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

He has caught his school cold, or else he is allergic, but to what? He can only think it is the dog who lived here and wonder how much of the dog is left. A collar, some rubbed-away places, but maybe there is hair? The old girlfriend’s hair, he remembers, there wasn’t very much of it. His own hair, too, is no more than smoke. The parched season is dangerous, and those who are sent to put out the fires thrash past in flames on the news. He is thirsty again, but he will not move. He sits at his desk and takes small breaths while the ravening dog scratches toward him.

WHATEVER THEY SAW LOOKED vaguely obscene until their hearts kicked in. Then they were in a car going at easy speed past once-in-a-life fields full of a dawn and a beauty unexpected in the home state with the ugly name.

She did not like to say it.

So they passed a field of alfalfa, a field of corn, a border of trees. The red-and-white barns were all there was of people; even the animals, it seemed, were put away; only tuneless crows in heavy flight surprised them — and the sound of their own voices.

“What don’t you want to tell me? Tell me what,” she was shouting at the others — George mostly. The village scale on which she had lived was a greenhouse of sharp smells, and she was not worldly. She did not know, and she did not know unless George, sleeping near her, explained. George, in his nimbus of genius rumors, was a loose mouth asleep against her book bag, a loose, large, wet-looking mouth — too alive! — she had never kissed it. She wanted to be quits of that history of stains, no more the fishy smells on her sheets.

“I’m coming down,” she said. “The high is passing through me.”

Now she was sleepy and slightly depressed.

Oh, what was she doing in this car with these people?

Sam, the braggart, was smoking on the stoop and toting up what parts of him still worked. He was smoking and eating at the same time. He was smoking and eating and laughing at himself. They watched him squish soft fruit between his teeth.

Other annoyances, hers, Sam on the porch now in her underwear.

“Who said you could?” she said.

“Oh, come on, come on, come on, come on,” Sam said, stuck on his own subject. “Let me,” he said. “I’m an old hair braider from way back. Let me,” he said to Alice, and then to her, “Please, you could be cute.”

But the hair braids brought on more headache, and she went calling after George until she saw and woke him: George, pillowed on his own books now, cheek grooved with reading Chekhov. Ordinary life, she said, was so confusing, and George said, “Don’t be ashamed.”

She thought, He doesn’t know me.

Sam was sucking on his pipe stem and turning up the violence on TV. “Fuck,” he said, faulting her for acting intellectual. Every day — the rest of his life — Sam said he wanted to get high and fuck!

“Good luck,” she said; but she had too much work to do to join him. She had a paper to write — this was college.

Days without sleep or food, she was locked in her room and writing papers. “Yes!” sometimes shouted when she read what she had written and approved of it: yes, yes, yes. The illusion of efficiency was easily heightened by the pills Alice gave her; and she was days awake and without appetite until, tearful and hungry, she gorged on junk snacks from the grocery. On its own, ready-made dip from the dairy section, she sucked it off her fingers — oh!

“Oh, I am so smart!” Sam said, all the time, to which she and Alice made faces.

They made faces at the faces George made whenever the three of them eavesdropped on Sam with a girl in bed. “Did anyone ever tell you how…how blue, how small.” Her room was right next, so she rarely missed what Sam was doing in his, but the sounds of him depressed her, and Alice seemed glum, and George, tired.

The raft of George’s room tossed in his doors opening.

She told him, “I’m bored or I’m lonely. I’m something. I don’t know which, but Sam doesn’t help.” She went on talking about her mother and her problems with her mother. “George?” she asked then, wondering. He seemed to be staring at something he saw behind her when she spoke. He was at the window and the afternoon shone through him. His hair, she saw, stood up, surprised. He leaned against the windowsill, a wan, indoor, unembarrassed boy, and she wondered what George was doing in this house with them.

He was leaning in a stupor against Alice's long legs and laughing with the laughers on late-night shows.

He was smudging magazines with reading in the bath.

He was toking on the stoop and talking places he would travel.

Travel, the breezy takeoff, the names of Daddy’s friends in case, dope in the tin box meant for mints — no, she said, this was not her Mexico. She said, “I was expecting pain, and I got it,” and she told George how they were chased into the suburbs until the driver lost the threatening car and could slow past the houses. Harmless-looking houses, but inside one of them was the makeshift clinic where at dawn it began, and she was last. The abortionist! Girl after girl — some were women — walked in on her own to where the doctor did it, then was carried out knocked out, obscenely padded, elsewhere looseness, breasts and buttocks — ugly! Later, but not much later, quickly, in fact, they were dressed and in the kitchen before the driver took them back to the hotel. She said the pineapple they offered was freshly cut and juicy.

Everything she said came out like sex, which might have been the way she was or the way it was in the house.

But what was that genius George reciting wearing only a towel?

The death dates of important thinkers, the titles to their essays, and the size of their estates. Genealogies and distances, Latin mottoes, old boundaries, gonfalon flags, divisions of heraldry — partitions, ordinaries, charges, furs — were some of George’s topics.

“Mary Moody Emerson slept in her shroud — took it on her travels — and wore out many.”

“Farther has to do with distance, further has to do with more in time or degree.”

“You’re a better student than I am,” he said to her, “but I am more ambitious.” Later — much later, in fact — she thought how George had seduced her with this line, taking her seriously, acknowledging her efforts. She didn’t even think of where he was standing when he spoke, looking in at her sudsing in the tub.

“Let me in,” he said, scooping up a poof of foam with which he crowned her.

“No,” she said, but he stepped out of his shorts and slipped in behind and put his hands beneath her breasts. He touched the pointy bones that were her hips, the swollen folds of her small sex.

“Stand up,” he said.

“No,” she said, laughing and at the same time rising to see her body fleeced with soap he blew away. Then George was pressing his fleshy mouth between her legs, and a part of her wondered if she was why George was living here in this swaybacked house miles from campus.

“Where’s George?” Sam asked.

“My room,” she said. “What’s so funny about that?”

And nothing was funny about George sitting on old laundry — all sore knees and reddened elbows — and using his hand to ash what he smoked. Sam had rolled it for him.

“Fuck,” she said, “fuck, fuck,” while she tried to get George’s attention. She shook him and asked, “Do you remember how many you took?”

Later, when George had slid off the laundry and was using the floor as a bed, she wanted to know from Sam what George had swallowed. Was it anything like what they had had before? Then she was asking George. She was shaking him, exhorting — pleading, “Don’t fall asleep!” but Alice, on the landing, said, “Fuck these boys.”