The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  The middle-aged woman says, “Damn, that’s impressive. If I was rich, I’d definitely get one of those.”

  The man has wandered back toward the yellow statue. “Claudia would like this,” he says. “Don’t you think?”

  It’s sweet, Elodie thinks, the way they talk about these things as if they can actually have them. And then she feels a pang of jealousy of this drab American couple, who are probably celebrating their twenty-fifth anniversary. First trip abroad, buying lots of lavender soap and postcards for everyone back home. Just as quick, the pang is gone.

  Ted is standing behind her, holding her shoulders. He leans down and says, “When do you want to rob this silly couple?” The silly couple has left the salon and they’re walking toward the lobby, where the uniformed bellmen give them appraising looks but don’t stop them as they head toward the bar.

  Elodie feels like an actress auditioning for a role in a play she has neither seen nor read. She imagines her mother saying to her father, “Buy me a drink, but make sure my parents don’t find out,” and this is what she tells Ted, who smiles at her with wide-eyed delight, as if she’s just told him again how foolish he is.

  —

  Yes, this must be what it’s like for Gertrude: like breathing underwater, then surfacing to find the air bright with electricity. Then diving again, floating. The bar is dim, with red curtains and white pillars, and in the watery light he and his sister could be any age at all. What on earth are they doing here, in this impossible place? They are sitting on pink velvet bar stools, that’s what. The bartender says, in accented English, “Yes, what can I get for you?” and Jim looks at the menu and orders a thirty-nine-euro whiskey.

  “Champagne,” says Gertrude. Thirty euros.

  The small room is nearly empty. A small blonde woman in a black dress is at the other end of the bar, feeding rice crackers to a Pomeranian. A young couple comes in, sits down in a far corner, and begins nuzzling over a guidebook. The stereo is playing “I Shot the Sheriff” very softly.

  The bartender looks about eighteen. He brings them their drinks, sets a ceramic bowl of rice crackers in front of them, and then goes to take the order of the nuzzling couple. Jim catches the girl’s eyes, and she smiles at him and lifts an imaginary glass.

  “Are you okay?” Gertrude says, touching his hand. This is a strange question, coming from her.

  He stares at his whiskey and then takes a sip. It doesn’t taste any different than it does back home, where it costs twenty-five dollars a bottle. “Sure,” he says. “Cheers.” Still, her question seems impossibly complicated. In less than two days he will be back in Pennsylvania with the two people he loves most in the world; he will teach seventh graders the parts of speech, he will fight hard to improve the quality of life in small ways in his small town. His chest is full of fire; he takes another sip of whiskey. He considers telling Gertrude: I think I know what it’s like for you, a little. I never want to feel this way again, but what a tragedy if I can never find my way back to it!

  “Because I’m starting to get tired of all this,” Gertrude is saying. “I’m starting to want to feel normal again. Thanks for the champagne, though.” She downs it in one gulp.

  “I wish we were staying longer,” Jim says.

  “No, you don’t,” says Gertrude.

  When the bartender is busy pouring a complicated drink that seems to require four bottles and several cherries, Jim says, “Quick and quiet. We’re drinking and dashing.” Gertrude gives no indication that she has heard him, but she’s already standing up. She links her arm in his and then they’re gliding out to the lobby. “Bonne journée,” the red-capped concierge calls after them, and they smile at him and keep walking.

  —

  Elodie had wanted to stay for her drink, but Ted is shoving at her, saying, “Hurry, come on, let’s go.” The middle-aged man and his wife have risen from their bar chairs and are walking, arms linked, toward the lobby. As they glide past, Elodie is struck by their faces, how the years have padded and worn them in the same way, making them look startlingly alike. Is this what happens when you spend twenty, thirty years with the same person? And yet—the woman is staring straight ahead as if she’s seeing something bright and wonderful: a girl flying with a bouquet of violet flowers, perhaps, or a red horse in the sky. The man’s brow is furrowed as if he’s seeing the same thing but doesn’t want to be heading toward it.

