Florida – Christine Schutt

“You don’t know?” “You don’t, really?” “Am I to believe such a story?” “You know who you remind me of, don’t you?” OceanofPDF.com “YOUR NONNA SAID ONE time she accidentally clobbered your momma with a oar when they was on the lake. She knocked Miss Alice out. She said she thought your momma was dead. And I’m not saying this is true now — okay? but your nonna said the accident might explain the way your momma is.”

OceanofPDF.com AN OLD STORY WAS that my mother and my uncle Billy were fighting on the second-floor landing when he pushed her down the stairs in an argument. Nonna was watching from the foot of the stairs as her children, who were then no longer children, fought for possession of The Clockmaker, an oil the size of a double bed, a clockmaker at his work in windowlight, all fumy, red-based colors.

Think of brandy or whiskey, think of whatever was being drunk by Uncle Billy and my mother and that was the painting’s preponderate color — the color of what made them drunkenly fight this way in front of Nonna. But Nonna liked to watch them fight was what my mother said, and I believed her. I believed Mother when she said the argument with Uncle Billy was about a lot more than money. Of course it was! Nonna’s heart was ridged, rough, dry.

The answer was simple: She only had room for Uncle Billy. I believed Mother when she told me about her father’s mistress, met on a train, although how would Mother know where he had met her? Still I believed Mother when she said the mistress had walked by Daddy on the train. The mistress was an old-fashioned milk-drinker wearing spiked heels, and Daddy followed her.

Daddy’s mistress had a heart that wasn’t bitter. “Do you believe everything you are told, Alice?” Uncle Billy had asked me in the desert. “Do you?” Yes, yes, yes, I did. I believed that before Nonna’s tongue thickened, she took her husband out of any story she thought to tell. She talked about her father, instead, and favorite dogs and Uncle Billy’s travels. I believed that when she had talked about my mother, and she had not often talked about my mother, Nonna frenzied helpless gestures.

Talk, talk that was what Nonna did before her stroke, and after her stroke, too. I believe we talked, Nonna and I, and that she told me about my father. There was a flood — remember—and Nonna made waves with her hands. My father gone away, yes, yes, yes, I was nodding; yes and the storms across the lake in air: stalk, leaf, stillness. “What else, Nonna, what else do you remember? What? Are you awake enough to talk? Do you think I am like my mother?”

“Quiet,” Miss O’Boyle was saying, “your grandmother is asleep.”

Alice Fivey, fatherless since she was seven, is left in the care of her relatives at ten when her love-wearied mother loses custody of her and enters “the San,” submitting to years of psychiatric care. She is moved from place to place, remaining still while others mold her into someone different from her namesake mother. But they do share the same name. Is she then her mother? Alice consoles herself with books, and she herself becomes a storyteller who must build her own home word by word.

Florida is her story, told in brief scenes of spare beauty as Alice moves ever further from the desolation of her mother’s actions, into adulthood and closer to the meaning of her own experience. In this most elegiac and luminous novel, Christine Schutt gives voice to the feast of memory, the mystery of the mad and missing, and, above all, the life-giving power of language. Christine Schutt I MOTHER MOTHER ARTHUR MOTHER TUCSON ARTHUR MOTHER MOTHER MOTHER ARLETTE’S STORIES MOTHER TUCSON FATHER FATHER ARTHUR ARTHUR MOTHER II THE BIG HOUSE THE BIG HOUSE TUCSON THE BIG HOUSE ANY HOUSE ARLETTE’S STORIES THE BIG HOUSE THE BIG HOUSE MR. EARLY FATHER FATHER ARTHUR III THE BIG HOUSE NONNA SPEAKS FATHER MOTHER WEST SEVENTY-SIX WEST SEVENTY-SIX WEST SEVENTY-SIX MR. EARLY MOTHER IV ARTHUR MOTHER WEST SEVENTY-SIX SHORT IDENTIFICATIONS MOTHER FATHER THE DREAM MOTHER ANY HOUSE TUCSON ANY HOUSE THE DREAM MR. EARLY FLORIDA ABOUT THE AUTHOR OceanofPDF.com Christine Schutt Florida TO SALLY ANN AND TO CHESTER OceanofPDF.com MOTHER SHE WAS ON HER knees and rubbing her back against parts of the house and backing into corners and sliding out from under curtains, rump polishing the floor, and she was saying, “Sit with me, Alice.”

She was saying, “Talk to me. Be a daughter. Tell me what you’ve been doing.” She spoke uninflectedly, as if thinking of something else — the dishes to do, drawers to line, clotted screens to clean out with a toothpick. Handles missing, silver gone, and a Walter in the next room unwilling to leave! Bitch, bitch, bitch, the sound the broomsticks made against the floor in Mother’s nettled cleaning and talking to herself, asking, “What am I doing?

What does it look like I am doing?” “You are stupid,” I overheard Walter say to my mother. “You’d be better off dead.”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 6a2c6a988d6b6a17
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 815,308 bytes (0.778 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 120
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 167.91 minutes
• Total Words: 33,582
• Total Characters: 180,913
• Average Words per Page: 279.85
• Average Characters per Page: 1507.61

Most Frequent Words

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