The O. Henry Prize Stories 2016
Page 21
The girl has never yet seen those fabled pictures of her father—the disappearing man, the vanisher—though she has seen the charm bracelet from him that her mother still wears everywhere. We’ve already looked in the jewelry store, the girl tells Marjorie. She’s sitting on a bench that wraps octagonally around a planter, in the middle of the mall’s throughway. The bench is made of slats, and bits of the girl’s legs keep getting stuck between them.
I’m just going to pop downstairs and check the bargain area, says Marjorie.
But it’s her birthday.
Just sit. Marjorie screws her lips up to the side, making herself look somehow garnished. Her mouth a vegetable sliced up like a flower. You never know, she says, what you’ll find down there.
This late in the day, Marjorie is the only one going to the basement, and so she seems to be the engine driving the escalator down, sinking the steps with her bulk. Who knows what she will do there, how long she will dawdle? The girl can only guess, inventing interactions between Marjorie and exhausted merchants: Marjorie tossing out uninvited banter and standing in the middle of a walkway to consider a spritz of discount perfume. Marjorie peering one-eyed through a glass paperweight, as though, on the other side, another world would reveal itself.
She won’t find anything, the girl knows. By now, half the bargain counters will have been locked up and prematurely abandoned. Perhaps, by the time Marjorie gives up her quest, the escalators will even have been disabled, forcing her to trudge, step-heavy, up the immobile staircase. The girl smiles; she thinks it’s funny: Marjorie tricking herself into getting some exercise.
Families hurry around her, mothers checking their children’s arms for the requisite number of packages. A threesome of teenage girls scurry by, their hands held up over the mouths, eyes alight. The girl is about to abandon her post to take a closer look at a store window—she’s drawn by its display of slender dummies, draped with summer whites and seersucker. But then she hears it:
Ha!
There’s Marjorie, rising, rising, on the escalator, one hand held over her head. She’s pinching something gold—a charm—which catches a flicker of fluorescent light and glints. Like a polestar. Like a signal. Marjorie is beaming, her mouth spread wide enough to show the fillings in the back of her jaw, but she doesn’t care. She’s laughing, smiling, coming up in triumph from below.
—
Aunt Marjorie went to church every week, and for many years ran the Relief Society. If she were a man, she would certainly have been a bishop, but she was content to serve as God saw fit for her. She took care of me when my own mother could not, and helped me see the clean lines of the church, the sweetness of discipline, the possibility of miracles.
Let’s look at heaven: a place of perfection, weightlessness. The ideal mathematics of celestial planets, one person on each, living as a god of light. That is something people don’t understand, if they don’t go to church, study the scriptures: that our God was once a man like us who earned his radiance through strict adherence to the Gospel. By living a life that was strictly good—good in every measure.
And now let’s look at Marjorie, fleshy from bottom to top. She wouldn’t listen to my explanation of why I only wanted a dinner of crackers and apples, the lightest possible food, the simplest vitamins. No matter how I tried to make her see, she turned ashen when I talked about the beauty of bones, how they are like volcanic rock—so much more delicate than they appear.
Bones are full of fatty marrow, Marjorie told me. People in Wrocław would boil them and scoop the marrow out, and spread it on toast. Like lard.
That’s what she said to me, that’s what she believed. Marjorie whom I loved. Marjorie, with her heavy feather pillow. Marjorie who dipped one pinkie into the cream of a tiramisu and stuck it in her mouth with such a glow of pleasure that she appeared to be self-cannibalizing. Marjorie, hungrily stripping the flesh off her hands to feed the rest of her heft, the fat marrow of her bones. Marjorie, massive.
—
I promised that we would end up on the salt flats in Bonneville, that somehow Marjorie would lead us there. But in fact it was my idea to go to Tooele County, and on the drive out I held Aunt Marjorie’s ashes in my lap. My mother drove barefoot, her black shoes kicked off and thrown onto the backseat in a jumble.
