Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt

Author:Christine Schutt [Schutt, Christine]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 2012-11-06T05:00:00+00:00

The Barn

Maine, 2004

“Who was bleeding?” Dinah asked Clive. “You or me?” She had found a bloodstain, surely oral, on the sheets, but whose? Their wanton, close sleep! Most likely his, his mouth, the older, though he didn’t feel any pain.

“You’re welcome to look,” he said, opening his mouth.

So the day came on, another day with a sky blue enough to put the sun in its place, a sky as hard to look at as the sun, although she looked up after the incongruously sweet sound of the ospreys. Straight through the afternoon she squinted and still she didn’t see them until they were a dash, then out of sight. She wrote about the frog she had stared at the other day, the cold hysteria in his eyes, but frogs seemed too enervated for hysteria; they seemed lazy. The sound they made was a plucked string, the start of down-home Delta, slow. The afternoon went on and on and she worked on her geraniums—all firecracker reds in clay pots of different sizes, some atop an old blue box, all packed close. Maine classic. Clive was with Isabel on the bench outside the barn; the bench, once soldier blue, had faded to something like oyster, a color she liked. It did not need repainting, not yet. When the wood looked dried out and splintery then she would paint.

But here was a change she wanted to make next year no doubt—next year, would Isabel be in the picture?—next year she wanted to paint the bench on the screen porch black, eschew geraniums for a good leaf, no blossoms necessary. A part of her was sick of the drawn-out dying about the geraniums. From so little a rain as a shower they seemed to emerge sopped and spotted black and brown; they only looked durable; their lives were short. What bewildered her was how much she had loved them and for so long. Her high-school sweetheart, her first love, her young husband, James, Jimmy, Jimbo Card, a rhyme—did he know she still loved him from time to time? Simply subdue them by loving them more was her tune. Endure was a word in another song. She didn’t always have to be in Isabel Bourne’s company; it was easier to lunch alone. What did Ned Bourne do for lunch? She had seen him the other day at Trade Winds shucking ears of corn to check the kernels, shucking fast and looking guilty about it. She had avoided him then, “glad to escape beguilement and the storm . . .” Did Robert Lowell know how much she loved him? A bit of a bully, like Clive, only madder. No, it wasn’t madness in Clive, Clive wasn’t mad—he was selfish, which was a fault, but a fault a person could live with. The word endure again. Ned Bourne squeezing avocados at Trade Winds, poking the vegetables, no, poking the meat, “and you, García Lorca, what were you doing down by the watermelons?” Patchwork poems while she waited for Clive, who had said the tide was high at four.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.