Nightwork: Stories

by Christine Schutt

  She was in the bathroom, and he was at the door. Mornings, evenings. “Do you mind?” she answered. “Are you deaf?” she asked, pressing a wet washcloth over her breasts and turning away from the cold huff of air in the door’s opening. “Just checking,” the boy said—and the mother smiled when she shouted, “I have no privacy here!”

  Room to room, stacked straight, tight, divisions so thin she could hear the boy at night butting against the wall between her bedroom and his. She thought of horses knocking in their stalls and wondered was it the boy’s foot or out-thrown arm, and would he, in some half sleep, come to her, shuffling on his big feet, saying, “I brought my own pillow.” She was always awake when he came to her and remembering what not to forget, so that to have this boy next to her, the sidelong press of him on his back, arms crossed over his chest, a sealed package to poke and wonder at, was a way of remembering, and she thought. This cannot be bad—and she sometimes spent the night with him.

  “You didn’t move!” was what the boy said, finding his mother when he did not expect to find her in the morning still beside him, but in his own bed and explaining, “You take up all the room,” or saying, “Here is room,” and smoothing the place beside her.

  Awake like this and in bed together, there was often nothing left to say, and so they kissed. They kissed as boys and mothers kiss: she, dry smacking everywhere fast—cheek, nose, chin, neck—and he, giddy in the heat of her kissing, kissing back slow and wet and opening his shirt to let her scratch. “Here,” he said, “and here,” pointing to low places prickling at her touch, pointing lower.

  “You!” the mother said, and roused herself from his bed. “You must be hungry,” she said.

  In this way, the day began, or else it happened he was gone, and she was in his bed “Because the light was better,” she said, and the pillows, plumped so near the window, stayed cool. And if the phone rang, very early, as it did when he was gone, she was nearer to it, ready to answer in a wide-awake voice, knowing even before he spoke, it was the boy calling. He was as suddenly moved to call her as he was to kiss her, and with nothing more on his mind than “What have you been doing, what are you doing now?”

  “Braiding corn tassels,” the mother said. “Gouging eyes in the potatoes.”

  The boy, at home again, said, “I am going to have lots of children.”

  The boy said, “I will never get divorced.”

  The boy was locking himself in the bathroom then. He was saying, “I want privacy.” He was saying, “Look at me”—goose-stepping toward the mother, naked as the day he was born, and asking, “Who am I?” The boy’s game—“Who am I now?”

  “A soldier,” the mother said.

  “A bad man,” the mother said.

  But she could never guess him right.

  The boy changed even as the mother answered, coming at her in some goofy bump and grind. She looked, and then she did not look, and swiped at his soft belly, and swiped again to keep him back, and when he kept on jiggling toward her, she took hold of his shoulders until he stood still and away from her, but not so far she could not touch him. She pressed her thumbs against his pink squint-eyed nipples, and the boy said, “You are my mother.”

  The mother said, “So?”

  “One kiss.”

  And the boy gave it to her, fast, before he moved away from where the mother was standing, in the middle of a room she did not recognize, in a body that was suddenly not quite hers.

  GOOD NIGHT,

  SWEETHEART

  I date an old man, a man so old, I am afraid to see what he is like under his clothes. I am afraid of his old mouth and his old breath. His eyes, when he looks at me, are watery and sad, even when he is laughing, and he is often laughing, just behind me, at a joke I have made. This old man seems to like me. He takes me to dinner; he lets me talk and talk, like boys used to do. My mouth waters with the pleasure of it, telling stories whole, being heard; I order dessert; I flirt. All this heat hatches my face. I feel it, and I am happy, schoolgirl happy, with a man I am afraid to kiss.

  I have done my share of kissing—so what am I afraid of? The teeth, their leafy transparency? His teeth remind me of my grandfather’s teeth, and the shock, up close, of all that metal inside his mouth.

  I never talk to the old man about my grandfather. My past reads earnest as a yearbook; I mostly keep it to myself. We have an understanding, the old man and I—he keeps the talk since the last wife’s death. Always, he pays for dinner.

  I like watching him take out his wallet. He seems very shrewd to me when he takes out his wallet—on his own, no need of me. I can get excited; I admit it. He looks good to me then. His brick red neck, his grizzle—a kind of overgrown look he has—hair in the ears and growing over even the knuckles, I am attracted to this about him, and especially to his knuckles, his hands. His hands are brown and easeful; I want to touch them. So why is it, when he touches me, I flinch?

  I worry when the meal is over.

  I worry about the walk home.

  What does he expect?

  His face blurs and tires; there is no sign of wanting, none that I can read. Used to be the body knew; the body made the decisions. I could smell it, all that want, and I knew what to do. The awkwardnesses—putting on a coat, taking up my purse—were only felt as tweaks on the way to the next event. The point was to leave—never as it is now: to wait, to consider. The point was move fast, get home, get anywhere.

