The Difference Between Women and Men
Page 15
But then she said it: “He’s going to die,” she let out, and Daddy’d answered, “God wills his own way.”
Earl heard the fact of no comfort in the words, same as his momma must have heard, for this was when she cried deepest, surest, her voice broken glass and blood all at once, and he knew that every one of his brothers heard the all of it too, from Curtis, who lay on his back at the far end of the sleeping porch and who’d already lit up a cigarette, him fifteen and already more grown and gone than Frank or any of them, right down to Chilton right here beside Earl, him a year older than Earl, his breaths in and out shallow and quick for the words he’d heard, Earl knew.
Frank would die.
Curtis drew in on his cigarette, the ember in the dark bright and distant and restless in the way it flared and fell, flared and fell. Chilton breathed in and out, in and out, each sound a sharp edge. And Raymond and Barney and Buster, Earl could feel on the quiet around him, on the thick air everywhere, lay awake too.
Six brothers, each in his own envelope of quiet, his own stretched silence and wonder and fear.
Earl rolled out from the somersault, ended up a couple-three feet closer to the bed, and to Frank, whose fever-wet hair made him look as though it might have been him out in the rain, him to climb in a window to see his favorite brother.
Here was still the startled shine in his eyes, eyes brimmed and full, as though Earl had made him want to cry for surprising him, for a somersault in a sickroom on a rainy day in June.
But then there crept on his brother’s face a smile, slow and bewildered, uncertain of itself. But a smile, and here with Earl was the brother lifting him to the wagon, the brother holding him in his lap and teaching him to tie his shoes, the brother poking a fork at Curtis’s hand when he grabbed for that pork chop already on Earl’s own plate.
Frank.
Earl put his arms out to either side and held them high, whispered hard just for Frank, all for Frank, “Hurrah!”
Frank smiled even better, even truer, and reached a hand out from beneath the quilt, a hand all the world like a sign to Earl of how his brother wouldn’t die, not now, not here, with this smile upon him. Their momma was wrong, he knew, and Earl got to his feet, stepped close to the bed, Frank’s eyes on him still full and wet, but with a smile now, one that Earl had brought to him, and one that was a gift right back to Earl.
Frank touched Earl’s head, his hand too warm, Earl could feel as his brother’s fingers moved along his scalp slow and thoughtful.
Frank said, “Be a good boy,” his voice clouded and thick, as though he’d said it from far away, said it through morning mist on an empty field. “Be a good boy,” he said again, the words even slower, even farther away and hidden, though Frank was right here, his warm hand in Earl’s wet hair.
Frank closed his eyes, withdrew his hand slow as could be from Earl’s head, brought it back beneath the quilt. He seemed to draw himself into himself, seemed to move somewhere else: his eyes clenched closed, his shoulders beneath the quilt inched up, his head sank deeper into the pillow. His chin trembled a moment, the sparse hairs on his upper lip quivering for it, and he took in a breath, quick and important, everything in him focused clear and certain on that measure of air he drew in.
He held it, held it, and held it still, the tremble in his chin gone, his mouth closed tight, and Earl saw a tear leave his closed eye, slip down from the corner of his eyelid shut tight and trail into his thin sideburn, and disappear.
“Frank,” Earl whispered and put his hands together at his chest, pressed hard against himself.
Then Frank let out the breath he’d taken in, the all of it out of him a dark and full tremble of breath, an ancient escape of sound. A tumble free of stone.
Frank lay still, his eyes suddenly held closed not by will but by something else, something even and calm, as though his closed eyes were held closed by nothing more than the gentlest touch to his lids.
The door burst open, their momma through it and suddenly beside Earl, one hand still holding the apron, the other already to Frank’s forehead and cheek and chest and forehead again, in her quick moves hope in hope in hope for some sign he wasn’t, as Earl already knew, dead. There, just behind her in the doorway, stood his daddy, mouth open, eyes creased nearly closed for the smoke up off that cigarette still tense at his lips.
Earl was six years old, and knew already the sound of death.
But Frank had smiled. Frank had smiled.
He looked at Frank, his eyes closed forever, he knew.
“Hurrah,” Earl whispered quiet as he could, one last time just for Frank, one last time all for Frank, the word out of him only and already a memory of his brother’s smile, brand-new and as ancient as the sound he’d heard.
