The Soho Press Book of '80s Short Fiction

by Dale Peck

  I would like to turn around and talk to her, tell her . . . “I’ve got a dust river in my head, a river of names endlessly repeating. That dirty water rises in me, all those children screaming out their lives in my memory, and I become someone else, someone I have tried so hard not to be.”

  But I don’t say anything, and I know, as surely as I know I will never have a child, that by not speaking I am condemning us, that I cannot go on loving her and hating her for her fairy-tale life, for not asking about what she has no reason to imagine, for that soft-chinned innocence I love.

  Jesse puts her hands behind my neck, smiles and says, “You tell the funniest stories.”

  I put my hand behind her back, feeling the ridges of my knuckles pulsing.

  “Yeah,” I tell her. “But I lie.”

  How Soft, How Sweet

  by Suzanne Gardinier

  It is 1958 and snowing in Syracuse and my mother is transferring lumps of wet clothes from a washer to a dryer in a laundromat. The room is warm, windows beaded with steam, her coat, wool scarf, and mittens in a heap on a chair. Seated on a dryer next to the one my mother fills is my father, in loafers and a baggy suit jacket, reading aloud from Dr. Zhivago. It’s the paperback copy they bought each other for Christmas. They have been married eleven days. For my mother the sound of my father’s voice reading about the vast Russian winter and doomed love sounds like something from a movie: richer than her own voice, when she asks for more quarters or for him to repeat something, larger, more passionate and assured. It is the voice of the world, and as he reads she imagines him reeling out of Korean bars when he was in the army, or running the car he had as a kid into the pumps of the town gas station in a shower of windshield glass and blood. His strength is in his voice, she thinks, and listens intently, hoping it can be absorbed.

  He reaches for an inside jacket pocket and a silver flask that was his father’s flashes in his palm. He takes a long pull, holding the book open with his other hand, then leans toward my mother over the whirling circle of their clothes, offering the whiskey. This is a secret between them, there is no one else in the laundromat (no woman in sneakers folding sheets alone, no children bickering over dropped change, no old man asleep with no hat or overcoat), and the smell of the whiskey, its smoky taste, the effortless waves of confidence it brings, are funny to them, exhilarating, not essential. They laugh and the flask disappears, back to its place next to my father’s heart, and his voice rises, breaks, giggles, recovers, keeps on. For an instant the gesture and the adolescent laugh remind my mother of her own father. With a flush of embarrassed affection she flicks the memory away.

  When they supper together in the early dark they sit on the same side of the kitchen table in the tiny veterans’ housing complex apartment, knees touching, feet close to a leased space heater, the snow falling more thickly outside. My father carves and forks slices of meatloaf from the crusted glass loaf pan, clanks portions of steaming mashed potatoes into their plates, and will not let my mother help, although she has prepared the meal. He spreads her paper napkin across her thighs, snaps the caps off their first bottles of beer and holds his in the air, proposing a toast.

  His gaze leaps between her eyes and her lips, and he wants to tell her how much he loves her, how she has taken his crabbed, soiled life in her hands and unfolded it, smoothed it clean, how wondrous it is that she has let him touch her everywhere and not been ashamed. He has no words for this, and pauses, grinning, feeling the intense heat against the toes of his loafers and the cold of the beer bottle creeping to his wrist, desire gathering in his mouth and chest and groin, as it does at this time every night. She holds her bottle just above the tabletop, eyes fixed on his face—the miracle of beard grown from cheeks smooth that morning, the mouth eager for her in a way she loves and fears—and waits for what she expects from him always: words, to lift her from her constricted self, the way the smell of pipe in his sweater does, or the look of his name and photograph on identification cards.

  “To winter!” he says, too loudly, “to cold, to shivers, to ten below zero!” His words are beginning to blur a little. He leans to kiss her neck and speaks into her skin. She is startled at the heat of his face against her, and at the shrill alarm of fear that clangs wildly inside at his blurred voice and his kisses, his knees now between hers. It is all so new, and yet oddly familiar. Not understanding, she closes her eyes and travels away from the clanging fear, so she can let him take her into the cold bedroom, under heavy layers of comforters, the meal and even the beer left unattended, although she can taste them on his breath.

  She remembers sitting on her father’s lap as he read her stories in his smooth tenor voice, eating crackers and Liederkranz cheese, his blunt fingers turning the pages, catching crumbs between them. As my father kisses her he can feel her escape, and he holds her more tightly, unfastens her clothes, trying to locate her and keep her close. Naked, he covers her with the length of his body, carefully supporting his weight with his arms, trying to prevent her departure. The effort arouses him, and as he pushes into her he thinks, this will keep her, with this I will find her, and listens desperately for signs for her presence, her pleasure. She is puzzled that he doesn’t understand, that without the escape none of this would be possible; but she has no words for this, and can only allow a few sharp intakes of breath and a few moments’ response from her hips to seep past her determined control, because she knows how this matters to him. Deep inside she tightens around him, and marvels at his fevered climb, his explosion. Then he is still, sad, far away. It’s too hot, and she flings a sheaf of covers aside.

