The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2018

by Sheila Heti

  “I know. I know these things,” he said.

  True enough, in less than a year the bride and groom were divorced.

  Later that year, Mr. Vong made another one of his predictions. This time he made it the minute he opened the wedding invitation. He said, “Ah, not even going to happen.”

  The wedding invitation had not been printed by Mr. Vong. One could presume that the prediction was the result of some petty competition or his hurt pride. It was printed at a fancy shop, downtown on a street called Richmond, whose only specialty was printing invitations. There was no Lao lettering to be found anywhere on the invitation. It was fancy and had raised print. The little silver-sparkled bumps could be felt, running a hand across the lettering, forming the names, addresses, dates. And yes, Mr. Vong’s prediction came true. The groom married someone else, named Sue. Phone calls were made: Canceled. Called off.

  “Dad, seriously, how did you know?”

  “Look, I know these things. You just can’t have a Lao wedding without Lao letters on the invitation. And you have to have your real name in there. Yeah, it’s a long name—but that’s your name. Why would you want to be Sue if it’s really Savongnavathakad? Because, you know, the real Sue will end up marrying the guy if it’s there in the invitation.”

  * * *

  Now, when it was time for Mr. Vong’s daughter to get married, he spared no expense. He ordered sparkled paint from Laos, made out of the crushed wings of a rare local insect. The gold specks were real and not artificial—real shine and shimmer for a real marriage. He printed the invitations and put each one out to dry on a metal rack. Four on each rack, a total of four hundred invitations, an even number. He did everything he could possibly do to ensure that his daughter’s wedding invitations were perfect and ready to be sent out into the scrutiny of the universe. But on the day of the wedding, the groom was not there. He was on the coast of France, vacationing with family. “Look, my family has been planning this for a long time,” the boy said. “I just couldn’t get out of it. So . . . yeah. Sorry, babes.” If the boy’s parents even knew about the wedding, Mr. Vong didn’t know. They had never met. At the time, Mr. Vong thought nothing of it, didn’t question, wasn’t curious. And now, thinking of it, there was always some excuse and it was always something coming out of that boy’s small mouth. It was as if Mr. Vong’s plans were of no value, or of lesser value, or not even up for consideration. It didn’t occur to him to ask questions. He believed what he was told. There had been a proposal, and that’s all he needed to know about that.

  Mr. Vong’s daughter threw the phone on to the floor and it stayed complete and solid in its protective case, invented for such situations. Then she ran. She ran and opened the first door she saw, but it turned out to be a closet. She folded herself in there and cried. He let her cry and shooed away everyone who tried to comfort her. A woman ought to cry, he thought. She ought to be allowed to bawl it all out.

  And after, she said, “Dad? Dad . . . are you there?”

  “Yes. I am right here,” he said.

  “Its all your fault, isn’t it? The invitations . . . something must have gone wrong.”

  Mr. Vong thought of an answer—one he could use to explain, to reason out what had happened to the day—how the wedding had come to this. “I . . . I found one invitation behind the door.” He talked to his daughter as if he were a small schoolboy who had stolen an eraser to win the affections of his friend, and had now been summoned by the head master to explain. “I must have missed it. The one. All invitations must go out. It was just one. I didn’t know the universe would be so cruel. I am terribly sorry. I am trained to know, to predict, and to ensure these things.” It was not true at all, of course. He had accounted for everything! But this was no time for his own pride. No amount of fuck-you-to-hells could make a difference to that boy. How could you tell her that the boy wasn’t kind or good, that she wasn’t loved by that boy, that sometimes what felt like love only felt like love, and wasn’t real. And that even if it had been real, sometimes love can stop spinning like a top you set in motion. You couldn’t do anything about that, but, you could say, Yes, yes, an invitation behind the door. That’s what it was.

  SAMANTHA HUNT

  ■

  A Love Story

  FROM The New Yorker

  “A COYOTE ATE A THREE-YEAR-OLD NOT FAR FROM HERE.”

  “Yeah?”

  “My uncle told me.”

