Nightwork: Stories

THE SUMMER AFTER BARBARA CLAFFEY

I once saw a man hook a walking stick around a woman’s neck. This was at night, from my mother’s window. The man dropped the crooked end behind the woman’s neck and yanked just hard enough to get the woman walking to the car. I saw this and saw rain winking in the yard in the light around our house.

Our house has the streetlight.

Mother says, “Our house marks the start of this corny town,” and the two of us laugh at what it takes to be the start of something.

Here is the house at night, lit up tall and tallowy. And in the morning, here is Mother, first one up by hours and already in a swimsuit and weeding muddy beds on her hands and knees. She has mud on her back and in her hair, and streaks have dried behind an ear where Mother says she has been scratching. Her arms are scored with bleedy cuts, nails mud-dull and broken, and there are mean-looking bites on her back, white swellings she must not feel or will not yet give in to touching, brave as Mother says she is to get hold of what she wants. I have seen shaggy weed ends spooled around my mother’s hand rope-tight. “But look,” she says, and wags off dirt from balled-up roots the size of shrunken heads.

This is what I have found to show Mother from the garden: one of a pair, dime-store flip-flops, size large.

Mother frowns at it. “Not his,” she says. “This last Jack didn’t have feet.”

“Garbage, then,” I say, like all my other finds — an upper plate of teeth, scarves, umbrellas, pens, and once, in the middle of the driveway, a ruined shirt so flattened by the weight of cars driving over and over, it had taken on the shape of a dead thing, and I had carried it to Mother on a stick.

Mother is still on this last Jack and on all the things about him that were missing. “For that matter,” she says, “this last Jack didn’t have hands.” She says this with her hands under cold water, cutting off the ends of flowers. One end pellets off the wall, then rolls under the kitchen table. I watch where it goes, but I will not pick that up, please.

No, Mother.

No telling the things under there — oily tacks and combs, bread crusts and withered peas, always more, and furred with such a dust that I think they come alive at night and breed.

Mother says, “Don’t be such a ninny. Go and get it.”

But no amount of teasing will send me looking for the bits of flowers that fly out in her wild cutting.

“You put your scissors up too high,” I tell my mother.

I tell her something else she may or may not know: how we used to stand in line for it, me and Barbara Claffey, shivering in our new bodies and waiting our turn for instruction. Barbara Claffey swore the last Jack used his tongue.

Mother doesn’t believe this story. “So where was I?” she asks.

“Chawed grass,” I say. “That’s how he tasted.”

Mother smiles at me. “Just be glad you were there,” she says. “You are probably smarter for it.”

In and out of doors, I slug around the morning in my baby-dolls. I have nothing to hide, I tell my mother, although I don’t know what to play with anymore.

Mother says, “Bored, bored, what’s to be bored about?” and she moves from room to room, hitching rolled papers under her arm, clucking glasses in a grip — two, three, swiped off her bedside table in a motion. She uses water on the table and her nails to get up bottle rings of cough syrup that she says help when she can’t sleep. Snaking the vacuum under her bed, Mother snorts up Kleenex. “Last night was bad. Coughing,” she says, “and coughing.”

“I didn’t hear a thing,” I say. Right through the streetlight’s sudden extinction, the house went on sleeping with me.

Mother on her hands and knees, in the garden, is what I wake to, day after day, pressed out of doors by the midsummer heat rising in the houses of this hokey town. The Smiths across the street, the Dunphies next door, all the way to the end of the road — in what Mother calls a farm and Barbara Claffey calls a subdivision — are neighbors dressed in scant disguises. Too white. Mother says, or too fat for these clothes, but they don’t know any better. Mother calls our neighbors hicks and winces when she sees Junior Klenk cut through our yard. Ready for a girl, she says, if he knew what to do with one.

Like that last Jack — he knew. Yipping the way he did that time in the yard when I saw him pricking Mother’s legs with a weenie fork.

“Not mine,” Mother says. “Some twangy girl’s from someplace south. Watch out!” Mother warns. “The girls down there are dumb as foxes.”

