The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus

  He read the book from cover to cover, reading a little in each room, and quickly came to believe in the divinity of the book and in the divine election of Daddy Norton, and in his own divine election as Daddy Norton’s disciple, called of God in this, God’s only true church. And then he read the book a second time and found himself no longer certain. It did not seem to him the same book the second time, for it began to reveal to him faces that he had not wanted to perceive before. He saw that his faith would fall in jeopardy were he to continue to read, and so, to preserve his faith, he abandoned the book in one of the upper rooms and never saw it again.

  He lived on what scraps he could find, when these were gone peeling off the wallpaper and eating the paste underneath. He began to find other books in the rooms. These at first he left where they were, passing along the walls of the room and into other rooms beyond. But when he began to find them more often, he took to picking them up and hiding them beneath beds and tables, so as not to have to see them again. Still, the books appeared everywhere, in each new room he entered as well as in rooms he thought he had entered before, as if someone were moving them.

  He stopped trying to hide the books and left them where they were. He tried to find his way downstairs but had no inkling of the way. He came into a room with a split-board floor where he thought the stairs should be. Light shone up hard through the floorcracks, the walls musted and blotched with mold. Kicking a hole through a wall, he crawled out into a narrow room, a globed glass fixture hanging from the ceiling and aglow. Lying on the floor, he watched the light and listened to fleas ping inside the globe, and fell asleep.

  He awoke to find fleas strung up and down his veins and grown fat upon him. He began to crush them with stiff thumbs, leaving smears of blood. Getting to his feet he saw a book on a table, and this he took up and opened and read from silently without avail or feeling though like every other book it was most likely some god or other’s sacred word. He read on blankly for many pages, until was given to him:

  He that loveth his brother abideth in light, and there is none occasion of stumbling in him.

  He put the book down as if struck and then as quickly scooped it up again. He took Daddy Norton’s dessicated eye out of his underwear and held it toward the words, then put the eye away. Putting the book under his arm, he went out of the room through a door and from there through chambers with irregular floors and from there fell down a ramshackle staircase face-first. He found himself in a room that seemed familiar to him, though he could place nothing about it. He made his way out through a door broken from its hinges and through a hall and down a staircase missing its treads. He entered what seemed at one time to have been a kitchen but which now seemed a repository for refuse of all kinds.

  Wading across the room, he opened a door and came out into a long hall, a door at one end of it, a window at the other. In the corner, beneath the window, was a figure, vaguely human. The smell of it was hard to breathe at first, and then became sweet and made his head dance with light.

  He could feel God watching. He approached the figure and sat beside it, pulling it over to lean against him. What he touched was soggy in his hands, as if impregnated with water, and it left portions of itself adhered to the wall even as it came away.

  He read the verse aloud, but his brother did not respond. He pulled him closer and felt him come apart in his hands.

  He gathered what he could and pushed it back into the corner. He took off the briefs he wore, Daddy Norton’s eye falling out and dropping away. He beat the pile in the corner like a pillow and lay his head onto it.

  “Brothers always,” he said. And closed his eyes.

  TINY, SMILING DADDY

  MARY GAITSKILL

  He lay in his reclining chair, barely awake enough to feel the dream moving just under his thoughts. It felt like one of those pure, beautiful dreams in which he was young again, and filled with the realization that the friends who had died, or gone away, or decided that they didn’t like him anymore, had really been there all along, loving him. A piece of the dream flickered, and he made out the lips and cheekbones of a tender woman, smiling as she leaned toward him. The phone rang, and the sound rippled through his pliant wakefulness, into the pending dream. But his wife had turned the answering machine up too loud again, and it attacked him with a garbled, furred roar that turned into the voice of his friend Norm.

  Resentful at being waked and grateful that for once somebody had called him, he got up to answer. He picked up the phone, and the answering machine screeched at him through the receiver. He cursed as he fooled with it, hating his stiff fingers. Irritably, he exchanged greetings with his friend, and then Norm, his voice oddly weighted, said, “I saw the issue of Self with Kitty in it.”

  He waited for an explanation. None came, so he said, “What? Issue of Self? What’s Self?”

  “Good grief, Stew, I thought for sure you’d of seen it. Now I feel funny.”

  The dream pulsed forward and receded again. “Funny about what?”

  “My daughter’s got a subscription to this magazine, Self. And they printed an article that Kitty wrote about fathers and daughters talking to each other, and she, well, she wrote about you. Laurel showed it to me.”

  “My God.”

  “It’s ridiculous that I’m the one to tell you. I just thought—”

  “It was bad?”

  “No, she didn’t say anything bad. I just didn’t understand the whole idea of it. And I wondered what you thought.”

  He got off the phone and walked back into the living room, now fully awake. His daughter, Kitty, was living in South Carolina, working in a used-record store and making animal statuettes, which she sold on commission. She had never written anything that he knew of, yet she’d apparently published an article in a national magazine about him. He lifted his arms and put them on the windowsill; the air from the open window cooled his underarms. Outside, the Starlings’ tiny dog marched officiously up and down the pavement, looking for someone to bark at. Maybe she had written an article about how wonderful he was, and she was too shy to show him right away. This was doubtful. Kitty was quiet, but she wasn’t shy. She was untactful and she could be aggressive. Uncertainty only made her doubly aggressive.

