The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  My stomach turned. Suddenly I wanted to kick him. Pinch him. Do something to snap him awake. “Hey,” I said. “How about you punch me?”

  Gabe Dove stopped the kissing. “Punch you?” he said.

  My toes were tingling. They flexed under the blanket. “Yeah.”

  He propped his head up on his elbow, gazing confusedly into my face. “Like how?” he said. “Like where?”

  “I don’t know. In the stomach? In the arm?” It was just a punch. Good god, did I have to decide everything?

  Gabe Dove frowned. He made a fist, limply, and nudged me in the shoulder. “No, no,” I said. “Do it for real.” I opened my arms, exposing my belly, the whole of my torso.

  “I’m not sure I understand,” he said. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about.” He was thinking too much. That was his problem.

  “I mean, it’s a punch,” I said, staring at the ceiling, exasperated. I was matter-of-fact. “Like what do you know about pain?”

  Gabe Dove hovered over my face, as if examining something trapped under glass. One eyebrow twitched uncontrollably, and his scrunched-up face was crisscrossed with new lines. On his lip was a thin white scar that I’d never noticed before, from an old piercing or some sort of cut. But all of this was secondary to the hugeness of his eyes, swollen with concern. I thought he might shout, or shake me. But then something passed, like a storm come and gone. His shoulders subsided. He relaxed.

  “I’ll punch you,” he said quietly. “But not now.”

  Gabe Dove lay down and pulled the sheet over his shoulder, exposing my feet to the cold.

  “You’ll what?” I said, thinking I’d heard him wrong. “What was that? Gabe?”

  “Don’t worry,” he said, turning away, adjusting his pillow. He switched off the lamp. “You’ll see.”

  I blinked. The radiator, the curtains, the crates of books: all went mute in the dark. It took a minute to notice my hands clenched around the sheet, my heart knocking at my ribs. I watched the back of Gave Dove. His round shoulders, his quiet breathing. Was he asleep? Was he pretending?

  In the morning we went for donuts. We walked along the sound barrier and past the tossing circles of the laundromat. But something was different. He didn’t sling his arm around me. He didn’t kiss me at the crosswalks, or whistle songs from the radio. Instead he followed behind me, silent. The sidewalk moved beneath us like a conveyor belt. I kept thinking, Will he punch me at the bus stop? At the streetlight up ahead? Will he punch me as I’m biting my donut, when I’m least expecting it, a burst of crumbs and sugar spraying from my hands?

  He opened the door and I walked in. He closed it. He didn’t punch me. I ordered two donuts and waited at the counter beside him. He didn’t punch me.

  We sat. I chewed my donuts. They tasted like water, like air-filled plastic. I was so excited. I fussed with a paper napkin, wiping each finger and the curved edge of every nail. I was aware of his feet moving under the table. But Gabe Dove’s eyes sat unmoving behind square sunglasses that he didn’t take off, revealing nothing. “What’s wrong?” he finally said.

  I giggled loudly. “What do you mean, what’s wrong?” I squeezed my hands between my thighs. My fingers were so cold.

  “You just seem like not yourself.”

  “Don’t I?” I wanted to laugh. Suddenly everything was funny.

  Gabe Dove’s mouth maintained its solid straight line across his face. He sucked on the straw of his iced double coffee.

  I played along. I kept my laugh to myself. We ate in silence, me watching his every gesture, each cough and shift of weight ripe with possibility.

  The next Friday we went to Mermaid Bowling. I waited for it the whole night—through the shoe rental, the weighing of balls, the sitting on our little bench. But it didn’t come. We went back to his place. He closed the door. Still nothing. We undressed. We did it in the foyer—I couldn’t wait for the bedroom—but afterward he just went to the bathroom and started his electric toothbrush. In bed he turned away again, no cuddling and no punch.

  Weeks passed. I waited for it in elevators, across parking lots, at the bus stop of the 64. Any time we were quiet, even for two seconds. Then I realized it might happen in the middle of a conversation. Why not? My voice got jumpy, readying for surprise. Everything I said sounded flirty, more alive.

