The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  Avie remembered that she and Grace had made jokes about Marsha, whom they saw as the sort of dim and tiresome girl who would not even mind becoming a high school teacher and would never have a man after her in her life.

  “Somebody said she had colitis,” Marsha said. “That’s when you get all swollen, isn’t it? That would be miserable.”

  Avie went home and wrote thank-you notes, which she had been neglecting to do. She mailed the presents that were going to Kenora. Hugo had his first teaching job there, in the high school. He had rented an apartment for them to live in. Perhaps in a year they could get a house.

  In the summer, when he was working at Labatt, they’d had one of their pregnancy scares, but it had turned out to be all right. So they’d gone camping on Civic Holiday weekend, to celebrate, and for the first time it had seemed that they were truly in love. It was also the first time that they had really gotten pregnant, and they had announced that they would be getting married in Kenora very soon, before she began to show.

  They were not unhappy about it.

  In what was once called the club car, on the train from Toronto to Montreal, Avie is on her way to visit one of her daughters. She and Hugo had six children in the end, all grown now. Hugo has been dead for a year and a half. Except for those couple of years in Kenora, he spent his entire teaching career in Thunder Bay. Avie never had a job, and nobody expected her to have one, with all those children. But she had more spare time than anybody would have thought, and she spent most of it reading. When the great switch came in women’s lives—when wives and mothers who had seemed content suddenly announced that it was not so, when they all started sitting on the floor instead of on sofas, and took university courses and wrote poetry and fell in love with their professors or their psychiatrists or their chiropractors, and began to say “shit” and “fuck” instead of “darn” and “heck”—Avie was never tempted to join in. Maybe she was too fastidious, too proud. Maybe Hugo was just too much of a sitting duck. Maybe she loved him. At any rate, she was as she was, and reading Leonard Cohen wouldn’t be any help to her.

  Since being widowed, however, she has read less. She has stared out of windows more. Her children say that she is withdrawing into herself. On this train ride she hasn’t bothered much with her book, though it is a good one.

  The man across from her has glanced at her a couple of times and is now studying her quite openly. He says, “Avie?”

  It’s Royce. He doesn’t look so different, after all.

  Their conversation is easy, covering at first the usual ground. The six children are marveled at. He says that you’d never know it to look at her. He didn’t remember Hugo’s name but is sorry to hear that he’s dead. He’s surprised at the idea that you can live a whole life in Port Arthur. Or Thunder Bay, as it is now called.

  They drink gin and tonics. She tells him that Hugo had no apprehensions at all. He died sitting in his chair, watching the news.

  Royce has traveled. Lived in various places. He taught geology, though he is now retired.

  Did he marry?

  No. Oh, no. And no children that he knows of.

  He says this with the slight twinkle that usually accompanies this statement, in Avie’s experience.

  Now he has a peach of a retirement job. The best job ever, except for geology. In eastern Ontario, as it turns out. Where he is heading now. Gananoque.

  He describes the old fort there, the fort built at the mouth of the St. Lawrence River to withstand the American invasion that never came. The most important of the chain of forts along the Rideau Canal. It has been preserved intact, not as a replica but as the thing itself. He shows people around, gives them a history lesson. It’s shocking how little people know. Not just the Americans, of whom you expect it. Canadians too.

  He has written a little book about the Rideau. It’s for sale in the Gananoque fort. He managed to get a good deal of the geology into it as well as the history. He went into the field a bit late to make his mark. But why not try to tell people about it? Now he is coming home from a trip he made to Toronto, to try to interest some booksellers there. Some of them took a few copies on spec.

  Avie says that one of her daughters works for a publisher in Toronto.

  He sighs.

  “It’s uphill, really,” he says abruptly. “People don’t always see in it what you see yourself. But you’re okay, I guess. You’ve got your kids.”

  “Well, after a point,” Avie says, “after a point, you know, they’re just people. I mean, they’re yours, of course. But they’re really—they’re people you know.”

  God strike me dead, she thinks.

