The Best American Short Stories 2019

by Anthony Doerr

  “Do you have a tornado shelter?” Kristin asked. We took them out back to see it. The house was so new the yard was still grassless, all loose yellow dirt.

  “I see you’re workin’ on Dust Bowl: The Sequel,” said Rich.

  “You know us Okies,” said Steven.

  He pointed out the shelter, a reinforced steel door in the dirt.

  “This would be just perfect for an abduction,” said Kristin.

  “Don’t tell anyone, but we’ve got a little Polish babushka down there right now,” I said.

  “We take her out when we’ve got a yen for pierogi,” said Steven.

  It had been months since we’d had anyone for whom we could show off our verbal acuity. The next morning as I watched them drive away, next stop Santa Fe, I could hardly breathe.

  That very day I picked up the local jobs newsletter at the grocery store and found the advertisement for a copywriter.

  WRITER NEEDED TO BRING RESIDENTIAL PROPERTIES TO LIFE.

  WORK FOR TOP-10 OKC REALTOR. PART-TIME, PAY NEGOTIABLE.

  Within the hour I had mailed off a cover letter and résumé. Two days later I received a phone call from Bethany Parkhurst, the Top-10 OKC realtor who had posted the ad.

  “The job is this,” she said. “Every listing needs a description for the brochure. I hate writing and I’m not good at it. I’ve always done it myself but I want to stop. That’s where you come in—I hope.”

  She asked about my experience and availability. I told her about my job in New York and tried to convey that I was very available without sounding too desperate; Bethany’s voice was crisp and polished, and suddenly I wanted this job more than I had ever wanted anything in my life.

  “Are you a good writer?” she asked.

  “Yes,” I said steadily. It was a relief to be asked a question about myself and to be so certain of the answer. I could dash things off quickly and I could make just about anything sound good. In college I got As on papers about books I’d barely skimmed. It was not that I was so smart; it was just that I was exactly what Bethany had asked for—a good writer. I could give the impression of meaning and insight, of grand convergence, and if you weren’t paying careful attention you might not notice that beneath the rhythms of thought the argument was facile, even specious.

  “I have a listing in Willow Canyon. Can you meet me there tomorrow at eleven?”

  I told her I could. She proposed an hourly rate which I agreed to. It wasn’t until that evening, when I told Steven about the job and he asked how it paid, that I realized I hadn’t even listened to the number.

  Bethany Parkhurst was one of the most appealing people I have ever known. I suspected this would be the case when I spoke to her over the phone, and when I met her the next day in front of a beige ranch in Willow Canyon, I knew immediately that it was true. I couldn’t stop staring at her. She was not beautiful, nor was there anything unique or interesting about her appearance. Her features exhibited a kind of generic perfection—hers was the face an adolescent wishes for while examining the acne on her too-wide forehead.

  “You’re on time,” she said when I got out of my car. I would later learn that she had been born and raised in Oklahoma City. But she did not have the open drawl of most locals. She kept herself a little apart without seeming to keep herself apart. This was one of her many talents.

  “This house isn’t much. The owners haven’t put any money into it at all. It really needs your special touch,” she said as we walked up the short driveway.

  Warmth spread through me. My special touch. Bethany had asked if I was a good writer, I had said yes, and that was that. The next day I would send her the copy and ask if the style, length, and structure were what she’d had in mind, and she would call and tell me that it was perfect, and after that she would never mention anything about the quality of the work I sent her ever again.

  The owners weren’t home. Bethany had a key and let us in.

  “Oh no you don’t,” she said when we stepped inside. I looked up, startled. Bethany was staring at a large painting on the living room wall. It was one of those kitschy landscapes—a stone cottage next to a babbling brook, a little wooden footbridge. “I told them to take this down. It’s part of my job to monitor taste. People have to trust me.”

  Bethany walked me through the house, pointing out those features I should highlight (chair-rail molding in the dining room, a vaulted ceiling in the master bedroom) and those I should refrain from mentioning (linoleum flooring, a cracked concrete patio out back).

  “What I’ve always done is, after I’ve seen everything I come back to the living room and just—” She breathed deeply in, out. “Reflect. Until I’ve sensed the house’s essence.”

  She looked at me a bit sheepishly, and I was touched by this betrayal of earnestness. I imagined Bethany Parkhurst hunched over a desk late at night, typing and deleting—striving, as she had said in her ad, “to bring residential properties to life.”

  Together, we stood in the living room beneath the painting of the stone cottage. (Was this the home the owners of this shabby ranch wished for? Suddenly the trite painting seemed as personal as a wound.)

  After a short while, Bethany turned to me. “OK,” she said, and waved me to the door, as if the metaphysical process of sensing a house’s essence always took precisely one and a half minutes.

  I assumed that Bethany had spoken so bluntly about the painting because it was just the two of us, but I would come to learn that she had a single self, which did not adjust. Later that week, at a house in Colony Corners, I would hear her say the same thing she’d said to me—“It’s part of my job to monitor taste. You have to trust me”—directly to the owner’s face, this time about a homemade quilt, a retro item in shades of avocado and mustard draped over the back of a sofa. The woman bit her lip and silently moved the quilt to the closet. But before we left, she thanked Bethany. “I do trust you,” she said, like a penitent seeking forgiveness from a priest; then she hugged Bethany.

