The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  Yasi made a sound that was not like his usual laugh but was meant to express amusement. “I think we’re in the middle of an old-fashioned French farce.”

  “This is what your father has become, an impotent old man in a farce with his young what’s-it, except this one isn’t young.” She smiled grimly, expecting Yasi to smile with her.

  Instead he was looking at Phul, as was the judge. She stood humbly, wrapped from head to foot in her widowlike sari, and she pleaded in a low voice, “Send me home.”

  “Home?” Binny cried. “You are home. This is your home. You can move in right now with my husband—please, I beg you, the house will be empty. I’m taking my son to Bombay.”

  Before she had finished speaking, Yasi had sunk to a footstool, embroidered years ago by a great-aunt now deceased. He buried his head in his hands and sobbed.

  His parents exchanged helpless looks. Binny said, “He’s not well. It’s his headaches. He mustn’t be upset.”

  And the judge said, “You’re right. We mustn’t upset him.” United in concern like any two parents, they spoke as though they were alone in the room.

  Now Phul came up behind Yasi and laid her hands on his forehead, pressing it as she had done with the judge’s feet. He seemed to relax into her touch, and his weeping stopped.

  Binny noticed—and hoped the judge did too—that Phul’s fingers were thick and coarse, unlike Binny’s own, which were adorned with several precious rings, some of them inherited from the judge’s mother.

  Yasi resumed his lively social round and soon became so preoccupied with helping one of his girlfriends with a private fashion show that he was often out all night. So he was absent the morning the driver returned alone from his daily mission with the report that Phul was sick. At once, the judge asked for his three-piece suit, but when Binny found him trembling with the effort of getting his thin legs into his trousers—how frail he had become!—she put him back into his nightshirt and forced him into bed again. He pleaded with her to ask Yasi to take a doctor and some medicine to Phul. “She’s alone,” he told his wife. “She has no one.” Binny regarded him with angry concern, then turned away. “Yes, yes, yes,” she agreed impatiently to his request.

  It was almost night when she called for the car and driver. The bazaar was even more alive than on her previous visit—music and lights and announcements on megaphones, vegetables trodden into the gutters, bits of offal thrown for the overfed bazaar dogs. She took the outside staircase that Yasi had climbed as she watched him from the shoe shop. The room she entered had a very different ambience from the one in which Phul presented herself in the judge’s house. Gay and gaudy, with little pictures and little gods, and hangings tinkling with tiny bells, it seemed more innately Phul’s, as though arising from memories of the places and the people among whom she had lived before meeting the judge. A garland of marigolds had been hung around an image of a naked saint with fleshy breasts. Amid the few bolsters scattered on the floor, there were only two pieces of furniture, both large: a colonial armchair, the twin of the one in the judge’s bedroom, and a bed, on which Phul lay. She wore a sort of house gown, as crumpled as the bed and with curry stains on it. When she saw Binny, she started up, and her hand flew to her heart—yes, Binny thought, she had every reason to fear the judge’s wife, after he had kept her holed up in this secret den for twenty-five years.

  But it turned out that her fear was for the judge—that there was bad news about him that would leave her forever penniless, alone, unprotected. She let out a wail, which ceased the moment she was reassured. Then her first words were of regret for her inability to serve a guest. She blamed her servant boy, who regularly disappeared when needed. She spoke in a rush and in a dialect that Binny found hard to follow.

  When the servant boy reappeared, Binny sent him for the doctor from the clinic next to the shoe shop. Phul lay resigned and passive on her bed, though her moaning grew louder at the doctor’s arrival. He was dismissive—some sort of stomach infection, he said. It was going around the city; he saw dozens of cases every day. He scribbled a prescription, ordered a diet of rice and curds. To Binny, it seemed that the room itself was a breeding ground for fevers and infections, with sticks of smoking incense distilling their synthetic essence into the air shimmering with summer heat. There was only one window, which was stuck. Watching her visitor wrestle with it, Phul got up and tried to help her and in her weakness almost fell, before Binny caught her. Struggling then to free herself—“No, no!” she cried—she threw up in a spasm that spattered over Binny’s almost new blue-and-silver shoes. Then she allowed herself to be carried to the bed and lay there with only her lips moving. What she seemed to be saying was the English word “sorry”—Binny thought how typical it was of the judge that among the few English words he had taught her was this abject one of apology.

