PEN America Best Debut Short Stories 2018

by Jodi Angel

  Shutian never asked her about her lessons. If she offered to perform for the family, he would listen with a toothy smile and hum along. But, on the whole, he treated her learning guitar as if it were an incidental attainment, something that simply happened when she picked up the instrument.

  Mayling would watch him lying in the folds of the bed they shared. His face, like Liang’s, had thin, small features; but these were so different from Liang’s, his body ever so different from Liang’s body, from both Liang’s true body and the body in Mayling’s mind, the one that cooed as she pushed her hips deep into his, one of his hands gripping her thigh, the other holding her under her armpit, his thumb pressing into her breast. This was the image that came to her on certain afternoons while Shutian and the twins passed more productive hours elsewhere, when she ducked under the covers and pressed herself against her palm again and again until she and Liang converged in a mutual grunt of climax.

  Once, about a year into their lessons, Liang asked her what her plans were for the night.

  Television, probably, she said, making sure not to smile too eagerly, with an expression that tried hard not to say, Unless you have something else in mind.

  He was playing at a show, he said. A small venue, something of a cross between a bar and a black box theater, and she would have free entrance and food and drinks as his—was he consciously trying not to hesitate?—guest.

  And Mayling pictured it: the grime on the postered walls and the dimly lit faces exhaling boozy cigarette smoke, appraising her. What on earth would she wear? She would be seen as Liang’s guest. To be known, by anybody, as Liang’s somebody. She looked up at him; beneath his casual demeanor she discerned childlike anxiety. He was nervous. He had probably rehearsed this casualness. She resisted the urge to bury her face in the curve of his neck. Maybe in that dingy basement, maybe in that moment when he was sweating from an impassioned performance under the dim spotlight, he would find the strength to brush her thigh with a calloused, feverish hand.

  Laughter sounded outside the classroom. Images from the evening before crashed into her thoughts: Yixin, tearful from bickering with her brother; Shutian’s slumbering face, with its comically round nostrils expanding, contracting, expanding, contracting.

  That sounds like a lot of fun, she said, and thank you for inviting me. But I need to be up early before the kids leave for school.

  That night, Mayling turned to face the snoring Shutian. She thought: I could have left you. I could leave you. I could leave.

  Then, one spring day, two and a half years after they first met, Liang said goodbye. He had signed on with a small record company to replace the guitarist in an up-and-coming band. It was nothing fancy, but he had liked the demos they’d sent him, and it would be good experience. She had been a top-notch student, he said. First class. He hoped she would pick up his album when it came out. He hoped she would keep playing the guitar.

  Mayling stopped playing the guitar. She offered no explanation to her family.

  Yixin and Yijie were both accepted to the top high school in Taipei. Each would go on to National Taiwan University, Yixin to study English and French and Yijie to study economics.

  Having not one but two children at the best school in the country could be considered enough good fortune for two lifetimes. But the twins went even further. Yixin flew off to Cambridge to garner more literary degrees; Yijie got a high-profile banking job in Hong Kong. By the time Shutian retired at sixty-six, family businesses had edged toward extinction. The management of the clinic was taken over by a trusted employee.

  Shutian’s retirement was to be expected given his age, but came as a rude shock to Mayling nevertheless. She had grown fond of her solitude, taking hours to prepare simple lunches for herself, watching daytime TV dramas with rambling plots, strolling through the neighborhood streets and marveling at the young people who filled them. Her children had been kind enough to induct her into the world of modern technology: she learned to browse news sites and blogs, email long-lost schoolmates, and, most notably, watch videos. Before the internet, she had been able to follow Liang’s band—now decades old and with a respectable following—only remotely, haunting the CD store in search of increasingly rare album releases. Now she was able to see him. She could actually watch him online, drawing her face close to the pixels where his fingers touched the strings; she could pause the video as the camera swept past him on its way to the lead singer. She would touch the screen with icy fingertips and feel them turn hot as her whole body warmed at the image of him.

