The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  My father was in Danbury, Connecticut, which my mother said was nicer than a lot of places, and he was there on principle. I knew what principle was. He was against the war, despite his despising Hitler and Hirohito as much as anyone ever could; he was against all wars waged by governments. He was against governments. He was an anarchist. Other people my parents knew went into the army as medics or did service at special camps, but not my dad, who wouldn’t register for the draft before the war even started. I had a fair idea what registration was, but my sister didn’t get it.

  My mother dressed us nicely for these two-hour bus trips, in pleated skirts and Mary Janes, as if we were going all the way from Manhattan to visit a relative, which we were. We had never, of course, thought of our father this way, and Barbara, my sister, shrieked when she first saw him in those brown clothes that weren’t his, with his mouth a tight line in his face. “Get her shushed,” the guard said. “Or get her out of here. I’ll say it once.”

  My father had an expression I’d never seen before, a wince of mortification. I made a zipping motion over my sister’s lips, sealing them. “Hey, muffins,” he said to us. We were in a visitors’ room with a bunch of wooden chairs and several other families in dramas of their own. Our mother made us tell him what we’d done in school—Barbara had learned the state capitals, and I had come in second in a spelling bee, after Maxie Pfeiffer, who thought she was the top of the world. “Second is good,” my father said.

  We couldn’t bring crayons or pencils or toys into this room, so when my mother wanted adult talk, she had me take my sister into a corner and tell stories to entertain her. “Thank you, Louise,” my mother said. We sat on the pitted linoleum and I made up a story about a blue elf that made no sense. Barbara pretended to like it.

  “Behave yourselves, kitten-heads,” my father said when we left. On the bus going home, my mother opened a bag with special treats—celery stuffed with cream cheese, ham sandwiches with relish, homemade brownies and date-nut squares too, and a thermos of lemonade. We were very excited, the whole trip seemed to have been so we could have this food.

  We learned to expect treats on every trip, donated by friends or baked by our hardworking mother at night. My dad was allowed an hour of us a month, which could be broken up into two half-hour visits. The visits had creepy aspects—our mother had to go behind a curtain to be searched; one of the prisoners had a face like a panther; the guards blocked us and made us go home the time we were four minutes late. All the same, we mostly looked forward to going. Our father was quieter there than at home—no rowdy games, no tickling—but he could tease us about our big feet or tell us we were more beautiful than Lana Turner; his voice was still his voice.

  The kids in school were the problem. My father didn’t care if the enemy bombed and burned and shot everyone in his own country. He didn’t care who died among all the brothers and fathers who were fighting for all of us. I heard this all day every day from kids I didn’t know and kids I did. “He’s my father,” I said. Maxie Pfeiffer dared another girl to punch me in the stomach. I had been taught not to hit, and my hands trying to shield myself just made everybody laugh. A teacher broke us up and sent the girl into detention (Maxie went free), but I was never safe at school. Barbara didn’t have it easy either. Once they threw a bag of dog shit at her back.

  My friend Ruthie’s family wouldn’t let me come to their apartment any more. Ruthie said, “Does your father want Hitler to kill us? We’re Jewish, you know.”

  “I know,” I said. “I’ve only known you since you were five.”

  Her parents wouldn’t let her in my house either, but we were old enough to go to the park in Washington Square ourselves, where we continued a game about cowgirls and runaway horses that we’d played for years. There was a grassy spot across from the fountain that we especially liked, and we met in all weather, out on the range in earmuffs.

  None of this got easier as time went on. My father was sentenced to a year, and when he came home, my sister kept sitting on his lap every time he sat down, and I was always tap-dancing for him. I pursued him nonstop with the shuffle-off-to-Buffalo. There was a big party to celebrate his return, with music on the Victrola and my mother giggling. She kept working at the job she had now, sketching ads for a department store in Brooklyn, and our dad was mostly home, where he read a lot. I didn’t understand what happened next. The law still wanted him to register for the draft—hadn’t he already told them? He had to tell them again. He was home for six months and then he was back in prison.

