PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018

by Jodi Angel

  I think about my house up the hill and my grandfather’s basement full of butterflies, and my grandmother’s fat that rolls over the edge of her mattress, threatening to anchor her to one place and time until she dies. I don’t know how many thoughts I’m having and I can’t tell how long I’ve been in the home of the landkeeper, but it must still be New Years, because nothing has happened to mark its ending. For now, we are stuck in the in-between of one year and the next. We are celebrating this moment, expanding it out toward even the hidden spaces in this valley, the fields where my grandfather works each day, my basement, filling all of it with our wanting. I’m at the party at the landkeeper’s house wearing my nicest dress with butterflies still latched onto the hem. And around me are the guerrilla soldiers, and the men and women displaced from their homes who before this were walking toward a new life, a refuge. I wonder what it would be like to walk across this landscape now and see through the window that although people are being taken captive, they are still dancing and covered in butterflies, and if that’s not reason to celebrate then I don’t know what is.

  Cristina Fríes is an MA student in creative writing at the University of California, Davis. Many of her stories explore ways in which women and girls contend with displacement and placelessness, disorientation, and trauma. Traveler and nomad at heart, she splits her time writing in California and Latin America. She is currently at work on a collection of stories and an opera. More at cristinafries.com.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  Lin King’s “Appetite” was published by Slice magazine in our Emerging Voices feature, which is part of our ongoing effort to connect the voices of established writers with authors who are just getting their start in the publishing world. King’s story grabbed us immediately with matter-of-fact and yet powerful details that add up to a life—a scrawny body, a favorite song, pastries for breakfast, a dutiful embrace. King’s Mayling is the only daughter from a well-to-do Taiwanese family who must choose a husband after a luncheon of small talk and commence with a life of duty and fulfilling expectations—clutching at and then letting go of any hope of passion or meaningful human connection. The life that Mayling is given is, as King writes, “as fair an offer as any twenty-four-year-old only daughter had reason to expect.” In the span of five thousand words, King depicts the way in which an entire life, from childhood to motherhood to the wrinkles of old age, can be both perfectly acceptable and also utterly tragic in its emptiness. King’s telling is unsentimental, and Mayling’s life flashes by as briskly for the reader as it does for Mayling herself. The “appetite” of King’s title is Mayling’s persistent, barely acknowledged hunger for a different, more passionate existence, a hunger that threads through the back of the story without ever bubbling to the surface.

  Elizabeth Blachman, editor in chief

  Slice

  APPETITE

  Lin King

  WU MAYLING NEVER knew the pains of dieting. She had always been thin and pale. When she was a child, this had caused her nurse much anxiety, especially when other women would pinch Mayling’s spare cheeks and shake their heads in disapproval. As a teenager, her scrawny figure led her mother to accuse the nurse of undernourishing Mayling. How will she ever find a husband, she cried, with those bony hips?

  The nurse was dismissed, and her paychecks used to hire a new cook, a man with a formidable waistline and a head like a monk’s. He was ordered to make pig feet stew once a week and chicken broth twice a week. But despite his best efforts, Mayling’s body remained lean. The nutrition had to go somewhere, however, and instead of cushioning her bones it seeped inside them, making her taller than her mother and, in time, even than the cook.

  In the fall of 1969, Mayling left her home in the south to attend the Teachers College in Taipei. Her mother had ordered the maid to sew cotton padding into the linings of her dresses to soften Mayling’s harsh edges. By the time of her graduation, however, Mayling was wearing new, unpadded dresses that she had purchased with her allowance. A few of the dresses were even sleeveless, and these she hid in the bottoms of her suitcases, safe from parental discovery. Still, the line had to be drawn somewhere, and despite her diploma-boosted confidence and head full of Carly Simon lyrics, Mayling did not own any denim.

