Free Nightwork: Stories by Christine Schutt Page B

powdering, putting on lipstick—pain for a mouth.
    She said the husband was lucky to have her, the sister.
    “Really,” the sister said, dressed and on her way downstairs. The sound the sister made was of soft cloth on cloth.
    “That?” from the sister in the kitchen when she asked. “That’s for bread,” the sister said. “I never use it.”
    The sister said, “Most of our friends are afraid to visit, I think. I wouldn’t visit us if I could help it. I didn’t think you’d come.”
    She said, “Please.” She said, “I’m sorry I wasn’t here,” but she couldn’t think of how to finish; she took out the plates instead.
    The sister said, “No, he already ate,” and she leaned against the sink—they both leaned against the sink and looked out at the yard. They couldn’t find him, the husband. The sister said, “Maybe he went into town, or maybe he’s around the house too close for us to see.”
    “We’re not good company,” the sister said. “My husband is depressed. He sits up nights and drinks. I’ve called out, ‘Aren’t you cold? Aren’t you tired? Do you want anything?’ But he doesn’t answer, which makes me more afraid.”
    The sister said, “Oh, why am I telling you this?”
    The sister said, “I was the one who found the baby.”
    She said, “I know. I am sorry,” and she touched the sister’s shoulder, put her hand there, softly at first, then firmly, finally to feel how feebly constructed, bones light as balsa wood for toys with daylong lives.

SEE IF YOU CAN LIFT ME
    I walk around to the other side of the bed we are sharing, and I put my face up close to hers and say, “Ann, please. Please,” I say, and her eyes open, and Ann sees me, I think, and she says, “Sorry” in a loud, steady voice, and she knows. She knows she has been talking in her sleep. In the morning, she will ask me, “Did I scare you?”
    The dog, sleeping next to Ann, sleeps through it all. Good, loyal dog he is—this dog and all the others, for as long as I have known her. Ann holds the dog so close, I itch just looking at her bare arm slung around. The bareness of it, that is what snags me, and how she wears these slippery nightgowns—must be cold. Her arm, around the dog, looks very cold and white and dry to me. The dryness especially, I notice this, in contrast to the tops of her breasts, where theskin, I think, is damp. No matter what Ann says, anyone would want to touch her here, but Ann tells me no, only the dog keeps her warm.
    Ann says, “You do not know my kind of loneliness.”
    Ann says, “You have a child.”
    And so I have.
    I used to say my skin smelled of girl from so much touching of my own. Ann remembers. Ann says, “That’s when I got my pooch,” and she takes his head up in her hands—Ann does this, all the time—and chuffs behind his ears.
    Or else she says, “Don’t get near me. I smell of dog.”
    I cannot smell a thing. In this bed again, on my back, I am not near enough to anything other than me; Ann is turned away. She is tucked against the dog, dog pressed against her hollows, which is not the right word for Ann there. Ann is full there. Ann can take hold there, and sometimes does, slapping herself in that place, which, when I am pressing on my own bones, I think of as hollows. The word is hollows , but what I see is the flatness of girls.
    I see cow skulls.
    I see hurtful blue sky and desert, cholla in bloom, places I have never been to but sometimes think I would like to live in with Ann: New Mexico, Arizona, parts of California. We talk about living in these places. Ann says she can see us now at a long table, feeding lots of children. We are feeding some women like ourselves, and some men, too. This part makes us smile, Ann and me, talking about all the people we will feed.“And not only that!” Ann says. “Not only that. You can buy your girl a horse. Think about it,” Ann says.
    I do.
    I lie next to Ann in this bed and think about us in the houses Ann says