The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Where are you coming from?” he asks.

  “Where are you going?” she asks. She is fully awake now and taking in the scene. It is four in the morning. There is a wedding today. The groom is standing at the elevator with a duffel bag. Something has gone wrong.

  “I can’t do this,” he says.

  Rena thinks of Dori, surely sound asleep by now, Dori with two years of wedding Pinterest boards, Dori almost certainly rescuing herself from the sweaty machinations of the would-be stripper and then making her friends feel better about having upset her.

  “You can’t just leave,” Rena says. “You have to tell her yourself.”

  “I’m going to call her,” he says. “I’m going out of town for a little bit.”

  Rena moves herself between JT and the elevator to look him in the eyes. He does not seem or smell drunk, only sad, and that he should be sad, that he should treat this decision as a thing that is happening to him, enrages her to the point that it surprises her. She speaks to him in a fierce whisper.

  “When I met you we were trapped across the world, and you told me you were calm because you’d learned not to take for granted that anything was safe. You don’t get to be scared of a woman you’ve been with since you were teenagers.”

  “I was scared,” he says. “You were calm. You were so fucking calm, and that was what I liked about you. For a while I thought you were so brave, and sometimes I still do, and sometimes I think it’s just that there’s nothing in your life but you, and you have no idea what it means to be scared that what you do might matter.”

  Rena flinches. She imagines slapping him, first imagines slapping the him inches from her face and then closes her eyes and imagines slapping the him from the photograph, slapping the useless mask right off of him. He wants this fight. People would come out of their rooms to see her shouting in the hallway, see a parting quarrel between old friends or old lovers or JT and a woman nursing an old wound. Excuses would be formulated; they would all calmly and quietly go back to sleep. JT is giving her a reason to give him a reason to stay. Rena does not stop him. She walks past him to the staircase and hears the elevator ding before the door closes behind her. The window in her room faces the parking lot, and she sees JT cross through the lot under the flush of the lights and disappear into his car. She sees the car flicker to life before he drives off, and she watches for quite some time but he does not come back.

  Rena falls asleep with the curtains still open, and in the morning the sun through the windows is dusty and insistent as the banging at the door wakes her. Her body, groggy from sex and drinking, is temporarily uncooperative, but the noise continues until she is able to rally herself to open it for Dori and Kelly the Yellow Bridesmaid.

  “JT is gone,” says Kelly.

  Rena lets the other women in and pretends not to notice them scanning the room for any indication of her duplicity. She reminds herself that she is unhappy with JT and that this is not her fight.

  “I ran into him in the hallway last night,” Rena says. “I didn’t think he would really go through with leaving.”

  “Did he say where he was going?” Dori asks.

  “That seems like the wrong question.”

  “To you, maybe.”

  “Ohio,” says Rena. The word has rounded its way out of her mouth before she has time to consider why she is saying it. But now that she has said it she keeps going. She invents an overseas friend with an empty cabin, a conversation about JT’s need to get his head together.

  “Okay,” says Dori. “Okay.”

  She sends Kelly downstairs to stall the guests and gives Rena fifteen minutes to get dressed.

  The address Rena has given is a three-hour drive from where they are in Indiana, mostly highway. Dori buckles herself into the driver’s seat, still, Rena notices belatedly, in her pre-wedding clothes—white leggings, a pale pink zip-up hoodie, and a white T-shirt bedazzled with the word BRIDE.

  “I really am sorry,” Rena says.

  “You didn’t tell him to leave, right?”

  This is true, so Rena lets it sit. She is quiet until Billie Holiday’s voice from the car radio becomes unbearable.

  “What do you want?” Rena asks.

  “From you?”

  “From life.”

  “Right now I want to go find my fiancé before we lose the whole wedding day.”

  “Right.”

  At a traffic light, Rena’s phone dings and Dori reaches for it with a speed that could be habit but Rena recognizes as distrust. The text, of course, is not from JT.

  “Michael?” Dori says. “Michael, really?”

