The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  After work I followed her outside to the parking lot of the strip mall, walked in step with her without talking. The door to the laundromat two doors down was open, and the smell of bleach wafted out onto the sidewalk. The Indian food market had closed for the night but still had a neon flamingo in the window advertising Florida lottery tickets. At the corner by a defunct carwash, cars slowed for a stoplight. When we got to my sun-bleached Corolla, I said, “Are you going to take me somewhere?”

  “Is that what you want?”

  “Yes.”

  She looked at me for what felt like a long time.

  “Okay,” she said finally, “I’m texting you the address.”

  She’d left the sublease where she’d spent the summer and was now living in a gray shotgun house on the other side of town with little potted plants everywhere and a brown leather furniture set I’d never seen before. The kitchen and living room were dark, but I could hear music behind a closed door in the other bedroom. Erika gave me a beer and told me to wait in the living room while she changed her sheets, and I texted my mom that I was hanging out with a friend and would be home late. It wasn’t even a lie exactly, but my mom didn’t like Erika and I felt bad for not telling her the whole truth.

  A few minutes later Erika appeared in the archway between the living room and the hallway and I followed her back to her room, which was painted electric blue and covered in small framed art prints. I took off my shirt first and kissed her, and then we were tangled on her bedspread in our underwear under her ceiling fan.

  She kissed me and ran her hands along my body. “You’re shivering,” she said. “Are you cold?”

  “No.” I felt impatient and dizzy. She had leaned away from me and was propped up on an elbow.

  “We don’t have to do anything else,” she said. “You know that, right?”

  I pulled her on top of me, slid off my underwear. “Come on,” I said. “Stop talking.”

  The rest was a blur of nerves and adrenaline until we were done and I was lying in the crook of her arm, the length of her body against mine, and time slowed down, and I felt like I was floating. If nothing else happened between us, I knew that this moment was enough.

  * * *

  That Monday afternoon she texted to say that she’d gotten the marketing internship. She was quitting Yotopia! and didn’t want me to hear about it from someone else. Also, she’d had a good time with me on Friday but didn’t think we should do it again. Hopefully I understood.

  “Not really,” I wrote back.

  “Are you mad?” she texted.

  “No.”

  “Do you regret it?”

  “No. Do you?”

  The gray text bubbles of ellipses appeared and disappeared.

  Then she texted back, “No.”

  Although I wanted more than anything to guilt her into seeing me again, I knew that I’d only gotten to have sex with her in the first place by playing it cool. “Hopefully I’ll see you around, I guess,” I wrote back. “Maybe we can be friends.”

  To this Erika responded almost immediately that she was sorry but no, she couldn’t be my friend, although she wished me well.

  Stupidly maybe, I felt fine, maybe even good. I had found someone perfect, and she had slept with me. The fact that she had done so against her better judgment just proved that she was attracted to me in the same combustible way I felt for her, and attraction like that seemed rare and true, a tugging magnet that couldn’t easily be ignored. Eventually—​maybe in a year, maybe in several years—​it seemed possible we’d find our way back to each other.

  * * *

  Less than a week later, though, I was at Yotopia! when she stopped by to drop off her polo shirts and aprons. She was wearing tight jeans and a flannel shirt rolled up at the sleeves, showing off a thick-banded watch she always wore. Just the way she walked made my stomach swish. It was midday on a Monday, but I had the day off for parent-teacher conferences, and I could see that Erika was startled to see me. She waved and then walked over to Gina, who was doing paperwork at one of the tables out front. I could make out the gist of their conversation—​good luck at the internship, come back if you ever need a job. Erika had worked there for two years, and Gina seemed genuinely sad to see her go. Then she peered out the window at Erika’s car, where a pretty girl in mirrored sunglasses leaned against the bumper. “Is that Kat?”

