Now that I'm working four days, I find little time to post to my blog, exercise, answer email. What I am doing in my spare moments is writing, so that's what I'll post. This is the beginning of a short story I've been hammering on for a few weeks, but it's been slow going. I haven't been able to hit a stride, hold onto the voice or see the story through, so mostly I wind up moving words around, changing the tense and adding little when I sit down with it. According to my deadline, it will be done by Monday. What will I ever accomplish without these deadlines? And now, the half-baked story:
Mother asks to have her chair taken down. An unnecessary demand when there are so many good chairs already on the patio, most of them bought to replace ones Mother complained about at one time or another. Still she insists on her chair, the battered chair, the heavy chair, the chair that is an eyesore among the canvas and beech sling backs, the chair that scrapes the walls on its way out of and back into the house. The cushions to mother’s chair have to be beaten. The hinges don’t like to bend, metal tears at skin and clothes. Sandy can't believe it’s taken her this long to ask.
Husband maneuvers the chair out of the sliding door with no verbal complaints, just a silly smile and a glance to his wife over mother’s head. Years ago, the same glance may have been an acknowledgment of mutual annoyance, but Husband has since sided with Mother.
Mother watches the proceedings of her chair. “I don’t see why you don’t keep the chair out here so it wouldn’t be such a bother,” she says. Lipstick edges over the outline of her mouth, a little bit on her cheek.
“No bother, Mother, no bother.” Husband shakes the handles of the chair, pounds on cranky metal parts with the heel of his palm. He has argued with Sandy to keep the chair outside, but she won’t have it among her sling backs.
Sandy’s silence says, “It is a bother. You’re always a bother.” She smokes by the screen door. “Put it in the shade,” she says. She holds in the smoke and it pricks her lungs. Mother will be back home tomorrow and Sandy will have done nothing. When she falls again, it will be her fault.
Husband moves the chair a few feet into the shade, collects the cushions and beats them over the sea wall with his fist so he will not have to sweep up later. Three seagulls detach from a rock in the sea and scatter across the sky. Husband’s stiffness, the way his fist beats the faded flowers of the cushion say to his wife, “Cool it.” Husband thinks Sandy is cruel to her mother, that she should be able to control her annoyances, deflect and steer them, shun the inappropriate ones. Husband loses his temper easily when he’s driving. She has that over him.
Mother settles into her chair and looks out to the sea. Her eyes are dim, dusty bulbs. She has arthritis pain all the time now, other pains she talks about less. She complained about the ferry ramp, how her feet stuck on the carpet and the people rushed past her with big bags. She is staying in the boy’s room on the first floor this year, the carpets rolled back and stored under the bed.
A dinghy bell tolls. Waves pull back on the shore and crackle over stones, the distant purr of a plane flying over the ocean. Three rocks stick out of the sea in front of them. They are beige in the morning and white, as they are now, as the sun gets stronger. The rocks are what they look at when they sit on the patio. Birds collect on one of the rocks, more than had been there before.
Sandy sits next to mother and puts her hand over mother’s hand. It twitches, mother’s hand. Sandy does not take it as an involuntary twitch but as a sign her own hand is unwanted, a suffocating factor, not warm or comforting. Why does mother always make her feel this way?
The dim eyes strain to see the dark yellow crescent of the beach below.
