The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  I wonder, if those girls were girls now, would they describe themselves as “assaulted” if someone put his hand on their knee? Would they say that they were too “frozen” in dismay to stop him?

  What a different story we told about ourselves then. How aware we were that it was a story.

  M.

  Though they don’t often express it freely, some people feel real sympathy for Quin. “It’s a travesty,” one guy whispered hoarsely over a table during an after-work group drink. “His life is ruined because an ass got pinched?” It wasn’t just men: a sixty-plus female publicist, who’d been in the business forever, was vocal in her sympathy, calling him “wonderful” and “generous,” as her younger colleagues frowned peevishly. “Maybe generous to a fault,” she said, “to twits who didn’t deserve it, poor man.”

  The dominant opinion, however, is that he got what he deserved; he’d apparently made more enemies than even I was aware of. Still, most people see my continued friendship with him as loyal, if suspiciously so. My professional reputation, after all, was made when I published a book of charming stories about masochistic women (the now charmless author of which is still complaining about the size of her advance), a book that was seen variously as groundbreaking, “empowering,” sad, eye-rollingly trite, and, finally, sociologically interesting; although I’ve shepherded many books into existence since, I have never quite separated myself from that titillating yet tiresome aura. So I took it quite personally when, after a particularly dull conference, gossip turned to all the men who’d recently been exposed and ruined by outraged women, and a colleague said, apropos of what, I don’t remember, “Then there’s the women trying to defend these creeps. The ones who say, ‘That’s just what men are like.’ Them I feel sorry for. Because I can’t imagine what their lives have been like.”

  She didn’t look at me; I didn’t look at her. Quin wasn’t mentioned by name. Still, I wish I’d said, “Quin isn’t ‘like’ any other man I’ve met. I don’t know any other man as comical and strangely lewd. I don’t know any other man who would kneel on the floor of a restaurant and try to kiss your feet just to be whimsical. Or offer to carry your money and lipstick for you so that you can appear more free. I don’t know any other man who would say to a crying woman he barely knew, ‘You are a lovely spirit,’ and ask her to meet him for tea when her female ‘friend’ had hung up on her.” My very proper colleague would, I’m sure, have hung up too, disgusted by my weakness in that moment. It was Quin who had restored me, and not just on that day. Over days and weeks and months, he helped me feel that I was part of humanity, and not with his kindness alone; it was his silliness, his humor, his dirtiness that rekindled my spirit.

  I saw him for lunch the other day and he was in exceptionally good form, perfectly dressed, his scarf tasseled rakishly. We talked about books that were coming out, his books, one of which had just been very well reviewed in the Times; we gossiped about colleagues. We talked about Carolina and about Lucia, who, at eight, had suddenly started sucking her thumb, a development that his wife was, he thought, making too much of. He chatted with all the waiters, polling them on everything from their uniforms and how they felt wearing them to their highest hopes and ambitions. The easygoing young men were plainly amused. “Keep asking questions!” one exhorted as we finally made our exit.

  “I think things are turning around for me,” Quin said. “I can feel it. The city is opening to me again.”

  Heart pain. Real.

  Q.

  Stories, it’s all stories. Life is too big for anybody, and that’s why we invent stories. Women are now very into the victim story; those I’ve offended are all victims, even as they’re feted everywhere. I could make that my story too, but it’s not the best, because it’s much too simple. The best story is one that reveals a truth, like something you see and understand in a dream but forget as soon as you wake up. The girl who bent over the toilet for me so long ago—​she was acting out a truth that she then ran from, and her running was also true. When I stuck my thumb in that bird’s face—​the example Margot never ceases to bring up, as if it were the worst outrage of all—​I was daring her to show herself, and I was showing myself too, showing my need to live and feel alive. I was asking, inviting: Can you play, do you play? Her answer was no, and that was fine. I bought her book anyway; I even read some of it.