  I bought Angela a box of six cupcakes. No reason. Half carrot and half chocolate, her faves. “Gee, thanks,” said Angela, peering under the lid. She lowered it and looked at me. “Is anything wrong?”

  “No,” I said. “Or, yes. But in a good way.”

  That day Gabe Dove picked me up from work. We went to a horror movie, The Chopping Mall, and I hid behind our popcorn as the lights went dark. Gabe Dove munched, staring ahead, his jaw moving and preoccupied.

  I wondered if he’d forgotten. Like maybe it’d slipped his mind. I wanted to ask, but that would ruin the whole thing. So I just had to wait. I had to be patient. During the previews he was quieter than usual: that told me something. He touched my thigh and I nearly jumped out of my skin, laughing. He spooked me.

  “Since when are you skittish?” he whispered.

  “Since now,” I grinned.

  The movie was bad and I hugged Gabe Dove’s shoulder through all the bloody parts. It felt wonderful to squeeze my eyes, to grip him like that, everything thrilling and safe. I thought about that patch of grass with Ex and his family. It wasn’t their boat I wanted. It wasn’t the cheese and the wine. It was the napping on the blankets. Closing their eyes wherever they pleased.

  What was wrong? I thought in the dark. What was wrong was that I was getting better.

  A week later I swam across the entire river. The water gave way beneath my hands; my breaths were deep and easy. I emerged panting onto the shore, seaweed clinging to my legs, aching and glorious. I regretted that there wasn’t more water to cross. Even the twigs strewn on the sand looked shiny, invincible. I took my time strolling back, feeling the warm sun dry the droplets from my skin. I was going to be late. It felt wonderful not to give one shit.

  I met Gabe Dove on the esplanade. He was sitting on a park bench, suitcase at his side. Atop the suitcase was a flattened paper bag, and Gabe Dove was peeling an orange and balancing the shreds of rind on the bag. I approached him but he didn’t look up from his orange. “What kept you?” he said.

  I was so awkward sitting down: all jacket sleeves and purse straps and wet stringy hair. I settled myself. I kissed the scruff by his ear. Gabe Dove stretched his arm along the bench but didn’t touch me, maybe not wanting to get his orangey hands on my back. “Guess what?” I said. “I swam the whole river today.”

  “That’s great,” he said.

  “I can’t believe it. I have to call Coach. I used to swim for ninety minutes straight, but not lately, thirty’s been like all I can do. But after today? Wow.” I crossed my legs and admired the smooth lines of muscle forming in my thighs. “Hey,” I said. “How about we go to Mermaid’s?”

  “I’m not sure,” he said, twisting toward me. “Truthfully, Chuntao, I don’t think that this is working for me.”

  I blinked. “Working for you?”

  He raised his head from the orange and looked at me with steady eyes. “I don’t think we’re right for each other. I think we have different values.”

  “Values?” His face: it was the same face. But it was making no sense at all. “What the fuck are you saying?” I said, my voice arriving at my ears like it wasn’t my own.

  “Well,” he said, “if really you want to know, I think you’re mostly concerned with yourself, and you don’t care about other people, and you don’t listen, and you’re scared, and you’re immature, and you lie, and you have a vision of what you want that’s very narrow, and self-serving, and fucked up, and you’re willing to use people to get it. People like me.”

  I couldn’t speak. Wind flew in my mouth. “I don’t even like you,” I yelled. “I never liked you. You’re boring and you’re predictabl
e and you’re bad in bed and you look like my fucking cousins. For fuck’s sake!”

  Gabe Dove opened his mouth but bit it closed, grimacing as if at some odor. His head tilted. His eyes changed. “How does it feel to be punched?”

  There was something happening to my chin. My eyes crumpled and burned. I was crying. My hands were pulling at my face.

  “You want to hurt me,” I said.

  “You want me to be someone else,” he said.

  “Never, never,” I said. But he was right.

  I was choking. I couldn’t breathe. I leaned over my knees. The grass zoomed in all directions, a thousand blades shifting in blurs and sharp glints. “I feel like there’s something wrong with me,” I said.

  “Could be,” said Gabe Dove. Warmth spread across my back. Gabe Dove was rubbing my back.