  Binny was wiping the judge’s face after his meal when he asked, quite shyly, “Is she better?”

  “For all I know, she may be, but not well enough to come here and infect us all.”

  She wrung out the facecloth in the basin behind the screen. When she emerged, she saw that he was deep in thought. He made a gesture as though communicating with himself; his hand was unsteady but his voice was determined.

  “Yasi must take care of her. He promised. Send him again; send him every day.”

  “If you go on fretting this way, you’ll have another attack and kill the rest of us with having to nurse you.”

  But it was she herself who went every day, with specially prepared dishes of healthy food. She ascribed the slowness of Phul’s recovery to the unfresh air in her room. With the one window now propped open, the incense and the bazaar perfume blended with the street smells—wilted produce, motor oil, and a nearby urinal. And what was worse were the unhealthy thoughts in Phul’s mind, the despair that kept her moaning, “What will happen to me?” One day, Binny found her up and dressed and ready to go to the judge; she sank back only when Binny asked her, did she really want to expose that sick old man to her infection? Then, for the first time, Phul spoke of Yasi and begged to see him.

  It was also the first time that Yasi was told about her sickness. “Oh, the poor thing,” he said. “I’d go to see her, but you know as well as I do that I catch everything.”

  “No, no, of course you mustn’t.”

  He promised to go once the danger was past. Binny couldn’t help warning, “Only don’t stay with her all night and then tell me lies about music and poetry.”

  “If you’d just listen for once in your life!” His exasperation lasted only a moment and he continued patiently, “I never stayed all night. I tried to get away as soon as I could, but she’s very clinging. And she’s also very stupid. And her singing, oh, my God, I wanted to pay her to stop. It’s his fault. It was her profession to entertain but he took her away to keep for himself before she could learn anything. Would you believe it, she can hardly read and write. I’d try to teach her, but it would be hopeless. Poor little Phul, and now’s she’s over forty.” He had accumulated a fund of feeling, first for his mother and then for all women whom he considered to have had a raw deal.

  In the early years of their marriage, the judge had taught Binny to play chess. Now, alone with him in his convalescence, she brought out the neglected chessboard and set up a table in his bedroom. He was a keen player, but that day his mind was not totally on the game. Instead of deploring her wrong moves, he asked if Yasi was looking after Phul. She said, “He’s done enough for you. Send someone else.”

  “There is no one else. I have no one.”

  “No one except her? And all she’s thinking is: What will happen to me? That’s all I ever hear from her—Yasi ever hears,” she corrected. “That is what she thinks about. Not about you, about herself.”

  “I’ve told her about the will and the boy’s promise, and still she’s afraid.”

  “Of me? Tell her she can vomit all over me and still there’s no need.”

  The judge clicked
his tongue in distaste. He pointed at her castle, which she had just stupidly exposed. He wouldn’t allow her to take the move back, but scolded her for not keeping her mind on the game. It was true: she was distracted. If she hadn’t been, she wouldn’t have made her next move, which put his bishop in jeopardy. She was usually more careful—she knew how much he hated losing. Intensely irritated, he reproached her, “It’s as impossible to have a serious game of chess with you as it is to have a serious conversation.”

  She reared up. “Then let me tell you something serious. Whatever happens, God forbid, she’s safe in her cage: there’s no wild creature waiting for her outside. She can have everything. Tell her! Yasi and I want nothing.” Without a qualm, she took his bishop.

  In a voice like thunder, the judge shouted, “Call him! Call your son!” He had leapt up and with one sweep of his hand he scattered the chess pieces, so that some fell in her lap, some on the floor. This sudden strength frightened her. She grasped his shoulders to make him sit in the chair again and, though withered, they still felt like iron under her hands. She had to match her strength against his; it didn’t take her long to win, but what she felt was not triumph.

