The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  Rand’s latest email had an attached news story: five westerners suspected of sex tourism gunned down by an Islamic group in an alley behind a hotel in Manila. He thinks his ideas guy was one of them and wonders if I want to come back to San Francisco to be his new number two. It’s easy, he says. Mostly just reading CNET and Fast Company and Red Herring and writing memos about possible avenues for expansion. “You don’t even have to write the memos,” he writes. “Just keep shoveling the money out the door.”

  I haven’t emailed him back. I don’t know what to do. I know this: if I leave Pensacola, I’ll never come back.

  Boom-splash. The pelicans take these kamikaze plunges into the water. The way they hit, not one should survive—but of course, they all do. They come up with their beaks full of fish.

  NATHAN ENGLANDER

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

  FROM The New Yorker

  THEY’RE IN OUR HOUSE maybe ten minutes and already Mark’s lecturing us on the Israeli occupation. Mark and Lauren live in Jerusalem, and people from there think it gives them the right.

  Mark is looking all stoic and nodding his head. “If we had what you have down here in South Florida,” he says, and trails off. “Yup,” he says, and he’s nodding again. “We’d have no troubles at all.”

  “You do have what we have,” I tell him. “All of it. Sun and palm trees. Old Jews and oranges and the worst drivers around. At this point, we’ve probably got more Israelis than you.” Debbie, my wife, puts a hand on my arm—her signal that I’m either taking a tone, interrupting someone’s story, sharing something private, or making an inappropriate joke. That’s my cue, and I’m surprised, considering how often I get it, that she ever lets go of my arm.

  “Yes, you’ve got everything now,” Mark says. “Even terrorists.”

  I look at Lauren. She’s the one my wife has the relationship with—the one who should take charge. But Lauren isn’t going to give her husband any signal. She and Mark ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hasidic, and neither of them will put a hand on the other in public. Not for this. Not to put out a fire.

  “Wasn’t Mohamed Atta living right here before 9/11?” Mark says, and now he pantomimes pointing out houses. “Goldberg, Goldberg, Goldberg—Atta. How’d you miss him in this place?”

  “Other side of town,” I say.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what you have that we don’t. Other sides of town. Wrong sides of the tracks. Space upon space.” And now he’s fingering the granite countertop in our kitchen, looking out into the living room and the dining room, staring through the kitchen windows at the pool. “All this house,” he says, “and one son? Can you imagine?”

  “No,” Lauren says. And then she turns to us, backing him up. “You should see how we live with ten.”

  “Ten kids,” I say. “We could get you a reality show with that here in the States. Help you get a bigger place.”

  The hand is back pulling at my sleeve. “Pictures,” Debbie says. “I want to see the girls.” We all follow Lauren into the den for her purse.

  “Do you believe it?” Mark says. “Ten girls!” And the way it comes out of his mouth, it’s the first time I like the guy. The first time I think about giving him a chance.

  Facebook and Skype brought Deb and Lauren back together. They were glued at the hip growing up. Went all the way through school together. Yeshiva school. All girls. Out in Queens till high school and then riding the subway together to one called Central in Manhattan. They stayed best friends until I married Deb and turned her secular, and soon after that Lauren met Mark and they went off to the Holy Land and shifted from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent—ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power. Because of that, we’re supposed to call them Shoshana and Yerucham now. Deb’s been doing it. I’m just not saying their names.

  “You want some water?” I offer. “Coke in the can?”

  “‘You’—which of us?” Mark says.

  “You both,” I say. “Or I’ve got whiskey. Whiskey’s kosher too, right?”

  “If it’s not, I’ll kosher it up real fast,” he says, pretending to be easygoing. And right then he takes off that big black hat and plops down on the couch in the den.

  Lauren’s holding the verticals aside and looking out at the yard. “Two girls from Forest Hills,” she says. “Who ever thought we’d be the mothers of grownups?”

  “Trevor’s sixteen,” Deb says. “You may think he’s a grownup, and he may think he’s a grownup—but we are not convinced.”