I think of us, me and my mother in this nowhere town, in the flattened middle of the country. What do we know?

Barbara Claffey knows how to wad a pair of socks into bundles tight as baseballs.

“But does she know how to kiss?” Mother asks, shuffling through bills and bills and more bills, saying, “This is what I have to do now. I have to figure out how to pay for things.”

• • •

I have to do nothing. Nothing, nothing long into the afternoon with the morning just-remembered light rising in her room.

“No reason to panic,” is what Mother says, and she looks over her shoulder as if expecting trouble, when all I want to know is. What is there to do? “I’ve left things for dinner,” Mother says, and takes up her glass and makes like this is coffee she is drinking, and she, a busy lady, elbowing the fridge, on the run, no time to talk, when she is talking all the time to friends in other, smarter towns. I sit between my mother’s legs with my shirt hitched to my shoulders. “Scratch,” I say. This way, I don’t mind when it is phone, phone, phone. This way, there is company.

“The tomatoes are alive,” I say, in the kitchen again, worrying about my dinner. I lift off foiled lids to things she should have thrown away: jellied gravy, old rice.

“I can guess what you’re thinking,” Mother says, “but all that Barbara Claffey could do was fold cubed fruit in Jell-O.”

I know how to mix drinks and make good scrambled eggs, buttery and smooth and not overstirred.

I know how to use a phone if I can recall a number.

“But there is never any paper,” I say. “And where are all the pencils?” Not like when the last Jack was here and bringing home the pens he said he stole from office girls. Big on where to put things, that Jack, left and right, above, below. The boxed cuff links, the money clips, the sized and guttered coins at the front of the drawer he shared with Mother.

The last Jack was particular even to the way he ate. “Remember?” I ask her. I used to pester him about the melon rinds he left scooped smooth as boat keels, or the ears of corn with each pocket emptied yet unbroken and erect. How did anyone eat corn, I wanted to know, so that the cobs, stacked four- and five high on the plate, looked like something you could eat again?

“Oh, Jack,” Mother says. “His problem was he didn’t drink enough.”

“And his handwriting,” I say, and Mother scowls at me. She does not remember his lists of what he left for us to do. The dashing caps on his capitals or the evenness of his hand, word by word, line by line, on unlined paper. Only business, that Jack said.

The white in his hair — why, white paint, what else? And the red in his eyes, just red string. I believed him.

Mother says, “He only looked like some big deal.”

Under the kitchen table, I licked this Jack’s plump shoes, both. But neither tasted of anything I knew of.

“Look,” Mother says, and I can see her looking out from the crack in the door she leaves open when she pees. “You can always lock the door.”

My mother soaping her throat is what I hear, and soaping the ledge along her throat where she sometimes lays her hand when she is quiet.

“This is the plan,” she is saying. “Someone handsome is on his way here. His name is John,” my mother says, “but we know what that means.”

Black hair, I think, buzzed to a shadow at the back of the neck.

“This new Jack is different,” Mother says. “This new Jack has some style. Not like the last Jack with his surf and turf or turf and surf — whatever the shit, on your first night out. Here’s style for you, the last Jack’s idea: snifters of candy on every table. What a dunce!” Mother says, handing me her puff and powder, showing me her back.

I white out trails of water leaking from her snarled hair.

“I know about a lot of things,” Mother is saying, “but I do not know about men. Only this,” Mother says, stepping from the damp and powder-traced impressions of her feet. “This last Jack had no taste. This last,” Mother says, “I dressed him. Remember the suits?”

I remember coats, gray and odorless, square-cut and severe — the same, the same, shrilling on the closet rod.

“The cashmere sweaters?” Mother says. “In case he read a book.”

I remember hats — not stiff, not Grandfather’s hats, those upside-down coffins, but soft hats slumped at ease.

“Jack and his affable act,” Mother says. “But he was handsome,” Mother says. “I got carried away.”

