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The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016

Page 3

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2016 (retail) (epub)


  Peter Cameron chose “Winter, 1965” as his favorite story of the present collection. (See this page.)

  —

  Another story about a young writer takes place in an entirely different literary scene: our current milieu of writers teaching writing, workshops set in faraway places, and graduate degrees. Elizabeth Tallent’s “Narrator,” though filled with the precise emotions and moves of a novice writer feeling her way into a new role, is principally about the young woman’s affair with an older man. She loved him before they met because she loved his writing, and she was naïve enough to think that loving his work and him were the same thing. When the workshop ends, it seems inevitable that she will stay with him, despite the pull of her husband and dog back in New Mexico, where she has a life. In Berkeley, she has only her lover and his increasingly uneasy company.

  One of the charms of Tallent’s story is her use of the narrator’s misunderstanding of the older man’s discomfort and her paralytic incapacity to leave when she knows she should. Though this mistake isn’t exclusively a problem of the young, Tallent uses it to reveal the narrator’s instability; there are moments when she seems so young and foolish that she could float away. Fortunately, Tallent is a generous writer and lets us see what the narrator becomes—the same person but wiser and all grown up. Without the final section, “Narrator” would be poignant; with it, the story is one that will stay with the reader.

  —Laura Furman

  Austin, Texas

  Elizabeth Genovise

  Irises

  I AM EIGHT WEEKS IN the womb and my life is forfeit. It is the first week of October in Chicago; for my mother, wandering the city alone, I am not yet a daughter but rather a subtle shift in the taste and color of her world, unfurling at the edges of her consciousness as the autumn does just before it erupts into deep reds and yellows. She is meeting her lover at the train station at seven o’clock tonight and planning to follow him across the country to a commune in Oregon, where she will change her name and, if all goes well, elude her husband as well as the panic that has been rising in her since her first year of marriage.

  Her lover, Joaquin, has promised to help her get me “taken care of,” but has also implied that should she decide to keep me, he would be willing to step in as my father. He has not asked my mother to marry him, but this is because he knows my mother: She is not too wild to be loved, but she has been a firefly in a jar for too long. It was her pulsing and banging around behind the glass walls of her life that attracted his attention in the first place, that desperate stunted music that made him think of his first years at the piano, when he had already mastered Brahms on the public library’s baby grand but had only a two-octave plastic keyboard at home that kept so many notes ethereal and out of reach.

  It is not her pregnancy but my father’s announcement of their impending move to East Tennessee that has broken my mother’s vows. He does not know about me yet, but wants a child dearly, and so it is a double betrayal my mother is about to commit. The conductor’s arm, pulling her onto the train that took her from the suburbs into the city this morning, pulled her away from every promise she had made to her husband and parents; she looked him in the eye as if for affirmation, and he said to her, “Careful, now; don’t slip.” Falling is exactly what all of this feels like, and she knows that therein lies the problem: She loves this feeling, and her husband’s inability to understand it, to bother to understand it, has created the yawning chasm between them that she feels hopeless to span even over a lifetime together.

  Her husband is not a bad man. He is a quiet, solid man; his name is Dan Ryan. He shares his name with a Chicago highway that is always thick with cars coming and going to work, and like the highway he is predictable, practical, a man of straight lines. He is a child of the Midwest, hardworking, and his dream (newly revealed to my mother) is to move them to Tennessee where he has family and a small homestead that is his now that his uncle has passed away. Like a father reading a bedtime story to his child, he has shown my mother old photos of the land, the little ranch house, the towering hills behind the big meadow, the goat barn. “Goats, Rosalie,” he has told her excitedly. “We’ll have our own milk. You can care for them while I’m working in Knoxville. You will love them.” What my mother wants is music, coffee shops, paint, and a barre, but she simply nods and tries to smile. My father takes in her smile like a breath to fuel his own speaking and she is overwhelmed by the extent of his plans. She sees the remainder of her life in a flash, like a child’s flip book, the pages rushing forward and the pencil-thin illustrations slimming down her choices as the years go by.

  My father knows just enough about my mother’s past—her years of living alone in different states, her solo travels—to feel confident that she has gotten the wanderlust out of her system. He never asks for details. He came into her life at the tail end of her ballet career, which took her from California to New York to Chicago and came to a shuddering stop when she injured her left knee. As though she had been a stripper or call girl, my father is made uncomfortable by references to her dancing life, but his discomfort is something only my mother and Joaquin can put into words: He has never known immersion in an art, never taken the artist’s gamble, and so the sheer foreignness of my mother’s commitment to dancing baffles him. A photograph of her onstage is like a memento of a former lover, a dangerous and enigmatic lover, and so my father bans them from the walls and prefers to frame snapshots of the two of them on their small-scale trips to places like Sister Bay in Wisconsin. He cannot imagine that my mother might not be content with spending the rest of her life on a small farm. He cannot imagine that she might want something outside of him, and this is partly her own fault: thrown out of her art like a vagrant from a freight train, my mother is bruised and uncertain, her pack dangling on her back. He is the embodiment of good sense. She is docile with him, a sweetness emerging from some part of herself she hadn’t formerly known. It alternately pleases and sickens her.