  Outdoors, indoors, rooms—all rooms—once even on a porch to a house I was helping christen: It happened anywhere, sometimes even with restrictions, insurmountable now, so drunk or dopey, the room turned to fuzz. I had sex when I was tripping, when I was sick with the flu, and often in the middle of my bleeding with so much coming out of me, I should have been embarrassed, not as I was, indifferent to precautions and towels, staining the bed, me, him, seeing his mouth red, but I cannot see this old man’s mouth ever being red.

  His age bleaches even his past.

  I cannot see this man’s mouth at all.

  He has pinched up his muffler. We are walking against the wind around the building where I live. The building is dark; even the doorman is absent. No one is waiting up for me.

  RELIGION

  We woke in the parked car aslant in the field Cory’s grandma had found for us to sleep in, turned earth in front of us, almost houses behind, frames and unpoured sidewalks, abandoned machines and wheelbarrows left anywhere in the thin light that was the afternoon light we knew for spring in the county. We had lived through these long, wrong seasons before; we knew this cold, how even the fruit trees went on pouting, unwilling as girls to unfurl their crimped leaves, show their blossoms. Too cold to have even unrolled the windows before we fell asleep—on the instant—the car driving itself over the ridged site and tender, penned-off, seeded yards to settle safely at an angle on higher ground.

  Here it was, awake again, we hushed the unmade house that we had left behind, the sorrowful impressions of bodies in beds, blankets, curtains, clothes bunched and flung away, my sister’s crying when what was there worth crying about?

  “Did you want to go on peeing in a pan in the basement,” we asked my sister, “no running water?” Food greasing the goosenecked paper bags the women gave us for the afternoon when they remembered there would be an afternoon with us children left to draw in the common room; nothing but gobby pens and squared-off pencils sharpened by a knife to make our names with—we used erasers. We could blow off what we wrote: our names and our mothers’ names and where we had come from or been to, which was no place you would want to be once you had learned how to spell it.

  But the stuttering boy, he couldn’t even say where it was he had been to. Lemon-water yellow color of someone sickly, he slunk about the compound, brushing his hand across his brush-cut hair, worrying his father’s dying in that tuh-town he couldn’t say—his mother in the bleeding room with our mothers, keeping clean.

  “Do you remember at all?” we asked my sister, who did n
ot answer and might still have been sleeping when we were in the front seat saying, “Yes, it was a good thing we had left our mothers—who knew what they were doing?”

  Kneading his feet with their spatulate thumbs, salving the raised skin of wounds.

  “How he suffers!” they said, walking among us with his terrible vision when the grasses shudder on an intake of breath and cattle list, and all things roosting or rooting lift off, move away, flame on flame taking up the field and us—but not by name. This man named Jerry, he was not always sure of our names. Jerry called us after others, or else it was we were the children, although I was no child. I had been to the bleeding room. I knew what the mothers inside were doing, washing one another and applying hot waxes. Three, four, five days shut off, standing in the steam of the herbal boil, we came out clean and nearly hairless, our knuckles pinked from scrubbing rags with stones.

  The compound was so primitive. There was a spigot in the greenhouse where the shot-out panes were taped with plastic, moaning in the wind. We made the stuttering boy or the older Ruth go there to the greenhouse—“Although it could have been you,” we told my sister. “Would you have liked that, the florist spikes and prickly markers at your feet, talking to the spigot, saying. Hurry, please, hurry?”

  We did not like to be alone on the compound, but we were often alone on the compound with the babies in sodden diapers, licking dirt. My sister found a dead rat and thought it was a kitten and came carrying it back to us in tears. We beat the dead rat with a shovel. We beat Naomi, too. We each took a whack at that stalk of a girl, running in the heat in just her underpants. The oppressive summers in this county—you need some way to stay cool.

  “Don’t you want air conditioning?” we asked the baby, my sister. “Don’t you like the comforts in this car?”

  “I miss Mother,” was what my sister said. “I want to go back.”

  But we told Cory’s grandma, “Don’t pay attention to her. She doesn’t know what she is saying. Drive on, please,” which she did, with Cory wheezing again in the front seat, and Cory’s grandma asking, “Where’s that thing you suck on, Coreen? Was there no one in that place to think of you?”

  No one, no one, we assured her, with the mothers stapling pamphlets and driving to the mall. They looked like messy girls to us, and I was surprised at my mother. She let her hair grow lank and her wide-slung self swing free. She jostled underneath her clothes when she walked, hoisting herself into the cab of the truck, never turning, as some others turned, to wave good-bye.

  “Is that your idea of loving?” I asked the sniveler, the baby, my sister.

  The mission was stu-stupid was what the stuttering boy always said, worrying his real father was already dead in his bed up north where the stuttering boy had seen him. The stuttering boy had said his good-byes before his mother put herself and him in that same truck as ours, had boarded and ridden to the compound, ridden to the mall, ridden to the old towns strung with bunting on the holidays.

  Our mothers, butting tambourines and crying out, “Amen!” and crying sometimes—oh, we were embarrassed!

  “Weren’t you embarrassed?” we asked my sister, which was a feeling she didn’t understand, I think, wearing her mopey face, saying, “I liked dancing with Mother. We put cracks in the ceiling from our dancing. Mother showed me the damage,” my sister said, and she was crying again, but we weren’t embarrassed this time—only angry.

