The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  Dori insists on checking out their picture after they towel off, so she heads for the photographer while Rena retrieves their phones.

  Rena has three texts from Michael:

  Did I do something wrong last night?

  Did you kidnap the bride?!

  Hey, I don’t know what’s up, but get your perfect ass back here—there’s an open bar waiting for us.

  There are five texts from JT:

  Where did you guys go?

  Why did you think I was in Ohio?

  Tell her I’m here

  Tell her I’m sorry

  Wedding is on! Where are you?

  Wedding is on! JT has doubled back after all. He has come back to the place where whatever his decision is, it always stands. When Dori makes her way to the lockers, Rena hands her the phone. For a minute Dori’s face is soft. She reaches for her own phone and reads through whatever amended case JT has made for himself there. She tugs on a strand of her wet hair. Then she turns to Rena and shrugs, turns the phone off, and shoves it back into the locker. She holds out to Rena the photo of the two of them. Dori’s hair is whipping behind her, her smile open-mouthed and angled away. Rena is behind her, staring at the camera, laughing and startled. Dori has chosen a hideous purple-and-green airbrushed paper frame reading WISH YOU WERE HERE.

  “This is going to be hilarious someday,” Dori says. “I hope.”

  Rena stashes her phone in the locker with Dori’s. There is still nothing at the carnival stage, and so they share cheese fries and cotton candy and make their way to the wave pool, where they rent inner tubes. Rena floats and thinks of the last time she did this, which must have been twenty years ago, must have been with her family when this was the kind of day trip they would have all found relaxing. When Rena would not have looked at the water and thought of E. coli, of hantavirus, of imminent drought, of a recent news story of a child who drowned in a pool like this because his parents sent him to the water park alone for daycare and no one there was watching for him. When it was still her job to keep Elizabeth’s swimmies on, when there was still Elizabeth’s laugh, when there were still seas to be crossed, when the whole world was in front of her. Wish you were here. Wish you were here. Wish you were here.

  MARY GORDON

  Ugly

  FROM Yale Review

  The company was sending me to Monroe for six weeks. Of course, professionally it was a good thing, a sign of their regard, their trust, and that was a relief. Because I was always afraid that one day—and it might be soon—they’d realize that I didn’t belong. That my place at Verdance, a company that manufactured herbal remedies, was really stolen and its relinquishment might be demanded, and with perfect justice, at any moment. My background was neither in science nor in business. I’ve never had any idea whether what they called “the product,” or “the products,” or sometimes, foreswearing articles altogether, “product” really worked, or if I’m involved in the sale of snake oil. I take on faith the CFO’s assertion that we—by “we” I mean the company of course—are making a handsome profit.

  My background was in literature, and my time spent attending to niceties of language made me unhappy every time I had to say the sentence “I work for Verdance in Human Resources.” What was a human resource? I couldn’t rid myself of the idea that the phrase had about it a tincture of slavery. And Verdance . . . a ridiculous name that the founders took a boyish pride in . . . “It’s like Verd . . . from verdure, you know everything green, but we add a dance to it, so we make our business a dance.”

  I have left English literature behind me. It’s been five years since I told everyone I was quitting. I stopped just short of finishing my PhD. The problem was my dissertation. I’d set my heart on a topic but I couldn’t find anyone willing to be my adviser. I wanted to focus on three poems about roses, Thomas Carew’s, Edmund Waller’s, and William Blake’s, using the poems to examine larger questions—questions of time, desire, beauty, death—and see how the image of the rose could illustrate the cultural differences these questions raised.

  I was told that my topic was both too small and too large. Three short poems, but three large historical periods. The Renaissance people wouldn’t venture into the part of the seventeenth century that moved into the eighteenth, and the Romantics felt they had no access to the earlier periods.

  And in the end, after months of fruitless arguing with intransigent professors, I began to feel it wasn’t worth it. Where would I end up, if I finished my dissertation? An underpaid peon at a third-rate institution God knew where, fighting with other overqualified, underpaid cohorts for the scraps left on the table of the dying liberal arts? Which, I had begun to fear, would no longer be economically viable at the end of a decade. Fifteen years, I reckoned, at the very best.

  I gave it up, with a little sadness, but not without a riven heart. Sometimes, coming in and out of sleep, lines of the poems still come to me. “Ask me no more where Jove bestows / When June is past, the lovely rose . . . Go lovely rose / Tell her that wastes her time and me, / That now she knows, / When I resemble her to thee, / How sweet and fair she seems to be . . . O Rose thou art sick. / The invisible worm, / That flies in the night / In the howling storm.”

  I began working for Verdance as a “technical writer,” translating scientific or New Age scientific jargon into readable prose. But I got bored with that quite early on, and I was glad that they transferred me to Human Resources because I was told I had “really good people skills.” What they meant was that I was good at calming some people down and revving others up. That I could settle office conflicts somehow, I don’t really know how, better than anyone else in the department, and that when some workers had to be warned that they weren’t “quite up to scratch,” I seemed to be able to encourage them without making them seem overwhelmed.