  Rena grabs the phone back: Hey, says the text. You didn’t have to take off last night.

  Dori’s relief at knowing where Rena spent the night is palpable. She turns to Rena with the closest approximation of a smile it seems possible for her to manage at the moment and asks, “So what was it like?” Rena understands her prying as a kind of apology. They are going to be friends now; they are going to seal it with intimate detail the way schoolgirls would seal a blood sisterhood with a needle and a solemn touch.

  “It was fine,” Rena says. “Kind of grabby and over pretty quick. We were both a little drunk.”

  “I had to teach JT. It took a few years.”

  “Years?”

  “God, I did a lot of faking it.”

  “Maybe it wouldn’t have taken as long if you hadn’t faked it?”

  “That, darling, is why you’re single. If I hadn’t faked it, he would have moved on to a girl who did.”

  “So she could have waited a decade for him to not marry her on their wedding day?”

  They are at the turnoff for the highway, and Dori takes the right with such violent determination that Rena grips the door handle.

  “My wedding day’s not over yet. We could have JT back in time to marry me and get you and Michael to the open bar.”

  “There’s an open bar?”

  “We’re religious. We’re not cheap. Besides, my mother always says a wedding is not a success if it doesn’t inspire another wedding. There’s a bouquet with your name on it. Cut Michael off of the gin early and teach him what to do with his hands.”

  Dori is technically correct about the timeline; it is early, the sun still positioning itself to pin them in its full glow. In the flush of the early morning light, Dori looks beatific, a magazine bride come to life. Rena has no idea in which direction JT actually took off, but it is possible that he has turned around, that he will turn around, that their paths will cross, the light hitting Dori in a way that reveals to him exactly how wrong he has been, and Dori will crown Rena this wedding’s unlikely guardian angel. Until Toledo, there will still technically be time to get back to the hotel and pull this wedding off, but Rena saw JT’s face last night, and if she knows anything by now she knows the look of a man who is done with someone.

  As for Michael, it doesn’t really matter what she says about him; Dori is spinning the story that ends in happily ever after for everyone, the one where two years from now Rena and Michael are telling their meet-cute story at their own wedding. But Rena can see already everything wrong with that future. As a teenager, she prized her ability to see clearly the way things would end. She thought that if she saw things plainly enough, she could skip deception and disappointment, could love men not for their illusions but for their flaws and be loved for hers in return. She did not understand how to pretend. In her early twenties a series of men one by one held her to their chests and kissed the top of her head if they were gentlemen and palmed her ass if they were not and told her that she deserved better than they could give her. But what did it matter what she deserved, faced with the hilarity of one more person telling her glibly that better was out there when she was begging for mediocrity and couldn’t have that?

  Rena pressed herself against the emptiness, flirted with cliché: nights fucking strangers against alleyway walls, waking to bruises in places she didn’t remember being grabbed. Thou
gh it had been almost a year of this by the time her sister was shot, her friends were happy to make retroactive excuses, to save themselves the trouble of an intervention that might only have been an intervention against a person being herself. So, more rough strangers, years she let make her mean. If she was not good enough for the thing other people had, who could be, if she did not deserve love, who should have it, if she could not find in a mirror what was so bad and unlovable in her, she would have to create it. She learned how to press the blade of her heart into the center of someone else’s life, to palm a man’s crotch under the table while smiling sweetly at his wife, to think, sometimes, concretely and deliberately, of her sister, punished for a thing she hadn’t done, while raising an eyebrow in a bar and accepting a drink from a man who didn’t bother hiding his ring. All the things she was getting away with! All the people who couldn’t see beauty or danger when it was looking right at them, when it had adjusted itself and walked out of their upstairs bathroom after tucking their husband’s penis back into his boxers, when it was under the hotel bedcovers while their boyfriend checked in on video chat. It was, if she is honest with herself, only because the circumstances were so strange that she didn’t sleep with JT, that she didn’t, one of those nights they woke up together, look him in the eyes and part her lips and trail her fingers down his bare chest and wait for what came next. It hadn’t been knowing Dori existed that kept her from it.

