The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  Later on in my reading life, though I had been fed on thriller endings, I started to want more than that when I read. But the idea of the “surprise” wasn’t abandoned entirely; instead, it was given a shine and polish and a more mature translation. It’s possible to see that a whole story—not just the ending—might itself take on what had been considered the function of an ending. I once heard someone paraphrase a writer (Donald Justice, she thinks, but I can’t seem to find the quote), who said that in all good stories, someone needs to turn a corner, or a hair. No longer on the lookout for the socko shift, the reader surrenders, and it’s then that surprises can flourish. By which I mean that you might not necessarily gasp; but without a doubt you will find yourself in a place you didn’t know about before. A place where you didn’t expect to be.

  We live in a moment when change is continually demanded and fetishized. “Advice, How-To and Miscellaneous” is its own category among the New York Times bestseller lists, the first two entries suggesting a hunger for finding a way to be different from the way you are right now, while the third, “Miscellaneous,” suggesting . . . I’m not sure what. I once asked a therapist friend if any of her patients ever actually “changed.” I said to her, essentially, “Come on, you can tell me, I won’t tell anyone,” thinking that maybe she would lean over and confide in me that no, no one ever really changed. That “change” was a grail too far. Maybe modification was a better word. Maybe subtle shift nailed it more accurately. Maybe learning experience was the closest way to describe what actually transpired in therapy. But instead she was mildly offended by this question, and she said to me, “Of course they do.”

  So okay, maybe they do, in therapy and in life. In short stories, I don’t think characters or their situation or their surroundings change as frequently as they turn.

  The stories in this year’s edition of Best American Short Stories live, and breathe, and again and again in them there is some kind of turn. After I came up with my final list and discussed it with the series editor, Heidi Pitlor, I thought about what it meant that these were the particular stories I had chosen. I considered what I was trying to say, in choosing them. Why they spoke to me as they had. I remembered once reading a book about someone with autism who had a tremendous facility for numbers. Patterns would jump out at her from a page filled with numbers. She was unable to describe how or why she saw them, but she did.

  I, too, can’t say exactly what made these stories “jump out” at me either, except to note that among the large number of superb entries I had the pleasure to read—and the quality of the stories given to me was consistently high—the ones I chose all feel like surprises in one way or another, and the surprises seem right. I think it’s true that stories that are surprising in an overarching way are also often surprising on a granular, language level. The macro-surprise and the micro-surprise work together to form something that is original and exciting and exists outside the world of the ordinary.

  That’s true of Leopoldine Core’s “Hog for Sorrow,” included this year, in which a man who has hired a prostitute is described as “a little desperate. Like someone on Judge Judy, fighting for old furniture.” I laughed when I read that, and part of me wanted to be an English teacher at that moment, so I could write in the margin, “How true!” (Not that Leopoldine Core, with her spare, lucid prose about desperation and love, needs an English teacher at this point.) T. C. Boyle, whom I have read and admired for years, offers in the first sentence of “Are We Not Men?” a jarring and almost physical surprise-pull into a world that is his own: “The dog was the color of a maraschino cherry, and what it had in its jaws I couldn’t quite make out at first, not until it parked itself under the hydrangeas and began throttling the thing.” Chad Anderson uses the second person in a strong and sure way in “Maidencane,” and if the voice makes for clear, rhythmic reading, time suddenly intrudes: “Two decades drop away. The past and the present spring together like a clap.” Sonya Larson’s first-person narrative is vivid with wit; humor works organically in this examination of race, coupledom, compatibility: “I met Gabe Dove when I was sad and attracting men who liked me sad.” Noy Holland’s short story “Tally,” weighing in at a far lower word count than anything else in this volume, is bold as well as economical: “The man, the men—the sober man, the dead man—had a sister, inscrutable as a turtle.” Jai Chakrabarti’s “A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness” gives us a drama about the delicate interlace of the exigencies of desire and family: “Nikhil convinced himself that Sharma had opened his heart to the idea of fathering, but the exuberance of this conclusion led to certain practical questions.” A very different fatherhood milieu exists in Fiona Maazel’s “Let’s Go to the Videotape,” in which supposedly private experiences are fiercely plumbed: “Who doesn’t film his kid experiencing a threshold moment?” Maazel asks. Jim Shepard’s “Telemachus” situates its characters in the close quarters of a short story and the equally close quarters of a British submarine during World War II, where, during a storm, “we alternated at the watch, poking our faces and flooded binoculars into the wind’s teeth . . .” Eric Puchner writes of adolescence and the residue of a boy’s parents’ broken marriage. The boy observes his father’s girlfriend, who had “done up her shirt wrong, and I could see her belly button, deep as a bullet wound, peeking between buttons.”

