The O. Henry Prize Stories 2014

by Laura Furman

  I was relieved. “Yes,” I said. She told me to come in thirty minutes. We hung up and I resumed work on my nails, not quite calmly.

  She lived on the second floor of an old Victorian house. I had never been inside. On the wraparound porch there were plastic chairs and a couple of bikes. “Not mine,” she said when she met me at the door. “The downstairs people use this porch a lot. I think they hate me, but they’re nice. They sold me their TV for forty bucks, down from fifty.”

  We went upstairs. Her door was ajar and strong smells wafted onto the landing where we stood. She turned to face me and I had the feeling of being in a crowded elevator. “Sorry,” she said. “It’s a little bit messy.”

  We entered the kitchen. There were things on nearly every surface—inches of mail on the table; birdhouses, mason jars, and hats on the counters; three ancient radios in a row on the wide windowsill, partially blocking the light being kept at bay by the smudged glass. On top of the refrigerator was a towering stack of phone books.

  “I love old phone books,” she said. “Here, sit.” She pulled a chair out for me, tossing the articles of clothing that were on it to the floor. When I sat down, something sweatery was underfoot. I pushed it to the side and there was a magazine beneath it. I gave up and sat still, trying not to disturb an environment that felt, despite its clutter, very precise. Unlike Second Chances, this appeared not to be a site of haphazard assemblage, a depository for sad or frustrated purges. It was, actually, quite sophisticated, evoking the air of a laboratory where serious, life-improving science could be undertaken. I felt as though I had walked inside of her, through the unruly glen of her instincts, past the exhausting expanse of her quirkiness, and arrived at some clearing, some place of deep wisdom, where she knew far more than I but would refrain from making me too aware of it. Here, there was a certain restraint emanating, it seemed, from the clocks and jars and papers; it was as if the items themselves owned the apartment.

  “I like your place,” I said.

  “Yes,” she said, sounding almost wistful, as though the place were not hers, “me too.”

  She handed me a chipped yellow plate with cubes of squash on it. They were flecked with bits of green and something that looked like cinnamon. I tasted it. It was not cinnamon, but close. It tasted good. She sat across from me, her own plate red and heaped.

  “Thank you,” I said. “This is good.”

  She nodded. “Nutmeg,” she said.

  For a moment, I felt like crying; a strong tenderness filled me, for her nutmeg and her small bare arms reaching to put more squash on my plate from the bowl between us. We sat quietly, and the feeling passed, and we were just eating.

  When we were finished, I started to take the plates to the sink. “Leave them,” she said. “Let’s watch TV.”

  I felt glad for this plan. It was nice not knowing what would come next, there in that apartment. And I do enjoy television, although I’ve never owned one. My father had offered me his old one, but said I’d have to pay to have it shipped, which in my mind ruined the transaction. I told myself that it would cost more to ship it than it would to buy my own television, but I didn’t know that for a fact, nor did I try to find out. So the offer kept me suspended between two possible courses of action, buying my own set or paying to ship his, and there, helpless to move beyond the potential of television to its actual ownership, the offer finally dissipated. This still bothers me, with something like regret, but it seems, as so many other things have, too late to do anything about it. I think I am frequently held hostage by my hunches. I think my father gave the television to someone else, someone uncomplicated and close by.

  I followed her to an oddly shaped room that had a large television on one side. The room was cold like a cellar. To the left against a recessed wall facing the television was a fold-out sofa bed strewn with sheets and pillows. A blanket hung off the edge. One corner of the thin mattress was visible—a shiny, patterned blue—and curled up slightly where the sheet had sprung off it. I tried not to look at the bed, not to think about the sex that had occurred there, but both bed and sex felt very much alive, filling the drafty spaces between the inert things of the room, between me and her, like a vague electricity.