  Erika nodded. I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but my heart was pounding. Kat was Erika’s ex-girlfriend, her first true love, and now it seemed they were back together? Gina knocked on the window. Kat waved. Gina motioned for her to come in, and she put her phone in her back pocket and walked toward us. She was wearing very short jean shorts with the pockets hanging out under the fringe, cowboy boots. She was thin but curvy, with long shiny brown hair, big boobs, smooth muscular legs.

  I took a drive-through order, and when I came back to get the frozen yogurt, Gina was behind the counter, making two chocolate/vanilla swirl cones. Kat was sitting across from Erika, legs stretched out under Erika’s chair, and Erika was talking to her but also looking up at me, watching me in a deliberate way that was supposed to communicate something—​that she was sorry, that she hadn’t meant for me to see her with Kat. It was a guilty, pitying look, and I pretended not to notice. Gina handed them the cones and then the three of them chatted for another ten minutes before Kat and Erika stood up with their half-finished cones and left. They were walking across the parking lot, side by side, close but not touching, laughing about something, and all of a sudden I understood. Kat might have spent the summer elsewhere, but there had been no breakup—​all along, all spring, all summer, while I had been falling in love with Erika, they had been together.

  “That front door’s covered in dog drool,” Gina said. “It needs to get wiped down.”

  * * *

  Paloma said that Erika was an asshole who deserved no more of my time or attention and that if I couldn’t stop myself from thinking about her, I should make a list of her flaws. This was what she’d done with her ex-boyfriend Christian, and now she barely thought about him at all.

  “I can’t think of anything,” I said. “Everything supposedly bad about her I like.”

  “She lied to you. She’s twenty and into a seventeen-year-old. She has a girlfriend and a dumb haircut. She’s not that good at art—”

  “Okay,” I said. “Please stop.”

  We were at school, sitting on a brick wall outside the cafeteria, eating lunch. The summer heat and humidity was finally giving way to fall. Across the lawn, a plastic bag sailed in the breeze.

  Paloma took a bite of her sandwich and then lifted her sunglasses and squinted at me.

  “Do you feel sick? Like physically.”

  I nodded. All week it had felt like the flu or how I imagined a drug withdrawal might feel—​nausea, weakness, a lack of will to do anything but sit very still and cry.

  “It gets better, I promise,” she said. “You just can’t let yourself contact her again or the wound doesn’t heal, okay?”

  * * *

  Jan had gotten a job at a pop-up Halloween costume store in the lesser, and mostly defunct, Tallahassee Mall, so I was spending more time at home. Because of this and because Paloma was sick of hearing about Erika, I told my mom about Erika one morning while the two of us were folding laundry. I left out the part about us hooking up as well as my Jan-inspired campaign to win her back.

  “I know you didn’t like her,” I said. “So now I guess you’ll say I told you so.”

  “Oh come on, Jules,” she said gently, and put her hand on my knee. “You know I don’t think that. This is why you’ve been sad?”

  I nodded.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” she said. “I hate that this happened.”

  To her credit, she didn’t say anything else. She just hugged me and let me talk. That night we got candy at Publix and ordered pizza and stayed up late like old times, making fun of Lifetime movies until we couldn’t keep our ey
es open.

  A couple days after that, though, Pete was over for dinner and said, out of nowhere, that breakups were hard, that even when he spoke to veterans and refugees and people who’d suffered great trauma, the issues they invariably came back to were about love.

  “As humans we’re wired that way,” he said. “Don’t let anyone tell you a breakup’s not a big deal.”

  If he hadn’t looked so pleased with himself, I might have let it go.

  “I guess we don’t have secrets anymore,” I said to my mom. “So now I know.”

  She looked like I had punched her, which I suppose was what I had intended, though on some other level I was just naming the truth. Pete was now her confidante, and as much as she deserved to have him, I had once been her entire family and all she ever seemed to need.

  * * *

  On Halloween I was with Jan, watching television and waiting for trick-or-treaters who probably were not going to come, when I got a text from another Yotopia! employee, inviting me to a Halloween party at Erika’s house. I knew that I wasn’t really invited, but I was still thinking about it. “I shouldn’t go, right?” I said. “Probably that would be a horrible idea?”