  “Huh.”

  “He said, ‘Don’t leave those babies outside again,’ as if I already had.” “Had you?”

  “Come on.” An answer less precise than no.

  “Why’s he monitoring coyote activity up here?”

  “Because.”

  “Because?”

  “It’s irresistible.”

  “Really?”

  A wild dog with a tender baby in its jaws disappearing into the redwoods forever. My uncle’s so good at imagining things, he makes them real. “Yeah. It’s just what he does, a habit.” Or a compulsion.

  “I don’t get it.”

  But I do. Every real thing started life as an idea. I’ve imagined objects and moments into existence. I’ve made humans. I tip taxi-drivers ten, twenty dollars every time they don’t rape me.

  * * *

  The last time my husband and I had sex was eight months ago, and it doesn’t count because at the time my boobs were so huge from nursing that their power over him, over all men, really, was supreme. Now, instead of sex with my husband, I spend my nights imagining dangerous scenarios involving our children. It’s less fun.

  * * *

  “Watch out,” my uncle says. “Watch out,” taking refuge in right-wing notions, living his life terrified of differences.

  * * *

  Once, I was a drug dealer, back when pot was still illegal here. I’m a writer now. I haven’t made any money writing yet; still, that’s how I spend my days, putting things down on paper. People continue to come to my house to buy pot and I sell it to them even though I’m no longer a drug dealer and they could get this shit legally, even though I’m sick of the people who pop their heads in my door, all friendly-like: “Hi. How you doing?”

  “Fine,” I say, but I mean, Shut up and buy your drugs and stop thinking you’re better than me.

  * * *

  When I was young, I shopped at the Army-Navy with the thought that if I bought these clothes and wore them I would prevent some beautiful young man from being killed in the garments. I’m romantic like that.

  I’m telling you about the coyotes, the kids, the taxi-drivers, the drugs, the writing, and the romance because I want to be as honest as I can here. As I said, thoughts become material. I’m not hysterical or crazy. I’m laying the groundwork for real honesty.

  * * *

  I had great hopes that the threat of Lyme disease would revitalize our sex life. “Will you check me for ticks?” You know, and things would go from there. Grooming each other as monkeys do. In that way, at least for a while, I got him to touch me again and it felt good, but then Lyme disease never really took off in California like it did on the East Coast.

  * * *

  The men I know speak about sex as if their needs are more intense or deeper than women’s needs. Like their penises are on fire and they will die if they can’t extinguish the flames in some damp, tight hole. Through high school and college, I believed men when they said their desires were more intense than mine because they talked about sex so much. They developed entire industries devoted to their desire. The aches! The suffering of the boys! The shame and mutual responsibility for blue balls. The suffering of the boys. Poor boys, I thought. Poor boys, as if I were being called upon to serve in a war effort, the war against boys not getting any.

  * * *

  The only desire I have that compares to the way men talk about sex is my fervor for rehashing the past. I relive the exquisite pain of things that no longer exist: my father’s jean jacket, my father, Travolta’s 1977 dark beauty, how it felt t
o be alone in the house with my mom after my siblings left for school, the hypnotic rotations of my record-player spinning the Osmonds and Paper Lace, the particular odors of a mildewed tent in summertime. Memory as erogenous zone.

  Then I realized that men think they are special because someone told them so.

  Then I realized that I, too, have begun to burn lately, and, while no one wants to hear about middle-aged female sexual desire, I don’t care anymore what no one wants. There are days I ache so badly, the only remedy beyond a proper plowing would be a curved and rusty piece of metal or broken glass to gouge out my hot center from mid-inner thigh all the way up to my larynx. I’d spare my spine, brain, hands, and feet. I’m not irrational.

  The list of potential reasons that my husband and I no longer have sex wakes me up at night. If I’m not already awake thinking about the coyotes. The first reason, and the wildest, craziest reason, is that maybe my husband is gone. Maybe one night a while back I kicked him out after a fight and maybe, even if I didn’t mean everything I said, he went away and didn’t come back. That would certainly explain why we don’t have sex. Maybe I’m just imagining him here still. It can be hard to tell with men, whether they are really here or not. Especially a man with a smartphone.