  My sister Barbara was a mess, so I had to be not a mess. I ignored her stupid whining and I acted very upright and prissy, which was a good idea—after a while she tried to imitate me and stopped being such a pill. My mother started to visit the prison more often without us. And in my dad’s second year there, he was part of a work strike because he didn’t like it that colored men had to sit separate in the dining room (my father told the guards he wouldn’t work) and this went on for months, and none of us could get in to see him.

  I was a teenager and the war was over by the time they let my father out. He had been a jovial, talkative man before he’d gone in; he came out shadowy and subdued, a phantom father. But then, week by week, he grew more distinct and animated, he spoke to us more often and more loudly. Sometimes he was newly bossy, checking to see if we’d made our beds, making us wait to eat till our mother sat down. We were a little afraid of him now.

  In the meantime, I was starting to think about boys. In high school people still knew my father had helped the enemy, but some boys decided it wasn’t my fault. I liked almost any boy who liked me; I couldn’t get over the thrill of their interest, though I had been raised to be a serious person.

  Various boys joked around with me after school or leaned over me on the subway ride home, but nothing came of it until there was an argument among the staff of the school newspaper, about whether we needed another article about prom etiquette, and this boy and I were on the same side (against it). He was a broody, sharp-edged guy, with a nicely developed sense of irony, which allured me greatly. Walking on the street after the newspaper meeting (our side had lost), we did our own spoof of a student boob presenting a corsage and stabbing the girl with its pin. I clutched my chest and leaned against a stoplight, to act out my wound. He pretended to half-carry me across the street, and all that horsing around was extremely interesting.

  What was his name? Ted Pfeiffer. He was Maxie Pfeiffer’s older brother! This twist of fate was not as jarring as the other known fact that came with it: the father in that family had been killed in the last year of the war. “I know your sister,” I said.

  “She’s a complete pain,” he said.

  • • •

  It wasn’t until our third time at the movies, when he made a move to start necking and I absolutely didn’t stop him and we emerged from the theater with pink, blurred faces, a tickled-to-death couple, that he told me on the way home that he really hadn’t wanted to start dating me because of my father.

  “But you’re not him,” he said. “Are you?”

  I didn’t even pause. I didn’t resist or explain or defend my family. “No, I’m not,” I said. “Definitely not.”

  I would’ve said anything to keep him with me, to make sure he didn’t change his mind, and perhaps I was lucky he didn’t ask anything worse, but that was the beginning for me, and I knew it, of a different life. When I got back inside the apartment, I looked at my mother, who had fallen asleep on the sofa waiting for me, and I thought, This apartment is really shabby. And in the room I shared with my sister, I hissed at Barbara when she woke up, “Stop looking at me. I despise your looking at me.”

  For a long time, I’d held what I thought of as two opinions. With my parents, I was entirely against the war and all wars. What could be gained by millions of people marching out with the sole purpose of killing as many of each other as they could? I couldn’t believe this butchery was allowed. Had always been allowed. The ugliest of
all insanities. I was proud of my father for not going along with any of it. On the other hand, we all saw the photos of the concentration camps in Europe, after our soldiers went in, the living skeletons lying among piles of corpses, and what if our side hadn’t won? Could people who did such things ever be stopped by peaceable means? I didn’t mind having two viewpoints—it made talking to my friends easier (especially Ruthie), and it showed that I was advanced enough as a thinker to hold more than one idea in my mind at a time. Wasn’t that a sign of a higher intelligence?

  “It’s okay to have two opinions,” my mother said, “if all you have to do is have an opinion. If.”

  I thought my mother, typically, was making everything harder than it had to be. Meanwhile, Ted and I were getting along extremely well. We cracked each other up at the newspaper meetings, we talked about what a bunch of yahoos most of the school was. We argued about whether Tolstoy was better than Dostoevsky (I said, “Tolstoy is fuller”) and we agreed about William Dean Howells being really boring. And he walked me between classes at school, a sign of major attention. This is what real life is, I thought, at his side in the hallways, and I have it already. Even Maxie started being nicer to me.

