Conventions are just that. They hold no special spell, except that they give readers a better chance to understand. They are boxes into which we conform our expectations in exchange for the opportunity to make out meaning more plainly. I get aggravated only by the assumption that stories of one kind are “better” than another. Although students of the short story have been worshipping at Joyce’s shrine for nearly a century, it is still the three-act story that dominates American narrative. That remains the shape repeated consistently on television and in the movies, as well as in novels, not to mention at the water cooler. When your coworker starts out, “So I met this guy at the health club,” what you want to know is what happened next.
More to the point, whatever convention a story originates from, the ultimate measure of its success will be tied to its originality, whether in language (Raboteux and Smith), conception (like Jeffery Deaver’s dazzlingly clever “Born Bad”), style (Leonard), or character. On the last point, consider the young Czech immigrants in C. J. Box’s “Pirates of Yellowstone,” who are of immediate interest because we have not seen them before. That is the great irony— the ultimate function of convention is to provide readers with a series of conditioned expectations that the best work will in some regard then transcend and defy, leading us to new ground. James Lee Burke’s “Why Bugsy Siegel Was a Friend of Mine” is an ostensible three-act, but it artfully turns in another direction. Each of these stories exhibits some commendably unique attribute that helps to convincingly project us into a coherent imagined world from which we emerge enlightened in some way about our condition as humans.
Scott Turow
<
~ * ~
The Best American
Mystery Stories 2006
~ * ~
KAREN E. BENDER
Theft
from Harvard Review
Ginger klein held all the cash she owned, which came to nine hundred and thirty-four dollars and twenty-seven cents, in an envelope in her red velvet purse. As she waited in line for the first dinner seating on this cruise to Alaska, she fingered the muscular weight of the bills. The ship’s ballroom was a large, drab room, tricked into elegance with real silver set out on the linen, sprightly gold foil bows on the walls, white roses blooming briefly in stale water. The room was filled with couples, friends, tour groups, glittering in their sequins, intent on having a good time. The room roared as the guests greeted each other, their faces gilded by the chandeliers’ silver haze. Gripping her purse, Ginger watched them and tried to decide where to sit.
Until a few months before, Ginger had been living in a worn pink studio apartment on Van Nuys Boulevard, storing her cash in margarine containers in her refrigerator. She was eighty-two years old and for the last sixty years she had sometimes lived in better accommodations, sometimes worse; this was what she had ultimately earned. On good days she sat with a cup of coffee and the Los Angeles phone book, calling up strangers for contributions to the Fireman’s Ball, the Christian Children’s Fund, the United Veteran’s Relief. Her British accent was her best one; with it, she could keep confused strangers in Canoga Park, Woodland Hills, and Calabasas on the phone. “Congratulations for being the sort of person who will help our cause,” she told them, and heard their pleasure in their own generosity. She cashed the checks at different fast cash stores around the San Fernando Valley, presenting them with one of her bountiful collection of false IDs.
One day, she took the wrong bus home. She looked out the window and was staring at a beach that she had never seen before. The water was bright and wrinkled as a piece of blue foil. Surfers scrambled over the dark, glassy waves. The other passengers seemed to believe this was merely a beach, but Ginger felt her heart grow cold. She had succeeded for sixty-five years as a swindler because she always knew which bus to take.
She had actually intended to pay the doctor if the news had been good. The doctor asked her a few questions. He held up a pair of pliers and she had no idea what they were. She returned to the office twice and saw more doctors who wore pert, grim expressions. The diagnosis was a surprise. When he told her, it was one of the few times in her life she reacted as other people did: she covered her face and wept.
“You need to plan,” her doctor said. “You have relatives who can take care of you?”
“No,” she said.
“Children?”
“No.”
“Friends?”
His pained expression aggravated her. “I have many friends,” she said because she pitied him.
She listened to him describe the end of her life and what she should expect her friends to do for her. Then Ginger had to stop him. She told the secretary that her checkbook was in the car and left the office without paying the bill.
~ * ~
She tried to come up with a grand scheme that would pay for her future care, but her thoughts were not so ordered and each day she lost something: the word for lemons, the name of her street. Peering out her window at the lamplights that pierced the blue darkness in her apartment complex, she imagined befriending one of her neighbors, but her neighbors were flighty college dropouts, working odd hours, absent, uninterested in her. Ginger did not want to die in a hospital or an institution. Dying in this apartment would mean that she would not be discovered for days; the idea of her body lifeless, but worse, helpless, was intolerable to her.
She was watching television one evening when she saw an ad for a Carnival cruise. Many years ago, she had sat with a man in an airport bar. He had been left by his wife of thirty-six years and was joking about killing himself in a room on a cruise ship. “Someone finds you,” he said, on his third bourbon. “A maid, another passenger. Quickly. It’s more dignified. You don’t just rot.”