That was when his momma wheeled to him beside her, but still with a hand to Frank’s forehead. She let go the apron, raised her hand to him, and he could see in her eyes behind her spectacles, saw even before she brought down hard her open palm across his cheek, that she did not know him. Who is this boy? he could see in the glaze of her eyes, in the gray and green of them, and the knot of her eyebrows, the set of her teeth as she bared them at him, set for the slap that came to him.
He saw his daddy behind her, his eyes on Earl too, still creased close, smoke up off the tip of the cigarette.
Earl’s eyes shot closed with the force of her hand, white shimmers of light filled him, his own breath left him, all in this instant.
“Hurrah, you say,” she seethed in a whisper.
He’d felt himself falling into that white shimmer, a white that became for an instant warm morning mist on an empty field, himself in a somersault as he fell, Frank smiling at him.
Frank had smiled.
His momma let out a cry, keen and simple and empty, all at once.
Hurrah! Earl spoke without speaking, and fell.
BRET LOTT is the author of the novels Ancient Highway, A Song I Knew by Heart, The Hunt Club, Reed’s Beach, Jewel, A Stranger’s House, and The Man Who Owned Vermont; the story collections How to Get Home and A Dream of Old Leaves; and the memoirs Fathers, Sons, and Brothers and Before We Get Started. Formerly editor of The Southern Review, he was appointed to the National Council on the Arts in 2006. Lott lives with his wife in Hanahan, South Carolina, and teaches at the College of Charleston.
ALSO BY BRET LOTT
NOVELS
The Man Who Owned Vermont
A Stranger’s House
Jewel
Reed’s Beach
The Hunt Club
A Song I Knew by Heart
Ancient Highway
STORY COLLECTIONS
A Dream of Old Leaves
How to Get Home
NONFICTION
Fathers, Sons, and Brothers
Before We Get Started
Praise for
THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN WOMEN AND MEN
“Strange and memorable…[Bret] Lott captures the texture of ordinary life with painful clarity.”
—New Orleans Times-Picayune
“[Lott] explores everyday moments, giving heightened meaning and insight through stark revelations about dissimilar lives.”
—Southern Living
“These are gravity-defying stories…. It’s difficult to describe Lott’s stories without ruining them for other readers. They are so figurative in their meaning and so inviting to analyze that too much is revealed before you know it. Lott is a smooth stylist, a storyteller who does not intrude on his tales.”
—Baton Rouge Advocate
“Fraught with emotional tension…Lott’s writing is solid, muscular, even spare. He frames relationships through action and dialogue, leaving his readers to intuit the feelings between characters and thus building an emotional connection to the work.”
—St. Petersburg Times
“Spare and streamlined…The sixteen stories in this collection take up seemingly normal characters—adult men and women—at small but pivotal moments in their lives, br
eaking these moments down into crystalline component parts.”
—The Buffalo News
“[The stories] are keenly observed slices of life that offer windows into how people deal with relationships.”
—Charleston Post and Courier
“Lott’s steadfastly matter-of-fact tone, despite the ironic leanings of his plot twists, weaves seamless domestic narratives out of real and surreal threads, rather like Raymond Carver crossed with Gabriel García Márquez.”
—The Georgia Review
“Lott has proven to be a keen observer of the minutiae of human relationships…. These are stories about the poignancies of love and loss, and they can be viewed as highly instructive in the craft of short story writing.”
—Library Journal
“The stories are startling in their range…. This is Lott at times recalling John Cheever, and at times delving into Southern gothic.”
—Christianity Today
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
2008 Ballantine Books Trade Paperback Edition
Copyright © 2005 by Bret Lott
Reading group guide copyright © 2008 by Random House, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.
BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.
READER’S CIRCLE and colophon are trademarks of Random House, Inc.
Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Random House, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., in 2005.
Original publication information for the previously published stories that appear in this collection can be found beginning on Acknowledgments.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Lott, Bret.
The difference between women and men: stories / Bret Lott.
p. cm.
1. United States—Social life and customs—Fiction. I. Title.
PS3562.O784D54 2005
813'.54—dc22 2004058442
www.randomhousereaderscircle.com
Title page photograph © CORBIS
eISBN: 978-0-345-50715-0
v3.0