The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  “Why did you say that to that beachcomber?” I asked.

  “Which part?”

  “That you can walk on your hands?”

  My mother looked at me humbly. Then she walked toward the water where the sand was firmer. She got down on all fours and jumped her legs up so she was standing on her hands, bent like a scorpion’s tail, the skirt of her dress hanging down around her. You could see her underwear—plain as a man’s briefs—but at the moment I was too astounded to care. She walked that way for a few steps, teetering along on her hands and scaring up a puff of kelp flies. A wave foamed between her fingers, dampening the ends of her hair, but she didn’t stop. I had the sense that this was the only time I’d ever see her do this. After today, we wouldn’t have the chance. But she could still do it now, she could surprise me with a useless talent. The sun flashed behind her, flickering between her legs, and someone watching from down the beach might even have mistaken us for two kids. She teetered on like that, on the verge of falling, while Shorty and Ranger barked and splashed around her, wagging their stubby little tails, no idea what was next.

  MARIA REVA

  Novostroïka

  FROM The Atlantic

  Daniil Ivanovich Blinov climbed the crumbling steps of the city council. The statue of Grandfather Lenin towered over the building, squinting into the smoggy distance. The winter’s first snowflakes settled on the statue’s shoulders like dandruff. Daniil avoided Grandfather’s iron gaze, but sensed it on the back of his head, burning through his fur-flap hat.

  Inside the hall of the council, hunched figures pressed against the walls, warming their hands on the radiators. Men, women, entire families progressed toward a wall of glass partitions. Daniil entered the line. He rocked back and forth on the sides of his feet. When his heels grew numb, he flexed his calves to promote circulation.

  “Next!”

  Daniil took a step forward. He bent down to the hole in the partition and looked at the woman sitting behind it. “I’m here to report a little heating problem in our building.”

  “What’s the problem?”

  “We have no heat.” He explained that the building was a new one, this winter was its first, someone seemed to have forgotten to connect it to the district furnace, and the toilet water froze at night.

  The woman heaved a thick directory onto her counter. “Building address?”

  “Ivansk Street, number nineteen thirty-three.”

  She flipped through the book, licking her finger every few pages. She flipped and flipped, consulted an index, flipped once more, then shut the book and folded her arms across it. “That building does not exist, Citizen.”

  Daniil stared at the woman. “What do you mean? I live there.”

  “According to the documentation, you do not.” She looked at the young couple in line behind him.

  Daniil leaned closer, too quickly, banged his forehead against the partition. “Nineteen thirty-three Ivansk Street,” he repeated.

  The woman considered an oily spot on the glass with mild interest. “Never heard of it.”

  “I have thirteen, no, fourteen citizens, living in my suite alone, who can come here and tell you all about it,” he said. “Fourteen angry citizens bundled up to twice their size.”

  She shook her head, tapped the book. “The documentation, Citizen.”

  “We’ll keep using the gas, then,” Daniil said. “Just leave the stove on for heat.”

  The woman raised her eyebrows; Daniil seemed to rematerialize in front of her. “Address again?”

  “Nineteen thirty-three Ivansk Street, Kozlov City, Ukraine. U.S.S.R. Mother Earth—”

  “Yes, yes. We’ll have the gas-engineering department look into it. Next!”

  Was it fourteen now? Had he included himself in the count? Careful to avoid the ice patches on the sidewalk on his way home from work, Daniil wondered when he had let the numbers slip. Last month twelve people were living in his suite, including himself. He counted on his fingers, stiff from the cold. In the bedroom, first corner, Baba Olga slept on the foldout armchair; second corner, on the foldout cot, were Aunt Lena and Uncle Ivan and their three children; third corner, Daniil’s niece and her friend (but they hardly counted, since they ate little and spent most of their time at the institute); fourth corner—who was in the fourth corner? Wait, that was himself, Daniil Blinov, bunking under Uncle Timko; in the hallway, someone’s mother-in-law or second cousin or who really knew, the connection was patchy; on the balcony camped Cousin Vovic and his fiancée and six hens, which were not included in the count but who could forget them? Damn noisy birds. That made thirteen. He must have missed someone.

