BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE
BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE
STORIES BY MONICA MCFAWN
© 2014 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
McFawn, Monica.
[Short stories. Selections]
Bright shards of someplace else : stories / by Monica McFawn.
pages cm. — (Flannery O’Connor award for short fiction)
ISBN-13: 978-0-8203-4687-8 (hardback : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-8203-4687-x (hardback : alk. paper)
1. Short stories, American. I. Title.
PS3613.C4397B75 2014
813'.6—dc23
2013049714
ISBN for digital edition: 978-0-8203-4776-9
British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data available
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Out of the Mouths of Babes
Dead Horse Productions
Key Phrases
Elegantly, in the Least Number of Steps
A Country Woman
Line of Questioning
Improvisation
The Slide Turned on End
Ornament and Crime
Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge
The Chautauqua Sessions
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Thank you to the journals that first published this work, occasionally in slightly different form: “Out of the Mouths of Babes,” Georgia Review; “Dead Horse Productions,” Gargoyle; “Elegantly, in the Least Number of Steps,” Confrontation; “Improvisation,” Hotel Amerika; “The Slide Turned on End,” Web Conjunctions; “Ornament and Crime,” American Short Fiction; “Line of Questioning,” Gettysburg Review; “Snippet and the Rainbow Bridge,” Bellingham Review; “The Chautauqua Sessions,” Missouri Review; and “A Country Woman,” Passages North. Thank you to all these journals and editors for their support. I also want to thank all the literary journals over the years that have declined my work with a complimentary note. These near misses were highly encouraging, and I appreciate the editors and readers who took the time to write to me.
I’ve also appreciated the good counsel and support of several people. I want to thank Anthony Doerr for his early insight and support of my short fiction and Christopher Stephens for his brilliance and antagonism—our aesthetic arguments have been a long-term fuel for my writing. I’m grateful to the Finnish Writing Group (Caitlin Horrocks, Beth Staples, Robby Taylor, Ben Drevlow, and Liz Weld) for their suggestions on several of these pieces. Both your comments and the fine examples of your own writing spurred me to make these stories better versions of themselves. I want to thank series editor Nancy Zafris for her insights, encouragement, and above-and-beyond advocacy for the work in this collection. I also appreciate the University of Georgia Press’s care in creating a beautiful finished product.
I also want acknowledge those people and beings in my life who helped this book in a more indirect way. I’m indebted to my family for teaching me to see the value in whimsy and subversion. Thank you to all the horsewomen I’ve known who’ve shown me how to care passionately for something esoteric and impractical. And thank you to my two horses—Shamus Fancy and GG Eragon—who have taught me how to trust myself in the act of trusting them. And thanks to Bob Marsh, for showing me, through his stellar example, how to live as an artist.
BRIGHT SHARDS OF SOMEPLACE ELSE
OUT OF THE MOUTHS OF BABES
He was nine years old. He had eczema. He scored very high on all tests that measured verbal ability. Some teachers mistook his brilliance for a smart mouth. Flossing was a point of contention, sometimes. He had a special diet—be sure to follow the special diet. He was different. A different child.
Grace had learned all this about the boy, Andy, in the first few moments of setting foot inside the Henderson household. Much could be made of the order in which the mother listed the boy’s traits. He was a young rash, an articulate and bratty rash, a high-maintenance and oh-so-special rash. Grace nodded as if everything the mother was saying was perfectly logical and expected. The boy sat across from her, playing a hand-held video game and sucking from a silver juice bladder. He pulled the straw from the juice and used it to scratch his head, then put it back.
“What was that again?”
“I said, keep him off the phone. He doesn’t need to be on the phone today.”
The mother gathered up her bags, turned to her son, and smiled. Grace would see a usual range of looks from parents during this moment: the clingy ones would blink all misty-eyed; the ragged ones would flash a guilty smile, ashamed at their own relief; the boastful parents would give a kind of wink, imagining all the ways the nanny would soon be dazzled. But when this mother met her boy’s eyes, she visibly shrank in her suit as if caught in a compromising moment. The boy looked up from his game and gave his mother a tight smile—the thin courtesy a person gives a beggar who is thanking him too profusely.
The silver car backed out of the driveway, the late-afternoon light flashing off its hood. The boy shielded the game screen with his hand and kept on playing. Grace watched him for a moment. He was sandy haired, with a high rosiness on his cheeks that looked like misapplied blush. His irises, under a frill of tufted lashes, were dappled gray-green like Spanish moss shot through with sun. She considered greeting him, or hunkering down next to him and asking about his game, but thought better of it. She hated the awkward joviality that always marked the first one-on-one discussion with a child, so lately she had skipped it altogether. She had all evening with the boy—the mother would be out late on a catering job—so there was no need to hurry things along.