  “Yes,” Jan said. “But I understand why you would want to go.”

  “But I shouldn’t, right?” I repeated.

  She reached for a mini Snickers bar and then smiled at me the way teachers did when they refused to give you the answer. “You’re practically an adult, Jules,” she said. “If you want to go, I’m not going to stop you.”

  When I told her about Kat, she’d said that she’d never cheated but had been the other woman a few times and that she’d let things happen with David that should not have happened. That she was a person who understood how, in the name of love, you could do things that seemed foolish. David had been very jealous, had followed her around, gone through her purse. She’d been a cocktail waitress at the time and he’d been convinced that she was flirting with other guys. I thought, but didn’t say, that she’d been in her sixties at the time, that to me this all sounded sad.

  Now she said, “You know about the furniture, right? About David trying to burn down my house and kill me?”

  I nodded, though I’d never heard it put that way.

  “Nobody knows this and don’t tell your mother,” she said. “But I was with him after that for almost a year.”

  I sat very still and tried to look normal. On the television a commercial for auto insurance gave way to a cartoon cat dancing in a tray of kitty litter.

  “I don’t regret it, either,” Jan said. “To be with the person you want is heaven. It doesn’t have to be the right circumstances to feel good.”

  This was the opposite of what sounded true, the opposite of why my mom had told me she was with Pete. She loved him, yes, but the more important thing was that he was devoted and dependable, that he didn’t jerk her around. I knew that Jan sounded crazy and that it made no sense for me to crash a party where a girl who had not only mistreated me but also made it very clear she didn’t want to see me anymore would be hanging out with her girlfriend, but I also knew that I was going to go. I wanted to be in the same room with her, and I wanted this helpless feeling to go away. To imagine a lifetime of this feeling made me dizzy.

  “I just want to be around her, I guess,” I said. “That’s all.”

  Jan had a box of Halloween costumes, a few new ones she’d gotten on discount this fall.

  “Go for an hour,” she said. “Wear a mask and don’t say anything. I’ll drive.”

  CAROLYN FERRELL

  Something Street

  FROM Story

  I.

  What is greatness? Funny dad sweaters, a sentimental nose, adorable crunkles in the corners of one’s eyes. Hilarious tales of the old country, Somethingville, North Carolina, when men were men, women women, etc.—​long-shouldered negresses being a special commodity, like lucky dice or a prizewinning calf. Fifty-four years ago, directly after our nuptials, Craw Daddy looked me dead in the eye and said, It’s all mapped out, Parthenia, one foot after the other. Are you in or you out? Cause there ain’t doing both.

  We were honeymooning in a stately brick in the Irish part of Yonkers, and I was feeling too beautiful for my own good. Uppity, my mam would’ve said. Course I let him have his feet, one after the other. Up one street and down another. Upon one threshold and across another. Turn the other cheek, Mam advised me in a daydream. The women in those doors are not queens. They have nothing on you. They ain’t even yellow.

  II.

  Our marriage in 1956—​with the understanding that some things get better and some worse but bottom line you ultimately float somewhere near the surface. Yes to the women fans, yes to the terribly late forays, yes to the pee smell of breath. Yes as long as he comes home by dawn and doesn’t wake the children, yes yes. You float and float with affirmatives; you may not be kicking but you will be gulping.

  III.

  Greatness is a cherished chestnut, humbly weaving its way out the comedian’s mouth: Did I ever tell you about the time Mama Love whupped my PARDON MY FRENCH? We’re in the auditorium of Ogden Hall, filled to capacity with hundreds here to see his farewell tour. The last time he will take us down Something Street.

