100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  Anyway, he’s accusing us all and he’s trying to get one of us to admit we did it. No way.

  “I hope one of you will come to me and tell the truth. Not a one of you knows anything about this? Come on, now.”

  I shake my head no and stare down at the three pairs of shoes. He says they’re not going to do anything to the person who did it, right, wanna make a bet, they say they just want to know, but they’ll take it back as soon as you tell them.

  I don’t care why I don’t believe him. I know one thing for sure and that’s they’re not going to do anything to me as long as I say no, I didn’t do it. That’s what I said, no, I didn’t do it, I don’t know a thing about it. I just can’t imagine where those missing packages could have gone, how letters got into garbage cans. Awful. I just don’t know.

  The cop had a map with X’s on it every place they found mail. The garbage cans. He said there was a group of students trying to get an investigation. People’s girlfriends sent cookies that never got here. Letters are missing. Money. These students put up Xeroxed posters on bulletin boards showing a garbage can stuffed with letters.

  Why should I tell them, so they can throw me in jail? And kick me out of school? Four-point-oh average and I’m going to let them kick me out of school? They’re sitting there telling us it’s a felony. A federal crime. No way, I’m gonna go to medical school.

  This tall, skinny guy with a blond mustache, Wallabees, looks kind of like a rabbit, he defended us. He’s another sorter, works Monday/Wednesdays.

  “We all do our jobs,” he says. “None of us would do that.” The rabbity guy looks at me and the other girl for support. So we’re going to stick together. The other girl, a dark blonde chewing her lip, nodded. I loved that rabbity guy that second. I nodded too.

  The cop looked down. Wide hips in the coffee-with-milk-colored pants. He sighed. I looked up at the rabbity guy. They let us all go.

  I’m just going to keep saying no, not me, didn’t do it and I just won’t do it again. That’s all. Won’t do it anymore. So, this is Glenn’s last chance for homemade cookies. I’m sure as hell not going to bake any.

  I signed the form, said I didn’t do it, I’m OK now. I’m safe. It turned out OK after all, it always does. I always think something terrible’s going to happen and it doesn’t. I’m lucky.

  I’m afraid of cops. I was walking, just a little while ago, today, down Telegraph with Glenn, and these two policemen, not the one I’d met, other policemen, were coming in our direction. I started sweating a lot. I was sure until they passed us, I was sure it was all over, they were there for me. I always think that. But at the same time, I know it’s just my imagination. I mean, I’m a four-point-oh student, I’m a nice girl just walking down the street with my boyfriend.

  We were on our way to get Happy Burgers. When we turned the corner, about a block past the cops, I looked at Glenn and I was flooded with this feeling. It was raining a little and we were by People’s Park. The trees were blowing and I was looking at all those little gardens coming up, held together with stakes and white string.

  I wanted to say something to Glenn, give him something. I wanted to tell him something about me.

  “I’m bad in bed,” that’s what I said, I just blurted it out like that. He just kind of looked at me, he was nervous, he just giggled. He didn’t know what to say, I guess, but he sort of slung his arm around me and I was so grateful and then we went in. He paid for my Happy Burger, I usually don’t let him pay for me, but I did and it was the best goddamn hamburger I’ve ever eaten.

  I want to tell him things.

  I lie all the time, always have, but I keep track of each lie I’ve ever told Glenn and I’m always thinking of the things I can’t tell him.

  Glenn was a screwed up kid, kind of. He used to go in his backyard, his parents were inside the house I guess, and he’d find this big stick and start twirling around with it. He’d dance, he called it dancing, until if you came up and clapped in front of him, he wouldn’t see you. He’d spin around with that stick until he fell down dead on the grass, unconscious, he said he did it to see the sky break up in pieces and spin. He did it sometimes with a tire swing, too. He told me when he was spinning like that, it felt like he was just hearing the earth spinning, that it really went that fast all the time but we just don’t feel it. When he was twelve years old his parents took him in the city to a clinic to see a psychologist. And then he stopped. See, maybe I should go to a psychologist. I’d get better, too. He told me about that in bed one night. The ground feels so good when you fall, he said to me. I loved him for that.