She began her tour. The mother had shown her around the house—here’s the pantry, here’s the laundry, be careful about this lock, it needs a hard turn, hold down the handle for a second or two to flush—but she always made her own circuit when the parents left. She enjoyed seeing how people arranged their things, found a comfort in the contents of other people’s medicine cabinets—those little curios of weakness and disease; she liked noticing the things that had been done for her first-day benefit (toys stuffed under the bed, fanned magazines on the coffee table, fresh soap in the dish) and the things that had gone undone (the rusty sink drains, dirty panties at the top of the laundry pile). She popped her head in the master bath, ran her hands over the couple’s bed, then stepped into the boy’s room and looked around. The twin bed was neatly made, and books rather than toys filled the shelves. The only concession to whimsy was a stylized bear painted on the wall, its paw in an abstract-expressionist honey pot composed with loose strokes.
The boy was an only child, it appeared. The third bedroom was used as a study, full of dark shelves and dressers. She particularly liked going through drawers. Funny that it was a pleasure, she thought, as she pulled the small brass knocker on the first set of drawers. As a child she had found troubling things: a note from her father to a mistress (“I want to dwell in the minute I first see you”), a bizarre letter that her mother had been long drafting to her own father, the handwriting and mood changing over the course of six pages. When
she held these unhappy documents in her hands, the aired secrets seemed to make the silent room buzz. Mostly, though, she found nothing of interest, either in her childhood home or the homes of strangers. The act of opening drawers soothed her in ways she couldn’t place. She wasn’t looking for scandal or valuables; she just liked looking.
The first drawer was filled with pens and office supplies, the second with tax documents and receipts, the third with framed photographs that had made their way out of rotation. One was of the boy, perhaps three years old, pulling a toy wooden boat through a greasy puddle. He regarded the camera with an aggressive look of inquiry, like a professor about to put a difficult question to an unprepared class. With his free hand he pointed to an appliquéd patchwork turtle on the front of his sweatshirt, as if it were a visual for the coming lecture. She was about to reach for another frame when she heard a man’s voice from downstairs. Startled, she shoved the picture back in the drawer and stood up. Was it a delivery man? Had the boy let him in?
As she walked down the stairs, she began to make out what was being said. “Mmmm … I see. But what if we have wood termites? You’d just leave and treat them on a second visit?” When she entered the living room, she was surprised to see only the boy: he was on the phone and the voice was coming from him. His back was turned to her and she stopped to listen. “That doesn’t work. What if they multiply in between the two visits? Then you’ll get more money than if you treated for them the first time through.”
The boy, when she listened more closely, didn’t sound like a man, exactly. His words began with an eager high chirp and a fuzzy pronunciation, like those of most children, but the ends of his phrases were crisp, even brittle. Within a single sentence he ran through the vocal life cycle, sounding like both a babbling toddler and an old man with the bass thinned out from his tone. The person on the other end of the line would have a hard time suspecting his age, not in the least because of his apparent penchant for hard bargaining. “No, I need all the vermin taken care of in one go. I have in my hand a coupon from your competitor—Riddit—and it says here that they’ll …” The boy was getting more and more excited. She could see him bounce on the couch as he read out the coupon in a ringing, triumphant voice. “Okay, then. I look forward to getting the manager’s call.” He hung up the phone and caught sight of her.
“Have a vermin problem?” she asked, seating herself in the love-seat across from him. He looked like any other kid in the face, obstinacy mixed up with vulnerability.
“I don’t know if we do. But I want to find the best deal just in case. I like to practice.”
“Practice what?”
“Negotiating.” He pronounced each syllable of the large word and smiled at the sound of it.
“Did your mother ask you to find a deal on an exterminator?”
“No. But that doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter if I talk to salespeople; they’re paid to talk.” The mention of his mother seemed to put them on bad footing. Grace leaned back in the loveseat and sighed. An easily affronted child—the smarter ones always were. She decided she wouldn’t say a thing more. Let him wonder if she was going to tattle on him to his mom. She was thirsty, anyhow. She pulled herself up and wandered into the dining room, soon finding herself in front of a large, gleaming liquor cabinet under a sideboard. There were all kinds of fancy snifters, highball glasses, cut crystal servers and decanters, but she made up her drink—vodka on the rocks—in an orange Tupperware cup. She had lately taken to having her first earlier and earlier, since otherwise she’d spend too much of the evening planning and wondering about the best time to make it. To have the drink in her hand, she thought, was to banish it from her mind. She took a long draw and refilled the cup—to save a return trip—and went back in to check on the boy.
He stared at the phone and she stared at him.
“The manager,” the boy finally said. “He was supposed to call right back.”
Andy was wearing a shirt with a clutch of tiger cubs screen-printed on the front, and he kept pulling it down as if it were riding up. His mouth was smeared red from a rash or the juice, and his bangs covered one eye. They both looked at the phone for a few moments before Grace spoke up.
“You know, if you want to negotiate on the phone, I’ve got something better for you than an exterminator.”
“What? Are you going to trick me into calling my mom or some special kids’ therapy hotline?”
Grace chuckled. She liked how he already knew the games a grownup might play. “No, no. I don’t see anything wrong with you talking on the phone. I was impressed with what I overheard. How would you like to make an even tougher call?”
