The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  Did Daphne know what she and Sebby were doing? Roughly, at least; probably: Henrietta had sometimes sensed (almost instantly denying this to herself) an intensity to Daphne’s gaze that might have come from her sorting and weighing bits of evidence, speculating with her usual fierce intelligence as to their cause. So perhaps Daphne had known what she was doing and, since Sebby was headed soon for a studio in Rome, judged the risk acceptable—as Henrietta herself had known, without knowing the details, how intently Daphne was campaigning to win over Mrs. Thaxter’s friends. The unspoken details of their night lives were, along with the work they’d returned to sharing, part of the sturdy thread that continued to bind them. Only the lie that had started it all, and the difficult scene during which, when she finally returned to Hammondsport, she’d broken things off with Mason, remained her secret.

  She forgot it herself, sometimes: forgot what she’d done, forgot that she and not Mason had ended their relationship. She forgot, when she saw Mason and his pleasant wife and their four boys at a holiday gathering or a fair, that she’d been the one to walk away from that life—not so she could take Daphne’s firm advice that remaining single was the better path (Daphne, across the hall, crackled the page of a book just enough to signal that she was awake if Henrietta wanted to talk, but busy if Henrietta needed her privacy)—​but so that, for barely more than a week, she could feel Sebby’s hair against her lips.

  SARAH SHUN-LIEN BYNUM

  The Bears

  FROM Glimmer Train

  ONCE, WHEN I was convalescing, I was sent to a farmhouse in the country. No one there knew I had been sick. A woman came to cook in the evenings, and her daughter would appear at odd hours with a mop and bucket, keeping the place clean. There were many kinds of tea to be found in the kitchen, and a woven tray on which you could arrange the tea things. Also there were deep old wooden chairs lined up along the front porch, so you could sit as long as you liked, looking out over the fields, the trees, and sometimes even the mountains if the sky was truly clear. Because of the porch and the tray and the slow way the day ended, I felt, in this place, though no one knew of my miscarriage, as if I were being gently attended to, as if all the demands of the world had been softly lifted away, and that I should rest.

  I had been invited there to finish a chapter on William James. I was to do so in the company of eight other people working on interesting, improbable projects. The invitation had come as a great surprise to me and had a magical effect on my confidence. As soon as I set foot in the farmhouse, however, every thought and hope I had about William James flew out of my head, like a bit of charred paper up a chimney. He had been my companion for several months, and now he turned into a man I barely knew. His sudden disappearance made the days seem long. Soon I discovered that the pastimes I had always imagined I’d enjoy—such as dipping into newly published novels, and drifting off to sleep in the middle of the afternoon—left me with a stiff neck, as well as a feeling of dread.

  My only relief was to walk along the sides of the highway and the roads. Though they were country roads, they were not laid out in a haphazard way, and I decided that if I were to set out, and turn left, and then left again, turning and turning until I found my way back again, I would be all right. I walked slowly, but for distances that surprised me. I walked without my wallet or my glasses, and felt my life was far away. The city I lived in, the appointments I made, the students I taught, my dog, my friend—it seemed as if what held me to them had loosened and let go. When I thought of home, all I remembered was a route I would sometimes follow as I walked to the bus stop, a route that took me past an empty parking lot, where long grasses and weeds had been allowed to grow in profusion. Even though it wasn’t strictly on my way, I liked walking past this empty lot because of the wild, sweet smell it sent out into the world. No other lot or overgrown yard I knew of had managed to achieve the right alchemy of grass and clover and tall spindly wildflowers, and no other place could secrete this same smell. But here, along the side of the highway, it was everywhere, the smell.

  Reading the signs that appeared on the road, I learned I was walking through a part of the countryside that had yet to be discovered and made over in a sentimental way. This area remained practical and suspicious. At frequent intervals, sometimes only two or three trees apart, the signs were posted: PRIVATE PROPERTY, they said. Then came a list of numerous activities, followed by the words STRICTLY FORBIDDEN, and for final emphasis, the phrase SHALL BE PROSECUTED. As if these yellow signs left room for doubt and interpretation, some people had gone to the trouble of making their own: NO VISITORS, said one. NO TRESPASSING, said another. And even the cornfields were wrapped around with barbed wire. But not once did I see another person walking along the road. It was hard to imagine who the trespassers might be.

