The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “Great. Do you love it?”

  “I try to love it,” I said, but I think the qualification was lost on him.

  Philippe was visiting the East Coast, with a backpack and an English pocket dictionary. He’d gone to D.C. and Philadelphia. After New York, he was on to Boston and Vermont.

  “Vermont in January. You know it’ll be really cold.”

  “Yes, all the snow. Like a fairy tale. I want to see it.” He pulled me closer, and I thought of the romance: New York for the first time. And I would be the girl he had met there, who used to be a dancer, and who danced him into her bed.

  Since my mother had died and left me some money, I could afford to have my own place. It was on the border of the Upper West Side and Harlem, in a building with a Christmas tree in the lobby six months out of the year. In the elevator there was a black and white framed picture of somebody’s son from long ago, with pomaded hair and pink cheeks painted on. My apartment was white and empty, bare walls, no rugs on the hardwoods, though I’d been told when I moved in that New York City law required carpeting on 80 percent of the floors. When he came up occasionally to fix my toilet, the landlord glanced around but didn’t comment. I kept the place clean and the neighbors didn’t complain. In the elevator we smiled at each other and then studied the door. A storage unit in Westchester held most of the things I’d saved from my mother’s apartment. An old oak stereo and boxes of records, dreamy folksongs I used to twirl to as a little girl. A series of antique lamps we’d hauled onto the subway. An armchair she settled into in the evenings. I sometimes found her there in the morning, with a mystery novel nearing the end of its mystery, her thigh a prominent bookmark. Sometimes I thought about renting a truck and furnishing my apartment with those things that were gathering dust out in Westchester. But I left them there. My mother and I had lived in a small East Village apartment that could barely hold the two of us. I had always loved the gleaming bareness of the dance studio, free of the oppressiveness of stuff. No stuff could survive on the dance floor. It would be pliéd and pas de deuxed and jetéd aside.

  My bed was high and firm and piled with white blankets. Philippe pulled me on top of him. “You are all so pretty,” he said.

  This moment when sex began with an almost stranger was always something of a puzzlement. Why do this, of all things, with a man whose name was still new on my tongue? But by then it was too late. Our limbs were artfully arranged, our chests pressed together, our mouths hovering near each other with embattled breath. I liked it. I wanted it. If on some level I also disapproved, so be it. I had trained for years to keep my body in alignment, to follow strict orders, to perform on command. Let my mind stumble and stagger about. Let it simper and second-guess. My body would carry on with its amorous work.

  Still, I wasn’t such a fool that I didn’t use condoms. The top drawer of my nightstand was reserved for only an eye pillow and a box of Trojans. But Philippe couldn’t seem to manage with one on. We spent an hour trying. Finally, I threw it aside.

  “Is it okay?” he asked. For three years, whenever someone asked if I was okay, I thought of my mother. She was thrown out of a car window on her way to the airport. She died on the shoulder of the Cross Bronx Expressway at forty-five years old. How could things be okay?

  I kissed Philippe’s tender neck. “Yes,” I whispered. I trusted his polite and eager foreignness, and sex was always a diversionary gamble anyway. I just didn’t really care.

  At the pub, we had consumed seven alcoholic drinks, two root beers, and an assortment of things sauce-smothered and fried.

  “Okay, last one,” Anne said, plucking an onion ring from Lara’s plate. “We have to go out with Robert’s parents tonight.”

  “Can’t you get out of it? Tell them you need to see a sick friend. After a few more beers, I’ll throw up for you,” Elaine said.

  “You know what my mother-in-law would say? She wants to see you, this sick friend? You’re a doctor now? What happened to the social work? The way she says social work, it’s like I’m planning parties. Her faith in doctors is insane. According to her I just haven’t gone to the doctor enough—that’s why I can’t have kids. You find a good doctor, and you go to him, and you keep on going to him until he fixes you. Unless you have cancer, and then there’s no hope.”

  Anne ate another onion ring. “But I have some good news for a change. We put an application in with an adoption agency in China. They approved it last week.”

