The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Well, so that’s what I mean, that’s what it is, it’s just a generational thing. Eventually the question of synth and human will just—​just be completely . . . normal.”

  “It is normal,” Toni said, a hard edge coming through. She had gone for the champagne bottle twice now. Toni and Max had three kids, two synth, both boys. “I mean, look at us! How many—” She counted with a long fingernail. “Seven at this table alone!”

  It wasn’t normal, though. They all knew it.

  It wasn’t normal yet.

  “I can’t believe your mom still has a phone,” Will said.

  “I hardly ever hear you on the cookie,” Toni scolded. “You’re really quiet.”

  “I know. I don’t use it outbound very much. Just to keep track of the kids. And even then, it’s—​I have it really low.”

  Another current went around the table as everyone considered what this meant. Everyone said they kept it low, of course, and had just about everything filtered, but something about his wife’s sweet, slightly awkward clarity made it clear to everyone that she meant just what she said. And it was true. It was true for him too. They were probably a little self-satisfied about it. But this too was how they liked it. He and Julie had theirs set to alert only when the fear or sadness readings went above a certain register, or when a certain pain threshold was crossed, and they could eyekey the map anytime they wanted to see where the kids were. But that was it. No AI readings of their thoughts, no anticipation measures. And the communication went only one way, from kids to parents. No father’s voice in the head, no mother’s cooing concerns.

  Toni said, “I wish I could do that. I mean, you guys are so cool, you’re all, you’re very classic. That’s just totally classic. But I just, I’m addicted. Like right now, I’m getting a wad right now. Oh my god. Oh my god!”

  They all leaned forward as her eyes widened.

  Toni gave a bark of disbelieving laughter. “Oh my god. Jenny Larsen just saw Harry Hewitt kissing some skinny bitch in a parking lot!”

  The group erupted as the news came across. Peter looked down the table at his wife, who was looking back at him. A look of resignation. But she set her glass on the table with a tidy click and, brightly, began to talk as well.

  * * *

  Well, everyone suspected Harry Hewitt had been having an affair, but nobody had managed to get a glimpse of the girl until now. Her name was Cindy Simmons. Seen in gremlin she was young, very skinny, but decidedly not a beauty (big teeth, too narrow a head, really thin mean eyebrows). This was interesting, because Harry’s wife, Theresa, was very pretty. The thinking first was that maybe Theresa hadn’t been having sex with Harry or that he wanted something slender and young to hold in his hands, or that the opportunity had simply presented itself and he hadn’t resisted. Everyone was delighted to have something to talk about, and for one memorable day Theresa Hewitt opened her feed to everyone and didn’t tell Harry and everybody lurked around for a while, and it turned out the Hewitts indeed hadn’t had sex for two years and it was because Harry wouldn’t get a TAP test after he’d come back from China twice without using a scrubber, because of the presumption of guilt it implied, and then everyone started to feel uneasy, and actually sorry for Harry, and people left the feed and made guilty noises of discomfort and talked about other things, the progress of the school play, etc. And then a few days later Theresa came on and apologized to everyone and to Harry, and announced they were going into counseling.

  “Grotesque,” Julie said, kneading some pizza dough.

  Peter had followed the whole business with a mostly clinical interest; he neither liked Harry nor wanted to sleep with Theresa (or for that matter with Cindy Simmons), so he was really just interested in how badly the couple was going to treat one another in public. And even that was a little prurient of him, he supposed. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s amazing anyone can stay friends with anybody after a while.”

  “That’s true. Although actually most people are pretty decent.”

  “That’s true too,” he noted. “Although everybody has their silences.”

  “Well, yes.” His wife blushed a little.

  “Well, not everybody.”

  “No, but then you wish they would.” She smiled. “Some people I just—” She held up two floury hands as Matt came sailing through the kitchen with a paper airplane.

  “Right, and even this, I mean it’s his business.”

  “Yes.” She sighed.

  Silently, through the cookie, he asked her, Why did you mention the Super?

  She smiled and produced a little shrug and said, “I wanted to tell them something they hadn’t heard before, and tell them in person.”

  He let that sit for a while.

  “Why don’t we just stop?” he suggested, after a minute. “Turn them off.”

  “Turn them off and then what?”

  “I don’t know,” he said, a thrill rising in him. “Call each other.”

  She laughed, looked up from the counter. “I don’t even know where my phone is, Peter.”

  “I have them,” he answered, a little breathless, “in my desk. With your mom’s!”

  “We can text!”

  “Sure,” he said.

  She gave the pizza dough a few more thoughtful shoves. “You mean just—​actually stop stop? People’ll notice.”

  A sudden erotic surge arose in him. “What if we just stopped completely. So it was just you and me. Nobody else.”

  His wife blinked as the heat climbed further into her face. She bit her lips and looked at him wide-eyed.

  Easy to dismiss the idea as foolish.

  Except he didn’t quite. And neither did she.

  It would mean being different from everybody—​not just a little, not just on the edges, but really different. Cut off, the way hardly anyone was. It was still just conceivable. The way their parents might have dreamed about moving to the country to raise artisanal chickens or something.

  Easy to dismiss it as a fantasy.

