The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  And when he went to investigate he saw that somebody was still there. A woman. She was sitting astride one of the blown-up exercise balls, just resting there, or perhaps trying to remember where she was supposed to go next.

  It was Leah. He didn’t recognize her at first, but then he looked again and it was Leah. He wouldn’t have gone in, maybe, if he’d seen who it was, but now he was halfway on his mission to turn off the light. She saw him.

  She slid off her perch. She was wearing some sort of purposeful athletic outfit and had gained a fair amount of weight.

  “I thought I might run into you sometime,” she said. “How is Isabel?”

  It was a bit of a surprise to hear her call Isabel by her first name, or to speak of her at all, as if she’d known her.

  He told her briefly how Isabel was. No way to tell it now except briefly.

  “Do you talk to her?” she said.

  “Not so much anymore.”

  “Oh, you should. You shouldn’t give up talking to them.”

  How did she come to think she knew so much about everything?

  “You’re not surprised to see me, are you? You must have heard?” she said.

  He did not know how to answer this.

  “Well,” he said.

  “It’s been a while since I heard that you were here and all, so I guess I just thought you’d know about me being down here, too.”

  He said no.

  “I do recreation,” she told him. “I mean for the cancer patients. If they’re up to it, like.”

  He said he guessed that was a good idea.

  “It’s great. I mean for me, too. I’m pretty much okay, but sometimes things get to me. I mean particularly at suppertime. That’s when it can start to feel weird.”

  She saw that he didn’t know what she was talking about and she was ready—maybe eager—to explain.

  “I mean without the kids and all. You didn’t know their father got them?”

  “No,” he said.

  “Oh, well. It’s because they thought his mother could look after them, really. He’s in AA and all, but the judgment wouldn’t have gone like that if it wasn’t for her.”

  She snuffled and dashed away tears in an almost disregarding way.

  “Don’t be embarrassed—it isn’t as bad as it looks. I just automatically cry. Crying isn’t so bad for you, either, so long as you don’t make a career of it.”

  The man in AA would be the sax player. But what about the minister and whatever had been going on there?

  Just as if he had asked her aloud, she said, “Oh. Then. Carl. That stuff was such a big deal and everything? I should have had my head examined.

  “Carl got married again,” she said. “That made him feel better. I mean because he’d sort of got past whatever it was he had on me. It was really kind of funny. He went and married another minister. You know how they let women be ministers now? Well, she’s one. So he’s like the minister’s wife. I think that’s a howl.”

  Dry-eyed now, smiling. He knew that there was more coming, but he could not guess what it might be.

  “You must have been here quite a while. You got a place of your own?”

  “Yes.”

  “You cook your own supper and everything?”

  He said that that was the case.

  “I could do that for you once in a while. Would that be a good idea?”

  Her eyes had brightened, holding his.

  He said maybe, but to tell the truth there wasn’t room in his place for more than one person to move around at a time.

  Then he said that he hadn’t looked in on Isabel for a couple of days, and he must go and do it now.

  She nodded just slightly in agreement. She did not appear hurt or discouraged.

  “See you around.”

  “See you.”

  They had been looking all over for him. Isabel was finally gone. They said “gone,” as if she had got up and left. When someone had checked her about an hour ago, she had been the same as ever, and now she was gone.

  He had often wondered what difference it would make.

  But the emptiness in place of her was astounding.

  He looked at the nurse in wonder. She thought he was asking her what he had to do next and she began to tell him. Filling him in. He understood her fine, but was still preoccupied.

  He’d thought that it had happened long before with Isabel, but it hadn’t. Not until now.

  She had existed and now she did not. Not at all, as if not ever. And people hurried around, as if this could be overcome by making arrangements. He, too, obeyed the customs, signing where he was told to sign, arranging—as they said—for the remains.

  What an excellent word—“remains.” Like something left to dry out in sooty layers in a cupboard.

  And before long he found himself outside, pretending that he had as ordinary and good a reason as anybody else to put one foot ahead of the other.

