The PEN O. Henry Prize Stories 2012

by Laura Furman

  I hadn’t been there. I didn’t even know he was sick. I’d been sent to Girl Scout camp. While he slowly died, I learned how to tie knots. While he hallucinated about his village, the cherry trees, the bull in the field that bellowed at night for sex, I kissed a girl named Julia Pfeffernuss. I believed for years afterward that tongues should taste like the clovers we’d sucked for the honey at their roots. When my father was forgetting his English and shouting for his mother in Hungarian, I stole a sailboat and went alone to the quiet heart of the reservoir. Before the dam had been built, there had been a village there. I took down the sails and dropped the anchor and dove. I opened my eyes to find myself outside a young girl’s room, her brushes and combs still laid out on her vanity, me in the algaed mirror, framed by the window. I saw a catfish lying on a platter in the dining room as if serving himself up; he looked at me and shook his head and sagely swam away. I saw sheets forgotten on the line, waving upward toward the sun. I came out of the lake and climbed into the boat and tacked for camp, and didn’t tell a soul what I had seen, never, not once, not even my husband, who would have made it his own.

  I might have told my friends, I think. I don’t think I’d meant to keep the miracle to myself. But the camp’s director had been waiting for me on the dock, a hungry pity pressing her lips thin, the red hood of her sweatshirt waggling in the air behind her. It stirred still, in my memory, still, a big and ugly tongue.

  When we first saw this house on its sixty acres, I didn’t fall for the heart-pine floors or the attic fan that kept the house cool all summer without air-conditioning or the magnolias blooming their goblets of white light. I fell for the long swing in the heritage oak over the lake, which had thrilled some child, which was waiting for another. My husband looked at the study, mahogany-paneled, and said under his breath, Yes. I stood in the kitchen and looked at the swing, at the way the sun hit the wood so gently, the promise it held, and thought, Yes. Every day for ten years, watching the swing move expectantly in the light wind of morning, thinking, Yes, the word quietly piercing the diaphragm, that same Yes until the day my husband left, and even after he left, and then even after he died; even then, still hoping.

  For a very long time, we sat there like that: my dad’s hand in mine, in the roaring black. I waited for him to speak, but he had always been a man who knew how to groom the silence between people. He smoked, I drank, and the world tired itself out with its tantrum.

  I lost awareness of my body. There was only the smoothness of the porcelain beneath me, the warmth of my father’s hand. Time passed, endless, a breath.

  Slowly, the wind softened. Sobbed. Stopped. The house trembled and moaned itself back to pitch. A trickle of dawn painted a gray strip under the door. My body returned to itself. I could only hear my heartbeat and rain off the roof when I said, Remember when you used to call your family in Hungary?

  You were always so furious, he said. You would scream at me when I tried to talk. Your mother had to take you out to get ice cream every time I wanted to call.

  I couldn’t eat it. I just watched it melt, I said.

  I know, he said.

  I still can’t eat it, I said. I hated that, suddenly, you opened your mouth and became another person.

  We waited. The air felt poached, both sticky and wet. I said, I never thought I could be so alone.

  We’re all alone, he said.

  You had me, I said.

  True, he said. He squeezed the back of my neck, kneaded the knots out.

  I listened to the shifting of the world outside. This is either the eye or we’ve made it through, I said.

  Well, he said. There will always be another storm, you know.

  I stood, woozy, the bottles clanking off my body back into the bathtub. I know, I said.

  You’ll be A-OK, he said.

  That’s no wisdom coming from you, I said. Everything’s all right for the dead.

  When I opened the door to the bedroom, the room was blazing with light. The plywood over the windows had caught the wind like sails and carried the frames from the house. There were rectangular holes in the wall. The creatures had left the room. The storm had stripped the sheets like a good guest, and they had all blown away, save one, which hung pale and perfect over the mirror, saving me from the sight of myself.