  She taught for just three years, at a private junior high school just outside Taipei. These were quiet years. She spent half of her weekends taking the bus to the city for movies and Western tea, and the other half in her small, spotless teachers’ dormitory room, humming to records she’d bought herself with her more-than-adequate salary. She began learning to apply makeup by studying glossy magazines. On the longer holidays, she went home to lists of potential suitors, each one carefully evaluated and ranked by her mother: family friends, friends of family friends, optometrists, patent lawyers, accountants, chemical engineering PhDs.

  Mayling met these young men at supervised lunches, always in the company of the suitor’s mother and perhaps a couple of aunts. Some of the men were good-looking but mostly mute, never saying a word without direct prodding. Then there was the opposite breed: loud, garrulous, prone to excessive eye contact, desperate to dazzle. These candidates sometimes later telephoned her or wrote her letters at school, to which she responded briefly, out of obligation, never revealing much. Most of the men were quickly discouraged; those most impressed with themselves hung on for a little longer.

  The third year of Mayling’s life as a teacher, the year of her twenty-fourth birthday, her mother demanded that she choose a husband by the end of the Chinese New Year break. You’ll have five months to get to know each other before getting married when the spring semester ends, she said. This being as fair an offer as any twenty-four-year-old only daughter had reason to expect, Mayling nodded her consent.

  Three weeks later, she made her choice. His name was Wu Shutian, a twenty-seven-year-old dentist in a steady, third-generation family practice. His main draw for Mayling, on paper, had been the location of his office, on the west side of Taipei, where fashionable theaters and shops lined the streets like paintings on display. During her college days, Mayling had frequented this colorful gallery borne of Taiwan’s commercial boom, marveling at its glossy, motley charms. However dull her married life, she told herself, at least it would be lived in a place that was anything but dull.

  In person, Shutian was decidedly a catch. He was tall, towering over his mother at a respectable 179 centimeters, with broad shoulders to match. He had a healthy complexion, thick eyebrows, and small eyes, which without his wire-rimmed glasses—as Mayling discovered later—gave him a somewhat comical look. When he had bowed his first greeting, Mayling’s mother had tightened her grip on Mayling’s forearm, signaling excited approval.

  After a luncheon of small talk, the mothers had proposed that the young people take a walk in the nearby garden. They were old women, they’d said; they would stay indoors and have some more tea.

  Mayling and Shutian trudged off stiffly together. When they reached the garden, safely out of their mothers’ sight, Shutian’s wide shoulders relaxed a little, and he stuck his hands in his pockets. Mayling said nothing. Shutian began to whistle.

  Rainy days and Mondays always get me down, Mayling sang softly as he reached the end of the verse, her tongue slightly uneasy with the weight of the foreign words.

  You know the Carpenters? he asked.

  Yes, I’ve been buying their records since college, she said, looking at her kitten-heeled feet, which hurt.

  Me too. I bought their newest one just last week, he said.

  That evening, Mayling’s mother announced to Mayling’s father that she had at last found a husband for their daughter.

  Mayling and Shutian were married in July, with a costly banquet and many blessings. They were not unhappy at their wedding. In fact, each was genuinely satisfied with their choice of the other. Their eyes were not offended by the faces they had vowed to look at for the rest of their lives; their hearts were fond of the same music, pop
ular songs imported from England and America with which they would fill their home—songs their future children would soon tire of but nevertheless feel obliged to play at their parents’ funerals.

  On their wedding night, Mayling took a long bath while Shutian prepared tea in the kitchen. She could hear him pacing outside the door when she turned off the tap. After her bath, and a moment’s hesitation, she decided to put back on the brassiere she had worn all day under her wedding dress. She then slipped into a white crepe nightgown that her mother had ironed herself and that was so crisp it crackled. It had a touch of lace trimming on the hem and a thin white ribbon that Mayling now tied into a bow at her collarbone. In the half-fogged mirror, she reminded herself of a heroine from a Gothic novel: her dark hair coiled in a damp braid, her face washed of rouge and powder, her waifish bone structure prominent under her thin, white gown.