The salt flats are moonlike, with the incandescent glow of a night-light even at high noon. In life there was little about Marjorie that was tidy, and I’d made it my mission to fix that, to the best of my ability, now that she was dead. Marjorie refused to understand me, couldn’t see that I was enacting a marvel of my own. A transformation. Sometimes her cheeks would hang off her face and jiggle a little. Sometimes she had jowls.
I imagine being a teacher, using Marjorie as an instructive example of how to save a falling soul. Here we see the droplets of sweat that polluted Marjorie’s brow when she exerted herself. Here is the back of Marjorie’s knee, creased like a marshmallow crushed between crackers. But then: We see her cleansed into ash, cool and gray and soft.
At Bonneville, the ground is self-disinfecting. Salt leeches out the moisture, evaporates into the air all possibility of mildew and blooming mold, leaving the landscape white and uniform, the wind whistling across it unimpeded. I told my mother: It will be pretty. It will be a nice place for her to rest. To meet with God.
I wanted to believe in Marjorie’s ascension into heaven: a last miracle, for her. Rising up into the arms of infinity. I wanted to believe I had the ability to make such a thing possible. My mother slipped back on her shoes, and we crunched out over the dry earth of the salt flats until we were in the middle of a great white nowhere. I knelt down and tried to pry the lid off of the box, the Marjorie box, but my fingers shook.
Let me, my mother said. Honey, let me help you.
She took an old pocket knife out of her purse, a knife with a yellow body and a slightly rusty blade. Her charm bracelet made a sound like ice when she jammed the blade into the seam of the box and then the hinge. Sharp, clean movements. One, two, three. With a pop, the lid came free and released a little puff of Marjorie around us.
God bless her and keep her, my mother said.
The sun was hot; there was very little breeze. I picked up the bag of ashes and turned it upside down above my head, downwind of my body, and watched Marjorie fall. I was a little disappointed—she was supposed to catch on a breath of air and fly to the Lord. But Marjorie remained in death what she was in life, even after all my planning: so heavy, so physical, so full. She drifted onto the salted earth and moved across it like a wave, like a twister. And then the wind changed.
The dust of Marjorie rushed back at us, a sudden gust hitting our faces and billowing my skirt. My mother covered her eyes, but I didn’t move quite fast enough. We were in a cloud, and then the cloud was gone. In the stillness that followed, I looked down at my arms, which were coated in gray. The color grit stuck to my eyelashes, and to my teeth.
Mama, I said.
She was all over me. Marjorie in my ears and under my fingernails. Sitting lightly on my collarbone and dusting the part in my hair. Marjorie, swallowed, no matter how I tried resisting. My mother used her shirtsleeves to clean off my cheeks, bent my neck down and scratched the ashes off my scalp, then flipped my hair back up and over, for volume, the way she’d shown me when I was a little girl still learning how to be in the world. How to be good, and how to measure it.
Safety
Lydia Fitzpatrick
IN THE GYM, THE children are stretching in rows. Their arms are over their heads, their right elbows cupped in left palms. Class is almost over, and this is the wind-down—that is what the gym teacher calls it—though the children move constantly, flexing their toes inside their sneakers, shifting their feet, canting their hips, biting their lips, because they are young, and their bodies are still new to them, a constant experiment. The gym teacher counts softly, one, two, three, four, and before five there is a sound that reminds a boy in the back row of the sound a
bat makes when it hits a baseball perfectly. In the front row, a girl thinks it is the sound of lightning, not lightning in real life, because it is sunny out and because she can’t remember ever hearing real lightning, but like lightning on TV, when the storm comes all at once. Next to her, her best friend thinks it is a sound like when her mother drives her into the city and the car first enters the tunnel, only this sound is sharper than that one and stays within its lines, and she is not inside it. One boy recognizes the sound. He has been to the range with his father and brother, and he has worn headphones and stood a safe distance and watched the sound jerk his father’s arm and push his brother off balance. This boy is the first to let his elbow drop.
