The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “He doesn’t have to go.”

  I wanted to go. I felt superior to everyone I knew because I was going.

  “You stuck with Dad,” I said.

  “Do I have to say how different that was?”

  My father didn’t say much, but he was clearly very disappointed. He’d look into my face and then turn his gaze away.

  My sister said, “Do you know where you’re going? They used to send planes from out of there to bomb Korea. For Christ’s sake.”

  Ted and I were in wonderful spirits. Japan! We talked for hours about what to bring, we read The Chrysanthemum and the Sword and a book of haiku the library had. I found a recipe for sukiyaki and I stirred bits of beef in a pan with canned bean sprouts. “Sometimes bad luck turns into good luck,” Ted said. We both thought we’d fallen into a wildly suitable fate: everything would be taken care of, and everything would be beyond what we’d imagined. We were making a great escape. We fell asleep holding hands.

  My sister, Barbara, said, “I never thought you would be like this.”

  We were going by ship from California, and we had to send everything in trunks and crates. What was the weather like? Like here except warmer in Okinawa. And I read that the Japanese believed theirs was the only country that really had four seasons, which seemed sweet of them. I was sorting out which books to give to Ruthie when Ted came into the room, shouting, “I don’t believe it!” Papers had come with an official seal: Ted had a security clearance to reside on the base, but family member Louise Buckman Pfeiffer was refused one.

  “Did you know about this?” I wailed.

  I’d never heard of such a thing. But what, really, had I heard of? “Maybe I can get work as a janitor in your bakery,” Ted said, grimly.

  I hated the goddamn government. My parents were right. Had always been right. “You should go without me,” I said. I was angry with Ted for having wanted to go in the first place. “You should just go as if you really were in the army.”

  Ted was hugging me. “You’re the most amazing person.” We were both sticky from the summer heat, and the scent of his skin was such a sharp, familiar smell as he held me.

  He was ready to get on the ship to Japan without me, and he thought I was noble. I felt quite crazy.

  I could have stopped him from going, but I didn’t. He kept saying, “There aren’t many wives like you,” as if I were a paragon of enlightened sacrifice. “I am just so wonderful,” I said, but he didn’t mind my tone. Why should he mind? He was going to have his adventure. I was the one cheated and defeated. Ted, in those last weeks, seemed to have decided he had a treasure in me. He’d watch me move around the house and say, “You are something.” He’d hold me close for minutes at a time, and I’d feel my heart in my chest beating for him. He would miss me. I was scared and said so, but he thought this was another sign of my valor.

  The first months without him were atrocious. I had to move back to my parents’ apartment, and I’d lie awake in my old room, with Barbara rustling around in the next bed, and everything was intolerable. The absence of Ted was like a weight in all my limbs, and my poor body was beset with useless longing. Ted made one expensive phone call to me on arrival—“The base is ugly!” he said, and sounded very thrilled. It was three weeks before a letter reached me (“I went into town and bought a grilled sweet potato on the street, very smoky. The students are easy—I don’t have to bribe them!”), and I wrote to him every day (“The autumn weather is still very warm” and “Barbara wants to be a French major, very practical”). My father said, “I can’t get over having a son-in-law on a military base,” and in truth I agreed with him. The whole thing was a humiliation.

  My work at the bakery was not very taxing and the hours felt very, very long. I ate too many cupcakes and got sick of them. My mother suggested I bring some of those eternal leftovers to the Catholic Worker place on Chrystie Street, which their friend Dorothy ran. Dorothy wasn’t there most of the time, and the House of Hospitality was full of sad, wacky, life-damaged people, roaming the rooms of an old building, with crucifixes on the walls looking down on all of it. They were exactly the people no one else wanted to bother with. Everybody—staff and residents alike—was thrilled by the boxes of pastries. “It’s Louise!” they would yell, when I walked in the door. One woman jumped around in circles until she had to be calmed by someone.

  What did I ever believe, where were my principles? My mother used to say my politics were driven out by my hormones, an insulting version of my history. Serious thought, as well as lust, had made it plain to me that love was truer than all the other weak notions in the world, and that justice could never be served by anything you did (what was the use), so there was no satisfaction serving it. Now I was in a different spot.