  Right then is when Trev comes padding into the den, all six feet of him, plaid pajama bottoms dragging on the floor and T-shirt full of holes. He’s just woken up, and you can tell he’s not sure if he’s still dreaming. We told him we had guests. But there’s Trev, staring at this man in the black suit, a beard resting on his belly. And Lauren, I met her once before, right when Deb and I got married, but ten girls and a thousand Shabbos dinners later—well, she’s a big woman, in a bad dress and a giant blond Marilyn Monroe wig. Seeing them at the door, I can’t say I wasn’t shocked myself.

  “Hey,” he says.

  And then Deb’s on him, preening and fixing his hair and hugging him. “Trevy, this is my best friend from childhood,” she says. “This is Shoshana, and this is—”

  “Mark,” I say.

  “Yerucham,” Mark says, and sticks out a hand. Trev shakes it. Then Trev sticks out his hand, polite, to Lauren. She looks at it, just hanging there in the air.

  “I don’t shake,” she says. “But I’m so happy to see you. Like meeting my own son. I mean it.” And here she starts to cry, and then she and Deb are hugging. And the boys, we just stand there until Mark looks at his watch and gets himself a good manly grip on Trev’s shoulder.

  “Sleeping until three on a Sunday? Man, those were the days,” Mark says. “A regular little Rumpleforeskin.” Trev looks at me, and I want to shrug, but Mark’s also looking, so I don’t move. Trev just gives us both his best teenage glare and edges out of the room. As he does, he says, “Baseball practice,” and takes my car keys off the hook by the door to the garage.

  “There’s gas,” I say.

  “They let them drive here at sixteen?” Mark says. “Insane.”

  “So what brings you here after all these years?” I say.

  “My mother,” Mark says. “She’s failing, and my father’s getting old—and they come to us for Sukkot every year. You know?”

  “I know the holidays.”

  “They used to fly out to us. For Sukkot and Pesach, both. But they can’t fly now, and I just wanted to get over while things are still good. We haven’t been in America—”

  “Oh, gosh,” Lauren says. “I’m afraid to think how long it’s been. More than ten years. Twelve,” she says. “With the kids, it’s just impossible until enough of them are big.”

  “How do you do it?” Deb says. “Ten kids? I really do want to hear.”

  That’s when I remember. “I forgot your drink,” I say to Mark.

  “Yes, his drink. That’s how,” Lauren says. “That’s how we cope.”

  And that’s how the four of us end up back at the kitchen table with a bottle of vodka between us. I’m not one to get drunk on a Sunday afternoon, but, I tell you, when the plan is to spend the day with Mark I jump at the chance. Deb’s drinking too, but not for the same reason. I think she and Lauren are reliving a little bit of the wild times. The very small window when they were together, barely grown up, two young women living in New York on the edge of two worlds.

  Deb says, “This is really racy for us. I mean, really racy. We try not to drink much at all these days. We think it sets a bad example for Trevor. It’s not good to drink in front of them right at this age when they’re all transgressive. He’s suddenly so interested in that kind of thing.”

  “I’m just happy when he’s interested in something,” I say.

  Deb slaps at
the air. “I just don’t think it’s good to make drinking look like it’s fun with a teenager around.”

  Lauren smiles and straightens her wig. “Does anything we do look fun to our kids?”

  I laugh at that. Honestly, I’m liking her more and more.

  “It’s the age limit that does it,” Mark says. “It’s the whole American puritanical thing, the twenty-one-year-old drinking age and all that. We don’t make a big deal about it in Israel, and so the kids, they don’t even notice alcohol. Except for the foreign workers on Fridays, you hardly see anyone drunk at all.”

  “The workers and the Russians,” Lauren says.

  “The Russian immigrants,” he says, “that’s a whole separate matter. Most of them, you know, not even Jews.”

  “What does that mean?” I say.

  “It means matrilineal descent, is what it means,” Mark says. “With the Ethiopians there were conversions.”