  What he carried with him, all he carried with him, was a lack, something like a lack of air, of proper behavior in his lungs, a difficulty that he supposed would go on forever.

  The girl he’d been talking to, whom he’d once known—she had spoken of her children. The loss of her children. Getting used to that. A problem at suppertime.

  An expert at losing, she might be called—himself a novice by comparison. And now he could not remember her name. Had lost her name, though he’d known it well. Losing, lost. A joke on him, if you wanted one.

  He was going up his own steps when it came to him.

  Leah.

  A relief out of all proportion, to remember her.

  Polly Rosenwaike

  White Carnations

  WE DIDN’T HAVE MOTHERS anymore, nor were we mothers ourselves, so we got together on Mother’s Day at a down-and-out pub frequented by gay men and regular drunks. There weren’t any mothers there, as far as we could tell, and the day gave us that kind of radar. We knew who was a mother and who wasn’t. It was the third anniversary of our early May outing, and we all showed up on time, at two o’clock on this sun-struck afternoon, as if we couldn’t wait to get inside where it felt dark and smoky, even though smoking had been banned in New York City bars and restaurants for several years now.

  The tradition started with Elaine and Lara, who worked together at a museum. When Elaine came back to the office after her mother died, Lara took her out for a fancy lunch and made her weep at the hazelnut-encrusted salmon and the chocolate turtle cake with caramel beurre salé. Sometime after that, Elaine and Anne met at a fundraiser and discovered what they had in common.

  Then Lara and I met at a party. It was the first party I had gone to since my mother’s death. I wore a red strapless dress and felt insanely cheerful and dangerously cavalier. I talked to women about bikini waxing and bedbugs. I found a way to touch every man I met: hand, shoulder, hip. At the punch bowl Lara introduced herself.

  “What do you do?” she asked. I told her that I did program administration for a ballet school, where I used to dance myself. Before I had time to reciprocate the question, she asked, “And what do your parents do?” The snobbery surprised me from this woman in jeans and a ponytail, but I was prepared for all questions that night, prepared to hold myself apart from whatever was asked of me.

  “I don’t know my father, and my mother is dead.”

  “Yes,” Lara said.

  I didn’t go home with a man that night. I drank spiked punch with Lara, who, it turned out, was not the kind of snob who dealt in pedigree or career. Parental loss was her stock-in-trade.

  So when Mother’s Day came around, with its bouquets and dinner specials, Elaine invited Anne, and Lara invited me, and there were four of us. But I imagined that our numbers were secretly legion, that in windowless joints throughout the city, huddled groups of women gathered, not a mother among them. We weren’t quite commemorating, and we weren’t quite commiserating, though we weren’t in denial either. We spent hours together in the hard wooden booth, and we
ate and drank, talked and laughed, and it was a kind of fun fueled by each of our particular experiences of death.

  For Elaine’s mother it was Alzheimer’s. At the end, as if to prove to Elaine that she’d always favored her younger sister, she could remember the name Janice, but not Elaine, though Elaine was the one who visited her mother more often, who had to explain over and over again why she couldn’t go back to her sweet little house with the Victory Garden she had planted for when the soldiers came home. Anne’s mother had died of cancer, the super fast kind, for which the relatives flew in right away to say goodbye. And Lara’s mother killed herself many years ago. Lara was twelve, away at camp for the summer. One morning she dropped a letter to her mother in the camp mailbox. That afternoon, her uncle came to take her home. The letter arrived a few days later. Lara retrieved it from the mailbox, lit a match, and burned it. When the paper was consumed, she let the flame burn her skin.

  When you think about it afterward, there is always something, in addition to the death, that marks the occasion. My mother was killed in a car accident three and a half years ago. Taxi drivers are known for their death-defying skills: you lurch and you cringe, but you get to where you’re going sooner than the other guys on the road, except in my mother’s case. And what else happened earlier that day? I sat in my office at the ballet school and watched the gingko leaves glide off the tree outside my window, the way gingko trees divest themselves, stunningly all at once.

