Prosperous Friends
Page 13
The books were at the end, at least that’s how she remembers it.
But why think on the past on such a day — pink wind, timid sun — softness in all things? She is on her hands and knees on the granite terrace Clive laid out a long time ago. She is neatening up with self-abasing ceremony. Her face nearly touches the stones in sorting the weeds from the moss and fancy pussytoes.
Something else she was thinking — what was it?
At Scottie Rostow’s party, she and Jim didn’t talk to anyone but huddled, facing each other, knee to knee, arms around in a loose embrace, heads pressed together, a mourning posture, both of them glum. But a family’s history of service in the Marines is not an inheritance to squander, she learned.
Something else, this: Jim is sitting on the plank seat chair in his mother’s kitchen, senior year, track season. She practically lives at his house. She snaps the kitchen towel at his little sister and talks with his mother about him in front of him. He drinks a milkshake at ten thirty every morning. Nothing sticks to him but it turns to muscle. He is sitting on the plank seat chair and taking off his running shoes that in memory turn silvery, melted and runny. After his exertions, the muscles in his arms jump just doing little things, like taking off his shoes. He is sitting on the plank seat in a plank of light.
Clive walks carefully over the terrace, examines her work, says, “Good job.” But the ache! Her shoulders especially, she massages her shoulders until her hands cry out, please! Poor, misshapen hands, the fleshy chuff deflated, her thumbs have disappeared. When she holds out a hand, stop-sign fashion, only four fingers show.
“Look at that, will you,” Dinah says, and he does. He frowns and gives her his hand and helps her up off the pavement. The deep imprint of her knees in the foamy kneeler is a disconcerting sight — too mortal.
“It doesn’t stop you,” Clive says.
“Plainness is the beauty of aging:
cropping my hair, blotting excess,”
He breaks off from quoting her and says, “I love your face.”
“And my poems?” she asks.
“‘Transparent Window on a Complex View’” —he exhales the title as if he’s just eaten something airy. “Of course, I like the poems — I like them very much.
“. . what was solid was miraculous:
planes of light, day-old eggs on a white dish. .”
His recall for her work mostly pleases and when they come to the barn bench, he is still plucking lines, and she is listening to herself and how he hears her, and it wins her over that he knows, better than anyone else knows, the great divide between who she is and what she has done.
*
“Wait,” Isabel said, and she thumbed Sally’s cheek. “Just a little ink. Pen, I think. Okay. You’re okay. Did you sleep all right? You weren’t cold?”
“Fine,” she said. “How’s your finger?”
Isabel held up her finger, a swami heavy headed and hung over.
“Poor little fellow,” Sally said.
“Doesn’t hurt so much, just sore. Say,” Isabel said, “we’ve got those tarts left over from last night for breakfast.”
They took coffee and the leftover tarts outside, and it was then Isabel noticed the birds. She was sorry to have missed them in the first place. Sparrows by the hundreds cheeped in the shrubs enough to shake them. She walked down the hill with Sally, delighted by the gregarious birds and all that was moving and inviting from the house to the road and across the road for an uninterrupted view of Acadia, a blue symbol on the tranquil horizon. She told Sally how she often took this walk and how she liked to walk, too, in the Seaside Cemetery. If she didn’t get outside first thing in the morning, she would have trouble breathing. “True!” she said.
“I believe you,” Sally said.
*
“Should I be laughing so soon after?”
The question was how did Isabel feel about the pink sands of Bermuda and Phoebe Chester-Harris on a half shell?
“I can tell you what Ned has to wear in the tropics. I can tell you he’s unpacking some dead guy’s seersucker jacket yellowing at the collar. But will Phoebe let him wear it? That’s the question.”
Did Phoebe have a say in her husband’s clothes? The last time Isabel had seen Ben Harris was at their country house and then he was wearing Barbour or something. Ben Harris was not a thrift-store shopper. No dead man’s shoes for him. Ben Harris in Bermuda in sorbet colors, easy anywhere and with skin that didn’t burn, whereas Ned. . ah, he was such a tender baby.
The Bridge House, on a scenic road treacherously full of blind spots, was locally famous and Clive Harris, she liked to imagine, was more than locally famous, so that pillowy elements attached to Sally and, to a lesser degree, Isabel, and the women lounged with ease in an indefinitely extended summer. The queen of the meadow was nearly gone. (Weren’t the common names for flowers lovely?) The roses had rallied and there were days yet in ‘Longfield’s Beauty.’