  When the newlyweds crawled under the thick duvet they now shared, they each had a rather morbid vision of what must happen, though neither was sure exactly how.

  Shutian began kissing Mayling on the mouth. Her lips felt very thick and clumsy. She tried opening her mouth as she had seen kissers do in countless Hollywood films, if only to stop the swelling sensation in her lips. The texture of Shutian’s tongue reminded Mayling of the grilled pig’s liver dish from their wedding banquet, and she wondered what hers might be reminding him of. Then, without warning, his tongue grazed the ridges of her front teeth, an act so alarming that she drew herself away from him sharply, moving back and back until her neck touched the headboard.

  They did not try any more kissing that night, but through sheer biological instinct, Shutian managed to complete the act for them both. When it was over and he had fallen into a noisy slumber, Mayling wondered if it would hurt less in the future and whether she would ever experience the pleasure that Shutian had exhaled so heavily into her face.

  With the red envelopes they had received from the wedding guests, they bought new clothes and furniture to fill the spacious apartment that Shutian’s father had bought for them. They lined their new shelves with alphabetized soft-rock albums, Shutian’s records to the left of the brand-new wood-framed Sony television, Mayling’s to the right.

  In the mornings, Shutian would pick out a record to go with breakfast while Mayling laid out the unchanging spread: sweet buns from the bakery down the street, hot coffee, and fruits of the season—mangoes, watery peaches, prickly lychees. With the constant presence of music, the lack of conversation in their home was not so apparent.

  Mayling never visited Shutian at the dental clinic, though it was only one block from the apartment. She preferred to do her housework slowly, in between languid hours of sifting through records, skimming translations of foreign novels, and putting on makeup just to go grocery shopping. This way, when Shutian told her about his day or about the latest goings-on in the field of dentistry, she could be genuinely interested, if only for the novelty of the information.

  Ten months after the wedding, to everyone’s great delight, Mayling’s tenure as a new bride was cut short when she attained the status of an expectant mother. The joy of both families was greatly multiplied when she gave birth to twins: a boy, Yijie, and a girl, Yixin. This was called a dragon-phoenix birth, one of the rarest and most coveted of good fortunes. With this extraordinary blessing, Mayling fulfilled her duties as a wife and daughter by producing, in a single afternoon, children of both the desired number and genders.

  And motherhood bestowed upon Mayling yet another blessing: unprecedented beauty. The body that her mother had failed to create through excessive feeding now bloomed into being. Even after her stomach had flattened, a shapely fleshiness remained. In the street, she would examine her reflection in shop windows: now, instead of emphasizing her hollows and sharp angles, her knee-length cotton dresses revealed gentle, womanly curves. Clasping the hands of Yijie and Yixin, Mayling walked the streets with her head held high.

  When the twins turned thirteen, they were plunged into their studies in preparation for the high school entrance exams. They took off at sunrise and did not come home until dusk, at which point they would practice their instruments for an hour—Yijie on the violin, Yixin on the piano—until Shutian returned from the clinic. The family would have dinner together, followed by an hour of playtime for the twins. After this, a young tutor, a recent graduate of Mayling’s alma mater, would come to guide them through their homework and administer additional exercises until it was time for their baths.

  Mayling found herself with an abundance of unstructured time, as she had in the first year of her marriage. Unused to this freedom, she had difficulty devising a routine that did not leave her taking several naps a day. Shutian proposed that she take up a hobby—what about guitar lessons? She liked the idea. Interest in music was one of the few things the two of them shared genuinely, not simply out of conjugal duty. She was thirty-eight, a perfectly reasonable age for learning a new trick or two. With the best possible education filling up her children’s timetables, Mayling threw herself into her own second career as a student with a Yamaha beginner’s model and a lengthy list of nostalgic ballads whose chords she hoped to master.