  The second reason I develop to explain why my husband and I no longer have sex is that my husband is, no doubt, gay. A faultless crime, though not without its heartache and deceit.

  The third reason I concoct to explain why my husband and I no longer have sex is that he must be molesting our children when he puts them to bed each night. This reason does double duty for me, cultivating worry about both my marriage and my kids at the same time. Such efficiency.

  The fourth reason is that I must look like a chubby English maid: bad teeth, mouth agape, drooling ignorance and breast milk. This reason sends me onto the Internet for hours, researching various exercise regimens and diets hawked by self-tanned women with chemically bruised hair. In the middle of the night, its easy to hate myself as much as the world hates me. A few years ago, my husband bought me a short black wig as part of a sex-toy package. His ex-girlfriend has short black hair. I know the chemistry of other people’s desire is not my fault, but the wig, so fucking blatant, really hurt.

  Finally, the last reason I imagine for why my husband and I no longer have sex comes almost as a relief, because it requires very little imagination or elaboration and after I think it I can usually go back to sleep. My husband must be having an affair.

  I have a friend from college. She’s a real New England Wasp, with a fantastic secret. Her family pays for all those Lilly Pulitzers, summers on Nantucket, and boarding schools from a fortune made manufacturing dildos and vibrators. I love that secret. One of the biggest sellers is a set of plastic prosthetic monster tongues, some forked, some spiky, most of them green or blue, all of them scaled for the lady’s pleasure, especially a lady with a lizard fetish.

  This friend once asked me a greasy question that returns on nights like this one: “Are you the kind of woman who would want to know if her husband’s cheating on her?” And she left the question dangling. Her mouth may have even been slightly open. People cheat because they are no longer running away from sabre-toothed tigers. I get that. Adrenaline insists on being taken out for a spin. But there was an indictment inherent in either answer I could give my friend, so I stayed silent and wondered, Was she asking because she knew something?

  We moved out of the city because there’s no room for non-millionaires there anymore. In the country, life is more spacious. We bought a king-size bed. Some nights we snuggle like baby snakes, all five of us. Those nights, our giant bed is the center of the universe, the mother ship of bacterial culture, populated with blood, breast milk, baby urine. A petri dish of life-forms. Like some hogan of old. Those nights I know we are safe. But when our children sleep in their own room my husband and I are left alone on the vast plain of this oversized bed feeling separate, feeling like ugly Americans who have eaten too much, again.

  * * *

  The plague of perfectionism on parenting blogs is rancid. Alice in Wonderland birthday parties; Spanish-speaking nannies; healthy children harvesting perfect blue chicken eggs from the back-yard coop; homeschooled wonders who read by age three; flat, tight bellies; happy husbands; cake pops; craft time; quilting projects; breast pumps in the boardroom; tenure; ballet tights; cloth diapers; French braids; homemade lip balm; tremendous flat pans of paella prepared over a beach campfire. What sort of sadist is running these Internets? And, more important, how do these blogs not constitute acts of violence against women?

  I glimpsed a huge beyond when I became a mother, the immensity of an abyss, or the opposite of an abyss, the idea of complete fullness, small gods everywhere. But now all that the world wants to hear from me is how I juggle children and career, how I manage to get the kids to eat their veggies, how I lost the weight.

  I will never lose this weight.

  When we encounter a mother doing too many things perfectly, smiling as if it were all so easy, so natural, we should feel a civic responsibility to slap her hard across the face and scream the word “Stop!” so many times that the woman begins to chant or whimper the word along with us. Once she has been broken, we may take her in our arms until the trembling and self-hatred leave her body. It is our duty.

  I once thought motherhood loosened a woman’s grasp on sanity. Now I see it is the surplus and affluence of America. Plus something else, something toxic, leaking poison, or fear. Something we can’t yet see.