  They had sent me to Monroe because of what they called a “productivity lag.” What they meant, in English, was that the Monroe branch wasn’t making as much money as the others, their orders weren’t up to the three other locations: Scottsdale, Arizona; Ashland, North Carolina; and what they liked to call “our mother ship,” in Danbury, Connecticut, where I worked, commuting every day to my apartment in the city. When I got back from Monroe I’d be moving from the Lower East Side to a place on West End and Eighty-Ninth; it would save me at least forty-five minutes a day in travel. I’d be moving in with Hugh. We were talking seriously about marriage now; we’d been talking about it in a desultory, slackish way for almost two years, the way you might talk about buying a refrigerator with an icemaker in the door, something you’d quite like but didn’t really require.

  The higher-ups—Jason, Josh, and Jonathan—were reluctant to say what they really believed: that the productivity lag was a result of their generosity, their flexibility, their willingness to allow people long parental leaves and the option of working from home. “The problem is, it’s a kind of demographic bottleneck,” Jonathan said, or it might have been Jason. “For some reason they all started reproducing at the same time, and so there’s just not enough product being handled. We need someone to go out there, not exactly lower the boom, but you know give them kind of a reality check.”

  “You mean you want me to tell them Santa Claus is dead.”

  “Something like that,” Josh said. He was the one with the sense of humor.

  “No, nothing like that,” Jonathan said. “It’s just . . . we need to readjust.”

  “In this market, they should be more amenable to adjustments in the workplace,” said Jason, who was the most wedded to management jargon.

  “It’s not going to be nice,” I said.

  “It would be better if you had kids yourself. I mean, the weird thing is, almost nobody here has kids . . . what is it in the Midwest? I guess there’s nothing to do in the cold winters but fuck. Haven’t they heard of birth control? The only one here with kids is Brianna, and let’s face it, that would be a nightmare in the people skills department.”

  “I could
try to reproduce in the next two weeks,” I said.

  I could see Jonathan looking hopeful for a moment. Then he laughed. “I get it,” he said.

  “If you can make this happen, there’s a big bonus in it for you, Laura,” Josh said. “And with the new place you’re moving into, I’m sure you can use the extra cash.”

  I wanted to say no, but I didn’t have a leg to stand on. It would only be six weeks. “How big a bonus?” I asked.

  “It depends on how successful you are. But let’s just say, even if you do a shitty job, you’ll be well rewarded.”

  I’d never been to the Midwest; I was one of those New Yorkers that made a reality of the Steinberg cartoon. The fact is, I’d never wanted to go. And certainly, Monroe wasn’t a place that Hugh would ever think of going. I could hardly even believe Missouri was a real place. It was one of those states, like Wyoming, that seemed improbable. I knew it was called the “Show Me State.” Its capital was St. Louis. I liked Meet Me in St Louis. But I wasn’t going anywhere near St. Louis. Monroe was four hours from St. Louis . . . and I was pretty sure I wouldn’t get there more than once, if ever.

  Hugh didn’t want me to go, but the prospect of the bonus pleased him mightily; he really wanted to spend money on good furniture. We spent our evenings trawling sites for contemporary Italian couches, the way some couples might have trawled porn sites looking for some specialty that would appeal to both their appetites—the woman wanting bondage, the man wanting her to dress like a French maid. I admitted that my taste in furniture was far less developed than Hugh’s; he is, after all, an architect, and it was a fairly recent thing that I had enough money to even consider anything more demanding than Ikea. I found the things that he particularly admired rather off-putting . . . they didn’t seem like they really belonged in a house; I thought they’d be better in a space capsule. One couch that Hugh was particularly taken by—it was by an Italian designer and it cost $8,000—was the color of tomato juice and shaped like some sort of bean, only it didn’t look the slightest bit organic. I thought if you opened it up you’d find a surveillance system, microphones, speakers, lots of wires . . . I said I found it slightly inhuman. Hugh pointed to the description in the website that said it was “ironic.” When I read it more closely I told him that the word was iconic, not ironic, and I guess that was why he was willing to give it up. Everything else he liked was so charcoal and black, so low to the ground, that I couldn’t imagine taking a nap on it, or—finally the argument that swayed him—making love on it with any kind of confidence. But I promised Hugh that we could use whatever money I made on a bonus to buy some wonderful furniture, something that excited us both.

  I might not have had the most cultivated taste in interior design, but the place the company had arranged for me to live, Brookside Corporate Housing, lowered my spirits dramatically when I opened the door. It was obvious what whoever had designed it had in mind: it was meant to offend no one and to absorb the greatest possible abuse. The linoleum was gray, the living room carpeting was gray and smelled of something that was clearly meant to cover something up—and of course I was busily wondering what that something might have been. The couch was upholstered in a gray-blue tweed; the armchairs matched. The coffee table was supposed to look wooden, but it was clearly not made of wood. I remembered something called “particleboard,” and I didn’t want to imagine what the particles might be.

  I spent as little time there as possible. I had breakfast at a café that sold the New York Times; if I asked for an extra shot, the cappuccino was almost up to New York standards. I lingered longer than I should have, because I dreaded going to work every morning. I didn’t like the job I’d been sent to do, and I didn’t quite know how to do it.