  At the pub, Lara and I sat on one side of the booth, Anne and Elaine on the other. I was the youngest at twenty-six, and Lara, thirty-three, was the second-youngest. We both favored eyeliner that made our eyes seem darker and not entirely trustworthy. We wore jeans that skinnied our already skinny legs. Elaine was fifty-two, with the skin of a woman who swore by an excellent facial cream, her hair a pretty, well-maintained white. Anne was a determined blonde at forty; her roots barely showed. She was good-looking in a hard way, with the polished directness of an anchorwoman. Lara’s mother and my own had died before their time, by choice and by accident, and Elaine’s and Anne’s mothers had died in their seventies, a reasonable age to go. But we, their daughters, wanted to make ourselves attractive not just for partners or lovers or co-workers or each other. When we looked in the mirror, we wanted to place ourselves far away from our mothers’ fate.

  Soon my body would escape the tight control I had always imposed as a dancer. It had already begun, with inflated breasts and a slight slackening of my belly. I was three months pregnant, and though, five weeks earlier, I went to an abortion clinic, I had left the clinic still pregnant. I went through all of the preliminary steps: blood draw, ultrasound, counseling. The nurse asked if I was sure of my decision and I told her I was. Then I lay on the table, waiting for the doctor. I expected a woman, I suppose because I’d always had female doctors. I preferred it that way. When men tended to my body, I wanted it to be for pleasure. Women were the clinicians, women older than I was, who had chosen this depressing profession that seemed the opposite of dance. Doctors worked with the body immobilized, the body unhealthy and unbeautiful. I felt sorry for them in their white coats and sensible shoes.

  The doctor came in. “Hi, Karyn,” he said amiably, as if he knew me. He was tall, fiftyish, with grayish-brown hair, good-looking in a mild way. With the nurse’s help, he began to prepare his instruments. Because I had never known my father, it was my habit to recognize him in a man of a certain age. His features, his voice, whatever task or gesture his hands were engaged in—I studied them all. I looked enough like my mother that lack of resemblance did not disqualify a man. I didn’t expect my father to be like me; I expected him to be as strange and remote as he was to my life. And vis-à-vis the inevitable converging paths of lost parents and children, well-documented in fairy tales and movies, here he was: my seventh-grade biology teacher, a proctor at the SATs, the college dance department advisor, a docent at the Met, the super of my apartment building, the doctor who was about to perform my abortion.

  He sat down by my stirruped feet, his gloved hands outstretched. “First I’m going to feel your cervix. It shouldn’t hurt. You’ll just feel some pressure.” I dug my nails into my palms. No, it didn’t hurt. I had heard that the cervix softened during pregnancy, and I wondered what that softness felt like to a practiced hand. The doctor disengaged himself. I watched his mild handsome competence and I wanted to stop it.

  “I’m sorry.” I scooted up the table to an upright position. “I have to go.” I was blazing with embarrassment and freedom.

  The nurse looked at the doctor, and I wondered how common last-minute defections were, and if they scored it as a point for the anti-abortion gang.

  “Are you sure?” the doctor asked.

  “Yes,” I lied. I was sure I wouldn’t see him again, though perhaps I would make an appointment somewhere else, ask for a female doctor, keep my eyes shut.

  “Okay,” he said, with a slight edge to his voice, the edge I imagined a father would have, thinking, but not saying to his squirming child, and why didn’t you go to the bathroom earlier, when I asked if you needed to? “Okay. We’ll let you get dressed.”

  I let time pass. I did not exactly say to myself, I will keep this baby. I was waiting to see what would happen. In the early mornings I ran in the park, around the murky reservoir, fighting off exhaustion. At work I watched girls in leotards and tights, girls with sweet, silky skin practicing before class. I met friends for dinner and told them I was taking antibiotics and couldn’t drink. Sometimes I thought of the doctor, who had known my secret and didn’t care, and sometimes I lingered over another man of fifty or so who could, if a great accident of time and place allowed, be the one who had brought me into being, unbeknownst to him. I had always seen my father everywhere, but my mother I had not seen since a few weeks before her death.

