The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Come in,” she says. “It feels great.”

  Yes, he thinks, oh, yes. But what’s he going to do? Take his pants off? Also, this is sin, and he knows it. This is the lure of the flesh. This is the moment they have been warning him about, all of them.

  “Come on,” she says.

  “I can’t,” he says. “I shouldn’t.”

  “All right, then,” Clara says, and turns her back to him, turns her face up to the sun. For a moment, Sander thinks she will dive in all the way. He feels it himself: the plunge, the beautiful clear cool water. Instead he sits on the log and feels sorry for himself and tries not to look at Clara, who is not looking at him, who doesn’t care if anybody sees her or not. He looks everywhere—the sky, the stream, the trees—but always back to her. The shape, even under her clothes, the curve of her hips. Sander is hopeless. Sander is lost.

  Clara wades out of the water toward him, dropping the hem of her skirt as she goes until the only bare part of her is her pretty feet, which is the last thing Sander finds to stare at. She sits next to him on the rough log. Sander wishes he could find a way to make it smoother for her.

  “I get it,” she says. “You’re not supposed to enjoy yourself or something. But I don’t understand why.”

  “God wants other things for me,” he says.

  “You can’t have both?”

  “I don’t know,” he says, while inside his mind he searches frantically for God to guide him. Even the name of God sounds like a fraud to him, a lie he’s telling himself.

  “I’m really asking,” Clara says. “I want the things you want. I want to feel like a whole person, you know? Just at peace with things. But then I’m, like, there’s nothing wrong with pleasure. I’m in the water and it’s clean water, you know? I don’t see what’s wrong with it.”

  Sander says nothing, but stretches out his hand and lays it on the damp fabric of her skirt, just at her knee. Clara looks at his hand and then at his face, with a deep sadness, almost exhaustion. She takes his hand from her knee and gives it back to him.

  “That’s not what I want from this,” she says. “From you.”

  “Okay,” Sander says.

  “We should get going,” she says, and laces up her big black boots.

  And Sander follows—down the path through the woods, across the bridge and home again, where his mother waits in the kitchen—but only a ghostly part of Sander. The real person is still back in the woods, still wondering where God was, why God did not stop him from making a fool of himself. All through dinner, all through the night, he wonders. Where is the holy part of him? He can’t find it, only sin. He seems to be made of sin, to contain nothing but dirty desires, tits and asses.

  All week, his mother looks at him as if she knows something, as if she suspects him, and maybe she’s right to. Clara’s white thigh torments him, the ease as her body enters the stream, the dazzle of sunlight on water and pale skin.

  She isn’t there at Fellowship. He looks from face to face and doesn’t see her. Then back to his mother, who has seen him searching, who knows, who is disappointed in him. This much good remains in Sander: he’s sad for the sake of Clara’s immortal soul that he drove her away. His greed and sin have pushed her back into the darkness. He sees again what a trap and a contrivance the world is, a tangle of sin and pain. And Sander’s God is nowhere near. He searches and searches within himself.

  Then she arrives, and Sander fills with an unreasonable happiness. All is not lost, not yet. She takes her place in the women’s section and kneels and prays, modest in her long skirt, a gray scarf over her head. She’s naked under her clothes, though. Sander knows this. Maybe God will find a way for them. Maybe they will marry. Maybe there is a godly way. Sander is filled with lust and virtue at the same time, seeing her in bridal white, the tattoo snaking up her neck. Sander in a good suit, with a good haircut . . .

  A commotion at the back of the room. Everybody looks: it’s Clara’s father, in undershirt and ponytail and intelligent-looking glasses.

  “Come on, girl,” he says to Clara. “We’re done here.”

  “I don’t want to.”

  “That doesn’t matter. It’s time to go.”

  He takes the scarf from her hair, not quite roughly, grips her arm and pulls her to her feet. Sander needs to rescue her, Sander needs to help.

  Instead it’s his mother who walks over to them.

  “Let the girl stay,” Sander’s mother says. “For the sake of her soul.”

