by Laura Furman
Cath in Keith Ridgway’s “Rothko Eggs” lives in London with her mother. Cath’s parents are divorced, and she feels like their caretaker, more knowledgeable about them than they are about themselves. She loves art and thinks about it, but just as often thinks about how to think about it. The story’s diction is striking; simple sentences, repeated, varied, until there’s a pileup, a fender bender of thoughts and words. The narration is a close-up third person, so close that we are nearly in Cath’s mind as she puzzles out matters of art and sex, and, oddest of all, her parents’ shared history before she was born. Cath is central to them, but, she finds, only part of their relationship and not the whole of it, as she once thought. Ridgway’s story plays with articulating inarticulateness. For Cath, an intelligent and sensitive young woman, the impossibility of describing abstract art is nothing next to the impenetrability of other people’s motives and emotions, and her own.
As in Kevin Wilson’s and Keith Ridgway’s stories, Hisham Matar’s “Naima” has at its core a child trying to accommodate himself to his parents’ choices and secrets. “You need adulthood to appreciate such horror,” the narrator tells us. A useful question when reading first-person stories is, Why is the narrator telling this story? A general answer is, To understand what happened. In the case of “Naima,” the narrator is trying to understand his parents’ marriage, his mother’s death, and the place in his life of Naima, the family’s servant. His parents so overshadow Naima that the reader also initially wonders why the story is named for Naima rather than the mother or father. The beauty of Matar’s story lies in the narrator’s delicacy as he seeks to slice through memory without destroying the past.
Adulthood doesn’t much benefit the narrator of Ann Packer’s “Things Said or Done,” nor does the wry humor with which she copes with her father’s egomania and hypochondria. “Other people throw parties; my father throws emergencies. It’s been like this forever. When I was a kid I thought the difference between my father and other parents was that my father was more fun. It took me years to see it clearly. My father was a rabble-rouser. He was fun like a cyclone.” And then there is the narrator’s mother, a model of distanced cool, an escaped prisoner who refuses to risk her freedom to help her daughter. If the father were all monstrous, the story wouldn’t be as good as it is, nor would the narrator be as sympathetic a victim of herself and her family. The story’s intertwined characters are testimony that there are no easy answers for those trapped by love and loyalty.
For the second year in a row, fiction by Mark Slouka and Jim Shepard is included in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
Last year’s story by Mark Slouka was about an estranged father taking a terrible chance with his young son; this year’s story is also about a father and son. In “The Hare’s Mask,” the narrator begins by announcing how much he misses his beloved father, then goes on to tell a complicated tale of himself as a boy trying to imagine himself into his father’s past. Something primitive is stirred as the narrator realizes that the world existed before he did. He pieces together a terrible loss his own father suffered at his age. The narrator tells us he had a “precocious ear for loss” and “misheard almost everything.” In this brief, layered, beautifully told story, the narrator moves from a child’s innocent inability to comprehend the past’s sorrows to an adult’s wonder that human beings dare to risk such pain again.
The narrator of Jim Shepard’s powerful “Boys Town” lacks, among other things, the capacity to weather loss and sorrow. His mother is a foulmouthed bully, and he is incapable of freeing himself from her. “Boys Town” is the story of a person without resources, internal or external, who has neither the education nor the emotional means to grow beyond his limiting circumstances. When he looks outside of himself at a movie seen long ago, he sees a hero who has nothing to offer but empty promises. “Most people don’t know what it’s like to look down the road and see there’s nothing there. You try to tell somebody that, but they just look at you.”
The hero/narrator of “East of the West” by Miroslav Penkov is named Nose for his “ugly snoot,” the result of his cousin Vera’s punch, which crushed “it like a plain biscuit.” In other ways, too, Nose is broken into pieces by Vera. “East of the West” centers on the river that divides Nose from his cousin, as it divides Serbia from Bulgaria. The river brings tragedy and heartbreak. The river covers the past, and Nose gathers his courage and swims to a drowned church with his cousin. The question of identity—who’s a Serb? who’s a Bulgarian?—rides through the story and becomes a larger question: Who will dare to change? When you finish reading some stories you feel you’ve listened to a song. Miroslav Penkov’s “East of the West” is such a story.