He was on his way to the Caribbean, desperately festive in his red vacation shirt, festooned with figures of tropical birds. “What an interesting idea,” she had said, lightly, deciding that it was time for a game of poker; she got out her rigged cards. When he stumbled off two hours later, she was $150 richer and certain she would never be that hopeless. But now his plan sounded useful to her.
Before she went on her cruise, she wanted to buy a beautiful purse with which to hold the last of her money. Three public buses roaring over the oily freeways led her to the accessories counter at Saks. The red purse sat on the counter like a glowing light. It was simple, a deep red with a rhinestone clasp; when she saw it, she felt her breath freeze in her throat. The salesgirl told her that it was on hold for someone.
“It’s mine,” said Ginger, her fingers pressing so hard on the glass counter they turned white.
Perhaps it was the hoarse pitch of her voice, or the pity of the salesgirl toward the elderly, but the salesgirl let her buy the purse. In it, Ginger put her cash and also two bottles of sleeping pills. The Caribbean was sold out this time of year, so she spent most of her remaining money on a cruise to Alaska.
~ * ~
She woke up early the first morning of the cruise, restless, trying to remember everything she had ever known. The facts of her life flurried in her head: names of hotel restaurants, the taste of barbecue in Texas versus Georgia, the aqua chiffon dress she had worn at a cocktail party in 1975. She sat at the table, scribbling notes on a pad: Fake furs on Hollywood Blvd., 1956, cloudy, blue fur hats from the rare Blue Hyena from Alaska, lemon meringue pie at the cafeteria on W. 37th St., New York, 1960s, the seagulls flying on the empty Santa Monica beach at dawn, how much money I made a year, $37,000 from Dr. Chamron in 1987 —
Magnolia in Los Angeles, she wrote. She remembered the scent of magnolia as she and Evelyn had stepped off the train in Los Angeles when she was fifteen years old. She remembered her sister Evelyn’s walk, Evelyn just seventeen then, her walk her first successful con; stepping hard onto her feet, shoulders lifted, she tricked Ginger into believing that she knew what to do. It was 1921 and they walked off the train into Los Angeles, two girls alone, armed with an address for an aunt whom they would never meet.
/>
Finally, Ginger’s hand ached and she put down her pen. Scribbling her room number on a paper, she put it in her purse and walked to dinner. She went carefully around the naked ice sculptures of David or Venus that rose, melting, out of bowls of orange punch. Table Sixteen was empty so she sat down, and a silver domed plate floated down in front of her.
She began to eat her salmon when a young woman slid into the seat across from her. Her hair hung down in long, straight sheets, as though flattened by the heat of her own thoughts.
“Darlene Horwitz,” she said, holding out her hand for Ginger to shake. She was young, ridiculously young, with the glossy, unmarked skin of a baby. “This is my first cruise.”
“Ginger Klein.”
“My parents sent me here,” said Darlene. “They had enough of my moaning.” She looked at Ginger. “I was — well, it’s an old story. Pathetic. Have you ever been on a cruise? Is it fun?”
“In the past,” said Ginger.
The girl unfolded her napkin onto her lap. “Are you retired? What did you do?” asked the girl.
Ginger leaned across the table and whispered to Darlene, “This is what I do. People have dreams that you want to be part of. I say I can make them come true. One gentleman expressed a desire to sample gelato in Italy. Then I just did it for him, but on his dime. That man was in the field of advertising. I thought of him sitting behind his desk, eating a bag lunch, a little sweaty, and I thought he’d be grateful that I could taste that gelato for him.”
This was Evelyn’s philosophy, really; she had believed that swindling was generous, as it allowed the suckers a moment to dream. Ginger pushed her seat back slightly. She unfolded her napkin and spread it on her lap.
“I don’t understand,” said Darlene.
Ginger coughed. Then she said, slowly, “I’m a swindler.”
“Oh,” said Darlene. She rubbed her face with her hands. Then she laughed. “Should I be hiding my purse? Are you going to steal money from people?”
“No,” said Ginger. “I don’t need to anymore.”
Darlene seemed to want to steer the discussion back to more familiar territory. “What does your family think of your job?” she asked, carefully.
“I haven’t talked to them in sixty years,” Ginger said. They had lost their parents suddenly, their mother to illness, their father to lust — when their mother had died of tuberculosis, their father left Brooklyn to pursue a stripper in Louisiana. He left a note with some train fare and an address for an aunt in Orange Hills, Los Angeles.
They tried the first phone booth on the street. When the number didn’t work there, they tried another. By the fourth phone booth, they realized that there was no neighborhood Orange Hills and there was no aunt. At the time, the girls had between them forty-three dollars.
“You want to know why I’m here?” Darlene asked. She looked dazed, as though she’d just seen something explode. “His name was Warren. One minute we were finishing each other’s sentences. The next minute he packed his bags. Now I am twenty-two years old and afraid I will never find the one.”
