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

Alice said, “You want to be careful. You don’t think it happens, but it does.” Alice, flicking stems and seeds from the resinous box between her legs, did not look up as she rolled thin cigarettes, laughing some, crying, saying, “You know how susceptible I am. I’ll fuck anyone once,” and then Alice said she was ashamed; and the plank between them broke, and she and Alice commiserated, “We’re such dopes.”

The messy intimacy of fucking aroused her, and she put down towels so as not to bleed through the sheets and told George, yes, some whiskey would do and fucking, yes, it helped, always, yes; but her bed was too jouncy and squeaky ridiculous for him, and there was the blood and a smell he could taste — a rusty taste, he said. He did and did not like it, so they quit.

George said, “I want to be happy more of the time than you are happy.”

George said, “You are always going to have the problem of your mother.”

George said, “And there’s also your temper.” George said and he said and he said on the last afternoon when they picked at picnic food someone had made. The cheese was in a sweat, and the deviled eggs slimed off the dish, and the drink poured out flat and tasteless; but she drank and she ate and she fought off feeling sick. That was that.

The restless house rolled over hardly breathing, yet awake; and in this way it started. She and George. Alice and George. She and Alice and George. She and Alice and George and Sam. George and Sam. Sam and Alice. She and George again. She and Sam — but only once — and finally only Alice.

Fast past the wavy fields full of light and meaning — drive fast!

MONDAY AND MONDAY AND Monday pass, all ragged-sky and midday-sun sameness, all closets and drawers she stares into. None of what kept time once works.

Orlando!

She left home just as finally, then kept going back until she had found it: baby shoes, lace cap, scribble, and ribbons; what she was before she was, before otherness and memory. The nights without Orlando home go on.

“Don’t even start!” Orin says, but she does. “It’s always something wrong, goddammit!” Orin says, or else, “I’m exhausted.”

Orin, no sweet name there, just ordinary, ornery, elbow-ugly Orin, asks if she has thought of something positive, say a movie. Tonight, tomorrow, he doesn’t care — does she?

She shrugs and shrugs again when the movie is over, and Orin asks, “Whose idea was that?”

Earlier or later, the same night or any other, Orin asks, “Why did you bring me here?”

“You said you were hungry. Weren’t you?” she asks.

Nights, Orin leaves to wake up in his bed downtown. Even now, with Orlando gone, Orin says he will not stay the night — don’t ask him! Don’t ask for any more money either; he does not have it! No more time for the Post House and Billy’s or any of that overpriced Indian shit. The sweaters he has bought her, the shoes, the trips — what more does she want?

It has to do with her mouth, Orin, still sober, guesses.

“Yes,” she says, excited.

“You’re such a dirty girl,” he says, but tonight he wants to drink.

Orlando, sweet Orlando, her boy, where is he calling from, what space of clanky sounds, many voices, music? “Are you drinking?” she asks.

No, he has called only to tell her this because it is amazing really, but it happened, just today he saw her, he saw his mother as she must have been once, on a school lawn, a girl with heavy eyebrows and a journal.

From where did he get this idea of her, from what photograph? How has Orlando imagined her, and is he the kind of boy to speak to the girl she was, and would she have talked to him? All the questions she might ask, but she lets Orlando talk.

She is so interested in him!

Orlando talks and talks. Of course he is keeping up; it's not all work here, hardly. Orlando says there is a girl.

Something about Orlando’s voice — is it greener in Vermont?

Pretty college, place just rained on and swayed with water, his home now, where he lives, she has not been there. She says, “I'd like to see your room.” The green beyond his window she imagines; birch bark, fogs, solitudes, this surely is the landscape where the poet walked. He, with his vigorous hair and worked hands, the farmer-poet in the photograph.

“I’d like to get away from earth awhile,” Orlando says. “Yeah, it’s all here.”

Orlando again. This time, a little money, please, an advance on his allowance. “Don’t worry,” he assures. “I’m fine.” Everything is nearly finished; he plans to come home after. He wants to bring a friend, okay?

“What do you think?” is her response although she does not — she does not! — want anyone else.

Orin says, “Spoiled bitch,” when she shows him the phone bill. He reads, “October two, October three, four — what the hell was it that week?”

Clothes, books, teachers, the plans for Christmas that change. She wants to know what Orlando is doing, and so she calls him, and Orlando calls her, too; he calls collect, and they talk, and she imagines what he is doing and remembers what she did. Does anything change? She is a girl again and churning up spit to wash out the wine taste that sours her mouth. She wants to go home to a bath but is too afraid to say so, and she lets herself be fucked.

Orlando’s girl sleeps under ironed sheets while his mother is used to the unwashed and defeated. His mother is used to the quiet in the late afternoon when she lies across his bed.

The muted TV is blinking action; the cold casserole is sunk — and she, she is undressing in Orlando’s dark room; she is getting into his bed. Orlando’s pillow smells of her from other nights.

Orin, in the near dark, she hears him slurring, “Go ahead, you sick bitch, rub yourself off on his sheets! I’m leaving!”

Does she sleep?

The next thing she knows, Orin is breaking a picture frame close to the bed. “Here’s something for you to boo-hoo about,” and he smashes the glass part and tears up the picture inside.

Who is it? She won’t look.

Are the stars not yet damped when Orin, on the phone to poor Orlando, shouts, “Your mother is dead. Talk to me?

“Orin, please, it’s too late for that.” The face she wears when she speaks is her youthful face from college. The long face isn’t long but simply regretful; she is too young to be a young man’s mother, too young for these abrasions — Orin’s scorn. Little is the word he puts in front of what is hers.

Now there is only the mail, which mostly means writing checks. Pay to the order of doctor, doctor, doctor, doctor.

How many times a week does she go is what Orin wants to know.

But a lot of what happens she does not understand. That time Orin said he couldn’t walk and made her call an ambulance, that time seemed incredible to her, and Orlando was at home, too. The boy was ten or eleven and saw what a drama could look like. Yelping obscenities, Orin was lifted, dragged, shoved onto, strapped in; he could not hold out his arms and snatch at what he passed riding through the house on a stretcher, shouting, “I’m in so much fucking pain!” Nothing could be found wrong, yet he got the pain pills for it, his crooked condition.

Confusions, she remembers, and embarrassments. Orin asleep at the dinner party and sick-drunk in the garden. “Orin, please,” she was calling out softly, “not the hydrangeas.”

The crystal, the chair — watch it!

Orin, uncomfortable in company, suspicious, loud, clumsy, in the habit of shouting, “Dim bulb, get me some ice”; Orin saying to Orlando, “Dim bulb, what do they teach you in that school?”; saying, “This kid is on another planet. I knew more at six.” Nasty, nasty, Orin must have been a nasty child, the kind whose excuse for any cruelty was to see what would happen.