The gym teacher is thinking five, and then he knows. He looks to the door that leads to outside, to the ESL trailers, to the walkway that connects the elementary school to its middle school, because that is where the shot has come from, and there is this throb of hope for the girl who teaches ESL, who has just moved here and still bakes brownies for the teachers’ lounge. The gym teacher is calm, and in his wind-down voice he tells the children to be quiet, completely quiet, and to run into the boys’ locker room. The gym teacher is old, has been at this school for decades, and with each passing year, the children like him more and listen to him less, but they know to be afraid from the carefulness in his voice—they are not talked to carefully, except when they ask questions about death and divorce—and at first their fear is only for the tone of his voice, but then they remember the sound. They run, and their sneakers are the sort that light up with each footfall and their shoelaces whip against polished wood, and the gym teacher is not worried that they will trip, but that they will stop—because they are that age when rules are God and shoelaces must be tied—but they don’t stop, and they don’t trip. There are eighteen of them. They are as fast and graceful as he has ever seen them.
When they reach the locker room, one boy grabs the gym teacher’s sleeve. It is September, and he has not yet memorized their names, but he knows that the boy’s brother was a student of his years ago and that the boy’s father is back from the war. The boy whispers, “Gun.” He is the one who recognized the sound and he has worried, as he sprinted across the basketball court, that the gym teacher might not know. The gym teacher nods, puts a finger to his lips. He is thinking means of egress. He is thinking police, hide, gun. He is thinking of his cell phone, which was a present from his son last Christmas, a tongue-in-cheek present, a comment on character, and it is in the pocket of his windbreaker on the back of the ladder chair in his kitchen at home.
The children have gathered around him when usually they scatter, and he can see in their eyes that they want to be picked up and held. One girl has forgotten the sound. She smiles and raises her hand. She has a question. She wants to know whether they should change out of their uniforms, but before she can ask, the gym teacher points to his office, which is in the middle of the locker room, and he tells them to lie on the floor behind his desk and to be quiet, and the carefulness drops from his voice—he can’t help it, there are more shots, inside the school now, and a yell cut short.
As the children file into his office, the gym teacher turns out the lights in the locker room and looks out into the lighted gym. The floor is perfectly bare, perfectly clean, glowing like the surface of a planet seen from afar. The cones and Frisbees and Hula-Hoops are back in their bins, and there is nothing to show that a class meets this period. Through the windows of the double doors he sees pale yellow wall tiles (they are the color of butter, of winter sun, but the tiles are more a constant in his world than butter or pale suns, and so when he sees those things he thinks that they are the color of the school). The boy whose father is just back from the war, the one who recognized the sound, watches the gym teacher look to the doors, and he wishes that the gym teacher were his father, because the gym teacher is old and afraid, and his father has only been afraid twice and both times were at the war, never at home, because here, he says, is paradise compared to there. This boy is the last into the office, and as he lies down next to the girl who thought of lightning, he goes on wishing for his father in the fervent way that children wish for things because they think those things are almost in their grasp.
On the teacher’s desk is the blue parachute that the children play with on Fridays. On Fridays, they grip the silk and make it ripple and buck, they run underneath it and around it, but one of its seams is split, and the gym teacher meant to take it home to his wife, who would stitch it up as she has dozens of times before. Behind his desk, the children are lying in two neat rows, and he has seen children lie this way before, on the news, in other countries, but not these children, his children, and he almost tells them to get up, that it is tempting fate to lie this way, but there are more shots, closer, in the cul-de-sac of classrooms across from the gym, and the gym teacher grabs the parachute and spreads it over them, and they are so small that it covers all eighteen of them easily, and at the thought of them—of how many and how small—his chest seizes, and he thinks that he will be the one to make a noise, but then he hears the clang of the gym doors opening and the long sigh of them swinging shut and his fear becomes the biggest thing he’s ever felt. It is so much bigger than him that for a second it eclipses him entirely.