  “Bonne journée.” The concierge swoops out from behind a marble counter to bow a little, and the middle-aged woman nods as a bellhop pulls the doors open and she and her husband step out into the late afternoon, Elodie and Ted close behind. The noise and the brightness of the Promenade des Anglais seem to swallow the couple for a moment—Ted is pulling Elodie by the elbow, like a hostage—and it occurs to Elodie that the woman isn’t carrying a purse. The man must have all the money in his wallet, so that means a quick shove, a distraction. It all suddenly seems like too much trouble.

  “Stop it, wait.” Elodie pulls away from Ted. “Just stop.”

  “Come on. It’s fun, isn’t it?” He looks like a child, his eyes bright and vacant. He shrugs and takes off running.

  And then the sirens begin, blaring through the blue sky. The noise lifts over the sound of the waves and the traffic, answering a panic Elodie hadn’t been fully aware of until now. She pushes her way through the slowing pedestrians, and when she catches up to Ted, he says, “Don’t go any closer.”

  Traffic has clotted on the boulevard, and motorcycle policemen are swarming in figure eights. The middle-aged couple has slowed down; the woman seems to be straining against her husband’s grip. Then Elodie sees the tiny white Renault with its front window smashed, the glass buckling in the center. There’s a woman’s shoe lying in the road. A black high heel.

  “Don’t gawk,” says Ted. “I don’t think we want to see what’s on the other side of that car.”

  “Maybe she’s okay,” says Elodie.

  “You don’t smash a car windshield like that and end up okay,” he says.

  A death, Elodie thinks. A death. But she is also thinking, as her heart sparks with an electric hum, that the cruise ships in the bay are oblivious, and the joggers are barely stopping, and now even the older couple—the woman with her hand covering her mouth—is moving on. The sky is the blue of a Chagall angel, the sun a yellow goat floating. Tonight, she knows, she’ll steal what she finds in Ted’s wallet and leave their hotel, go back to the Gare Routière and take a bus to Avignon or Arles, a place where the tourists come for the history instead of the sun. Maybe that’s what she needs, too, a thoughtful stroll through the Palais des Papes; a drink at a café in the shadow of the Roman amphitheater.

  Some of the beachgoers are coming up slowly from the Bay of Angels, blinking like sleepwalkers at the spectacle. The sirens are turning the sky into glass. “Let’s see what they left for us,” Elodie says to Ted, and they dodge traffic and head toward the water.

  Lynn Freed

  The Way Things Are Going

  GWEN WAS THE ONE who had insisted that Ma and I move to America. Sooner or later, she’d said, it would happen again, it was only a matter of time. And I suppose she was right. But really it was all my fault; I should have known better than to let them in. I did know better. How many times had I read of people tied up, beaten, robbed, raped, or killed by men pretending to be the police? Or by the real police? What was the difference, once they were tying you up? And what stupidity had had me sliding off the door chain if not my infuriating habit of consideration for others?

  So if anything were to blame, it was that—the manners we’d been saddled with right from the start. Even on the plane, with the aging pharmacist talking me through the history of the national parks of America, and me nodding—oh yes? oh really?—wishing him struck down right there by a stroke, even then I was thinking, I’ll never be free of this, never.

  And now here we were, Ma and I—she settled into Gwen’s guest room, and me with the washing machine and th
e dryer on the glassed-in upstairs porch, her snoring thundering through the glass door between us.

  I pushed my hair off the scar across my forehead, a new habit. It still throbbed when I was tired, a sort of memento mori, or memento stupiditi more like it, because they had told me not to look at them, told me to keep my head down or they’d shoot me right there, and still I’d looked up to ask—well, what? What was there anyone could ask of such people on behalf of one’s own life?

  So that’s when the gun had come down across my forehead, slamming my face back to the floor. They’d laughed, and one squatted over me and began fingering under my skirt, considering, no doubt, whether I’d be worth the trouble of a rape. And even so, lying on the cloakroom tiles, the blood pooling under my face, I’d whispered, Please—please don’t!

  And then suddenly the fingers were withdrawn and a hand grasped the back of my neck, banged my head hard, once, twice, on the tiles.

