The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  I was proud of the way I was living. Having so few objects around me, I became newly interested in the desire to live modestly, which I think also had something to do with the lake, so modest in its largely uninterrupted wideness. The rare swell, the occasional constellation of waterfowl, but mostly just the expanse of calm, even water. A meadow of water, where all creatures might safely graze.

  I cooked for myself every night; sometimes I’d make a big soup and have it for a first course several evenings in a row. I spent time at the farmer’s market that had just opened for the season, and I bought early asparagus and tender spring onions, and waxy new potatoes; I splurged on artichokes, which I cooked simply, steaming them with just a spoonful of oil and a little salt. I downloaded three versions of the Bach Cello Suites: Casals, Rostropovich, Yo-Yo Ma, and I played them over and over trying to hear the differences; after a while I told myself I could. It made me very happy to listen to classical music on the local NPR on my way to and from work; I called and made a one-time donation; I even believed them when they said it was “awesome.” They asked if I would like to make an ongoing contribution; I said I would be leaving the area soon, and saying that, I felt quite sad. One morning I read the label on a container of cut-up cantaloupe I’d bought at the supermarket. Living up to your life, it said, and with a deep quiet pleasure I told myself I was doing just that.

  I was almost embarrassed at my clichéd response to the coming of spring, or I would have been embarrassed if I had mentioned it to anybody, but I never did. Each evening, the increasing minutes of light seemed tremendously valuable, like a legacy I’d been left from an aunt I’d never known existed. I would eat my dinner in front of the window, and watch as the sky sipped in the last silver light. I hoped no one would ask me how I was, because I would have found it hard to explain why I was so happy.

  But then it was over, quickly, and for good. As if the power company had just turned off the electricity and suddenly everything went dark. But no, it wasn’t like that—it was that suddenly someone turned the lights up, and I could see that I’d been wandering around in some half-lit twilit state, mistaking things for other things, mistaking myself for another person.

  I guess it was the sight of Hugh’s headlights in the driveway. He’d come to drive me home, but a week early so we could relax together. He was driving his parents’ BMW and the lights seemed unsuitably, even offensively bright. When he turned off the ignition the lights went on inside the car and I could see him flip the visor down and look at himself in the mirror. I could see the pleasure he took in his own reflection—that he was so well put together that he didn’t even need to comb his hair—and I was ashamed for both of us.

  He was going to stay with me for a week. I was grateful; it would be a great help transporting everything.

  Standing in the doorway, I felt a tremendous shyness. I realized it wasn’t just shyness. It was reluctance. I didn’t want him here, here in my place. My place but, of course, it was really Lois’s.

  “The view is just spectacular,” he said, looking around for a place to leave his jacket. When we embraced, I was surprisingly aroused by his smell and the texture of his beard. It was six o’clock and he usually needed a shave by five.

  “What’s the décor? Heartland minimalist . . . with a little heartland hideous thrown in,” he said, plopping himself down in my beautiful chair.

  I didn’t like the idea of his sitting in my chair. I knew he’d say something insulting about it. Why hadn’t I realized that it was a mistake for me to buy furniture that I knew he wouldn’t like? Well, I realized it too late, and little beads of panicked sweat formed at my hairline like seed pearls.

  “How’d you come by this monstrosity?” he said.

  Monstrosity. Anyone would say he’d gone too far. It might not be his taste, but certainly he could see that it was well made, and, on its own terms, admirable. I don’t know, even now, why I didn’t defend myself. My chair. My right to my own taste. My right to deviate from the tyranny of high postmodern. And why did I say what I said next, the plain false words of the last-minute betrayer.

  “It belongs to my landlady.”

  “The famous Lois,” he said. “Even the name is ugly. I can’t wait to clap eyes on her.”

  My panic intensified. I would not allow Hugh to “clap eyes” on Lois. I would do whatever was necessary to keep them apart.

  But that turned out to be impossible. No sooner had I resolved in my mind to keep them apart than there was a knock on the door and Lois’s habitual, “Yoo-hoo!”

  I wondered later if she deliberately dressed her worst as a test: of me, of Hugh. She’d just come from a run, so not only her face, but her bare legs were blotched. She was wearing lime-green nylon running shorts, a peacock-blue sleeveless T-shirt, exposing her arms, also blotched, and raspberry-colored socks that seemed to have been chosen deliberately to match her running shoes. I was hoping I had just imagined it, but I thought I saw Hugh visibly shudder at the sight of her. And I was convinced she knew I had betrayed the chair, denied my connection to it, passed it off like a bastard child, pretending it was my mother’s, that I had never in fact given birth.

  “Welcome to our fair city,” she said, extending her sweaty hand to Hugh.

  He didn’t take her hand, but he did, to his credit, offer coffee.

  “No thanks. Got to jump into the shower. I reek.”

  “I’ll bet you do,” Hugh said, after she’d run out the door, closing it firmly behind her. It was, after all, her property.

  He pressed the button of the coffee grinder with what seemed to me an unnecessary force. He slammed the drawer where I kept the silverware; he banged the cups onto the counter. He pulled the stools out, making what I knew was a deliberately unpleasant sound against the slate floor.