  He turned the edge of one nostril over with his thumb and nervously stroked his nose hairs with one finger. He knew it was a nasty habit, but it soothed him. When Kitty was a little girl he would do it to make her laugh. “Well,” he’d say, “do you think it’s time we played with the hairs in our nose?” And she would giggle, holding her hands against her face, eyes sparkling over her knuckles.

  Then she was fourteen, and as scornful and rejecting as any girl he had ever thrown a spitball at when he was that age. They didn’t get along so well anymore. Once, they were sitting in the rec room watching TV, he on the couch, she on the footstool. There was a Charlie Chan movie on, but he was mostly watching her back and her long, thick brown hair, which she had just washed and was brushing. She dropped her head forward from the neck to let the hair fall between her spread legs and began slowly stroking it with a pink nylon brush.

  “Say, don’t you think it’s time we played with the hairs in our nose?”

  No reaction from bent back and hair.

  “Who wants to play with the hairs in their nose?”

  Nothing.

  “Hairs in the nose, hairs in the nose,” he sang.

  She bolted violently up from the stool. “You are so gross you disgust me!” She stormed from the room, shoulders in a tailored jacket of indignation.

  Sometimes he said it just to see her exasperation, to feel the adorable, futile outrage of her violated girl delicacy.

  He wished that his wife would come home with the car, so that he could drive to the store and buy a copy of Self. His car was being repaired, and he could not walk to the little cluster of stores and parking lots that constituted “town” in this heat. It would take a good twenty minutes, and he would be completely worn out when he got
there. He would find the magazine and stand there in the drugstore and read it, and if it was something bad, he might not have the strength to walk back.

  He went into the kitchen, opened a beer, and brought it into the living room. His wife had been gone for over an hour, and God knew how much longer she would be. She could spend literally all day driving around the county, doing nothing but buying a jar of honey or a bag of apples. Of course, he could call Kitty, but he’d probably just get her answering machine, and besides, he didn’t want to talk to her before he understood the situation. He felt helplessness move through his body the way a swimmer feels a large sea creature pass beneath him. How could she have done this to him? She knew how he dreaded exposure of any kind, she knew the way he guarded himself against strangers, the way he carefully drew all the curtains when twilight approached so that no one could see them walking through the house. She knew how ashamed he had been when, at sixteen, she announced that she was lesbian.

  The Starling dog was now across the street, yapping at the heels of a bowlegged old lady in a blue dress who was trying to walk down the sidewalk. “Dammit,” he said. He left the window and got the afternoon opera station on the radio. They were in the final act of La Bohème.

  He did not remember precisely when it had happened, but Kitty, his beautiful, happy little girl, turned into a glum, weird teenager that other kids picked on. She got skinny and ugly. Her blue eyes, which had been so sensitive and bright, turned filmy, as if the real Kitty had retreated so far from the surface that her eyes existed to shield rather than reflect her. It was as if she deliberately held her beauty away from them, only showing glimpses of it during unavoidable lapses, like the time she sat before the TV, daydreaming and lazily brushing her hair. At moments like this, her dormant charm broke his heart. It also annoyed him. What did she have to retreat from? They had both loved her. When she was little and she couldn’t sleep at night, Marsha would sit with her in bed for hours. She praised her stories and her drawings as if she were a genius. When Kitty was seven, she and her mother had special times, during which they went off together and talked about whatever Kitty wanted to talk about.

  He tried to compare the sullen, morbid Kitty of sixteen with the slender, self-possessed twenty-eight-year-old lesbian who wrote articles for Self. He pictured himself in court, waving a copy of Self before a shocked jury. The case would be taken up by the press. He saw the headlines: Dad Sues Mag—Dyke Daughter Reveals … reveals what? What had Kitty found to say about him that was of interest to the entire country, that she didn’t want him to know about?

  Anger overrode his helplessness. Kitty could be vicious. He hadn’t seen her vicious side in years, but he knew it was there. He remembered the time he’d stood behind the half-open front door when fifteen-year-old Kitty sat hunched on the front steps with one of her few friends, a homely blond who wore white lipstick and a white leather jacket. He had come to the door to view the weather and say something to the girls, but they were muttering so intently that curiosity got the better of him, and he hung back a moment to listen. “Well, at least your mom’s smart,” said Kitty. “My mom’s not only a bitch, she’s stupid.”

  This after the lullabies and special times! It wasn’t just an isolated incident, either; every time he’d come home from work, his wife had something bad to say about Kitty. She hadn’t set the table until she had been asked four times. She’d gone to Lois’s house instead of coming straight home like she’d been told to do. She’d worn a dress to school that was short enough to show the tops of her panty hose.

  By the time Kitty came to dinner, looking as if she’d been doing slave labor all day, he would be mad at her. He couldn’t help it. Here was his wife doing her damnedest to raise a family and cook dinner, and here was this awful kid looking ugly, acting mean, and not setting the table. It seemed unreasonable that she should turn out so badly after taking up so much of their time. Her afflicted expression made him angry too. What had anybody ever done to her?