  “Combeenayshin, beetch! Geev me the combeenayshin or I shoot you now!”

  And so I did, hearing the numbers bubble out low and warped into the pool of blood—two left, eight right, six left—as if a giant bell had settled over me as I lay there in the damp echoing darkness of the cloakroom, with the smell of rubber raincoats and the faint barking of the Moffits’ dogs, waiting for death to come.

  And only then did I remember Ma. What had they done to her up there? I’d heard the stories, horrible, ugly, monstrous stories of what they did to old women. I could hear them up there now, smashing things, grunting, banging. One was in the dining room, kicking at the liquor cabinet, and I tried to say, The key’s in my bag, because who knew what they’d do if they couldn’t get at the liquor? I did say it, but they seemed to have broken in already, I could hear the bottles clinking. Please, I prayed, please let the Moffits hear them and call the real police before they get so drunk that they rape and kill us both.

  How many of them were there? Three? Four? I couldn’t tell. And when one came to stand over me and I saw his policeman’s boot, felt the urine running in a warm, stinking stream through my hair and over the gash, I wondered, in the calm way of the doomed, whether he was the fingerer, and if he was whether he had AIDS. Most of them had AIDS, people said. Most of them were high on drugs as well.

  And just then the phone rang, silencing everything for a moment. The answering machine clicked on and Gwen’s voice came through. “Hey, Jo,” she said, “it’s me. You there? Gladys? Gladys, would you pick up the phone please? Hmm. Look, Jo, I’ll try again in ten minutes. If you’re not there, I’ll phone the Moffits.”

  That’s when they began to quarrel, hissing and spitting at each other. One threw the phone to the floor, kicked it. They even seemed to have forgotten me as they ran here, then there, dragging things, heaving things, until at last the front door opened, letting in a draft of warm night air. And a car started up. And they were gone.

  —

  So, here we were now, drinking tea out of mugs around Gwen’s kitchen table.

  “You girls should do what I did,” Ma said brightly. “Take in the odd man of an afternoon.”

  Gwen snatched up the scones and held them out. “Here, Ma,” she said. “Sonia made them.”

  “Sonia? Who’s Sonia?”

  Sonia rolled her eyes. She was a charmless girl, sneering and sarcastic. Gwen said they were all this way, American teenagers, because right from the start they’d been fed a diet of praise and false encouragement. And look what it produced—joylessness, confusion, discontent.

  “I just followed the recipe,” Sonia mumbled.

  Ma twisted around to take her in. Soon she wasn’t going to be able to see at all, Dr. Slatkin had warned me, nothing to be done about it. “Couldn’t you find a girl who speaks English?” she said.

  I saw Gwen stiffen. “Let it go,” I whispered. “She’s just enjoying herself.”

  But Gwen could never let a thing go, certainly not when it came to Sonia. She might have theories about American teenagers, send the girl to her father’s when she’d had enough of her rudeness, because really she was just like him, she said, vicious, unprincipled, aggressive—she might long for the day when the girl would be out of her hair and away at college—but when it came to Ma, all she wanted was to have Sonia properly loved.

  “That’s Sonia, Ma!” she said, starting the whole rigmarole again. “And we don’t have a ‘girl’ here, only a cleaning woman, who, as a matter of fact, doesn’t speak a word of English. This ‘girl’ is your granddaughter. And she certainly speaks English! American English! Because she’s an American!”

  Ma shrugged. “Well, whoever she is, there’s no reason even an American can’t make use of her afternoons. Mark my words, my dear, it would go a long way toward helping with the petty cash.”

  Sonia launched herself from her chair and stamped out of the kitchen. Hers was a different world from ours, Gwen had explained, and there was nothing you could do to bring such teenagers around to the sort of compunctions under which we ourselves would have had to labor if an aunt and a grandmother suddenly descended into our lives.

  “Oh, Ma!” Gwen said. “She’s only fifteen, for God’s sake!”

  But Ma just gave her a cagey look. “Fifteen? You could always try marrying her off, you know. If she’d stand up straight and do something with that hair, some man might find it in him to take her off your hands.”