  “Does anything feel that good now?” I said.

  “Sex sometimes. Maybe dancing.”

  Know what else he told me that night? He said, right before we went to sleep, he wasn’t looking at me, he said he’d been thinking what would happen if I died, he said he thought how he’d be at my funeral, all my family and my friends from high school and my little brother would all be around at the front and he’d be at the edge in the cemetery, nobody’d even know who he was.

  I was in that crack, breathing the air between the bed and the wall. Cold and dusty. Yeah, we’re having sex. I don’t know. It’s good. Sweet. He says he loves me. I have to remind myself. I talk to myself in my head while we’re doing it. I have to say, it’s OK, this is just Glenn, this is who I want it to be and it’s just like rubbing next to someone. It’s just like pushing two hands together, so there’s no air in between.

  I cry sometimes with Glenn, I’m so grateful.

  My mother called and woke me up this morning. Ms. I’m-going-to-be-perfect. Ms. Anything-wrong-is-your-own-fault. Ms. If-anything-bad-happens-you’re-a-fool.

  She says if she has time, she might come up and see my dorm room in the next few weeks. Help me organize my wardrobe, she says. She didn’t bring me up here, my dad did. I wanted Danny to come along. I love Danny.

  But my mother has no pity. She thinks she’s got the answers. She’s the one who’s a lawyer, she’s the one who went back to law school and stayed up late nights studying while she still made our lunch boxes. With gourmet cheese. She’s proud of it, she tells you. She loves my dad, I guess. She thinks we’re like this great family and she sits there at the dinner table bragging about us, to us. She Xeroxed my grade card first quarter with my Chemistry A+ so she’s got it in her office and she’s got the copy up on the refrigerator at home. She’s sitting there telling all her friends that and I’m thinking, you don’t know it, but I’m not one of you.

  These people across the street from us. Little girl, Sarah, eight years old. Maybe seven. Her dad, he worked for the army, some kind of researcher, he decides he wants to get a sex-change operation. And he goes and does it, over at Stanford. My mom goes out, takes the dog for a walk, right. The mother confides in her. Says the thing she regrets most is she wants to have more children. The little girl, Sarah, eight years old, looks up at my mom and says, “Daddy’s going to be an aunt.”

  Now that’s sad, I think that’s really sad. My mom thinks it’s a good dinner table story, proving how much better we are than them. Yeah, I remember exactly what she said that night. “That’s all Sarah’s mother’s got to worry about now is that she wants another child. Meanwhile, Daddy’s becoming an aunt.”

  She should know about me.

  So my dad comes to visit for the weekend. Glenn’s dad came to speak at UC one night, he took Glenn out to dinner to a nice place, Glenn was glad to see him. Yeah, well. My dad. Comes to the dorm. Skulks around. This guy’s a businessman, in a three-piece suit, and he acts inferior to the eighteen-year-old freshmen coming in the lobby. My dad. Makes me sick right now thinking of him standing there in the lobby and everybody seeing him. He was probably looking at the kids and looking jealous. Just standing there. Why? Don’t ask me why, he’s the one that’s forty-two years old.

  So he’s standing there, nervous, probably sucking his hand, that’s what he does when he’s nervous, I’m always telling him not t
o. Finally, somebody takes him to my room. I’m not there, Lauren’s gone, and he waits for I don’t know how long.

  When I come in he’s standing with his back to the door, looking out the window. I see him and right away I know it’s him and I have this urge to tiptoe away and he’ll never see me.

  My pink sweater, a nice sweater, a sweater I wore a lot in high school, was over my chair, hanging on the back of it, and my father’s got one hand on the sweater shoulder and he’s like rubbing the other hand down an empty arm. He looks up at me, already scared and grateful when I walk into the room. I feel like smashing him with a baseball bat. Why can’t he just stand up straight?

  I drop my books on the bed and stand there while he hugs me.

  “Hi, Daddy, what are you doing here?”

  “I wanted to see you.” He sits in my chair now, his legs crossed and big, too big for this room, and he’s still fingering the arm of my pink sweater. “I missed you so I got away for the weekend,” he says. “I have a room up here at the Claremont Hotel.”