  Other than me, of course. The pickup trucks wouldn’t slow down when they passed me on the road. They hadn’t slowed down for other things either. Along the highway’s edge I saw a rabbit, its remains vanishing, its bits of fur lifting up from the pavement as dreamily as thistledown; I saw a small black songbird, throbbing with larvae, and a freshly dead chipmunk, curled up on its side as if in sleep. There were also many beautiful horses, heraldic and fully alive. I wanted to watch them gallop across the fields with their ravishing black manes streaming behind them, but it seemed when left alone they had little reason to do so. They chose to stand still, in mysterious silence. The cows, in contrast, were full of spirit, but maybe only when being pushed into a trailer. I happened to be walking by while this process was underway. The cows already inside the trailer made an alarming sound, a truly unhappy and outraged sound, the sort of hoarse trumpeting you might hear from an elephant. It could not be described as either mooing or lowing. I wondered where the cows were being taken, whether their misery was mindless and fleeting, as they were simply being driven to another pasture; or whether the truth was darker and the animals sensed the sure approach of death. So I studied the cows, and I noted that these were black, and large, with heavy brows and small eyes, and that their boulder-like bodies hung low to the ground. But what did this mean? I had no idea. I had no way of knowing just where they were off to.

  The list of things I did not know was getting longer. I could name only two of the plants that grew in abundance on the side of the road. If there had been a child walking alongside me, its hand in my own, and if this child had shown any curiosity about the world, I would have been able only to say, That is goldenrod. And that, Queen Anne’s lace. It would have been a poor display of knowledge. Pale starry blue flowers and velvety purses of orange and gold, whole swamps of tawdry purple tapers and creeping vines that spread their fingers out into the road—all of it as common as day, and all of it inscrutable to me. I had also been forced to admit, while trying to write a postcard, that I wasn’t completely sure which mountains I was looking at. The cows, the flowers, the mountain range; why William James had seen fit to abandon me; whether I would ever get well; how to relieve the sorrow of my friend.

  That I continued to call him my friend probably added to his unhappiness. But the other names sounded antiseptic to me. Sometimes he would identify himself lightheartedly on phone messages as the father of your unborn child. After a certain point, though, this no longer applied. I believed friend to be a true honorific, but he said he felt differently, and so what to call him was among the many unknown things that troubled me as I made my slow way around the fields.

  But there was always the white house of Jerry Roth, which I did come to know. And, in fact, the house seemed such a reflection of him, I sometimes felt as if I knew him, the man. His house was set back slightly from the road, sitting upon a soft rise in the land; it looked out over the acres of a horse farm, and nearer than that a fishing pond, edged with cattails, shadowed by willow trees, a rowboat resting on its grassy bank. Perfect as in a painting or a dream; as if all the charm and sentiment the countryside had been coolly withholding could now, at last, express itself, could gloriously unfurl
, in one long exhalation of white clapboard and dappled shade and undulating lawn. A colonial house, but without stiffness or symmetry: a wing rambled off to the right, toward a glassed-in porch, and on the left stood a new addition, a sort of studio or guest quarters, its face yawning open in a wide cathedral window, and its entrance marked by a great glass lantern, which echoed, in wittily enormous proportions, the quaint, black-leaded lights that hung beside the front door of the original house.