  The pub menus were stained and familiar, with their selection of unwholesome food. Bacon-cheese melt, fish and chips, clam chowder. The closest you could get to healthy was Caesar salad. Today we all agreed to enjoy things that tasted great and bad at the same time, that left us feeling bloated and satisfied.

  “My neighbor gave me a white carnation this morning,” Anne said. “A nice gesture, but you know.”

  “Ugh,” Elaine said.

  “Why aren’t you wearing it in your buttonhole?” Lara mocked.

  “I don’t get it,” I said.

  “Carnations—the Mother’s Day flower,” Lara said. “Red for the living. White for the purity of a dead mother’s love.”

  “How did Mother’s Day get started, anyway?”

  “A woman named Anna Jarvis,” Anne said. “She wanted to create this memorial to her mother, and it caught on and was declared a national holiday in 1914. But she got disgusted with it. The commercialism, Hallmark, and chocolates—you know the whole bit. She ended up spending her family inheritance campaigning against Mother’s Day and died in poverty. She never married, never had children.”

  Anne had been trying to get pregnant for years. She filled us in on her methods: basal thermometers, Clomid, IVI, and IVF. She wanted a baby so badly, and yet the more desperate energy she poured into the baby-making project, the less sympathetic I had felt. Now I sat across from her, my womb occupied by an inhabitant I hadn’t meant to encourage. Looking at Anne’s carefully concealed frown lines, I felt guilty. She was an earnest social worker with an architect husband and a nice house in Tarrytown. Why shouldn’t they do everything to try to have a child? But it bothered me to think of them having sex on designated days in the missionary position to allow the sperm the shortest trip to the egg—or worse, making regular visits to the fertility clinic, where sex was a matter of extracting and inserting the necessary material.

  The waiter arrived with our drinks. A gin and tonic, a whiskey sour, a Molson, and a root beer. I was prepared with my antibiotics excuse, but no one commented. Elaine began talking about her mother.

  “Did I tell you she didn’t even recognize herself in the mi
rror? But when she looked at an old photo of herself as a young woman—oh yeah, that’s me. Smooth skin and hair, and smiling on a bicycle seat. I could never figure out if she knew it was from the past, or if she actually thought that was what she looked like.”

  “When she saw herself in the mirror, who did she think it was?” Lara asked.

  “Just some old lady, I think. Another lady who happened to be in the room, like a roommate. But the one good thing about it all, for me, was that as soon as she started losing her memory, she didn’t care who Nancy was anymore. It seemed plausible to her that Nancy was just a friend I’d invited over. Then eventually, of course, she didn’t recognize either of us. So maybe we should give all the homophobes just a little bit of Alzheimer’s.”

  Elaine and Nancy had been together for years, as had Anne and Robert. It was incumbent upon Lara and me to provide the dating stories. When she wasn’t at parties, bobbing for orphans, Lara was online. She liked the way you could scrutinize a guy, pore over photos and read into chats, before actually meeting him. My boyfriends, flings, and one-night stands were usually men I met by dancing with them, feeling first the tension in their arms, the concentration or abandon of their faces near mine. Since I’d stopped dancing ballet in college, I went to clubs with bump and grind music. More and more, I went alone. Sometimes I brought men home, and who was around to tell me that I shouldn’t?

  In January I’d met Philippe that way. He wasn’t a great dancer, but he was determined, keeping up with me for three hours, his clammy fingers stuck in mine. He was French, from Nice or Nantes, I forgot which. A gawkily handsome man, he would probably seem a boy until he was forty and then he’d retreat into bony limbs and wrinkles.

  “Do you live here?” he asked, when it was clear that we were dancing with each other and wanted to keep on doing it.

  “You might say that,” I said. “I come here often.”

  “But in New York, do you live?” I liked his accent. I liked that it made him seem both sophisticated and unsure.

  “Yes,” I said. “For my whole life.”