The O. Henry Prize Stories 2005

by Laura Furman

“Which one do you want?”

  I pointed to the dark one, the one with a pink swirl. She took it from its wrapper and handed it to me.

  “Try it.”

  I did. It was filled with a caramel crème that dripped on my chin. I smiled. So did Rita. She wiped my chin with her thumb. She took a nutty one out of the box and popped it in her mouth all at once. I heard it crunch. She gave me another, then another.

  “It's a shame,” she said, smiling, “that your mother doesn’t let you eat these things. She shouldn’t deprive her child. But she's a child herself, your mother.” Rita took a chocolate between her fingers and stared at it. “She's too young up here,” she pointed to her head, “to appreciate these things, but you aren’t, are you? No, you aren’t.”

  I felt Rita was trying to say that she and I were alike, and I felt flattered by this. Rita seemed different than the other hired help—more elegant somehow, more ambitious. As a girl I was fascinated by her ambition because I could not see the viciousness in it, or how useless and sad it was for a person in her position to even harbor it.

  By the end of the afternoon we had finished the whole box of candies. Rita lay on her bed while I sat beside her, one leg up on the mattress, the other dangling above the floor. We made an appointment to go for a walk the next morning, together, during low tide. We would leave early so no one would even know we were gone. Rita liked to take walks along the beach in the mornings when the rocks and tide pools were exposed. I knew she took these walks because I had often spied her leaving in the mornings, silently closing the screen door and heading out to the beach without shoes on.

  We took our secret walk the day before Rita died. She and I came back to the house giggling and whispering. The sun was out by then and we heard sounds in the kitchen. We had planned on separating; Rita would go in through the back door as usual and I would sneak in through the front. But just as we were about to part, we heard the back door open and my mother came out of the kitchen. She held a dishrag in her hand. Raimunda stared from the doorway with a concerned look on her face. My mother did not say a word. I thought she was going to slap me, but instead she hit Rita square across the face, then dragged me by the arm up to my room. I looked back and saw Rita holding her cheek in her hands.

  I was confined to my room all day. I did not know what I had done wrong. I could only hear the murmurs of my parents’ yells from my room. I was not allowed to have lunch. I felt feverish. I wept until I fell asleep. I woke up again and it was dark outside. I crept downstairs to try to sneak into the kitchen for some food, and saw that the lights were on in my fathers study.

  He was sitting at his desk and looking out the window, and I could not tell if he was staring out at the darkness on the other side of the glass, or at his own reflection. Then he saw me in the doorway.

  “Tough day, wasn’t it Lúcia?” he asked, smiling slightly. He looked tired and old.

  “Yes,” I replied.

  He invited me in. Then he did something he had never done before— he searched his bookshelf and handed me a copy of Robinson Crusoe. We were never allowed to touch my father's books. Their different-colored leather bindings and illegible writing—most were written in German— fascinated me. My father had studied electrical engineering in Germany before the war, and had even worked in America, in New York City, until he was called back when Grandfather Chico died. I’ve always wondered what it must have been like for him—to have seen so many exotic places and then to come back here, to Recife, at a time when even simple electricity was a novelty to everyone but him.

  He spoke very little about those sorts of things. It was only when he was older, in his late seventies, that he spoke about his time in Germany. I was the only one in my family who still visited him at that time, so I got to hear his stories. He had left my mother, had moved out of our family home and began living with a young black manicurist in a rough part of town. She was my age at the time, in her thirties, and I remember she liked to kiss him on the top of his bald head and this bothered me.

  “You should read this, Lúcia,” my father said that night in his study as he kneeled next to me. The chair I sat in was made of mahogany and was so tall my twelve-year-old legs could not touch the ground. “It's very good,” he said. “It's about a man who is all by himself in the world,” and he went on to tell me the entire story as I turned the book around in my hands.

  I went to bed with the book under my arm and did not wake up until morning, when the first light started to peek through my windows and I heard the screen door slam and knew it was Rita.

