Nightwork: Stories

by Christine Schutt

  SEE IF YOU CAN LIFT ME

  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.

  Or else she says, “Don’t get near me. I smell of dog.”

  I cannot smell a thing. In this bed again, on my back, I am not near enough to anything other than me; Ann is turned away. She is tucked against the dog, dog pressed against her hollows, which is not the right word for Ann there. Ann is full there. Ann can take hold there, and sometimes does, slapping herself in that place, which, when I am pressing on my own bones, I think of as hollows. The word is hollows, but what I see is the flatness of girls.

  I see cow skulls.

  I see hurtful blue sky and desert, cholla in bloom, places I have never been to but sometimes think I would like to live in with Ann: New Mexico, Arizona, parts of California. We talk about living in these places. Ann says she can see us now at a long table, feeding lots of children. We are feeding some women like ourselves, and some men, too. This part makes us smile, Ann and me, talking about all the people we will feed. “And not only that!” Ann says. “Not only that. You can buy your girl a horse. Think about it,” Ann says.

  I do.

  I lie next to Ann in this bed and think about us in the houses Ann says belong to grown-up friends, houses with rooms unused for days, houses with two and three of everything, blenders and televisions—closets full of coats of every size. I think about Ann with a man in such a house and doing some of the things she has told me she once did with a man, and I have done, too. I think about breasts—his, hers, mine. I think hard on these breasts or else my mother’s breasts come into view, long and unmuscled, and sometimes my grandmother’s breasts or my grandmother’s shoulders or the way my grandmother hitched up her brassiere to show off her strap marks to me. My grandmother’s shoulders are polished nobs of bone and smell of—but I can only see the cream she is using.

  Ann’s drinking, now this is something I begin to smell. I put my face into the back of her neck and shut my eyes and see it wavering off her arm like the oily heat that rises off the roads we hope to take fast and sober.

  Some team we would make.

  Ann drinks through much of the night and likes to eat bread for dinner. She picks at the soft center and dangles the crust for the dog. “I wish you would eat something, pooch,” she says; or else to me, “Are you sure?” Ann’s nails are the off-white of old candles or honey. They are not always clean—from keeping her hand on that dog all day, taking that dog with her everywhere. I understand that she is tired, but I do not eat her food.

  Sometimes Ann says, “Let’s have cookies for dinner.”

  She says, “We are too old to be living like girls!” and we laugh because we are girls.

  We are eating cereal at midnight.

  We are sleeping together in the big bed and keeping a space between. We are still as stones, I think, and dumb as only girls are dumb to how most anyone wants it, someone’s breathing.

  Ann always says, “Stop looking at me” when I am looking at her, and she pinches me, but I go on looking, smiling this big dumb smile.

  I am smiling now.

  I am thinking of Ann.

  I am thinking of all the women I have seen stepping out of water. Mother, grandmother, sisters, cousins, all different, some remembered. Strong white legs and a black sex worn like a shield; I remember the impulse to kneel. I wonder, Is my cousin still red, and how have men treated her? I look at the way Ann sleeps, curled up against the dog. The last man Ann knew left her with sores. “What a dirty trick!” is what Ann says.

  My mother again; I see her hoisting up her panty hose. She is saying, “Is that all you girls think about?” She is getting dressed or undressed or standing at the sink. Mother is saying, “It has been so long since, the parts are grown together.” And that is how it looks to me, my mother’s smeared gray sex, my grandmother’s bones.

  Sweet Jesus, I am cold.

  Just looking at Ann, the sheet only to her waist and the rest of her pressed to the dog, makes me cold. How can she sleep like this? Why not just use the blankets?

  It is cold under the sheets is what I tell Ann, but Ann says, “We are not in college anymore. We are grown-ups. We sleep under.” Then she asks me—she does this—for a pillowcase—maybe from the last time? But I am sleeping on last time’s, so I give her new, and she hardly sleeps on it, she sleeps so close to the dog.

  I shut my eyes and listen for sounds of her, but the only sound is of the dog. The dog is the noisy one. I have heard the dog talk right along with Ann, who lies so still now, I must lean to feel her small adjustments, elbowing a pillow, pulling close the dog to warm herself, as Ann says she wants to warm herself against a person, someone, anyone else; then she laughs at herself. She says, “What an embarrassing story.”

  “Yes,” I say, now lifted on my arms to see if she is sleeping. “Yes. Please.”

  TEACHERS

  She told her daughter as she might a lover such things her lover said were best kept secret from a girl. The color of his hair, for instance—a corolla of metallic light—your mouth went to it. “You had to touch,” she said.

  “Please,” from the daughter, cheeks marked with sleeping and with a salted trail of gargle from the sore that was her mouth. “Sweet girl,” she said to the daughter, “stay home from school today, and I will do your hair.” But the daughter’s hair tangled on the teeth of the comb and stood off her head in surprise.

  The daughter said, “I should go to school.”

  The daughter said, “My mouth doesn’t hurt.”

  “No, no, no, no, no,” she said.

  “But science!” the daughter said. “History!”