  Daniil’s name had bounced from waitlist to waitlist for three years before he was assigned to his apartment by the Kozlov Canning Combine, where he worked as a packaging specialist. The ten-story paneled novostroïka had been newly built and still smelled of mortar. His suite was no larger than the single room he had shared with his parents in a communal apartment, but he could call it his own. The day he had moved in was nothing short of sublime: he walked to his sink, filled up a glass of water, took a sip, and lay down on the kitchen floor, his legs squeezed into the gap between the stove and the table. Home was where one could lie in peace, on any surface. He felt fresh and full of hope. Then came a knock at the door. Daniil’s grandmother burst into the apartment, four sacks of grain and a cage full of chickens strapped to her back. She spoke rural Ukrainian, which Daniil barely understood. She said something about her farm burning down and a neighbor who had it in for her. The exchanges between Daniil and his grandmother had never been long. And so Baba Olga stayed. Two. Two was all right. Until two became fourteen.

  Daniil stuffed his hands back into the damp warmth of his pockets, climbed the narrow set of stairs up to his floor. The familiar smell of boiled potatoes and sea cabbage greeted him.

  “Daniil, is that you?” Aunt Lena yelled from the kitchen.

  Daniil cringed. He had wanted to remain undiscovered by his relatives for a few seconds longer. He opened the closet to hang his coat, and a pair of gray eyes stared back at him, round and unblinking. Daniil started. He had forgotten Grandfather Grishko, the fourteenth member of the Blinov residence, who slept standing, as he used to do while guarding Lenin’s mausoleum. Daniil closed the door softly.

  “Come look, we get barely any gas,” Aunt Lena said. She wore a yellowed apron over a floor-length fur coat. Its massive hood obscured her face. “Took me three hours to boil potatoes.” She turned the knobs to maximum; the elements quivered with a faint blue. “Did you go to the city council? They should look into it.”

  “It seems they already have,” Daniil said. “They’re just better at turning things off than on.”

  Aunt Lena’s daughter jumped out from under the kitchen table, singing, “May there always be blue skies!” She air-fired at the light bulb hanging from the ceiling. Aunt Lena tickled the nape of the child’s neck, and she retreated back under the table.

  “What did they tell you at the council?” Aunt Lena asked.

  “The building doesn’t exist, and we don’t live here.”

  She brushed a strand of hair off her forehead with a mittened hand. “I guess that makes sense.”

  “How?”

  “I had a talk with the benchers last week.” She was referring to the group of pensioners who sat at the main entrance of the building, ever vigilant, smoking unfiltered cigarettes and cracking sunflower seeds day and night. “They told me this block was supposed to have only two towers, but enough construction material was discarded to cobble together a third—ours.”

  A series of barks blasted through the thin walls of the bedroom. A chill colder than the air ran through Daniil. He hadn’t approved of the hens, but they were at least useful—now a dog?

  Aunt Lena cast her eyes down. “Dasha. Bronchitis again, poor child.”

  Daniil fiddled with the gas knobs, never having felt so useless.

  “What are you going to do?�
�� she asked.

  Aunt Lena’s daughter bellowed, “May there always be me!”

  Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

  “I don’t know.”

  Uncle Ivan appeared in the doorway to inform them that he needed to get a glass of milk. Everyone evacuated the kitchen and waited in the hallway to give him enough space to open the refrigerator.

  The human shuffle complete, Daniil and Aunt Lena resumed inspecting the stove. Aunt Lena’s fur hood kept falling over her eyes until she flung it off, releasing a cloud of dust.

  “Grandfather Grishko’s telling everyone he hasn’t seen his own testicles in weeks,” she said. “We’re tired of the cold, Daniil.”

  Daniil stroked the smooth enamel of the stove. “I know.”

  Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

  “And we’re tired of hearing about the testicles.”

  The memo on Daniil’s desk unsettled him. It was addressed from Moscow:

  In accordance with General Assembly No. 3556 of the Ministry of Food Industry, Ministry of Meat and Dairy Industry, and Ministry of Fish Industry on January 21, 1988, the Kozlov Canning Combine has been ordered to economize 2.5 tons of tin-plate per month, due to shortages. Effective immediately. See attachment for details.

