The pink of Ida’s candy pink gums and tail-fin glasses—Ida was ugly in ways even a young girl would notice—me five, six, seven when I stayed with Ida and Dale those times my mother couldn’t find her mother to do it. My glamorous mother, of course I would notice: Mother all high color and Ida, muddy hair and eyes—those preposterous pink gums. The way Ida sucked on her teeth after supper—after any meal— but Dale never seemed to mind. Dale, in his damp bib overalls and lace-up shoes, was happy to chew on a toothpick.
The homely everyday about their lives!
They are both dead now.
I listen to your workmanlike exhausted sleep, the gagged intake and hissed release of breath, heel scratch, then the wounded sound in your descent before you startle. Are you awake?
“Are you awake?” I ask.
Nothing.
“Are you?” I ask again, and lean closer to your ear, to you asleep.
How can you sleep in this cheap motel—generic, unmarked, grouted vanity, unmarked surfaces, castered bed?
I saw the foot of Dale’s bed in passing, and it looked hard to me and plain—plain as Ida shucking down the hall in pink chenille and mukluk slippers.
Dale’s house is the house we see at either end of town, small and white and near the road, muddy yard and broken hedge, a dead car overgrown, and something that may or may not be a fence, a flag and maybe flowerpots from cut-up painted tires—a grill, a laundry line, a dog chained even in the rain. I can hear him still. Dale’s Lucky, the shunt and clank of him leashed and whining, rubbing fecal streaks against the side of the garage because the mutt can’t reach the house, although the house smells of him—of wet dog.
Onion, there is the smell of that, too, the front door clacking onto Ida’s kitchen—the impact of the kitchen—hard floor and mean light, the smell of wet dog. On the steps to the kitchen, big unbuckled boots, openmouthed and panting—I think the boots were animals only waiting to be fed.
Early risers on the road, you buy us soft glazed dough-nuts and doughnut-shop coffee, and we eat and drink, driving into the red eye of another yellow morning. You say, “Before we know it,” and then attach to this clause whatever is passing—the towns, the states, this summer, our lives.
“Oh, please don’t say it,” I say.
The corn silk is black-yellow, and there are unexpected, early turnings—bloody leaves and blown weed, bowed fields, picked barrens.
Dale was used to seeing blood, working out-of-doors and with his hands the way he did, and yet the sight of Ida’s bloodspurt from the doctor-lanced boil took Dale’s breath away. “He fainted,” Ida said, right there in the office before them both, Ida and the doctor, looking over Dale—amazed at what could fell a man.
Love—not of the kissing sort; I never even saw them touch—but shadowing one another the way they did in sickness, toward the end, when Dale’s heart had become the thing we knew would kill him—in their every movement bent to each other, love it was.
The special diet, the new hours, the slow, deliberate life Dale slunked in as in a too-big coat, playing at being old and near to dying, when he was not so old, only that he looked it and was afraid.
The mean life I thought Dale led—even so, he loved it and was afraid. He was afraid of being ambushed, so that the clothes he wore were the clothes I guessed he wanted to be found in—ready for it, the next, last bed.
Every day the suit then, brown or gray, the polished shoes, the dark, sour socks. Water-combed his hair and shaved, close-shaved, three times a day shaved and hands washed until the short nails wore away, translucent and smooth as water-beaten glass and not as I remembered—not yours, yellow, bark-thick, carelessly much used and bruised in what you do.
Gardener, laborer, lover—you, I love your thumb, the thumbnail’s scrape of me.
In the story of our lives, nothing much happens but that we drive past the same town sometimes and remember. A long time ago and for a long time, I knew them, Dale and Ida. I leave a lot out when I tell you they were poor and childless, so that I thought as a child I was the saving of them—or could be.
They are both dead now even as you drive past the like houses, the churchyards, the graves.
You say, “Maybe we should find a house.”
But we like this way, I know, turning in each morning the last room’s heavy key and wishing perfect strangers a good day.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Christine Schutt lives and teaches in New York City.
Nightwork: Stories Page 9