  Well, and now the truth is that everyone has said no. Now the truth is that I’m the man in the sexy artist’s video, kneeling and barking for a kiss. Really, I’ve always been him. I would have done anything Sharona wanted—​invite her boyfriend to dinner with us so that I could be in her presence, kneel and bark if it would lead to laughter and a kiss, just a kiss! Well, that all sounds very disingenuous. I can see Margot rolling her eyes. I can see Carolina, her face stunned and desolate, aged by grief—​the way she looks when she thinks I can’t see her, the way she looked last night, coming out of Lucia’s room, her bright smile collapsing, then hardening as soon as she saw me. I can see my little girl, her lovely cheeks and forehead glowing in the dim light of her laptop behind a half-closed door, carefully not hearing the angry words, the tears. What she might see on that laptop one day: it comes barreling at me with sickening speed, veers malevolently close, then passes like some satanic truck in a horror movie. It’s a sad story, all right, but . . . Best to take it one day at a time. And remember . . .

  Life is big enough for any story. I walk in the street with tears running down my face; I walk in a world of sales racks and flavored refreshments, marching crowds, broken streets, and steam pouring through the cracks. Jackhammers, roaring buses, women striding into traffic, knifelike in their high, sharp heels, past windows full of faces, products, bright admonishments, light, and dust. Slouching employees smoke in doorways; waiters clear outdoor tables. Eaters lounge before empty plates, legs spread, working their phones. Flocks of pigeons, a careful rat. At this newsstand, I know the proprietor; he catches my eye and tactfully registers my tears with the slightest change in his expression. Deep in his cave of fevered headlines and gaudy faces, he shivers with cold and fights to breathe; his lungs are failing as he sells magazines and bottled water, mints and little basil plants. We greet each other; I don’t say but I think, Hello, brother. And life rushes by. On the corner people play instruments and sing. Sullen men sit with filthy dogs and beg. In the subway a hawk-nosed boy with dyed, stringy, somehow elegant hair squats and manipulates crude puppets to sexy music amid a weird tableau of old toys. There is something sinister; he looks up with a pale, lewd eye. An older woman laughs too loudly, trying to get his attention. A beggar looks at me and says, “Don’t be so sad. It’ll get better by and by.” And I believe him. There will be something else for me. If not here, then in London, I can feel it. I am on the ground and bleeding, but I will stand up again. I will sing songs of praise.

  The beggar laughs behind me, shouts something I can’t hear. I turn, a dollar already in my hand.

  MENG JIN

  In the Event

  FROM The Threepenny Review

  In the event of an earthquake, I texted Tony, WE’LL MEET AT THE CORNER OF CHINAMAN’S VISTA, ACROSS FROM THE CAFé WITH THE RAINBOW FLAG.

  Jen had asked about our earthquake plan. We didn’t have one. We were new to the city, if it could be called that. Tony described it to friends back home as a huge village. But very densely populated, I added, and not very agrarian. We had come here escaping separate failures on the opposite coast. Already the escape was working. In this huge urban village, under the dry bright sky, we were beginning to regard our former ambitions as varieties of regional disease, belonging to different climates, different times.

  “Firstly,” Jen said, “you need a predetermined meeting point. In case you’re not together and cell service is clogged. Which it’s likely to be. Because, you know, disasters.”

  Jen was the kind of person who said things like firstly and because, disasters. She was a local local, born and raised and stayed. Tony had met
Jen a few years ago at an electronic music festival back east and introduced us, thinking we’d get along. She had been traveling for work. Somehow we stayed in touch. We shared interests: she worked as a tech consultant but composed music as a hobby; I made electronic folk songs with acoustic sounds.

  “The ideal meeting place,” Jen explained, “is outside, walkable from both your workplaces, and likely free of obstacles.”

  “Obstacles?”

  “Collapsed buildings, downed power lines, blah blah hazmat, you know.”