  “It’s an act of aggression, it couldn’t be anything else,” he said.

  “Aggression?” I said, not knowing what he was talking about.

  “Looking that ugly. Appearing in the world like that. Forcing people to have to see you in that way, forcing them to have to experience ugliness. It’s like those crazy people with TB who sneeze on people in the subways just so they’ll get infected too.”

  Ugly. It was a terrible word, and yet it sounded so inoffensive . . . it was so short and it ended in an ee sound, so it appeared not to be too serious, too dangerous. It wasn’t the opposite of beautiful, because beauty suggested something eternal, whereas the claims of ugliness were much more modest; ugliness would go away, somehow, would be made to seem irrelevant by the sheer passage of time. I had first met Lois when I said I wanted one beautiful thing. I hadn’t used the word ugly; I don’t know what word I’d used when I was thinking to myself about the problem with where I lived. When she had come to the place I was staying at corporate housing, the words she used were unlovely and lowering. But ugly? We hadn’t said it . . . maybe because it would have coated the inside of our mouths . . . by which I really mean our minds, with a sticky, nasty-smelling paste.

  “Hugh, that’s really going too far. Lois has no idea of hurting people. She’s kind of in her own world, but it’s a benign world . . . she does have an aesthetic sense, a real one, but it just doesn’t extend to her own appearance.”

  “Oh, my God, my darling, I must get you away from here. They’ve infected you with softening of the brain.” And he scooped me up—I literally felt scooped, as if he were something metallic and clearly shaped and I was something formless, like flour, or sugar or salt—and threw me down onto the bed.

  I shouldn’t have let him make love to me, as I shouldn’t have said that the chair was Lois’s, but as he touched me and traveled over my body with his hands and mouth, I realized how starved I’d been for this kind of attention, the attention of his body—let’s call it by its right name, sex—and I gave in, there was nothing in me that wanted not to give in, to hold back. Even as I was giving in, I remembered an aunt of mine who had been widowed young and after a decade remarried. She said to me
, “I didn’t even realize I’d missed it”—she never gave the “it” a name—“but then when I had it again, it was all very clear. What I’d been deprived of.”

  Making love to Hugh, I was no longer the person who spent days in Rusty’s workshop, or hand-washed my new china, or sat in my beautiful chair to watch the sun rise. And lying in his arms, I had no doubt which one was the real me. Perhaps I had been infected with brain softening. Perhaps I had gone flaccid, flabby, and I would return now to the taut, hard, muscular self, shedding the false fat that covered my true skeleton.

  The next week was so busy that I hardly had time to think. I had, all these weeks, been working out a plan so that the people who were in the office least could stagger their flex time; and the people who worked at home would have to come into the office at intervals that would ensure their productivity. Everyone would have to give up a little, but the relinquishments were fair and even: no one, I hoped, could feel ill-done-by or ill-favored. First I presented it to their Human Resources person, who had kept me at a great distance all the weeks I’d been here, almost cowering when she saw me, and disappearing into her office, almost slinking there, when I’d asked her to consult. I could see that she thought my plan was good; for the first time in my presence, her spine straightened, she looked me in the eye. She gave me a high-five—something I loathed, something, though, it didn’t matter. I had to make a presentation—oh the bullet points, the flow charts—to everybody in the company, and no one challenged me. There was a lot of nodding when I said, “Look, we all have to work together because no one wants the company to go under. If this happens, we’re all out of a job.” Then I had long private conversations with each of the people most affected. And, to my astonishment, no one suggested that what I offered was unacceptable, problematic, harsh.

  I made my report to Jason and Jonathan and Josh, and they were so pleased that if they could have leapt off the computer screen to embrace me, I was sure they would. They offered me what seemed a ridiculously large bonus, and I had no impulse to refuse. What surprised me, driving home, back to my lake abode, was how pleased I was at the thought of all that money. It made me feel lighter, younger . . . I drove faster than I ever had. I was happy to be giving up my Toyota Camry rental; I was looking forward to driving Hugh’s parents’ BMW.

  I hadn’t talked to Lois in all the time that Hugh had been there. And I didn’t want to. I wanted to leave right away. We had planned to rest up for two days after my last day of work, but I burst into the apartment, told Hugh the news about my bonus, and said, “Let’s go. Let’s go right now. Let’s get out of here. I’ll just leave Lois an envelope and avoid all the messy farewells.”

  “I love you . . . I love you . . . let’s get out of Dodge,” he said.

  There wasn’t really much for me to pack up. I had decided I would leave the dishes and the chair. There wouldn’t be a place for them in my New York life. Lois would resell them to someone more appropriate, she’d make a little more money, and they could live in a home where they belonged.

  Hugh was running the engine. I told him I wanted to check the place one last time.