  “It’s their home and people can be sensitive,” Bethany said to me once we were outside. She said this in a voice absolutely empty of judgment. She’d spoken about monitoring taste in this same rinsed tone. There was nothing moral about taste to Bethany, no pride in having it nor shame in lacking it. It was simply necessary in the selling of residential property.

  Soon I was visiting five or six properties a week. After the first few houses, Bethany did not accompany me. Sometimes, as at that first house, the owners were not at home, and I would be given instructions for getting in. The key was under the mat, or in the planter, or taped to the mallard whirligig. I would wander through the house taking notes: walk-in closet, en suite master bath. Exploring the houses alone felt wonderfully subversive. I especially loved to investigate the pantries. If I found items that suggested a sophisticated home cook—curry paste, anchovies, cornhusks—I would put in some extra effort with my writing. Often I found mountains of junk—jumbo tubs of cheese puffs, three different marshmallow cereals, a discovery that was like pressing my tongue to a battery, a sour thrill of pleasure at the poor choices of other people.

  Frequently there were pets—terriers yapping from the garage, a marmalade cat slinking across the back of a sofa, gerbils spinning in the dark. Once, I stepped into a house where I’d been told no one would be home and a loud, clear voice said, “Go away, please!” I blurted an apology and was hurrying out the door when the voice said the same thing again with exactly the same intonation. “Go away, please!” It was a parrot, a splendid lime-green bird that lived in the kitchen in one of those old-fashioned domed cages. I recounted the story to Steven that night, and again to his coworkers and their wives at a dinner party that weekend. (It was all coworkers and wives; the extraction of resources, apparently, was the province of men.) I had become a person whose job came with that most valuable perk: good anecdotes.

  Usually, though, someone was at home, and except for a single instance, that someone was a woman, which meant
, almost automatically, a wife and mother. One house, I told Kristin on the phone, had so many shrieking, stampeding towheads that I found it impossible to ascertain how many children there actually were. In another, I entered the living room and a child of about four in spaceship pajamas looked up from his cartoons and said, very matter-of-factly, “We’re moving to Texas because of Trashley.”

  Often the women were about my age, with a baby on a hip, a toddler hanging from a leg. “Can you imagine having two kids?” I would say to Steven at night, as if the idea were as lunatic as keeping wildebeests for pets. We would laugh together, delighting in our sense of ourselves as too urbane, too bright and scattered, to manage the exigencies of family life—exigencies about which we were intentionally very vague—at such a young age. (Though looking back, I wonder if Steven actually felt this way at all, or if he simply went along. I believed then that I understood him completely, but perhaps I had simply assumed he saw everything the same way I did.) The competence of these women, the hardened shapeliness of their lives, terrified me. Though none was quite as appealing as Bethany, many shared a certain ineffable quality with her—a diamond selfhood, hard and translucent. It turned out many of her clients attended the same church as she did, Radiant Assembly, an evangelical congregation that one of Steven’s colleagues, a fellow transplant from the Northeast, referred to as “Rabid Insanity.” I used to wonder whether it was the church’s power shining through these women. Sometimes when I was touring a house and the woman was out of view, I would pretend that her house was my house and her children were my children. I had been born here and was among Radiant Assembly’s faithful. I was friends with Bethany and fistfuls of women like her, like us. If I could get deep enough into that imagining, my self would sweep cleanly away and a feeling would fill me that was like being dipped in cool, sweet water.

  My drives out to the prairie stopped. My work kept me busy in the suburban enclaves close to downtown, and I no longer felt the need to cultivate my own fear by traveling beyond these places. At unexpected moments, though, I would be overcome by an acute physical awareness of everything that was still out there. Once I was standing in an ersatz Arts and Crafts bungalow in Rivendell Corners, when suddenly I felt the vastness of the prairie and the sky tingling against my skin; I felt the oil beneath my feet, like swimming far out in the ocean and sensing all that black depth below you. Then I heard Bethany’s voice in my mind—You have to trust me—and at once, I felt better.

  Some of the things I saw resisted the transformation into anecdotes. Once, I found myself in the home of an elderly widow. I sensed the house had once been well kept, but it was badly neglected now, and the woman’s daughter, who was also her live-in caregiver, apologized over and over for what she euphemistically called “the mess.” The house needed everything—a new roof, new floors. The kitchen appliances were ancient. Mold speckled the wallpaper and the husks of flies collected on every windowsill. From a reclining chair in front of the television, the old woman muttered, “Tell her to write about the garden.”

  “She knows to write about the garden, Mom,” the daughter said. She looked at me with an embarrassed smile that perplexed me until I went out into the yard and saw that there was no garden, just a mud patch where a garden must have been once.

  “There’s bluebells, foxglove, snapdragons,” the old woman said when I came back inside, counting the flowers off on her fingers.

  “She knows, Mom,” the daughter said impatiently.

  “Be sure to mention the hollyhocks. People like those. And the daylilies. Stargazers—”

  The daughter closed her eyes.