Sally drove Isabel to the outdoor concert: African and African American choral music in the field overlooking the reach. The wind was arctic out of Canada and worsened. Isabel was wearing a ski cap; it was that cold. An old man in an overturned poncho staggered, blind and blown. The sight of him! And then the not-so-old woman in a parka wheeling her own wheelchair out of the field after shelter. The hood to her parka was tied tightly against the wind and crumpled her face, and she looked angry, though the music was full of odd notes resolving. There were upright bodies of every size everywhere, dancing. Isabel watched a toddler on legs stiff as stilts scare his mother while older children skidded around picnics or collided on purpose, fell. A boy with blond dreadlocks played on invisible bongos. He played with such passion, the music might be his, yet Isabel and Sally walked past him and nearer the larger sound of the chorus. They walked around the huddled and dancing. Someone called out, “Holly!” and Sally said, “Someone’s kid, I bet.”
“Everyone’s here,” Isabel said, though she knew no one, a few faces, but there, behind the fat woman in fleece, was Mr. Weed. Even Mr. Weed was at the concert, and Sally, seeing the skinny man on a picnic blanket, said yes, sure enough. “Mr. Weed is such a nice guy.”
Really?
“Holly!” they heard again. They saw Stephanie who worked at the post office and the lithe woman with long white hair who sold them the goat cheese at the co-op. Sally said her name was Helen Friendlander; Helen was behind the co-op’s hippie baskets from Ghana.
But where were the black faces, the migrants who picked in the blueberry barrens?
Were they Haitian, Isabel wondered, or what?
Sally said, “The Haitians pick apples and the Mexicans pick blueberries.” She said, “The Guatemalans and Hondurans are loggers. The lobsters,” she said, “are for white folks to get.”
Isabel blew into her hands to warm them although it was warmer near the prow of the chorus and Isabel was not so cold that she couldn’t stand and watch, without shivering, as an older man danced with a younger woman. They were not married; at least Isabel thought they were not married. “But why do I think that?” she asked Sally.
Sally said, “They might be anything to each other.”
They danced, this ordinary man and younger, ordinary woman. They hopped and clapped, hooked arms, and went in circles.
Epilogue
Aura Kyle puts her father’s best shoes in her lap. He wore these shoes when he acted as a driver for Mrs. Pfizer, which he did with greater regularity in the last years of his life. A dark walnut color, the shoes are glossy with his care — they could be mistaken for new. Someone else would gladly wear them, but Aura knows she will not give her father’s shoes to anyone. Heart hobbled at the end, her quiet father yielded of necessity and put aside his job and his uniform — the green shirt with the EBS stitching, the pin with his name, Dan Carter. Dan Carter, one of the many Carters in Hancock County, now wore clothes better suited for a salesman, though he was largely unemployed. At home and short of breath, he sat at the
card table, sat for hours every afternoon making toothpick ashtrays and pencil holders. In a better world her father would have died at the card table in rolled sleeves and good shoes; instead, he died seated on a crate in the middle of the frozen lake. Ice fishing! Gone alone, he must have known what he was risking, but why had his wife let him go? Aura’s mother called the boys for a search party before she remembered he had told her his intentions, yet she had let him go knowing, as she must have known, the icy air would kill him.
The father Aura remembers sat at the kitchen table polishing his shoes — these shoes, cold and heavy in her lap. The shoe trees preserve their shape and cork the ominously stained linings. It must have hurt to wear these shoes, but anyone finding him in an accident on the road would think he was a salesman, if not a banker, when all along her father was a man who liked to fix motors and get greasy. Ed Kyle is a dirt man and Aura is wed to him and can say, not without astonishment, that she has known him for fifty years, forty-four of which they have been married.
Aura and Ed Kyle have a daughter, named Nancy, who lives with a man from Brewer. They don’t want to marry. Rick’s divorced, already has kids, doesn’t want any more. His children call Nancy Nancy. Why can’t they call Nancy something affectionate? That way, they might call Aura something; that way, she would be more to them than what she is now, which is what?