  Rena thought for years that the meanness in her would be hers forever, except first, the hard mean thing about her started to sparkle; she began to advertise trouble in a way that made her the kind of woman friends did not leave alone with their boyfriends. Then, the rage she’d spent a decade fucking to a point softened into a kind of compassion. Men seemed more fragile to her now, and because it was impossible to entirely hate something for being broken, she forgave even those men who’d left her teary-eyed and begging for their damage. No wonder they had sent her off—who wants to be loved for the hole in their chest when there is a woman somewhere willing to lie and say she can fix it, another prepared to spend decades pretending it isn’t there? She was, she wanted to tell everybody, so full of forgiveness lately, for herself and for everyone else. Her heart, these days, was a mewling kitten, apt to run off after anyone who would feed it, but try telling that to anyone who had known her the last decade, to anyone who had lived through all of her tiger years and wouldn’t hold a palm out to her without wanting the chance to be destroyed. It was a lovely daydream Dori was having for her, but if Rena went to Michael’s door speaking of her kitten heart, he would only hear kitten, he would only think pussy.

  The awkward conversation fades into the comfort of nineties pop—God bless XM radio, the mercy of Dori changing the station before Billie broke open what was left of their hearts. Songs they have forgotten but now remember loving keep them company as they press through the landscape of rest stops and coffee shops and chain restaurants, slightly above the speed limit, so that things look even more alike than they might otherwise. By a little after ten they are at the edge of Indiana and Dori needs to pee, so they pull over at a rest stop off the turnpike. Rena follows her into the travel plaza to buy a bottled water and a packet of ibuprofen, her mouth still dry and her head faintly pulsing. The warm smell of grease activates her hangover, and by the time Dori exits the ladies’ room, Rena is grabbing breakfast at the McDonald’s counter.

  There must be some law that any chain in an airport or rest stop is required to be just slightly off-brand: Rena’s hash brown tastes congealed and suspiciously like grape soda, and her breakfast sandwich is dry and slightly oblong. Dori has a Coke and a sad parfait, which is so sad that she has downed the Coke before making it more than a few spoonfuls into breakfast. When she gets up to refill the soda, she walks by a man a few tables away, hunched over his own pitiful breakfast, the bottom of his gray beard dotted with a drip of coffee he doesn’t seem to have noticed. His face breaks into a full smile as Dori walks by, and on her way back he calls, “Who’s the lucky man?”

  Dori freezes. For a moment her grip on the soda is so shaky it seems clear that she will drop it, that she will stain the offending bride T-shirt beyond wearability, which will at least solve the problem of future commentary. But she keeps the soda in hand and composes herself as she turns back to the man with the beard, who has dabbed off the coffee with a napkin while waiting for her reply.

  “All of Toledo,” she says with a smile.

  “Huh?”

  “Bride’s our band name. I’m the drummer. Show tonight.”

  “Yeah?” he says. His smile is still just as affable and natural; it is not the wedding that excited him but the chance to congratulate a stranger’s happiness, and this endears him to Rena. She walks over to join the conversation Dori and the stranger have started regarding their imaginary band. He was in a band in college. The band was called Cold Supper. His name, fittingly, is Ernest.

  “We never made it so far as the tour part,” Ernest says. “Got out of the garage at least, played a few local shows. But never the road.”

  “Believe me, the glamour of the road life doesn’t stop,” says Rena, holding up the soggy second half of her sandwich.

  Ernest smiles and pulls out a phone to show them a picture one of his old bandmates posted a few months earlier. A younger, skinny and long-haired version of himself plays the guitar. He has not played in years, ten or fifteen, but he has a lucky pick in his wallet, which he shows them too. It is smooth to the touch and dips in where his thumb has pressed against it and has faded to the yellow of a smoker’s teeth. Ernest insists on an autograph on the way out, promises to tell his niece in Toledo about their made-up show in a made-up bar, and so they provide him the autograph on a paper napkin, renaming themselves Glory and Tina. He waves them good luck on their way out. Rena flushes with shame. Ernest and his earnestness, his guitar pick, his poor niece in Toledo.