  “Something is wrong with me and I don’t know what it is.”

  Gabe Dove was tracing a circle over my shoulders. He was offering me a cold slice of orange, placing it in my shaking hand.

  “Seems so,” he said.

  Years later I checked out a book about the history of China. Seven hundred and forty-one pages, 2.5 inches thick, written by Poverman and Levitsky. I could have gotten the e-version, but I sort of liked the weight in my backpack, like I was on some quest, like I was climbing a mountain. I took it to The Vault—it was now called The Lounge—and sipped Bud Light while reading it on my stool. “That’s a big book,” grinned the men at the bar. “Does it have any pictures?”

  The book: it wasn’t my favorite. It didn’t really grab me. Opium wars, rebellions, people killing and getting killed. Now, years later, I can only tell you that they happened. Not when or where or who exactly was involved.

  But there was a chapter toward the middle, about fighting in Rangoon. A devastating loss, it said, to the people of Myanmar.

  And I thought: No.

  It’s Burma, guys. Didn’t they know?

  I lugged the book to the grocery store. I pushed it in my cart, in the seat meant for children. Tubes of cookies tossed beside it. Cheese chunks, plastic-wrapped.

  Burma. Two round sounds. Like the name of a woman.

  “You sure know a lot about Burma,” said my mother in the hospital. She whimpered and scratched the band at her wrist.

  Burma, I said aloud down the shaking elevator at Livagon Insurance. I said it through the windshield wipers, blurring the red lights.

  What do you know about pain? I’d asked Gabe Dove. And the thing I remember only now is that he didn’t ask what I meant. About the punch, sure. But not about the thing I was asking him about.

  “You’ll see,” he’d said. And he turned off the light to show me—to show both of us—the things that he knew.

  FIONA MAAZEL

  Let’s Go to the Videotape

  FROM Harper’s Magazine

  The finalists were him and some other people, but really there was just him. Him filming his boy, who was riding a bike for the first time. A red-and-blue Spider-Man one-speed with plastic webbing and Spidey graphics arrayed along the frame. The bike had been this year’s Christmas surprise because Gus was five and not so much depressed as departed from faith that the universe doled out her favors equitably. He was, in this way, easy to impress but hard to parent, which often felt to Nick like trying to grow a happy boy in the soil of their misfortune.

  Who doesn’t film his kid experiencing a threshold moment? It was bittersweet, really. Of course it was. Gus pedaling away on his own, newly aware of his autonomy, which contravened everything Nick had taught him by force of grief, the bond between them fortified by the loss of Nick’s wife—Gus’s mom—three years ago in a car accident that was still being litigated today.

  And so, the film. Possibly the winner of America’s Funniest Home Videos, on which was: Gus wobbling along on his bike, insisting his father not let go, as Nick gripped an iPhone that actually corrected for the tremble in his hand as he did let go, despite the screaming woman who’d taken up residence in his heart the instant his wife died—her name was Dread—and Gus, whose fear turned to joy when he realized he wasn’t falling, on the contrary he was flying. There was, also, a hint of the disconnect that afflicts people who are filming an event instead of participating in it, so that even as Gus’s tire snagged on a rock and he vaulted over the handlebars; as his helmet, which was too big, came down over his eyes like the curtain at show’s end; as he popped out of the bush where he had landed and turned around several times because he could not see; as he cried out to his father, Nick beheld this spectacle at a distance, and continued to film.

  Later, when they watched the clip at home, they agreed Gus had been pretty scared but also that it was pretty funny. He looked like one of those animals with its head trapped in a bag. Cue the circus music and probably Nick’s friends would be amused.

  They were. The next morning, six emailed back saying: Hilarious. Also: That kid. And: I forwarded this to my sister who teaches kindergarten, and even she thought it was a riot. By day’s end, it had been posted online, subtitled humorously, and had more than five thousand views.

  The studio was warm. Sweat dribbled down the host’s neck, which someone kept blotting with a paper towel. He two-stepped across the room and worked his face into expressions of mirth. When he smiled, you could see his molars and caps. The audience sat on padded bleachers arranged as if someone had tossed them there. Ten grand, the host was saying, because that was the top prize for the night.

