Praise for Danielle Lazarin’s
Back Talk
“Danielle Lazarin’s Back Talk is deceptively quiet but packs a powerful punch—much like the girls and women in its pages. The stories in this collection batter at the boundaries of female desire—not just for sex, but for intimacy, for visibility, for agency. They talk back to the idea that stories about women are ‘domestic,’ burrowing deep to find wildness and a smoldering fury beneath. The best collection I’ve read in years, from a phenomenal new talent.”
—Celeste Ng, New York Times bestselling author of Little Fires Everywhere and Everything I Never Told You
“The stories in Back Talk are not only fierce and unflinching in their clear-eyed portrayal of women and girls, they are also tender and compassionate, imbued with a deep longing; Lazarin’s characters ache for their lives to be without pain. Lazarin is a sophisticated writer, and her remarkable debut offers us subtle but profound truths about growing up, moving forward, and finding ourselves.”
—Edan Lepucki, New York Times bestselling author of Woman No. 17 and California
“These are wonderful stories—sparkling, witty, and tender, riding that sweet spot between urbane and vulnerable, between hilarity and heartbreak, all those impossible contradictions that remind us of what love is like. Lazarin’s astonishing insight and craftsmanship put me in mind of short-story masters like Ann Beattie and Charles Baxter. I think she’s destined for the big leagues.”
—Dan Chaon, New York Times bestselling author of Ill Will
“Back Talk offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of the contemporary family in a state of creative destruction, flying apart and simultaneously reconstituting itself in new forms. Danielle Lazarin guides us through the varied permutations of her extended, blended families with insightful wit, surpassing empathy, and wry wisdom.”
—Peter Ho Davies, author of The Fortunes
“Misfits and mess-ups, dreamers and delinquents, kids chafing at adolescence and adults failing at parenthood—it’s easy to see yourself in Danielle Lazarin’s characters. But these stories, like all good stories, aren’t a mirror: they’re a window that shows us the whole world.”
—Rumaan Alam, author of Rich and Pretty
“I absolutely loved this book—from the first page to the last, this collection is stunning for its insight into the lives of young women, revelatory for its finely tuned prose, and unforgettable for its humor and tenderness. I will return to these stories again and again. I envy the reader who gets to discover Danielle Lazarin’s work.”
—Julie Buntin, author of Marlena
“Smart, sharp, well-paced stories—worlds of their own that circle life and loss with humor, wit, and sparkling intelligence.”
—Megan Mayhew Bergman, author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise and Almost Famous Women
“Thank God, a collection of stories about women who don’t hate themselves, don’t hate other women, don’t hate their bodies, don’t hate their husbands, or even their ex-husbands, don’t hate their sisters, their mothers, their fathers, their children. Women who sometimes choose to have sex and sometimes choose not to. Women who are simply, like me, trying to figure out what it means to be alive, to be in love, to be daughters, parents, siblings, wives, citizens, human beings. I hope Danielle Lazarin writes a million more stories like the ones in Back Talk so I can keep reading her work forever.”
—Eileen Pollack, author of A Perfect Life
PENGUIN BOOKS
BACK TALK
Danielle Lazarin’s short stories have won grants from the New York Foundation for the Arts and the Northern Manhattan Arts Alliance, the Glimmer Train Family Matters Award, and Hopwood Awards. She is a graduate of the writing programs at Oberlin College and the University of Michigan’s Helen Zell Writers’ Program. She lives in her native New York City with her husband and daughters.
PENGUIN BOOKS
An imprint of Penguin Random House LLC
375 Hudson Street
New York, New York 10014
penguin.com
Copyright © 2018 by Danielle Lazarin
Penguin supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin to continue to publish books for every reader.
“Appetite” first appeared in Colorado Review; “Spider Legs” in Glimmer Train; “Window Guards” (as “Ghost Dog”) in People Holding; “The Holographic Soul” in Michigan Quarterly Review; “Landscape No. 27” in Indiana Review; “Back Talk” in Copper Nickel; “Dinosaurs” in Five Chapters; and “Gone” in Boston Review.
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA
Names: Lazarin, Danielle, author.
Title: Back talk : stories / Danielle Lazarin.
Description: New York : Penguin Books, [2018]
Identifiers: LCCN 2017013074 (print) | LCCN 2017028206 (ebook) | ISBN 9781524705190 (ebook) | ISBN 9780143131472 (softcover)
Subjects: | BISAC: FICTION / Short Stories (single author). | FICTION / Contemporary Women. | FICTION / Literary.