A puffball granny in a rickracked house or a crone in a perfume of soup, laundry baskets stacked in the back of the truck, full of sheets hardly slept in by folks on zigzagging routes — Rockport, Belfast, Stonington, Acadia. The ghosts of them, those guests, who crackled up the gravel drive at night, expected, waylaid strangers. Once, a small woman, not so young, drove in, high beams wheeling into the outraged woods on her noisy approach. She was traveling with a German shepherd who slept in the car. The car was the dog’s crate, she explained, early the next morning after she had walked him down the drive, along the edge of the woods. Duke or Buck, he was a savage-looking muscle with an oily coat, a prodigious defecator and marker — piss-bleached holes in the modest lawn. His owner left the car windows down. Did the big dog rove? The small woman and her dog didn’t stay long enough for Aura to find out much. The small woman, who could have used a breakfast, skipped it.
What was that all about do you suppose?
And the two fat men who sang for their breakfast? Ed said he didn’t know where to look when they started singing a medley at the table: the sentimental journey song and the other one, with the “yangy sound,” Ed calls it. “Sunshine, you are my sunshine, you make me happy. .” All and all, she and Ed have had some very nice guests. The two fat men in matching sherbet colors, lime and mango, they said, were harmonizers, barbershop type.
Aura surprises herself sometimes with what she knows. Barbershop quartets, for instance, she has never seen one but on TV.
An actress stopped once for a week engagement at the opera house. Three nights she stayed. The actress had rich friends nearby, but a B & B was as close to a home of any kind as she would ever get, which was pretty much all she said. She didn’t have time to take the boat to Rockport or hike or bike in Acadia. Lobster was all she knew of Maine. The actress was funny on TV but not in life. She was one of those who didn’t like to talk at breakfast but gestured for coffee and black toast, no butter.
That visit had made Aura sad, and a couple, earlier in the summer, crying — or the girl crying — had astonished her. Easy to be awed by extravagant suffering or bitterness — look at her own over her father and his disappointed life — but joy or the quiet delight Aura once saw in the softened face of a woman who knew she was watched even as she ate, watched and admired, to witness such affection of one for another, to see the kinder moments as she has, and Ed has, too, this was all and enough. Ed often acts surprised, not so much by her observations as by the thing itself — heart or goodness or whatever a person wants to call it. Plants, he has said, are nicer. And that’s true, but, oh, she lets herself be teased; he likes to nettle her, she knows, which is another way to love.
The breakfast that comes with a night at the Wax Hill B & B includes vegetables and fruits from the garden. Yesterday she served a couple from Minnesota grilled tomatoes topped with browned bread crumbs along with bacon and sunny-side eggs. She doesn’t squeeze oranges; she doesn’t go that far — no fresh juice, just Tropicana, but Aura’s mother! Every morning the woman found the time to give her husband and children four ounces of fresh orange juice. Sausages and powder biscuits were also a part of their diet. No wonder, her father’s heart. Aura’s parents were long married, too, and met in the same way in high school. Her mother taught sixth grade — spelling tests and prepositions, long division, Greek myths.
The Greeks, her mother told her, valued hospitality. For eating rather than feeding his guests, the one-eyed giant Polyphemus lost his eye. Pious mortals who stick to the code fare better. Like the poor old couple — what were their names? — who offered all of what they had for the comfort of gods in disguise: the best chair, their last chicken, the cask of wine now sour but the gods make it sweeter. In the end, the old couple are granted any wish — and this is the tender part of the story Aura’s mother loved and she does, too — the old couple say we have lived so long together, let neither of us ever have to live alone. Grant that we may die together. So it is that in dying they have only enough time to cry, “Farewell, dear companion,” before they turn into trees, a linden and an oak, sprung from one trunk.
Acknowledgments
For their generous support I am indebted to the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation, the New York Foundation of the Arts, and Yaddo; for guidance and close reading thank you to Rebecca Godfrey, Elisabeth Schmitz, and Will Schutt. To Nick Schutt for joy, thank you, and to David Kersey, great enabler, love.
Table of Contents
Christine Schutt A Day, a Night, Another Day, Summer: Stories
Prologue
Postdoc, London, 2002
The White Street Loft, New York, 2003
The White Street Loft, New York, 2004
The Bridge House, Maine, 2004
The Barn, Maine, 2004
In Transit, 2004
The Bridge House, Maine, 2004
Longfield’s Beauty, Maine, 2004
Epilogue
Acknowledgments