The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  Lucy rose and clacked across the room with the steady grin of an assassin. It was her third appointment that day but she was an enduring faker, tossing her hair and sucking in her stomach. The man twinkled as he handed Sheila a white envelope full of money, which she counted and placed in a small drawer, then led them to their room with a crabby smile, one hand extended.

  Once she was alone, Kit raised her butt off the sofa and pulled her stockings up. Sheila returned to her desk and groaned. She circled something in her catalogue and Kit’s client called to say he would be fifteen minutes late.

  “But he’s already fifteen minutes late,” Kit said.

  “Well,” Sheila said, without looking at her, “there was some sort of emergency. I told him you would wait.”

  “Yeah, I remember that.”

  Kit walked to the bathroom. The walls were gray with one frosted window and a big beige air freshener that hissed vanilla perfume every ten minutes. She yanked the window open and a great wind came into the room. Snow rushed onto the black tile floor. Kit lit a half-smoked joint from her purse. She kept several on hand at all times in a battered Altoids tin.

  She took a squinty suck and held the smoke in, liking the long burn, then leaned her head into the wind and exhaled, snow pricking her face. She peered down at the neon-white streets below, car tops mounting quietly with snow. Kit shivered. She took another long toke and thought of the miserable year she’d spent at Bennington, where she had barely attended class, watching snow fall from her dorm window. She had been bored there. All anyone wanted to do was get plastered and sleep around. It was a lot like being a prostitute, she thought, only she had never gotten paid.

  Kit took another tug of smoke. She stubbed the joint lightly in the tin and licked her index finger, daubing the orange ember. With one hand, she pushed on the window until it clapped shut, then walked to the oval mirror. Kit stared at herself like a doctor who—right away—sees something very wrong. She wore a sleeveless black dress that she had bought in high school for her aunt’s funeral. Her body hadn’t changed much since then. She still had narrow legs and a lean, gloomy face, half-moon shadows under her eyes. There was a pubescent look about her, a Peter Pan shapelessness. She flickered between boy and girl.

  Kit returned to the black couch, reeking of pot, and began eating a flattened corn muffin from her purse. Sheila shot her a look of amazement and Kit glared back at her. She took another bite of the greasy yellow muffin and a man walked in. He removed his collared black coat and looked pensively about the room, tugging off his leather gloves. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Ned.”

  Kit smiled, her mouth packed.

  He stared at her and she tensed with embarrassment, knowing that he was comparing her face to the one he had seen on the Internet, a photo in which she sat posed on the arm of a beige sofa with the stricken look of a woodland creature in captivity. Kit hated to have her photo taken. The fact of one moment being yanked from all the other moments scared her. It was the same fear when people stared at her, much as Ned was doing. Her fear looked fresh and clearly he found this attractive. She seemed unaccustomed to it—unable to hide it—which suggested that she had not been a prostitute for very long.

  To Kit, Ned looked a little desperate. Like someone on Judge Judy, fighting for old furniture. She watched as he counted out ten twenties on Sheila’s desktop, then wiped his nose with the back of his hand. Sheila led them to a square bedroom with scuffed white walls and brown carpeting. Once she’d shut the door, Ned removed his suit jacket and the two sat on the edge of the bed.

  “What was your name? Tammy?”

  “It’s Tonya,” she said, crossing her legs. “So what are you into?”

  “I’m not going to touch you.” Ned pressed his temples. “But I’d like you to get undressed.”

  Kit nodded absently. Her eyes were bloodshot and her thoughts floated somewhere near the ceiling. Ned leaned his face toward her neck, as if about to plant a kiss there, but instead took a sniff.

  “Your hair smells like pot,” he said. “And like that big piece of cake you were eating.”

  Kit turned in alarm. “It was a corn muffin.”

  He smiled oddly. “You should be careful, eating all the muffins you want. You’ll get fat.”