  We all agreed this was great and clinked our glasses with Anne’s.

  “Do you know how long it might take?” Lara asked.

  “It could be a month. It could be six months. We have to be ready to buy a ticket to China. They tell you when to come, and then they send you on a tour with these other prospective parents. It’s this weird vacation where you get a baby prize at the end.”

  I let Lara and Elaine continue to ask the questions. Last Mother’s Day, Anne and I had clashed over adoption. She was going through what seemed to be an unsuccessful round of IVF, and I wanted to know whether she was considering adopting. Yes, of course, she said coldly. But they really wanted their own baby. I pressed her on it. Why such attachment to your own genetic lineage? I didn’t mean to be accusatory or self-righteous. My interest in this topic was philosophical. Wasn’t motherhood essentially a matter of care? Was origin so important? True, I had fantasized all my life about finding my father. But wasn’t that because I didn’t have any father at all?

  “Okay, Karyn,” Anne had said. “You make a good case. But do me a favor? Let me have my fantasy. Let me have it until I’m out of patience and stamina and spirit, which will happen soon, and then maybe I’ll come around to your point of view.” I was chastened by her tone. I felt like I’d been put in my place by a teacher or a mother, though not by my mother, who wouldn’t be so direct. But then, I hadn’t pushed her the way I pushed Anne. I had never asked her what she thought motherhood was. I had never asked her for my father’s name. In the following year, Anne and I saw each other at a few different social occasions. We weren’t friends exactly. There was formality and tension, a kind of tightly controlled uncertainty between us, the kind that makes you think either you’ll never connect with this person, or you will eventually, in a deep and intractable way.

  “They’re all girls, of course,” Anne said about the Chinese babies. “I’ve always wanted a girl. I remember thinking at nine or so, in an extreme boy-hating stage, maybe I’ll adopt a baby when I get older so I won’t get stuck with a stupid boy. I was always planning ahead.”

  “Girls are the best,” Elaine said.

  “Girls are smarter,” Lara said.

  It was hard to tell how happy Anne was about the prospect of adoption. But then, we weren’t a happy bunch. We descended into this below-street-level pub on Mother’s Day, holding our losses close, though how much did they really have to do with the way we met the world? Whatever influences our mothers had on us, that work had been done long ago. And though we had our moments of tunneling into the past with hardhat and headlamp, for the most part, out of loyalty and love, fear and denial, we didn’t want to think about it.

  What I’d thought about a lot since my mother’s death was the story of how she came to be my mother. That is, from a child’s perspective, how she came to be herself. I knew the story from bits she had told me over the years and from the narrative license of my own imagination.

  Elizabeth Rylant grew up on a farm in Idaho. She was the only child of older parents who were surprised when she finally came along. They’d resigned themselves to calves and chicks and kittens for babies. But Elizabeth was born, and she was a restless child, racing through her chores and startling the animals. She watched the Times Square New Year’s Eve celebration on TV every year. “The Big Apple,” she wrote for a fourth-grade social studies report. “It doesn’t have apple trees and it’s actually not that big. But seven million people live in it. When I grow up, I will be one of them.” Her parents smiled at her fantasy. What
she didn’t know, apart from how impossibly expensive everything was in New York, was that big cities are horrible. The buildings close you in, the crowds push you down. The day is choked with smog and the night is shut off from the stars. Her great-grandparents had climbed aboard trains heading west the first chance they could. Elizabeth would be lucky to go to the University of Idaho.

