100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  As for me, I have not strayed much farther. Mala and I live in a town about twenty miles from Boston, on a tree-lined street much like Mrs. Croft’s, in a house we own, with a garden that saves us from buying tomatoes in summer. We are American citizens now, so that we can collect Social Security when it is time. Though we visit Calcutta every few years, we have decided to grow old here. I work in a small college library. We have a son who attends Harvard University. Mala no longer drapes the end of her sari over her head, or weeps at night for her parents, but occasionally she weeps for our son. So we drive to Cambridge to visit him, or bring him home for a weekend, so that he can eat rice with us with his hands, and speak in Bengali, things we sometimes worry he will no longer do after we die.

  Whenever we make that drive, I always take Massachusetts Avenue, in spite of the traffic. I barely recognize the buildings now, but each time I am there I return instantly to those six weeks as if they were only the other day, and I slow down and point to Mrs. Croft’s street, saying to my son, Here was my first home in America, where I lived with a woman who was 103. “Remember?” Mala says, and smiles, amazed, as I am, that there was ever a time that we were strangers. My son always expresses his astonishment, not at Mrs. Croft’s age but at how little I paid in rent, a fact nearly as inconceivable to him as a flag on the moon was to a woman born in 1866. In my son’s eyes I see the ambition that had first hurled me across the world. In a few years he will graduate and pave his way, alone and unprotected. But I remind myself that he has a father who is still living, a mother who is happy and strong. Whenever he is discouraged, I tell him that if I can survive on three continents, then there is no obstacle he cannot conquer. While the astronauts, heroes forever, spent mere hours on the moon, I have remained in this new world for nearly thirty years. I know that my achievement is quite ordinary. I am not the only man to seek his fortune far from home, and certainly I am not the first. Still, there are times I am bewildered by each mile I have traveled, each meal I have eaten, each person I have known, each room in which I have slept. As ordinary as it all appears, there are times when it is beyond my imagination.

  2000

  ZZ PACKER

  Brownies

  from Harper’s Magazine

  ZZ PACKER was born in Chicago in 1973 and grew up in Atlanta and Louisville. She first published in Seventeen when she was nineteen years old. Packer attended Yale University and went on to study at Johns Hopkins University and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa. She was then named a Stegner Fellow in fiction at Stanford University.

  Her short story collection, Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, was published in 2003. The book was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, chosen as a New York Times Notable Book, and selected by John Updike for the Today show Book Club.

  Packer said, “I think a lot of my characters wish race didn’t matter as much as it does, but it does. When you are either in the minority as is the case for blacks in the U.S. or the oppressed majority as was formerly the case in South Africa, you don’t have the luxury of being able to decide whether or not to pay attention to race, because if you don’t, someone else will, and the surprise repercussions are far worse than preparing for the worst and being pleasantly surprised if the worst never occurs.”

  Packer won a Guggenheim Fellowship and was named one of America’s Best Young Novelists by Granta, one of The New Yorker’s 20 Under 40, as well as one of Smithsonian magazine’s Young Innovators in October 2007. She lives in San Francisco.

  ★

  BY THE END of our first day at Camp Crescendo, the girls in my Brownie troop had decided to kick the asses of each and every girl in Brownie Troop 909. Troop 909 was doomed from the first day of camp; they were white girls, their complexions like a blend of ice cream: strawberry, vanilla. They turtled out from their bus in pairs, their rolled-up sleeping bags chromatized with Disney characters—Sleeping Beauty, Snow White, Mickey Mouse—or the generic ones cheap parents bought—washed-out rainbows, unicorns, curly-eyelashed frogs. Some clutched Igloo coolers and still others held on to stuffed toys like pacifiers, looking all around them like tourists determined to be dazzled.

  Our troop wended its way past their bus, past the ranger station, past the colorful trail guide drawn like a treasure map, locked behind glass.

  “Man, did you smell them?” Arnetta said, giving the girls a slow once-over. “They smell like Chihuahuas. Wet Chihuahuas.” Although we had passed their troop by yards, Arnetta raised her nose in the air and grimaced.

  Arnetta said this from the very rear of the line, far away from Mrs. Margolin, who strung our troop behind her like a brood of obedient ducklings. Mrs. Margolin even looked like a mother duck—she had hair cropped close to a small ball of a head, almost no neck, and huge, miraculous breasts. She wore enormous belts that looked like the kind weight lifters wear, except hers were cheap metallic gold or rabbit fur or covered with gigantic fake sunflowers. Often these belts would become nature lessons in and of themselves. “See,” Mrs. Margolin once said to us, pointing to her belt. “This one’s made entirely from the feathers of baby pigeons.”