  Ted wrote, “I wish wish wish you were here.” Well, I wasn’t. His contract was for two years, and he had one free trip home in a year. How could I be lost in bedroom fantasies of someone I was so outraged with? At the bakery I had a hazy, distracted look a lot of the time, too much of the time. We were paid very little, and some of the women had families living on this pay. “Wake up, Susie-Q,” they would say.

  Ted thought I was being “rash and shortsighted” when I moved out of my rent-free home with my family and got a one-room apartment on East Third Street—tub in the kitchen, toilet in the hall. “By yourself?” Ruthie said. “No one else?”

  My mother said, “I thought you wanted to save money.”

  Nobody thought I was smart, and maybe they were right. But how many months could I stay in that room with Barbara? How hard I tried to make the new place interesting, how earnest my attempts at décor—the one wall painted coral-orange, the poster of Picasso’s Guernica, with its twisted figures. I was not really at home there at first, but I thought that I would be, and I was right. I’d been raised to love freedom (of another sort, but this sort had a meaning) and my pride took me a long way. Sometimes the sight of my own table, where I read whatever I wanted to while I ate, put me in a kind of rapture. No one believed me.

  At Thanksgiving, my father took all of us to join a small march downtown in support of the United Auto Workers’ strike at the Kohler steel plant in Wisconsin. My mother brought a thermos of hot cider to make sure Barbara and I stayed warm. The Thanksgiving weather was sunny and not so cold and we knew a lot of the people marching, so it was an okay afternoon. “Be wise, don’t buy Kohler plumbing supplies,” my picket sign said.

  And how was Ted’s holiday, with his fellow Americans in Japan? Not bad, but he missed me. His voice sounded underwater when he called. He got to go to the Officers’ Club, where they all drank enormous amounts of whiskey and sang “Over the River and Through the Woods” together. A staff sergeant kept imitating a turkey. Gobble, gobble. Yes, yes, I missed him, but I was secretly glad I wasn’t there.

  And so it went. We longed for each other in raging fevers and we nursed our resentments. My youth was being wasted, and Ted said he was in exile because of my parents. Clearly he kind of liked his exile. (“Just tried buckwheat noodles. And bits of pigs’ ears!” he wrote. “Very tasty!”) To distract myself, I went and took a night course at Hunter College, on Love and Money in the Victorian Novel. I was older now and spoke more in class, I had opinions about Becky Thatcher.

  Arrigato meant thank you in Japanese, Ted wrote, and konnichiwa was hello. In the spring Ted was coaching a school softball team. I’d never seen the man play baseball in my life. We stopped squabbling in our phone calls but I didn’t always know what he was talking about. I was friendly with two girls from my class at Hunter and we’d go for tea afterward and have ideas about Rochester’s blindness. And then how nice it was to come back to my room, the stillness at the end of the night. Ted was in my thoughts but it wasn’t so bad being parted. I could tell he felt that, too.

  “How’d you come up with this?” he said, when he saw my apartment, on his big trip home in August. We’d already embraced long and hard at the door, but he was a little thrown by t
he coral-orange wall and the desolate sink. “I like it,” I said. I was still tasting the feel of his mouth, the fresh surprise of it. “I pictured something different,” he said.

  But we did very well, in our odd circumstances. Once we got over a few preliminaries in bed, we were back as familiars, lolling in the luxury of actually really having each other. I had forgotten the Ted-ness of sex with him, the specificity of it. All my craving had not been a true memory. How weak the imagination was.

  Ted said, “In Japan they take baths at night, they think we’re weird with our showers in the morning.” He enjoyed slipping in these reports. I was curious, but not as curious as he thought. “They eat raw horse meat, not just raw fish, can you believe it?” he said. “But they’re very clean. The base is immaculate.” My friendly imperialist of a husband. I didn’t talk much about school, I didn’t want to hear what he thought he knew about Dickens.

  The clock was ticking, we only had two weeks to be happy together. It took concentration, but we did all right. I cried at the airport—I felt so bad for myself—but I said, “Don’t mind me, I’m silly,” as if I really were a soldier’s wife.