  “I remember something,” he says, much more cheerfully. “I remember I was on a bus, and I was going through the town where you lived. I don’t know if I knew beforehand that it was where you lived, but there I saw you on the street. I just happened to be on the right side of the bus to see you. I was going farther north. I was going to see a girl I knew then.”

  “Grace.”

  “That’s right. You were friends with her. Anyway, I saw you there on the sidewalk talking to somebody and I thought you looked just irresistible. You were laughing away. I wanted to get right off the bus and speak to you. Make a date with you, actually. I couldn’t very well not turn up where I was expected, but I could meet you on my way back. I thought, That’s what I could do—make a date to meet you on the way back. I actually did know something about you, now that I think of it. I knew that you were going around with somebody, but I thought, Well, make a try for it.”

  “I never knew,” Avie says. “I never knew you were there.”

  “And then, as it happened, I didn’t come back the same way, so I wouldn’t have been wherever you were waiting, so it would have been botched all round.”

  “I never knew.”

  “Well, if you had known, would you have agreed? If I’d said, ‘Be at such-and-such a place, such-and-such a time,’ would you have been there?”

  Avie doesn’t hesitate. “Oh, yes,” she says.

  “With the complications and all?”

  “Yes.”

  “So it’s a good thing? That we didn’t make contact?”

  She does not even try for an answer.

  He says, “Water under the bridge.” Then he leans back into the headrest and closes his eyes.

  “Wake me up before we’re into Kingston if I’ve gone to sleep,” he says. “There’s something I want to be sure to show you.”

  Not so far off from giving her automatic orders, like a husband.

  He wakens without any prompting from her, if he ever was asleep. They sit in the train at the Kingston station while people get on and off, and he tells her it’s not yet. When the train starts up again, he explains that all around them are great slabs of limestone packed in order, one on top of the other, like a grand construction. But in one spot this gives way, he says, and you can see something else. It’s what is known as the Frontenac Axis. It is nothing less than an eruption of the vast and crazy old Canadian Shield, all the ancient combustion cutting through the limestone, pouring over, messing up those giant steps.

  “See! See!” he says, and she does see. Remarkable.

  “Remember to watch for that if you come through again,” he says. “You can’t really look at it from a car—there’s too much traffic. Why I take the train.”

  “Thank you,” she says.

  He doesn’t answer but turns away, nods a little with what seems to be important assent.

  “Thank you,” she says again. “I’ll remember.”

  Nods once more, doesn’t look at her. Enough.

  When that first pregnancy was well advanced, around Christmastime, Avie had received a brief letter from Grace.

  “I hear you are married and expecting. You may not have heard I have dropped out of college, due to some troubles I have had with my health and my nerves. I often think of our talks and particularly the dream you told me about. It still scares the daylights out of m
e. Love, Grace.”

  Avie remembered then the conversation with Marsha. The colitis. The tone of Grace’s letter seemed off kilter, with some pleading note in it that made her put off answering. She herself was feeling quite happy at the time, full of practical concerns, light- years away from whatever stuff they had talked about in college. She didn’t know if she could ever find her way back there or find a way to talk to Grace as she was now. And later, of course, she got too busy.

  She asks Royce if he heard anything from Grace, ever.

  “No. No. Why should I?”

  “I just thought.”

  “No.”

  “I thought you might have looked her up later on.”

  “Not a good idea.”

  She has disappointed him. Prying. Trying to get at some spot of live regret right under the ribs. A woman.

  LAWRENCE OSBORNE

  Volcano

  FROM Tin House

  SIX MONTHS AFTER she divorced her husband, Martha Fink packed her bags and flew to Honolulu to attend a lucid-dreaming seminar at the Kalani resort on the Big Island of Hawaii. She had discovered the faithless Donald in the same position that the wife of Samuel Pepys had discovered the London diarist in, three hundred years before: copulating with the family maid. “I was deep inside her cunny,” Pepys admitted that night in his diary, “and indeed I was at a wondrous loss to explain it.”

