Days

by Mary Robison

  ALSO BY MARY ROBISON

  An Amateur’s Guide to the Night

  Believe Them

  Oh!

  One D.O.A., One on the Way

  Subtraction

  Tell Me

  Why Did I Ever

  Days

  Originally published in 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright © 1977, 1978, 1979 by Mary Robison

  First Counterpoint paperback edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  The following stories have appeared in The New Yorker:

  “Sisters,” “Doctor’s Sons,” “Kite and Paint,” “May Queen,”

  “Daughters,” “Independence Day,” “Pretty Ice,” and “Smoke.”

  “Grace” appeared in the August 1978 issue, and “Beach Traffic” in the January 1979 issue of Viva.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Robison, Mary.

  Title: Days : stories / Mary Robison.

  Description: First Counterpoint paperback edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint, 2019. | “Originally published in 1979 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.”—Title page verso.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018044346 | ISBN 9781640091801

  Subjects: | GSAFD: Short stories.

  Classification: LCC PS3568.O317 D39 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018044346

  Cover design by Jenny Carrow

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10987654321

  For Jim

  Contents

  Kite and Paint

  Care

  Grace

  Sisters

  Weekday

  Apostasy

  Doctor’s Sons

  Camilla

  Widower

  Pretty Ice

  Daughters

  Relations

  Beach Traffic

  May Queen

  Bud Parrot

  Smoke

  Independence Day

  Heart

  Stay with Me

  Felt Pieces

  Kite and Paint

  IT WAS THE LAST DAY of August in Ocean City, and everybody was waiting for Hurricane Carla. Don was outside the house he shared with Charlie Nunn, poking at the roses with an umbrella. The cuffs of Don’s pants were soaked with dew. His morning coughs were deep, and with each round of coughs he straightened up and clutched his cardigan to his throat.

  Charlie Nunn was watching Don from an old glider on the porch. He had taken apart the morning paper, and had the sports section open on his khakis. Both men were in their sixties.

  “You don’t sound good,” Charlie said.

  “I know it,” Don said. He paused in the roses and whacked at a spoke of weed with his umbrella.

  A green car pulled up at the curb in front of the house. Charlie nodded at a face in the window of the car. The car door opened, and Don’s former wife, Holly, got out. She was all dressed up—a pale green crocheted dress, nylons, and alligator shoes. She came up the path of flat stones that led to the house, one hand on her red straw hat.

  “Come in, come in, Holly,” Charlie said. He folded his newspaper and tucked it under his thigh. “Do sit down,” he said.

  “Thank you, no,” Holly said. “I’m just here to check on my piano.” She stepped onto the porch, and her hand dropped from her hat to one hip. She smiled at Charlie.

  “I could kick myself for not moving it out of here long ago,” she said. “Don can’t play it. Unless he learned to play.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Charlie said. “But the piano’s safe. I got it on top of the meat freezer, believe it or not. I built a frame for it so it won’t warp if we get flooded, and it’s shrouded in polyethylene.”

  “On a meat freezer?” Holly said. “My goodness. It’s really nice of you, Charlie. Or did you even know the piano belonged to me?”

  “I guess I did,” Charlie said. “I used to keep track of what was whose. Last evening, I just decided everything had to be protected.”

  “Well, what are you going to do?” Holly said. “Are you two going anywhere for the hurricane?”

  “Not that I know of,” Charlie said. “I guess almost everyone else already left.”

  “Yes, a lot of them are staying over at the grade school,” Holly said. “It’s high ground.” She turned and looked toward Don. “I wonder if he should be out there,” she said. “What’s he doing?”

  “Picking mint, it looks like,” Charlie Nunn said. “What can I do?”

  “Nothing at all,” Holly said. She tapped one of her shoes against the other.

  “Let’s go look at the piano,” Charlie said. He got off the glider and led Holly by the wrist through the front door.

  They went through the parlor and the kitchen to a small storage room at the back of the house. Charlie gestured at the piano, an upright, which was lying on one side on top of a low freezer. Inside its slatted frame, the piano was swathed in plastic wrappings.

  “It looks like a coffin,” Holly said. “It should be fine. It looks great. How in the world—”

  “I got in some beach kids, and they gave me a hand with it,” Charlie said.

  “What are those?” Holly said, pointing to some flat shapes stacked in one corner.

  “Sized canvases,” he said. “I don’t know why I’m keeping them safe. Don won’t use them. He hasn’t worked since he had the flu.”

  “He hasn’t?” Holly said.

  “No.”

  “Well,” she said, “you know the only time he painted with me was when we were first married—oh, twenty years ago. Back when he was friends with some of the big names.”

  Charlie followed her back into the parlor.

  “Oh, God, look at that,” Holly said. “He left the caps off his oils. They’re all clotted.” She went over to Don’s drawing table, in one corner of the room, and stared at the metal trays that held his paint tubes.

  “I would at least like to see the canvases stay dry,” Charlie said, half-sitting on an arm of the couch. “They were work.”

  “They predict fourteen-foot waves,” Holly said.