  And now, to have Shutian at home, sharing her days? What would he say about her aimless routine? He had not asked about the details of her day-to-day life since the twins were born. Would they now have to relinquish their mutual genteel obliviousness of each other? She could not bring him beers and give him massages all day long. What would they do to fill up their hours? What could they add—after almost four decades—to fill up their marriage?

  They were each too old to adjust to new habits in the other, Mayling decided. She would not, could not see Shutian as anything beyond the tired face whose whims, uninspired jokes, and gurgling bodily functions strained her patience from dinnertime to bedtime. He was a scheduled disturbance in her quiet existence. What if he decided to pick up some unbecoming hobby, like . . . waltzing?

  Before her fears had time to be realized, however, an X-ray of Shutian’s left lung revealed a shadow. The earliness of the diagnosis meant that surgery and recovery were both possible. But the worry, the bewildering medical vocabulary, the long-distance phone calls to Yijie and Yixin, and the trips to the hospital now filled up Mayling’s days.

  Yijie and Yixin, visiting with spouses in tow, decided that the work was too much for Mayling alone—what if she fell ill as well? A home care nurse was hired, a brusque woman in her fifties with a baked complexion and a gaudy collection of short-sleeved button-down shirts. Her name was Nini, a name Mayling found too dainty for a woman with such big, rough hands, such a big, rough grin.

  The twins had worried that Shutian would find Nini’s presence an insult to his masculine pride—but no, he soon took to her. He had, as Mayling knew, a natural disposition to being nursed. Nini was there to assure his every comfort, be it fetching the remote control, preparing snacks, or singing at his request: coarse folk songs from the South, Japanese-style enkas in the Taiwanese dialect, Teresa Teng ballads with all the wrong lyrics. A favorite pastime of Shutian’s was to watch television on the sofa with Nini seated on a low stool beside him, massaging his feet with her left hand and snacking on cashews with her right. This seemed to Mayling a highly unsanitary habit, but as it kept both of them quiet and out of her way, she never objected.

  Once a day, as his only exercise, Nini took Shutian for a walk in the nearby park. Mayling would take that time to read, or take a long bath, or stretch out under the covers. Sometimes she tried to recreate the image of Liang, pulling up his concert videos on her smartphone, but the sheets smelled too thickly of Shutian’s illness. The rippling pleasure never came.

  Neither of the twins was able to make it home for her sixty-fifth birthday, so she settled for phone calls filled with the squabbling and bickering of her grandchildren. Nini had insisted on buying a cake, but she chose Mayling’s least favorite kind, with artificial-tasting fruit slices and three layers of heavy, cloying whipped cream. Nini also insisted on singing, and she made Shutian sing as well. Mayling was coaxed into making wishes and blowing out candles. After these painful festivities, Shutian and Nini went on their daily walk. Mayling, wearied to the marrow of her bones, took the opportunity to slip into bed with her favorite of Liang’s music videos. She settled into the familiar position. She was about to click play when she felt a lump of cloth at her foot.

  Removing her earphones, she tugged out the foreign object from under the covers. It was a ball of black pantyhose, rolled and tangled in a way that could only mean they had been removed in a hurry.

 
; Mayling had not worn black pantyhose since before she had given birth.

  She pressed play on the video. The familiar frames flashed by, Liang’s face among them: a second here, a second there. When it ended, Mayling got up, wound the earbuds around the phone, and made the bed.

  Shutian, whose last bottle of cologne had long sat empty on their bathroom sink, who reeked of camphor and that special scent of those whose skin was undersunned; Shutian, who had not changed the style of his glasses since 1986; Shutian, who had stopped bothering to remove her top during intercourse when they reached middle age, who would keep his eyes closed as she lay with her nightgown bunched up at her waist and the bedsprings creaked at an unvarying rhythm. Who had stopped doing even that almost ten years ago. How could such a man be harboring extramarital hosiery in his sickbed?