The main character in “Mickey Mouse” by Karl Taro Greenfeld is a Japanese artist in wartime Tokyo assigned the task of creating a cartoon character to represent his country and displace the globally popular American rodent. The atmosphere of war, survival, and danger is so skillfully created by Greenfeld that it isn’t until the end of the story that the reader understands what the artist hasn’t about his peculiar and impossible assignment.
Steven Millhauser’s “Phantoms” is about the memory of a whole community as it lives with its all-too-present past. The phantoms, or ghosts, appear and reappear, a continuity after death that brings little comfort to the living. The presence of the past creates problems for the parents of the town: to tell or not to tell? What frightens a child more—ignorance or knowledge? Humorous, wise, and smart, the first-person-plural narrative covers the life of the haunted town and its people, making its consciousness of its phantoms and its willful forgetfulness seem more or less like our own relationships with our own ghosts. As ever, the strangeness in Steven Millhauser’s fiction pulls us in, intrigues us, entertains us, and makes us reflect on our own odd lives.
Steven Millhauser’s work has appeared in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories before, as have the stories of Wendell Berry, who is also well known as a poet and essayist. “Nothing Living Lives Alone” is about Berry’s recurring character Andy Catlett, in several stages of his life. As ever, Berry meditates on the qualities of home and the relationship held by generations to the place they think of as their own, the “home place.” In this lovely, slow story, Berry is particularly interested in the entrance of the mechanical into the lives of the animals and people there, and he examines different ideas about labor and freedom, including the freedom some feel to destroy the planet on which they live. The story concerns worlds gone by and their place in our present. Once more Berry gives us intelligent, vibrant fiction, the product of his own excellent labor.
Each year, three jurors read a blind manuscript of the twenty short stories I’ve chosen for the collection, and each picks a favorite. This year’s jurors are Mary Gaitskill, Daniyal Mueenuddin, and Ron Rash, three wonderful short-story writers who could hardly be more different from one another. The fiction of all three jurors has been celebrated in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories. Each has written an essay on a chosen story, and I invite you to enjoy them in “Reading The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2012,” this page–this page.
The favorite stories for 2012 are by Yiyun Li and Alice Munro, two writers whose work has been included before in The PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories.
“Kindness” by Yiyun Li is the confessional autobiography of a woman who’s lived in isolation and recalls those few who noticed her, ambivalent attentions she regards in the end as kindness. The narrator is humble, modest, and calls herself “an indifferent person,” which can be taken in two ways, that she is like many others and that she is immune to others. Her isolation stands out in her crowded Beijing neighborhood, in school, and during her time in the Red Army. Her life is circumscribed; the reader recognizes a war between her individuality and the demands of her society and of other people. Both the sourness and loneliness of “Kindness” are more predictable than the narrator’s final declarations about the kindness of others, hinted at in the story’s beginning when she says, �
��I have few friends, though as I have never left the neighborhood, I have enough acquaintances, most of them a generation or two older. Being around them is comforting; never is there a day when I feel that I am alone in aging.” Her apartment house is derelict, threatened with destruction by Beijing’s newly prosperous developers, but the life she lives and has led has filled her with stories, which alone keep her company.
Alice Munro’s “Corrie” is also about a woman without husband or family, a rich girl in a small town. Corrie, lame from polio, has a quick mind and self-possession to a remarkable degree. She takes what she wants from the life she’s been given, at least in one way, and she looks her losses and gains in the eye. Corrie is not sentimental, which saves her. The ending of her story is its most surprising part, and Corrie’s reaction to a revelation seems both exactly what the reader would expect her to feel—and its opposite. Reading the story, I didn’t want to be anywhere else, doing anything else—once again receiving a gift from Alice Munro.