  At the bakery, one of the older women teased me about those geishas over there and how the smart thing would be to have a little bundle of joy to keep him tied to home. People really said these things? I couldn’t tell her: I love my husband and I don’t. And everybody knows, you can’t be a little bit pregnant.

  • • •

  I’d long since lapsed out of writing letters every day, and in the second year I didn’t always remember every week. When his monthly checks arrived, I’d write, “Thank you for your lovely contribution to the ever-popular Louise Likes to Eat Fund.” I did need them for the rent. Was this what made us married, that he still sent me money? Sometimes he’d say, “I know you can always use it,” as if it were extra. “I love your taste in checkbook paper,” I wrote. “The green tint goes with everything.”

  I had a preposterous flirtation with one of the bakers on the night shift at Mrs. Plymouth’s—he came on during my last hour of work, and sometimes we kidded around in the kitchen. His name was Trevor, he was from Trinidad, and I told him he looked like Harry Belafonte (he did). He was very careful around me, but when I complimented him on his way with the dough he gave me an appropriately merry look. My fantasies of him began to block out my fantasies of Ted, which was a peculiar feeling. And what did it matter, if it was all in my head anyway? But one evening I asked Trevor what his days were like, did he sleep all day, and I somehow invited him for supper on Monday, when the bakery was closed.

  He dressed so nicely for that dinner, in a pressed shirt of dazzling pale blue, and we talked about the winters in Trinidad—“oh, yes, gets up past eighty degrees”—over my fried flounder and mashed potatoes. “I like the colors in your house,” he said. “Little, little place but you make it pretty.”

  I had to give him a sign—I brushed against him on the way to the stove—and after that it was simple. We were in bed! I’d never thought I would have any other lover but Ted, and I was astonished at myself, even after all the rehearsals in my mind. He was different from Ted—more full of flourishes, and also more jolly and confident. I thought that I was a reckless person but I had chosen a kind man. I can do this, I thought, I’m lucky.

  • • •

  This went on for several months, and then Trevor became more afraid he was going to be fired if the bakery found out. This was perfectly true—we didn’t have a union—and we both knew that ugliness might be waiting for him. We rarely talked about race, that most delicate of topics. “Happy but going nowhere,” he said of us.

  “I know, I know,” I said.

  We never went outside together, we never went anywhere except my place. The kids in the building tittered at us in the hall and sometimes worse. They were just kids but I hated them. We kept ourselves out of sight, like the scandal we were. “You know what I have in Trinidad, near Port-of-Spain?” he said one night.

  “No,” I said.

  “You know. A wife.”

  Why are you telling me this? I hadn’t known but I wasn’t stunned for more than a minute. I had a husband, didn’t I?

  “Her name is Hyacinth,” he said.

  This was not a good sign, that he wanted to invoke her. Some dopey little girl of a wife, who sat home in a tiny kitchen all day, waiting for his MoneyGrams.

  “That’s how it is,” he said.

  Oh, was it? He wanted me to let him go before there was trouble for either of us. He wanted me to be a good sport.

  “Time to call it a day, isn’t it?” I said.

  “I am so sorry,” he said. He did have manners.

  In the bakery, for weeks after, we hardly spoke when we passed each other. When we moved around the kitchen and made sure our gazes didn’t meet, I felt that life had insulted us both. I tried not to hear his voice in the room, the tune of his English.

  One evening I didn’t see him on his shift, and one of the counter girls said he’d left for another job. “When?” I said. “When did he go?” None of them had the name of where he’d gone—“How would I know?” they said—and I couldn’t keep asking every single person.

  Ruthie said, “Is your heart broken? I’m worried about you.”

  “I would say no. Not broken. Do I look devastated to you?” I said. “A little the worse for wear maybe.”

  “Do you have a heart?” Ruthie said. “Just kidding.”

  Ted wrote, “And you know what is interesting about the Japanese? Their single-mindedness at any task. How hard they concentrate. I like their sake too!”