  The damage was done: three-hundred-year-old trees smashed, towns flattened as if a fist had come from the sun and twisted. My life was scattered into three counties. Someone found a novel with my bookplate in it sunning itself on top of a car in Georgia. Everywhere I looked, the dead. A neighbor child, come through the storm, had wandered outside while the rest of the family was salvaging what remained, and fallen into the pool and drowned. The high school basketball team, ignoring all warnings, crossed a bridge and was swallowed up by the Gulf. Old friends were carried away on the floods; others, seeing the little that remained, let their hearts break. The storm had stolen the rest of the wine and the butler’s pantry, too. My chickens had drowned, blown apart, their feathers freckling the ground. For weeks, the stench of their rot would fill my dreams. Over the next month, mold would eat its way up the plaster and leave gorgeous abstract murals of sage and burnt sienna behind. But the frame had held, the doors had held. The house, in the end, had held.

  On my way downstairs, I passed a congregation of exhausted armadillos on the landing. Birds had filled the Florida room, cardinals and whip-poor-wills and owls. Gently the insects fled from my step. I sloshed over the rugs that bled their vegetable dyes onto the floorboards. My brain was too small for my skull and banged from side to side as I walked. Moving in the humidity was like forcing my way through wet silk. Still, I opened the door to look at the devastation outside.

  And there I stopped, breathless. I laughed. Isn’t this the fucking kicker, I said aloud. Or perhaps I didn’t.

  Houses contain us; who can say what we contain? Out where the steps had been, balanced beside the drop-off: one egg, whole and mute, holding all the light of dawn in its skin.

  Keith Ridgway

  Rothko Eggs

  SHE LIKED ART. She liked paintings and video art and photography. She liked to read about artists and she liked to hear them talk. She had been to all the big London art museums already, and she had been to some small ones too, and some galleries. She wanted to be an artist, she thought. She liked how the world looked and felt one way when you looked at it or breathed or walked about, and looked another way completely when you looked at art, even though you recognized that the art was about the world, or had something to do with the world—the world you looked at or breathed or walked about in. She didn’t mean realism. She didn’t like realism very much, really, because usually there was no room in it. She would look at it, and everything was already there. But she liked abstract art because it was empty. Sometimes it was only empty a tiny amount, and it was easy for her to see what the artist was trying to say or make her feel, and sometimes that was okay, but she usually liked the art that had lots of empty in it, where it was really hard to work out what the artist wanted, or whether the artist wanted anything at all, or was just, you know, trying to look like he had amazing ideas. But really good artists had lots of empty in their paintings or whatever they did. They left everything out, or most things, anyway, but suggested something, so that she could take her own things into the painting (or the installation or the video or whatever), and the best art of all was when she didn’t really know what she was taking in with her, but it felt right, and when she looked at that art and took herself into it she felt amazing.

  She wanted to be able to do that. Make that.

  Photography was a bit different. She hadn’t worked out why yet.

  Her Dad was having a text fit. She put her phone on silent and stuck it in a drawer.

  She was trying to finish her history essay but Beth kept on popping up on MSN asking her stupid questions. She didn’t answer her for a while and then set her status to away and tried to think about why Churchill lost the election after the
war.

  There were some artists that she couldn’t really understand. She could see that they had left her lots of space, but she didn’t know what to fill it with. Sometimes, if they were not very well known or respected artists she decided that they just weren’t very good—that they were faking it and they didn’t know what they were doing really. But if they were famous and supposed to be amazing, then they just made her feel stupid. It was easier the farther back in history you went, because art became more realist and you could just like something or not like it. More or less. Though sometimes when you didn’t like something and then read about it, or read about the artist, you could start to see things you didn’t notice before, or you could feel things differently, and start to like it. Unless you went back to when everything was sort of cartoonish, like Fra Angelico, and then she didn’t really understand what was going on there either, because it just looked so sloppy and bad. But apparently it was amazing.

