Christine Schutt - Nightwork - Stories

The Fifth Avenue kitchen is so bright and clean. My husband says the counters are still gritty with cleanser. He says the food is ashamed to be seen.

I admit it, I am driven. Last thing I do each night is wash my floor. One of the reasons the gerbils are such a problem is that they are so ridiculously dirty.

I should get out of the kitchen.

I should set the gerbils free.

I should let the scrub pads rust and the inky vouchers stain the counters. I should mess up.

My husband says the fridge door reads like advertisement. He says the door is not a bulletin board. He says, “Why don’t you get a date book, act like other people?”

I thought that’s what I was doing: acting like other people. So much space glinting off the white dune of Fifth Avenue: I thought. Other people must want this, but not, it seems, the woman my husband wants. She, he says, wants to pitch her umbrella elsewhere.

Where?

I am standing here with the gerbils, who are loose again and scrabbling over my bare feet.

There is broken glass on the floor.

I can’t help what happens.

The kitchen is sprung like an army knife, and I am in a hurry.

I have thrown open the window and am moving fast to catch these gerbils with only my hands. First the girl, who is trembling and trying to nip me — I swing her by the leg out the window; she is gone. Then I make for the boy, hiding in a corner.

I think he thinks he is safe; he doesn’t move. Lost, pointless, filthy boy.

I toss him underhand — just like rice.

She wanted to touch the sister’s back as she saw it in the light beyond the door where she stood, breathing through her mouth, a spy on the sister in the sister’s house — yet waited for, welcome.

“You see that yard?” the sister asked. “That’s my garden.”

Gray morning yellowed here and here and pinched with ribbed red leaves. Impossible to believe that they had slept through to winter again or that this was April — and snow, she in the bedroom with the sister, and somewhere around the house the sister’s husband, caulking windows maybe, wrangling locks. Not much seen, this husband, but she sometimes heard him brush against the wall, bulked shoulders and the clack of buttons. The sound reminded her of parts of him, the husband’s black hair shocked off his wide wrist, his hairy fingers fixing things.

The sister said, “I see a doctor now. I’m on a medication.”

“What kind?” she asked. “Since when?”

The sister said, “Since it happened,” folding blanket squares and sacks that crackled with static, the sister’s hands had snagged on the clothes. “And the sparks,” the sister said. Even pulled apart, hand-ironing, the sleepwear had stuck to the sister’s palm, and the tips of her fingers had felt coarse to the sister.

The sister said, “I raked the little clothes like leaves into giant bags and lugged them to the basement.” She said, “I tossed them. I didn’t care where they landed.”

The sister said, “Want to know how you can help? You can throw out the flowers. Burst tulips are obscene — black and dusted parts exposed. They don’t dry shut or turn to paper. They are never quite dead.”

She saw the husband in the yard was waving something away.

“Maybe the dog,” the sister said. “You’ll hear him howling. It’s all very gothic. The neighbors are afraid of us. Everyone, I think, is afraid of us.”

The sister said, “The food I buy spoils on the drive home, and you’ve seen what has happened to my doors. The strips of torn-up bedclothes are to warn off the birds. There is nothing we can do about the howling.”

The sister’s hands were cutting into pillows, when what she had expected — what she always expected — was to see fleshier hands, the sister’s once, flushed on flushed breasts under cover of their bedroom.

She said, “What can I do to help?”

Tucking in the bed tight, beating the pillows, the sister said, “Talk,” and then they didn’t.

White sheets and pillows, white lace curtains very white, and the way the room was arranged, she saw, the high bed, the nightstands, the mournful dresser, all was familiar, was their mother’s room, early morning. The light was a salt in her eyes, but she kept blinking into it.

Spit-writing names on the wall, she remembered, and spying on their parents. The sister had dared her to look.

“What do you see?” the sister had asked her.

“Nothing,” she had said, when what she had seen was Mother heaving on the stairs, carrying her wrong babies low — Stephen, Michael, Patrick, John.

Her sister stood close to the mirror on the door. “I’m glad you’re here,” the sister said.

She said, “I hope,” and stood near enough to watch the way the soft powder caught in the small lines of the sister’s skin, the sister powdering, putting on lipstick — pain for a mouth.

She said the husband was lucky to have her, the sister.

“Really,” the sister said, dressed and on her way downstairs. The sound the sister made was of soft cloth on cloth.

“That?” from the sister in the kitchen when she asked. “That’s for bread,” the sister said. “I never use it.”

The sister said, “Most of our friends are afraid to visit, I think. I wouldn’t visit us if I could help it. I didn’t think you’d come.”

She said, “Please.” She said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” but she couldn’t think of how to finish; she took out the plates instead.

The sister said, “No, he already ate,” and she leaned against the sink — they both leaned against the sink and looked out at the yard. They couldn’t find him, the husband. The sister said, “Maybe he went into town, or maybe he’s around the house too close for us to see.”

“We’re not good company,” the sister said. “My husband is depressed. He sits up nights and drinks. I’ve called out, ‘Aren’t you cold? Aren’t you tired? Do you want anything?’ But he doesn’t answer, which makes me more afraid.”

The sister said, “Oh, why am I telling you this?”

The sister said, “I was the one who found the baby.”

She said, “I know. I am sorry,” and she touched the sister’s shoulder, put her hand there, softly at first, then firmly, finally to feel how feebly constructed, bones light as balsa wood for toys with daylong lives.

I walk around to the other side of the bed we are sharing, and I put my face up close to hers and say, “Ann, please. Please,” I say, and her eyes open, and Ann sees me, I think, and she says, “Sorry” in a loud, steady voice, and she knows. She knows she has been talking in her sleep. In the morning, she will ask me, “Did I scare you?”

The dog, sleeping next to Ann, sleeps through it all. Good, loyal dog he is — this dog and all the others, for as long as I have known her. Ann holds the dog so close, I itch just looking at her bare arm slung around. The bareness of it, that is what snags me, and how she wears these slippery nightgowns — must be cold. Her arm, around the dog, looks very cold and white and dry to me. The dryness especially, I notice this, in contrast to the tops of her breasts, where the skin, I think, is damp. No matter what Ann says, anyone would want to touch her here, but Ann tells me no, only the dog keeps her warm.

Ann says, “You do not know my kind of loneliness.”

Ann says, “You have a child.”

And so I have.

I used to say my skin smelled of girl from so much touching of my own. Ann remembers. Ann says, “That’s when I got my pooch,” and she takes his head up in her hands — Ann does this, all the time — and chuffs behind his ears.