  “No I won’t,” she frowned. “Not if I tried. No one in my family is fat.” It was absolutely true. They were a bunch of beanpoles with long feet and sunken faces. Ugly, Kit thought. But uglier was his smile and his warning. His wish for her not to eat. For her to remain locked in a single state of attractiveness, like a woman in a painting, with no body fat or smells, nothing to say.

  Kit could smell Ned too. Strong cologne with the scent of his underarms screaming behind it, a bright, beer-like tang. She tried to imagine the women who loved his smell. A wife. Daughters. Possibly girlfriends. These women were lurking in the private lives of even the ugliest men she saw. Ned was neither ugly nor handsome. He had the sort of face that there had to be hundreds of. A pale white oval with a slight shine. Small eyes and a largish nose.

  “I bet you drink a lot too,” he said, still smiling foolishly.

  “Not really.”

  “Youth is an incredibly buoyant medium,” he mused. “What you can do at twenty you can’t do at forty.”

  “So you’re forty?”

  “About that.”

  Kit undressed. She lay on the bed with shining eyes, like some dog awaiting the strange and particular abuse of its owner. Ned stripped down to his boxers and stood alongside the bed, staring down at her.

  “You are so stoned,” he said.

  “Not so much,” she said.

  “Yes you are. You’re barely here at all. It’s like you’re dead.”

  Kit felt a flash of panic pass through her eyes and knew he’d caught it. Ned was right. She was completely stoned. And because of this, certain things in the room appeared huge. The pink-flowered Kleenex box. The pump bottle of generic lube. Ned’s oily, egglike head.

  Kit was arranged face-down on the bed. She shut her eyes and Ned rocked into the quiet space between his hands. “I think you like this,” he said, which was what they all said.

  She fell into a partial sleep. Dreamless brown darkness closed around her. She heard her heart beat. It was like a fist pounding at the bottom of a swimming pool. Ned groaned. He came onto her buttocks and she woke, a dull hate glowing inside her. She stood and wiped off her butt cheeks with a tissue. “Are you married?”

  He nodded.

  “Does she know you come here?”

  “I think she does.”

  “And it doesn’t bother her?”

  “She has a very good life,” he said. “She’s not gonna go and fuck that up.” He lay down on the bed next to her.

  Kit refrained from pointing out that he had not answered the question. He went on to say that his wife didn’t work. She took care of his daughter. He talked about her in a frank and vulgar manner, like she was an animal who had eaten out of the same can for years. He said she was really interested in astrology. He said all women were. He said his wife kept a dream journal and he laughed gently, slightly like a madman. “Who cares about dreams?” he said. “They don’t mean anything.”

  Ned said he was a dentist and Kit wondered how he handled all that revulsion. He complained about his practice and boringly recounted the events of a cocktail party in which he had humiliated a fellow dentist in front of several beautiful women. “That took a bite out of his swagger!” he said. And Kit laughed obediently, which felt like the worst kind of sex.

  Kit and Lucy walked to the train at dusk, snow swirling past their faces. The sky was a pearly gray, the moon dimly visible. The two walked along a narrow path of brown slush, bookended by white humps of snow. In their boots and coats, they looked like the children that they were. Each bundled and waddling, their tight dresses and biscuit-colored stockings buried underneath. Lucy wore a long tweed coat with big glossy black buttons, Kit a brown leather bomber jacket and sagging wool-kni
t hat. They hooked arms, steadying each other.

  “He, like, reprimanded me for eating a corn muffin.”

  “What an asshole.”

  “It was like he wanted me to be dead. Like I was interfering with my potential hotness by living.” Businesspeople passed swiftly in black coats. “I hate this neighborhood,” Kit sneered. “I hate every single person.”

  “Are you okay?”

  “No. I’m freezing. And I hate these tights.” She wiggled with discomfort. “I hate this dress.”

  “Well,” Lucy grinned, “they need you to remind them that they want to fuck you.”

  Kit laughed. They stopped in front of the train station and looked at each other. “Do you wanna come over?” Lucy asked. There was snow in her eyebrows.