  She sat on the edge of the bed and I sat next to her. She groped around in the muddle of sheets and, finding the remote control, switched on the TV. A talk show host’s face filled the screen. It was a close-up of the host talking. I sat back, leaning on my elbows. I felt the metal beneath the mattress. She changed positions and lay on her stomach. I kept thinking about the sex, which she appeared to be completely oblivious to—it and my thinking about it. She was listening intently to the talk show host, and her engrossment had a soothing effect. All at once I felt comfortable, part of the room, part of the bed, part, even, of the earlier tryst. My body relaxed into the sheets, which smelled faintly like roses and something else I couldn’t place.

  Now the camera showed that the talk show host was sitting on a sofa next to a woman. The woman was talking animatedly but with a stricken look on her face, and she was using her hands. The talk show host looked stricken, too. I registered all of this before I made sense of the words, and when I forced myself to pay attention to the words it was as though they were coming from the television itself, and not from actual people.

  “That is pathological,” the talk show host was saying. “Truly pathological.”

  “I know!” the woman said. “I know. And I couldn’t stop. Nothing could stop me.”

  “It sounds as though you were at the mercy of something greater than yourself,” the talk show host said. “More powerful than yourself. It’s almost … mind-blowing”—she looked at the camera—“how pathological this is.” The camera panned across the audience members, the majority of which were nodding their heads or wiping their eyes.

  “I know. It really is.” The woman was crying now. “I’m so ashamed.”

  The talk show host touched the woman’s shoulder and looked again at the camera. She was wearing purple and her lips were shiny and purplish. “When we come back, a mother reacts to her daughter’s shockingly pathological behavior.”

  A car commercial came on. A man was wearing a cowboy hat and yelling. I looked at her and she was still staring fixedly at the screen. It was too early to be dusk, but outside, through the window opposite and tinted by the gauzy curtains, the sky looked like dusk. I still felt mostly comfortable, but my mind was beginning to move beyond the room. When would I leave? How would I leave? The commercials had disrupted the sense of timelessness, and now I felt a decision pressing to be made, pacing back and forth between us and the television.

  She got up and went to the kitchen. When she came back, she had the bowl of squash. She sat down on the bed with the bowl in her lap. Now the earlier part of the visit was here with us, which seemed to signal something. I felt the urgency and anxiety of the previous moment lift. She ate squash with her fingers. I hesitated, then ate some too. It tasted better than it had before, as though it was supposed to have been eaten this way all along, with our fingers, with us slanting into each other on the pullout bed.

  We watched a lot of television that day, into the night, and we talked little. I felt strange when I got home. It was after midnight, and my mind was deadened and jittery at the same time, from the television and the odd room and the lack of conversation and the inactivity that all combined to create a bizarre but unquestionable intimacy. I was at a loss as to what to do next. I felt like calling her, but I hadn’t had much to say in the last nine hours, and I didn’t have anything to say just then. I poured a bowl of cereal and sat eating it, trying to think of something I could call her to talk about. As improbable as it felt, I missed her, the way I missed things when I was younger. I looked at the back of the cereal box for a while, and then at some unopened mail that was on the counter, and then eventually brushed my teeth and went to bed. I dreamed that I was drunk and disorderly at a party, and she was there and drunk and disorderly too, and wh
en it came time to leave it was clear that we were despised by everyone else there, and we couldn’t leave fast enough because we were stumbling around, looking for my coat, which was my mother’s coat and which I was desperate to find. But drunk-desperate, and therefore filled with conflicting urges, to apologize, and to redeem myself, and to disappear, and to kiss the host, and to explain the importance of my mother’s coat. In the end, I did some combination of all of these things, and I awoke feeling mortified, my embarrassment like a hangover. I showered and drank coffee and decided to go to work early, to busy myself and to distance myself from everything of the last three-quarters of the previous day.

  By noon, she still hadn’t come in. The owner looked displeased when he dropped by to do some paperwork, and he told me to call. “You shouldn’t be here all day by yourself,” he said. “It’s bad for business.”

