The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  “Yes, but what exactly does one do? Arm them with lawyers and fly them to Rome for DNA tests that they can use to lay siege to relatives who will never accept them? And for what? Between you and me, that family hasn’t got anything left. Just land that is all tied up with taxes and entailments, and some sculptures of popes that no one wants, and acres of architecture that costs too much to restore. Oh, and titles. They have titles to spare.”

  Shay envisions a Princess Harena changing money at the Fleur des Îles, and a Prince Didier, with his aristocrat’s hands, dismembering truck engines in Mahajanga. Madagascar has its own kings and noblemen, whose polysyllabic names lie deeply rooted in the historical conquests and ancient migrations of each tribe, but none of those revered Indian Ocean pedigrees belongs by birthright to either of the half-Italian children. And on the tourist island of Anjavavy, what would a hereditary Roman certificate of rank be, without money to back it up, but a meaningless piece of rubbish, another plastic bag blowing down the beach?

  “They could send something—​pay for education!” Shay persists.

  “Believe me. They will do nothing.”

  Giustinia and Shay look fiercely at each other, aware that they are so indignant over the neglect of Leandro’s progeny because they feel guilty about their own role in stirring up false hope: in bringing that tremulous, starry look to Harena’s eyes, and spurring Didier to travel for days over land and sea for nothing.

  They sketch a plan to raise the situation with the Italian and Malagasy consuls, and they both send letters to which no answers come. And so bureaucracy performs its traditional task of transmogrifying action into inaction, and the two women lose themselves in their own busy lives.

  * * *

  At Christmas, when Shay and Senna travel to Madagascar, Shay is pregnant with their first child. This makes her the center of attention, but she still keeps up with the gossip, and the first thing she hears is that Harena has married a half-Chinese musician, who has taken her to Mauritius, where his band plays in the smaller clubs and hotels. It is a love match, and Harena is said to be always dressed up and much admired, but drinking more than ever and doing hard drugs. Shay is told that when some visiting Italian finally gave Harena the news of her father’s death, she flung bottles, clawed her own face, and screamed that it wasn’t true; that even now she talks about Leandro as if he were coming to fetch her. Her husband is patient with—​maybe even proud of—​what he calls her European behavior, but people on Anjavavy say that she is possessed. Nothing good, they say, will come of her.

  As for Harena’s half-brother, Didier, the phone number he gave Shay is out of service, and no one can discover his whereabouts in Mahajanga or Morondava, though there can’t be many mechanics like him. So the lost heirs who came into Shay’s life are just as suddenly gone.

  Around the same time that Harena got married, the murderer who had been cutting off heads was caught hiding out in the cane. He was a lunatic from Toamasina, a Betsimisaraka dockworker of fearful strength, whose whole family perished in the catastrophic floods of a few years back. He was, they say, obsessed with the idea of chasing vazaha out of Madagascar, of eliminating the rich Europeans and Indians who were offending the spirits of the ancestors and who for so long had plundered the wealth of the country. His twisted method was to kill Malagasy men who worked for the foreigners. But he had no chance to expound on this in a trial, or even to languish for more than a day in the medieval hell of Anjavavy’s prison, because on his way to the courthouse he was seized by a mob of islanders and promptly lynched, torn to pieces, burned, and cast into the sea.

  Shay’s neighbor Madame Rose and the staff at the Red House all have a gentle air of pitying the murderer as a man cursed by madness, and placidly seem to accept the idea that justice has been served. With no newspapers to pick up the story, and with both criminal and victims at the bottom of the social scale, talk of the drama soon fades away.

  Shay herself cannot help associating the unspeakable murders with the plight of Harena and Didier. But is it a plight? Wrong was certainly done. By miserable Leandro, and by his stony-hearted family. But also by Giustinia and Shay, with their frivolous intervention—​they were like magpies who settle on cattle and peck open wounds.