  “I want to make children with you,” he says into the dark, now on his back beside her, invisible and brave. Instantly he knows the words are not right, and searches for a joke, but only the crude and unfit come to mind. He wonders why she consented to marry him, and sees clearly ahead the narrow path he must walk to protect his good fortune. His body’s ripples of pleasure ebb.

  She is thrilled at what he has said, and contemptuous at the same time—how bald he is, how foolishly unprotected—and doesn’t understand that doubleness. Again she travels, sits beside her father in his Chevy, on the way to Fort Dix to break her engagement to another man. He is there to protect her in case of trouble. On the seat between them in a snap-jawed box lies the ring. Suddenly she is worried that there is something effete about the way he holds the steering wheel, something weak in his posture or his jaw. What if something happens? Will he be enough? Panic races its fingers up her legs.

  My father shreds his thoughts in search of words to redeem himself. The silence grows unbearable to him. Finally he tries her name: “Barbara?” he asks. “Barbara?”

  Years later, when she is trying to move his leaden, unconscious body from the front walk to their bed, or when he lines up my brothers to be beaten, she will touch in her mind my father’s declaration and his two soft questions as if they are a candle flame, and she must pass her fingers through to test herself, to see if she is still alive. But now his eyes are intelligent, still his own, and his hipbones rise on either side of his cock delicately, covered by only the thinnest sheath of skin. There is nothing about him of the heavy, clumsy drunk, the bully, the cold destroyer. Next to her he is all nervous hope and adoration. The sheets are warm with it. She curls against him and burrows her fingers into the hair on his chest.

  Relieved, he encircles her with his arm and sleeps. As his breathing deepens she wonders why she feels so little, why she can’t share his eagerness, his shudders, his awkward testimonies of love. She has always known she is beautiful; her father has told her this since before she can remember. Yet her body feels like someone else’s. As she lies there with her head on my father’s chest she admits for several seconds that it feels like a prison, in which she must serve out the term of her life. She touches her fingertips to her face. In this shelter I begin.

  Secretary

  by Mary Gaitskill

>   The typing and secretarial class was held in a little basement room in the Business Building of the local community college. The teacher was an old lady with hair that floated in vague clouds around her temples and Kleenex stuck up the sleeve of her dress for some future, probably nasal purpose. She held a stopwatch in one old hand and tilted her hip as she watched us all with severe, imperial eyes, not caring that her stomach hung out. The girl in front of me had short, clenched blond curls sitting on her thin shoulders. Lone strands would stick straight out from her head in cold, dry weather.

  It was a two-hour class with a ten-minute break. Everybody would go out in the hall during the break to get coffee or candy from the machines. The girls would stand in groups and talk, and the two male typists would walk slowly up and down the corridor with round shoulders, holding their Styrofoam cups and looking into the bright slits of light in the business class doors as they passed by.

  I would go to the big picture window that looked out onto the parking lot and stare at the streetlights shining on the hoods of the cars.

  After class, I’d come home and put my books on the dining room table among the leftover dinner things: balled-up napkins, glasses of water, a dish of green beans sitting on a pot holder. My father’s plate would always be there, with gnawed bones and hot pepper on it. He would be in the living room in his pajama top with a dish of ice cream in his lap and his hair on end. “How many words a minute did you type tonight?” he’d ask.

  It wasn’t an unreasonable question, but the predictable and agitated delivery of it was annoying. It reflected his way of hoarding silly details and his obsessive fear I would meet my sister’s fate. She’d had a job at a home for retarded people for the past eight years. She wore jeans and a long army coat to work every day. When she came home, she went up to her room and lay in bed. Every now and then she would come down and joke around or watch TV, but not much.

  Mother would drive me around to look for jobs. First we would go through ads in the paper, drawing black circles, marking X’s. The defaced newspaper sat on the dining room table in a gray fold and we argued.

  “I’m not friendly and I’m not personable. I’m not going to answer an ad for somebody like that. It would be stupid.”

  “You can be friendly. And you are personable when you aren’t busy putting yourself down.”

  “I’m not putting myself down. You just want to think that I am so you can have something to talk about.”

  “You’re backing yourself into a corner, Debby.”

  “Oh, shit.” I picked up a candy wrapper and began pinching it together in an ugly way. My hands were red and rough. It didn’t matter how much lotion I used.

  “Come on, we’re getting started on the wrong foot.”

  “Shut up.”

  My mother crossed her legs. “Well,” she said. She picked up the “Living” section of the paper and cracked it into position. She tilted her head back and dropped her eyelids. Her upper lip became hostile as she read. She picked up her green teacup and drank.

  “I’m dependable. I could answer an ad for somebody dependable.”

  “You are that.”

  We wound up in the car. My toes swelled in my high heels. My mother and I both used the flowered box of Kleenex on the dashboard and stuck the used tissue in a brown bag that sat near the hump in the middle of the car. There was a lot of traffic in both lanes. We drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop. They still hadn’t put the letter Y back on the Amy sign.

  Our first stop was Wonderland. There was a job in the clerical department of Sears. The man there had a long disapproving nose, and he held his hands stiffly curled in the middle of his desk. He mainly looked at his hands. He said he would call me, but I knew he wouldn’t.