Waiters came out carrying ignited baked Alaskas. Sparklers on the desserts fizzled, and a faint smoky odor filled the air.
“I went to my parents’ house,” said Darlene “Big mistake, they packed me off to the glaciers to have fun —”
Ginger did not want to spend one moment of this week comforting someone else. She folded her napkin, stood up. “Well,” said Ginger, “I hope you have a grand time.” Then she turned and walked across the room. The ship was approaching the first glaciers. Sliding down the mountains the ice was rushed and utterly still. The glacial ice was pale blue and huge pieces drifted by, like the ruined bones of a giant. She watched the pale bones of ice float by her and wondered when she would forget her name.
~ * ~
Her awareness had been her great gift: of the best hour to meet the lonely, of the hairstyle that would make her look most innocent, of the raised eyebrow that indicated a person’s longing, and of course, the moment when she knew that what a person owned would belong to her. Sitting on a train, she would feel the money, a roll wrapped around her hip, ride the click of the train along the tracks. She sometimes tried to imagine what freedom could feel like, for in its place was an immediate, dangerous urge to chain herself to another. She wanted to be the imposters she claimed to be: the lost cousin, the secret aunt, the high school classmate, the one who had loved from afar. When she acted as these people, she conjured up the feelings she believed she would have; she enjoyed her suckers’ gratitude. They saw some goodness in her, and as the night deepened, she sometimes believed she saw their reflections in the dark train windows, sad, unholy ghosts in the glass.
There was a knock on her door at ten a.m. It was the girl from dinner. “Remember me?” she said. “I’m your seatmate. I wanted to go to the chocolate buffet.” She clutched her own hands fiercely. “Who wants to gorge on chocolate alone?”
It was the tyranny of the normal, the attempts of regular people to energize their lives. It was ten in the morning and she could hear the rapid footsteps of the other passengers as they rushed to fill their mouths with sweetness. The girl was insistent and Ginger found herself in the long, winding line. All of the passengers appeared to have risen for this experience. To maintain order, a waiter walked through the crowd, doling out, with silver tongs, chunks of milk chocolate to eager hands. Another waiter, dressed as a Kodiak bear, was offering cups of hot chocolate spiked with rum. Many of the passengers had dressed up — in loose-fitting sweatsuits, draping shirts — to celebrate the impending gluttony. There was a radiant excitement in the air.
Darlene was chatty. “After this I go on a diet,” the girl said. “A major one. Celery and water for weeks —”
Ginger knew, suddenly, that she herself would never go on another diet. She pressed her hands to her cheeks, her lips, feeling a terrible fierce love for her body. She wanted all the chocolate, fiercely. All. She moved quickly, placing truffles, chocolate-dipped potato chips, macaroons, chocolate torte, mousse, fudge on her tray. She was so hungry she was in pain.
When they sat down, she looked at the girl and she wanted to convince her of something; she wanted to shout into Darlene’s ear.
“I’ve had better than this,” she said. “1968. The Academy Awards party at the Sheraton. Truffles everywhere. I said I was a waitress. I said in my off-hours I was working for Montgomery Clift’s mother, who was dying of cancer, and could they please contribute to a cancer fund —” She paused. “They were a nice bunch. Generous. I actually have a high opinion of mankind —”
“Did anyone get mad at you?” asked Darlene.
“Mad?” asked Ginger.
“When they realized that you had taken their money —”
Ginger rose halfway in her seat. “Why would I care?” asked Ginger. “Look. You go to a regular job. They tell you what you’re worth. Or Warren. You love him and he leaves you and you feel like you’re nothing at all. Darling, I don’t have to tell my worth to anyone.”
Darlene looked down. The longing in the girl’s face was like a bright wound.
“What was so good about him anyway?” asked Ginger.
“He said my eyes were pretty,” Darlene said. “He also liked listening to the Cherry Tones. He liked to put his hands in my hair —”
This was the material of love? “So fool him into loving you.”
“How?” Darlene stared, desolate, at slices of chocolate cake so glossy they appeared to be ceramic.
“What did he want? Pretend to be it,” said Ginger.
“He wanted a million dollars.”
“So say you’ve won the lottery,” said Ginger. She bit into a truffle. “But I didn’t.”
“No one knows what they want until you show them.”
Darlene’s face was flushed, excited. “But I want him to love the real me —”
‘Who do you think you are?” said Ginger. “No one. We all are. That’s what I do, notice no
ones —”
“I’m not no one,” said Darlene, huffily. “I come from a nice suburb in San Diego. My father is a successful pediatrician —”
“So? That’s all temporary,” said Ginger. “But the noticing, that’s yours.”
The Best American Mystery Stories 2006 Page 2