The boy nodded, wide-eyed, as if shocked at being indulged.
“Just give me one second. Let me give you the information you need.”
Grace walked to the foyer and dug her cellphone bill out of her purse. With all that was going on, she hadn’t had a chance to get those overage charges removed. She hated making such calls and always fell for the representative’s tricks and runarounds, buying new products and features and even thanking those perky voices, when she hung up, for screwing her over. Let the boy wander into that maze of automated voices, menu options, on-hold music. He could defend her money from the call-center monster; it would be like one of his little video games. If nothing else, the call would keep him busy for at least an hour or so, leaving her free to call Greg and see what new dirt he’d dug up on Susan.
The foyer adjoined the dining room, so she swung off, refreshed her drink, and reentered the living room from the other side.
“Alright, Andy. Here’s my bill. Here’s my customer code. The last four digits of my social security number are 7419.” She sat down on the couch by him and laid out the documents as if they were a board game. “They’re going to ask you for all that. Then they’ll ask you how they can help. Here’s where you need to be sharp. You’re going to ask them to take these charges off.” She pointed to a line of numbers. The boy was transfixed and seemed to be holding his breath. He stared at the bill the way most boys his age would stare at pile of Legos, perhaps imagining all the configurations the call might take. Grace noticed his ears were bent down at the tips, as though he had not yet unfolded from the womb. There was no way he would get past the main menu, she thought.
Harmless fun. Still, she explained why the charges weren’t fair, and for good measure let him in on some further injustices in her own grownup world. “I have to call a lot of lawyers. They charge me just for talking to them on the phone, and then the phone company charges me, too! Can you believe it?” She laughed.
“Are you in legal trouble?” The boy looked at her. His face was bland and rosy like any little kid’s, but his eyes actually reminded her of her lawyer, J. T. Hillman, Esq.—the same sharp look, the pinprick of a pupil that would pop any of your bullshit before it even formed in your head. She’d have to be straight with the boy.
“We’ll get to that. Are you ready to call now, or do you need some review time?”
In answer, he dialed. For a while they were both silent. She could hear the hold music muffled by the child’s ear. He let out a deep breath and squeezed his eyes shut, but then his face softened and took on a meditative look. He pressed a few buttons with great precision and a bit of flourish, like a pianist. Grace watched him and sipped her drink.
This wasn’t nice, what she was doing. He would get frustrated. He might tell his mother. No, he wouldn’t do that; she had enough leverage with the exterminator call. They had achieved that equilibrium where she had something on him and he something on her.
“I have a problem with some charges on my bill,” he began. His voice rang out with a compelling combo of childish eagerness and unmistakably adult impatience. Grace tensed up. Suddenly, she didn’t want to be there to witness the eroding of his innocent confidence. She stood up, wandered into the dining room, and checked her voice-mail. Greg had left a message. After he got through baby-talking to her, she heard what he ha
d found out about her sister:
“Baby, I dug through everything. She is as clean as a whistle. A plowed snowdrift—nothing like her sis. Anyway, I stayed up all night and finally found, in the expunged crime record of Henry County, a charge for misdemeanor embezzling. She stole from Girl Scouts. Does that ring a bell?”
Grace shut the phone and topped off her drink. So that’s all he found. Her sister Susan, four years her junior, was suing her for about ten grand, money that their mother had not left to Susan, who contended that their mother had not been lucid when she drew up the version of the will that favored Grace, and that Grace had manipulated their mother into excising Susan from the will. This was all true; Grace had done just that. Her mother had thought, in her addled state, that the newly drawn-up will was a petition for freeing the whales from Sea World.
But Grace and Susan had been feuding so long that everything could be framed as a justifiable retaliation. Their bad blood predated everything. Susan stole her boyfriends, turned relatives against her, tried to get her involuntarily committed. Grace had come back with restraining orders, countersuits, and most recently had hired a private investigator to find dirt. She was disappointed with Greg’s find. He was no better an investigator than he was a lover, apparently. Still, the private Catholic girls’ school Susan worked at might be troubled by the Girl Scout thing. She stirred her drink and began rehearsing, under her breath, what she might say on Susan’s voicemail. “St. Victoria’s might be interested to learn that their 2000 Administrator of the Year awardee hasn’t always been so upstanding …” Ugh. Thin gruel. It would take more than that to rattle Sue.
The boy was—remarkably—still on the phone when Grace returned. He was scribbling on her bill and his expression was that of Renaissance cherub. He beamed and chuckled into the receiver. She could hear a woman’s warm voice trilling a laugh. “I’m so glad we had this talk,” the boy said, convincingly earnest, chewing on the pen cap. His lacy eyelashes quivered, and he rubbed the underside of his nose with his index finger, playing his nostrils like a fiddle. “Bye now.” He set the phone on its charger so softly it didn’t make a click, then pulled up his empty juice box and did a staccato slurp on the straw.
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