  On her laptop the wallpaper was a self-portrait by Frida Kahlo. She liked it. She thought it was sort of funny, because it looked so serious. She liked this woman. She had seen a film about her. That wasn’t why she liked her though. She liked the way she made people fit her world, and be a bit ugly, but still made them beautiful. And funny. There were not enough women artists in history. She paid them extra attention when she came across them. She wondered if that was fair, and then wondered why she wondered that. It was not a competition. She was not a judge. So she decided she could pay them more attention if she wanted.

  On her wall she had some small postcards lined up in a grid. There were quite a few now. It was useless to look at any one of them really, because the prints were so small, and you could get only the vaguest sort of idea of what they were really like. She had seen some of them for real. But there were thirty-eight now, in seven rows of five, and one row of three at the top. Two more and then she’d start another grid. Her Dad had sent most of them. Or just given them to her. But there were ones from her Gran as well, and from friends, and her mother had picked up a few when she’d gone to the National Gallery in Edinburgh on her weekend away. She suspected her mother had just gone into the shop.

  The grid was really neatly spaced and aligned. She didn’t like that now. She wished it was more disorganized. She’d made it look like a chart. But she’d decided to leave it as it was and make the next one messy in contrast. She thought that would be interesting. It had started by accident, when she just stuck her first postcard, of the Thames, by Turner, on the wall above her desk. It was only when she’d added the third that she lined them up properly. And then she told people she liked art postcards. So more came. She’d only been doing it about a year. She wondered how long it would take to fill all the empty space on the walls.

  She had a Francis Bacon exhibition poster that her Dad had bought for her. She had a really nice print of a young Rembrandt self-portrait where he looked mad and sort of handsome. She also had a poster of van Gogh’s Starry Night, which she hated, but which she had to leave there, at least for now, because her mother had bought it for her. She didn’t hate it. But it was so clichéd that she couldn’t help deciding not to like it. Her favourite print was the one over her bed. It was Judith Slaying Holofernes by Artemisia Gentileschi. Her mother didn’t like it at all. She said it would give her nightmares. All that blood. But it didn’t. It was very violent, but it was like that wasn’t the point. The point was something else. It was the way Judith gritted her teeth. It was good.

  Her mother was calling her. She shouted back. She opened the drawer and looked at her phone. Okay. No new texts from her Dad. She read the last one. He was panicking about the summer holidays. It wasn’t even Easter yet. If they talked to each other and left her out of it everything would be sorted in about ten seconds. She hated clichés. Except maybe it would be a cliché if they got on really well and were all mature all the time and made sure she never felt like a football or whatever, and were super civilized and cool. That would be another cliché. At least it would be a more pleasant cliché. Maybe it wouldn’t. Maybe it wouldn’t because it would feel forced and unnatural, whereas at least this was them being honest.

  —Is he annoying you?

  —What?

  —Your father?

  —No. Why?

  —You’re sighing at your phone. You always sigh at your phone when he’s texting you.

  —I don’t. It’s not him. It’s Michele.

  —Why are you sighing at Michele?

  —Oh, she thinks she’s pregnant. Again.

  Her mother stared at her for a second. And relaxed.

  —Jesus, Cath, don’t do that. It’s not funny. I am … God almighty. Just don’t.

  Cath smiled. Her mother stood in the doorway.

  —Washing.

  —No, I put it all in the basket.

  —What’s that then?

  There was a pair of socks on the bed.

  —They’re clean. They’re today’s.

  —All right. Come down for a cuppa.

  —I will in a minute. I’m doing an essay.

  —Well I’m putting the kettle on. Come down and have a cuppa with me. I’m bored. Do you want to go to the shops?

  —No. I’ll be down in a minute.

  She waited until she was alone again and then replied to her father. Yes. No. I did. There is. It will be all right. Shut up. She knew that if something terrible happened to her, her parents would have to meet in casualty or the morgue or something and they would break down and cry and hug each other and all the dumb fighting would be forgotten and they would love each other again, because she was dead or a vegetable and that was all they had. And then she imagined herself thinking that if she really loved them she’d kill herself and she laughed. Then she thought that if something terrible happened they would blame each other and spend the rest of their lives tied together by hatred and her death.