  I did not apprehend all of this graciousness at once. It revealed itself to me in a slow unfolding of surprises. One afternoon, the wind stirred the leaves of Jerry Roth’s old maple, and only then did I see how beautifully it spread its canopy across the front lawn, and how thickly the plantings grew beneath it, their dark green leaves polished and aglow, the white flowers floating above their long stems like candle flames. Another day, hearing a window shut, I turned and saw the kaleidoscopic horse standing calmly in the garden. The same size, the same stillness as the creatures across the road, but its coat glistened with blue sky and yellow stars, with tempera paint and varnish, with winding streams and hills of violet and umber and red. And in this backward glance I also found the apple tree, crooked with age, its lowest branch dipping only a few feet from the ground, extended as if in invitation for a child to take a seat.

  What else. There was a plaque attached to the mailbox post, its delicate Roman capitals spelling out JEROME ROTH, and beneath that a picture of a pheasant, wings spread, like something you might find on a piece of porcelain. And opposite the mailbox, a square of white-and-blue tin announcing that this little stretch of road should be known as RUE JERRY ROTH (MARIN EMERITÉ). The street sign was displayed on a dully red barn, now turned into a garage for three wonderful cars: a wood-paneled station wagon, a Volkswagen van, and a sleek silver two-seater, Japanese and new. One evening, while walking along the highway, I was passed from behind by the wood-paneled station wagon, and my heart quickened involuntarily, as though I’d seen a star.

  I guess it shouldn’t have surprised me that my heart beat the way it did. For having walked by his house so many times, and gleaned with such pleasure all the small and large details of the world he had made, I admired him. I would have liked him for a friend. Even more, I would have liked him to gather me into his family, a family I imagined as manifesting the same humor and whimsy and discernment that was evident everywhere in his house and on his land. For I knew there must be a family, moving through the clean rooms of the house, laughing and groaning, just beyond the reach of what I could see.

  That same evening I returned to the farmhouse, still elated by the sight of the station wagon, to find that there was swordfish for dinner. And tired of my own reticence, I decided I wanted to talk about Jerry Roth. Not to the woman who had cooked the swordfish, with whom I usually talked, but to the people who were eating it with me. I think I would have liked the farmhouse much more if it hadn’t been for those eight other people, who would emerge from their rooms at the end of the afternoon, looking dazed and replete. They took turns walking to the village to buy bottles of wine that were opened and poured at dinner. I had to wait for a pause in the conversation; the wine made them talkative, and they had hit again upon a favorite subject: the other farmhouses, castles, villas, and cottages where they had been guests in the past.

  Potatoes. At every meal, said Laszlo. Boiled or fried. Or cold, cut up in little chunks and mixed together with an herb I couldn’t identify.

  But it’s Italy! Anna cried.

  My point, Laszlo said irritably, and jiggled the wine in his glass. Not what one would expect.

  Mary spoke: The first week with the baronessa, I could barely eat, she made me so nervous. And all those little dogs underfoot. I was sure I was going to step on one and cripple it. But the food was good; there were no potatoes.

  Ah, so you’ve been to Santa Maddalena, Laszlo said with a small sigh of resentment.

  The platter of swordfish was heaved up into the air and then made its precarious way around the table for a second time.

  They are fattening me up here, Cesar said, helping himself.

  Haven’t you seen that great big oven there in the back? Behind the barn? Erga said. We’re going to be plump and delicious when we’re done.

  She was looking at her plate as she said this, and without eye contact, I could not tell how merrily she intended it. We ate in silence, and for a fleeting moment it seemed possible that we had all been tricked, that this gift of quietude was in fact a term of captivity and terror.

  Have you tried walking? I asked them finally. I find that walking helps.

  Mary wiped her mouth and gently pushed back her chair.

  I just run, she said, I run as fast as I can.

  And so it was that I was running the next time I saw the house of Jerry Roth. By that point the running had become painful and strange to me. At first, when I began to run, I felt surprised by my lightness, I felt young and strong, I felt like a child running ecstatically, for no reason at all. But soon that feeling changed and my breath started to disappear. I had to pause to hitch up my jeans and wipe the fog from my glasses. Then, out of perversity, I began running again. Just to that tree, I told myself. And after the tree, an electrical pole, a mailbox, a NO TRESPASSING sign. I kept promising that upon reaching these landmarks I would stop, yet I didn’t stop, I continued to run, trying to be swift, becoming more damp and anguished as I passed each marker and found another just a little farther on. I must have been bleeding for some time before I noticed it. I suppose I thought the wetness slipping down my legs was sweat. So what made me notice? Maybe the smell, the faint animal smell, a smell that has always made me think of wounded prey in the underbrush, or a mother licking afterbirth off her young. Foolishly, I had not been expecting it. In the deepest part of me, I had not believed that my body would return to normal, or that one day I would be well again.