  The third morning, after my coffee, I noticed an antiques store next to the café. Wanting to kill time before the inevitable arrival at the office, I stood in front of the window. I wasn’t someone who’d spent time in antiques shops, but my eye fell on a vase that stood on a bare wooden table. It was a deep rose color, and its surface was almost iridescent, entirely unornamented; nothing got in the way of its allowance of a play of lights. The shape was classical: almost an urn. It occurred to me that I might feel better about Brookside Corporate Housing if I had one nice thing of my own there. The anonymity of the place was nearly total—except for my clothes and toiletries I’d brought nothing with me, not even books: I’d downloaded everything I wanted to read on my Kindle.

  I heard the tinkle of a bell and noticed that the shopkeeper had opened the door. She wasn’t a good advertisement for the beautiful things in her window; I try not to judge people on their looks—it’s a skill I’ve cultivated in Human Resources—but I had rarely seen someone who seemed to take so little care with her appearance. I could see right away that nature had not been kind; she had the kind of oily hair that would never look clean, and although I guessed she was in her fifties, her face was covered with an acne that would have anguished a teenager. Perhaps it had anguished her, and she had understood that there was nothing much she could do to make herself look good, and she had given it up. But she could have done something better than the clothes she had selected: orange running shorts, an orange tank top, orange knee socks and sneakers. Whatever her dermatological misfortune was, it affected the skin on her arms and legs, which was mottled and unsmooth.

  “Take the plunge, why don’t you?” she said. I was surprised at her voice; it was low and velvety and the accent was cultivated, Eastern, upper class.

  She stepped into the store to let me in. I followed; how could I not? It would have been horribly rude, and besides, I really was interested in the vase.

  Inhibiting my entrance was a large, elderly, and overweight golden retriever; a few feet behind him, making himself comfortable on a ratty-looking divan, was an equally ancient chocolate Lab. I thought it probably wasn’t a good marketing ploy; probably people wanting fine things didn’t want to be stepping over dogs and knowing they’d have to take a clothes brush to whatever they were wearing after they got back home.

  She turned on the lights and I saw that what she had was of a very high quality. There didn’t seem to be a pattern to the placement; easy chairs were next to desks and dining tables situated themselves too close to china cabinets. I tried to call up and make sense of some words I had never used but that I thought might be of use here: hutch, tallboy, armoire, étagère. The room was large and dim, and the rows of tables receding into the foggy distance gave the impression of a forest just at nightfall; some sense of adventure beckoned, but there could, as well, be the chance of doom.

  “I was interested in that pink vase in the window,” I said.

  “Lusterware,” she said. “German immigrants specialized in it. Early twentieth century.” She hopped into the window with an agility that surprised me. She put the vase in my hand. I was enchanted by the way the light played differently on the surface indoors.

  “Luster,” she said. “Isn’t it a great word, luster.” It’s a particular kind of light, not exactly a shine, something slightly thicker.

  “It is a wonderful word,” I said.

  She ran to the computer and typed something out with a remarkable speed, printed it out, and handed the page to me.

  Lusterware. Pottery or porcelain with a metallic glaze that gives the effect of iridescence, produced by metallic oxides in an overglaze finish, which is given a second firing at a lower temperature in a “muffle kiln,” reduction kiln, which excludes oxygen.

  “How much?” I asked.

  “Twenty dollars.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I’m always sure. It’s what I do. It’s my business. What’s yours?”

  I told her part of my reason for being in Monroe. “I live in a pretty awful place; I just wanted to have one beautiful thing to look at.”

  “One beautiful thing,” she said. “Everybody should have one beautiful thing.”

  I was feeling that I much preferred being with this strange woma
n than going to the office.

  “Lois,” she said. “I’m Lois.”

  “Laura,” I said.

  “Laura,” she repeated, nodding. “It’s a good name. It’s a sensible name. So many names now aren’t sensible.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said. “I’m so glad I wasn’t named Tiffany or Ashley.”

  “Or Brittany. Spelt Britni.”

  I realized that I hadn’t laughed since I’d left New York.

  “You have wonderful things here,” I said.

  “Take a look around.” The room with its rows of tables seemed like a forest, this place, the demesne of chairs, seemed like the overcrowded province of some resentful, fussy aunts. I began to find it difficult to breathe; I could feel my lungs constricting. And then, with no notice, my lungs felt rich and light, and a ridiculous line of poetry came to me. “My heart leaps up when I behold a rainbow in the sky.”

  It wasn’t, of course, a rainbow. It was a small, graceful chair, upholstered in a light green. Its arms were curved and elegant, and I saw that there was a pattern of leaves carved into the wooden jointure of the back and cushion. So many of the chairs Hugh and I had looked at were either engulfing or unwelcoming. I was curious to see if this lovely thing was comfortable.

  Immediately I knew that I would have to make it mine. It fit me so well; it was neither too hard nor too soft; I wouldn’t fall asleep when I was reading, but I wouldn’t have to shift around to make myself comfortable. But before that moment, I had had no idea of buying a chair; I could perfectly well sit in the anonymous but comfortable furniture in corporate arms, and it would be a problem to move it when I would be leaving in what would be, after all, a matter of weeks.