  “I heard that,” he said. “If we flood out, I swear I’m taking the canvases first. I had to cut the stretchers with a miter box. They’re black oak. The sizing’s made with white lead from Germany and glue from Japan.”

  He got off the couch and went over to a closet. “Let me show you something. This makes me furious,” he said over his shoulder. He knelt and eased a square of illustration board from between some storage envelopes on the closet floor.

  Charlie showed Holly the illustration board. It had childish doodles of a warplane dropping a row of finned bombs, and beneath the bombs there was a pencil sketch of a pelican.

  “Do you see this part?” Charlie said, circling the pelican with the tip of his index finger. “Feather perfect,” he said. “It could buy us food.”

  “How bad is the financial situation with you two?” Holly said.

  Charlie said, “I have a pension from teaching.”

  “You taught? I never knew that,” H
olly said.

  “Sure. I taught shop at the junior high for twenty-three years.”

  “This junior high? Then you’re from here?”

  “Oh, yeah,” Charlie said. “My dad was with the shore patrol. My mother’s still alive. She lives on Decker Street. I’m told somebody already drove her to Philadelphia for the blow. One of my nieces, I think.”

  Don came into the parlor, carrying a handful of mint. “Aren’t you scared?” he said to Holly.

  “No, I’m not scared,” she said. “Just exhausted is all.”

  “I think I’ll take some of my kites down to the beach,” Don said. “It’s getting sort of windy already.” He dropped the mint on the seat of an armchair.

  “In fourteen-foot waves?” Holly said. “How smart would that be?”

  Don pointed the end of his umbrella at Holly’s hat. “What a thing on your head,” he said.

  Holly’s face reddened. She said, “I’m on my way to Philadelphia, Don. I’ll be at Mary Paul’s.” She turned to Charlie. “Maybe I’ll see your mother,” she said.

  “Maybe you will,” Charlie said, rocking forward on the soles of his shoes.

  “Goodbye, Charlie,” Holly said, heading for the door.

  “Goodbye, Don,” said Don.

  “Yes, goodbye, Don,” Holly said.

  “I don’t feel good,” Charlie said, in the next hour. He and Don were in the parlor.

  “Go outside and take some breaths,” Don said.

  Charlie frowned at the couch, which was heaped with cardboard boxes he had just brought up from the basement. He got down and lay on his back on the parlor rug. He touched his fingers to his wrist, and cocked his arm to read his pulse against his watch.

  Don had changed his pants and sweater for a bathrobe and sandals. He was sitting in an armchair and drinking from a bottle of gin. On his lap was a small wheel of cheese.

  “The air is so bad in here it’s making me cry,” he said.

  Charlie had a lighted cigarette in his mouth and was smoking it while he took his pulse. Some ashes had fallen on his unshaven chin.

  Don snapped the switch on an electric fan that stood on a table beside his chair. The fan wagged slowly to and fro, cutting the smoke haze over Charlie’s body.

  “Chess?” Don said. “A quick game while we wait?”

  Charlie stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray he had balanced on his stomach. He glared at his watch. “No, I don’t want to play chess,” he said. “I just want to feel better.”

  “You would if you ate. Only you’d better get to it, because what you see here is about all there is, and it’s nearly gone,” Don said. He snapped off the fan.

  “You’re eating that cheese with the rind still on,” Charlie said.

  There was a gust of wind outside, and the parlor curtains billowed against the windowsills. “You should see it out there,” Don said. “From here, it looks like the sky is beige.”

  Charlie rubbed his stomach.

  “I’ll let you see what I did last night,” Don said. He got up and stepped over Charlie on the way to the closet. He brought out a shopping bag and put it on the rug by Charlie’s head.

  “Looky here,” Don said. He pulled a half-dozen kites from the bag. The kites were made of rice paper, balsa-wood strips, and twine, and were decorated with poster paints in bright primary colors.

  “They look like flags,” Charlie said.

  “I made drawings of each one in a notebook beforehand,” Don said. “I gave them titles. These are called ‘Comet’ and ‘Whale.’” He showed Charlie a blue kite and a yellow one with an orange diagonal stripe.

  “Yeah. What else?” Charlie said.

  “This is ‘Boastful,’” Don said, handing Charlie a kite. “Stay still a minute.” He crossed the room with a kite in each hand.

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Charlie said.

  Don propped the kites against the boxes on the sofa, where the light from one of the parlor windows fell on them. “These are the next to the best,” he said, standing back. “‘My Beauty’ and ‘Moon.’”

  “Right, right,” Charlie said. “Let’s see the best.”

  “This one—‘Reddish Egret,’” Don said. “It’s my favorite.” He held the last kite flat above Charlie’s face. “See?” he said, touching a stenciled figure in the center of the kite. “It’s a bird.”

  “Why don’t you send them to Zack in the city?” Charlie said as Don took the last kite away. “He could get you some gallery space or something, I’ll bet.”

  “I fired Zack,” Don said. “It’d be fun to waste them in the blow.”

  “Not a chance,” Charlie said.

  “Why can’t we?”

