“I want to submit,” she said, facing the wall, away from him. “But do it so I don’t lose my virginity.” Fly feared she might mean in her bum, which he wasn’t prepared for. He used his fingers on her, while he stroked himself, trying to figure it out. Then, oh goodness, Suzanna started singing. Humming really, but not like a girl in a porno. Like actual singing. All harmony and lovely. Wow, did he love her. He twisted his fingers in her a little; she raised her voice up an octave. He pushed his fingers in more; she trilled.
“Let me know,” he said; “this is my first time too. Let me know, okay?” She didn’t answer, but when he slipped it in, not her ass after all, it was so easy, smooth, wet, sticky. He remembered what she’d asked, so he held his pelvis tight and went slow, slow. She sang sweet, so sweetly. He went a little deeper. “No,” she said, talk now, no music. He felt her clench tight on him like a fist. He pulled back, slowly, and she released him, but even that was . . . well . . . “Jesus, this is good,” he said. Her singing started again. He went in a little, but never all in. He had the idea of what she wanted now. Just a little bit of him, the tip; maybe half of him. No more. Until the too-soon end.
“Was it good?” she asked, facing him now, her arms and legs wrapped around him.
“It was you,” Fly said. “It was perfect.”
7. The Ordeal
Clive leaned into the doorway. Then he righted himself. Fly was lying alone in his bed, but a little alone time was okay these days—he was exhausted with classes and church. Clive put one hand to his chest and the other out like a stop sign. “I’m not saying you’re gay,” Clive started inexplicably. “I’m just, man. I just want you to know that it would be okay if you are. And it would make sense why you’d want your own room, you know. No temptation and no weirding anyone out. I get it. It’s just. That religious cult group . . .” Clive’s hands were still in the same strange position. Hand to chest, other hand out—Fly recognized the gesture. It was like: stop in the name of love, before you break my heart. “But dude,” Clive went on, “they could mess you up, you know. I mean, as far as I can tell, God loves the queers as much as he loves the, um, not queers. I just want you to know that that is how I feel.” Clive dropped his hands.
“Thanks,” said Fly. Clive nodded and then turned around. He stood in the doorway for a minute with his back to Fly. Fly was trying to get some reading done; Suzanna would be over soon. And sex with her, holding back the way she needed him to, was tiring but thrilling, and afterward he would collapse and sleep like, well, like a teenager who’d just had sex. But Clive was still standing in the doorway, and now he turned back around. “Listen. Look.” Clive looked at the chair at Fly’s desk longingly, as if he wanted to sit down. “I didn’t make myself clear just now.” Fly felt bad for the guy; he’d made himself clear enough. “It’s just . . .” Clive seemed distraught. “Dude, listen. I’ve seen this before.” He stared at Fly pointedly until Fly realized he was supposed to ask something.
“Seen what before?”
“This group. This girl. Specifically, this girl.”
Fly wanted to sit up, wanted to face Clive, punch Clive’s face, face off in some way. But instead the tension gathered inside Fly’s body. Quietly, it gathered. He felt the sweat trickling down his neck.
“I’ve seen her with other guys. Other freshmen. Gay guys mostly. She turns them straight. Or tries to. Or something. Breaks their hearts. Because a man still has a heart. You know. Straight or . . .” Clive made his hand wiggle like a fish, “still a man. A human being.”
Fly had the question ready for Suzanna: Do you love me or are you missioning to me for the love of God? Is our sex lovemaking? Or is it conversion therapy? Just because I was lonely doesn’t mean I was gay. And was lonely what gay people were anyway? Fly, again, didn’t think he’d ever spoken to a gay guy. Though Fly was pretty sure he’d been lonely his whole life. But then Fly didn’t ask Suzanna anything when she came that night. Wanted to. Really did. Couldn’t.
8. Atonement with the Father
Instead he dropped Sue off at her dorm room. Then he got in his car and drove home. Did it fast, under an hour. It was late, and the house was dark. He went to his bedroom, straight. He quietly opened his childhood closet, which had been his only closet until just a few months ago. He was looking for the porno video he’d had all these years. The one he’d kept and treasured, the one that had taught him what sex could be. He pulled the video out from beneath the magazines of white girls, which were stacked beneath the magazines of black girls. He cracked the video case. Then he carefully cracked the video itself. Unspooled the film. Sliced it to pieces with a knife from his mother’s kitchen drawer. Left the house with the slaughtered tape, dumped the scraps of it before he got back to campus. Never even woke his parents.
That was a Friday. The next day his mother called to cry that his father was leaving her. Fly drove home again that Saturday. He went to his father’s little office in the house. The older man was crowded in there, and Fly could tell that he’d been sleeping there at least a few days, maybe weeks—hell, maybe since Fly had left for college. Fly scowled silently at his father boxing things up. All the ridiculous goggles and respirator masks. All the rat-repelling handbooks. Fly wanted to curse or punch, but he couldn’t tell what was his place. His father spoke up first. “She wasn’t with us in the pictures,” he said. “She was separate. Alone on the mantel. And that made all the difference.” Which Fly didn’t understand then, and never fully understood either, though after a few slow seconds he realized the “she” was his dad’s ex-girlfriend, the same one from the videotape Fly had dumped the day before.