All those ties my mother bought him — so many, a ladderwork contraption looped with ties, one over another, sometimes slipping loose, falling in a faint behind the shoe racks. I have found these ties in the back of Jack’s closet and used a broom handle on them.

“Do you have to go out?” I ask Mother, and I follow her from room to room.

“I have to think,” Mother says, putting on her model’s coat, looking through her closet. Dressing for this new Jack as she did for all the others takes up lots of time, she says. The purses packed like eggs, the mixed-up shoes all hooked in sacks.

“Better to be small,” Mother says, taking out her slimming skirt. “Men take care of small women.”

But I may grow to be as big as Mother. I have her hair, and what I think were once her eyebrows.

“And the rest?”

Mother smiles at me. “Takes two,” she says.

I do not have my mother’s face — that much I know. I do not have the face my mother wears for all her Jacks, smooth and lit-up and amazed. Beautiful, the Jacks all say, and she is. I have seen women stop to look at her, my mother, and sometimes even ask. Have they seen her before? Have they seen this face in magazines, the same face my mother pulls at now, pinching up her eyelids, saying, “I may be too old for this business.”

“So why do you want to go?” I ask, watching the light wash over Mother’s laid-out clothes. Slip, panties, pearls, and dress, all the whites turned old-teeth yellow.

“What do you think?” Mother asks, pouting at the mirror.

I say, “I think you shouldn’t wear that dress. And don’t let this John know you have any money.”

Mother says, “Okay, little mother. What should I wear?”

“I don’t know,” I say. “Just stay buttoned. And don’t tell this guy about me,” I say.

Mother says, “I’m not listening to you.”

“Remember the last Jack?” I ask.

“Oh that bastard,” she says, “but what do you think he was doing to me?” She is penciling eyebrows, arched and alert. “Yes?” Mother asks. “I’m waiting,” and she rubs off an eyebrow in the harsh way she did when this last Jack was here and she was always washing, saying she smelled bad — and Mother did not smell bad.

Night after night, dinner on the porch at the glass-topped table, me between the two of them, this last Jack and Mother, I sometimes got the smell of her confused with food and snatched her wound-up lipstick once and bit her red in half. I remember.

Under the glass-topped table, I saw my mother’s long brown legs crossed at the ankles, thucking her heel in and out of her shoe.

“ ‘Do you think everything you do is so pretty?’ this last Jack said.”

I ask, “What did he mean by that?”

“Who cares?” Mother says. “He made me feel dirty, that Jack.” She licks a paintbrush to a point and outlines her mouth. Mother says, “Oh God, I have no taste in men. Do you know what that means?”

I think.

I think I do — hearing how it was when this last Jack came home. The plak-plak of his briefcase, open and shut; no other word for days.

Mother says, “He was not nice, that Jack.”

I say, “So why are you going out?”

“Because I am,” Mother says.

And she is standing now, my mother, in the spatter of her dress — back, forth, back, forth — a sweater, a purse, an umbrella in case. “Besides, I am hungry,” Mother says, “for surf and turf — who cares? I won’t be paying for this stupid meal, and if the man has any manners, I won’t know the price.”

“Oh, don’t go,” I say.

She is watching from her window the man’s approach across the lawn. “You can wave from here,” Mother says in the voice she uses with the new Jacks, and I do.

I wave and wave, even though she is not looking. I wave at my mother muscling her own weight under this Jack’s arm. I cannot hear what they are saying; it is quiet in this town.

But the neighbors must notice my mother and her Jack. Either side of us and across the street, the Dunphies, the Smiths, Barbara Claffey down the street, must press to windows startled as by birds that swoop and mate so queerly close. I sometimes draw the blinds to them — but not to Mother. I am ready for Mother and her sudden turning to see if I am watching her, to see if I am paying attention to how she stands, tottering in her shoes, ankles gagged and tense and helpless — and Mother is not helpless. My mother is brave, I think, and her upturned face is shining. I see this, and see them both, willful lovers, tilted away from the house, leaning hard into the night.