  We rarely had more than one customer in the store at a time, and no real business to speak of, but I didn’t argue. I called her and she answered on the fifth ring, just as I was about to hang up.

  “Hi,” she said.

  “Hi. Are you sick?”

  There was a pause. “A little bit, I think.” Her voice got muffled. “… chills … but”—her voice got muffled again—“… fine.”

  “What? I didn’t hear everything you just said.”

  “Oh, nothing. I’m fine.”

  “Okay,” I said. “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to bring you anything?”

  “Nah. No. I’ll be in tomorrow. Sorry to leave you in the lurch. I owe you one.”

  We hung up, and I told the owner that she would be coming in at one, and the owner asked if I would be all right by myself until then, since he really wanted to go to an estate sale and “scavenge.”

  “I’ll be fine,” I said. “Don’t worry.”

  I spent the rest of the day in the shop alone, tidying up racks and organizing inventory lists and dealing with two people, one older man who wanted to find a hat for his wife but left with nothing and seemed displeased and one college boy who bought three extra-small T-shirts that he would wear, I could only guess, ironically.

  When she didn’t come in the next day or the day after, and didn’t answer the phone when I called repeatedly, forcing the owner—who by then was so flustered that he plastered the front door and windows with Help Wanted signs and left the curtains wide open, giving the shop an unnatural brightness that made everything look more drab—to work with me, I got begrudging permission to leave on my lunch break and drive to her place. One of her neighbors with the bikes was sitting on the porch.

  “You here for your friend’s stuff? The landlord’s up there now, but go on in.”

  “Oh,” I said, trying not to look as puzzled as I felt. “Okay. Thanks.”

  I went upstairs. Her door was partially open. A thin, middle-aged man in ripped jeans was looking in the refrigerator. He turned and faced me.

  “Broke her lease, just like that. And no forwarding address. Called this morning and left a message saying she’d leave the key and someone would come by for the rest of her things. That’s you, I’m assuming? You can tell her that she won’t be getting her security deposit back, not a chance.”

  It looked like most of the phone books were still on top of the fridge. The old radios were gone. “She left all of this?”

  “It’s all yours, or it’s getting trashed.” He looked at me and smiled, a little unkindly. “Is she in some kind of trouble? Where’d she go in such a hurry?”

  I kept staring at the phone books. “She’s not in trouble,” I mumbled. I felt sick but also relieved—as though I’d had a fever and it was breaking and I could sit up and drink ginger ale, as though nausea and recuperation were happening in the same moment, the contrast its own kind of balm. “She’s—it’s her family, I think. Some sort of family … emergency, she said.” I thought to myself, It doesn’t matter what I say, it doesn’t make a difference, she’s gone, she isn’t here, she’s no longer here, and it felt almost like joy, but not really.

  The landlord told me to lock the place up when I was done and leave the keys with the neighbors. When he left, I wandered into the other room. The furniture was still there, including the television, and it looked expectant, as if I could turn it on and it would tell me something. I sat on the fold-out couch and turned it on and there was a soap opera, one woman facing the camera and pouring amber-colored liquid from an ornate decanter into a glass, and swirling it, and turning around slowly, deliberately, and another woman with her back to the camera, looking out a window and touching the edge of a lace curtain, framed by the window and the camera and the gaze of the other woman and waiting, it seemed, for some cue.