  Chinaman’s Vista was the first meeting place that came to mind. It was a big grassy field far from the water, on high ground. Cypress trees lined its edges. In their shade, you could sit and watch the well-behaved dogs of well-behaved owners let loose to run around. We had walked past it a number of times on our way from this place or that—​the grocery store, the pharmacy, the taqueria—​and commented on its charm with surprise, forgetting we’d come across it before. In the event of a significant earthquake, and the aftershocks that typically follow significant earthquakes, I imagined we would be safe there—​from falling debris at least—​as we searched through the faces of worried strangers for each other.

  * * *

  Other forces could separate or kill us: landslides, tsunamis, nuclear war. I was aware that we lived on the side of a sparsely vegetated hill, that we were four miles from the ocean, a mile from the bay. To my alarmed texts Tony responded that if North Korea was going to bomb us, this region would be a good target: reachable by missile, home to the richest and fastest-growing industry in the world. Probably they would go for one of the cities south of us, he typed, where the headquarters of the big tech companies were based.

  NUCLEAR BLAST WIND CAN TRAVEL AT > 300 M/S, Tony wrote. Tony knew things like this.

  He clarified: METERS PER SECOND

  WHICH GIVES US

  I watched Tony’s avatar think.

  APPROX 3 MINS TO FIND SHELTER AFTER DETONATION

  More likely we’d get some kind of warning x hours before the bomb struck. Jen had a car. She could pick us up, we’d drive north as fast as we could. Jen’s aunt who lived an hour over the bridge had a legit basement, concrete reinforced during the Cold War.

  I thought about the active volcano one state away, which, if it erupted, could cover the city in ash. One very large state away, Tony reminded me. But the ash that remained in the air might be so thick it obscured the sun, plunging this usually temperate coast into winter. I thought about the rising ocean, the expanding downtown at sea level, built on landfill. Tony worked in the expanding downtown. Was Tony a strong swimmer? I asked with two question marks. His response:

  DON’T WORRY ’LIL CHENCHEN

  IF I DIE I’LL DIE

  * * *

  I was listening to an audiobook, on 1.65x speed, about a techno-dystopic future Earth under threat of annihilation from alien attack. The question was whether humans would kill each other first or survive long enough to be shredded in the fast-approaching weaponized supermassive black hole. Another question was whether humans would abandon life on Earth and attempt to continue civilization on spacecraft. Of course there were not enough spacecraft for everyone.

  When I started listening, it was at normal 1.0 speed. Each time I returned I switched the speed dial up by 0.05x. It was a gripping book, full of devices for sustaining mystery despite the obvious conclusion. I couldn’t wait for the world to end.

  * * *

  Tony and I were fundamentally different. What I mean is we sat in the world differently—​he settling into the back cushions, noting with objective precision the grime or glamour of his surroundings, while I hovered, nervous, at the edge of my seat. Often I felt—​more often now—​I couldn’t even make it to the edge. Instead I flitted from one space to another, calculating if I would fit, considering the cosmic feeling of unwelcome that emanated from wherever I chose to go.

  On the surface Tony and I looked very much the same. We were more or less the same percentile in height and weight, and we both had thin, blank faces, their resting expressions betraying slight confusion and surprise. Our bodies were constructed narrowly of long brittle bones, and our skin, pale in previous gray winters, now tanned easily to the same dusty brown. We weren’t only both Chinese; our families came from the same rural-industrial province south of Shanghai, recently known for small-goods manufacturing. But in a long reversal of fortunes, his family, businesspeople who had fled to Hong Kong and then South Carolina, were now lower-middle-class second-generation immigrants, while my parents, born from starving peasant stock, had stayed in China through its boom and emigrated much later to the States as members of the highly educated elite.

  Tony’s family was huge. I guess mine was too, but I didn’t know any of them. In this hemisphere I had my parents, and that was it.

  A couple years ago I did Thanksgiving with Tony’s family. It was my first time visiting the house where he’d grown up. It was also the first time I had left my parents to celebrate a holiday alone. I tried not to guess what they were eating—​Chinese takeout or leftover Chinese takeout. Even when I was around, my parents spent most of their time sitting in separate rooms, working.