  She bent down to pick up the pieces from the floor and tried to replace them on the board. He waved her away, as though waving everything away.

  “You can’t do this,” she said. “In your condition.”

  “Yes, my condition,” he echoed bitterly. “Because of my condition, I lose my bishop to someone with no notion of the game.”

  He allowed her to lead him from the chair to his bed. She brought him water, and after he had drunk it he gave the glass back to her and said, “I’m sorry.”

  “Oh, my goodness!” she cried in shock. He had often done this—scattered the pieces when he was losing—but he had never before apologized for it. She understood what this was about and tried again to reassure him. “Everything will happen as you want it, the way you’ve written it. You have my promise, and Yasi’s promise.”

  “The boy is weak. It’s not his fault—no, not yours, either. You’ve done your best.”

  “Who knows what is best and what is not best,” she said. Freud, she thought, bitter in her mind against her friend.

  “Fortunately, you’re strong enough for both of you. Sometimes too strong.” He smiled, though not quite in his usual grim way.

  He was looking at her, considering her, as she was now, as she had become; and though what she had become was not what she had been in her youth, he showed tolerance, even affection. It made her put her hands to her hair; she could guess what it looked like, what she looked like to him, how wild. She was overdue at the salon. She had been meaning to go for weeks—but what time did she have, between the judge and Yasi and this home and the secret one across the river, day after day, running from here to there?

  O. A. LINDSEY

  Evie M.

  FROM Iowa Review

  TODAY I PHONED and had a cup of coffee, created/distributed a handful of B-20s, then phoned and had a cup of coffee. We ran out of powder creamer, but there were creams from McDonald’s in the break area mini-fridge, which I just disinfected. Around 4:40, I decided to cruise hyperlinks until close. There was something about the president, and news that a small plane had crashed somewhere in Illinois. A sullen pop diva will guest-star on a Thursday night prime-time. It’s sweeps. Her crimson mouth was parted in the photo, and for an instant I couldn’t help but picture myself ejaculating—I guess. Accurate or not, I felt despicable, and quickly went to scrub my hands. I must remember to remember her name, to purchase her recordings. I drove home.

  Home, where the shows are on. Between five-thirty and seven: utter contentment. The reruns allow me to nod off for a few and then rejoin any story without worry. They showed these same shows in the women’s barracks, and again at base camp, and you could even watch them at forward operations. Usually a nap, followed by a quick Swiffering of the apartment, will help me to unwind before the new episodes come on at seven. I know everything, until the new episodes come on, at seven.

  Today, though, someone had called and the red light blinked. No one ever calls. I was terrified to check the message, so I did not, and then did not sleep.

  Back to work. Somebody left the coffee machine on all night, so the break area smelled burnt, and the pot had a veneer of tar-stuff on the bottom. I picked it up and looked into it, considered scrubbing it, considered smashing it into the brushed-steel sink, my knuckles grinding the shards, but then put it back and trod down the long hall to another break area, where I poured a cup. There were pyres everywhere in the desert. There was plenty of powder cream, here. Near my partition, a thin clerk shrugged his shoulders at the scorched pot. His khakis were wrinkled from having been worn too many times without a wash. I told him about the other break area, but he just stared at me. I told him there was plenty of cream.

  Later, my supervisor stood at the edge of my workspace and flashed his perfect, glazed teeth. It made me nervous, which I think he enjoyed. Enjoys. He’s younger than I am but doesn’t act it. He told me he’s been listening in on my customer calls and that I needed to master the Art of Inflection. Told me that I had a lovely voice, but that if I didn’t sound interested in our product, I could not expect anyone else to get interested in it. Could I? Huh?