—Laura Furman Austin, Texas
Dagoberto Gilb
Uncle Rock
IN THE MORNING, at his favorite restaurant, Erick got to order his favorite American food, sausage and eggs and hash-brown papitas fried crunchy on top. He’d be sitting there, eating with his mother, not bothering anybody, and life was good, when a man started changing it all. Most of the time it was just a man staring too much—but then one would come over. Friendly, he’d put his thick hands on the table as if he were touching water, and squat low, so that he was at sitting level, as though he were being so polite, and he’d smile, with coffee-and-tobacco-stained teeth. He might wear a bolo tie and speak in a drawl. Or he might have a tan uniform on, a company logo on the back, an oval name patch on the front. Or he’d be in a nothing-special work shirt, white or striped, with a couple of pens clipped onto the left side pocket, tucked into a pair of jeans or chinos that were morning-clean still, with a pair of scuffed work boots that laced up higher than regular shoes. He’d say something about her earrings, or her bracelet, or her hair, or her eyes, and if she had on her white uniform how nice it looked on her. Or he’d come right out with it and tell her how pretty she was, how he couldn’t keep himself from walking up, speaking to her directly, and could they talk again? Then he’d wink at Erick. Such a fine-looking boy! How old is he, eight or nine? Erick wasn’t even small for an eleven-year-old. He tightened his jaw then, slanted his eyes up from his plate at his mom and not the man, definitely not this man he did not care for. Erick drove a fork into a goopy American egg yolk and bled it into his American potatoes. She wouldn’t offer the man Erick’s correct age, either, saying only that he was growing too fast.
She almost always gave the man her number if he was wearing a suit. Not a sports coat but a buttoned suit with a starched white shirt and a pinned tie meant something to her. Once in a while, Erick saw one of these men again at the front door of the apartment in Silverlake. The man winked at Erick as if they were buddies. Grabbed his shoulder or arm, squeezed the muscle against the bone. What did Erick want to be when he grew up? A cop, a jet-airplane mechanic, a travel agent, a court reporter? A dog groomer? Erick stood there, because his mom said that he shouldn’t be impolite. His mom’s date said he wanted to take Erick along with them sometime. The three of them. What kind of places did Erick think were fun? Erick said nothing. He never said anything when the men were around, and not because of his English, even if that was the excuse his mother gave for his silence. He didn’t talk to any of the men and he didn’t talk much to his mom, either. Finally they took off, and Erick’s night was his alone. He raced to the grocery store and bought half a gallon of chocolate ice cream. When he got back, he turned on the TV, scooted up real close, as close as he could, and ate his dinner with a soup spoon. He was away from all the men. Even though a man had given the TV to them. He was a salesman in an appliance store who’d bragged that a rich customer had given it to him and so why shouldn’t he give it to Erick’s mom, who couldn’t afford such a good TV otherwise?
When his mom was working as a restaurant hostess, and was going to marry the owner, Erick ate hot-fudge sundaes and drank chocolate shakes. When she worked at a trucking company, the owner of all the trucks told her he was getting a divorce. Erick climbed into the rigs, with their rooms full of dials and levers in the sky. Then she started working in an engineer’s office. There was no food or fun there, but even he could see the money. He was not supposed to touch anything, but what was there to touch—the tubes full of paper? He and his mom were invited to the engineer’s house, where he had two horses and a stable, a swimming pool, and two convertible sports cars. The engineer’s family was there: his grown children, his gray-haired parents. They all sat down for dinner in a dining room that seemed bigger than Erick’s apartment, with three candelabras on the table, and a tablecloth and cloth napkins. Erick’s mom took him aside to tell him to be well mannered at the table and polite to everyone. Erick hadn’t said anything. He never spoke anyway, so how could he have said anything wrong? She leaned into his ear and said that she wanted them to know that he spoke English. That whole dinner he was silent, chewing quietly, taking the smallest bites, because he didn’t want them to think he liked their food.