  It wasn’t really that much of a surprise, near the end of the second year, when Ted began to say in his letters that he might be staying on. What did I think? What kind of man wants to live on an air base? I thought. I still thought of Trevor every day, but I’d gotten sort of interested in a guy I’d talked to about getting a union into the bakery. He worked for the CIO, traveling to their member unions, and was on the road all the time. We hadn’t done more than have conversations, but he called from Duluth and Sioux Falls and told me goofy jokes. So it was clear that life had possibilities. “If you really feel you’re needed there,” I wrote to Ted.

  “You are such a rare wife,” Ted wrote. “This is hard on both of us but I will be getting a raise and sending a little more money.”

  “How can he keep you on ice like that?” Ruthie said. I thought Ted probably had a Japanese woman in town or maybe some secretary on the base, somebody he wasn’t about to marry. I wasn’t angry at him for this. I told people he was staying because the salary kept getting higher, and sometimes I said it was because his work was so rewarding. People could never make sense of the ways we’d redistributed the affiliations of our union, and you couldn’t blame them.

  My mother said, “It’s very unusual.”

  “Is that a crime?” I said. “Unusualness? I thought you were on the side of that.”

  • • •

  Ted came back in July that year, in time for Ruthie’s wedding. I had to bring him, I couldn’t leave him home. There we were, sitting together in the synagogue, with Ruthie in white silk organza marching toward this Bob guy she was so crazy about. It made me as tearful as it made everyone else, at the same time I felt it was all a poufy fraud. Why would you vow yourself to an unlikely ideal? I snuck a look at Ted, dressed up in a navy-blue suit I’d never seen, and to my amazement he took my hand. We had been getting along at home, but not saying much. Now he was rubbing my fingers, an old sweet gesture. He’s grateful to me, I thought.

  And so it went. Once he was gone, I did take up with Mick, the union organizer, who was really a very charming guy and never in town for more than a month at a time. He was used to talking to all kinds of people, and once you got him off his rhetoric, he had great stories. The guy whose dog always knew what time it was, the woman who sang in two languages at once: Mick could tell about all of it.

  He was very taken with me, and he
didn’t like it when I neglected him for my night classes or my homework, but I pretty much stuck to my guns. He’d say, “Sweetie, just tonight,” and I could say, not too meanly, “Honey, I’m not your wife.” Ted paid the rent, such as it was, and I had no reason to take off my wedding ring. I had the protection of a husband without the nuisance of him being there. Everybody thought I was kidding myself.

  Meanwhile, Mick and I, after a lot of work, got the Bakery and Confectionery Workers’ International Union voted into Mrs. Plymouth’s, much to the disgust of the burly old owner (Mrs. Plymouth was a fiction). The owner was very disappointed in me and would’ve fired me if he could’ve (not legal!), but I was leaving then anyway, because I’d actually managed to graduate from college.

  My mother wanted to make me a dress to wear to commencement, a touching but terrible idea. My father was immensely pleased. One of his kittens was getting a diploma. “We did okay, didn’t we?” he kept saying. Mick, who was not a secret from my family, sat with him at graduation. They were great pals.

  Ted wrote, “Congratulations to my brilliant wife.”

  I got a silly English-major’s job as a proofreader at a women’s magazine, where I read pap all day (“twenty smart tricks with paper towels”) and was good at finding mistakes about baking, which I did know about. My proofreading skills catapulted me into a much better job at the National Maritime Union (okay, Mick knew someone), where I copyedited their newsletter and eventually sort of rewrote most of it and was, in time, listed on the masthead as an editor.

  And what about Ted? When I moved to a better apartment, he wrote, “Don’t make it so nice I don’t recognize it.” How long could this go on? “Have unpacked your favorite sheets,” I wrote, “and they lie waiting for you.” “Miss those sheets like crazy,” Ted wrote. Did I mind that Ted didn’t come home that year? I thought I did. He said he was saving his money to improve his housing, or something like that. He stayed faithful in his monthly allotments to me, whatever that meant. Mick wasn’t around then either—he was working in Idaho for a few months—and it was a long, bleak summer. “Don’t take this personally,” Ruthie said, “but I think you’re an idiot.”