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

The times I cautioned him, “Remember, he’s your son,” he said, “What do you know about being a parent?”

What did I? My oldest daughter vowed never to visit.

My oldest daughter said, “You hate everyone,” and she was right: I did hate many people. I hated disproportionately, vociferously, indulged in wrathful scratching and saying how I hated…I hated my mother, my ex-husband, him. Any inconvenience—“We don’t have,” “We won’t take,” “We can’t do”—abraded old sores or made them, and I berated and insulted and slurred helpless persons and said fuck and fucking all the time. My daughters, witnessing, trailed with puzzled faces. “Will you fuck off?” I said to them — and to him.

I especially hated him and thought, If I only had his money…For he had money, and money gentles everything, except when it is given cruelly; then the thwart of cancellations and delays abrades. Think of a starchy collar against a sunburned neck.

A day in spring too bald yet still pastel, the wind is hard through the trees. We are touring the murdered wife’s house, where the carpeting sweeps through the gaping rooms — few divisions, recessed lights, marble surfaces, money. The banker husband’s, surely; what is she but aggravation — a threatening debt, stupidly indifferent. “A bit like you,” the man says to me, “a lot like you.” He says, “So go on. So waah, waah, waah about money,” but his hands come first.

I am saying horrible things and hitting back, and we are standing in the murdered woman’s bedroom. The house belongs to no one now until the bullet holes are fixed and someone else wants to live here. We don’t!

I already owned a house, but in the summer, for my sake, he rented within walking distance of the beach. The season cost as much as a car, but the house on the lane was invisibled by hedges, and I had lots of time on my own there — no children. So what did I have to complain of? That’s what he wanted to know.

At night, weepy, I wandered out of doors to such sensations as I had had once with a boy who fanned his hair for me to sleep on — soft.

The heat blows through the summer rental; the house billows or seems to, and I am glad glad glad the man is gone! I can call my girls now and talk and talk until my tongue swells, and I am tired.

Cissy on the phone scolds, “It’s always sex with you, Mother. I’m too young.”

I was thirty-six, yes, thirty-six, and he was older by eleven years exactly. He said he would die first, especially with me around, but he promised trust funds for the girls, so I stuck it out carelessly and heard time clang past.

Why didn’t I have more fun?

Once, in the beginning, before the neighbors, before the cops, he met us at the zoo. Cissy, I think, suspected he was coming, or something like him, something large and wheezing and hairy. Cissy, as a child, was open arms to anybody, but when he made to speak, she cried for me to lift her.

Why didn’t I take my child to me and run?

He said from the start he was a misanthrope, but I didn’t believe him. I thought…I thought adult life was meant to be uncomfortable, full of anguish and embarrassment; but after a while, I felt no embarrassment. What people saw, they saw.

The real estate agent saw us rushing from the murder scene to the lawn, saw this fat man hitting me, and me hitting this fat man, and both of us screaming how we hated and swearing we would — yes, definitely, today, no more fucking around but seriously over now, no more, before we killed each other.

Think of poisonous solvents that smoke through cloth. Think of miseries, stinks. He was steak-red and fat, and we were both full of wine when the house winked in high sun, a bloody charge against my eyes.

“Some renovation,” the real estate agent had said, and it could be ours.

No thanks! I wanted to live at home again with my mother and the girls, but I didn’t know how to ask.

“What a fucking sad sack!” he said. He said horrible things, but I said worse.

The real estate agent in her locked car leaned on her horn as if, like water on the rabid, it would startle us apart. The dusty snarl of us, us on the front lawn in full sun fighting. Sun! How I cursed it! Heat chafed, itchy, cankered, and confused by the freakish rush of summer, and this man pushing me against the car, saying, “Get in, goddammit, before I kill you.”

Do it! Do it! Do it! was my heart — is still my heart when I think of him, and I think of him. I wonder at that tin-bright vision, that acidic bite of spit, that embrace, that poetry by which I live.

Christine Schutt is the author of the short-story collections Nightwork and A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer . The former was chosen by poet John Ashbery as the best book of 1996 for the Times Literary Supplement . Schutt’s first novel, Florida , was a National Book Award finalist for fiction in 2004, and her second novel, All Souls , was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for fiction in 2009. Her latest novel, Prosperous Friends , is out now from Grove Press.