  The belt layered with feathers was uncanny enough, but I was more disturbed by the realization that I had never actually seen a baby pigeon. I searched for weeks for one, in vain—scampering after pigeons whenever I was downtown with my father.

  But nature lessons were not Mrs. Margolin’s top priority. She saw the position of troop leader as an evangelical post. Back at the A.M.E. church where our Brownie meetings were held, she was especially fond of imparting religious aphorisms by means of acrostics—Satan was the “Serpent Always Tempting And Noisome”; she’d refer to the Bible as “Basic Instructions Before Leaving Earth.” Whenever she occasionally quizzed us on these at the beginning of the Brownie meeting, expecting to hear the acrostics parroted back to her, only Arnetta’s correct replies soared over our vague mumblings. “Jesus?” Mrs. Margolin might ask expectantly, and Arnetta alone would dutifully answer, “Jehovah’s Example, Saving Us Sinners.”

  Arnetta made a point of listening to Mrs. Margolin’s religious talk and giving her what she wanted to hear. Because of this, Arnetta could have blared through a megaphone that the white girls of Troop 909 were “wet Chihuahuas” without arousing so much as a blink from Mrs. Margolin. Once Arnetta killed the troop goldfish by feeding it a French fry covered in ketchup, and when Mrs. Margolin demanded an explanation, Arnetta claimed that the goldfish had been eyeing her meal for hours, until—giving in to temptation—it had leapt up and snatched the whole golden fry from her fingertips.

  “Serious Chihuahua,” Octavia added—though neither Arnetta nor Octavia could spell “Chihuahua” or had ever seen a Chihuahua. Trisyllabic words had gained a sort of exoticism within our fourth-grade set at Woodrow Wilson Elementary. Arnetta and Octavia, compelled to outdo each other, would flip through the dictionary, determined to work the vulgar-sounding ones like “Djibouti” and “asinine” into conversation.

  “Caucasian Chihuahuas,” Arnetta said.

  That did it. Drema and Elise doubled up on each other like inextricably entwined kites; Octavia slapped the skin of her belly; Janice jumped straight up in the air, then did it again, just as hard, as if to slam-dunk her own head. No one had laughed so hard since a boy named Martez had stuck his pencil in the electric socket and spent the whole day with a strange grin on his face.

  “Girls, girls,” said our parent helper, Mrs. Hedy. Mrs. Hedy was Octavia’s mother. She wagged her index finger perfunctorily, like a windshield wiper. “Stop it now. Be good.” She said this loudly enough to be heard, but lazily, nasally, bereft of any feeling or indication that she meant to be obeyed, as though she would say these words again at the exact same pitch if a button somewhere on her were pressed.

  But the girls didn’t stop laughing; they only laughed louder. It was the word “Caucasian” that had got them all going. One day at school, about a month before the Brownie camping trip, Arnetta had turned to a boy wearing imp
ossibly high-ankled floodwater jeans, and said, “What are you? Caucasian?” The word took off from there, and soon everything was Caucasian. If you ate too fast, you ate like a Caucasian; if you ate too slow, you ate like a Caucasian. The biggest feat anyone at Woodrow Wilson could do was to jump off the swing in midair, at the highest point in its arc, and if you fell (like I had, more than once) instead of landing on your feet, knees bent Olympic-gymnast-style, Arnetta and Octavia were prepared to comment. They’d look at each other with the silence of passengers who’d narrowly escaped an accident, then nod their heads, and whisper with solemn horror and haughtiness, “Caucasian.”

  Even the only white kid in our school, Dennis, got in on the Caucasian act. That time when Martez stuck the pencil in the socket, Dennis had pointed, and yelled, “That was so Caucasian!”

  Living in the south suburbs of Atlanta, it was easy to forget about whites. Whites were like those baby pigeons: real and existing, but rarely thought about. Everyone had been to Rich’s to go clothes shopping, everyone had seen white girls and their mothers coo-cooing over dresses; everyone had gone to the downtown library and seen white businessmen swish by importantly, wrists flexed in front of them to check the time on their watches as though they would change from Clark Kent into Superman any second. But those images were as fleeting as cards shuffled in a deck, whereas the ten white girls behind us—invaders, Arnetta would later call them—were instantly real and memorable, with their long shampoo-commercial hair, as straight as spaghetti from the box. This alone was reason for envy and hatred. The only black girl most of us had ever seen with hair that long was Octavia, whose hair hung past her butt like a Hawaiian hula dancer’s. The sight of Octavia’s mane prompted other girls to listen to her reverentially, as though whatever she had to say would somehow activate their own follicles. For example, when, on the first day of camp, Octavia made as if to speak, a silence began. “Nobody,” Octavia said, “calls us niggers.”