  In the car Rena can’t bring herself to close her door or click her seat belt, even as Dori starts the car and the bells ding.

  “I have to tell you something,” she says. “I have no idea where JT went. I made the cabin thing up.”

  Dori is still flushed with guilt and exhilaration from the life they made up inside. It takes a minute for her face to catch up with her feeling, for her eyes to start and her delicate features to scrunch together.

  “You made it up?” she says. “What the hell address did you give me?”

  “My sister’s old house.”

  “Who lives there now?”

  “Some people who sued their realtor because they didn’t know when they bought the place that someone was shot there.”

  “Who was shot there?”

  “My sister. By her husband. Two days before her first wedding anniversary. She’s alive. She can’t talk. Or maybe she can now. I don’t visit.”

  “So this is your fucked-up cautionary tale? It’s a good thing JT left me now because if he hadn’t he would shoot me when he got sick of me?”

  “I wasn’t thinking that. I wasn’t thinking anything, and I said the first thing that came to mind.”

  “The house where your sister got shot was the first thing that came to mind when I asked if you knew where my fiancé was?”

  “It’s always the first thing that comes to mind,” Rena says, and she is too relieved by the honesty to be ashamed.

  Dori pulls the car out of the rest stop lot and Rena prepares for the long silence on the way back. Dori will be too proud and polite to say what happened; she will only say they didn’t find him. She will send guests home with tulle-wrapped almonds and be front and center at her father’s sermon Sunday, by which point Rena will be on a plane home, home being a city she hasn’t yet lived in, two weeks in a short-term sublet while she looks for a real rental, her belongings in a pod, making their way across the ocean. But two exits later and many exits too early for that future, Dori gets off the highway. Rena isn’t sure which set of signs they are following until they get there.
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  Waterworld. As advertised in highway billboards, except the billboards make it look giant and fluorescent, while in person it is somewhat sadder, a slide pool one direction, a wave pool in another, and off to the side, vendors and a carnival stage with no show in progress. It is fifteen dollars to get in, but the real cash cow is the entryway gift shop, where now that they are here Rena supposes it would be rude not to buy a bathing suit. Dori buys a pink suit and a pair of blue Waterworld sweats. She is luminous. It is the first time all weekend Rena has seen her in real color.

  “I’m sorry,” Rena says, which she realizes only then that she didn’t say earlier. Dori doesn’t answer, and Rena follows her poolside, where they lock their phones in electric blue lockers with the paint scratched and peeling. KING SUM, someone has carved into theirs, and there is no explanation or response. On the other side of the lockers, there is a whole tangle of slides, the tallest of which has a long line, but it is the one Dori wants and so they wait.

  In order to go down the slide you must first go up, and halfway through their waiting they have come to an uncertain staircase, alarmingly slippery in places, spiraled and winding around a cylinder. The higher they go the more Rena feels something like fear. Once she spent some time in Mexico, in the city where Edward James built unfinished or intentionally incomplete sculptures in the middle of a series of waterfalls: stairs leading nowhere, a lack of clarity about what was nature and what was built, a wildly unsafe tourist trap. This staircase should feel safer but does not, and by the time they reach the top Rena is giddy with relief at the thought of going back down. She seats herself at the start of the slide with something like genuine joy.

  It is a fast ride to the pool below. At the third turn is a waterproof camera, the kind that projects the photo down to a booth where the operator will offer to print and frame it and sell it to you at an outrageous markup. Dori and Rena, riding together, two to a tube, down through a series of sharp turns, are sprayed with water that seems to be coming from every direction and then dropped into the pool, which stings first with impact and again with chlorine. Rena surfaces with an unexpected lightness, which she sees mirrored in Dori’s smile. It occurs to her this might be the least terrible idea anyone involved in this alleged wedding has had in the last forty-eight hours.