  I did not tell anyone this story or any of the others like it. They weren’t meant for me. I witnessed them only as an accident of circumstance. This is life. This is what it means to be human, I would think to myself vaguely as I breathed in the humid air of other people’s dramas. And I would feel pretty good about myself, both for bearing witness and for keeping their secrets.

  The writing was a breeze. I developed an efficient process: I would draw up a list of evocative words and phrases that were more or less germane to the house at hand. Say: curb appeal, mint condition, stately, pristine. Or: stunning, sought-after, the very best in country living, charmer. Then I would string these words together with the pertinent information. This pristine three-bedroom ranch oozes curb appeal, from its stately front lawn to its mint-condition brick facade. Or, For homebuyers looking for the very best in country living, this stunning charmer in sought-after Castlegate is a must-see. The copy was like candy floss—voluminous clouds that dissolved to sweetness, to the idea of substance.

  Months passed. At some point I realized that it had been a long time since a part of my body separated itself from my control.

  One day Bethany called me about a house that was not located, as most of her properties were, in one of the developments that encircled Oklahoma City like a frill. This house was thirty miles away, out in the country. “Really annoying location,” she said. She had a knack for stating opinion as fact.

  I drove out to see the house the following afternoon. It was a cloudy, humid day, the air fuzzed with an electric tingling. I drove for miles down a two-lane highway that radiated northwest from the city. A few months earlier this drive would have terrified me, and I felt relieved, not because I could now speed past fields of switchgrass unafraid, but because it seemed to me that my resilience had been affirmed; I remember thinking that I was very good at handling a mental rough patch, and this pleased me the same way being good at anything pleased me.

  I still remember the name of the street, Redtail Road. It was a narrow country road, straight as an arrow and shot dead into the abyss. The houses were spaced far apart. You could look down the whole length of the road and see them all at once, like dice cast on an enormous table. My destination turned out to be the last house. Just past the driveway the asphalt formed a tidy edge against an infinity of prairie.

  For a minute before I got out of the car, I just sat and stared. This house was like none other I had visited for Bethany. It was architecture, a word whose variants I had deployed emptily countless times in my copy: This three-bedroom home exhibits colonial architecture at its very finest. Gorgeous architectural touches abound in the formal dining room. Architecturally innovative yet effortlessly livable, this home embodies the elegance for which The Meadow Estates are prized. The exterior was cedar and glass. The angles of the roofline fit together with the mysterious rightness of a poem. The roof was copper and, touched by the diffuse light of the overcast sky, it seemed to glow. Beside the house, a tall tree grew; it looked older than any other tree I had seen in the state, with a broad, generous crown of leaves. I blinked, half-expecting that when I opened my eyes the improbable house and tree would be gone.

  I had just the last name of the seller—Follett. I rang the bell and a few seconds later the door opened. I blinked again. I was standing face-to-face with the most conventionally handsome man I had ever seen. I told you that except for a single instance, the people in the houses were women. This story, the one I’ve been getting to all along, is the story of that single instance.

  “Mac,” he said, holding out his hand. He was tall and leanly muscular and looked entirely sun made—skin darkened by it to the shade of a toasted cashew, hair lightened by it to gold filaments.

  “Jen,” I said, and shook his hand.

  An image blazed into my head of him on a chestnut horse with a Marlboro between his lips. For a horrifying moment I was certain he had somehow seen it, too. In my head I was already on the phone with Kristin: “When I say handsome I mean beyond anything you could be imagining right now.”

  “I’ll leave you to it,” he said. “Let me know if you need anything.” He walked down the hall and disappeared.

  I stood in the foyer, flummoxed. Typically the owners wanted to show me around, at least a little. They wanted to be sure I noted the recessed lighting in the living room or that I knew the kitchen cabinets were s
olid maple. “The open floor plan is a fantastic kid-friendly feature,” a woman once said to me. They had an idea of how they wanted their home portrayed and they wanted to be sure I got it right. I attributed Mac Follett’s behavior to a certain male cluelessness—he didn’t have the instinct to monitor and steer things the way a woman did, I thought.

  I began to make my way through the house with my notebook. It was as beautiful inside as out: soaring post-and-beam ceilings, a fireplace with a stone hearth, tongue-and-groove pine floors. Outside it had begun to pour, and through a leaded glass window I watched the rain strafe the terrace.

  I had noticed that Mac didn’t wear a ring, and there was no evidence of a woman’s presence in the house, at least not the kind I was used to seeing—no fashion magazines in the basket next to the couch, no lipsticks or lotions in the bathrooms.

  “What do you think he’s doing out there all alone?” Kristin would ask, and we would toss around theories.

  “He used to live in the Rockies until he developed a debilitating fear of elevation.”

  “He was married, but his wife left him for a dirt farmer.”

  “It’s a real sod story.”

  When I reached the master bedroom, he was sitting on the neatly made bed watching television. Golfers strolled across a velveteen green. I tried my best to do everything as usual. I jotted: double exposure, built-ins.

  “So you go around looking in people’s houses?” he asked, his eyes still on the golfers.

  “Pretty much.”

  “Sounds interesting.”