  Mayling grabbed her purse from the dressing table and stuffed the pantyhose inside. She walked at a perfectly unremarkable pace out the door, down the two flights of stairs, and out of the building. Once outside, she turned a few corners before coming to an old-fashioned, run-down coffee shop. Inside, the tables were a reddish wood that clashed awfully with the cedar chairs. The menu was written in an unsophisticated font on plain printer paper with a clip-art Victorian border. The coarse, garish cutlery reminded Mayling of Nini, of Nini’s coarse, garish body, a body that must have pumped itself against her husband’s God knows how many times.

  She ordered a rose tea, but when it came she did not drink it. When the shrill, peppy pop songs proved too much, Mayling paid for her tea and left.

  She considered taking a taxi and going to a friend’s, or maybe to the airport and on to Hong Kong, on to England, making a pit stop at, say, Turkey, Sweden, somewhere completely alien.

  In the end, she decided to go with the bus. Any bus. One that would take her away from this corner of the city that had consumed her entire life. Not so far that she would no longer recognize her surroundings; only far enough that she no longer had to recognize herself.

  On her way to the bus stop, she came across two mailboxes: red for express, green for regular.

  Mayling stopped. Behind her, a group of boys passed by, talking about girls in quacking pubescent voices.

  She took the pantyhose from her purse and unrolled the legs. She folded the hose neatly into a square and slipped them into the slot of the green box. Clasping her bag close, she smoothed the front of her dress and continued on to the bus stop.

  Lin King grew up in Taipei and currently does most of her writing on the New York City subway. A global citizen, she writes about global citizens. She works for the artist Cai Guo-Qiang and is a graduate of Princeton University. See lin-king.net.

  EDITOR’S NOTE

  The editors of The Baltimore Review were drawn to “1983” for its quietly compelling story, the fine and often poetic quality of the writing, and the skillful weaving of a woman’s personal story with details of this time of economic and political strife in Ghana. And what powerful and precise details—from the Harmattan fog and orange stars; to pots filled with boiling water and rocks to convince children their hunger will be satisfied; to Ghana-Must-Go bags; to a family curse; to a mother and daughter who are strangers to each other, and the only sound in the room a spoon grating against an earthenware pot.

  The story mixes the ordinary stuff of life with mysteries, grittiness with magic. After the final page, we can’t know with any certainty what the future holds for these women, but we can’t help hoping for reconciliation and a better life for them. I think it takes considerable talent for a writer to do so much in a short story, and I look forward to reading more stories by Elinam Agbo in the future.

  Barbara Westwood Diehl, senior editor

  The Baltimore Review

  1983

  Elinam Agbo

  IF NOT FOR the white Harmattan fog and the orange stars hovering over my eyes, I would have recognized Efua Agbezuge on the gravel road. Instead I squinted at the undulating shape, a dark vertical line with a glow, a full-body halo. It was a thirsty morning in December. Around the shimmering figure, hibiscus petals fell like slabs of shriveled flesh. The spiny remains of a rosebush snarled at anyone who passed it. No roosters crowed.

  I was returning from a pond deep in the woods, where I occasionally found fish. I had not had any success in days and was wondering if I would need to try even earlier tomorrow. The sky turned from indigo to tangerine during my trek home, and daylight shone on my soiled hands and feet. I saw Efua—or rather, the shape of her—when I looked up from scraping the mud off my sandals. I immediately thought her a spirit and veered my wheelbarrow through a forgotten farm to avoid the encounter, trampling over cornhusks and cassava sticks. I was too disappointed to be haunted by an angel, too weak and empty to be bothered by a ghost.

  I arrived at my doorstep to find items that had not been there earlier: a traveler’s Ghana-Must-Go bag, a newspaper-wrapped tuber of yam, a small sack of gari. They looked so purposefully placed, leaning casually against the cracked clay of my hut. I had done nothing to deserve them—and yet there they were, at least two different kinds of food. I told myself it was another vision, induced by my hunger, fueled by false hope. What if my mind had conjured food in place of what may have been a bundle of snakes? There was no one around to tell me the truth, so I did not dare touch a thing. Either Tasi Mary had returned from Lagos, or my time was near.