  “Shoo-in,” Nick whispered, and poked Gus in the ribs.

  “Too tight,” Gus said, and yanked at his chinos. The audience had been told to dress business casual, which had Nick stuffing Gus into last year’s pants and polo, looking at the result and thinking: big picture. He would leave the superlative fashion sense to double-parent families and focus, instead, on celebrating his son with five million other Americans.

  He pointed at the screen. The first finalist had a walrus rolled on its back like spilled pudding and an animal trainer nudging it in the gut with her foot. The voice-over said, “Yeah? Then you do ten sit-ups for a lousy piece of fish.” The audience clapped. Second finalist: an older woman making popcorn who took a kernel in the eye. The voice-over said, “Glasses, Granny. The better to seeeeee you with.” The audience clapped. The man sitting next to Gus let out a hacking laugh, and said, “So true.”

  “We’re up,” Nick said.

  Gus pulled at his collar. This morning he had asked Nick if the show was really a good idea because one of the kids at school had seen the video online and called him a tard, but Nick, who’d been bullied for stuff like poorly apportioned facial hair in high school, knew that kids who wanted to harass his son would find a way, video or not.

  “You’re my special guy,” he’d said. “And after tonight, everyone will know it.” Which probably had not mollified Gus, but which had filled Nick with the kind of anticipation he hadn’t felt since his second date with his wife. Before she’d been his wife, though already he could predict their future. Or some of it, anyway: They got married; they had Gus. And after, when Nick took stock of things, he found himself happy to a degree of hubris that attracts wrath the way an especially bright flower attracts a bee.

  Subdural hematoma is what the doctors had said. Blunt-force trauma. Nick had been rear-ended by a car doing forty. His seat had lurched forward, then back, which slammed his head into his wife’s, who’d been sitting behind him to coddle Gus because Gus got carsick. Weak seats, the industry had said. Regulated poorly. Under the speed limit, the other driver had said. It wasn’t clear who had been to blame, but the blame was out there waiting for the law to assign it.

  Not long after the accident, Gus had developed a speech impediment. A kind of nasal approach to language Nick barely even noticed anymore, but which the producers thought might ruin their film’s big moment. So at 10.4 seconds in, when Gus rose up from the bush, pumping his arms like a newborn bird, and saying, almost yelling, “Daddy, am I okay?” the question was
printed at the bottom of the screen in a cartoon font. The voice-over said, “Ahhh, the big questions.”

  Nick snickered and clapped Gus on the back. And when the audience laughed with more vigor than before, Nick said, “See?” and he beamed—less with pride than relief. Because the hardest part of being a single parent wasn’t the logistics or even the exhaustion, but just the solitude of having no one to share his son’s life with. The day after his wife died, Gus picked up a pink crayon and drew a circle for the first time. Nick had been so proud, though there was nothing sui generis about the circle or the precocious timing of its drawing. But who could he tell besides his wife? Who would care beyond his friends, whose care was dutiful at best? My boy just used a fork! Used the potty! Zipped his jacket! All these moments relished, extolled, and filed away in a vault of memories no one else would open. When Nick was feeling extra grim, he wondered if these memories were even safe with him as their only safeguard. He was bad with names and faces and recently had a meeting with several lawyers, one of whom he mistook for opposing counsel because he hadn’t remembered spending a half-hour with the man just two months earlier. So it was possible all the milestones Gus had jumped would actually be forgotten and in this way erased from the human script being written every second by every person on earth.

  The show was almost over, time for the host to announce the results. Third place: “The Lazy Walrus.” No surprise there. First place (Nick crossed his fingers in his lap, embarrassed that he should care so much): “The Existential Biker”! Sent in by Nick and Gus Slocombe from Providence, Rhode Island. Nick threw up his arms. Gus put his palms together, but if he’d meant to part them again, no one could say because the host was on them in seconds, shaking Gus’s hand and saying congratulations. And, “How’s the bike riding going?” Nick went a little pale. He hadn’t known they’d be interviewed, and certainly not that the questions would be directed at Gus.