  * * *

  During the next years, as more hotels are built and charter flights arrive from Rome and from Paris, prosperity steals over the island like a gilded mist, and pale half-European babies become a more common sight in the villages and on the beaches. Some of them are loved, legitimized, and even taken away to live comfortable lives in France and Italy; others grow up amid conflict and squalor. The situation of Harena and Didier, no longer unusual, fades into the constantly rewoven fabric of gossip and fantasies that makes up island history.

  By this time Shay and Senna have a small son and daughter of their own, who, being half Italian and half African American, are often, during their holidays on the island, mistaken for mixed-race Malagasy children. With the births of Roby and Augustina, Shay suddenly knows the crushing force of that incomparable love, which, when the parents are from different worlds, brings with it all the shadows of historical conflict, in custom and color and speech.

  Darlings of fortune, adored by their Italian and their American grandparents, Shay’s children grow up fluent in two languages. They are at home in Milan and in her native city of Oakland, and also in Madagascar, where they pick up rudimentary French and Sakalava dialect as they splash in the warm Anjavavy waters. From the kids they play with on Rokely Beach, they grow used to hearing lurid stories of sorcerers and ghosts—​even the horrific tale of the headhunter—​and because the disgraceful misadventures of foreigners are the villagers’ entertainment, they absorb the details of intricate scandals as well.

  Buried somewhere amid all the other unsuitable anecdotes that her son and daughter bring home, Shay suspects, is a distorted account of the Leandro story, but she is certainly not going to bring it to light.

  Sometimes she sits at her little writing table at the end of the garden and from the deep tamarind shade watches Roby and Augustina at play on the dazzling sand with a horde of village and tourist children, the hollering crowd expanding and contracting with algorithmic logic, like a flock of starlings, as they splash in the waves, play raboka, race hermit crabs, or draw mysterious labyrinths in the sand for the island version of hopscotch. Her son and daughter are always the focus of her vigilance, with their wild hair burned brassy gold, their faces bearing the stamp of distant continents; children healthy and loved, who play in front of the house of wealth that they will inherit; who, in short, have everything. And from time to time, as Shay watches them, she’ll unavoidably envision a boy and a girl who are their shadow twins: Didier and Harena, the beautiful children who have almost nothing. And then she holds a guilty circular conversation with herself, a kind of call-and-response.

  “What more could we do?”

  “We did what we could.”

  “What did they need?”

  “They needed to be found. Of course.”

  “Was that our job?”

  “Who knows if it was?”

  “We could have tried harder.”

  “We did what we could.”

  Like a lullaby or a nursery rhyme, the sequence of excuses blends into the voices of the kids on the beach. But this is one song Shay doesn’t sing aloud. She is well aware that on the journey toward separation that is life with even the best-loved children, it is all too easy to lose their respect.

  SARAH THANKAM MATHEWS

  Rubberdust

  FROM Kenyon Review Online

  The little girl with no friends reads contentedly enough at her small wooden desk during recess. (We pronounced it ri-CESS.) She sits by the corner of the softboard, likes to tenderly peel the crepe paper sheets that Mrs. Lobo has stapled to its expanse away from their moorings. From her schoolbag she pulls out Enid Blyton, Roald Dahl. Books about heroic friends solving crime, tales of spunky weirdos forceful enough
to make dents in their worlds. In second grade you read for the same reasons you eat candy bars, not to see yourself reflected at you as if from mirrors, and in this case that’s just as well; the little girl does not fall into either category.

  * * *

  Usually the little girl is smart enough to keep her head down when the other second-grade teachers come to eat their lunches and gossip at Mrs. Lobo’s desk. But Mrs. Tareen, who teaches 3B, is getting divorced (we pronounced it DIE-vorced), and the teachers are all whispering about it, making big-big eyes, saris rustling like dry leaves. The details are almost as riveting as James and the Giant Peach, so the little girl looks up and listens with frank interest, forgetting all subterfuge.