  At the bottom of the memo, his superior’s blockish handwriting:

  THIS MEANS YOU, DANIIL BLINOV.

  Attached to the memo was a list of items the combine had canned that year. Daniil read the list with great interest. He mouthed the syllables, let them slosh around his tongue deliciously: sausages in fat; macaroni with beef, pork, or mutton; apricots in sugar syrup; mackerel in olive oil; sturgeon in natural juice of the fish; cubed whale meat; beetroot in natural juice of the vegetable; quince in sugar syrup; beef tongue in jelly; liver, heart, and kidneys in tomato sauce; cheek, tail, tips, and trimmings with one bay leaf; and so on.

  The telephone on Daniil’s desk rang.

  “You’ve read the memo?” Sergei Ivanovich, his superior, was calling. Daniil turned to look across the many rows of desks. Sergei Ivanovich stood at the doorway of his office, watching Daniil, the receiver pressed to his ear.

  “I have, Sergei Ivanovich.” Daniil inquired about testing alternative tin-to-steel ratios for containers.

  “None of that, Daniil Blinov. Just stuff more food into fewer cans. Use every cubic millimeter you have,” his superior said. “You’re not writing this down.”

  Daniil pulled up an old facsimile and set to doodling big-eared Cheburashka, a popular cartoon creature unknown to science.

  “Good, very good,” Sergei Ivanovich said. “But don’t think of pureeing anything.”

  “No?”

  “The puree machine’s on its way to Moscow. Commissar’s wife just had twins.”

  Daniil noted the diameter of Cheburashka’s head, to make sure the ears matched its size exactly. “Sergei Ivanovich? May I ask you something?”

  “If it’s quick.”

  “I was looking over the impressive list of goods our combine produces, and couldn’t help wondering . . . Where does it all go?”

  “Is that a philosophical question, Daniil Blinov?”

  “All I see in stores is sea cabbage.”

  Sergei Ivanovich let out a long sigh. “It’s like the joke about the American, the Frenchman, and the Soviet guy.”

  “I haven’t heard that one, Sergei Ivanovich.”

  “That’s a shame,” Sergei Ivanovich said. “When I have time to paint my nails and twiddle my thumbs all day, Blinov, I’ll tell you the joke.”

  Daniil resisted the temptation to roll himself into a defensive ball position under his desk, like a hedgehog. He straightened his shoulders. “Sergei Ivanovich? May I also ask about the pay?”

  Daniil watched his superior retreat into his office. Sergei Ivanovich mumbled something about the shortages, surely the pay would come through next month and if not then, the month after, and in the meantime don’t ask too many questions. He hung up.

  Daniil reached into his desk drawer, produced a new sheet of grid paper and a T-square. He ran his fingers over the instrument, rich red in color, made of wild pearwood. When he was a child his parents had awarded the T-square to him for top marks in school. At the time he thought the pearwood held some magical property, a secret promise.

  He set to work drawing diagrams of food products in four-hundred-milliliter cylinders. Chains of equations filled his grid paper. Some foods posed more of a packing problem than others: pickles held their shape, for instance, while tomatoes had near-infinite squeezability. Soups could be thickened and condensed milk condensed further, into a cementlike substance. String beans proved the most difficult: Even when arranged like a honeycomb, they could reach only 91 percent packing efficiency. In the middle of every three string beans hid an unfillable space. Daniil submitted a report titled “The Problematics of the String-Bean Triangular Void” to Sergei Ivanovich’s secretary.

  For the rest of the day, Daniil pretended to work while the combine pretended to pay him. He drew Gena the Crocodile, Cheburashka’s sidekick. He pondered the properties of dandruff, specifically Grandfather Lenin’s dandruff. Could a bald man have dandruff? Unlikely. But what about the goatee?