  Kit couldn’t help but smile sheepishly at the offer because, until that moment, they had only ever spent time together in diners or on the black couch. “Yeah,” she said. “I do.”

  Lucy’s apartment was small and lit like a bar, one long room with yellow light in every corner. There was an old clawfoot tub next to the stove and a mattress on the floor by the wall. Kit stooped to pet a brown rat terrier with a silvery snout. He rolled under her hand with a guttural moan, groveling with delight. “That’s Curtis,” Lucy said.

  “It’s like a dirty-sock sex club in here,” Kit laughed.

  “I know.” Lucy smiled without embarrassment. “Curtis pulls them out of the hamper. I should probably throw some of them away,” she said, lifting a white ankle sock off the floor. “That way I would be forced to do laundry more often.” She jammed the little white sock into an overfilled wicker hamper. “I won’t go until I’m completely out of clothes. Hate it too much.”

  “Seriously, I could look anywhere and see socks.”

  “Do you want anything?” Lucy asked.

  “Anything?”

  “Well. Beer or water.”

  Kit laughed. “I’ll take water.”

  “Help yourself, okay? I’ve gotta take him down.” Lucy Velcroed a little red coat onto the dog and left.

  Kit ran tap water into a Charlie Brown Christmas mug. She roamed around the room, sipping water and snooping vaguely. Apart from the strewn socks, Lucy’s apartment was relatively bare. There were tall Mexican candles on the floor by her mattress, a tiny cactus on the windowsill. And on the floor there was an old mint-green record player with brown accents. Lucy’s possessions looked misplaced, but because there weren’t so many, the wrongness of their arrangement had a childish charm.

  Kit spotted several photos of a younger-looking Lucy, tacked by the bed in a crooked cluster. In one she sat in an auto rickshaw, in another she stood handling fruit in a marketplace. Kit approached the images intently. She sat cross-legged on the bed and stared up at them.

  The door flung open and Curtis raced inside. He leapt onto Kit’s lap and squirmed on his back in ecstasy, biting her fingers gently, his wet paws paddling. Kit stroked his underside, her eyes fastened to the photographs.

  “He likes you,” Lucy said.

  “Does he not like a lot of people?”

  “No. He likes pretty much everyone.”

  Lucy hung her coat on a hook by the door. She pulled off her boots and stockings, then fetched a can of beer from the fridge and tapped the top of it with her fingernail. She turned to Kit, who still sat staring at the photographs. “In India I just went around buying things. You can spend a quarter in like a half-hour,” she said, cracking the can open. “It was so beautiful there. Every single person was doing something. It was such a sensory overload, but way softer than America.”

  “I want to travel,” Kit said. She looked at Lucy. “I sort of feel like I have to do it now, while I’m still cute. Like if I wait till I’m old and ugly it won’t happen.”

  “You might be right,” Lucy said and took a swig from the silver can. “But I’m really looking forward to being old and ugly.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean it’ll be nice to be left alone. I want to get a little house somewhere with grass out front for Curtis. There’s no grass here. I mean, there is grass but you aren’t allowed on it, not with a dog, anyway. It’s like walking through some holy museum.” She stooped to pet Curtis. “Sucks.”

  Kit smiled.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I just like when you talk about how much something sucks.”

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m serious! That’s always how I know I like someone. They’ll be going on about their own hell and it should be tedious to listen to, but for some reason it’s not. Something about their face or the way they’re joking about their unhappiness is so . . . attractive.”

  “I know exactly what you mean. It’s like perfume.”

  “Right.”

  Kit set the mug down on the floor and hugged her bony knees to her chest. Curtis trotted over. He lowered his snout into the mug and began lapping.

  “He does that,” Lucy said unapologetically and smiled at the animal. She knelt beside the record player and put the Modern Lovers on. The record turned and crackled. Jonathan Richman sang Roadrunner, roadrunner in his hot, sloppy way and Lucy began to dance, shouting along with the words.

  “You’re so retro,” Kit marveled, staring up from the bed.