  The father laughs the same loud cawing laugh as his daughter. The same. Everything is being taken from Sander.

  “Y’all sound crazy as a shithouse mouse,” the father says. “Two years, when she turns eighteen, she can believe whatever bullshit she wants to. But for now I have to take care of her. Steer her in the right direction. Come on, honey.”

  He keeps his grip on her arm, up by the shoulder, and pushes her toward the door. Clara looks back in a kind of panic, seeks out Sander’s face, implores him. But he sits rooted to his chair, suddenly heavy. This is the last he will ever see of her. He knows it and still cannot move. Then she’s gone, and an electric hush falls over the room. Nobody says anything.

  A week later, they drive by Clara’s house on the way to a different neighborhood and see the windows empty and open. Nobody lives there now. Sander feels it as just one more thing. One more nothing. None of this matters. Everything that matters to him is gone. His mother pulls to a stop a few blocks farther on, and Sander takes the big valise of pamphlets, walks behind her. The sun shines down on his black suit. Still eight weeks of summer left.

  JAI CHAKRABARTI

  A Small Sacrifice for an Enormous Happiness

  FROM A Public Space

  From his balcony, Nikhil waited and watched the street as hyacinth braiders tied floral knots, rum sellers hauled bags of ice, and the row of elderly typists, who’d seemed elderly to him since he’d been a boy, struck the last notes of their daily work. Beside him on the balcony, his servant, Kanu, plucked at the hair that grew from his ears.

  “Keep a lookout for babu,” Nikhil shouted to Kanu. “I’ll check on the tea.”

  Kanu was so old he could neither see nor hear well, but he still accepted each responsibility with enthusiasm.

  The tea was ready, as were the sweets, the whole conical pile of them—the base layer of pistachio mounds, the center almond bars that Nikhil had rolled by hand himself, and on the top three lychees from the garden, so precariously balanced, a single misstep would have upset their delectable geometry.

  When he returned to the balcony he saw Sharma walking up the cobbled lane, his oiled hair shining in the late afternoon light. The typists greeted him with a verse from a Bollywood number—Sharma’s boxer’s jaw and darling eyes reminded the typists of an emerging movie star—and Sharma shook his head and laughed.

  Kanu limped downstairs to let Sharma in, and Nikhil waited in the living room while the two of them made their way up.

  “And what is the special occasion?” Sharma said, eyeing the pile of confections with a boyish grin.

  Nikhil refused to say. He allowed Sharma to have his fill, watching with satisfaction as his fingers became honey-glazed from the offering.

  Afterward, when they lay on the great divan—hand-carved and older than his mother’s ghost—Nikhil breathed deeply to calm his heart. He feared the words would be eaten in his chest, but he’d been planning to tell Sharma for days, and there was no going back now. As evening settled, the air between them became heavy with the sweetness of secrecy, but secrecy had a short wick.

  “My dearest, fairest boy,” he said. “I want our love to increase.”

  Sharma raised his eyebrows, those lines thickly drawn, nearly fused. Who better than Sharma to know Nikhil’s heart? Who but Sharma to take it all in stride?

  “I desire to have a child with you,” Nikhil said.

  Nikhil had trouble reading Sharma’s expression in the waning light, so he repeated himself. His fingers
were shaking, but he took Sharma’s hand anyway, gave it a squeeze.

  “I heard you the first time,” Sharma said.

  A rare cool wind had prompted Nikhil to turn off the ceiling fan, and now he could hear the rum sellers on the street enunciating prices in singsong Urdu.

  He touched Sharma’s face, traced the line of his jaw, unsure still of how his lover had received his news. Likely, Sharma was still mulling—he formed his opinions, Nikhil believed, at the pace the street cows strolled.

  Nikhil waited out the silence as long as he could. “Listen,” he finally said. “The country is changing.”

  “A child diapered by two men,” said Sharma. “Your country is changing faster than my country is changing. What about the boys from Kerala?”