  Once, when I was complaining about a sudden streak of sultry weather in May, Ted said, “My father always liked the heat.” I had stopped feeling that he held his father’s dying against me, and I had gone over to another feeling, an envy of what Ted knew about death.

  “You should like hot weather then,” I said. “As a tribute.”

  He nodded at this, he liked my making room for his ceremonies of memory.

  We did a lot of necking. I was only sixteen, I didn’t think—and he didn’t demand—we would get into actual sex, but we hovered in an exquisite border area, became adepts in its every shading of excitement. How slow and patient we were then, how attenuated in our efforts. It was the sweetheart desire of innocents, for all its shocks and grunts and revelations.

  He was two years ahead of me in school, and I did not have a good feeling about his graduating, though I gave him a very nice edition of Tolstoy’s Resurrection for a present. I didn’t like the way he thanked me for it by saying, “I only hope I’ll have time to read it.” He was going to City College, just a subway ride uptown, but I had reason to fear he’d slip away from me.

  And I wasn’t wrong. He took up with some female from his Western Civ class, and then, more fatally, with a blonde who worked in the library. He decided that we should no longer “fence each other in” and I was “free” to date other people. During this speech, he looked stern and aggrieved at having to speak at all. “Thank you for the blessing of liberty,” I said. Sarcasm was not even slightly effective.

  What could I do? I wanted to fight for him, fight hard and dirty if I had to. I had my pride and my upbringing, but I wasn’t above using Maxie. Nothing sneaky, but I goaded her into inventing mean nicknames (Frog Eyes, Miss Dainty) and using her gifts of mimicry after the poor girlfriend paid a family visit. Maxie claimed the girl had actually said, “I adore pot roast,” and Maxie loudly adored everything in sight for weeks after.

  My job was to be the true-blue one. If I ran into him (Maxie aided this), I was friendly, forthright, calm. “Great to see you, Ted. Everything okay?” Ever loyal. Very, very warm.

  My mother did not admire my scheming. “What can you gain by trickery?” she said.

  “It’s not tricks,” I said. “And all is fair in love and war.”

  “Oh, Louise,” she said. “Can you hear yourself, can you?”

  I spent two years of my adolescence gutted by the outrage of being without him, eaten up with agonized guesses about my future. It was constantly clear to me what I had to have, every cell in my body was fixed in certainty. I had no way to know whether I would win. All the nights of imagined raptures, could they be for nothing? My friend, Ruthie, who didn’t have anything going yet, envied my suffering, and probably thought it was better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, but I didn’t. And I didn’t have a Plan B. When Ruthie said, “You could get Alan Brody to like you if you wanted,” I said, “No! Thank you, no.” No halfway measures, no compromises. I knew what I knew. I shouldered my burden, I had been bred to staunchness.

  Senior year I worked after school at a bakery in the neighborhood. It was called Mrs. Plymouth’s, a homey place with mile-high coconut cakes and fudge-filled yellow layers. People still remembered when butter and sugar had been rationed in the last war years, and they liked the party-prettiness of what we sold. My earnings went to our ailing household budget; my father had found a job at a printshop, but we were always behind on our bills.

  I told my mother I could bring in more money as a file clerk, once I was out of school. Plenty of girls as smart as I was had jobs like that, and (I didn’t say this) I hoped to get married very soon anyway. Neither of my parents had been to college, but my father had his heart set on my getting a degree, and his bloodied heart was sacred to all of us. My mother thought I should go to Hunter (all girls) and not City, where I would run into we-knew-who.

  I ran into him anyway, in the bakery, where he pretended to be surprised to find me. “Hey!” he said. “What’s up?”

  “Couldn’t be better,” I said. “This is such a good time for me. I think I’m going to Hawaii. To help with the big dock workers’ strike.”

  “Hawaii! How will you get there?”

  “There are ways. I have friends.”

  “What friends?”

  “Oh, you know. So school is good?”

  I had been raised to always, always be truthful, and I refused to say more, knowing I was not a skillful liar. “Forget I mentioned it,” I said. “Okay? Please.”

