The Best of the Best, Volume 1

by Gardner Dozois

  “Look,” he said. “You can even buy the dress.”

  Kwan shook her head in amazement. Then a voice said the price and Kwan gasped again. “Oh, yes, all I have to do is sell one of our four farms, and I can have a dress like that.”

  “I saw all that two years ago,” said Mae. “It is too plain for the likes of us. We want people to see everything.”

  Kwan’s face went sad. “That is because we are poor, back in the hills.” It was the common yearning, the common forlorn knowledge. Sometimes it had to cease, all the business-making, you had to draw a breath, because after all, you had known your people for as long as you had lived.

  Mae said, “None of them are as beautiful as you are, Kwan.” It was true, except for her teeth.

  “Flattery talk from a fashion expert,” said Kwan lightly. But she took Mae’s hand. Her eyes yearned up at the screen, as secret after secret was spilled like blood.

  “With all this in our heads,” said Kwan to her husband. “We won’t need your TV.”

  It was a busy week.

  It was not only the six dresses. For some reason, there was much extra business.

  On Wednesday, Mae had a discreet morning call to make on Tsang Muhammad. She liked Tsang, she was like a peach that was overripe, round and soft to the touch and very slightly wrinkled. Tsang loved to lie back and be pampered, but only did it when she had an assignation. Everything about Tsang was off-kilter. She was Chinese with a religious Karz husband, who was ten years her senior. He was a Muslim who allowed, or perhaps could not prevent, his Chinese wife from keeping a family pig.

  The family pig was in the front room being fattened. Half of the room was full of old shucks. The beast looked lordly and pleased with itself. Tsang’s four-year-old son sat tamely beside it, feeding it the greener leaves, as if the animal could not find them for itself.

  “Is it all right to talk?” Mae whispered, her eyes going sideways toward the boy.

  Tsang, all plump smiles, nodded very quickly yes.

  “Who is it?” Mae mouthed.

  Tsang simply waggled a finger.

  So it was someone they knew. Mae suspected it was Kwan’s oldest boy, Luk. Luk was sixteen but fully grown, kept in pressed white shirt and shorts like a baby, but the shorts only showed he had hair on his football-player calves. His face was still round and soft and babylike but lately had been full of a new and different confusion.

  “Tsang. Oh!” gasped Mae.

  “Ssssh,” giggled Tsang, who was red as a radish. As if either of them could be certain what the other one meant. “I need a repair job!” So it was someone younger.

  Almost certainly Kwan’s handsome son.

  “Well, they have to be taught by someone,” whispered Mae.

  Tsang simply dissolved into giggles. She could hardly stop laughing.

  “I can do nothing for you. You certainly don’t need redder cheeks,” said Mae.

  Tsang uttered a squawk of laughter.

  “There is nothing like it for a woman’s complexion.” Mae pretended to put away the tools of her trade. “No, I can affect no improvement. Certainly I cannot compete with the effects of a certain young man.”

  “Nothing … nothing,” gasped Tsang. “Nothing like a good prick.”

  Mae howled in mock outrage, and Tsang squealed and both squealed and pressed down their cheeks, and shushed each other. Mae noted exactly which part of the cheeks were blushing so she would know where the color should go later.

  As Mae painted, Tsang explained how she escaped her husband’s view. “I tell him that I have to get fresh garbage for the pig,” whispered Tsang. “So I go out with the empty bucket.…”

  “And come back with a full bucket,” said Mae airily.

  “Oh!” Tsang pretended to hit her. “You are as bad as me!”

  “What do you think I get up to in the City?” asked Mae, arched eyebrow, lying.

  Love, she realized later, walking back down the track and clutching her cloth bag of secrets, love is not mine. She thought of the boy’s naked calves.

  On Thursday, Kwan wanted her teeth to be flossed. This was new; Kwan had never been vain before. This touched Mae, because it meant her friend was getting older. Or was it because she had seen the TV models with their impossible teeth? How were real people supposed to have teeth like that?

  Kwan’s handsome son ducked as he entered, wearing his shorts, showing smooth full thighs, and a secret swelling about his groin. He ducked as he went out again. Guilty, Mae thought. For certain it is him.

  She laid Kwan’s head back over a pillow with a towel under her.

  Should she not warn her friend to keep watch on her son? Which friend should she betray? To herself, she shook her head; there was no possibility of choosing between them. She could only keep silent. “Just say if I hit a nerve,” Mae said.

  Kwan had teeth like an old horse, worn, brown, black. Her gums were scarred from a childhood disease, and her teeth felt loose as Mae rubbed the floss between them. She had a neat little bag into which she flipped each strand after it was used.

  It was Mae’s job to talk: Kwan could not. Mae said she did not know how she would finish the dresses in time. The girls’ mothers were never satisfied, each wanted her daughter to have the best. Well, the richest would have the best in the end because they bought the best cloth. Oh! Some of them had asked to pay for the fabric later! As if Mae could afford to buy cloth for six dresses without being paid!

  “They all think their fashion expert is a woman of wealth.” Mae sometimes found the whole pretense funny. Kwan’s eyes crinkled into a smile. But they were also moist from pain.

  It was hurting. “You should have told me your teeth were sore,” said Mae, and inspected the gums. In the back, they were raw.

  If you were rich, Kwan, you would have good teeth, rich people keep their teeth, and somehow keep them white, not brown. Mae pulled stray hair out of Kwan’s face.

  “I will have to pull some of them,” Mae said quietly. “Not today, but soon.”

  Kwan closed her mouth and swallowed. “I will be an old lady,” she said and managed a smile.

  “A granny with a thumping stick.”

  “Who always hides her mouth when she laughs.”

  Both of them chuckled. “And thick glasses that make your eyes look like a fish.”

  Kwan rested her hand on her friend’s arm. “Do you remember, years ago? We would all get together and make little boats, out of paper, or shells. And we would put candles in them, and send them out on the ditches.”

  “Yes!” Mae sat forward. “We don’t do that anymore.”

  “We don’t wear pillows and a cummerbund anymore either.”

  There had once been a festival of wishes every year, and the canals would be full of little glowing candles, that floated for a while and then sank with a hiss. “We would always wish for love,” said Mae, remembering.

  Next morning. Mae mentioned the candles to her neighbor Old Mrs. Tung. Mae visited her nearly every day. Mrs. Tung had been her teacher, during the flurry of what passed for Mae’s schooling. She was ninety years old, and spent her days turned toward the tiny loft window that looked out over the valley. She was blind, her eyes pale and unfocused. She could see nothing through the window. Perhaps she breathed in the smell of the fields.

  “There you are,” Mrs. Tung would smile underneath the huge spectacles that did so little to improve her vision. She remembered the candles. “And we would roast pumpkin seeds. And the ones we didn’t eat, we would turn into jewelry. Do you remember that?”

  Mrs. Tung was still beautiful, at least in Mae’s eyes. Mrs. Tung’s face had grown even more delicate in extreme old age, like the skeleton of a cat, small and fine. She gave an impression of great merriment, by continually laughing at not very much. She repeated herself.

  “I remember the day you first came to me,” she said. Before Shen’s village school, Mrs. Tung kept a nursery, there in their courtyard. “I thought: is that the girl whose f
ather has been killed? She is so pretty. I remember you looking at all my dresses hanging on the line.”

  “And you asked me which one I liked best.”

  Mrs. Tung giggled. “Oh yes, and you said the butterflies.”

  Blindness meant that she could only see the past.

  “We had tennis courts, you know. Here in Kizuldah.”

  “Did we?” Mae pretended she had not heard that before.

  “Oh yes, oh yes. When the Chinese were here, just before the Communists came. Part of the Chinese army was here, and they built them. We all played tennis, in our school uniforms.”

  The Chinese officers had supplied the tennis rackets. The traces of the courts were broken and grassy, where Mr. Pin now ran his car repair business.

  “Oh! They were all so handsome, all the village girls were so in love.” Mrs. Tung chuckled. “I remember, I couldn’t have been more than ten years old, and one of them adopted me, because he said I looked like his daughter. He sent me a teddy bear after the war.” She chuckled and shook her head. “I was too old for teddy bears by then. But I told everyone it meant we were getting married. Oh!” Mrs. Tung shook her head at foolishness. “I wish I had married him,” she confided, feeling naughty. She always said that.

  Mrs. Tung even now had the power to make Mae feel calm and protected. Mrs. Tung had come from a family of educated people and once had a house full of books. The books had all been lost in a flood many years ago, but Mrs. Tung could still recite to Mae the poems of the Turks, the Karz, the Chinese. She had sat the child Mae on her lap, and rocked her. She could still recite now, the same poems.

  “Listen to the reed flute,” she began now, “How it tells a tale!” Her old blind face swayed with the words, the beginning of The Mathnawi. “This noise of the reed is fire, it is not the wind.”

  Mae yearned. “Oh. I wish I remembered all those poems!” When she saw Mrs. Tung, she could visit the best of her childhood.

  On Friday, Mae saw the Ozdemirs.

  The mother was called Hatijah, and her daughter was Sezen. Hatijah was a shy, flighty little thing, terrified of being overcharged by Mae, and of being underserved. Hatijah’s low, old stone house was tangy with the smells of burning charcoal, sweat, dung, and the constantly stewing tea. From behind the house came a continual, agonized lowing: the family cow, neglected, needed milking. The poor animal’s voice was going raw and harsh. Hatijah seemed not to hear it. She ushered Mae in and fluttered around her, touching the fabric.

  “This is such good fabric,” Hatijah said, too frightened of Mae to challenge her. It was not good fabric, but good fabric cost real money. Hatijah had five children, and a skinny shiftless husband who probably had worms. Half of the main room was heaped up with corn cobs. The youngest of her babes wore only shirts and sat with their dirty naked bottoms on the corn.

  Oh, this was a filthy house. Perhaps Hatijah was a bit simple. She offered Mae roasted corn. Not with your child’s wet shit on it, thought Mae, but managed to be polite. The daughter, Sezen, stomped in barefoot for her fitting. Sezen was a tough, raunchy brute of girl and kept rolling her eyes at everything: at her nervous mother, at Mae’s efforts to make the yellow and red dress hang properly, at anything either one of the adults said.

  “Does … will … on the day …,” Sezen’s mother tried to begin.

  Yes, thought Mae with some bitterness, on the day Sezen will finally have to wash. Sezen’s bare feet were slashed with infected cuts.

  “What my mother means is,” Sezen said. “Will you make up my face Saturday?” Sezen blinked, her unkempt hair making her eyes itch.

  “Yes, of course,” said Mae, curtly to a younger person who was forward.

  “What, with all those other girls on the same day? For someone as lowly as us?”

  The girl’s eyes were angry. Mae pulled in a breath.

  “No one can make you feel inferior without you agreeing with them first,” said Mae. It was something Old Mrs. Tung had once told Mae when she herself was poor, hungry, and famished for magic.

  “Take off the dress,” Mae said. “I’ll have to take it back for finishing.”

  Sezen stepped out of it, right there, naked on the dirt floor. Hatijah did not chastise her, but offered Mae tea. Because she had refused the corn, Mae had to accept the tea. At least that would be boiled.

  Hatijah scuttled off to the black kettle and her daughter leaned back in full insolence, her supposedly virgin pubes plucked as bare as the baby’s bottom.

  Mae fussed with the dress, folding it, so she would have somewhere else to look. The daughter just stared. Mae could take no more. “Do you want people to see you? Go put something on!”

  “I don’t have anything else,” said Sezen.

  Her other sisters had gone shopping in the town for graduation gifts. They would have taken all the family’s good dresses.

  “You mean you have nothing else you will deign to put on.” Mae glanced at Hatijah: she really should not be having to do this woman’s work for her. “You have other clothes, old clothes. Put them on.”

  The girl stared at her in even greater insolence.

  Mae lost her temper. “I do not work for pigs. You have paid nothing so far for this dress. If you stand there like that I will leave, now, and the dress will not be yours. Wear what you like to the graduation. Come to it naked like a whore for all I care.”

  Sezen turned and slowly walked toward the side room.

  Hatijah the mother still squatted over the kettle, boiling more water to dilute the stew of leaves. She lived on tea and burnt corn that was more usually fed to cattle. Her cow’s eyes were averted. Untended, the family cow was still bellowing.

  Mae sat and blew out air from stress. This week! She looked at Hatijah’s dress. It was a patchwork assembly of her husband’s old shirts, beautifully stitched. Hatijah could sew. Mae could not. Hatijah would know that; it was one of the things that made the woman nervous. With all these changes, Mae was going to have to find something else to do beside sketch photographs of dresses. She had a sudden thought.

  “Would you be interested in working for me?” Mae asked. Hatijah looked fearful and pleased and said she would have to ask her husband.

  Everything is going to have to change, thought Mae, as if to convince herself.

  That night Mae worked nearly to dawn on the other three dresses. Her racketing sewing machine sat silent in the corner. It was fine for rough work, but not for finishing, not for graduation dresses.

  The bare electric light glared down at her like a headache, as Mae’s husband Joe snored. Above them in the loft, his brother and father snored too, as they had done for twenty years.

  Mae looked into Joe’s open mouth like a mystery. When he was sixteen Joe had been handsome, in the context of the village, wild, and clever. They’d been married a year when she first went to Yeshibozkay with him, where he worked between harvests building a house. She saw the clever city man, an acupuncturist who had money. She saw her husband bullied, made to look foolish, asked questions for which he had no answer. The acupuncturist made Joe do the work again. In Yeshibozkay, her handsome husband was a dolt.

  Here they were, both of them now middle-aged. Their son Vikram was a major in the Army. They had sent him to Balshang. He mailed them parcels of orange skins for potpourri; he sent cards and matches in picture boxes. He had met some city girl.

  Vik would not be back. Their daughter Lily lived on the other side of Yeshibozkay, in a bungalow with a toilet. Life pulled everything away.

  At this hour of the morning, she could hear their little river, rushing down the steep slope to the valley. Then a door slammed in the North End. Mae knew who it would be: their Muerain, Mr. Shenyalar. He would be walking across the village to the mosque. A dog started to bark at him; Mrs. Don’s, by the bridge.

  Mae knew that Kwan would be cradled in her husband’s arms and that Kwan was beautiful because she was an Eloi tribeswoman. All the Eloi had fine features. Her husband Wing did not mind and
no one now mentioned it. But Mae could see Kwan shiver now in her sleep. Kwan had dreams, visions, she had tribal blood and it made her shift at night as if she had another, tribal life.

  Mae knew that Kwan’s clean and noble athlete son would be breathing like a moist baby in his bed, cradling his younger brother.

  Without seeing them, Mae could imagine the moon and clouds over their village. The moon would be reflected shimmering on the water of the irrigation canals which had once borne their paper boats of wishes. There would be old candles, deep in the mud.

  Then, the slow, sad voice of their Muerain began to sing. Even amplified, his voice was deep and soft, like pillows that allowed the unfaithful to sleep. In the byres, the lonely cows would be stirring. The beasts would walk themselves to the town square, for a lick of salt, and then wait to be herded to pastures. In the evening, they would walk themselves home. Mae heard the first clanking of a cowbell.

  At that moment something came into the room, something she did not want to see, something dark and whole like a black dog with froth around its mouth that sat in her corner and would not go away, nameless yet.

  Mae started sewing faster.

  The dresses were finished on time, all six, each a different color.

  Mae ran barefoot in her shift to deliver them. The mothers bowed sleepily in greeting. The daughters were hopping with anxiety like water on a skillet.

  It all went well. Under banners the children stood together, including Kwan’s son Luk, Sezen, all ten children of the village, all smiles, all for a moment looking like an official poster of the future, brave, red-cheeked with perfect teeth.

  Teacher Shen read out each of their achievements. Sezen had none, except in animal husbandry, but she still collected her certificate to applause. And then Mae’s friend Shen did something special.

  He began to talk about a friend to all of the village, who had spent more time on this ceremony than anyone else, whose only aim was to bring a breath of beauty into this tiny village, the seamstress who worked only to adorn other people.…