  Each story is a discrete surprise, the whole of them a collage of distinctness and distinction. This is true, too, of the stories honored in the back of the book, including ones by (to name just a handful of authors) Smith Henderson, Shruti Swamy, Lydia Conklin, Rebecca Makkai, Wells Tower, Caitlin Horrocks, Lee Conell, Manuel Muñoz, Corinna Vallianatos, Michelle Herman, John Fulton, Sarah Shun-lien Bynum, Helen Schulman, Jennifer Haigh, Joan Frank, Bret Anthony Johnston, and David Bergen. It goes without saying that choosing twenty for a collection such as this one is always going to be difficult, and is a kind of skill that you figure out how to do on the job. This year, though, it was perhaps difficult in a different way; and here is the moment in this essay in which I want to talk about a very different kind of surprise, in order to give some context for how I approached the reading of these stories. As it happened, I was sent the first batch of them right before the 2016 presidential election. Like everyone I knew, I felt hope and excitement mixed up with unrelenting ambient worry and dread. I would watch the news at night and then shut it off after a while and return to the task of reading for Best American Short Stories.

  Then, after the longest vamp ever, November 8 arrived, bringing with it its own surprise ending, and one that seemed, to so many people, wrong on a few different levels. Wrong, by my view, as in outrageous, wrong as in puzzling, wrong as in unearned. As of this writing, all those feelings remain in place. Here’s a difference between life and art: the first might or might not contain a surprise or turn that feels wrong, while the second should contain one that feels somehow right, even if in being “right” it reveals injustice or tragedy or the unexplainable. And after the surprise has been revealed, it might well have an afterlife—which, if it’s a wrong life-surprise we’re talking about, can feel deadening, and create the sensation of time standing still. People want to know: Will it always be this way? Will the molasses of time ever thin out and flow? Will we ever have reason to feel hopeful?

  At some point during election night, when I was the only one still awake in my household, I felt I really shouldn’t sleep. It was as if I had to keep vigil. I was waiting for the results to become official; waiting to find out what was what, for sure, and then start to face it in a way that would no longer be theoretical. Waiting for the last leaf to drop off the vine. Pacing around the apartment, I wandered up to the big pile of short stories I’d been sent. At 2 a.m. I found myself trying to read them, but it was tough. Almost immediately I put them aside, realizing that this was not the time for this. But when would that time be? Each one had been written with care and command; and I wondered how reading fiction after this election was going to
remain an imperative act; and I wondered what, too, would happen to its sister act, writing fiction.

  To say, merely, “We need art now more than ever before,” in answer to the questions that surround us, is sort of an unsatisfying response, and a little sanctimonious, and maybe not entirely true. Okay, we do need art more than ever before, but we still want it to perform the same magic that it once performed, when in fact we are living in a different moment. What is art going to give us now? Will the leaf clinging to the vine be proven to be not art but purely artifice, a false comfort that can’t actually save anyone’s life and in fact is pretty much good for nothing?