  Michael Parker

  Deep Eddy

  WE HAD TO PARK by the bridge where the black ladies fished through dusk, ignoring us as they peered into the murk for the bob of red cork in the water. A quarter-mile walk along a root-ruptured path to where the river whirlpooled and the bottom dropped so wildly myth bubbled up from it, a froth of dead babies crying on moon-shiny nights, suicide pacts of numerous young lovers, an entire stagecoach of painted ladies, midway from Charleston to Baltimore in pursuit of a regiment of whoremongers, sucked under its current. Sorcery, devilment, human sacrifice: legends spread for decades by teenagers who heard them from grandmothers trying any old lie to warn them away from a place known for deflowering. But we went that night and other nights seeking only the wild circling current. We’d just been to see a movie where a dingo ate a baby, stole it from a tent in the night while the parents slept alongside it, and we were talking all Australian. Bye-bee, she called me, my bye-bee. We went in with our underwear on, laughing at our awful accents. She’d lost her flower with the first of a string of boys and she liked me only in the way girls like those boys who make them forget, temporarily, some pain I hoped was only temporary. My job was to make her laugh. So we laughed at babies carted off by dogs on big grainy screens; we mocked the fantastic rumors of that cowlicked spot in the river and dubbed it Jacuzzi, we laughed at the word Jacuzzi, hollered it into the dark woods so we could laugh again at the echo. But the word rang in my head until it was frightening, not funny, so I told her something true that I knew she might misinterpret as the first line of a joke. Today I saw part of a snake. If she said, What part? I would swim to shore, pull on my clothes, and leave. If she just said, Which? I would stop fighting the current and allow it to deliver me to her. Everything—then and since—hinged on a single word. There was no answer, just a gurgling in the dark water, laughter from the eternal circle of poor drowned whores, the baby in the dingo den, the short end of the snake.

  Maura Stanton

  Oh Shenandoah

  MY FIANCÉ—I STILL THOUGHT of him as my fiancé although I was already planning not to marry him—came out of the bathroom with a funny look on his face. I’d heard the noise in there, even in the living room, where I was fussing with a pot of basil sitting out on the window ledge over the canal. I was wondering if it was going to rain or if I should water it.

  “What did you break this time?” I asked. Hugo had already dropped the hair dryer, shattering the plastic casing, and knocked the glass shower doors off their rails. These were not good reasons for breaking our engagement, of course. I had other reasons that were going to be hard to explain to him, which is why I kept putting it off.

  “The toilet seat cracked.” He looked sheepish. “It just fell down. They’re not supposed to do that.”

  I followed him back to the bathroom. Sure enough, the wooden seat had cracked straight across. It was still usable, but the cleaning woman who came in on Saturday was bound to report it to the owner, who’d charge me a fortune.

  “We’ve got to buy a new one,” I said. “Pronto.”

  “In Venice?”

  “Venice is full of toilets,” I said. “They must sell the seats somewhere.”

  I was the one who’d rented the apartment, with help from a
n Italian friend of my aunt, so I felt responsible. I’d told my aunt, and she’d told her friend to tell the landlady, that I was a quiet single asthmatic young woman who was looking for a place to escape the spring pollen that always made her sick. I hadn’t said anything about sharing the tiny apartment with my fiancé because I didn’t think he’d be able to get away.

  I’d met him at the community garden back home. Our plots adjoined, and when we were both there on Saturday afternoons we’d stop work and talk about this and that. He’d been an English major without much of a future. But then he’d been hired by his entrepreneur brother who ran an airport shuttle service. I was going to graduate school in English, living on fellowships, loans, and summer jobs.

  I gave Hugo big bunches of basil, my most successful crop, and he gave me red peppers. One July day when it was especially humid he saw me gasping, and took the weed clippers out of my hand and finished the job for me. Then one day in August a wasp got down my T-shirt. I screamed, and Hugo dropped his rake and rushed over. He reached down the neck of my T-shirt and probed with his fingers and crushed the wasp with his fist before it could sting me. I leaned against him. “See if there’s another one down there,” I whispered. There wasn’t, but it took him a while to be sure, and by then we were both shaking and gasping. We went back to his truck, and we drove to his apartment and spent the weekend together. That was last summer.

  In March, when I could feel my chest getting tight again, I decided to use my savings plus some help from my parents to spend the month of May, the month that always made me really sick, in a place where I might not need to use my inhaler every day. I’d figured out that Venice had no grass and hardly any trees and was surrounded by water. At first, Hugo seemed fine with the idea. Then, in April, he got wildly nervous about being separated from me. He wanted to marry me. He wanted to marry me right away.