  THE YEAR WAS 1983 and no clocks struck anything except the hour of exile. Nigeria had begun its purge of our people—illegal immigrants, they were calling the Ghanaians seeking asylum from economic and political strife. The radio at Chief Ega’s house wouldn’t stop chattering about the millions congesting border checkpoints. Soon the returning exiles flooded the cities, crowding streets and diminishing resources. Food stores were drained as demand exceeded supply. Those of us who lived off the land were fine until the rains stopped and then the land rejected us too.

  Here at home, the northeasterly wind blew dust in our faces. Neighbors visited less frequently. Probably because they couldn’t stand one another’s groaning. Some preferred to bide their time indoors—waiting for the arrival of rain or death, whichever came first. Others like Chief Ega, our resident rich man, seemed to have evaporated into the air. He had left no evidence as to where he had been or where he was going. Even the diligent kerosene boy was nowhere to be seen, leaving us to resort to lighting fire with dried palm chaff and twigs, the way we did before kerosene.

  Rolling my empty wheelbarrow through our abandoned market, I could not help but reflect on how lonely the village roads had grown as burial grounds were prepared for the dying. No drums were pulled out for the dead. Rocks clanged in blackened pots, boiled all day to keep hungry children expectant until their eyes closed from fatigue. The last playful child I’d seen had stumbled on one of these pots, knocking it over and discovering his parents’ ruse. I remember how abruptly his giggling had transformed into wailing, the pain of his burns inseparable from that of wretched disappointment.

  Now even wailing required too much energy. Now those children who could still crawl out of their rooms went to Ane Afi, my grandmother, for her Anansi retellings, for tales she wove as deftly as the trickster-spider-man wove his webs. Before each story, the old woman would instruct her audience to break open dried palm kernels with rocks so they could ease their empty stomachs. I marveled at the strength in Ane’s voice, how it carried, especially from a body surviving on koko with palm kernels in the morning and palm wine in the evening. As if porridge, nuts, and wine were enough to sustain her brittle bones. When I asked for her secret, she claimed to have experience with famines with the same air she claimed to have experience with storytelling.

  As I reached the jacaranda tree in Chief Ega’s compound, Tasi Mary’s name escaped my cracked lips. I had been waiting for my aunt since news had reached me that her letters were lost in transit. There was nothing I could do but wait. Few lorries left the closest station and fewer arrived. We hadn’t
seen a new face in months. No merchants or cowherds. Ane Afi kept asking about the shepherd boys from neighboring villages whenever she craved meat.

  I spent my days strolling through the village grounds and nearby forests, collecting palm kernels to deliver to Ane and searching for streams or ponds, because where there was water, there could be fish. On my way back, I would stop at Chief Ega’s veranda, where he had left his wireless radio. I would replace the batteries when they ran out. I needed a reminder that there were still communities alive in the world.

  Unfortunately, Chief’s radio was stuck on one station, replaying the same news, but I listened to the crackling noise when the village lost its music. Also the radio of my mind was broken, on repeat, like the chorus of a song: Tasi Mary is not coming back. I had returned for Tasi Mary, but Tasi Mary would not return for me.

  I needed something to break the loop.

  “WHAT ARE YOU doing, Adzo?” my grandmother called. The resurrection of my day name broke through the sour song.

  “I’m just sitting, Ane.”

  “Just sitting or inviting spirits into that head of yours?”

  “I’m waiting for Chief,” I lied.

  Chief Ega was not really my older brother’s name. I told myself the hunger had taken any memory of his given name so my inner jester could invent a nickname. (Ega I formed from ga, “money”). He had come to his wealth quite surreptitiously, from a bargain with an unnamed merchant in the Ashanti Region. Though I wondered: what if his road to affluence only seemed surreptitious to me?

  “Oh, you didn’t hear?” Ane said. “Your brother has abandoned us-oh.”

  From the glint in her eye, I knew Ane did not really mean her words, that she was aware of her grandson’s whereabouts and did not feel at liberty to disclose it. She had always been our best secret-holder.