  So he’s here for the weekend. He’s just sitting in my dorm room and I have to figure out what to do with him. He’s not going to do anything. He’d just sit there. And Lauren’s coming back soon so I’ve got to get him out. It’s Friday afternoon and the weekend’s shot. OK, so I’ll go with him. I’ll go with him and get it over with.

  But I’m not going to miss my date with Glenn Saturday night. No way. I’d die before I’d cancel that. It’s bad enough missing dinner in the cafeteria tonight. Friday’s eggplant, my favorite, and Friday nights are usually easy, music on the stereos all down the hall. We usually work, but work slow and talk and then we all meet in Glenn’s room around ten.

  “Come, sit on my lap, honey.” My dad like pulls me down and starts bouncing me. Bouncing me. I stand up. “OK, we can go somewhere tonight and tomorrow morning, but I have to be back for tomorrow night. I’ve got plans with people. And I’ve got to study, too.”

  “You can bring your books back to the hotel,” he says. “I’m supposed to be at a convention in San Francisco, but I wanted to see you. I have work, too, we can call room service and both just work.”

  “I still have to be back by four tomorrow.”

  “All right.”

  “OK, just a minute.” And he sat there in my chair while I called Glenn and told him I wouldn’t be there for dinner. I pulled the phone out into the hall, it only stretches so far, and whispered. “Yeah, my father’s here,” I said, “he’s got a conference in San Francisco. He just came by.”

  Glenn lowered his voice, sweet, and said, “Sounds fun.”

  My dad sat there, hunched over in my chair, while I changed my shirt and put on deodorant. I put a nightgown in my shoulder pack and my toothbrush and I took my chem book and we left. I knew I wouldn’t be back for a whole day. I was trying to calm myself, thinking, well, it’s only one day, that’s nothing in my life. The halls were empty, it was five o’clock, five-ten, everyone was down at dinner.

  We walk outside and the cafeteria lights are on and I see everyone moving around with their trays. Then my dad picks up my hand.

  I yank it out. “Dad,” I say, really mean.

  “Honey, I’m your father.” His voice trails off. “Other girls hold their fathers’ hands.” It was dark enough for the lights to be on in the cafeteria, but it wasn’t really dark out yet. The sky was blue. On the tennis courts on top of the garage, two Chinese guys were playing. I heard that thonk-pong and it sounded so carefree and I just wanted to be them. I’d have even given up Glenn, Glenn-that-I-love-more-than-anything, at that second, I would have given everything up just to be someone else, someone new. I got into the car and slammed the door shut and turned up the heat.

  “Should we just go to the hotel and do our work? We can get a nice dinner in the room.”

  “I’d rather go out,” I said, looking down at my hands. He went where I told him. I said the name of the restaurant and gave directions. Chez Panisse and we ordered the most expensive stuff. Appetizers and two desserts just for me. A hundred and twenty bucks for the two of us.

  OK, this hotel room.

  So, my dad’s got the Bridal Suite. He claimed that was all they had. Fat chance. Two-hundred-eighty-room hotel and all they’ve got left is this deal with the canopy bed, no way. It’s in the tower, you can almost see it from the dorm. Makes me sick. From the bathroom, there’s this window, shaped like an arch, and it looks over all of Berkeley. You can see the bridge lights. As soon as we got there, I locked myself in the bathroom, I was so mad about that canopy bed. I took a long bath and washed my hair. They had little soaps wrapped up there, shampoo, may as well use them, he’s paying for it. It’s this deep old bathtub and wind was coming in from outside and I felt like that window was just open, no glass, just a hole cut out in the stone.

  I was thinking of when I was little and what they taught us in catechism. I thought a soul was inside your chest, this long horizontal triangle with rounded edges, made out of some kind of white fog, some kind of gas or vapor. I could be pregnant. I soaped myself all up and rinsed off with cold water. I’m lucky I never got pregnant, really lucky.

  Other kids my age, Lauren, everybody, I know things they don’t know. I know more for my age. Too much. Like I’m not a virgin. Lots of people are, you’d be surprised. I know about a lot of things being wrong and unfair, all kinds of stuff. It’s like seeing a UFO, if I ever saw something like that, I’d never tell, I’d wish I’d never seen it.