But the elder man didn’t seem to be talking to Fly at all, hadn’t looked at him yet. He had a book in his hand and was placing it in a box. Instead he looked at the book. Then he finally looked at Fly. He passed the book to Fly wordlessly—Invisible Man, by Ralph Ellison. Fly’s first copy. It should have been a thing. An occasion, religious-like. But it wasn’t.
Fly walked away. Walked down the hallway to his own bedroom. His mother was in the kitchen cooking chicken and rice and a baked ziti and a lasagna and whatever else she could fit onto the stove and into the oven. Fly couldn’t face her, was humiliated for her. Was for himself too. Divorce was an embarrassing admission, either of failure or of a deeply consequential mistake. Either way, awful. Fly was trying to be a man about it.
He felt exhausted but went back down the hallway again. His father was taping the boxes now. The tape made a loud screeching noise when pulled across the box, was ripped with a violence at its jagged cutting edge. Fly took a deep breath and started in on his father: “I mean, really. Mom put up with you. Clenching your fists every time you heard the voices. And you doing your stupid Hindu meditation chants, or praying to Allah or worshipping anything that anyone else had ever worshipped. Because you couldn’t stand yourself. I mean, for years Mom has put up with you. The least you could do was stay by her.” Fly’s hands were shaking, his arms were glistening with an anxious sweat.
Fly’s father looked up at him. But then Fly had to turn away, head back down the hallway, because his father was crying. And so was Fly.
9. The Road Back
Fly headed back down the hallway. He had never seen his father cry before. This was a vexing thing to realize, because Fly had always thought his father was weak, the mental illness and all. But his father, he realized, had never cried in front of him. Was Dad off his pills? Or was he also devastated by his own leaving? Fly was too devastated himself to consider this much, so Fly drove back to campus, his own tears obscuring his vision. He imagined getting pulled over, getting handcuffed unfairly by a police officer; he imagined spitting in the cop’s face, getting so brave and angry he could use his own head to smash the cop’s head in. But Fly felt tired just thinking about it. The steering wheel was slick, and he realized it was his own hands sweating. He drove so slowly.
The pain clamped onto his chest as soon as he hit the bed. It hurt so badly
he was sure he’d fallen on something hard, but only his soft pillow was there beneath him. The pain was on the left side, where his heart was—it was broken, his heart was.
The next day when Suzanna came to walk with him to church he was still in bed, sweating and in agony. Who knew divorce could feel like this? Suzanna held back at the door, looking at him in horror. “Divorce?” she said, snarling like it was contagious.
“My heart is breaking,” he said. The fatigue was in Fly’s bones, in his skin—his teeth felt tired. He didn’t notice the exact moment when Suzanna left. Had she made it to church?
Later Clive leaned into the threshold, but almost fell over. “Oh, shit,” he said. When health services came, they came with a stretcher.
“Mono,” the nurse practitioner made clear.
“A sexually transmitted disease?” Arthur said when he and Suzie passed by Fly’s dorm room that night. Fly was less sweaty now, but still beat.
“Sorry I didn’t come earlier,” Suzie said. “A girl got saved so I had to stay and pray for her. You don’t have a cell phone, so . . .”
“It wasn’t my heart,” Fly explained, though Suzie’s eyes were so big and he was so tired. “It was my spleen. Swollen. But I’ll be fine.”
But of course he wasn’t fine. His mother had to come get him. His teachers had to get a formal letter excusing him from exams. His final grades would be the grades he’d earned so far, which was good, because he’d barely read a thing since he and Suzanna had started having sex. Fly slept until Christmas, it felt like. Didn’t feel rested until New Year’s. His father came once to visit him.
When the spring semester started, Fly was pretty much better. Suzie came to his dorm room the first day back. She came to tell him before he heard it elsewhere. “I was saving myself for the man God created for me,” she said, looking Fly in the face with the authority of a grown woman. Arthur had actually given Suzanna a real engagement ring; it gleamed like a miracle on her finger.
* * *
So Fly was alone again. Four classes this semester. Another music, an English, and an algebra for the gen-ed requirement, plus an African drumming class for his soul. The English teacher was uninspiring, assigned them stupid stuff, like Harry Potter, which Fly felt was beneath him. For the midterm they had to memorize the various stages of “The Hero’s Journey,” a form the teacher professed was the basis for all Great Narratives. This seemed like such a stupid thing to say that Fly lost all respect for the professor immediately.
But Fly could memorize a list. Critical thinking was beyond him these days; the mono had addled his brain. Or maybe it was the actual heartbreak this time. But he could do the basics (reproduce the algebraic formulas, plug them in), though he never understood the mathematical meaning. What did it matter? Anything that followed a formula was useless anyhow. Still, alone in his room lonely Fly started charting his own life in his notebook—applying the hero’s quest to the life he’d lived thus far. But no matter where he started the story he couldn’t find his way to a resurrection. So he plugged in his father’s life, what he knew of it. There must be a complete narrative in there—his dad had lived long enough. But no, there was no heroic return for Fly’s father. There never would be.