  My grandmother once told my mother that there is a splice of quartz inside each of us, like the quartz inside a compass or clock. We feel the stone glow warm when we find what it is we are meant to do. My grandmother was a singer; voice was her quartz, a second heartbeat that reminded her always of who she was. My mother’s quartz is dance and Joaquin’s is the piano. The saddest souls in the world, my mother believes, are those who never discover this thing within them. There is a difference between those who wander in search of that glow and those who wander in hopes of evading it. It is frightening, after all—that first awakening when the radiance within threatens to topple you. Even more terrifying is the decision to allow the fire to continue smoldering, because the brighter you let it get, the more terrible the darkness should you ever let it out. This is the analogy my mother has grown up with, and it has saved her in many ways, keeping her spirit alive even five years into her marriage when it seems there are no mirrors left in her world to reflect the truest parts of herself back to her.

  Once a dancer, always a dancer. She has repeated this to herself through the thick cottony silence of her domestic life, over the towers of clean linen as she carries them up the stairs, into her cup of stale coffee as she tries to caffeinate herself through another conversation about finances. She has stopped doing her exercises because my father tends to watch her with open suspicion, as though detecting traces of infidelity in her suppleness. She has stopped writing letters to her girlfriends from her performing days because my father hovers over her shoulder, impatient as an excluded child on the playground. His vehement desire to have children terrifies her. Not even now, two months along, can she imagine trading in the weightless grace of a dancer’s body for the anchored solidity of motherhood. But the weightlessness of flight alarms my father, who will not even board a plane or a carnival ride, much less try to empathize with my mother’s fear of relinquishing her days of spanning half a stage’s length with a doe’s leap.

  My father, who during their courtship was thrilled to
discover my mother’s love for the color red, had proposed to her with a lab-created ruby. In this final year before meeting Joaquin, my mother could no longer stand to look at her left hand, seeing only a tiny traffic light blinking there, unnaturally pink-red, reminding her that everything had stopped. It was in this year that my father’s demand for a child became insistent. My mother could feel the walls closing in around her. The void that had opened when she left dance behind gaped wider every day and she often thought of an Edgar Allan Poe story, a lone man in the dark slowly discovering all the ways he might die if he should make a wrong move: a bottomless pit here, a swinging blade there. She was groping along those walls and she knew she was in trouble. In a final attempt to hold on to herself, she volunteered to teach ballet to impoverished young girls at a community center, and that was where she met Joaquin, a drifter who had been hired on as a pianist for the girls’ dance club and choir. She knew it would upset my father but he surprised her by saying little about it. Perhaps he knew her distress; perhaps he was too drained by his own work to vent his frustrations. He ran his own tiny handyman shop just outside the city and he had to fight to keep his customers as better-funded businesses boomed around him. When he came home, he had just enough strength left to eat and shower before falling into their bed.

  My mother taught the girls’ dance class twice a week, which meant that she saw Joaquin just as often. There had been many chances to fall in love with him. There was the day she first saw him; his looks, not at all exotic as his name might imply, nonetheless startled her. He had softly curling chestnut hair and cornflower blue eyes with impossibly long golden lashes; his mouth was wide and delicate, his bones long. There were rumors that he had been homeless throughout his teens but she did not ask about his background. There was the day she caught him working on a composition, alone in a practice room. She had said nothing and had only watched, a still life herself before the tableau of him bent furiously over the keys, his lashes gold tags on his cheeks, papers with tiny scribbled notes all over the floor and sticking out of the pocket of his wrinkled button-down shirt. There were many days when their eyes would meet as he played for the girls and she led them through a simple routine. He seemed to know that this was only the merest glimpse of what she could do, and she could see the curiosity there along with something like yearning. But it was after months of his playing and her dancing that it happened. He asked her to come into the studio with him alone, before the girls arrived for their class, and she had imagined that he would take her in his arms and kiss her, or tell her that he was in love with her. Instead he sat at the piano and said, “Listen.”

  The opening notes cascaded down from the treble and arrested her where she was. As he played on, she knew first of all that the music was his own and secondly that he had written this solely for her. It was like singing a piece precisely in one’s range; the movements of what he’d written suited her so truly that she began to dance without thinking about her knee or even how she looked to him. As she spun, she recognized that his insight went even deeper than she’d thought; this was a piece that she could dance to without hurting herself again. This realization made her eyes sting. She swayed her way back to him and when Joaquin had played the final chord she put her hand over his. The three notes thrummed there above their hands like a hummingbird and then flew away.

  “How did you know—” my mother started to ask, and then the little girls began filing in, and she had to rise from the piano.

  In her mind it was over then—her marriage to my father, the domesticity she had struggled to find a place in. Cracked though it was from injury and disappointment, her quartz was sunrise orange again; she was Rosalie. My father’s voice over dinner that night was just noise. His socks, as she turned them outside-in before putting them in the washer, were gossamer light in her hands. She rose up on her tiptoes at odd moments, when it was unnecessary, as if to pluck the can of cinnamon down from the low cabinet above the stove.

