The Story: Love, Loss and the Lives of Women: 100 Great Short Stories

by Victoria Hislop

  You said no the following four days to going out with him, because you were uncomfortable with the way he looked at your face, that intense, consuming way he looked at your face that made you say goodbye to him but also made you reluctant to walk away. And then, the fifth night, you panicked when he was not standing at the door after your shift. You prayed for the first time in a long time and when he came up behind you and said hey, you said yes, you would go out with him, even before he asked. You were scared he would not ask again.

  The next day, he took you to dinner at Chang’s and your fortune cookie had two strips of paper. Both of them were blank.

  You knew you had become comfortable when you told him that you watched Jeopardy on the restaurant TV and that you rooted for the following, in this order: women of color, black men, and white women, before, finally, white men – which meant you never rooted for white men. He laughed and told you he was used to not being rooted for, his mother taught women’s studies.

  And you knew you had become close when you told him that your father was really not a schoolteacher in Lagos, that he was a junior driver for a construction company. And you told him about that day in Lagos traffic in the rickety Peugeot 504 your father drove; it was raining and your seat was wet because of the rust-eaten hole in the roof. The traffic was heavy, the traffic was always heavy in Lagos, and when it rained it was chaos. The roads became muddy ponds and cars got stuck and some of your cousins went out and made some money pushing the cars out. The rain, the swampiness, you thought, made your father step on the brakes too late that day. You heard the bump before you felt it. The car your father rammed into was wide, foreign, and dark green, with golden headlights like the eyes of a leopard. Your father started to cry and beg even before he got out of the car and laid himself flat on the road, causing much blowing of horns. Sorry, sir, sorry, sir, he chanted. If you sell me and my family, you cannot buy even one tire on your car. Sorry, sir.

  The Big Man seated at the back did not come out, but his driver did, examining the damage, looking at your father’s sprawled form from the corner of his eye as though the pleading was like pornography, a performance he was ashamed to admit he enjoyed. At last he let your father go. Waved him away. The other cars’ horns blew and drivers cursed. When your father came back into the car, you refused to look at him because he was just like the pigs that wallowed in the marshes around the market. Your father looked like nsi. Shit.

  After you told him this, he pursed his lips and held your hand and said he understood how you felt. You shook your hand free, suddenly annoyed, because he thought the world was, or ought to be, full of people like him. You told him there was nothing to understand, it was just the way it was.

  He found the African store in the Hartford yellow pages and drove you there. Because of the way he walked around with familiarity, tilting the bottle of palm wine to see how much sediment it had, the Ghanaian store owner asked him if he was African, like the white Kenyans or South Africans, and he said yes, but he’d been in America for a long time. He looked pleased that the store owner had believed him. You cooked that evening with the things you had bought, and after he ate garri and onugbu soup, he threw up in your sink. You didn’t mind, though, because now you would be able to cook onugbu soup with meat.

  He didn’t eat meat because he thought it was wrong the way they killed animals; he said they released fear toxins into the animals and the fear toxins made people paranoid. Back home, the meat pieces you ate, when there was meat, were the size of half your finger. But you did not tell him that. You did not tell him either that the dawadawa cubes your mother cooked everything with, because curry and thyme were too expensive, had MSG, were MSG. He said MSG caused cancer, it was the reason he liked Chang’s; Chang didn’t cook with MSG.

  Once, at Chang’s, he told the waiter he had recently visited Shanghai, that he spoke some Mandarin. The waiter warmed up and told him what soup was best and then asked him, “You have girlfriend in Shanghai now?” And he smiled and said nothing.

  You lost your appetite, the region deep in your chest felt clogged. That night, you didn’t moan when he was inside you, you bit your lips and pretended that you didn’t come because you knew he would worry. Later you told him why you were upset, that even though you went to Chang’s so often together, even though you had kissed just before the menus came, the Chinese man had assumed you could not possibly be his girlfriend, and he had smiled and said nothing. Before he apologized, he gazed at you blankly and you knew that he did not understand.

  He bought you presents and when you objected about the cost, he said his grandfather in Boston had been wealthy but hastily added that the old man had given a lot away and so the trust fund he had wasn’t huge. His presents mystified you. A fist-size glass ball that you shook to watch a tiny shapely doll in pink spin around. A shiny rock whose surface took on the color of whatever touched it. An expensive scarf hand-painted in Mexico. Finally you told him, your voice stretched in irony, that in your life presents were always useful. The rock, for instance, would work if you could grind things with it. He laughed long and hard but you did not laugh. You realized that in his life, he could buy presents that were just presents and nothing else, nothing useful. When he started to buy you shoes and clothes and books, you asked him not to, you didn’t want any presents at all. He bought them anyway and you kept them for your cousins and uncles and aunts, for when you would one day be able to visit home, even though you did not know how you could ever afford a ticket and your rent. He said he really wanted to see Nigeria and he could pay for you both to go. You did not want him to pay for you to visit home. You did not want him to go to Nigeria, to add it to the list of countries where he went to gawk at the lives of poor people who could never gawk back at his life. You told him this on a sunny day, when he took you to see Long Island Sound; and the two of you argued, your voices raised as you walked along the calm water. He said you were wrong to call him self-righteous. You said he was wrong to call only the poor Indians in Bombay the real Indians. Did it mean he wasn’t a real American, since he was not like the poor fat people you and he had seen in Hartford? He hurried ahead of you, his upper body bare and pale, his flip-flops raising bits of sand, but then he came back and held out his hand for yours. You made up and made love and ran your hands through each other’s, hair, his soft and yellow like the swinging tassels of growing corn, yours dark and bouncy like the filling of a pillow. He had got too much sun and his skin turned the color of a ripe watermelon and you kissed his back before you rubbed lotion on it.