Contributors’ Notes
SELENA ANDERSON’S stories have appeared or are forthcoming in Oxford American, American Short Fiction, BOMB, Callaloo, and Fence. She is a recipient of the 2019 Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award and has received fellowships from the Kimbilio Center, the MacDowell Colony, and the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference. Anderson is an assistant professor at San José State University and director of the Center for Literary Arts. She is working on a novel.
■ When I began “Godmother Tea,” I noticed that I kept getting all this furniture. I had my own apartment, which was crappy, but it was mine all month, every month, so I became very focused on filling it up with things. Having furniture meant that you were rooted to a place. Instead of only wanting things, you had things. Most of my furniture was hand-me-downs, something I found in a consignment store and fixed up as best I could. Nothing cost me more than $100. I couldn’t afford anything nice. My only show of success was that I could live without roommates.
I was thinking about Joy and the furniture in her apartment, about what it looks like when she’s alone. Since objects tend to take on the personality of the person who uses them, I got to know her pretty quickly. I saw her standing in front of this mirror with the gold edge and little gold feet, sizing herself up and practicing her explanations. When you look in a mirror you see yourself, but you also see a mess of other people who came before. Simply by looking, you’re reconciling yourself in a long line of these folks. I wanted to play with this idea of being your ancestors’ greatest dream—I keep seeing T-shirts that say this. But when you’re young and struggling, you’re more likely to think they’re disappointed. The godmother is an extension of what Joy is both seeing and avoiding. She’s basically there to cook amazing meals and give cutting straight talk. The horrible thing isn’t so much hearing an important person’s worst opinion of you as it is feeling your own body agree with them. Joy is in a spell where moments like this are happening on loop. She eventually gets beyond it, but none of that resolution stuff was up to her either.
Last, I just want to say that I’ve been reading Best American Short Stories since college, and it’s an honor to be included.
T. C. BOYLE is the author of twenty-nine books of fiction, including Outside Looking In (2019), The Relive Box and Other Stories (2017), and The Tortilla Curtain (1995), which will be repackaged this fall in a new twenty-fifth anniversary edition. He published his collected stories in two volumes, T. C. Boyle Stories (1998) and T. C. Boyle Stories II (2013), and has been the recipient of a number of awards, both in the short story, including the Rea Award and the PEN/Malamud Prize, and the novel, including most recently the Jonathan Swift Creative Writing Award, the Mark Twain Voice in American Literature Award, and the Henry David Thoreau Award. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
■ As I creep through Shakespeare’s seven stages of life (I’m now knocking on the door to the final one, “second childishness and mere oblivion,/Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”), I’ve necessarily become more attuned to the vicissitudes of old age, and notions, however transparent, of eternity. This is where Jeanne Calment (1875–1997) comes into the picture. Madame Calment was the longest-lived human being in recorded history, having continued to live, breathe, and pump blood into her one hundred and twenty-third year. What would it be like, I wondered, to live that long? Would it be a burden or a daily revivifying challenge to beat the odds, especially as one competitor or another shuffled off the mortal coil? The historical figure of Jeanne Calment, by virtue of her astonishing longevity, has already morphed into the mythological, and it was that mythological status I wanted to explore.
Happily, my entry point into the story was provided by the figure I call Monsieur R., who took a gamble any oddsmaker would have applauded when he contracted to buy Madame Calment’s apartment en viager—that is, allowing her to live there and collect a stipend until such time as she should die and he could take possession. But here’s the rub—as with any bet, there’s no such thing as a sure thing.
JASON BROWN’S linked collection of short stories, A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed, was published in 2019. He has two other books of short stories, Driving the Heart and Why the Devil Chose New England for His Work. He is an associate professor of creative writing in the MFA program at the University of Oregon.
■ “A Faithful but Melancholy Account of Several Barbarities Lately Committed,” the title story for my new collection, is loosely based on my family, who have lived in Maine and northern New England since my first ancestor arrived in Maine in 1607 as part of the failed Popham Colony. I always start stories with situation and character, in this case a fake wedding at an old family homest
ead on an island off the coast of Maine and an old patriarch obsessed with what will happen to the homestead after he is gone. Once I dove into the familiar surroundings and once the characters began to stand up and speak for themselves, I started to think about the larger context of the story—the history. Questions of history are in the background of the story, as they should be, but the past is always with us, whether we recognize it or not. The story’s title is from a Cotton Mather pamphlet on atrocities committed against the English settlers “by the said French and Indians.” My use of the title is ironic, of course. The numerous wars over the coast of Maine between, on the one side, the English and Scottish settlers and, on the other side, the French and Native inhabitants resulted in a genocide that all but completely wiped out the Native population of northern New England. The death of Cotton Mather, the great narrator of Puritan paranoia and exceptionalism, signaled the end of an Anglo-Puritan theocracy in America, but much of the underlying psychology of the early New England Puritans—particularly their sense of themselves as a chosen people—has survived in their distant, modern-day progeny. I have tried to capture a family living in the ruins of the “city upon a hill.”
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