  “Small water pitchers have big ears, hain na?” says Mrs. Azmi, nudging Mrs. Lobo, who is busy telling the rest about how when she went to Mrs. Tareen’s house for Eid, Mr. Tareen touched her sari pallu very suggestively and also complained how his wife always missed the top of the television set when she did dusting.

  They all look up and see the girl staring at them through the fringe of her bowl cut. She looks back down at her book, but it’s too late.

  “You can’t sit here like this, okay,” Mrs. Lobo says, rustling over. “This is not good, okay. Go outside! Challo, go play like a normal child!”

  The teachers giggle as the little girl walks out, biting her lip. She circles the soccer (we pronounced it football ) field, squinting in the noonday sun. Her knee socks have slid down, and she pulls them up, weary as sin itself.

  * * *

  The little boy sneaks up behind her and tries to place a handful of dried leaves on her head. She whips around and says, “Stop it.”

  He keeps doing it. Arcing his arm like a lamp, giggling in a maddening way. And so she slaps him. Bloodying his nose. A teacher sees, and she is sent home with a note safety-pinned to her blouse. She has to have it signed by one of her parents.

  The note says, in a round and spiteful hand, “Did not behave today. Slapped fellow pupil badly.”

  “Next time, slap him well,” her father says.

  He chuckles, which is a grown man’s way of giggling, and hands the note back to her. He lifts his newspaper back up between the two of them like he is closing a door.

  * * *

  In third grade both she and the little boy who salted her with leaves are now in Mrs. Tareen’s class. He is seated at the desk behind her, both of them at the back of the class. Anuj, the boy’s name is. Anuj (we pronounced it Uhn-uj ) is confident, loud, a jokester. He has a toothy, pretty grin.

  In front of her sits a boy who has no friends. His name is Karan. (We pronounced it Curren.) Karan has a lantern jaw, bulbous staring eyes, and a stink that nestles close, follows him like a stray. Even Mrs. Tareen, who is the kindest of all the elementary school teachers, is mean to him.

  During recess Anuj asks the little girl if she wants to go on the swings, and she looks shocked, and then shyly says, Yes, thank you.

  * * *

  Even though she doesn’t turn around to see, a small section of her is aware of Karan sitting at his desk in the now empty classroom, not even a book in front of him, watching the door swing shut, as she and Anuj go out into the bright, hot world.

  * * *

  Anuj’s parents are getting divorced, he says, but he doesn’t care. He spends more time now with the little girl than with his football friends, which delights her even as it makes the two of them the target of ridicule, the object of sitting in a tree rhymes.

  She tries to show him how to draw Minnie Mouse or make paper origami frogs, but he is uninterested. They spend homework period at the end of the day making rubberdust, which is what Anuj calls the tiny pink and gray curls left behind in an eraser’s wake. They do this every day. They store the clumps of rubberdust in the drawer of the little girl’s wooden desk.

  * * *

  “Let’s stare at the sun,” Anuj says.

  They lie on a slope of dry grass, and he squints up into the sky. The girl covers her face with her hands.

  “I can’t do it,” she says.

  “S’okay,” Anuj says.

  It becomes a routine: walk past the football field, pass the guarri hedges, and lie down together, the girl shielding her eyes with her small palms.

  “Let’s play get married,” the little girl suggests from behind her hands during a sun-staring session.

  “Yuck, no. That’s corrupted,” is Anuj’s matter-of-fact rejoinder.

  The rubberdust production continues. Anuj discovers that sawing his steel ruler across his Faber-Castell rubber makes several times the amount of dust. A fourth of the girl’s desk is now full of soft shavings the color of organs. She likes to run her hands through them while Mrs. Tareen writes Hindi vocabulary on the board: नमक$न. बुरा. पुराना. पुराना means “old,” and it also means “story,” the little girl notes.

  * * *

  At some point they start sprinkling the rubberdust on Karan’s head. Biting lips to keep from laughing, they wait until the teacher’s back is turned and pepper it into the naked whorls of his scalp as he bends over penmanship or multiplication tables.