  “I know, right?” Lucy said, catching her breath. “The record player was my grandmother’s but all the records are mine.” She began to sing again, gaily shaking her hips and shoulders. Lucy was a silly dancer, but in the way only someone who is confident of their sexiness can be. She flailed about like she had no respect for anyone or anything, whipping her gold lion hair from side to side.

  “You’re a good singer,” Kit said.

  “Fuck you.”

  “I’m not kidding! You’re really good.”

  Lucy rolled her eyes and threw herself back into the air. Jonathan sounded more like a loud talker than a singer to Kit. I’m lonely and I don’t have a girlfriend but I don’t mind. He made her wish she were in a band.

  Lucy tired herself out dancing to the next few songs and the two wound up lying on her mattress. They talked about dropping out of college, how it had been the easiest decision in the world. Lucy had studied dance at Sarah Lawrence, which surprised Kit.

  “What was that like?”

  “It was like being abused. Routinely. By people I had no respect for.” She sighed. “What did you go for?”

  “Writing,” Kit said.

  “That makes sense.” Lucy smiled. “So when did you know you were a writer?”

  “I don’t know. About ten, I guess. But I didn’t consider myself a real writer. I had one skill and that was to lie in bed,” she laughed. “I loved being alone in my room. I mean, that was the real love. I just wrote because there was nothing else to do. It didn’t feel special.”

  “So were you a slow kid or a fast kid?”

  “Well I was both.”

  “Me too.”

  Kit raised herself up on both elbows and crawled over to her bag. After some digging she brought her Altoids tin onto the floor and surveyed its sooty contents. She returned to the bed with a crooked smile, a joint pinched between thumb and forefinger.

  “I can’t smoke pot,” Lucy said.

  “Oh. I thought maybe you just didn’t like to at work.”

  “No, I never do. Some people get all focused and brilliant when they’re high but I don’t.”

  “Well I can only focus on like, cleaning my bathroom,” Kit said. She lit the joint and dragged on it.

  “I can only focus on hating myself,” Lucy said. “It’s like I can feel every cell and every pore and I’m hating them one by one. Then I put giant signs on them like CRAZY, FAILED, FAT.”

  Kit laughed and smoke leaked from her mouth. She set the joint down in the open tin, coughing into her fist. She imagined saying: I love that you’re fat. I love everything about you. It was the absolute truth. But she said nothing and strained not to look at Lucy. She heard her heart beat. She bega
n branding herself. LESBIAN. LOSER. WHORE.

  “So you never get paranoid?” Lucy asked.

  “I definitely get paranoid.”

  “Like how?”

  “I just get scared I’ll say what I’m thinking or do something insane. Like tell someone what a shit they are or like, assault them.”

  “You want to assault people?”

  “No! I mean, not really. It’s just this fear of losing it. I mean, I have that fear anyway. ’Cause you hear about people doing crazy things out of nowhere. And the slight possibility that I could be one of those people, that someone else could be inside me . . . it’s the loneliest feeling. Like what if I didn’t know myself?”

  “You aren’t one of those people.”

  “How can you be sure?”

  “I just am.”

  Kit smiled. This was one of the nicest things anyone had ever said to her. You aren’t crazy.

  Curtis curled beside Lucy and laid his chin on her breast. She began rubbing his ears and he went limp, collapsing into a state of bliss.

  “How old is he?”

  “I think five or six. I got him two years ago with my boyfriend. We were totally wrong for each other.” She smiled, shaking her head. “I mean, I loved him but we argued constantly.” Lucy looked down at Curtis. He was asleep. “I wonder what it’s like to hear people fighting in another language your whole life.”

  “You hear the tones,” Kit offered. “You understand. There’s probably only one language.”

  “That seems true.” Lucy began stroking Curtis and he roused for a second, then went soft again. “I wish I knew what his life was like before I got him. It’s so strange. Dogs are the repositories of stories we can never know.”

  “That’s probably part of the pleasure of looking into their eyes.”

  Lucy nodded.

  “He’s very cute,” Kit said.