  The thing that wrapped itself around your neck, that nearly choked you before you fell asleep, started to loosen, to let go.

  You knew by people’s reactions that you two were abnormal – the way the nasty ones were too nasty and the nice ones too nice. The old white men and women who muttered and glared at him, the black men who shook their heads at you, the black women whose pitying eyes bemoaned your lack of self-esteem, your self-loathing. Or the black women who smiled swift solidarity smiles; the black men who tried too hard to forgive you, saying a too-obvious hi to him; the white men and women who said, “What a good-looking pair” too brightly, too loudly as though to prove their own open-mindedness to themselves.

  But his parents were different; they almost made you think it was all normal. His mother told you that he had never brought a girl to meet them, except for his high school prom date, and he grinned stiffly and held your hand. The tablecloth shielded your clasped hands. He squeezed your hand and you squeezed back and wondered why he was so stiff, why his extra-virgin-olive-oil-colored eyes darkened as he spoke to his parents. His mother was delighted when she asked if you’d read Nawal el Saadawi and you said yes. His father asked how similar Indian food was to Nigerian food and teased you about paying when the check came. You looked at them and felt grateful that they did not examine you like an exotic trophy, an ivory tusk.

  Afterwards, he told you about his issues with his parents, how they portioned out lo
ve like a birthday cake, how they would give him a bigger slice if only he’d agree to go to law school. You wanted to sympathize. But instead you were angry.

  You were angrier when he told you he had refused to go up to Canada with them for a week or two, to their summer cottage in the Quebec countryside. They had even asked him to bring you. He showed you pictures of the cottage and you wondered why it was called a cottage because the buildings that big around your neighborhood back home were banks and churches. You dropped a glass and it shattered on the hardwood of his apartment floor and he asked what was wrong and you said nothing, although you thought a lot was wrong. Later, in the shower you started to cry. You watched the water dilute your tears and you didn’t know why you were crying.

  You wrote home finally. A short letter to your parents, slipped in between the crisp dollar bills, and you included your address. You got a reply only days later, by courier. Your mother wrote the letter herself; you knew from the spidery penmanship, from the misspelled words.

  Your father was dead; he had slumped over the steering wheel of his company car. Five months now, she wrote. They had used some of the money you sent to give him a good funeral. They killed a goat for the guests and buried him in a good coffin. You curled up in bed, pressed your knees to your chest and tried to remember what you had been doing when your father died, what you had been doing for all the months when he was already dead. Perhaps your father died on the day your whole body had been covered in goosebumps, hard as uncooked rice, that you could not explain, Juan teasing you about taking over from the chef so that the heat in the kitchen would warm you up. Perhaps your father died on one of the days you took a drive to Mystic or watched a play in Manchester or had dinner at Chang’s.

  He held you while you cried, smoothed your hair, and offered to buy your ticket, to go with you to see your family. You said no, you needed to go alone. He asked if you would come back and you reminded him that you had a green card and you would lose it if you did not come back in one year. He said you knew what he meant, would you come back, come back?

  You turned away and said nothing, and when he drove you to the airport, you hugged him tight for a long, long moment, and then you let go.

  The Redemption of Galen Pike

  Carys Davies

  Carys Davies is a British short story writer. She won the Society of Authors’ 2010 Olive Cook Short Story Award for ‘The Quiet’, and was then awarded the V. S. Pritchett Memorial Prize in 2011 for ‘The Redemption of Galen Pike’. She curates the short fiction programme for Lancaster’s literature festival, Litfest, where she hosts readings and discussions with other writers of short fiction.

  They’d all seen Sheriff Nye bringing Pike into town: the two shapes snaking down the path off the mountain through the patches of melting snow and over the green showing beneath, each of them growing bigger as they moved across the rocky pasture and came down into North Street to the jailhouse – Nye on his horse, the tall gaunt figure of Galen Pike following behind on the rope.

  The current Piper City jailhouse was a low cramped brick building containing a single square cell, Piper City being at this time, in spite of the pretensions of its name, a small and thinly populated town of a hundred and ninety-three souls in the foothills of the Colorado mountains. Aside from the cell, there was a scrubby yard behind, where the hangings took place, a front office with a table, a chair and a broom; a hook on the wall where the cell keys hung from a thick ring; a small stove where Knapp the jailer warmed his coffee and cooked his pancakes in the morning.