  And then suddenly it wasn’t.

  * * *

  Melissa’s teacher this year was one Mrs. Hartley—​slight, pale, worried-looking, with a high, tremulous voice that seemed to Peter to be forever on the verge of tears. But Melissa was devoted to her. At the low table in the playroom she bent over long penciled letters to her: You are not just my teacher. You are my friend. You are a friend to so many people because you love them. You are a fair person because you are always fair to other people.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Burkhart,” Mrs. Hartley said, smiling, during the parent-teacher conference, in the high-ceilinged room in the sweet old elementary school two blocks away. (Really, their life was a throwback.) “Your daughter is a delight.”

  This was always nice to hear. And yes, still a slight frisson around daughter and your, all parties concerned understanding that this was the correct terminology, all parties very conscious of having to use it properly. But Mrs. Hartley’s pleasure was obviously genuine. “She’s very bright, of course, as you know, and she’s very socially conscious and aware, and it’s just a delight to have her in the class.”

  “Thank you!” Julie smiled. “She’s a sweetheart.”

  “We have a lot of children who look up to her,” Mrs. Hartley went on. “She’s a very natural sort of leader. Protective of herself and others.”

  This was going somewhere, it was plain. He said, “She can be sort of fierce, actually? When she feels slighted, I guess.”

  Mrs. Hartley gave them a neutral smile. “Now, what do you hear over the cookie?”

  They looked at each other. Julie spoke first. “We keep it tuned pretty low.”

  Mrs. Hartley regarded them politely.

  “We like to let her have her own space,” he said.

  Mrs. Hartley said, “Yes.”

  “So,” Julie said, “we have a sense of how she’s doing, generally, but we don’t actually—​we don’t actually listen in.”

  “I see.” Mrs. Hart
ley addressed her tablet. “That’s fine. That’s a choice.”

  “I mean, we have a sense, just from being with her,” his wife said. “She’s a very, sort of, intense kid? Like Peter said, she can be very fierce about things.”

  “And fairness is an issue with her,” Mrs. Hartley mentioned.

  “Yes,” Julie nodded. “That’s her thing lately.”

  Mrs. Hartley said nothing, considering how to proceed. And now it was plain she was older than she appeared at first, firmer, had the situation more in hand than you would think by looking at her fuzzy hair, scoop-necked dress. “Well, I think it’s one of the questions we face, with an integrated classroom environment. There are issues that come up from time to time, with feelings being hurt on either side. Your daughter is—​she’s wonderful. And as I say, she’s very protective of her friends.” She faced them now directly. “Most of her close friends, still, are, uh, synth people. Which may be the result of the numbers as they happen to be right now. Most of the girls in this class happen to be synth, and most of Melissa’s friends are in the group, so it may just be one of those circumstances where the numbers have turned out in a certain way. And Melissa, good for her, is just unafraid to speak up when she feels a certain issue needs to be mentioned.”

  “That’s Melissa,” he said.

  “So, for instance, we have a boy in here, a biological boy, Dimitri. You may know him.”

  “Oh yeah,” Julie said.

  “Well, Dimitri is, I will confess to you, a handful. But he’s a seven-year-old boy, which, of course—​well, they can be like that. And he likes to make up songs, and the songs are about, you know, who’s who. Who’s what. He probably gets some of this from home, which, that’s neither here nor there, but let’s just say—​it’s not always very friendly. And his song last week was about Melissa’s friend Joanie. Who is synth. And it went, ‘Joanie is a phony, Joanie is baloney.’ ”

  “Nice,” Peter said.

  Mrs. Hartley gave a wry smile. “It’s not his worst.”

  “Did you hear about this?” Julie asked him.

  “Me? No.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Me neither.”

  Mrs. Hartley eyed them warily. “So Melissa asked Dimitri to stop. Which had the predictable effect of encouraging him. She was very, very polite. She said, and I didn’t catch the whole exchange, but it was something like, That hurts my feelings, and it hurts Joanie’s feelings, we were born like this and you were born like that, but we’re all just people.”

  This was the accepted line. Again, that self-conscious steadiness.

  “How’d that go?” he asked.

  “Well, it didn’t work. So I could see Melissa getting angry. And she dropped it for a few minutes, but I knew it wasn’t quite over. But I like to let the children work out their own issues with one another, as far as possible.” Mrs. Hartley licked her lips. “Then Melissa went over to him, they were in the middle of an activity in the soft corner, and she said to him, very calmly, very seriously, ‘Well, you’re going to die, and we’re not.’ ”

  Julie drew in a breath. “Oh god.”

  He ejected a single dry laugh. “Well,” he said. “Okay. That’s a new one.”

  Julie said, “I wish we’d heard about this earlier.”

  “Actually, I assumed you had,” Mrs. Hartley said. “I assumed that line came from you.”

  His wife took this in. “I guess we should have been clear with you about how much we listen. That’s our mistake,” she said.

  “This hasn’t happened before,” he explained.

  “It’s all right,” Mrs. Hartley answered. She was unflustered. “I’m glad we’ve opened a line of communication between us. Some parents like to look in on me, even, from time to time, which I permit.”