Classification: LCC PS3612.A974 (ebook) | LCC PS3612.A974 A6 2018 (print) |
DDC 813/.6—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017013074
These selections are works of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Cover design: Lynn Buckley
Version_1
For my parents
Contents
Praise for Danielle Lazarin’s Back Talk
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Appetite
Floor Plans
Spider Legs
Weighed and Measured
American Men in Paris I Did Not Love
Window Guards
The Holographic Soul
Landscape No. 27
Hide and Seek
Back Talk
Lovers’ Lookout
Dinosaurs
Gone
Looking for a Thief
Red Light, Green Light
Second-Chance Family
Acknowledgments
It was different for a girl.
—Susan Minot, “Lust”
Appetite
In Val’s bedroom before Arthur Binder’s party, I have one of my black boots on my left foot, and one of my dead mother’s shoes—oxblood leather, two-inch heel—on my right. “Which one?” I ask Val.
“The right,” she says, “but with the first pair of jeans.”
“Yeah?” This is not the first time I’ve taken the shoes out of my parents’ room, but I’ve never worn them before.
“Yeah, definitely. Those new?”
“New-ish,” I say.
At the party, girls say they like my shoes and I say thank you; I pretend they are mine.
When Val follows her ex-boyfriend from the living room into a back bedroom, she leaves me on the arm of the chair she was just in, alone with a boy I don’t know. He’s looking straight at me as he exhales the last of a cigarette through the window screen before extinguishing it in his glass, one of the good ones from the locked part of the
liquor cabinet. Because he is beyond handsome, and because he is likely out of my league, I say, “Can I help you?” trying my hardest not to smile.
“I know you,” he says, and pats his pockets for another cigarette.
“Oh yeah?” I am still trying to be cute, though he hasn’t said this in a flirtatious way.
“You and your friends ran out on the check at my uncles’ diner last weekend. You have a cigarette?”
It’s true. We were short ten dollars, and somehow it seemed smarter to not leave anything at all. I want to throw up. I also want to kiss him, this boy who clearly doesn’t want to kiss me back.
“I don’t. My mother died of lung cancer.”
“And before she died, she didn’t teach you not to steal?”
“Obviously not.”
Come, my mother used to say when she was particularly frustrated with me, I want to hurt you, just a little bit, as she pinched me.
“Had you been boys, we would’ve come after you. Rich girls,” he says, shaking his head.
“I’m not the one in private school.”
“Have we met before?”
“Nope.” I don’t know him, but I recognize his friends; they go to an all-boys private school in the Bronx.
He tells me his name, George, and asks for mine, and then uses it when he offers to refill my empty cup, a plastic one. “Tell me what you want, Claudia,” he says, and I feel sweat under the band of my bra at my name in his mouth. While he’s in the kitchen, I peel off a twenty from sixty dollars I’m keeping for Val, who loses things too easily, who has yet to emerge from that back bedroom. I hold it out to him when he hands me my drink. “This is all I have, but give it to your uncles.”
Our fingers graze as he takes it. He thanks me. The diner, he explains, is the last of its kind in New York. “People like to eat shit out of trucks now,” he says.
• • •
At half past twelve George asks if I am staying much longer. I look at the door where Val is with her now-not ex. The last thing I want is to be stuck on a late-night subway platform with the two of them, as they paw at each other or rehash their last breakup. I find Val’s jacket in a pile in the bedroom and zip her two remaining twenties into a pocket.
Once outside, George asks, “Which way?”
“The A.”
“Me too,” he says, but already I don’t believe him.
George rides with me to my stop, the last one. He walks the five blocks to my building as if he knows where he is going. When I ask him where he lives, he points downtown and east. “Oh, that way,” I tease him. “Yes, precisely,” he replies.
He takes the step below mine outside my building, asks, “Is your mother really dead?”
“I’m wearing her shoes,” I say, and we both look down at my feet.
“Doesn’t prove anything.”
“I may be a thief, but I’m not a liar.”
“We’ll see.”
“Will we?” I ask, when I want to ask why he hasn’t kissed me, when he does, with one hand on my waist, which he uses to push me gently toward the building when he’s done. On the train he put his number in my phone but won’t take mine. “You’ll call,” he assures me, shooing me up the steps. He doesn’t move from his step until I am through both sets of locked doors and safely in the lobby.
• • •
Our building used to be grand, sixty years ago. Now the floor dips right before the elevator, worn down by years of impatient waiting. The mosaic around the mailboxes needs cleaning and repair; the crests of its ocean waves, though we live nowhere near the ocean, swell no more. Tiles fall off every month; the super slips them into his pocket with a headshake. When I was a child, I’d work them like loose teeth. “Stop that,” my father would say while flipping through the mail, and I would put my hands at my sides, my fingers itching to finish the work. Back then, Josef was our super; he’d cup my chin every time I brought him a tile, as though I were bringing him gold coins. When Josef moved upstate to live near his grandkids, we got a new super. He’s good at fixing plumbing, but he doesn’t talk much; he doesn’t smile at the kids, though I guess I am not a kid anymore. A few upscale restaurants have moved in; more strollers, nicer ones, take up the sidewalks, the steps to the subway station, but our building seems to be falling down despite this, despite all the people who show up in our neighborhood with their money and their dreams and their ripe uteruses. Somewhere in the building’s basement, there is a collection of tiles big enough to construct a new ocean.