  The torchy glare of the art room windows—that was school as she saw it from the street—and besides, today a winter fog was everywhere, a fumy curling, fishy air, mists shifting against the windows, nothing to see any which way, but you must strain for something known, as to the daughter at the windows, to the crooked nightdress at the windows—a girl, a blue-white like the underside of a wrist, neck and shoulders that same white, small shadows for bones. She asked, “Whatever, dear, can you make out?” and she walked to where the daughter was to see for herself shoes and cuffs under taut umbrellas, hasps to heavy cases.

  “What you see is every morning,” she said. “We should do something different,” and she told about the lover on his way by foot to the sooted downtown where all she knew to say of what he did was eat and smoke. He smoked expensive cigarettes from a foppish country. He tamped them in his overwashed hands. His hands, the sight of which always surprised her, were a white—not her color, not the daughter’s—but something sickly.

  “Come back to bed with me,” she said to the daughter. “We can look at magazines together and figure out what we are doing.”

  “We should get dressed
,” the daughter said.

  “Today?” she asked the closet, the dresses hanging smally—no expectations, the compact bags for evening in a dust. She said she couldn’t find the energy to blow. She said, “Come here,” and she took hold of the daughter and led her to the bed. She said to the daughter, “Maybe we should see someone together.”

  The daughter said, “No, I don’t need to talk to anyone, Mother, no.”

  “No breakfast, either,” the daughter said. “No lunch.”

  The daughter said, “Shit school,” and turned her backpack upside down.

  The daughter dressed.

  The daughter undressed and dressed again, studding the curled lips of her small ears and rolling bracelets over the heart that was her fist.

  Sulk, how easy it was to be a girl and sulk, she told the daughter, watching the girl fold and unfold the gold foil from an empty pack of cigarettes, mumbling herself off to other rooms, seeming a little mad, the way the daughter’s eyes flashed when she creaked past the girl—a back, a screen of hair, a voice behind the raised-up neck of her sweater, saying, “Leave me alone,” the daughter scoring her journal with a dull pen.

  “What are you writing?” she asked.

  “Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck for pages,” the daughter said, and seemed happy to say it, fuck.

  In bed again, she put her hand to herself under the covers and called out to the daughter.

  “No,” said the daughter, “I don’t need help.”

  The daughter at the door, the journal spread against her breasts, said, “I should go to school today is what I should do.”

  But the mother said, “Please, for me—stay home. We could talk about what you would like to do for the summer. Maybe I can find a way to afford it.”

  She was looking for ways to afford it, ways to buy mornings with a family in another part of the world or mornings where they both might wake close enough to water. Her hand at the throat of the drawer, she was sweeping after money and talking on the phone. “You may think that living here is glamorous. You may think we’re really having fun.” Brothers and bankers—men she did not know that well, had never known or had forgotten, she called to remind them, “I have a daughter now.”

  They asked, “The child doesn’t have a father? You have to live in that costly town?”

  She said to the daughter, “At least here I am charmed. I am living in history.” The cobbling hoof-beats of the Horse Guards on parade, the uphill groans of buses and pauses—a sound as of the ocean, brooms against wet bricks and water-loaded leaves falling to the terrace, these sounds, she knew, and the fences and the roses and the beaded brass details, boot scrapes and doorknobs and lion’s head knockers, the cakey houses at the end of the crescent—“If I could go on living here with you,” she said to the daughter, “then I would be happy.”

  “Can I see what you did?” the daughter asked, and the mother, at the mirror, showed the seams, which if anyone had thought to look or if anyone had seen her as her daughter had seen her—mouth skinned of its pleats and swollen as from a beating—he would know what she had done, and he would leave her.

  “Do I look that much older?” she asked. But she saw that she was not as the daughter, walking lightly across the room, growing every day lighter, and so moving her to speak of it, to say, “You heartbreaker, you, come back here.”

  “Sit with me; talk with me; tell me what you are thinking,” she said. “You never tell me what you are thinking. Do you love me anymore? Are you listening?”

  The daughter, at the end of the bed, holding tails of fanned hair in front of her eyes, insisted, “I am listening.”

  “I hope so,” she said to the daughter, and she shook her head with what she knew.

  “What?” the daughter demanded of her.

  “No, don’t,” the daughter said. “I know your dirty business.”

  She told the daughter how once, traveling with another man, she was, for a day and a night, sick in a dark bedroom, with only a shared sink at the end of a narrow hallway for water. She and the man were both sick. He had the chills and so did she; they were very thirsty. In the night, he crawled along the floor to the shared sink to wet a cloth, which he carried in his mouth for her to suck on. They were unwell in an unfamiliar room and unable to tell anyone what it was they needed and afraid also of doors along the narrow hallway opening onto the sight of him, a sick man crawling with a cloth in his mouth, so that he did not make many trips, and they suffered; they held together for hours and hours, teething the same wetted cloth.

  “Such ways to be pleasured,” she told the daughter. But the daughter said, “Don’t use that word—please. We are not in Arabia.”