  My dad knocks on the door.

  “What do you want?”

  “Let me just come in and talk to you while you’re in there.”

  “I’m done, I’ll be right out. Just a minute.” I took a long time toweling. No hurry, believe me. So I got into bed with my nightgown on and wet already from my hair. I turned away. Breathed against the wall. “Night.”

  My father hooks my hair over my ear and touches my shoulder. “Tired?”

  I shrug.

  “You really have to go back tomorrow? We could go to Marin or to the beach. Anything.”

  I hugged my knees up under my nightgown. “You should go to your conference, Dad.”

  I wake up in the middle of the night, I feel something’s going on, and sure enough, my dad’s down there, he’s got my nightgown worked up like a frill around my neck and my legs hooked over his shoulders.

  “Dad, stop it.”

  “I just wanted to make you feel good,” he says, and looks up at me. “What’s wrong? Don’t you love me anymore?”

  I never really told anybody. It’s not exactly the kind of thing you can bring up over lunch. “So, I’m sleeping with my father. Oh, and let’s split a dessert.” Right.

  I don’t know, other people think my dad’s handsome. They say he is. My mother thinks so, you should see her traipsing around the balcony when she gets in her romantic moods, which, on her professional lawyer schedule, are about once a year, thank god. It’s pathetic. He thinks she’s repulsive, though. I don’t know that, that’s what I think. But he loves me, that’s for sure.

  So next day, Saturday—that rabbity guy, Paul’s his name, he did my shift for me—we go downtown and I got him to buy me this suit. Three hundred dollars from Saks. Oh, and I got shoes. So I stayed later with him because of the clothes, and I was a little happy because I thought at least now I’d have something good to wear with Glenn. My dad and I got brownie sundaes at Sweet Dreams and I got home by five. He was crying when he dropped me off.

  “Don’t cry, Dad. Please,” I said. Jesus, how can you not hate someone who’s always begging from you.

  Lauren had Poly Styrene on the stereo and a candle lit in our room. I was never so glad to be home.

  “Hey,” Lauren said. She was on her bed with her legs propped up on the wall. She’d just shaved. She was rubbing in cream.

  I flopped down on my bed. “Ohhhh,” I said, grabbing the sides of the mattress.

  “Hey, can you keep a secret about what I did today?” Lauren
said. “I went to that therapist, up at Cowell.”

  “You have the greatest legs,” I said, quiet. “Why don’t you ever wear skirts?”

  She stopped what she was doing and stood up. “You think they’re good? I don’t like the way they look, except in jeans.” She looked down at them. “They’re crooked, see?” She shook her head. “I don’t want to think about it.”

  Then she went to her dresser and started rolling a joint. “Want some?”

  “A little.”

  She lit up, lay back on her bed and held her arm out for me to come take the joint.

  “So, she was this really great woman. Warm, kind of chubby. She knew instantly what kind of man Brent was.” Lauren snapped her fingers. “Like that.” Brent was the pool man Lauren had an affair with, home in LA.

  I’m back in the room maybe an hour, putting on mascara, my jeans are on the bed, pressed, and the phone rings and it’s my dad and I say, “Listen, just leave me alone.”

  “You don’t care about me anymore.”

  “I just saw you. I have nothing to say. We just saw each other.”

  “What are you doing tonight?”

  “Going out.”

  “Who are you seeing?”

  “Glenn.”

  He sighs. “So you really like him, huh?”

  “Yeah, I do and you should be glad. You should be glad I have a boyfriend.” I pull the cord out into the hall and sit down on the floor there. There’s this long pause.

  “We’re not going to end up together, are we?”

  I felt like all the air’s knocked out of me. I looked out the window and everything looked dead and still. The parked cars. The trees with pink toilet paper strung between the branches. The church all closed up across the street.

  “No, we won’t, Daddy.”

  He was crying. “I know, I know.”

  I hung up the phone and went back and sat in the hall. I’m scared, too. I don’t know what’ll happen.