The gym teacher cannot think, and then, just as suddenly, he can. He turns out the lights in his office and the parachute is not quite as dark as the shadows around it—the silk has a gleam—but it is the best he can do. He crouches under his desk. He is between the children and the door, and he whispers to them one more time, “Do not make a sound. Do not move.” Under the parachute, a girl pees without thinking of holding it. She feels it hot and soaking the seat of her gym shorts, and the parachute is light on her face. On Fridays this is the best feeling, and she thinks of that, of how she is getting to feel it today even though it is not a Friday. There are footsteps moving across the gym. A boy thinks, Dad. A girl thinks, Mom, Mom, Mom. One boy thinks it is the principal, because the principal is the only one who walks through the halls when they’re empty. One girl begins to count silently. She panics sometimes—when she sees the road disappearing too fast under the car’s tires; when the train cuts through their town, its whistle blaring; when she is in the swing at the park and finds herself too high—and her parents tell her to count, to breathe, to count and breathe, and they count with her, lead her from one number to the next.
The footsteps are slow. The gym teacher knows that this means it is the man with the gun and it means something about him too. The gym teacher is curled around his own knees. He has never made himself so small. Behind him, the parachute moves with each of their breaths.
There is a new noise. A clang of metal on metal. The boy who recognized the shot does not know what this sound is, and he realizes now that there was comfort in knowing. He does not love Fridays and the parachute. He does not love anything that hems him in, and his mother tells him that even as a baby he did not like to be held. He edges out from under the parachute. He is between the wall and the girl who thought of lightning, and it is dark, but he can see the gym teacher’s coat rack branching over him and he can see the windows that line the walls of the office and look out into the locker room. Deep in the dark there is a red haze from the exit sign over the door that leads to outside, to the ESL trailers, and to the walkway to the middle school where his brother is, and the boy could run that walkway in twenty-two seconds—he has timed himself on a watch that is both waterproof and a calculator—but his brother does not like him to come to the middle school. Instead, his brother meets the boy on the hill above the soccer field, where there is a tree with peeling bark and a path that leads through the woods to their house.
The clanging noise shakes in the air and gives way to the footsteps. The girl counts thirty, thirty-one. The man with the gun is close, the gym teacher thinks, by the showers, whose dripping is the metronome of his days. The showers are separated from the office by three banks of lockers, and as he t
hinks of the lockers, he realizes that that was the clanging sound, metal on metal—the butt of the gun or the muzzle. The children’s things are inside the lockers and strewn around them, their backpacks and jackets and lunch bags and dioramas—they are that age, when teachers tell them to pick their favorite place in the world and fit it in a shoebox and they can—and the man with the gun will see these things, and he will know that they are here. The gym teacher shifts into a squat and one of his ankles cracks. He doesn’t know what he’ll do when the door opens, but he keeps his eye on the dark square of the window next to the door. The footsteps are closer and closer and closer and far away there are screams, and a girl—the youngest in the class—has heard these screams before, at the hospital, when she was having an arm set and down the hall someone else was having something worse. Next to her, a boy wishes for something to hold on to. His palms burn with the need, and he finds the girl’s hand next to his and grabs it, and she thinks this is like the hospital too, where everyone was holding hands.
He is here. There is a change in the darkness in the window that the gym teacher feels more than sees (just as he feels his wife’s absence some nights, when she is sleepless and moves through the house below him), and then the change is clearer: He can see the man’s glasses catch the red light of the exit sign. He can see the nose of the gun moving toward the window. There is a clink, a knife on a plate. Fifty-six, the girl counts, and the gym teacher knows the glass will splinter, he knows how this ends, but behind him the boy crouched under the coat rack sees something different: A half-foot down the gun’s barrel, where the shoulder strap attaches, there is a dangling medal, a slim silver oval barely bigger than a thumbnail, but big enough for the boy to recognize it. It is a saint medal, the saint whose job it is to protect soldiers, and the boy knows the saint’s name because it is the same as his own, and he knows the medal because his mother gave it to his father years ago, before you were born, she tells him, before your brother was born, when your father left for the first time.