  Martha filed for divorce. She collected the apartment on Central Park West and a considerable sum of money, then went to counseling. Lovers did not materialize to replace the discarded husband. She became yet more enraged, went on Zoloft, and finally decided that her eighteen years of therapy and dietary rigor had not, in the end, helped her very much to face the endgame of biology itself. Growing older had proved a formidable calamity.

  Nothing saves you from it, she realized. Not irony, certainly, or dieting or gyms or drugs or the possession of children and priceless friends. Nothing saves the declining human from the facts of her decline except the promises of work. And that had not saved her either, because, unluckily, she hated her work. She detested it more and more. A lawyer, she now realized, should always maintain extracurricular passions, and she had not. Her lifelong practicality and good humor had not sustained her either, and her fine skin and aristocratic profile felt to her increasingly insufficient, if not wasted. There was now just Hawaii and dreams. The resort, run by two gay dancers, was next to an active volcano.

  She spent a night on Waikiki in a high-rise hotel called the Aston. The city seemed compressed, airless and suffocating. A nightmare of dullness and saturation, of Burberry and Shiseido, of families braying on the far side of thin walls. Her room was filled with red neon.

  She wept all night, strung out on sleeping pills. In the morning, she went to the old Sheraton for coffee in a courtyard of banyans and squabbling pintails. It was now called the Manoa Surfrider, and there was Soviet-looking architecture all around. She sat there for some hours. She felt herself coming apart. The sun did not cheer her up; there was no charm whatsoever in the colonial affect of her surroundings, a style that could be called New Jersey Tropical.

  She went to Pearl Harbor in the afternoon. Sappy music played, and the crowd was hustled along like cattle. “Each visitor can contemplate his innermost responses and feelings.” In the bus back to Waikiki, she saw a poster for Dr. Rosa Christian Harfouche, a preacher selling Signs, Wonders, and Miracles. The streets were full of federal detention centers and ukulele stores. Not a single attractive human. Suddenly she felt years older than forty-six.

  She waited tensely for her flight to Hilo.

  From the air, the islands regained their beauty. They seemed far-flung again, imposing, like sacred statues lying on their sides. The sea was immense, like a visual drug that could calm the most turbulent heart. Not America, then, but Polynesia, though it was difficult to remember. She slept, and her tears subsided into her core.

  A driver from Kalani was there to meet her. They drove down to Pahoa through a landscape of lava rock and papaya groves. In town, they had a milk shake in a “French café” and sat outside for a while, looking up at silver clouds shaped like anvils, static above the volcano. The driver told her, as if it was a detail she might relish, that he had transported fourteen people so far from the airport to Kalani for the Dream Express seminar. Most of them, he said cattily, were middle-aged women who looked like they were having a bad time.

  “A bad time?” she said tartly. “Do I look like I’m having a bad time?”

  “No, ma’am. You look real eager.”

  Eager, was she that? In a way, she was. A wide freeway swept down to the southern coast and lava flats and cliffs, above which Kalani stood in its papaya woods. As the sea appeared, she felt a keen relief. The road dipped up and down past affluent hippie resorts, yoga retreats, and fasting centers. A few flabby joggers shot by, all ponytails and tattoos. At the gates of Kalani, lanterns had been lit for the evening.

  The resort was a considerable estate made up of groups of traditional spherical Hawaiian houses raised off the ground. In the thatched communal meeting place, everyone ate a macrobiotic, vegetarian buffet dinner, courtesy of the resort. The owners and the dancers were dressed in Hawaiian skirts and performing a votive dance to the volcano goddess, Pu’ah. They danced and clapped to welcome the new residents, jiggling their hips, rolling their fingers, and hailing the volcano itself, which lay only a few miles distant and had become active only two weeks before. At sundown, a dull red glow stretched across the horizon.