  Daniil reached the entrance to his building in late evening. His eyelids were heavy with fatigue, but his feet kept him from going inside. Perhaps it was the hacking coughs, the questions, the innumerable pairs of shoes he’d have to dig through just to find his slippers. With his index finger he traced the red stenciled numbers and letters beside the main entrance. Nineteen thirty-three Ivansk Street. The building was a clone of the other two buildings on the block: identical panels, square windows, and metal entrances; identical wear in the mortar; identical rebar under the balconies, leaching rust. Nineteen thirty-three Ivansk was there, in front of his nose. He blinked. But what if it wasn’t? He stepped closer to the stenciled numbers, felt the cold breath of the concrete. Was he the only one who could see it? It was there. Or it wasn’t.

  “Fudgy Cow?” a voice behind him asked.

  Daniil jumped. In the dark he could make out the hunched silhouette of Palashkin, the oldest member of the benchers. He sat in his usual spot on the bench. Palashkin lit a cigarette, handed a candy to Daniil. The chubby cow on the paper wrapper smiled up at him dreamily. Daniil hadn’t seen the candy in months. He pocketed it for later.

  “What are you out here stroking the wall for?” Palashkin asked.

  Daniil shrugged. “I was just on my way in.” He stayed put.

  Palashkin looked up at the sky. He said in a low voice, “It’s all going to collapse, you know.”

  “Oh?”

  “Whispers is all it is now, rumors here and there, but give it another year. Know what I’m saying? It’s all going kaput.”

  Daniil gave the concrete wall a pat, thinking that Palashkin was referring to the building. “Let’s just hope none of us are inside when she goes.”

  “What are you, cuckoo in the head? We’re already inside.”

  “I don’t know about you, but I’m outside,” Daniil said, now feeling unsure.

  “Go eat your Fudgy Cow, Daniil.” Palashkin extinguished his cigarette between his thumb and his index finger, stood up, and disappeared into the dark.

  Daniil bent so close to the glass partition, he could almost curl his lips through the circular opening. The woman in booth No. 7 (booths 1 to 6 were CLOSED FOR TECHNICAL BREAK), Kozlov Department of Gas, wore a fuzzy wool sweater that Daniil found comforting, inviting. He gazed at her and felt a twinge of hope.

  The woman shut the directory with a thud. “What was it, thirty-three nineteen Ivansk, you said?”

  “Nineteen thirty-three Ivansk.”

  “Look, I’ve heard rumors about it, but it’s not on any of the lists. Thirty-three nineteen Ivansk is, though.”

  “That doesn’t help me.”

  “Don’t be hostile, Citizen. You are one of many, and I work alone.” />
  “I know you know nineteen thirty-three Ivansk exists. It exists enough for you to fiddle with the gas when you feel like it,” Daniil said.

  “What are you accusing us of, exactly?”

  “Us? I thought you worked alone.”

  The woman took off her reading glasses, rubbed the bridge of her nose. “Refer to the city council with your questions.”

  “I was there last week.”

  “So?”

  “So nothing,” he said.

  “Refer to the factory in charge of your apartment assignment.”

  “What do you think they know? The whole combine is in a state of panic.” He was referring to the problem of the string bean.

  “Best wishes with your heating problem,” she said. “Next!”

  Cough cough cough cough cough cough cough.

  Daniil entered his apartment to find every square centimeter of shelf and bed space covered in stacks of red bills. His relatives had squeezed themselves into corners to count the money. No one looked up when he came in.

  Daniil backed out of the apartment, closed the door behind him, stood on the landing until he had counted to thirty, then came back in. The red bills remained. All right, he thought, so the hallucination continues. Run with it. Let the mind have its fancy.

  The children’s shrieks and snivels and coughs rang from the kitchen, but their voices seemed warped and far away, as though they were coming from a tunnel.

  Uncle Timko, the only grown-up not counting bills, sat cross-legged on Daniil’s bunk, hacking away at a block of wood with a mallet and chisel. “Your grandfather’s disappearing testicles saved the day, Daniil.”

  “I can’t stand lamenting them anymore,” Grandfather Grishko said. He assumed his straight-as-a-rod Honor Guard pose, cocooned in a bed comforter. “Back in my district, they had quite a reputation. The girls would come from far and wide just to—” He said a few things Daniil chose to block out of his hallucination.