  —

  Somehow, Gwen said, the whole thing must have got through to Ma, even subliminally, didn’t I think so? All this business about belles de jour and so forth?

  I shrugged. As far as anyone could tell, they’d overlooked Ma completely. Pure luck, people said, that phone call. And maybe Gladys was the one who’d tipped them off. Why else would she have come back so late from church? And then gone into such an aria of shrieks before she’d even seen me on the cloakroom floor?

  Still, it was her shrieking that had alerted the Moffits, John Moffit, who had untied me, and Aileen, who had run upstairs to find Ma. And, yes, there she was, fast asleep and snoring.

  “I mean, she must have heard you talking about it,” Gwen said, “not to mention giving evidence to the police and so forth.”

  We had always thought in different directions, Gwen and I, but I could never quite bring myself to point this out to her. So if she wanted to believe that Ma fancied herself a belle de jour because one of the intruders had considered raping me, or that Ma loved me best because I had never had a chance, as Gwen put it, “to threaten her primacy” with my father—if it comforted her to think life ran in those directions, fine with me.

  “Perhaps I should look into some sort of therapist for her,” Gwen said, “someone versed in this sort of delusion.” She took out her notebook and jotted something down.

  Next to my bed was a plastic folder full of her notes, all printed up, with headings and page numbers. This was how to use the washing machine, that the alarm system, and to set it every time I went out, regardless, and if I did happen to set it off by mistake, to phone this number within three minutes or the police would come and there’d be a hefty charge.

  The gash on my forehead began to throb. We’d been at Gwen’s for thirteen days, and even before we’d landed I’d been considering a polite way to free myself. But when I suggested a little flat of my own somewhere, even a room, she just reminded me that we were living on rands here, Ma and I, not dollars, and did I realize how far rands would go in a place like California? Surely it would be more sensible for us all just to bung in together? Share the burden? Didn’t I agree?

  And so, of course, I did agree. But every night I lay awake, feeling myself slide down so far into what I always became when I was with Gwen that soon there would be nothing to grasp onto to pull myself back up. And if I went on agreeing with her like this, one day I’d forget how to know what I thought or felt, and would find myself heaping scorn on the sort of people I’d always loved, people she considered “full of nonsense,” because I’d have forgotten how full of nonsense I was
myself, so bewitched would I be back into childhood, with Gwen wielding all the authority of ten years between us.

  —

  I switched on the bedside light. 11:57. At home it would be Sunday morning already, hadadas on the lawn and the sea silver in the morning light. That Sunday morning, as I’d driven down to the beach, hill after hill, I’d been thinking of Ma waking to the thought of another day without a future to look forward to. She’d be asking for me, I thought, and Gladys will have to remind her that it’s Sunday, my day for the beach. And then, feeling forsaken, she’d start casting about, looking for someone to blame.

  And that would be Gwen, never mind that she lived on the other side of the world. I’d tried to explain to Gwen that Ma was rudderless without her sight, couldn’t even see herself in the mirror anymore or read without some sort of headgear that she refused to wear. If I were going blind like this, I’d say, if I’d lost my looks and the life that went with them, I’d also be full of blame.

  “Life?” Gwen cried, full of blame herself. “What life? Anyway, you’re blind already! Can’t you see what you’re doing? Won’t you at least promise that you’ll consider your own future?”

  And so, of course, I did promise. But walking out along the pier that morning, I thought that the future was, perhaps, the whole point of a married man. Without a future, there was just this—the pier, the sea, the beach, and him sitting, as usual, among the Indian fishermen, quite unaware that his presence there might spoil their morning’s fishing. He was selfish in this way, greedy for what pleased him. Standing behind him, with the sun on my skin, the sting of the salt, the bucket of dying fish, I realized quite suddenly that this had been part of it all along—his selfishness, his greed. And that even as I stood there, longing for him to turn, and for the smell of his sweat, the taste of his skin, it was as if a cloud, cool and sweet, had been passing over us all the years we had known each other, and when it passed, as it was passing already, everything would be different, exposed in a glare of light.