  They had learned about a schoolteacher and a postal clerk who’d secretly made a life together. Unfashionably attired and chubby cheeked, they seemed too dull for the news. A few months ago, locals threw acid on their faces. Even in the black and white of the photographs, their scars, along the jaw, the nose, the better half of a cheek. Ten years since man had landed on the moon, and still.

  “We are not boys from Kerala. We are protected.”

  No ruse better than a woman in the home, Nikhil had argued over a year ago, and eventually Sharma had agreed to a marriage of convenience. Kanu, who had loved Nikhil through his childhood and even through his years of chasing prostitutes, had arranged for a village woman who knew about the two men’s relationship but would never tell.

  Nikhil rummaged through his almirah and returned with a gift in his hands. “You close your eyes now.”

  “Oh, Nikhil.” But Sharma closed his eyes, accustomed now perhaps to receiving precious things.

  Around Sharma’s neck, Nikhil tied his dead mother’s necklace. It had been dipped in twenty-four carats of gold by master artisans of Agra. Miniature busts of Queen Victoria decorated its circumference. A piece for the museums, a jeweler had once explained, but Nikhil wanted Sharma to have it. That morning, when he’d visited the family vault to retrieve it, he’d startled himself with the enormity of what he was giving away, but what better time than now, as they were about to begin a family?

  “Promise you’ll dream about a child with me.”

  “It is beautiful, and I will wear it every day, even though people will wonder what is that under my shirt.”

  “Let them wonder.”

  “You are entirely mad. Mad is what you are.”

  Nikhil was pulled back to the divan. Sharma, lifting Nikhil’s shirt, placed a molasses square on his belly, teasing a trail of sweetness with his tongue. Nikhil closed his eyes and allowed himself to be enjoyed. Down below, the rum sellers negotiated, the prices of bottles fluctuating wildly.

  Afterward, they retired to the roof. Their chadors cut off the cold, but Nikhil still shivered. When Sharma asked what the matter was, Nikhil kissed the spot where his eyebrows met. There was another old roof across the street, where grandmothers were known to gossip and eavesdrop, but he did not care. Let them hear, he thought, let them feel this wind of enormous change.

  The next morning, while Sharma washed, Nikhil said, “I want you to toss the idea to your wife. Get Tripti used to the matter.”

  Sharma dried himself so quickly he left behind footprints on the bathroom’s marble floor. “Toss the idea to my wife. Get her used to the matter,” Sharma said, before he changed into his working clothes, leaving Nikhil to brood alone.

  Tripti would have few issues with the arrangement of a child, Nikhil believed. After all, at the time of her marriage to Sharma, her family was mired in bankruptcy, her father had left them nothing but a reputation for drink and dishonesty, and she herself—insofar as he recalled from his sole meeting with her, at the wedding—was a dour, spiritless creature who deserved little of the bounty that had been provided her. What little else he knew was from Kanu’s reports. Extremely pliable, Kanu had first said. Then, closer to the wedding: A little stubborn about the choice of sweets. She wants village kind. On that note, Nikhil had wilted—let her have her desserts, he’d said, the wedding paid for, and the matter removed from mind.

  The next few days, when Sharma was away at the village and at the foundry, Nikhil paced around the house, overcome by the idea of a child. He’d always dreamed of becoming a father but had never believed it would be his due until this year’s monsoon, when, in the middle of a deluge, his forty-two-year-old sister had given birth to a girl. The rain had been so fierce no ambulance could ferry them to the hospital, so the elderly women of the family assumed the duties of midwifery and delivered the child themselves. The first moment he saw his niece he nearly believed in God and, strangely, in his own ability—his right—to produce so perfect a thing.

  He couldn’t bring Sharma to his sister’s house to meet his new niece, so the next week he’d spent their Thursday together sharing photos; if Sharma experienced the same lightness of being, he didn’t let it show. All Sharma said was, “Quite a healthy baby she is.”

  It was true. She’d been born nine pounds two ounces. The family had purchased a cow so that fresh milk would always be available.