  “Hawaii, huh?” he said.

  “Forget I said it.” I gave him my sunniest, sweetest look. “Everything good with you?” And I went off to wait on someone else.

  I didn’t have wiles, not really, but I knew that woe and supplication had no sex appeal. He phoned me that night, trying to find out who I was seeing. I let him talk me out of my fake Hawaii plan, and that was the start of our revival.

  No triumph could have been purer, more glorious, than those early days of having him back. I was smug with victory, I went around giving my sister the most platitudinous advice about love and life—“if it’s meant to be, it happens,” “when you know, you know.” His mother was less than pleased about me and tended to refer to my parents as Reds, no matter how many times I explained they were anarchists, not Marxists—the black flag, not the red flag!—and their actions these days were mostly down to picketing with labor unions, which was perfectly lawful. I did go out on picket lines with them (we’d always done this as a family), but I wasn’t big on chanting. “They’re just slogans!” I said.

  “What do you have faith in?” my mother said.

  The truth was that I wanted to be ordinary. I wanted the coziness of private life. Why should that be out of reach, why couldn’t I have that?

  “I have faith in people,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” my mother said. “You think you can do without ideas but you can’t.”

  I lasted through a year and a half of college, and then Ted and I were married. It was his idea as much as mine—his dating life had scared him about the risks of ending up with someone shrill or cloying or shallow or stupid. I was at the very least none of those things. Once we were engaged, we had sex of a lavish and reverent kind. He looked at me very intently afterward, his eyes deep in their sockets, without his glasses, and his features softened and slightly swollen, an almost-naked face. I was dazzled myself, but I had been dazzled before we even did anything.

  My parents were against my marrying Ted—my mother said, “You’re selling yourself to the first bidder,” a surprisingly bitter thing for her to say—but they put together a decent wedding for me, not fancy but with bouquets of pink carnations and a real cake from the bakery. Everyone was crowded into our living room, and we had a Unitarian minister, w
hich satisfied no one, and I wore a dress I’d sewn from a pattern, with a scalloped neck and a gathered skirt, in dotted swiss, white on white. I looked good in that dress.

  Ted had managed to graduate a semester early, and the city was in bleak winter. We moved into a tenement on the Lower East Side, with crappy heating, and I worked very hard to make it nice. We paid the rent from Ted’s new job teaching English in a high school, and I liked all the budgeting and household cleverness.

  No one in my family admired the drapes I made for the windows, a tasteful slubbed weave in creamy beige. “I can see a lot of effort went into this,” my mother said, not that nicely.

  “Isn’t everything you fight for,” I said, “the peace and the fair wages, for the sake of each family?”

  “We fight for freedom,” my sister said. “Not for cornflakes.”

  But I fooled them all by being happy.

  Ted came home every day from being a “permanent sub” teaching five English classes—oh, God, five—of ninth and tenth graders in deepest Brooklyn, and he could be very funny. We’d crack up over their misapprehensions of Silas Marner and their hilarious sentences, and I’d get indignant on his behalf when the principal made absurd decrees, and in this spirit of teamwork we ate my excellent meals, and by dessert I was explaining why I thought Pearl Buck wasn’t that great a writer or how Tolstoy could get into any character’s head. I had plenty of time to read.

  We were happy in bed too. I had a life of considerable animal pleasures, a day of simple tasks easily done, and a husband who treated me well. I felt very elemental, in our fifth-floor walk-up, with its clanging pipes and lopsided walls—I was a person who’d guessed right about what was essential. I had what I wanted: how many people have that?

  I didn’t even mind the summer, when our small, boxed-in rooms were airless ovens and we slept on the fire escape. Ted was teaching summer school to make more money, and in the days alone, I’d go dunk myself in the municipal pool on Carmine Street, near where I used to live. The pool was so crowded it was like swimming on the subway, but I’d see Ruthie or other girls I’d known in high school. I felt older, calmer, less worried than they were. I’d lie on a towel in my bathing suit and be very aware that my body was not a virgin’s body.