  Everything was a cliché.

  Sometimes when she was out with her Dad and they were talking with other people, he would refer to her Mum as “my ex-wife.” One day she asked him if he ever referred to her as his ex-daughter. They had a row. But since then he referred to her Mum as Catherine’s mother. Which made it sound like her fault.

  Churchill lost the postwar election because people were tired. When you have a fire in your house you want the fire brigade to come. When the fire is out you want them to leave. She wrote this in her essay and was really pleased with it. She thought it was a brilliant analogy. But when she got it back she’d been given 65% and there were no comments at all, and the bit where she said that wasn’t even ticked or marked. She didn’t know why she bothered.

  • • •

  He waited for her sometimes in a coffee shop near her school. She’d get a text at exactly 3:30 saying “fancy a quick coffee”? even though she never actually had a coffee, she had one of their herbal teas, or sometimes a smoothie. Sometimes she couldn’t meet him because she had something on, or was going somewhere with Beth or Michele. Sometimes she pretended she had something on. Well, just once or twice. Usually it was fun to see him. He was usually in a good mood. He’d tell her funny things about work. About people at work or people he’d met. Sometimes he’d get a call and have to leave in a hurry. She liked that. He’d say What into his phone and then listen and grunt or say yes or no, and then he’d sigh and say all right ten minutes, and he’d stand up and kiss her on the forehead and whisper that he loved her and he’d be gone.

  The coffee shop was at a crossroads. She had to walk past it on the way home. Down the road from the school. Then the zebra crossing. One time she was walking past it and she glanced in and her Dad was sitting there. He hadn’t seen her. He was reading a newspaper. She just looked at him. She was with a couple of people. Stuart and Byron and Felice, or someone. So she couldn’t really just stop. But she lingered. And looked at him. He was reading. Every so often he’d look up. But he was looking out toward the crossing. He’d missed her. He looked worried. He looked sad and
worried and tired. He looked the way he always looked whenever she caught sight of him before he saw her. Then when he saw her he’d light up, or, well, not light up, but his face changed. He would smile. And yeah, he’d brighten up a little. And she liked that. But his face when she wasn’t in front of him worried her. He sat slumped. He looked old. Older. Did he fake it when he saw her? Or did seeing her just make him happier than he really was? She didn’t like either idea. She caught up with the others. Later she got the text that he must have sent at 3:30. It had been lost somewhere. She replied immediately and he texted back saying it didn’t matter, it was no big deal, he’d just been passing. Love.

  She and Stuart had sort-of-sex in his bedroom one Saturday afternoon. Everyone thought he was gay, and he never really cared one way or the other about that and never denied it or got angry or anything, so she had thought he was gay, too. And he liked books and art, so … and he wore a scarf in a sort of gay way, and he was good friends with Byron, who was actually gay. But it turned out he wasn’t gay. Or wasn’t very gay, anyway. He was a really good kisser. Kissing him was … really good. She talked to Beth about it, and she wanted to describe what the kissing was like; and she wanted to tell her that kissing Stuart was like being inside a Jackson Pollock painting. She really wanted to say that. She was determined to say that. But when it came to it she just said that it was really good and bare sexy. It made her think that maybe Beth and her weren’t as close as she had thought. Because why else would she not say what she wanted to say? It was just stupid.

  Stuart had talked to her about art. She knew more than he did. He had seemed interested in listening to her. He sent her an e-mail saying he’d looked up Francis Bacon online and thought he was mad and brilliant. But she thought he was faking it a bit. And it was the first she’d heard from him since the sort-of-sex, and he didn’t mention that at all, or her really either, or mention anything about meeting up again outside school or whatever. He had film posters on his wall. Watchmen and Superbad, and an old Finding Nemo one that she thought was cute but which made him blush when she mentioned it.