  Kalani hosted four different seminars at a time. The Dream Express group was indeed, she saw at once, highly populated with middle-aged women wearing tense and confused expressions. Her heart might have sunk right then if she hadn’t determined not to let it. She braced herself for these sad, bewildered specimens, who were likely capable of comradeship and kindness. Her eyes sorted through them, but she was unable to keep from disapproving. The seminar leader, Dr. Stephen DuBois, was a Stanford psychiatrist who supplemented his academic income with dream seminars in alternative health centers. It was he who had devised a way to “wake” the dreamer inside her dream and make her conscious of it, through a daily routine of herbs and nightly use of a special pair of goggles that shot regulated beams of light into the eyes during the deepest periods of REM sleep. With these methods, one could enter a state of “lucid dreaming” and consciously direct the flow of the dream itself. It was a common technique of dream therapy but rarely used in a controlled environment like Kalani, a context from which normal reality had been almost entirely subtracted. DuBois claimed to be able to alter each participant’s relationship to her own dreams by the use of the herb galantamine. Aside from being a popular treatment for Alzheimer’s, polio, and memory disorders, galantamine, derived from Caucasian snowdrop flowers, was said to induce exceptionally intense and memorable dreams by deepening REM sleep. It looked like a white powder, like very pure cocaine.

  DuBois introduced them all to one another: a psychiatrist from Rome at the end of a long nervous breakdown, a married couple from Oregon working through their difficulties, a female stockbroker from London who already possessed a “friend” inside her dreams who flew with her across vast oneiric landscapes. There were a few Burning Man types from the Bay Area who came every year, young and wide-eyed, and two New York basket cases fleeing their catastrophic jobs and marriages. All in all, they were what she had expected. Bores and beaten-down shrews in decline and kooks. She didn’t mind, particularly. People are what they are and they were no more broken down by life’s disappointments than she herself was. She was sure that half the women had faithless husbands who had run off with younger women. They had that archetypal event inscribed upon their faces.

  “It’s very simple,” DuBois explained from the head of their trestle table. The volcano dance had wound down, and a group of new-age square dancers arrived at the adjoining table. “Every night we’ll take a capsule of galantamine and go to bed at a reasonable hour. We’ll
put on our goggles before we go to sleep. If the infrared beam wakes us up, we’ll leave the goggles on and go back to sleep. Hopefully, though, we won’t wake up at all. We’ll simply become conscious inside our dreams.”

  “Really?” said the Italian psychiatrist.

  “Certainly. When that happens, you all have to remember a few basic things. To change your dream, simply reach out and rub a rough surface. A wall is perfect. The dream will change immediately and you can enjoy the next one. If you want to fly, simply start turning on the spot. You’ll start flying.”

  They all began to smile, to nod. It would be like hours of entertainment every night. Like cinema inside their heads. And, because of the powdered snowdrop, they would remember it all.

  “Every morning, we’ll tell each other what we dreamed. It’ll help us remember everything, and it’ll help us write our dream journals. The dream journal will be a book we can take back with us when we have finished here. Something permanent and life-changing.”

  Now they would get acquainted and then return to their thatched cabanas and prepare for the first night of lucid dreaming. It seemed to Martha a simple enough plan, and she was still tired from the long flight. The resort owners stopped by the table, still in their skirts: handsome, tan, muscular gay men whom you could imagine vigorously fucking in hot tubs and saunas. Shaking their hands gave her a twinge of arousal.

  “Look over there,” one of them said. He pointed to the glow visible above the tree line. “Looks like lava on the move.”

  Across the smooth, rolling lawns, Martha could see naked men strolling down toward the hot tubs surrounding the swimming pool. The resort was nudist after 9 P.M. After a cup of chamomile tea and a few desultory chats, she said good night to the group and walked back to her cabana. A high moon illumined the edge of the jungle.

  She took the galantamine capsule, lay under the mosquito nets of her bed, and attuned herself to the rhythmic chirping of the tree frogs. She put on the cumbersome goggles and adjusted the strap so that it did not squeeze her face too tightly. Then her exhaustion took over. She was too tired to care that the goggles were uncomfortable or that the frogs were loud because the windows had no glass. She slept without thinking about sleeping, and soon the REM cycle had swept her up.