Nightwork: Stories

WHAT HAVE YOU BEEN DOING?

She was out of practice, and he wanted practice, so they started kissing each other, and they called it practicing, this kissing that occurred to him. In the middle of rooms, she obliged, in her bedroom, his bedroom, a kissing done standing, her hands on his shoulders, his not quite on her waist, heads tilted, mouths open. “Like this?” the boy asked, and the mother said, “Yes,” but kept her tongue to herself, and only laughed sometimes at the suddenness of his — his tongue that in its darting seemed not his. The way he drew back to laugh and to ask, “Isn’t that right?” made her think he didn’t like that part, not quite, not the way she liked that part and how it was he tasted — always he tasted of a warm sweet water, and of a breath so clean, she wondered how she must have tasted, so that she shut her mouth to him and steered him by the shoulders to his desk or to his bed and said, “Okay, you know now.” She said, “Someday you will make a girl happy,” and her saying so made the boy smile, for this was something the boy wanted to do — he was in training, she knew, in readiness for making a girl happy.

He said, “I am going to have a maid when I grow up.” They were in the kitchen then, the boy and the mother, rinsing dishes. “Lucky you,” she said, and they went on washing dishes.

“I am going to have three houses,” the boy said. This was later, another time. “I don’t know where,” the boy said. “But the places will be important.” The mother was approving and asked what she always asked: “May I visit?”

“If Dad is not there,” the boy answered, and later, another time — for these ideas, she found, came to him as suddenly as kissing — he said, “I will have houses for you next to all of my houses.”

Sometimes the boy thought of dancing. He put on his music and called out to the mother, “Come dance,” and she went to the boy because she knew the music — she told him so. “This was our music,” the mother said, “before you were born.” She taught the boy how to stroll and Cakewalk and guide a girl under the arch of his arm. She told him, “The girls love boys who love to dance,” and “The girls love boys who ask.” When she told the boy these things, she put her arms around his neck and swayed, pulling on his slow, sleepy body, his big feet hardly moving, his hands at his sides — his boneless, dimpled child hands cupped and open and cool to her touch. She pressed to find his knuckles, to measure, by feeling the length of his fingers, which, she believed, was a measure of the man to be, or was it feet? She could never remember — but his fingers were short and his thumbnail, when she looked, was rucked and milky. “Bad boy,” she said, and she put his thumb in her mouth and tongued the whorled thumb pad. “Okay,” the boy said, “I get the idea,” and he pulled away from her embrace and started his own dance, a made-up dance, hop-skipping to his room. “I want to play now,” the boy called. “And can you get me something to eat?”

She was in the bathroom, and he was at the door. Mornings, evenings. “Do you mind?” she answered. “Are you deaf?” she asked, pressing a wet washcloth over her breasts and turning away from the cold huff of air in the door’s opening. “Just checking,” the boy said — and the mother smiled when she shouted, “I have no privacy here!”

Room to room, stacked straight, tight, divisions so thin she could hear the boy at night butting against the wall between her bedroom and his. She thought of horses knocking in their stalls and wondered was it the boy’s foot or out-thrown arm, and would he, in some half sleep, come to her, shuffling on his big feet, saying, “I brought my own pillow.” She was always awake when he came to her and remembering what not to forget, so that to have this boy next to her, the sidelong press of him on his back, arms crossed over his chest, a sealed package to poke and wonder at, was a way of remembering, and she thought. This cannot be bad — and she sometimes spent the night with him.

“You didn’t move!” was what the boy said, finding his mother when he did not expect to find her in the morning still beside him, but in his own bed and explaining, “You take up all the room,” or saying, “Here is room,” and smoothing the place beside her.

Awake like this and in bed together, there was often nothing left to say, and so they kissed. They kissed as boys and mothers kiss: she, dry smacking everywhere fast — cheek, nose, chin, neck — and he, giddy in the heat of her kissing, kissing back slow and wet and opening his shirt to let her scratch. “Here,” he said, “and here,” pointing to low places prickling at her touch, pointing lower.

“You!” the mother said, and roused herself from his bed. “You must be hungry,” she said.

In this way, the day began, or else it happened he was gone, and she was in his bed “Because the light was better,” she said, and the pillows, plumped so near the window, stayed cool. And if the phone rang, very early, as it did when he was gone, she was nearer to it, ready to answer in a wide-awake voice, knowing even before he spoke, it was the boy calling. He was as suddenly moved to call her as he was to kiss her, and with nothing more on his mind than “What have you been doing, what are you doing now?”

“Braiding corn tassels,” the mother said. “Gouging eyes in the potatoes.”

The boy, at home again, said, “I am going to have lots of children.”

The boy said, “I will never get divorced.”

The boy was locking himself in the bathroom then. He was saying, “I want privacy.” He was saying, “Look at me”—goose-stepping toward the mother, naked as the day he was born, and asking, “Who am I?” The boy’s game—“Who am I now?”

“A soldier,” the mother said.

“A bad man,” the mother said.

But she could never guess him right.

The boy changed even as the mother answered, coming at her in some goofy bump and grind. She looked, and then she did not look, and swiped at his soft belly, and swiped again to keep him back, and when he kept on jiggling toward her, she took hold of his shoulders until he stood still and away from her, but not so far she could not touch him. She pressed her thumbs against his pink squint-eyed nipples, and the boy said, “You are my mother.”

The mother said, “So?”

“One kiss.”

And the boy gave it to her, fast, before he moved away from where the mother was standing, in the middle of a room she did not recognize, in a body that was suddenly not quite hers.