The elevator smells of my neighbors’ sins: takeout, trash, too much perfume. In my fifteen years, I’ve ridden with them all: the pot dealer in 8C; Mr. Rivera, his crumpled receipts falling from his jacket pockets; dirty boots and hangovers; and my parents, who gathered themselves in a steely silence after a fight, before they entered the world pretending to be happier than they were. Tonight, I am grateful to ride alone, to not have anyone know I am coming home this late.
Off the elevator, I slide out of the shoes, rest for a moment barefoot on the cool floors of the hallway. It’s not the heel that bothers me, but the toes; they pinch. I only remember my mother wearing the shoes twice: to a cousin’s bar mitzvah, and to a dinner with my grandparents. Both times she ended the evening in stockinged feet. The shoes are at least twenty years old but it’s as though no one has worn them, and I count on this when I return them to my parents’ closet in the morning, while my father is buying the paper. I’m not sure Dad even knows they’re there anymore, that he can remember what we’ve kept of hers and what we’ve thrown out. The only evidence is the slight ache I have in my arches the next day, a secret he’s not interested in discovering.
I was twelve when my mother died. It took three years. Before she left, we let her have as much anger and fear as she wanted, even as it suffocated the rest of us.
My older sister, Michelle, asked once to go to boarding school.
“You only have a little more than a year to go,” Dad reminded her.
“I just want out of here,” she whimpered across the kitchen table, and my mother gave a little moan from the other room as if to say she was on her side. Then Mich leaned over her baked ziti and cried. I remember thinking how selfish she was; I thought she was crying because Dad had said no. He returned to his dinner, wiping his mustache between bites.
Seven months after my mother’s death, Mich left for college. Last spring break, her sophomore year, while everyone else her age was getting tan and wasted on beaches in the southern United States, Mich came home. It felt foolish to even utter the word spring in New York; moisture still dripped, cold, from the heating pipe in the bathroom, from our noses. It had been a miserable winter. The snow fell regularly but wouldn’t stick. The sidewalks were slicked with a sheet of ice so thin we walked with our feet clenched for months.
I’d imagined Mich coming home with interesting friends and stories, with music I’d never heard of, but most of our conversations were her clucking at me, her tone dripping with the kind of pity I’d been trying to shake now that I was finally in high school, now that fewer people knew the big horrible thing that had happened to us. But instead, college had made her more serious than she already was. She either dismissed her classmates for their ignorance about “real-world problems” or droned on endlessly about her course work, always circling back to impending world collapse, alternately due to population explosion, political implosion, or the general stupidity of humanity.
During that break, she insisted we sit down for dinner every night, as though we had ever done this. One night she made us roasted chicken and potatoes, with two kinds of greens she’d taken the train all the way to the market at Union Square to get. As soon as we sat, she started talking, and I was eating because in truth, it had been a while since we’d had food that good. Dad was too consumed by his chicken to even nod along to Mich’s chatter like he usually did. They both had b
ottles of beer at the top of their plates, and I could tell he was relaxed, happy to have her home.
The whole time she talked she was shaking salt onto her potatoes and it was as though she was unaware she was doing it, a zombie’s hand at work. I waited for her to take her first bite and be shocked by the snowcap of salt she was amassing on the world’s smallest pile of mashed potatoes, but she forgot to do that, too.
“I think I’m just going to stay home,” she said. “I don’t think college is for me. Not now.”
My father put his fork down and reached out to touch her shoulder. And for the twentieth time in my recent memory, Mich cried in her food at our table.
I took more mashed potatoes, because it was clear no one else had the stomach for them. There was a time, my father says, when I didn’t eat, when I refused to sit at a table for more than a few minutes, the world far more interesting than food. I don’t remember that. I’m not one of those girls. I have an appetite.
• • •
The morning after I meet George, I hear my father on the phone, early, before he’s started the coffee. When I come out to the kitchen, he’s leaning against the counter, phone in his hand, hair askew. “Come downstairs with me?” he asks. “Your sister’s here.”
Back in New York, Mich found a boyfriend, someone she had gone to high school with who she’d always had a thing for. She moved in with him in Queens over the summer, and my father and I got our quiet back. When she comes uptown to see us now, she’s a touch lighter than she was when she was at school. As we wait on the same steps I was on with George hours earlier, I ask my father if that’s over now, too, if John broke up with Mich.
“She didn’t say, exactly. I don’t really know.”
“Okay,” I say, not asking him what he didn’t ask her.
“And weren’t you staying at Val’s last night?” my father asks.
“Changed my mind.”
“Just let me know next time, will ya?”
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