  She spent a year there, taking geography and history classes, memorizing the details of places that were too far away in miles or too far back in time to travel to. She met a saxophonist named Hollis who wanted to play in clubs. He had a little money and thought they could go to Chicago, but Elizabeth convinced him it had to be New York. After her last final exam, she packed up her suitcases and sold her beat-up Ford. On the bus heading east she wrote a letter to her parents, breaking the news as gently as she could. She told them she and Hollis were planning to get married. But they didn’t marry. They lived far out in Brooklyn, and Elizabeth rode the subway two hours each way to attend City College. She got a job as a waitress, while Hollis smoked and drank and played music in the street. A year before I was born, when my mother was twenty-one, she was finishing her degree in accounting with a minor in history and working five nights a week, hoping that the few gigs Hollis was finally getting would lead to gigs that were actually paid in more than beer. She worked late at the diner, but he was out later than she was. They didn’t explore New York together the way they used to, making fun of stores and hairdos, trying out whatever food was foreign and cheap and could be eaten while walking, stopping in parks to kiss on benches.

  And then one day a musician friend told her that Hollis had been seen dancing with a slutty jazz singer, dancing too late at night and too often and too close. Elizabeth was furious, but before she confronted Hollis for this and other sins, she went out and cheated herself. A man several years older than she was came into the diner to drink coffee and flirt. Now she flirted back in earnest. By the time she found out she was pregnant, she and Hollis had split up, and she was back in Idaho, visiting her parents, who’d never liked him anyway. They missed their daughter, who had, after all, not done so badly. She’d graduated from college with honors and a BA in accounting, and she hadn’t been mugged or raped or murdered or had the country glow knocked out of her. She was flushed and docile. She walked in the fields in the early morning, nauseous, and the moaning of the cows didn’t help. She could stay with her parents and they would take care of her in their quietly efficient, only slightly disapproving way. She could return to New York and struggle on her own. I don’t know if she considered abortion. Her family was Catholic, but religion didn’t mean anything to Elizabeth. In the end, it seemed, she was determined to follow through with me, as she had been determined to make it to New York, and to support herself, and to make practical plans for the future, and to leave a cheating man—though not as the innocent wounded party, but guilty herself.

  She left Idaho, keeping the pregnancy secret from her parents, and she went back to New York and stayed with a friend until she got a job at an accounting firm. She worked until they let her go on maternity leave. As for the diner customer, she never saw him again. But she was sure that he, and not Hollis, was my father, and she was glad of it. If I had been Hollis’s child, she would probably have broken down and told him, which would have meant that her life would be forever entwined with his. One of the many beauties of New York City, a beauty shaded with disappointment and resentment, was that you could stay in it for the rest of your life, avoiding your past, living another life than the one you thought you were going to live.

  What had never occurred to me until I was pregnant with a potential child I hadn’t planned to have, and by a man I didn’t expect to see ever again, was that my mother might have kept me for the company. Though of course she didn’t know this at the time, she would never have another serious relationship. There were men who drifted in and out, whom she tried to manage along with the daughter she was raising herself, and her demanding job, and going back to Idaho when she could to care for her ailing and then dying parents. Of course if she hadn’t had me, who knows what other company might have come along? And what if I hadn’t demanded ballet lessons from the age of six on up; and if she had been able to pursue her love of geography and history instead of plugging away at people’s taxes for reliable pay; and if her boss hadn’t insisted she attend a training in Atlanta that she never made it to, because a taxi driver made the worst possible mistake? I was always aware of the sacrifices my mother made for me, and in little ways she didn’t fail to remind me of those sacrifices. But to think of that was to tumble toward one of those tunnels, into which I had barred the entrance.

  It was getting late, and Anne was expected at her in-laws’. Elaine was heading home to Nancy; they were in the middle of watching a TV series that I’d never heard of on DVD. Lara could look forward to a chat with any number of online guys. We settled the bill and went out into lovely May. It was hard to be in the light. Down the street a middle-aged woman pushed an older woman in a wheelchair. The older woman wore a corsage and her head was cocked to one side as if someone was speaking very strongly to her into that ear. The four of us hugged or kissed each other goodbye.

  “We should see each other more often.”

  “Yes, let’s do that.”

  “You’re going this way, right?” Lara gestured toward our subway line.

  “Actually, Karyn, could you walk with me a minute?” Anne’s hand was firm on my shoulder.

  “Sure,” I said, surprised.

  Lara looked surprised, too, but she said, “Well, take care, dears,” and walked across the street.

