Prosperous Friends by Christine Schutt

impressed her, and Dinah tugged at herself a little, but hard so it hurt, which was a way to feeling, and she went off to sleep thinking about her age—sixty—and Clive’s age and Sally’s. The Bournes, how old were they? Ned Bourne was in her dream, ineffective, silent, seated, yet comely compared to the woman she saw or what might have been a woman: Where there should have been breasts were cavities; where hair, a coarse whorl, a black twat.
    “Oh, what a terrible dream I had!” were her first words in the morning.
    He didn’t ask her to recount it, but she would not have told him; no more than she would tell him that she, too, often cried in the morning—what remedy? She had her jiggered-up juice from time to time and reveries of children. She was sorry she had not prevailed on the subject of children. Childlessness was a hole in her life, and how a child might map this house was a game she had played for years—still did. By what surfaces, what smells, colors, places, dogs would a child know this house?
    Something Sally did one summer when she stayed with them in Maine. She was old enough to drive by then, but didn’t; rather, every morning, she and Clive set themselves up—he seated in a wheelbarrow en plein air. Sally had a foldout chair but stood, even then, restless or jumpy, a girl who trembled to be spoken to though her hand was steady. The watercolors Sally made were as precise as oils. Dinah had one, a painting of stalks and tassels, high summer greens; she hung it in the sunny nest where she wrote in the winter—a green memory of summer.
    Which of the daylilies would a granddaughter favor? The cream-colored, ruffled ‘Longfield’s Beauty’ or the velvety red ‘Woman’s Work’? The yellows will not move her—and ‘Going Bananas’ is just another yellow, but the name might win her over. Dinah didn’t like the common orange when she was a kid, so why should a granddaughter, fancifully made, embrace them? (Poor Wisia is not fancifully made. She hasn’t the attention span for flowers. She likes camp and archery—and may come to love horses.) Go on with the game, and Dinah does, thinking a granddaughter has come to visit. The stone floor in the kitchen is cold underfoot in the morning and Grandfather is a grump, but Grandmother wears an apron—hug her!—she is bacony and sweet.
    Dinah would like to tell Clive that she wants grandchildren, that the unaccountably odd Wisia is preferable to silence, and Sally is his daughter.
    *
    “Let’s start the morning over again,” she said. “How do you want your eggs?”
    *
    After the smear of lunch, blue skies and a chance to play with watercolors, sleep, no swimming today but she was caught up in the cocktail hour and playing around with the festive mesclun, washed red bits sticking to her hands—“My day?” Dinah considered. “It was,” and she tossed the salad not unhappily though she heard his knuckle-crackling sounds and sighs.
    “Break the seal on the whiskey,” he said, and she turned away from the sink to do it. Five Motrim at a swack usually did the trick for him, but tonight the ache went on. He was looking at his feet.
    “Your drink,” she said, and now she looked at his feet and was awed by the crisscrossed, ropy varicosities knotted at his ankles. Was it any wonder he ached?
    *
    “Good morning, sweetheart!” Clive was not always glum. So why did she ruin the day with mention of Sally?
    “I’m not talking about the Bournes,” she said. “Why can’t Sally stay with us?”
    “I saw a lot of Sally in New York this spring. Too much of Sally,” he said. “I don’t want to go on outings to Isle au Haut.” Clive said, “I want to work,” and his purpose was as final as a nail.
    Once your parents die, there is nothing between you and it. Not a new idea, but the reality has pressed against his heart. Clive has had his mother on his mind. And not because Ned Bourne has made it his subject—no, hardly that; rather, remorse over