  “Chenchen!” his mother had cried as she embraced me. “We’re so happy you could join us.”

  My arms rose belatedly, swiping the sides of her shoulders as she pulled away.

  She said my name like an American. The rest of the family did too—​in fact every member of Tony’s family spoke with varied degrees of southern drawl. It was very disorienting. In normal circumstances Tony’s English was incredibly bland, neutered of history like my own, but now I heard in it long-drawn diphthongs, wholesome curls of twang. Both his sisters had come. As had his three uncles and two aunts with their families, and two full sets of grandparents, his mom’s mom recently remarried after his grandpa’s death. I had never been in a room with so many Chinese people at once, but if I closed my eyes and just listened to the chatter, my brain populated the scene with white people wearing bandannas and jeans.

  Which was accurate, except for the white people part.

  The turkey had been deep-fried in an enormous vat of oil. We had stuffing and cranberry sauce and ranch-flavored mashed potatoes (a Zhang family tradition), pecan and sweet potato and ginger pie. We drank beer cocktails (Bud Light and lemonade). No one regretted the lack of rice or soy sauce, or said with a disappointed sigh that we should have just ordered roast duck from Hunan Garden. It was loud. I shouted small talk and halfway introduced myself to various relatives, as bursts of yelling and laughter erupted throughout the room. Jokes were told—​jokes! I had never heard people who looked like my parents making so many jokes—​plates clinked, drinks sloshed, moving chairs and shoes scuffed the floor with a pleasing busy beat.

  In the middle of all this I was struck suddenly by a wave of mourning, though I wasn’t sure for what. The sounds of a childhood I’d never had, the large family I’d never really know? Perhaps it was the drink—​I think the beer-ade was spiked with vodka—​but I felt somehow that I was losing Tony then, that by letting myself know him in this way I had opened a door through which he might one day slip away.

  In the corner of the living room, the pitch of the conversation changed. Tony’s teenage cousin Harriet was yelling at her mother while Tony’s mom sat at her side loudly shaking her head. Slowly the other voices in the room quieted until the tacit attention of every person was focused on this exchange. Others began to participate, some angry—​“Don’t you dare speak to your mother like this,” some conciliatory—​“How about some pecan pie?,” some anxious—​Harriet’s little sister tugging on her skirt. Harriet pushed her chair back angrily from the table. A vase fell over, dumping flowers and gray water into the stuffing. Harriet stormed from the room.

  For a moment it was quiet. In my pocket my phone buzzed. By the time I took it out the air had turned loud and festive again. THIS HAPPENS EVERY YEAR, Tony had texted. I looked at him; he shrugge
d with resigned amusement. Around me I heard casual remarks of a similar nature: comments on Harriet’s personality and love life—​apparently she had just broken up with a boyfriend—​and nostalgic reminiscences of the year Tofu the dog had peed under the table in fright. It was like a switch had been flipped. In an instant the tension was diffused, injury and grievance transformed into commotion and fond collective memory.

  I saw then how Tony’s upbringing had prepared him for reality in a way that mine had not. His big family was a tiny world. It reflected the real world with uncanny accuracy—​its little charms and injustices, its pettinesses and usefulnesses—​and so real-worldly forces struck him with less intensity, without the paralyzing urgency of assault. He did not need to survive living like I did; he could simply live.

  * * *

  I woke up to Tony’s phone in my face.

  R U OK? his mom had texted. Followed by:

  R U OK????

  PLS RESPOND MY DEAR SON

  CALL ASAP LOVE MOM (followed by heart emojis and, inexplicably, an ice cream cone)

  His father and siblings and aunts and cousins and childhood friends had flooded his phone with similar messages. He scrolled through the unending ribbon of notifications sprinkled with news alerts. I turned on my phone. It gave a weak buzz. Jen had texted us at 4:08 A.M.: