Joy

by Erin McGraw

  ALSO BY ERIN MCGRAW

  The Baby Tree

  Better Food for a Better World

  Bodies at Sea

  The Good Life

  Lies of the Saints

  The Seamstress of Hollywood Boulevard

  JOY

  Copyright © 2019 by Erin McGraw

  First hardcover edition: 2019

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: McGraw, Erin, 1957– author.

  Title: Joy: and 52 other very short stories / Erin McGraw.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California: Counterpoint, 2019.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018039857 | ISBN 9781640092082

  Classification: LCC PS3563.C3674 A6 2019 | DDC 813/.54—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018039857

  Jacket design by Nicole Caputo

  Book design by Wah-Ming Chang

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Andrew

  Now the days of riches are gone

  and no one can bring them back for us.

  But we can let ourselves be poor again.

  —RAINER MARIA RILKE

  Contents

  America

  Comfort (1)

  Comfort (2)

  Compliments

  The Tenth Student

  Second Sight

  Phantom

  Cloth

  Friendship

  Hallelujah Day

  Haircut

  Rock and Roll

  L.A.

  Before

  Spice

  Learning

  Hope

  Breaking Glass

  Sympathy

  Ava Gardner Goes Home

  Law and Order

  Love

  Management

  Snitch

  Edits

  Hello from an Old Friend

  Cat

  Nobody Happy

  Soup (1)

  Soup (2)

  Soup (3)

  Song

  Fat

  Pebble

  Pariah

  Priest

  Artist

  Parable

  Happiness

  Dogs

  Job

  Wedding Gown

  Joy

  Peru

  Necropolis

  Honor

  Bucket (1)

  Bucket (2)

  Cliché

  Nutcracker

  Stingers

  Teeth

  Prayer

  Acknowledgments

  America

  Mr. Bixby is showing us again how to do the lay-back. He says we’re all too stiff, but what he means is that we’re all too white. “Curl your upper backs! With every kick you’re giving yourselves.” He kicks as high as his shoulder and lets his upper back droop and he looks idiotic, but he’s trying to get Melissa Ridge to quit it with her ramrod ballet kicks, and anyway, Mr. Bixby is Mr. West Side Story, and all we can do is go along.

  He’s already got us, the Sharks and their girls, training with the Spanish teacher to improve our accents. He’s training the Jets’ accents himself, and now Trent Boynton, who’s playing Action, goes around muttering, “Kick da can to da koib.” If Trent runs into any of the Sharks, he’s supposed to refuse to talk. Mr. Bixby won’t let the Sharks and the Jets eat lunch together or hang out after school. “This isn’t just a play,” Mr. Bixby says. “It’s a life.” The day I woke up surprised to see my regular room and not a tenement, I told him about it. “That’s—good, that’s real good,” he told me. I wasn’t five feet away when he complained to Rob, the script boy he always keeps nearby, “We’ve been rehearsing for two months. What has she been doing?”

  I’ve been learning to be Puerto Rican. At first I wanted to be Velma, Riff’s girl, but Mr. Bixby cast Antoinette Mercer, who’s so stupid that she can say her line—“Oublee-oo”—and sound like she means it. Now I’m Marisol, the name Mr. Bixby gave me, and I’ll have leeway to improvise lines once Mr. Bixby thinks my accent is good enough.

  First, though, I have to learn the steps to “America.” It’s an all-girl number, which I thought would make the dancing easy, but Mr. Bixby says we’re supposed to dance in Spanish, and none of us knows how to do that. At first he told us to wiggle, but now he’s telling us to ripple. “You can’t just jiggle your skirt and think you’re going to look Puerto Rican,” he says, holding his hands up as if he were shaking out a towel. In case anybody has missed it, he’s gay. “Your whole body is alive and flashing. The Jets girls are wound tight, but you are exploding!”

  We try to explode. Some of the shows we’ve done are stupid—nobody has forgotten that cowbell in Oklahoma!—but I can feel West Side Story’s angular music scraping at my brain, its constant anger keeping me buzzing like a high-tension wire. Every day my lay-backs get a little deeper, and my body is moving in new ways, as if it’s barely holding back something I didn’t know I had. One night, Mom asks me if I’ve taken out the trash and I say “Sí” without thinking. In the moment before she frowns, shock blanks out her face, and I feel a sizzling pleasure.

  Because Tony and Maria are using the stage, we’re practicing in the cafeteria—“Neutral territory,” Mr. Bixby says. By the silverware bins, I tap my foot and watch the “America” rehearsal stop because of Marina Rowe, who must have been cast as Rosalia because of her boobs, not that Mr. Bixby cares about them. She’s a terrible dancer and can’t remember any of her sixteen lines. But she’s the only girl other than Maria who argues with haughty Anita, and even though Rosalia loses, it’s still thrilling to watch someone take Anita on. Or it would be thrilling, if the person weren’t Marina.

  “What do you think you’re arguing about?” Mr. Bixby says to her.

  “Whether America is good or not.”

  “Deeper than that.”

  “Immigrants should go home?”

  Mr. Bixby takes a deep breath, the one that signals we’ve just hit the end of his patience. “Inclusion. You’re arguing to prove you belong. There’s nothing more important than that.”

  “Okay,” says Marina, happy to have the question answered for her.

  “So how do you pour the hunger to be included into your dancing?”

  “We ripple,” she says promptly, then glances at his face. “We explode?”

  Quietly, my feet moving lightly over the tile floor, I start again with the shuddering little steps, then the explosive kicks that make me cry out. I may be a sixteen-year-old German-Irish girl living in flat Ohio, but West Side Story is a chute I slide down, and every day I’m a little more Marisol, working in a West Side dress shop and kissing Pepe on the fire escape. When Jeff O’Brien, who plays Snowboy, bumped into me in the cafeteria, I hissed at him.

  Mr. Bixby notices me marking out the steps, and I see him pause. I feel the moment like a hitch in the breath, and for a second all the sound in the cafeteria stops. He’s never seen me before—or rather, he’s never seen Marisol, sixteen years old and hungry for an American car, an American house and boy and life. She did not come here
to mark out tiny steps in a white cinderblock room that smells like gravy. Can Mr. Bixby see my sneer? Mr. Bixby would be lucky to have Marisol walk over him in her sharp-pointed shoes. Promises have been made on every side, but so far all Marisol has been given is a script, the boys she has known all her life, and one small hope in being picked out by a man in tight pants and dancing shoes. I kick again, laying back into the air, which catches me.

  Mr. Bixby claps his hands and sound rushes back in. “Again,” he says. “Marisol, show them.”

  I swish my skirt, walking to the front of the room, and feel every set of eyes. We are living this play, almost all of us, and I wish a Jet were here so I could spit on him. This is my country now.

  Comfort (1)

  “Just tell the truth,” they say, and I can’t even count how many things are wrong with that sentence. There are a lot of truths, and most of them aren’t on speaking terms with the others.

  True: I am the man who killed a child. My family and friends don’t believe that, pointing out that all my life I have liked kids. Also true, and irrelevant. People bring up stuff that they want to matter.

  “Sam and Mark love you. They still talk about the kite you made them. We’ll fight this,” my sister says. She thinks there’s a solution, but for there to be a solution, there has to be a problem.

  I had never held a gun before. That thing people say about how a gun is surprisingly heavy? That’s true. I fiddled with the trigger, then lifted the gun two-handed, like cops on TV, sighted a little boy kicking dirt behind the dugout, and fired. I was as surprised as anybody when the bullet went off. It turns out I’m a good shot.

  The boy’s mother says I am a monster. True. The prosecutor says that I have no concept of the value of human life. Not true. The value of that boy’s life is my life, to the penny.

  “It was an accident!” my sister wails. Why should that make any difference?

  Before this happened I was a flight attendant. The point of the job is not to fulfill customers’ needs, but to anticipate them—the blanket, the cargo space, the airsickness bag fast. “What if I’m the one getting airsick?” somebody asked in training school.

  “You get airsick on your own time,” the teacher said.

  “So we put our needs last?”

  “You’re flight attendants. You don’t have needs.”

  Other people groaned, but I smiled. For the first time in my life, I was right at home.

  I know how to give mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. I can swim with a baby on my back. I can splint a broken leg and tie a tourniquet, and I know how to make three oxygen masks support five people. My job is to save lives, but no one at thirty thousand feet wants to think about battling for an oxygen mask, and so I hand out pretzels and squat in the aisle, grinning at the toddler furious to find herself imprisoned on a slightly grubby airplane seat. I used to do these things, before my airline let me go. “I’m sure you understand,” the supervisor said, and he was right.

  I had never done anything to hurt anyone, not even when my first boyfriend stabbed the upholstery of my car with a twelve-inch knife, or when another boyfriend gave me cocaine laced with laxative and then locked me in the bedroom. “I just wanted proof you were human,” he said, and after I cleaned the room I let him stay for another five months because he had no place else to go and it didn’t seem to make much difference, in the end. I was the guy who was too nice, until I murdered a little boy.

  “Don’t say it like that,” my sister snaps.

  “What did you think would happen when you squeezed the trigger?” the D.A. asks.

  I was at my nephew’s baseball game, wandering behind the bleachers during an endless inning, foul after foul after foul. The afternoon had turned spongy with boredom and humidity, and I felt trapped inside a dream of a life parallel to mine, one that circled around baseball games and coolers and a single half-full bottle of rye at home, in the cabinet above the refrigerator. Off by himself, one of the dads motioned to me, and I went to him. That’s my training. When somebody calls, you go. “Check this out,” he said, pulling a pistol from his jacket pocket. Gray, with lighter gray around the casing. “Glock 17. Gen4,” he said.

  “At a Little League game?”

  “Nobody needs to know.”

  His eyes were bright as he raised and lowered the gun—not sighting through it, just hefting it, excited with the feel in his hand. I knew before he asked that he was going to let me touch it.

  “Did you know that the gun was loaded?” Everybody asks, but the question never occurred to me. When you pick up a gun in a dream, you don’t ask if it’s loaded.

  “You didn’t know!” my sister says. The ordeal has been hard on her. Her pretty face has gone muddy and she hasn’t gotten her hair done in weeks. I see her husband looking at the seam of gray at her hairline. “No one can blame you for what you didn’t know,” she says, her voice shrill with repetition.

  That’s the stupidest thing she’s said yet. What kind of idiot pulls a trigger and expects nothing to happen? My old boyfriend texted me that I had set back the cause of gay rights ten years, because even a decent homo would know how to handle a gun. The man at the game, the gun’s owner, said, “The action on it is smooth. Hardly no kick.” I don’t mean that he was encouraging me to find out. That was my own idea.

  I was supposed to fly to Chicago that night. My suitcase was already packed. I knew where I would stay for the night, and how early I’d have to get up for the flight back the next day. I knew how many bottles were supposed to be on the airline bar cart, and how many I could palm to help me get to sleep. I knew a number I could call if I didn’t want to be alone. I knew that man beside me under the bleachers would have shoved me to the ground if I had reached out to touch his chest, at the same time that he was putting a goddamn gun in my hands.

  After I shot the boy, a moment passed before I heard the screams and felt the gun ripped away. The day’s spongy haziness vanished into stark, dazzling light, and in the shining split second when nothing had yet changed, I looked at my sister, her face brilliant. She shook her head again and again: No, no, no, no, no. Then the next part started.

  Comfort (2)

  Nothing to prepare you. Nothing to say. “We’re here for you,” my friends repeat, and I hear the anguish in their voices. They mean the best, they mean love, but, Jesus, they need to go away. “You can’t be alone now,” my mother says, and then amends it to “You shouldn’t be alone,” which is righter, but there’s only one person I want to be with, and he’s gone.

  I did everything exactly right, every step by the book. Bobby had no idea what even my tits looked like until our wedding night, something we made tense jokes about later. At least they got big when I was pregnant; he liked that. I quit my job and painted the nursery a sweet green, a color that would welcome the five children I planned on. Bobby was doing well at the dealership, meeting his quotas and getting his bonuses. I saw life stretching out like a wide, pretty pasture without so much as a stone to get in my shoe. That’s how you think when you’re young.

  After Jason was toddling, I saw Bobby’s mouth tighten when I talked about the next one. I went to Victoria’s Secret and bought a teddy that the salesgirl said was perfect for little girls like me. “The ruffles are your friends. They give the look of fullness right where it counts.” Shyly, I pulled it on that night after we put Jason down, and Bobby blushed. He kissed my forehead and left the room.

  When he moved in with his massively titted girlfriend, he was good to me. He made sure that his child-support payments came in time to cover the mortgage, and when I had trouble finding a job at first he asked his friends to look out for me. He had a lot of friends.

  “He’s a decent man,” I said.

  “You need so much more,” Mama said.

  I gestured at my boy, who was frowning at the pyramid of Legos he had built, trying to see where he could fit his toy truck. “I’ve got riches.”

  Mama’s face softened, but she still said, “No,
you don’t.”

  When Jason turned four, he vandalized our neighbor’s iris bed to bring me a bouquet. At six, he brought me breakfast in bed: a microwaved cheese sandwich. He wouldn’t go to sleep unless I came into his room, smoothed his hair, and told him I loved him. When his teacher told him to draw a picture of the person he liked best in the world, he drew a figure with long red fingernails and a pennant of yellow hair, with my name in his brand-new printing. “I don’t look anything like that,” I said, and he said, “That’s what you really look like, underneath.”

  My son was the only male I knew who looked at me. Every day men came into the bank and didn’t ever notice the flat-chested gal counting out twenties. “Don’t you meet anyone at that place?” Mama said, and I told her no. Easier than telling her that I met people every day, over and over. Exactly once did a man ask my name. He said, “Claudette. That’s pretty.” A month or so later he came back needing a cashier’s check for $300, and asked my name. “Claudette. That’s pretty.”

  Named after my dad. I saved some boy from being Claude Jr.

  Jason thought that Claude was the funniest name in the world, so I threatened him with it all the time. “I’m your mother! I gave you your name; I can change it!” “Just don’t name me CLOD,” he would yell, delighted.

  He used to yell. We used to collapse in laughter at the kitchen table, one or the other whispering “Clod” to set us off again. We did that before Jason was shot to death at a baseball game by a gay man holding a gun for the first time in his life.

  “He didn’t even know him!” people said. What difference would that have made? Dead is dead, a sentence people don’t want to hear. Some others: God doesn’t have a plan; Jason is in a box, not a better place; Thank you for coming, please leave. I didn’t mean to be ugly, but there are no words that help, and twice I wound up having to comfort a visitor who couldn’t bear my tragedy. “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle,” my mother’s friend said. I scrounged up a thin smile for her and said, “I’m still standing.”