  Rita's body was almost dried off, but the water was lapping over her ankles. A smell, like bad breath, came from her. I stared at Rita's clean face. I had woken up that morning, my father's book in my arms, and had heard Rita leaving for her walk. A cluster of seaweed washed up near my feet. It was bright green with little seed balls that were the size of pearls. I popped these pearls between my thumb and forefinger, then looked at Rita's outstretched arm. I took the strand of seaweed and made a bracelet for Rita, tying it loosely to her stiff wrist. I searched for another strand and made her a necklace. Then I combed her hair with my fingers and made her a crown.

  As I arranged her hair I heard a siren and knew that the Recife Civil Police had finally arrived. They pulled onto the sand in a green jeep accompanied by an old station wagon ambulance whose lights and siren were broken. Everyone remembered the body then, and came out of their homes. My cousins stopped their football game, my brothers forgot their forts. My uncle Paulo and my father spoke with the officers—two short men in green military uniforms—while two paramedics told me to move aside as they checked Rita for any signs of life. My father explained that we had found her that way, already stiff, brought in by the tide. The men in green were silent. Then I saw my uncle slip both of them fifty cruzeiros, “to avoid any confusion.” The men in green nodded and said it was awful, how many accidental drownings there were this time of year on the beaches.

  The paramedics brought over a stretcher. They lifted Rita by her shoulders and feet and plopped her on it. One medic laughed and mockingly shook Rita's outstretched hand.

  “This happens every time,” they said to my uncle. “After a while the bodies get stiff. You wouldn’t believe the positions we find some of them in! We’ll have to break her arm to get it down.”

  “Be careful not to cut your feet!” Rita had said during our secret walk.

  We picked up starfish and Rita explained how they could lose an arm and grow it back. She giggled when she almost slipped on a rock covered with moss. We crouched over a tide pool and she pointed out the pink sea anemones, their tentacles swaying in the water. We saw black-spiked sea urchins and small fish flutter and hide under bands of seaweed. Then, Rita told me to be very still and we closed our eyes and listened to the ocean gurgle as it trickled into and out of the tide pools.

  “You’re growing up, Lúcia,” she said softly, looking into the water.

  I nodded.

  “Things will happen to you soon… changes… do you know what I mean?”

  I did. I knew because I had seen my aunt Gilmara, who liked to lie nude in her hammock on hot afternoons with only a small sheet covering her. Some afternoons the sheet shifted and I caught glimpses of her grown woman's body.

  I knew why my mother got sick once a month and stayed in bed all day with the door locked. The doctor who treated her had seen me once, listening outside of her door, and he told me the story of Eve and the Serpent and said that one day I too would get sick each month, and one day I too would feel the pain of bearing a child.

  “It is part of growing up,” he had said, “and with it comes responsibility.”

  I knew all of these things awaited me, but I told Rita that I didn’t. I let her talk, let her hold my hand and tell me, as we sat by the tide pool, how I would grow and change.

  Rita did not know that her body would wash up on the beach the next day, bloated and foul-smelling. She did not know that at the end
of the summer I would be sent away to boarding school. And she would never know that I would not develop… not get a period or breasts or pubic hair… until I was eighteen years old because, the doctors said, of a hor- monal abnormality. Rita would never know that I only learned my retarded development was a serious problem through the whispers and hushed conversations of my aunts, and that my mother had to smuggle me in to see a women's doctor because my father had strictly forbidden it. Rita would never see me grow up lanky and quiet, stuck in my little girl's body without knowing why. And she would never know that in the years after her death we stayed at the beach house less and less, until we stopped going there altogether.

  But I didn’t know most of these things either, that summer, when they took my friend away on a stretcher, her seaweed bracelet bobbing on her stiff arm, making her look as if she were waving good-bye.