  On the way back to the parking lot, we passed a pet store. There were only hamsters, fish and exhausted yellow birds. We stopped and looked at slivers of fish swarming in their tank of thick green water. I had come to this pet store when I was ten years old. The mall had just opened and we had all come out to walk through it. My sister, Donna, had wanted to go into the pet store. It was very warm and damp in the store, and smelled like fur and hamster. When we walked out, it seemed cold. I said I was cold and Donna took off her white leatherette jacket and put it around my shoulders, letting one hand sit on my left shoulder for a minute. She had never touched me like that before and she hasn’t since.

  The next place was a tax information office in a slab of building with green trim. They gave me an intelligence test that was mostly spelling and “What’s wrong with this sentence?” The woman came out of her office holding my test and smiling. “You scored higher than anyone else I’ve interviewed,” she said. “You’re really overqualified for this job. There’s no challenge. You’d be bored to death.”

  “I want to be bored,” I said.

  She laughed. “Oh, I don’t think that’s true.”

  We had a nice talk about what people want out of their jobs and then I left.

  “Well, I hope you weren’t surprised that you had the highest score,” said my mother.

  We went to the French bakery on Eight-Mile Road and got cookies called elephant ears. We ate them out of a bag as we drove. I felt so comfortable, I could have driven around in the car all day.

  Then we went to a lawyer’s office on Telegraph Road. It was a receding building made of orange brick. There were no other houses or stores around it, just a parking lot and some taut fir trees that looked like they had been brushed. My mother waited for me in the car. She smiled, took out a crossword puzzle and focused her eyes on it, the smile still gripping her face.

  The lawyer was a short man with dark, shiny eyes and dense immobile shoulders. He took my hand with an indifferent aggressive snatch. It felt like he could have put his hand through my rib cage, grabbed my heart, squeezed it a little to see how it felt, then let go. “Come into my office,” he said.

  We sat down and he fixed his eyes on me. “It’s not much of a job,” he said. “I have a paralegal who does research and leg-work, and the proofreading gets done at an agency. All I need is a presentable typist who can get to work on time and answer the phone.”

  “I can do that,” I said.

  “It’s very dull work,” he said.

  “I like dull work.”

  He stared at me, his eyes becoming hooded in thought. “There’s something about you,” he said. “You’re closed up, you’re tight. You’re like a wall.”

  “I know.”

  My answer surprised him and his eyes lost their hoods. He tilted his head back and looked at me, his shiny eyes bared again. “Do you ever loosen up?”

  The corners of my mouth jerked, smilelike. “I don’t know.” My palms sweated.

  His secretary, who was leaving, called me the next day and said that he wanted to hire me. Her voice was serene, flat and utterly devoid of inflection.

  “That typing course really paid off,” said my father. “You made a good investment.” He wandered in and out of the dining room in pleased agitation, holding his glass of beer. “A law office could be a fascinating place.” He arched his chin and scratched his throat.

  Donna even came downstairs and made popcorn and put it in a big yellow bowl on the table for everybody to eat. She ate lazily, her large hand dawdling in the bowl. “It could be okay. Interesting people could come in. Even though that lawyer’s probably an asshole.”

  My mother sat quietly, pleased with her role in the job-finding project, pinching clusters of popcorn in her fingers and popping them into her mouth.

  That night I put my new work clothes on a chair and looked at them. A brown skirt, a beige blouse. I was attracted to the bland ugliness, but I didn’t know how long that would last. I looked at their gray shapes in the night-light and then rolled over toward the dark corner of my bed.

  My family’s enthusiasm made me feel sarcastic about the j
ob—about any effort to do anything, in fact. In light of their enthusiasm, the only intelligent course of action seemed to be immobility and rudeness. But in the morning, as I ate my poached eggs and toast, I couldn’t help but feel curious and excited. The feeling grew as I rode in the car with my mother to the receding orange building. I felt like I was accomplishing something. I wanted to do well. When we drove past the Amy Joy doughnut shop, I saw, through a wall of glass, expectant construction workers in heavy boots and jackets sitting on vinyl swivel seats, waiting for coffee and bags of doughnuts. I had sentimental thoughts about workers and the decency of unthinking toil. I was pleased to be like them, insofar as I was. I returned my mother’s smile when I got out of the car and said “thanks” when she said “good luck.”

  “Well, here you are,” said the lawyer. He clapped his short, hard-packed little hands together and made a loud noise. “On time. Good morning!”

  He began training me then and continued to do so all week. No interesting people came into the office. Very few people came into the office at all. The first week there were three. One was a nervous middle-aged woman who had an uneven haircut and was wearing lavender rubber children’s boots. She sat on the edge of the waiting room chair with her rubber boots together, rearranging the things in her purse. Another was a fat woman in a bright, baglike dress who had yellow in the whites of her wild little eyes, and who carried her purse like a weapon. The last was a man who sat desperately turning his head as if he wanted to disconnect it from his body. I could hear him raising his voice inside the lawyer’s office. When he left, the lawyer came out and said, “He is completely crazy,” and told me to type him a bill for five hundred dollars.