  But Deb wants to keep us away from politics, and the way we’re arranged, me in between them and Deb opposite (it’s a round table, our kitchen table), she practically has to throw herself across to grab hold of my arm. “Fix me another,” she says.

  And here she switches the subject to Mark’s parents. “How’s the visit been going?” she says, her face all somber. “How are your folks holding up?”

  Deb is very interested in Mark’s parents. They’re Holocaust survivors. And Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to me too. All I’m saying is there’s healthy and unhealthy, and my wife, she gives the subject a lot of time.

  “What can I say?” Mark says. “My mother’s a very sick woman. And my father, he tries to keep his spirits up. He’s a tough guy.”

  “I’m sure,” I say. Then I look down at my drink, all serious, and give a shake of my head. “They really are amazing.”

  “Who?” Mark says. “Fathers?”

  I look back up and they’re all staring at me. “Survivors,” I say, realizing I jumped the gun.

  “There’s good and bad,” Mark says. “Like anyone else.”

  Lauren says, “The whole of Carmel Lake Village, it’s like a D.P. camp with a billiards room.”

  “One tells the other, and they follow,” Mark says. “From Europe to New York, and now, for the end of their lives, again the same place.”

  “Tell them that crazy story, Yuri,” Lauren says.

  “Tell us,” Deb says.

  “So you can picture my father,” Mark says. “In the old country, he went to heder, had the peyes and all that. But in America a classic galusmonger. He looks more like you than me. It’s not from him that I get this,” he says, pointing at his beard. “Shoshana and I—”

  “We know,” I say.

  “So my father. They’ve got a nice nine-hole course, a driving range, some greens for the practice putting. And my dad’s at the clubhouse. I go with him. He wants to work out in the gym, he says. Tells me I should come. Get some exercise. And he tells me”—and here Mark points at his feet, sliding a leg out from under the table so we can see his big black clodhoppers—“‘You can’t wear those Shabbos shoes on the treadmill. You need the sneakers. You know, sports shoes?’ And I tell him, ‘I know what sneakers are. I didn’t forget my English any more than your Yiddish is gone.’ So he says, ‘Ah shaynem dank dir in pupik.’ Just to show me who’s who.”

  “Tell them the point,” Lauren says.

  “He’s sitting in the locker room, trying to pull a sock on, which is, at that age, basically the whole workout in itself. It’s no quick business. And I see, while I’m waiting, and I can’t believe it—I nearly pass out. The guy next to him, the number on his arm, it’s three before my father’s number. You know, in sequence.”

  “What do you mean?” Deb says.

  “I mean the number tattooed. It’s the same as my father’s camp number, digit for digit, but my father’s ends in an eight. And this guy’s, it ends in a five. That’s the only difference. I mean, they’re separated by two people. So I say, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ And the guy just says, ‘You with the Chabad? I don’t want anything but to be left alone. I already got candles at home.’ I tell him, ‘No. I’m not. I’m here visiting my father.’ And to my father I say, ‘Do you know this gentleman? Have you two met? I’d really like to introduce you, if you haven’t.’ And they look each other over for what, I promise you, is minutes. Actual minutes. It is—with kavod I say this, with respect for my father—but it is like watching a pair of big beige manatees sitting on a bench, each with one sock on. They’re just looking each other up and down, everything slow. And then my father says, ‘I seen him. Seen him around.’ The other guy, he says, ‘Yes, I’ve seen.’ ‘You’re both survivors,’ I tell them. ‘Look. The numbers.’ And they look. ‘They’re the same,’ I say. And they both hold out their arms to look at the little ashen tattoos. To my father I say, ‘Do you get it? The same, except his—it’s right ahead of yours. Look! Compare.’ So they look. They compare.” Mark’s eyes are popping out of his head. “Think about it,” he says. “Around the world, surviving the unsurvivable, these two old guys end up with enough money to retire to Carmel Lake and play golf every day. So I say to my dad, ‘He’s right ahead of you. Look, a five,’ I say. ‘And yours is an eight.’ And my father says, ‘All that means is he cut ahead of me in line. There same as here. This guy’s a cutter. I just didn’t want to say.’ ‘Blow it out your ear,’ the other guy says. And that’s it. Then they get back to putting on socks.”