  Declining Shutian’s offer to hire a home tutor, Mayling signed up for private lessons at a music studio four blocks from their street. The boulevards of West Taipei had grown ever more kaleidoscopic in the thirteen years she had been busy raising her children, and she inhaled everything with the eagerness of a freshly weaned cub.

  He asked her to call him Liang. This was what everyone at the studio called him. She was not sure if this was his given name or just part of it, or only perhaps a nickname. He told her his last name once, on the very first day of class, but she had not particularly cared to know it at the time and never found the opportunity to ask him again.

  Liang was in his mid-twenties. In truth he could have been younger or older, but in Mayling’s mind he was twenty-six. Everything about his face was petite and angular. He had narrow eyes, a small nose, thin lips, and a notably pointy chin. Even his ears were bony, a fact she noticed only because of his earrings—five silver hoops through the thin cartilage of his left ear. On any other man his face would have looked rather mouse-like, but these diminutive features were somehow balanced by his hair: thick, wavy curls—permed, she thought, though she never asked about this either—that he brushed to the right side of his head, emphasizing the piercings on the left. His unfussy wardrobe consisted of gray, white, and black T-shirts and faded jeans. He wore his keys on a long chain around his neck.

  Mayling paid painstaking attention to Liang’s appearance because it was the only thing she could take from him without anyone noticing. He was neither a great teacher nor a bad one. They began with C, E minor, G, D, A, A minor. She had great difficulty with F. He demonstrated on his own guitar, brushing her fingertips to make slight adjustments. A little more curved, he would say. Press harder, but don’t squeeze, press. Twice a week she paid him five hundred Taiwanese dollars to soak in his scent of tobacco and laundry powder and, curiously, a hint of vanilla ice cream. His face was sunburned, even though it was the tail end of autumn. How? she wondered. She looked, and wondered more. The shape of his throat. The curve of his nose. The freckles on the backs of his hands. Did he sleep with another body at night?

  She wondered.

  At home, Mayling watched the man to whom she had given her life. Shutian, meanwhile, continued living his routine without ever noticing her gaze: reading newspapers at dinner, picking his ears and then sniffing the sullied finger, changing the television channel without asking, wriggling his strangely long gray toes while guffawing at political talk shows, requesting endless beers and endless massages. The beers distended his soft stomach and the backs of his arms and the skin under his chin. The massages forced Mayling to dig her fingers into these growing mounds of pillowy flesh. She felt them appear and expand in all the expected (and some unexpected) places on his body. On one of his birthdays, he receive
d a bottle of cologne from his mother. He began dousing himself every morning, leaving pungent traces in the sheets, in the furniture, in the children’s hair—even in the food on the table. Why did he never buy new records anymore?

  In the studio, Mayling learned bits and pieces about Liang: he owned a black dog with a single white paw (he showed her a Polaroid), he had attended the University of the Arts but received very poor marks (he confessed with a laugh when she pointed out his memorabilia keychain), he loved guavas (he almost always ate one before class), he hated Coca-Cola. But that’s a secret between you and me, he told her. He was full of little surprises like that, hinting at confidentiality when she did not expect it, with an offhand grin. Every few lessons he would give her a compliment—something small, maybe about her new haircut or improvements in her strumming, and, twice, about her “glow.” These she gulped down hungrily and later etched into her mind’s schoolgirl diary, reenacting them whenever she had a moment to spare.

  Sometimes, when puzzling over a chord or lowering her head to hide her blushing, Mayling would feel the tingling sensation of his gaze gliding over the buttons on her chest, the waistband of her skirt, her bare shins, the recesses of her ankles. Most of the time, when she looked up again, he would be focusing dutifully on her fingers. But sometimes she would catch his eyes flickering away. This happened so rarely, though, and so fleetingly, that Mayling questioned her own senses. But just in case, she began rubbing scented lotion on her wrists and hands—the only parts of her body that he sometimes touched. And whenever he did touch her . . . did his fingers tremble, or did he inhale more deeply, or . . . ?