Not bad,” she says, appraising what she has done, “but I should have, I should have…” Her jealous mother on the porch agrees. Her jealous mother calls the work dashed off and nothing serious.

Agnes is sixteen, and her chest shows a cleft when she bends, and there, between her breasts, Agnes sweats.

After forty, she will have no desires.

My sister and I hold the phone to our ears and breathe. We talk about Mother and the drapery of her skin, for instance, and what’s between her legs.

We think of our legs, too, each of us, alone; I can hear how we breathe; I know.

We are lucky to live far away. We don’t have to see our mother. We can get reports from Faye.

Faye says, “Yesterday it was horses. In the stable next door a boy was crying because his horse had died.”

I wonder — my sister wonders — How did Mother find dead horses?

Faye says, “Remember how old she is.”

Our mother, talking at the phone, is purely sixteen. Agnes is sixteen years old and talking boys, always boys. Always it is the boys with her, that is what Agnes's jealous mother on the porch says. “Always boys,” she is muttering. “Agnes…we’re going to…” Oh, that jealous mother’s shadowed face is witchy. Just look! Look at her! Under a light made for handiwork, Agnes’s mother is beading sweaters. She is sewing doll clothes, using her hands, loving her hands, loving them in the arduous business of manicures. The jealous mother’s fingernails are pearls. Agnes wants to suck them. She wants to pet her mother’s oily hair. She wants to ring a finger with it, play with its crimped, thick curliness. Netta’s hair is black, too, nothing of Agnes’s white blond is there.