Christine Schutt - All Souls

"No, I have news for you. We are not buying a long dress. Save that for your wedding."

"There are no short white dresses. They're not making short white dresses this year, Mother."

"Well, we'll have one made, then."

The girl at least had thick hair; otherwise, a bulldog's body for all her modern dance. Lisa looked like Bill, and clothes shopping with her had long ago ceased to be fun. She didn't have much in the way of an ankle, a heavy step. Maybe her eyebrows? They were thick and bossy — maybe if they were plucked just a little?

"Mother, will you stop pawing me?"

"I was only thinking you might think about your eyebrows."

"Oh my god."

"I'm sorry. Go in and try it on. I'll wait out here."

"Mother, this looks like a nurse's uniform."

Lettie Van de Ven did what she was famous for doing with her face.

"Okay, okay, okay," Lisa said. "I'll try it on."

When Lisa came out, her mother did that other thing she was famous for doing with her face. "You were right. Now you do look like a nurse."

Unattached

Tim Weeks and Anna Mazur walked a string of girls down Park Avenue to the Alford School to see some of their classmates with the eighth-grade boys from Al-ford in Our Town. I've read it too often. It's sentimental. Dated. Old-fashioned. Maybe, but on this day when Mrs. Gibbs said that "people are meant to go through life two by two. It ain't natural to be lonesome," Anna Mazur saw camels and elephants headed for the ark, and she felt sad. The boy playing George Gibbs had a voice that was soft as a fruit — too much saliva — whereas Gillian Warring seemed never to be surprised. She knew where the play was going and all of its players. "Oh, Mama, just look at me one minute as though you really saw me."

Siddons

The same subjects — Brown and Suki Morton and money — had been part of their conversation so many months ago in the Greek coffee shop. The Mortons were the soup people. Miss Wilkes remembered now. I'm not a nice girl. I'm growing more disappointed every day. That was how it had started —I'm not a nice girl —and for a few weeks, they had talked after school in the art room. Lisa had come on to her. She had not pursued the girl; rather, she had tried to keep her distance. Tried until she put her hand over Lisa's in the Greek coffee shop. She had put her hand over the girl's, but had she applied any pressure? You knew I was a take-charge person. The girl had called her Janet and had asked to visit. School was too personal — whatever that meant — but the single afternoon at her apartment with Taffy all over the place and Lisa's face, the mottled rash, the eyelids plump, reacting on the instant. Allergies. I think I may only be experimenting, Miss Wilkes. Miss Wilkes, Miss Wilkes, to be called Miss Wilkes in her own apartment, to be reminded of the awkward self that lurched around the lunchroom every day too early — the trays overturned on the salad-bar selections — too early, so she feigned interest in coffee, which gave her the jitters. She had the jitters in her own apartment. It was cold, of course, on that day in January when Lisa Van de Ven paid a visit, but this shaking came from the ever-hungry self at the teachers' table too early in the morning. Miss Wilkes, I think I may only be experimenting. The embarrassment of her appetite, and yet she had learned to restrain herself. For weeks now she had gone to the last lunchtime seating and missed seeing Lisa Van de Ven every time.

Mothers

"I leave you to your own devices" was what he had said on the morning he left, and Theta was late for work. Not the first time she was ever late in all the years — nine years, not so very long ago. The weird thing was that she remembered Bob at the door carrying a yellow suitcase. Theta said to Marlene, "I'm not an imaginative person particularly, Marlene, so this is strange. Don't you think? I see an old-fashioned yellow, a strong yellow, cardboard suitcase. I don't think your father was probably carrying anything. The way I remember it happening he is wearing a gray suit, which also seems preposterous. I can't remember him ever wearing a suit."

Marlene said, "It has to do with maybe the way he wasn't or you wanted him."

"Yes, it does. I know. I don't want to look at his face."

"You miss people more when they're gone," Marlene said while she picked out nuts in a pint of ice cream. "No, that's not how it goes. You — no. People make a big impression on us for not being around, something like that. Astra and I have talked about it." She swallowed. "I love her. She's so great." The carton looked crushed for the heat of her hand, and the ice cream, Theta saw, was a soup when Marlene put it back.

"No one's going to eat that, you know."

"She's a saint. She finds something good in everybody. It's ridiculous."

A girl with a healing touch, true, and for a moment Theta went missing. Something else there was she had meant to tell her daughter, but her daughter was swinging out the swinging door of their old kitchen. Lately it seemed Theta had time, more time to herself, which explained the lightness she felt — better posture — and it was not unwelcome. And the ice cream? Would she miss finding the refrozen melted ice cream with its skim-milk color and consistency? The same she threw away — not for being nutless but because it wasn't sweet anymore, wasn't salty but tasteless — would she miss the trail of her daughter in the house? She didn't know, but Theta Kovack was thinking of going back to school! For what? To finish her degree. And then? Something more.

CHF

The question was why she had included the story that had started as an essay about her father, the one where he sat looking small on a large sofa, with one leg crossed over the other, the leg swinging and swinging the wide bell of his cuffed, creased pants. Everything he wore looked soft enough to sleep in, and the plausive gestures — only his legs were crossed, the rest of him open, his arms opening as if to embrace him or her or him or anyone else who came near — these open arms deceived her, and when she bent to kiss his cheek, he looked into her breasts and said, "Too much French pastry, Carlotta." In front of the Dutch hostess, who knew so many languages and stood just behind in a pleated dress with silken cord, classic as a caryatid, in front of all the elegantly gathered, her father had said she was fat. A fat, bumptious teenager in a too-tight dress unbecomingly thrusting her breasts at the dowagers, at the drab and the dull she had expected to meet and trump. The problem with Car's story was that all the characters were ugly. Even Miss Hodd, who liked everything Car wrote, had said it was hard to sympathize with a judgmental narrator and discouraged her from putting it in Folio, however accomplished some of the descriptive passages.

"I wanted to get back at him, of course. I want everyone to know he's an asshole and a fag." Car said, "I'm sorry." She said, "I'm just so sick and tired. I'm so mad. I wake up every morning in a rage."

Nobody wakes up in the morning trying to burn was what she wrote him.

Car said, "I can't help myself. My only excuse is I'm young." She said, "Please, don't look at me like that. I'm serious. Don't make me laugh. I don't want to laugh."

Astra said, "So how was St. Bart's with your mother?"

"I should have gone to Paris and endured my dad."

Mothers

"How does your father feel about Columbia?"

"I don't know why you ask me these things when you know I don't know," Car said, and she let go of her knife, stuck upright in the meatloaf, to see if it might stand. It didn't.

Mrs. Forestal startled. "Damnit, Carlotta," she said. "Must you?"