  “I’m not getting off this floor,” Charlie said, “unless it’s to get in hot bathwater, and I mean up to my chin.”

  Don collected his kites and dropped them one by one into the shopping bag. He threw himself into the armchair and turned on the fan again.

  “Holly was shocked at the mess your oils are in,” Charlie said after a while.

  “Oh, don’t even tell me,” Don said. “Holly! Her very presence is dispiriting to me.”

  “I don’t know why you say that,” Charlie said. “All she hopes for is to see you do an occasional day’s work.”

  “I never liked to paint,” Don said.

  Charlie turned on his side on the floor and braced his head on his palm. “Would you turn off that fan? I can’t hear myself,” he said. “You liked painting when you had a model. Especially that one model.”

  The fan quit by itself, in mid-swing, and the noise from the refrigerator stopped.

  “Uh-oh,” Charlie said. “That means the hot water, too.” He got off the rug and went to the window, and stood holding back the curtain. “It looks like a good one,” he said. “How about flying your kites from the porch roof, if I rip up an old bedsheet? For the tails, I mean. You want to climb out there and try it?”

  “I do,” said Don.

  Care

  BARBARA LED LEAH THROUGH A coalyard to behind the elementary school. “Now look at that,” Barbara said. “It’s human.” She pointed into the cinders at a blade of bone studded with teeth.

  “That’s from a cow,” Leah said.

  “No,” Barbara said, shaking her head. The back and shoulders of her coat were soaked with dissolved snow.

  “Well, I guess I ought to ask you about Jack,” Leah said. She kicked a coal chip at one of the school’s caged windows.

  “I refuse to see him,” Barbara said. “We’re separated, as I’m sure you heard. We’ve been separated four months.” She was still staring at the bone. “For a lot of good reasons. One is that I found this in his tool drawer.” She opened her coat and showed a nickel-plated handgun tucked in at the waistband of her skirt.

  Leah said, “Jack is the one person who shouldn’t keep a revolver.”

  “He’s so much worse since you’ve been gone,” Barbara said. “My dad thinks it’s because Jack reads so much. You know who Jack always liked, though?” Barbara leaned over and snapped one of the buckles on her galoshes. “Your sister, Bobby.”

  “Yes, I think he really did,” Leah said. She sighed, and turned the shard of bone with the toe of her shoe. “You can tell him Bobby’s wonderful. Just remarkable. She takes a lot of speed still. She’s chewed a nice hole in her lip.”

  “Bobby’s disturbed,” Barbara said. “You can tell that just from the way she walks.”

  Leah blinked at a tiny maroon car that was circling the playground, and Barbara said, “That’s Jack, and I’m leaving.” She turned up her coat collar and ran away along a narrow alley that edged the back of the schoolhouse.

  “Now wait just a minute!” Leah called.

  “I will not see him!” Barbara called back before she disappeared around the corner of the school’s library annex.

  JACK DROVE HIS CAR ONTO the playground and hit the brakes when he had pulled up beside Leah. “My wife moves pretty good whenever I’m around,
” he said. His face was chapped red with cold under his watch cap. He used his coat sleeve to scrape at a rust scab on the car door. “I heard you were back in town.”

  Leah got into the car. She said, “What have you done to Barbara?”

  “My wife is just afraid of me,” Jack said.

  “Afraid?”

  “Um-hmm,” Jack said. A block away, his car began to shimmy as if it might explode. A waxed cup full of cigar butts slid off the dashboard and into Leah’s lap.

  Jack laughed and clicked a fingernail on the windshield, where a helicopter was wading into view.

  “What do they want?” Leah yelled over the terrible beating of the machine.

  The copter bobbed directly overhead, then canted off toward the lake.

  “Not us,” Jack said.

  HE BOUGHT LUNCH FOR THEM at a grocery cafeteria. Leah put her feet up on the seat of the vinyl booth, and watched out the bank of windows. The room smelled of warm food and of the laundered cotton blotters under the casserole trays.

  Jack said, “Look at the snow flying.” He nodded at the window.

  But Leah saw a boy go by, pushing another boy in a shopping cart on the icy parking lot. The boy in the cart sucked cigarette smoke into his nose, and adjusted a dial on the plastic radio he was holding.

  “Want to hear what I’ve been thinking about you?” Jack said, turning to Leah.

  “Sure do,” she said.

  “I’ve decided that Europe didn’t change you,” Jack said, “like I hoped it would. You still want for something, as if somewhere you’ve been robbed.”

  “What have I been robbed of?” Leah said.

  “Something important,” Jack said. He spilled soda into his mouth. “The crux, the thrust of what—as I see it—is going on with you. And I’m talking about your whole life, not just here this afternoon.” He grinned. “I mean it,” he said. “What you oughtn’t to be afraid of is a little more rarefied stratum, Leah. One thing I learned about being young is that there’s a kind of purity of insight. You know? For example, right now I could decide to be a proletarian, a laborer, an artist, an executive.” He was counting the possibilities off on his spread fingers. “But I wouldn’t be you.”

  “I’m sorry you feel that way,” Leah said. She munched ice from the rim of her water glass.