When she got upset about days like that, she told Erick that she wished they could just go back home. She was tired of worrying. “Back,” for Erick, meant mostly the stories he’d heard from her, which never sounded so good to him: She’d had to share a room with her brothers and sisters. They didn’t have toilets. They didn’t have electricity. Sometimes they didn’t have enough food. He saw this Mexico as if it were the backdrop of a movie on afternoon TV, where children walked around barefoot in the dirt or on broken sidewalks and small men wore wide-brimmed straw hats and baggy white shirts and pants. The women went to church all the time and prayed to alcoved saints and, heads down, fearful, counted rosary beads. There were rocks everywhere, and scorpions and tarantulas and rattlesnakes, and vultures and no trees and not much water, and skinny dogs and donkeys, and ugly bad guys with guns and bullet vests who rode laughing into town to drink and shoot off their pistols and rifles, as if it were the Fourth of July, driving their horses all over town like dirt bikes on desert dunes. When they spoke English, they had stupid accents—his mom didn’t have an accent like theirs. It didn’t make sense to him that Mexico would only be like that, but what if it was close? He lived on paved, lighted city streets, and a bicycle ride away were the Asian drugstore and the Armenian grocery store and the corner where black Cubans drank coffee and talked Dodgers baseball.
When he was in bed, where he sometimes prayed, he thanked God for his mom, who he loved, and he apologized for not talking to her, or to anyone, really, except his friend Albert, and he apologized for her never going to church and for his never taking Holy Communion, as Albert did—though only to God would he admit that he wanted to because Albert did. He prayed for good to come, for his mom and for him, since God was like magic, and happiness might come the way of early morning, in the trees and bushes full of sparrows next to his open window, louder and louder when he listened hard, eyes closed.
The engineer wouldn’t have mattered if Erick hadn’t told Albert that he was his dad. Albert had just moved into the apartment next door and lived with both his mother and his father, and since Albert’s mother already didn’t like Erick’s mom, Erick told him that his new dad was an engineer. Erick actually believed it, too, and thought that he might even get his own horse. When that didn’t happen, and his mom was lying on her bed in the middle of the day, blowing her nose, because she didn’t have the job anymore, that was when Roque came around again. Roque was nobody—or he was anybody. He wasn’t special, he wasn’t not. He tried to speak English to Erick, thinking that was the reason Erick didn’t say anything when he was there. And Erick had to tell Albert that Roque was his uncle, because the engineer was supposed to be his new dad any minute. Uncle Rock, Erick said. His mom’s brother, he told Albert. Roque worked at nigh
t and was around during the day, and one day he offered Erick and Albert a ride. When his mom got in the car, she scooted on the bench seat all the way over to Roque. Who was supposed to be her brother, Erick’s Uncle Rock. Albert didn’t say anything, but he saw what had happened, and that was it for Erick. Albert had parents, grandparents, and a brother and a sister, and he’d hang out only when one of his cousins wasn’t coming by. Erick didn’t need a friend like him.
What if she married Roque, his mom asked him one day soon afterward. She told Erick that they would move away from the apartment in Silverlake to a better neighborhood. He did want to move, but he wished that it weren’t because of Uncle Rock. It wasn’t just because Roque didn’t have a swimming pool or horses or a big ranch house. There wasn’t much to criticize except that he was always too willing and nice, too considerate, too generous. He wore nothing flashy or expensive, just ordinary clothes that were clean and ironed, and shoes he kept shined. He combed and parted his hair neatly. He didn’t have a buzzcut like the men who didn’t like kids. He moved slow, he talked slow, as quiet as night. He only ever said yes to Erick’s mom. How could she not like him for that? He loved her so much—anybody could see his pride when he was with her. He signed checks and gave her cash. He knocked on their door carrying cans and fruit and meat. He was there when she asked, gone when she asked, back whenever, grateful. He took her out to restaurants on Sunset, to the movies in Hollywood, or on drives to the beach in rich Santa Monica.