  And the comedian my husband glistens in the spotlight. Moments before he took the stage, a lackluster girl student applied a hint of Ambi lightening cream under his eyes and over his cheeks, to promote his already fulsome visage—​EBONI, her nametag reads. The boy student next to her has a tag that merely says, HELLO MY NAME IS; both are otherwise nondescript save for the matching varsity scarves (neatly knotted) and Greek badges pinned on their breasts (gold, pearls, and black enamel for Alpha Delta Pi). There is no hint of lotion on their volcanic-ash arms, and both heads are bone-withered with neglect. The eyes belonging to this girl and boy seem overcast. One would think they had somewhere else to be.

  But I know this type well. In all probability Eboni and Hello My Name Is are kissing the ground Craw Daddy walks upon, grateful to have been granted the chance to tend to the comedian my husband during his annual visit to Hampton University (née Institute, why in heavens did they change that glorious old name?). Before the performance Hello My Name Is hauled a folding table center stage while Eboni poured a glass of water or gin into a tumbler. When Craw Daddy walked on and greeted the crowd, they stood back and looked up into the rafters, as if checking for dust mites in the beams of light. Likely their minds were like, His air, Lord, how blessed we are to breathe in his air!

  It’s a natural cycle; I know my head once worked that way.

  The comedian my husband begins his set; the students are standing near me in the curtains, grimacing and scratching their coffee-colored necks with their hands. They notice the pram I’m rocking, perhaps they are up here wondering whether the baby will be a potential disturbance? The girl and boy edge closer to me, sharpening their eyes in that sickening way the Sable-Tea Club ladies used to do (how I loved and dreaded their homilies on The Progressive Colored Doyenne! ), and I can almost hear the prayer bursting forth from their reverent mouths: Let the Good Lord do his work to preserve the peace so that the Almighty Comedian may once again entertain us and lift us and teach us, etc. etc.

  I’ve heard that prayer before.

  Eboni hisses at the boy, Where her chair at, Paul? You expecting her to stand the whole damn night?Paul scuttles away quietly, further backstage. Eboni’s grimace does not leave her face. Your husband didn’t mention his lady was gonna be here tonight, she said. Ain’t that the shit?

  IV.

  The floors of the ancient stage rattle as the comedian my husband wanders up and down in the ancient spotlight, beginning his stories. The audience hovers—​I can tell there is nary a whiff of the Complaints anywhere at all. In this moment, nothing is lost. He is bright, he is shining. His teeth bare white into every soul in the house. Mama Love, she made me who I am today. Y’all tell me if you heard this one before.

  V.
>
  In all other moments, we’ve lost damn near everything.

  VI.

  Back in the day, the Sable-Tea Club ladies loved showing their Mahogany Maidens (yes, that was the word they used for us) the right way to act: how to set a table, to use silverware, to answer a telephone; they were against elbows, against overly wide mouths and hands that did not obey; they absolutely loathed wagging tongues. We sat on a slipcovered couch in the home of a full-bodied New Rochelle matron, sipping sorrel tea, dreaming of biscuits and Shirley Temples, reciting the first few syllables of Lysistrata, stretching our pinkies in the air just like white girls, nodding tastefully to Perry Como and Nat King Cole—​maybe someone would mention Dr. King, and like magic the reverent swaying of heads and chests would commence. Our voices were orderly. Did you know that at those marches, the wind can go and make one’s hair most unflattering? Did you know you could wear out a good pair of nylons just by standing and holding a sign? We were all for racial progress and whatnot, but honestly: none of us Mahogany Maidens actually wanted to use a public water fountain, colored or white.

  VII.

  Who didn’t think that being a part of the Sable-Tea Club Ladies wasn’t greatness itself? After a customary lecture (perhaps on the place of classical Latin in the contemporary domicile), we made our way to the luncheon spread on a huge oak table covered in lemon wax and doilies. Meats, gelatin molds, cold European soups that tasted like resurrected earth. Watercress sandwiches, a charger of raspberry thumbprints. The Sable-Tea Club ladies thanked that very special matron for her hospitality, then made us hold hands for the Lord’s Prayer. She whispered that if we messed up any of the words, we’d get our black behinds beat big-time.