  “I should pick up some flowers. I think there’s a place down here,” Anne said. We turned away from the pub. A sign in the drugstore on the corner read “Remember Your Mother. Chocolate Hearts!”

  “I remember her. I remember that she didn’t like chocolate,” Anne said.

  “Really?”

  “If someone gave her a box of chocolates, she’d break off the shell and eat the cream inside.”

  “My mom hated olives, so when I was little I thought I didn’t like them either. In third grade a kid at school offered me one, and I told him my mom didn’t eat them. So? he said. So? I realized the flaw in my logic, and I ate an olive. I couldn’t believe how good it was.”

  We walked past a gaggle of parents and young children. Everyone, even the dads, was dressed in pastels.

  “If this adoption thing works out, I guess my daughter will realize early on how different she is from me,” Anne said. “I guess that’s a good thing.”

  “I think it’s really exciting,” I said. I waited nervously for her to offer more, to explain why she’d wanted me to walk with her.

  “Oh, there’s the store,” Anne said. The little market sold flowers under an awning outside. A few bouquets of roses remained, on sale, along with bouquets of their poorer cousin, the carnation. “I just don’t think they’re a beautiful flower,” I said, pointing to the carnations.

  “Yeah, they look raggedy. The roses are so tightly wound, and the carnations are just kind of splayed out there, trying but not making it.” We laughed, and suddenly I was sorry for Anne in a way that I hadn’t been before, not because I pitied her, but because I admired her. She put her hand on my shoulder.

  “How are you doing?”

  “I’m, well, I’m okay.”

  “You seemed to be mulling something over this afternoon.”

  I hesitated. What did she know, or think that she knew? Sometimes my mother had seemed fully absorbed in her own concerns, and then she’d come out with an observation about me that I couldn’t deny, though I tried to, with the vehemence of a young person convinced that to be known, even in her graces and triumphs, was fundamentally an embarrassment. If my mother were here today would I persist in that evasion, or would I lay my sorrows and my tiny burst of joy at her feet?

  “I feel weird telling you this.”

  “I’m a social worker, rem
ember? Weird is all I know.”

  “Okay. I’m pregnant. Thirteen weeks. The guy is gone, but I’m going to have the baby.” I looked down at the flowers, their colors kaleidoscoping in my eyes. I wiped my nose with the back of my hand. A little noise escaped my throat, like the squeak of a hinge. I couldn’t look at Anne.

  “What do you think of the irises?” she asked. “They don’t last very long, but you can’t beat that blue.”

  “They’re pretty,” I managed. I leaned down into a lilac. It seemed to me that the smell could knock me out. I didn’t want to stand up.

  “There’s a bench down the street,” Anne said. “Why don’t I finish up here and I’ll see you there in a minute.”

  I stumbled over to the bench. It was next to the kind of tree that is carefully doled out on well-tended New York City blocks, a tree with its own tiny plot of dirt, fenced off protectively and given its best chance to grow. Anne was coming toward me with two bouquets of flowers, irises and lilacs, wrapped up in paper cones. She smiled with the pride of a woman bearing something beautiful. She set her canvas bag down on the bench and gently angled the irises inside it.

  “These are for me, though when my mother-in-law sees them, she’ll think they’re for her.” The dizzying scent of the lilacs enveloped me. Anne placed them in my hands.

  “And these are for you.”

  Tash Aw

  Sail

  1.

  It was the shape of an arrowhead: sleek, sharp, fast. Thirty feet long, it sat on the ash-gray water, away from the other boats, aloof. “The only one in Hong Kong,” the Frenchman said. “No one else has owned anything like this in Asia. This boat is made for you.”

  Yanzu looked out across the marina at the ranks of plastic-white yachts; the jumble of masts and ropes reminded him of the washing lines and aerials that clad the run-down apartment blocks in the New Territories. Shorn of their sails, the boats looked fragile, purposeless. Just beyond the last row, not quite in open water, lay this new toy, its nose pointing westward toward the dipping afternoon sun.