  Not in the burghers’ town, either, she reminded, not with the boys in Dutchy houses, bonnet-topped and solvent. “We are not touching up the window frames with last year’s paint.”

  She said to the daughter, “You won’t be able to wear those very much longer,” and she was slinging hangered clothes onto the bed—scarf-weight dresses in slick, frictive plastic bags. “See if it fits,” she was saying. “Here’s this, this. You don’t wear a uniform on weekends. You could wear the strapless.” The old Bermuda cashmere, the Avenue shoes from a schoolgirl’s spring vacation—“Take them,” she said to the daughter. “Let me see if it fits,” and she tucked behind the bags in bed to watch the girl in furtive dressing and undressing, the scissoring shoulder blades in pulling over, pulling off.

  “I don’t like this,” the daughter said. “This isn’t me.”

  “Maybe not,” she said, and she was squinting at the small hardness of the girl in a skirt cocked on hipbones—a body concaved and antlered, no belly to speak of when she whispered in the lover’s ear what might arouse him, the daughter’s hair, for instance, sharp as packing cellophane your fingers raked.

  “I am bleeding,” the daughter said, “my mouth.”

  “Get a cloth,” she said, “ice—and not on the bed or that skirt—please, be careful.”

  “I hate not being at school,” the daughter said. “I want to know what they are doing.”

  She told the daughter it was passing time in school and girls were stalling in the hallways, doing what they do to one another when few men are in sight—and those men old or turned away, often given up to drinking—the girls are pressing close enough to see the wild hairs over the eye bone. They are touching, as they do—sometimes cruelly. “I know,” she told the daughter. “I have been in school.” Hanks of wiggy hair they hold as if the hair were dirtied—‘How often do you shampoo?’ they ask. ‘Let me try on your rings,’ they say, when they have never thought to ask before, wouldn’t pluck off stray hairs, wouldn’t touch the girl in the mispressed blouse rusty and freakish as a mother’s saved corsage. ‘These closet-smelly clothes,’ they are saying, ‘who wants them?’

  “Stay home with me,” she said to the daughter. “Your lips are swollen. Don’t get dressed.”

  Once hours on the floor doing puzzles, and even earlier, she remembered, a baby in the middle of the bed, so needful and small, she had thought she might kill it—this, and the flushed breasts inflamed from suckling. His thirst, too, the oil he used to ease past the stitches when she was milky and wounded and just to put her foot against the floor to rise from bed as lightly as she did amazed her, as the baby amazed her. “You,” she said to the daughter. “I was most afraid of open windows,” she said, “when all of my fears were of dropping you, of letting the head snap back against the sill or the sink, you slipping from my fingers into water—sometimes boiling water in the deep pot on the stove. You can imagine,” she said, “how I felt about outdoors. Days and days we stayed in; it was too hard to go out. I was afraid of your crying in public places.”

  “Stay home,” she said. “You could make your bed,” she said. “If you are so ambitious, you could clean out drawers.”

  “To find the things that you have left for me to find?” the daughter asked. “I’d just as soon the house was dirty. But his smoke,” the d
aughter said, opening windows to the roil and drawing out of curtains with a violating sound—a wind. “Fuck,” the daughter said, “I hate this house,” and the daughter moved through it, a girl loosely made and brushing against corners—reckless, willful, loud, saying, “Let’s open some windows here. Get some air.”

  She followed the daughter. She put her hands over the flutter of schoolwork on the dining table and on the daughter’s desk and on the sill in the kitchen—English, found! Something she could read, not math or Latin.

  “What is this?” she asked, holding away the pages, reading how it was for the girl with the man who brought home sand in his pockets, how it was for the girl beside the mother in the bed—sometimes moving against the girl, saying, “You should know what it costs just to live here.” School and food and medicine was what the daughter heard, until the daughter promised she would not be sick, but she was sick and often absent. “This assignment is late,” written at the top of homework.

  But understand—there is this mother! The bath towels, old messages, Q-Tips, hair, the strewn ephemera of indoor living, the unguents for raspy skin, the mother’s rubbing in and rubbing in, telling such things that made the daughter wonder—and wonder was this natural, the parts of her the mother bent to? Shouldn’t a mother take her sorrow to someone else—to a husband, a lover—a man lying on the bed with his ankles crossed, saying, “Please me.” What did a daughter, untucked and scuffed, have to do with their pleasure?

  “How awful,” she said.

  “Hell,” the daughter said, angry or tired the way it sounded, almost swaggered, from a girl half-dressed in uniform. Saying, “I wrote that for my teacher”—a girl wetting her broken lips at her mother’s ear and saying, “This teacher loves me.”

  BECAUSE I COULD NOT STOP FOR DEATH

  More than any other, you belong here, but what is there to say but what I meant to say and never did?—not quite and perhaps not even here, and yet I write to you and see your same uneven hand, me older now than you when first we met, my teacher, the oddest-looking man—everyone said so. You were—what, in your thirties?—and worked up every day, spitting into the gullies of books and more books. They have made movies out of you, but the heroes have been handsome—hardly you. Impossible list of imperfections: no chin, moist, petulant lips.