  It was just before seven; the light over the lake was silvery, and the clouds were beginning to be underlit: peach and mango, and a dark gray, like the kind of eye shadow you would only wear in a city, the kind that magazines call smoky. I looked back. There was my chair, framed by the dim emptiness. But it was not my chair, and I wondered if it ever really had been. “You are beautiful,” I said to it. “You are very beautiful. You are fine, you are good, you are full of goodness and I am not. You don’t belong with me. You wouldn’t want to belong to me. You should be grateful that you aren’t mine.”

  LAUREN GROFF

  The Midnight Zone

  FROM The New Yorker

  It was an old hunting camp shipwrecked in twenty miles of scrub. Our friend had seen a Florida panther sliding through the trees there a few days earlier. But things had been fraying in our hands, and the camp was free and silent, so I walked through the resistance of my cautious husband and my small boys, who had wanted hermit crabs and kites and wakeboards and sand for spring break. Instead, they got ancient sinkholes filled with ferns, potential death by cat.

  One thing I liked was how the screens at night pulsed with the tender bellies of lizards.

  Even in the sleeping bag with my smaller son, the golden one, the March chill seemed to blow through my bones. I loved eating, but I’d lost so much weight by then that I carried myself delicately, as if I’d gone translucent.

  There was sparse electricity from a gas-powered generator and no Internet and you had to climb out through the window in the loft and stand on the roof to get a cell signal. On the third day, the boys were asleep and I’d dimmed the lanterns when my husband went up and out and I heard him stepping on the metal roof, a giant brother to the raccoons that woke us thumping around up there at night like burglars.

  Then my husband stopped moving, and stood still for so long I forgot where he was. When he came down the ladder from the loft, his face had blanched.

  Who died? I said lightly, because if anyone was going to die it was going to be us, our skulls popping in the jaws of an endangered cat. It turned out to be a bad joke, because someone actually had died, that morning, in one of my husband’s apartment buildings. A fifth-floor occupant had killed herself, maybe on purpose, with aspirin and vodka and a bathtub. Floors four, three, and two were away somewhere with beaches and alcoholic smoothies, and the first floor had discovered the problem only when the water of death had seeped into the carpet.

  My husband had to leave. He’d just fired one handyman and the other was on his own Caribbean adventure, eating buffet food to the sound of cruise-ship calypso. Let’s pack, my husband said, but my rebelliousness at the time was like a sticky fog rolling through my body and never burning off, there was no sun inside, and so I said that the boys and I would stay. He looked at me as if I were crazy and asked how we’d manage with no car. I asked if he thought he’d married an incompetent woman, which cut to the bone, because the source of our problems was that, in fact, he had. For years at a time I was good only at the things that interested me, and since all that interested me was my work and my children, the rest of life had sort of inched away. And while it’s true that my children were endlessly fascinating, two petri dishes growing human cultures, being a mother never had been, and all that seemed assigned by default of gender I would not do because it felt insulting. I would not buy clothes, I would not make dinner, I would not keep schedules, I would not make playdates, never ever. Motherhood meant, for me, that I would take the boys on month-long adventures to Europe, teach them to blast off rockets, to swim for glory. I taught them how to read, but they could make their own lunches. I would hug them as long as they wanted to be hugged, but that was just being human. My husband had to be the one to make up for the depths of my lack. It is exhausting, living in debt that increases every day but that you have no intention of repaying.

  Two days, he promised. Two days and he’d be back by noon on the third. He bent to kiss me, but I gave him my cheek and rolled over when the headlights blazed then dwindled on the wall. In the banishing of the engine, the night grew bold. The wind was making a low, inhuman muttering in the pines, and, inspired, the animals let loose in call-and-response. Everything kept me alert until shortly before dawn, when I slept for a few minutes until the puppy whined and woke me. My older son was crying because he’d thrown off his sleeping bag in the night and was cold but too sleepy to fix the situation.

  I made scrambled eggs with a vengeful amount of butter and Cheddar, also cocoa with an inch of marshmallow, thinking I would stupefy my children with calories, but the calories only made them stronger.

  Our friend had treated the perimeter of the clearing with panther deterrent, some kind of synthetic superpredator urine, and we felt safeish near the cabin. We ran footraces until the dog went wild and leapt up and bit my children’s arms with her puppy teeth, an
d the boys screamed with pain and frustration and showed me the pink stripes on their skin. I scolded the puppy harshly and she crept off to the porch to watch us with her chin on her paws. The boys and I played soccer. We rocked in the hammock. We watched the circling red-shouldered hawks. I made my older son read Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to the little one, which was a disaster, a book so punny and Victorian for modern children. We had lunch, then the older boy tried to make fire by rubbing sticks together, his little brother attending solemnly, and they spent the rest of the day constructing a hut out of branches. Then dinner, singing songs, a bath in the galvanized-steel horse trough someone had converted to a cold-water tub, picking ticks and chiggers off with tweezers, and that was it for the first day.

  There had been a weight on us as we played outside, not as if something were actually watching but because of the possibility that something could be watching when we were so far from humanity in all that Florida waste.

  The second day should have been like the first. I doubled down on the calories, adding pancakes to breakfast, and succeeded in making the boys lie in pensive digestion out in the hammock for a little while before they ricocheted off the trees.