  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. Sharma’s wife would be the carrier of the child, but where would the child live? In Sharma’s house in the village, or in Nikhil’s house here in the city? If she lived in the village, which Nikhil admitted was the safer option, how would Nikhil father her, how would she receive a proper education?

  These questions consumed the hours. When he went to check on his tenants, he was distracted and unable to focus on their concerns. A leaky toilet, a broken window, the group of vagrants who’d squatted outside one of his properties—all these matters seemed trivial compared to his imagined child’s needs.

  The next week, the afternoon before he would see Sharma again, he stepped into a clothing store on Rashbehari Avenue to calm his mind. It was a shop he’d frequented to purchase silk kurtas for Sharma or paisley shirts for himself. He told the attendants he needed an exceptional outfit for his niece. They combed the shelves and found a white dress with a lacy pink bow. He imagined his daughter wearing it. From his dreaming he was certain a girl would come out of their love—Shristi was what he’d named her—Shristi enunciating like a princess, Shristi riding her bicycle up and down Kakulia Lane.

  Early on, they’d agreed Nikhil would avoid the foundry, but he was feeling so full of promise for Shristi that he did not deter himself from continuing down Rashbehari Avenue toward Tollygunge Phari, nor did he prevent himself from walking to the entrance of Mahesh Steel and asking for his friend.

  Sharma emerged from the uneven music of metalworking with a cigarette between his lips. His Apollonian features were smeared with grease. His hands constricted by thick welding gloves, which excluded the possibility of even an accidental touch. When he saw Nikhil, Sharma scowled. “Sir,” he said, “you’ll have the parts tomorrow.”

  Though he knew Sharma was treating him as a customer for good reason, the tone still stung. Nikhil whispered, “See what I have brought.” He produced the perfect baby girl dress.

  “You have lost your soup,” Sharma whispered back. Then, so everyone could hear, “Babu, you’ll have the parts tomorrow. Latest, tomorrow.”

  Nikhil tried again, “Do you see the collar, the sweet lace?”

  “You should go to your home now,” Sharma said. “Tomorrow, I’ll see you.”

  But that Thursday Sharma failed to visit. Nikhil and Kanu waited until half past nine and then ate their meal together by lamplight.

  Thursdays because it was on a Thursday that they had met three years ago, that time of year when the city is at its most bearable, when the smell of wild hyacinth cannot be outdone by the stench of the gutters, because it is after the city’s short winter, which manages, despite its brevity, to birth more funerals than any other time of year. In the city’s spring, two men
walking the long road from Santiniketan back to Kolkata—because the bus has broken and no one is interested in its repair—are not entirely oblivious to the smells abounding in the wildflower fields, not oblivious at all to their own smells.

  He supposed he had fetishized Sharma’s smell from the beginning, that scent of a day’s honest work. The smell of steel, of the cheapest soap. The smell of a shirt that had been laundered beyond its time. The smell of his night-bound stubble. He allowed his hand to linger on Sharma’s wrist, pretending he was trying to see the hour. An hour before sunset. An hour after. He did not remember exactly when they parted. What did it matter.

  What mattered were the coincidences of love. The day he saw Sharma for the second time he counted among the small miracles of his life.

  Sharma was drinking tea at the tea stall on Kakulia Lane. He was leaning the weight of his body on the rotting wood of the counter, listening to the chai wallah recount stories. Later, he would learn that Sharma had landed a job at a nearby foundry and that this tea stall was simply the closest one, but in that moment he did not think of foundries or work or any other encumbrance, he thought instead of the way Sharma cradled his earthen teacup, as if it were the Koh-i-noor.

  Oh, he had said, did you and I . . . that broken bus . . . What an evening, yes?

  A question that led to Thursdays. Two years of Thursdays haunted by fear of discovery, which led to a wedding, because a married man who arrived regularly at Kakulia Lane could not be doing anything but playing backgammon with his happenstance friend. What followed was a year of bliss. He considered this time their honeymoon. They were as seriously committed as any partners who’d ever shared a covenant, and shouldn’t that show?