  I’m not sure if it was the thought of being well or the memory of getting sick that affected me. But either way, I bent over and started to cry. For the first time I wanted help, but predictably no one was near; there was a detached humming in the air, coming from the hidden insects or the electrical lines overhead. The horses and cows were absent from the fields. The sun burned indistinctly behind a thin screen of clouds. I limped out to the middle of the road, but I couldn’t see any trucks in the distance, approaching me at dangerous speeds. I was at a loss. I didn’t even know what to call the place where I had stopped. There was a route number posted on a sign a few hundred yards ahead, but that number had no meaning for me.

  Standing there in the road, I was visited by an idea, startling and clear. It was the idea of crisis; the idea that I was in the midst of having one. And with this idea, my earlier sense of lightness returned, and though my face was burning and my chest hurt and sharp pains were rocketing up my shins, I wanted to run again. I wanted to get there fast. For I knew now exactly where I was going.

  I knew too what I was going to tell him. Why I had come, a stranger running down the road, and knocked on his door. Doubled over on the threshold of his old house, beneath the black-leaded lights, breathless and red-faced, dark stains growing on the legs of my pants. And it wasn’t completely untrue. It had been true only two months before, but then I had been in the restroom on the third floor of my department, inside a stall where the metal was beginning to show through the gray-green paint, as a slender graduate student I had once taught was energetically brushing her teeth at the sink. She had probably just finished eating one of the frugal, grainy meals she brought with her to campus in a cloudy plastic container.

  So I ran as best as I could until at last the white house appeared before me; climbed the steps at the base of the slope, followed the flagstone path, passed beneath the branches of the magnificent tree, all the while ushered along by the profound sense of permission that the word crisis had given me. In fact I’d come to feel that I was seeking help for someone other than myself. As if under a spell, I lifted the knocke
r, and when the brass hammer dropped down on its plate, the force of its fall eased open the door, which was, of course, unlocked. Jerry Roth shared none of his neighbors’ suspicions. No bolts, no barbed wire, just a half-lit entryway with a good Turkish carpet and a bowl of summer roses, and beyond that a bright kitchen smelling of coffee and slightly burnt toast. And the table! The table was even better than I’d imagined: huge, rough-hewn, radiant with age, practically seaworthy; surely salvaged from a tumbledown farm nearby and then refurbished at some expense. The kitchen chairs looked rescued too, mismatched as they were, some with spindles, others slatted, one with a little painting of grapes and fruit fading on its back, all of them gathered in expectation around the table, as charming and different as children. The chair I sat in had narrow armrests, and I could feel the shallow dip in the wood where hundreds of other elbows had rested, or maybe only a few chosen elbows repeatedly over the course of a hundred years. The newspaper was close at hand, not the local paper but the Times, whose presence I so missed that I almost started crying again, already opened to the film section, my favorite, and a review of an Iranian movie that my friend and I planned to see together.

  The review was admiring, not to anyone’s surprise, and full of the sort of empty reverential phrases—a master of world cinema, etc.—that made my friend particularly impatient. My friend had little patience with a number of things: dog owners, pigeons, overcooked food, fatuous reviews, ATM fees, antiques, and people’s mispronunciation of his name. Yet he had been unfailingly patient with me. Opening the windows wide, reading to me from William James, walking my dog, taking my clothes and sheets to the laundromat. Why something that not only ended but began in an accident should have so undone me—but, well, it did. And he had been undone too, which moved me. It made me realize that he’d been serious all along.