  As the stories piled up in drifts around me in the weeks after the election, I found some answers, because among the stories, when I dug in fully, were stellar moments of profound change and beauty and weirdness and singularity. And while the election had made me feel that there was nothing on earth powerful enough to drown out this particular bad surprise, that turned out not to be true. Life kept getting lived, though with different emotions attached now. I returned to the well of stories again and again, finding myself drawn there not for distraction, not for, “Take me away from 2016,” but for many reasons, none of them easy to describe. If you know exactly what you are going to get from the experience of reading a story, you probably wouldn’t go looking for it; you need, in order to be an open reader of fiction, to be willing. To cast a vote for what you love and then wait for the outcome. You need to have faith in the reading experience of the past to allow you to read now, in the present, and to keep reading into the future, regardless of what dark shape it takes. And once you start reading, you may well find that you are launched out of despair. The launching isn’t necessarily from a cannon; it might be from a slower kind of transport. Slow and deliberate, with the particular tang and feel of the writer whose work in particular launched you.

  Joseph Conrad wrote about how art, when it succeeds, can offer “that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask.” This year was a strange year to be reading so much fiction in the midst of what I think of as a bad surprise. But the glimpse of truth, as ever, is on display if you make the effort to look for it. So I raised the shade.

  Meg Wolitzer

  CHAD B. ANDERSON

  Maidencane

  FROM Nimrod

  Nowadays, the memory starts like this: there’s a rush in the red dirt, and you and your brother snatch up the tackle box and run from the girl. She flings her fishing pole at you and yells that her daddy will just buy her another tackle box. And another, and another. The girl’s echoes follow you along the riverbank.

  The river is green and appears desolate—no motorboats, no fishermen, no teenagers cannonballing, no herons stretching, no feral cats pawing the muck for crayfish, frogs, or mice—which only sharpens the sounds: the orchestra of insects, the whistles of birds, the girl’s fading echoes, your steady breath. Your and your brother’s white T-shirts are smeared with mud, and he has a cassette tape in the back pocket of his jean shorts. You wish you could remember the songs he liked. There’s only this Saturday left, and you two are only a day from losing one another.

  You remember the red riverbank and the sagging dock jutting into the water and how later that afternoon a dirty fishing hook snagged your thumb, and you imagine how the girl would’ve laughed because you stole it from her and the snag was deep and bloody.

  You remember that you both caught a fish and brought them home. Your mother spread newspaper over the kitchen table and began to clean the fish while your father sat outside on the porch, chopping potatoes. You and your brother sat next to your mother at the table, but every few minutes he jumped from his chair to rewind a cassette tape to the start of the song he liked most. He had borrowed the tape from a school friend. You didn’t really understand the song, but you admired so much how easily your brother had learned it, how he mouthed it aggressively, as if he could will the people around him, the whole house, to match the song’s exuberance.

  Your mother chopped off the heads of both fish and then started to cut one open along its belly but suddenly stopped and just stared at the mess she’d made soaking into the newspaper. Your daddy came in from the porch with a plastic bowl filled with the chunks of potatoes and stared at her. She asked him to help her, and he said he didn’t know how to clean fish. Your mother started to cry, and your father just stood there, hunched over, as if he might fall over any minute, and only now do you get that they felt guilty because this was your last supper together and they couldn’t even get this right. The song playing on the stereo descended into a garbled moan as the cassette player began to eat the tape, and your brother sprung from his seat, but your father was quicker. He yanked out the cassette, its tape snapping and trailing from it like spilled entrails, and he flung the cassette onto the table where it slid into the fish heads. All fell quiet, even your mother. To break the silence, you lifted your snagged thumb for them both to see. It had started to sting sharply, and your flesh was red and angry.