  * * *

  He sat forward and gently gnawed the insides of his mouth as he listened to the dying girl in La Bohème. He saw his wife’s car pull into the driveway. He walked to the back door, almost wringing his hands, and waited for her to come through the door. When she did, he snatched the grocery bag from her arms and said, “Give me the keys.” She stood openmouthed in the stairwell, looking at him with idiotic consternation. “Give me the keys!”

  “What is it, Stew? What’s happened?”

  “I’ll tell you when I get back.”

  He got in the car and became part of it, this panting mobile case propelling him through the incredibly complex and fast-moving world of other people, their houses, their children, their dogs, their lives. He wasn’t usually so aware of this unpleasant sense of disconnection between him and everyone else, but he had the feeling that it had been there all along, underneath what he thought about most of the time. It was ironic that it should rear up so visibly at a time when there was in fact a mundane yet invasive and horribly real connection between him and everyone else in Wayne County: the hundreds of copies of Self magazine sitting in countless drugstores, bookstores, groceries, and libraries. It was as if there were a tentacle plugged into the side of the car, linking him with the random humans who picked up the magazine, possibly his very neighbors. He stopped at a crowded intersection, feeling like an ant in an enemy swarm.

  Kitty had projected herself out of the house and into this swarm very early, ostensibly because life with him and Marsha had been so awful. Well, it had been awful, but because of Kitty, not them. As if it weren’t enough to be sullen and dull, she turned into a lesbian. Kids followed her down the street, jeering at her. Somebody dropped her books in a toilet. She got into a fistfight. Their neighbors gave them looks. This reaction seemed only to steel Kitty’s grip on her new identity; it made her romanticize herself, like the kid she was. She wrote poems about heroic women warriors, she brought home strange books and magazines, which, among other things, seemed to glorify prostitutes. Marsha looked for them and threw them away. Kitty screamed at her, the tendons leaping out on her slender neck. He punched Kitty and knocked her down. Marsha tried to stop him, and he yelled at her. Kitty jumped up and leapt between them, as if to defend her mother. He grabbed her and shook her, but he could not shake the conviction off her face.

  Most of the time, though, they continued as always, eating dinner together, watching TV, making jokes. That was the worst thing; he would look at Kitty and see his daughter, now familiar in her withdrawn sullenness, and feel comfort and affection. Then he would remember that she was a lesbian, and a morass of complication and wrongness would come down between them, making it impossible for him to see her. Then she would just be Kitty again. He hated it.

  She ran away at sixteen, and the police found her in the apartment of an eighteen-year-old bodybuilder named Dolores, who had a naked woman tattooed on her sinister bicep. Marsha made them put her in a mental hospital so psychiatrists could observe her, but he hated the psychiatrists—mean, supercilious sons of bitches who delighted in the trick question—so he took her out. She finished school, and they told her if she wanted to leave it was all right with them. She didn’t waste any time getting out of the house.

  She moved into an apartment near Detroit with a girl named George and took a job at a home for retarded kids. She would appear for visits with a huge bag of laundry every few weeks. She was thin and neurotically muscular, her body having the look of a fighting dog on a leash. She cut her hair like a boy’s and wore black sunglasses, black leather half-gloves, and leather belts. The only remnant of her beauty was her erect, martial carriage and her efficient movements; she walked through a room like the commander of a guerrilla force. She would sit at the dining-room table with Marsha, drinking tea and having a laconic verbal conversation, her body speaking its precise martial language while the washing machine droned from the utility room, and he wandered in and out, trying to make sense of what she said. Sometimes sh
e would stay into the evening, to eat dinner and watch All in the Family. Then Marsha would send her home with a jar of homemade tapioca pudding or a bag of apples and oranges.

  One day, instead of a visit they got a letter postmarked San Francisco. She had left George, she said. She listed strange details about her current environment and was vague about how she was supporting herself. He had nightmares about Kitty, with her brave, proudly muscular little body, lost among big fleshy women who danced naked in go-go bars and took drugs with needles, terrible women whom his confused, romantic daughter invested with oppressed heroism and intensely female glamour. He got up at night and stumbled into the bathroom for stomach medicine, the familiar darkness of the house heavy with menacing images that pressed about him, images he saw reflected in his own expression when he turned on the bathroom light over the mirror.

  Then one year she came home for Christmas. She came into the house with her luggage and a shopping bag of gifts for them, and he saw that she was beautiful again. It was a beauty that both offended and titillated his senses. Her short, spiky hair was streaked with purple, her dainty mouth was lipsticked, her nose and ears were pierced with amethyst and dangling silver. Her face had opened in thousands of petals. Her eyes shone with quick perception as she put down her bag, and he knew that she had seen him see her beauty. She moved toward him with fluid hips; she embraced him for the first time in years. He felt her live, lithe body against his, and his heart pulsed a message of blood and love. “Merry Christmas, Daddy,” she said.