  Tessa Hadley

  The Card Trick

  from The New Yorker

  IT WAS 1974: not a good year, clothes-wise, if you were an eighteen-year-old girl, tall and overweight, with thick, curling hair and glasses. Gina liked best to wear a duffel coat, underneath which she imagined she hid herself. But this was summer, and she was on holiday, and she’d had reluctantly to leave the duffel coat at home. The fashion was for smocks and long skirts with deep frills and cotton prints, so she mostly wore a Laura Ashley dress in a blue sprigged cotton that was meant to look as if it had been faded by long-ago haymaking in meadows of wildflowers; its buttons gaped open across her bust and it was tight around her hips and its effect on her, she was quite sure, was not rustic but hulking and vaguely penitentiary. Sometimes as she walked, bitter tears stung her eyes at the idea of the sheer affront of her ugliness forcing itself upon the successive layers of the air. At other times, she was more hopeful.

  Today, at least, the sun was not shining. When it shone—and it had shone every day since she arrived—it made things worse; it seemed such an insult to nature and beauty not to want to peel off all one's clothes and run around on the beach, not to be happy. But now the sky was a consoling soft gray, which dissolved from time to time into warm rain, and everybody was more or less muffled under raincoats and umbrellas. Because it was raining, Mamie had driven inland with Gina from the house on the coast, to visit Wing Lodge.

  Mamie was her mothers friend, and Gina was staying with her and her family for a fortnight; although to call her a friend did not quite explain the relationship, since Mamie was also a client, for whom Gina's mother made clothes. Mamie was small and very pretty, with sloping shoulders and ash-blond hair and a face that was always screwing up with laughter. Her tan was the kind you can get only in the South of France. (She had a house there, too.) Her clothes seemed effortless—today, for example, a Liberty print blouse under a cream linen pinafore—but Gina had seen some of these things in the making and knew how much effort actually went into them: the serious scrutiny of pinned-up hemlines in front of the mirror, Mamie bringing things back ruefully, apologetically, after a week or two, with a nagging suspicion that a sleeve had been set in too high, or an inspiration that the seams would look wonderful with two rows of overstitching.

  She was being very kind—very encouraging—to Gina. She had not made any mention of the Laura Ashley dress or of the barrette that had seemed an appealing idea when Gina brushed her hair that morning but was now bobbing against her cheek in a way that suggested it had slid to an altogether wrong and ridiculous place.

  They stopped off on their way to Wing Lodge at a tearoom by the side of the country road; they were the only customers in a small room crowded with unbalanced little chairs and glass-topped wicker tables, smelling of damp and cake.

  It’ll probably be instant coffee, Mamie whispered with conspiratorial amusement. (Gina only ever had instant at home.) But I don’t care. Do you? Or we could always risk the tea. And you’ve got to have a Danish pastry or something, to keep you going.

  Complicatedly, Mamie was making reference to the fact that Gina clearly oughtn’t to be eating pastries of any kind; but her diet, which was perpetual during this period of her life, alternating drearily between punishing obedience and frantic transgression, had been thrown into such chaos since she’d been staying at Mamie’s—on the one hand, she was too shy to refuse the food that was pressed upon her; on the other, she didn’t dare to raid the fridge or the cupboards in between meals—that she didn’t even know whether she was being good or not. She took advantage of the lack of clarity to agree to the pastry.

  Gina had just had her A-level results—three As—and she was prepar- ing for her Cambridge entrance examinations in November. Mamie professed an exaggerated awe of her cleverness.

  You really make me so ashamed, she said, when she had finished charming the gray-haired waitress and giving very exact instructions as to how she liked her tea (“pathetically weak, no milk, just pour it the very instant the waters on the leaves, I’m so sorry to be such a frightful nuisance”). We’re such duffers in my family. We’ve hardly got an O level between us— and that's after spending an absolute fortune on the children's education. Josh simply refused to go back to Bedales to do retakes. Becky left the day she was sixteen. She never even sat any exams. How I’d love for one of them to have your brains.

  I’m not that special, Gina lied, her voice muffled through damp pastry flakes.