  At lunch, my hands and face were filmy from a french dip. I finished half of it before I had to rush to the bathroom to wash. There was only an air dryer, so I used toilet paper to pat myself and ended up with tissue pills all over my chin. After that, I drove through McDonald’s for coffee. I asked the woman for a handful of extra creams, and she glared at me as if I were the cause of something awful, like a tumor. She spoke into a headset, then slammed the window. As I pulled away, my exhaust made a grumbling sound, like rocks tumbling in a pipe, like the collision of track gears on an M113A3 personnel carrier. I simply cannot afford any extra expenses, car repair or anything. I put the car in park and sat in the lot, rubbing my thumbs against the corrugated thimbles of cream, rubbing and rubbing until another headset person knocked on my window and ordered me away.

  Supervisor came by again. He stood over my shoulder, breathing through his nose. At some point, I had to turn and look up at him. His smile made me feel like a schoolgirl humiliated by her teacher. (I was given remedial teeth-brushing lessons after the red pill polluted my mouth.) The Art of Inflection, Evie, he said to me again. He then squeezed my neck, kneaded it, and walked off. I spent the rest of the day refreshing my in box. Someone sent a joke e-mail that showed a fat cartoon woman in black lingerie. Her beet-red nipples were spilling over the top, and her vagina was bisected by the panties. A stick-thin bald man dressed only in an undershirt and with a small, limp cock said that Victoria’s secret was out: models were one thing, but nobody’s wife looks good in these outfits. It wasn’t funny. I sent it on to my account reps.

  The red light was a message from Helen—I finally checked; I had to sleep. We broke up because she took a job elsewhere. Maybe this wasn’t the end of the world, but it wasn’t so goddamn good either. The thing is, we sat Indian-style on the wooden floor in her empty living room, the window light gentle and lemony, the moving trucks already gone, and she promised that she would hang in there if I hung in there.

  I have to stop thinking about it—her—now. If you heat an individual serving (two) of Rich’s frozen glazed doughnuts for 29 to 42 seconds, they’ll be as hot and fresh as fresh. We had this little bitch dog in the desert, this black-and-white mutt that found us, just wandered into camp out of nowhere. We fed it chunks of dehydrated pork patty and whatever from our MREs, and someone named it Sheeba—that name, my God I hated that name. Growing up I’d never been allowed to have a dog, so I gave it every leftover from my meal packet, gum and salt and powdered cream and everything, and it began to sleep under my cot every night, and I’d dangle my hand down there on its ribs for as long as I could stay awake, and . . . And you’d pat it—her—Sheeba, and puffs of dust would fly from her
fur, it was so funny, so dirty, and once she was outside the compound berm, out there in the sand, pawing at a beetle, springing back from a tiny bug or something, crouching on her front paws and growling at it like a puppy, and a few of us laughed and then went in the tent, and some guys from the motor pool took bets and shot it. Her. It depends on how frozen the doughnuts are. You can tell they are ready when they are spongy but not hard as you test them with the tines of your fork. Then: stop. Any longer in the microwave and the dough seizes up, and the glaze will coagulate. I know this.

  Supervisor’s teeth are only clean on the front. He uses those grocery-store whitening strips instead of going to the dentist. I want to tell him about his yellow side-teeth. Wanted to tell him today when he smiled and told me to remember—told me twice—that Annual Evaluations are upon us.

  I was sitting on the floor next to the copier. I can’t bear it when the copier spool gets dry because of too much usage. It’s precarious, because you’d think you could just relubricate the plate glass with a wipe of oil, like greasing a cookie sheet. But you absolutely cannot put an abundance of copier oil on it, or it won’t feed right. Just a film, a light au jus. Unfortunately, if you’re out of copier oil and still have to bundle stapled and sorted sets of product logs for supervisors with white front teeth, you know that this will take your entire day: press the green button, get through (at best) one set, deal with the jam. Repeat repeat repeat. Empty Duplicator. Replace Last Two Originals In Document Feeder. Repeat repeat repeat. Close Document Feeder. Repeat. It kills you after about an hour. Finally, you just sit on the floor, dying over the fact that if you wait for the repairman to arrive and relubricate, your ass is over. Annual Evaluations are here.