  But he would never do that, he realized. Never in a million years.

  “Melissa can be fierce,” he mused. “Like I say.”

  “Well, she pays very close attention to the way the world works,” Mrs. Hartley replied, closing her tablet. “As I say, your daughter is very smart. She’s very acute. She’s aware of everything. As you know.” Now the teacher smiled. “She reminds me of my own daughter in that way.”

  The question hovered. Was Mrs. Hartley’s daughter synth or human? And all three of them sensed the question hovering there, and none of them spoke to it, and then it slowly, very slowly, drifted off. Because it didn’t matter. Officially, it didn’t.

  * * *

  He could tell Julie was upset. She stirred the carrot soup with extra vigor and moved around the kitchen in brisk irritated steps. He knew enough to wait for it. Whatever she wanted to say would emerge in its own time. In bed she perched her glasses on the tip of her nose and said, finally, after several preliminary sighs and halting starts, “You know, I remember what it was like to be a girl.” She fixed him with a fierce, protective stare. “What I wanted most of all was to have everything be fair.”

  “Well,” he said, “that’s our girl.”

  “You know who that Dimitri kid is,” she said. “He’s the one who ran around the playground swinging his belt over his head and trying to hit kids with the belt buckle.”

  “That one! Well, good for her for standing up to him.”

  “Damn right good for her. I’m sorry we didn’t know about it,” she said. “But you know what, there’s something else that mattered to me just as much as things being fair. And that was to be left alone.”

  They left the matter there for a while.

  They decided against asking Melissa about any of it.

  “Let her come to us,” Julie said. “If she wants us to know, she’ll tell us.”

  * * *

  So in the end it was not so much a decision as a willingness to experiment—​at least as they described it to themselves. Of course parenting overall could be considered, really, a haphazard, screwy, make-it-up-as-you-go experiment, done without controls, the sort of exercise that would get your funding revoked and get you called up before your departmental Internal Review Board in a second.

  And your experimental subjects? Helpless captives!

  Once in a while a lifestyle magazine featured things like this. People taking weeklong retreats, going completely bug-free. Exhilarating, restful, recentering, people tended to say. A new way of looking at the world! (And then, he was sure, people just went right back to their old habits.) For him, once the cookie was off—​completely off—​he just felt it as a weird silence. As though he had discovered some new space in the air, a new room, empty, featureless, that had been carved out of his brain.

  He would turn to it and find nothing. A great quiet.

  He missed it most when he was doing dumb stuff around the house—​laundry, tidying up the playroom. How natural it had been to flit from music to news to the feed. The whole world carved out of his head, gone.

  And when he turned to see the children, they were gone too.

  They told the children the day they did it, breaking the news at dinner. Better a brief, factual statement than a drawn-out evasive one.

  “What happens if I break my arm?” Matt wanted to know.

  “We’ve got it set to alert in emergencies.”

  Melissa turned a forkful of pasta over. “You don’t want to be bothered by us,” she proposed.

  “No, that’s not it. We think you should be allowed to be yourself, by yourself, when you’re just alone. When you’re with us, you should be with us. We’ll know in the case of an emergency, but that’s it.”

  It helped that he and Julie were strange, that they had cultivated among themselves as a family a sense of strangeness. It helped the kids accept this choice as one more instance of their parents’ unconventionality.

  At the old settings, Matt’s cookie profile had shown him to be a jumpy, easily frightened, easily moved kid, so at least once an hour had come a yellow message about him—​some sudden spike in fear or surprise, vanishing as the shock passed. Activating the full-spectrum view, you would
watch the levels plummet to baseline. By contrast, Melissa’s readings had always been very smooth, gentle waving pulses, never too high, never too low.

  And now?

  Now he had to go down the hall and poke his head into their bedrooms to see what was what. And even then he never knew what he was seeing.

  How had his grandparents done this, exactly?

  He could tell even Julie was having trouble adjusting. At times he would enter a room and find her standing there, looking a little marooned in the middle of the carpet, holding a book or a toy and appearing visibly stilled, like a ship that had lost its engine. She would turn to him with an expression of slight disquiet.

  “Hello,” she would say.

  “Hi.”

  A little laugh from her. “I didn’t hear you.”

  “I come on little cat feet.”

  “This is really . . . strange,” she said.

  “I like it.”

  “You do?”

  “Yeah. It’s peaceful.”

  She blinked. “Yeah,” she said.

  * * *

  A garden of memories came into view for him. It was as though a fog were lifting from an area of his mind and what was revealed was a place of a dozen pathways, tunnels, mazes, overgrown and wet with dew, long branches overhanging.

  His room as a boy: the chrome of the spinning overhead fan, the baking heat of those days, the deep bundled comfort of the narrow bed beneath the high window, overlooking the street.

  His brother, Ian, the game they had, launching a red rubber ball back and forth over the top of the house, one of them in the front yard and the other in the back, watching, watching the empty sky for the red ball to come shooting, gloriously, into view.

  His mother, red hair back in its clip, seating herself on the sofa to tell him his cat Standard had been hit by a car, and her own tears leaping to her eyes.

  This whole life he had lived already. As though it had been lived by another man, another boy.