  Somewhere in the deepest recesses of herself, Gina pitied Mamie and her children, precisely along the lines that Mamie suggested. The children— three older boys and a girl Gina's age—certainly weren’t clever in the way she was. She’d never seen them reading a book; they hadn’t known the other day at breakfast who Walter Gropius was; and she was sure that they were sublimely ignorant about all the things that seemed to her ultimately to matter in the world: literature and painting and the history of ideas. But that arrogant intellectual reflex felt so remotely subterranean as to be almost inconsequential, compared with her willingness to acknowledge every advantage that Becky and Josh and Tom and Gabriel had on the surface in the here and now, in honor and envy of which she was horribly ready to abase herself. And Mamie was surely disingenuous in her praise of Gina's brains. She was just being kind. She wouldn’t have exchanged brains, really, for the easy personable charm that all her children had, not if it meant that they’d have awkward bodies and thick glasses.

  And, even if they weren’t clever, Mamie's children didn’t actually say stupid things, as Gina did, tongue-tied with bookish awkwardness. On the contrary, they were funny and chatty and informed about practical matters. They confessed to being indifferent to politics but were sincerely charming and generous with the woman who came to clean and cook and iron for them every day, whereas Gina didn’t know how to talk to her. And then they were masters of arts that Gina knew she would never be competent in, no matter how hard she tried: tennis, for example, and motorcycling, and snorkeling. She couldn’t even ride a push-bike.

  Gabriel, the oldest, had a darkroom and developed his own photographs; Becky posed for him, unembarrassedly arranging her face to look its best whenever called upon. If Gabriel turned the camera on Gina, she swiveled away, protesting and sulking, so he soon stopped trying. The house was filled with vivid black-and-white pictures, in which the lives of this family seemed poignant and enchanting, even beyond what you could grasp in ordinary everyday contact with them. Gina studied the photographs with the same yearning she felt over the fashion pictures in magazines: trying to understand how one might possess oneself with such certainty, and know so confidently how to live.

  They were all beautiful. Gabriel and Becky looked like Mamie, small with pretty faces, turned-up noses, and huge eyes. The others looked like their father, who was in the South of France with friends. (A separation that seemed to Gina, whose parents did everything together, both strange and significant: her mother had hinted, out of confidences accorded while she was crawling around a hemline with her mouth full of pins, that all was not well in Mamie's marriage. Still, Dickie's absence was a grea
t relief. Gina had seen him only once or twice, when he came to pick up Mamie after a fitting, but it had been enough to know that he was terrifying, tall and tanned and savagely impatient.) Tom and Josh—Josh was the nearest boy to Gina in age—were tall, with slim long bodies, fine skin taut over light strong bones, sensitive-knuckled hands and feet. She had got used to their near-nakedness on the beach in swimming trunks, or bare-chested in cutoff jeans. It was 1974: they wore their sun-bleached hair long, and they walked barefoot everywhere.

  The spare bedroom Gina was staying in was on the ground floor of the house, and it opened onto the hall, whose dark parquet was always dusted with a layer of fine sand blown in from the beach. She spent a lot of time in her room—“working,” she told them—and sometimes, when she peeped out of her door to see if the coast was clear to visit the bathroom, she saw the prints of the boys’ bare feet in the sand, crossing the hall to the kitchen or the stairs. For some reason, this moved her, and her heart clenched in an excitement more breathlessly sexual than if she’d seen the boys themselves.

  The visit to Wing Lodge had been part of the pretext for Gina's coming to visit Mamie in the first place. It was the house where John Morrison, her favorite novelist, had lived, and she had desperately wanted to make a pil- grimage there; but she was beginning to wish that she could have come on her own. She was burdened by her sense of Mamies kindness: Mamie had clearly never read any of Morrison's books, and she could have no good reason, surely, to want to see his house. Gina worried over the things that Mamie would probably rather have done, and in more congenial company.

  But when they arrived in the little town and found the house on one of its oldest streets, behind the church, a more complex unease began to dawn on Gina. Wing Lodge stood back behind a walled front garden, which even in the rain was very lovely: pale roses bowed and dripping with water, a crumbling sundial, a path of old paving stones set into the grass, leading to a bench under a gnarled apple tree.