  For years, Walter’s sister Patience had been visiting the felons who found themselves incarcerated for any length of time in the Piper City jail. Mostly they were outsiders – drifters and vagrants drawn to the place by the occasional but persistent rumours of gold – and whenever one came along, Patience visited him.

  Galen Pike’s crime revolted Patience more than she could say, and on her way to the jailhouse to meet him for the first time, she told herself she wouldn’t think of it; walking past the closed bank, the shuttered front of the general store, the locked-up haberdasher’s, the drawn blinds of the dentist, she averted her gaze.

  She would do what she always did with the felons; she would bring Galen Pike something to eat and drink, she would sit with him and talk to him and keep him company in the days that he had left. She would not recite scripture, or lecture him about the Commandments or the deadly sins, and she would only read to him if he desired it – a psalm or a prayer or a few selected verses she thought might be helpful to someone in his situation but that was all.

  She was a thin, plain woman, Patience Haig.

  Straight brown hair scraped back from her forehead so severely that there was a small bald patch where the hair was divided in the centre. It was tied behind in a long dry braid. Her face, too, was long and narrow, her features small and unremarkable, except for her nose which was damaged and lopsided, the right nostril squashed and flattened against the bridge. She wore black flat-heeled boots and a grey dress with long sleeves and a capacious square collar. She was thirty-six years old.

  If the preparation of the heart is taken seriously the right words will come. As she walked, Patience silently repeated the advice Abigail Warner had given her when she’d passed on to Patience the responsibility of visiting the jail. Patience was always a little nervous before meeting a new prisoner for the first time, and as she came to the end of Franklin Street and turned the corner into North, she reminded herself that the old woman’s advice had always stood her in good stead: if she thought about how lonely it would be – how bleak and frightening and uncomfortable – to be shut up in a twelve foot box far from home without company or kindness, then whatever the awfulness of the crime that had been committed, she always found that she was able, with the help of her basket of biscuits and strawberry cordial, to establish a calm and companionable atmosphere in the grim little room. Almost always, she had found the men happy to see her.

  “Good morning, Mr Pike,” she said, stepping through the barred door and hearing it clang behind her.

  Galen Pike loosened the phlegm in his scrawny throat, blew out his hollow cheeks and hawked on the ground.

  “I have warm biscuits,” continued Patience, setting her basket on the narrow table between them, “and strawberry cordial.”

  Pike looked her slowly up and down. He looked at her flat-heeled tightly laced boots, her grey long-sleeved dress and scraped-back hair and asked her, in a nasty smoke-cracked drawl, if she was a preacher.

  “No,” said Patience, “I am your friend.”

  Pike burst out laughing.

  He bared his yellow teeth and threw back his mane of filthy black hair and observed that if she was his friend she’d have brought him something a little stronger than strawberry cordial to drink.

  If she was his friend, he said, lowering his voice and pushing his vicious ravenous-looking face close to hers and rocking forward on the straight-backed chair to which he was trussed with rope and a heavy chain, she’d have used her little white hand to slip the key to his cell off its hook on her way in and popped it in her pretty Red Riding Hood basket instead of leaving it out there on the goddamn wall with that fat pancake-scoffing fucker of a jailer.

  Patience blinked and took a breath and replied crisply that he should know very well she couldn’t do the second thing, and she certainly wouldn’t do the first because she didn’t believe anyone needed anything stronger than strawberry cordial to refresh themselves on a warm day.

  She removed the clean white cloth that covered the biscuits. The cloth was damp from the steam and she used it to wipe the surface of the greasy little table which was spotted and streaked with thick unidentifiable stains, and poured out three inches of cordial into the pewter mug she’d brought from home that belonged to her brother Walter.

  She told Galen Pike that she would sit with him; that she would come every morning between now and Wednesday unless he told her not to, and on Wednesday she would come to
o, to be with him then also, if he desired it. In the meantime, if he wanted to, he could unburden himself about what he had done, she would not judge him. Or they could talk about other things, or if he liked she would read to him, or they might sit in silence if he preferred. She didn’t mind in the least, she said, if they sat in silence, she was used to silence, she liked it almost more than speaking.

  Pike looked at her, frowning and wrinkling his big hooked nose, as if he was trying to figure out whether he’d been sent a mad person. When he didn’t make any reply to what she’d said, Patience settled herself in the chair opposite him and took out her knitting and for half an hour neither she nor Galen Pike spoke a word, until Pike, irritated perhaps by the prolonged quiet or the rapid clickety-clack of her wooden needles, leaned across the table with the top half of his scrawny body and twisted his face up close to hers like before and asked, what was a dried-up old lady like her doing knitting a baby’s bootie?

  Patience coloured at the insult but ignored it and told Pike that she and the other women from the Franklin Street Friends’ Meeting House were preparing a supply of clothing for Piper City’s new hostel for unwed mothers. A lot of girls, she said, ended up coming this way, dragging themselves along the Boulder Road, looking for somewhere to lay their heads.