  I’d like to post some shots from my own childhood, a version of my parents’ parenting blog, if such an abomination had existed back then. In these photos, through the fog of cigarette smoke filling the living room, across the roar of Georges Moustaki blasting his sorrow from the record-player at midnight, it would be difficult for a viewer to even locate the children in rooms so thick with adults acting like adults.

  * * *

  I’ve been thinking about drafting a manual for expecting mothers. An honest guide to a complex time of life for which no one’s ever properly prepared. After I became a mom, I asked an older friend, “How come you never told me I’d lose my identity when I had a kid?”

  “’Cause it’s temporary. They give you a new one. And I kind of forgot.”

  “Really?”

  “No.”

  When I sit down to begin my manual, I realize how specific my guide is to one demographic. So then, O.K., a mothering guide for middle-class, heterosexual women who went to college and are gainfully employed. But once I’ve arrived there, my pen raised and at the ready, I realize I actually have very little wisdom. So: a brochure. Pen in hand. Until I realize that what I’ve learned about being a middle-class, hetero mother who went to college could actually be boiled down to one or two fortune cookies. I write, HORMONES ARE LIFE. HORMONES ARE MENTAL ILLNESS. I WRITE, EQUALITY BETWEEN THE SEXES DOES NOT EXIST. And then my job is done.

  A few days ago, I was scrubbing the rim of the upstairs toilet because it smelled like a city alley in August. My phone dinged. I’d received an e-mail. I pulled off my latex gloves to read the message. Who am I kidding? I wasn’t wearing gloves. Real honesty. I was scrubbing the toilet with bare hands. I was probably even using the same sponge I use on the sink, that area right near the toothbrushes. The e-mail was from my husband. “Thought you might like this,” he said. It was a link to a list of life hacks, simple tricks designed to make one’s life easier: use duct tape to open stuck lids, keep floppy boots upright with pool noodles, paper-clip the end of a tape roll so you can find it easily.

  I wrote him back. “Or you could marry a woman and make her your slave.”

  He never did respond.

  * * *

  I’m not saying that men have it better or women have it better. I don’t ever want to be a man. I’m just saying there’s a big difference between the two.

  * * *

  When I swim at the public pool, I wear sunglasses so I can admire the h
airless chest of the nineteen-year-old lifeguard. I love it that he, a child, really, is guarding me, fiercest of warriors, a mother, strong as stinky cheese, with a ripe, moldy, melted rotten center of such intense complexity and flavor it would kill a boy of his tender age.

  * * *

  Once, I woke Sam in the night. That’s my husband’s name, Sam. “Honey,” I said. “Honey, are you awake?”

  “Uhh?”

  “I think I’m dying.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Uh-huh.” And then he went back to sleep.

  Presumably my husband likes stinky cheese and the challenge of living near my hormones. Presumably that’s what love is.

  * * *

  Another night, also in bed, I woke Sam. I do that a lot. “I want you to agree that there is more than one reality.”

  “Huh?”

  “I want you to agree that if I feel it, if I think it, it is real.”

  “But what if you think I’m an asshole?” he asked.

  “Well. Then that’s real.”

  “Really?”

  “What does that word even mean, ‘really’?” I started to scream a little.

  “What?”

  “The word ‘really’ suggests that we all see things the same way. It suggests one reality. Right?”

  “Sure. Right. Really,” he said. Really.

  One huge drawback to my job as a drug dealer is that, while I grow older, passing through my thirties and into my forties, the other drug dealers stay young. They are almost all in their twenties. Normally, I don’t socialize with the other drug dealers, but one night a group of the twenty-year-olds asked if I wanted to join them for a drink. I almost said no, but then decided, why not.

  All the motions at the bar were familiar. It’s not as if I forgot how to go out for a drink. I know what kind of wine I like. I had no trouble finding a seat. After our first drink, some of the young drug dealers disappeared to play pool, some wandered off to greet other friends. Halfway through my second drink, I was holding down the fort alone, a couple of purses, packs of smokes, and cocktails left in my charge. No problem. I didn’t mind a moment of silence.