  Over time she learned that Joaquin had been a music teacher at a small academy but had lost his job due to his political views; he was something of a Socialist, he admitted to her, believing firmly that all things could be shared and that too much competition helped people expand their riches but left their souls boxed in the attic. My mother admired his spirit though secretly she found his ideas simplistic. There would always be rich and poor. Some would have a wealth of love, others a wealth of talent. She wanted to tell him that the singularity of his genius would only cause problems in a commune. But she refrained from saying so, because Joaquin was so set on at least attempting the kind of life his childhood had made him long for. They shared histories often. Music and dance, their ravishing force, the madness of the give-over they demanded; the way it felt to reach your stride, to become untouchable yet visibly burning, like a star flickering behind a curtain of clouds; all of this there was no need to talk about. Instead they talked about the places they’d been and the people who had reformulated the arc of their lives.

  Joaquin told her that he’d had tiny, unforeseen seizures all his life, moments when he fell away from himself and teetered somewhere between his body and the world. He told her how afraid he was of those moments but how galvanized he was after, as though he had caught sight of someone he’d once loved and had feared he’d never see again. My mother told Joaquin about her obsession with ledges: precipices, points, pinnacles, the lonesome islands and cliff hikes and capes she had sought out whenever she’d had the time and money to travel alone. She told him about the breathlessness of it. The sense of an afterlife or a parallel one in the water below or the air above. The strange familiarity of it all. She fumbled for words; he told her not to worry about it. He knew. It was an addiction to the possibility of loss. The paradox was that it kept them alive. It kept their minds and bones sharp, alert to beauty in its transience.

  Even as she walks the well-known streets of downtown Chicago, my mother is standing on this ledge. She has come into the city too early but she has done so for a reason. She needs to think. After all, she is a few hours away from leaving her marriage and a few days away from ending my life. To settle her nerves she is revisiting all her old haunts, most of them on Michigan Avenue and Lake Shore Drive. She never had the money to live here but took the train into the city every day for years to dance in the old Fine Arts Building, which is where she goes first. She walks the halls that smell musty, like old sheet music; she moves gracefully up and down the staircases worn marble-smooth by a thousand slippered feet. The piano rooms are quiet—pools of darkness from which the ivory keys shimmer like moonlight on water. Writers’ desks in the studies wear the maps of old pen lines and the hollows of elbows. A bespectacled man attends the ancient elevator and seems pleased to have someone to shuttle up and down the floors. My mother is quiet, remembering.

  When she leaves the building she walks to the Hilton, where she once took a lover. She is still amazed at Joaquin’s generosity, his willingness to accept this about her past—the other men she has loved, her passionate affairs before meeting my father. She stands in the lobby where she had kissed this lover and fingers the leaves on the potted plants there. She gently loosens a leaf and sticks it in her pocket. Lastly she walks through the Art Institute, hurrying past most of the exhibits in her search for Monet’s wall, where the same hut in a field is painted over and over again but at different times of day. First light, midday, a winter twilight. Colors and shifts that have rattled her since she first saw them in a book. She checks her watch. Her hands tremble.

  She can hear her mother’s voice, and all the arguments her mother would make right now against this decision. You made a vow to your husband, she would say. There are ways to do what you love and still be a good wife. But my mother is embittered—the memory of my father spreading out a map of Tennessee across her lap is fresh and infuriating—and she walks faster, heading for the stairway. My grandmother would tell her, You’re carrying a life inside of you. It’s murder to end it before it
can begin. That little soul was meant to come into this world; where will she go if you end her life? But my grandmother always tended a garden as a hobby in spring and summer, and my mother thinks of evening primrose, how it grows everywhere and anywhere, and she thinks that human souls are this way, too; you cannot stop one from entering this world if this is where it wants to be. If you end a life before it can begin, it will simply find another passageway, another vessel, and it will be back. So there is nothing now to stop my mother from moving forward, and she does: down the stairs, out the door, and back toward the station. The old confidence and grace returning to her, she moves past strangers with ease. She bends to drop a dollar into a homeless man’s extended hands. She has seen the Northwest and she can easily imagine this commune so close to the ocean. She sees herself walking the beaches alone, bringing a starfish back to Joaquin. The descending sun will be behind her, framing her with light, as she nears the camp. Making love, she and Joaquin will enter together into a long fall, and wake both heavy and unburdened, having given some memories and taken others.

  When she reaches the station and claims her ticket, she shakes herself out of her light jacket and out of her doubt. She scans the crowd for Joaquin but does not see him; it is still just quarter to seven. He is coming with all of her luggage and she knows it might take a little time. She sits down on the floor, against the wall, with her legs crossed in front of her like a much younger girl. She no longer feels the faint weight of me inside her; I am as good as gone. Her life is about to begin again and she whispers to herself, “And I am not taking anything along.”

 

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