  (Later, neither the little girl nor the person she grows into will remember who started this, she or Anuj. That uncertainty will beat its own tattoo within her, bang a hidden gong of shame.)

  * * *

  Anuj grows bolder and bolder, dropping rubberdust onto Karan nearly every time he walks by him. He has begun to get headaches, leaving for hours to sit in the nurse’s office.

  Mrs. Tareen says, “You need to get your eyes checked, son. Here, take this note to your parents.”

  “My parents don’t care one fart and I don’t need stupid glasses,” Anuj yells, kicking Mrs. Tareen’s desk legs and running out of the room.

  Later he shows the little girl the new rubbers his mom has bought—​large, pliable, pinkly beautiful—​and they get to work.

  * * *

  Anuj’s mother arrives the next day, during homework period. Mrs. Tareen gives namaste, then says, “If I don’t hear pin-drop silence while I’m in the next room, everyone here will be quite, quite sorry. Okay?”

  “Yeeesss, Ma’am,” the denizens of 3B say in chorus. It is testimony to how Mrs. Tareen is both strict and beloved that most every child keeps their head down in their notebooks, yellow HB pencils gripped tight.

  “Okay, fine, challo, let’s get married,” Anuj whispers to the little girl, apropos of nothing. She smiles at him, then raises her eyebrows to signal: watch. She scoops a handful of rubberdust from under the desktop and shows him: she’s been mixing it with color-pencil shavings.

  Hand outstretched, she begins to powder it on Karan’s head. Anuj covers his hands with his mouth to muffle his snickering.

  Karan whips around, facing the little girl. His bulging eyes are full of tears.

  “Why do you do this?” Karan hisses, face twisting, swatting at his own head, and the rubberdust-and-shavings mix dribbles down his forehead and gets into his eyes.

  “Ow, oww.”

  He rubs his eyes furiously, mewling in pain. The little girl’s mouth turns dry like sand.

  She turns around to Anuj, who looks thunderstruck. By now the other children around them are staring, whispering like so many rustling leaves. Karan runs out of the room, hands over his eyes.

  The little girl reaches in and sweeps every bit of rubberdust in her desk into the skirt of her pinafore. Sweat prickles in her armpits and down her back. There is so much of the dust. So much. Why did they do this? Holding the heaps of dry, gray-pink matter in her skirt, she runs to the garbage can. (We called it dustbin.) She shakes out her pinafore, trembling, her ears buzzing. The class’s whispers burrow into her. A sonic drill. She runs out to look for Karan, shoving her palms hard into the swinging door.

  When she finds him outside the boys’ bathroom, his eyes are a bright and burning red. He hunches into himself the second he sees her. (Years later she will look up the w
ord cower in the dictionary, and the image of a child’s bloodshot eyes, lashes wet with hurt, will surface in her and thrash like a fish.)

  “I’m sorry, Karan,” the girl says. “I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry.”

  He turns his head. She wants to cry.

  “Sorry. Please. I’m sorry.”

  “I won’t tell Ma’am” is all he mumbles before starting down the stairs to the nurse’s office, and she doesn’t know how to say that that’s not it, that his tattling isn’t remotely the shape of her fear, that the dark creature that has galloped into her chest and gnaws around her organs might actually be kept at bay if Mrs. Tareen thrashed her, sent her to the principal’s office, wrote Did not behave today across the front of her blouse.

  She goes back to the classroom. Mrs. Tareen is marking corrections at her desk. Everyone is still doing homework. Anuj has put his head down on his desk, arms folded above it like a roof. He is very still, but she can hear his occasional sniffle, hear the too-fast rustle of his breath.

  In front of her, Karan’s chair is empty, stray curls of rubberdust on its wooden seat.

  * * *

  “Can you beat me, please?” she asks her father, but he just changes the TV channel to the India-Pakistan match and then to American news.

  She locks herself in the cupboard and pinches her legs all over.

  * * *

  Anuj’s mother takes him to get glasses. His headaches persist, racking him with an evil, shelling pain. He and the little girl do not talk much anymore.