  “Drive faster, please,” we said to Cory’s grandma. “We are too many in this car. It is hard to breathe.”

  Under the driver’s thumb, all the windows hummed down at once.

  “Air!” we said, and breathed.

  Scabs in the spring air on the compound, cottonseed and petals, early bees and trembling webs, dews, worms, some stones in the sun already warm against our feet—remember spring there? How Jerry caught us in our nightgowns, how he stared? I was ashamed—we all were. We never went outdoors again quite so undressed.

  Summer, the last, the insects hung in the air unmoved, the fine threads of their legs just a riffle. We went looking for water beyond the fields, broke through pokered plants to the mud bank, wet-bark brown that was a river. There, crouched, we spit white spit to watch the fish puck at the surface to eat it. I was next to the older boy, the one we never asked to come along but who sometimes came along, took his pants off, made to swim. The older boy dangled his martyred feet in the river. I watched them drift in the sluggish current and saw, too, the dark sacs of his sex, legs apart, water to his knees. Unmuscled arms and narrow shoulders, tender neck and skull, near bald he was, that older boy, ghostly border over nuded ears. We knew which mother had done that to him—and she in tears. But the older boy was a dirty boy; we saw that much about him. Chewed-up lips and blood stars on his cheeks from scratching, the older boy was angry. We were right to leave him.

  Cory’s grandma said, “Not if I had had more room in this car. If I had had more room in this car, I would have gathered up all of you children.”

  Jerry used to say things like that, too. On a painfully bright day, when I remembered I might otherwise be in school, I stood—we all stood—at the bleached field under a dark blue sky and listened to him loving us: surcease and promise. Jerry’s throat tightened when he spoke, and he unbuttoned his shirt, and we saw the flushed and grizzled heart he beat when he was speaking to us as Jerry was speaking to us. Children, he said, and we were all children—even the mothers—we belonged to him, which was belonging to something more than to a man.

  “What are you crying about, you baby, you sister? You didn’t even understand what he was saying. You were winding yourself in Mother’s skirt. You said you were cold; you said you couldn’t see,” I said, although we all had to admit it was hard to see him with his back to the sun and our own eyes dazzled from wherever in the sky the sun was shining. Jerry was just a cutout; even his face was black, and his hair, wet slash in his pacing, water dripping off his chin—we never knew a man could dribble as though he were a spigot you could drink from.

  I wanted to be his favorite, but when it seemed I might be, I grew afraid of Jerry’s snouty fingers sniffing in the dark, his gentling, “You, is this you? Have you been waiting?”

  “Oh, I am glad you children wrote me,” Cory’s grandma said, and we said we were glad, too. The winter had been hard. Cindered mouth and blank dawning, we slept near to fires and woke, crying, “Water!” running after it to the greenhouse with a jar, jumping over babies, their puckered hands smudged black. We wouldn’t touch them, though the mothers stomped and cried out, “Will you take that baby with you!” But we were after water, running over frozen earth in the fossilized boot tracks of someone’s earlier departing in a thaw, in a hurry—other mothers it had been, not ours. Ours were in the common room, waiting for water. They were waiting for Jerry’s instructions: what to do next.

  Sell your plated silver; close your thin accounts.

  “Don’t you remember our first house?” I asked my sister. Father’s indentations in the soft couch not yet cold, and already on the curb that Jerry.

  “But I liked him,” my sister said. “I was carried when I didn’t want to walk. He promised he would show me things outside the county.”

  “Jerry had nothing in his pockets for us,” we said. “His hands were empty and hairless.”

  “Soft,” my sister said, “warm.”

  “Moist, maybe,” the fingernails cracked, stained. I remembered, too, the fingertips steepled, pressed against his lips as he considered what to do with the stuttering boy when the stuttering boy cried at the table, his face a leaky sore at the mention of a father—anyone’s father—when his was dying, was probably dead. “I thought you were grown up,” is what Jerry had said, before he took him to the greenhouse and left him bleedy at the spigot.

  Cory’s grandma said, “Lordy, Coreen, where was your mother in all of this? How was it this Jerry had such a hold?”

  “The mothers were easy,” we said. They only wanted a word—a sweethear
t or a honey.

  The mothers said Jerry’s gentleness reminded them of fathers who had had to do hard things for which they yet seemed sorry.

  But the man we’re talking about was never sorry. Jerry backed up over the older boy’s old dog and left the bitch for us to bury. He took the money that our grandparents sent—it was lucky someone knew how to sneak us a stamp!

  “Lordy,” Cory’s grandma said, “lucky!”

  “It was lucky you came,” we said, when at the windows Jerry said he saw faces—but looking in on what? Mothers putting waxy sacks of white bread on the table, sticks of softened butter? The babies in the common room were licking the TV while the in betweens were slunk on bunk beds, playing who will you marry and what will you be. Not a lot to look in on, although we hoped someone was looking in on the stuttering boy with his mouth taped shut, so that his sound was all blurred howling—and that to rouse his mother from what the man had done to her when she had said, “But Jerry, the boy only wants to see his father before the man is dead.”