  Your parents bickered about what to do with you, complaining because they feared you’d get tetanus and they couldn’t really afford the shot. That’s not who you were back then, a person who could afford tetanus shots willy-nilly. In the end you piled into your father’s truck and they all took you to get the shot. It was only later, back at home, while your daddy wrapped up the mess of a fish and took it away, that your mother explained to you and your brother what was happening as she uselessly rewound the tape back into the cassette with a pencil. She and your brother were taking a long trip, but you were staying with your daddy. After, your mother disappeared to her bedroom and your daddy to the front porch while your brother microwaved canned pasta for you both to eat for dinner. That night, you and your brother made plans to run away, but your father stayed awake all night, watching loud war movies on the television, only falling into his usual snore at 7 a.m. when your mother awoke, as if they anticipated your plans and coordinated a watch schedule. A few hours later, your brother and mother boarded a westbound Greyhound bus, leaving Florida for good.

  The details of those twenty-four hours stick with you like bread caked to the roof of your mouth, like fat in your arteries, like dirt under your fingernails. You are the trees that day, deep green and drooping with humidity. You are your brother’s sneakers in the red dirt and the rubber band he used to tie his dreadlocks back. You are the girl on the dock and the snagged hook in your finger. You are the pencil your mother used to wind up the cassette. And you are the scar your daddy got the next day from slamming the metal screen door on his ankle after they left. The ankle of a man who only knew how to love one person at a time. Your mother chose you for him and took herself and your brother out of the equation to make it easier.

  All of this and what you’ll think about most is the girl on the dock, from the scab on her elbow to the purple galoshes that her sister passed down to her.

  Of course, that is the past. You don’t know your brother anymore, and the girl on the dock is dead. You live in Baltimore now. You’ve got two dogs and a sleeve of tattoos on your left arm. You’re contemplating one on your right. Your boyfriend wishes you wouldn’t do it, but your girlfriend is encouraging. The girlfriend knows about the boyfriend, but he doesn’t know about her.

  Your brother lives in Wisconsin. From time to time, you call the number your mother sent you, but the phone just rings and rings, and there is no voicemail. If he calls you, you don’t know—he’s never left a message. You’re one of those people who doesn’t own a cell phone—just a landline—which your boyfriend finds endearing and your girlfriend is on the fence about. Your boss has threatened to fire you if you don’t get a cell phone, but you always show up when you say you will, and if he calls any one of the bars or restaurants that he owns and you manage, he’ll find you there or you’ll return his call in fifteen. You spend your day with the type of people your mother would hate: people who chose the service industry willingly, not out of necessity. Since you are a mana
ger you feel it isn’t quite the same, and you haven’t disappointed her. You wear a wooden rosary she once sent you around your right wrist. The small cross clicks against tumblers of whiskey and glass bowls filled with fresh herbs as you craft drinks. Sometimes restaurants that do not belong to your boss invite you to create their new seasonal cocktail menus and you say sure, but you keep it under the table. You don’t have a do-not-compete clause, but still.

  Your father once said that black people in red cars only attract bad attention, and you should never buy one. You never bought a car at all, sticking to a motorcycle. Once a year you have to remind yourself that your father is still alive, and you call him. The conversations are pleasant and last a few hours—you cover politics and recipes and your boyfriend and your girlfriend, about which he casts no judgment—but there is no need at the end of these talks to pretend that you’ll speak any sooner than a year or so from that moment, give or take a month. All the plates in your house are from your father’s mother. He gave them to you wrapped in newspaper, and they are pale green and very sturdy.

  Your mother sends you a long letter once or twice a year, usually nonsensical but beautiful, drifting between English and Spanish, including long descriptions of your birth, or the glacier she saw on a recent trip to Alaska, or the invasive species of grass in her garden, or the brief affair she had with her distant cousin when she was seventeen. Her handwriting is always exquisite. Her ink is always blue. Once it was red, and she apologized for it. You’ve framed some of her letters, creating in your living room a gallery wall of smooth, intricate streams tracing across white or yellow stationery. Like maps with no cities, just rivers. Her address is in New Orleans, but you do not think about her when you visit that city, which is at least twice a year because your girlfriend and boyfriend both have best friends who live there, coincidentally. When you write her back, it’s always brief, and you include a blurry snapshot of your face.