  Deb looks crestfallen. She was expecting something empowering. Some story with which to educate Trevor, to reaffirm her belief in the humanity that, from inhumanity, forms.

  But me, I love that kind of story. I’m starting to take a real shine to these two, and not just because I’m suddenly feeling sloshed.

  “Good story, Yuri,” I say, copying his wife. “Yerucham, that one’s got zing.”

  Yerucham hoists himself up from the table, looking proud. He checks the label of our white bread on the counter, making sure it’s kosher. He takes a slice, pulls off the crust, and rolls the white part against the countertop with the palm of his hand, making a little ball. He comes over and pours himself a shot and throws it back. Then he eats that crazy dough ball. Just tosses it in his mouth, as if it’s the bottom of his own personal punctuation mark—you know, to underline his story.

  “Is that good?” I say.

  “Try it,” he says. He goes to the counter and pitches me a slice of white bread, and says, “But first pour yourself a shot.”

  I reach for the bottle and find that Deb’s got her hands around it, and her head’s bowed down, like the bottle is anchoring her, keeping her from tipping back.

  “Are you okay, Deb?” Lauren says.

  “It’s because it was funny,” I say.

  “Honey!” Deb says.

  “She won’t tell you, but she’s a little obsessed with the Holocaust. That story—no offense, Mark—it’s not what she had in mind.”

  I should leave it be, I know. But it’s not like someone from Deb’s high school is around every day offering insights.

  “It’s like she’s a survivor’s kid, my wife. It’s crazy, that education they give them. Her grandparents were all born in the Bronx, and here we are twenty minutes from downtown Miami but it’s like it’s 1937 and we live on the edge of Berlin.”

  “That’s not it!” Deb says, openly defensive, her voice super high up in the register. “I’m not upset about that. It’s the alcohol. All this alcohol. It’s that and seeing Lauren. Seeing Shoshana, after all this time.”

  “Oh, she was always like this in high school,” Shoshana says. “Sneak one drink, and she started to cry. You want to know what used to get her going, what would make her truly happy?” Shoshana says. “It was getting high. That’s what always did it. Smoking up. It would make her laugh for hours and hours.”

  And, I tell you, I didn’t see it coming. I’m as bli
ndsided as Deb was by that numbers story.

  “Oh, my God,” Deb says, and she’s pointing at me. “Look at my big bad secular husband. He really can’t handle it. He can’t handle his wife’s having any history of naughtiness at all—Mr. Liberal Open-Minded.” To me she says, “How much more chaste a wife can you dream of than a modern-day yeshiva girl who stayed a virgin until twenty-one? Honestly. What did you think Shoshana was going to say was so much fun?”

  “Honestly-honestly?” I say. “I don’t want to. It’s embarrassing.”

  “Say it!” Deb says, positively glowing.

  “Honestly, I thought you were going to say it was something like competing in the Passover Nut Roll, or making sponge cake. Something like that.” I hang my head. And Shoshana and Deb are laughing so hard they can’t breathe. They’re grabbing at each other so that I can’t tell if they’re holding each other up or pulling each other down.

  “I can’t believe you told him about the nut roll,” Shoshana says.

  “And I can’t believe,” Deb says, “you just told my husband of twenty-two years how much we used to get high. I haven’t touched a joint since before we were married,” she says. “Have we, honey? Have we smoked since we got married?”

  “No,” I say. “It’s been a very long time.”

  “So come on, Shosh. When was it? When was the last time you smoked?”

  Now, I know I mentioned the beard on Mark. But I don’t know if I mentioned how hairy a guy he is. That thing grows right up to his eyeballs. Like having eyebrows on top and bottom both. So when Deb asks the question, the two of them, Shosh and Yuri, are basically giggling like children, and I can tell, in the little part that shows, in the bit of skin I can see, that Mark’s eyelids and earlobes are in full blush.