  At the end of that first day, when half of our troop made its way back to the cabin after tag-team restroom visits, Arnetta said she’d heard one of the girls in Troop 909 call Daphne a nigger. The other half of the girls and I were helping Mrs. Margolin clean up the pots and pans from the ravioli dinner. When we made our way to the restrooms to wash up and brush our teeth, we met up with Arnetta midway.

  “Man, I completely heard the girl,” Arnetta reported. “Right, Daphne?”

  Daphne hardly ever spoke, but when she did her voice was petite and tinkly, the voice one might expect from a shiny new earring. She’d written a poem once, for Langston Hughes Day, a poem brimming with all the teacher-winning ingredients—trees and oceans, sunsets and moons—but what cinched the poem for the grown-ups, snatching the win from Octavia’s musical ode to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, were Daphne’s last lines:

  You are my father, the veteran

  When you cry in the dark

  It rains and rains and rains in my heart

  She’d worn clean, though faded, jumpers and dresses when Chic jeans were the fashion, but when she went up to the dais to receive her prize journal, pages trimmed in gold, she wore a new dress with a velveteen bodice and a taffeta skirt as wide as an umbrella. All the kids clapped, though none of them understood the poem. I’d read encyclopedias the way others read comics, and I didn’t get it. But those last lines pricked me, they were so eerie, and as my father and I ate cereal, I’d whisper over my Froot Loops, like a mantra, “You are my father, the veteran. You are my father, the veteran, the veteran, the veteran,” until my father, who acted in plays as Caliban and Othello and was not a veteran, marched me up to my teacher one morning, and said, “Can you tell me what the hell’s wrong with this kid?”

  I had thought Daphne and I might become friends, but she seemed to grow spooked by me whispering those lines to her, begging her to tell me what they meant, and I had soon understood that two quiet people like us were better off quiet alone.

  “Daphne? Didn’t you hear them call you a nigger?” Arnetta asked, giving Daphne a nudge.

  The sun was setting through the trees, and their leafy tops formed a canopy of black lace for the flame of the sun to pass through. Daphne shrugged her shoulders at first, then slowly nodded her head when Arnetta gave her a hard look.

  Twenty minutes later, when my restroom group returned to the cabin, Arnetta was still talking about Troop 909. My restroom group had passed by some of the 909 girls. For the most part, they had deferred to us, waving us into the restrooms, letting us go even though they’d gotten there first.

  We’d seen them, but from afar, never within their orbit enough to see whether their faces were the way all white girls appeared on TV—ponytailed and full of energy, bubbling over with love and money. All I could see was that some rapidly fanned their faces with their hands, though the heat of the day had long passed. A few seemed to be lolling their heads in slow circles, half-purposefully, as if exercising the muscles of their necks, half-ecstatically, rolling their heads about like Stevie Wonder.

  “We can’t let them get away with that,” Arnetta said, dropping her voice to a laryngitic whisper. “We can’t let them get away with calling us niggers. I say we teach them a lesson.” She sat down cross-legged on a sleeping bag, an embittered Buddha, eyes glimmering acrylic black. “We can’t go telling Mrs. Margolin, either. Mrs. Margolin’ll say something about doing unto others and the path of righteousness and all. Forget that shit.” She let her eyes flutter irreverently till they half closed, as though ignoring an insult not worth returning. We could all hear Mrs. Margolin outside, gathering the last of the metal campware.

  Nobody said anything for a while. Arnetta’s tone had an upholstered confidence that was somehow both regal and vulgar at once. It demanded a few moments of silence in its wake, like the ringing of a church bell or the playing of taps. Sometimes Octavia would ditto or dissent whatever Arnetta had said, and this was the signal that others could speak. But this time Octavia just swirled a long cord of hair into pretzel shapes.

  “Well?” Arnetta said. She looked as if she had discerned the hidden severity of the situation and was waiting for the rest of us to catch up. Everyone looked from Arnetta to Daphne. It was, after all, Daphne who had supposedly been called the name, but Daphne sat on the bare cabin floor, flipping through the pages of the Girl Scout handbook, eyebrows arched in mock wonder, as if the handbook were a catalogue full of bright and startling foreign costumes. Janice broke the silence. She clapped her hands to broach her idea of a plan.

  “They gone be sleeping,” she whispered conspiratorially, “then we gone sneak into they cabin, then we gone put daddy longlegs in they sleeping bags. Then they’ll wake up. Then we gone beat ’em up till they flat as frying pans!” She jammed her fist into the palm of her hand, then made a sizzling sound.

  Janice’s country accent was laughable, her looks homely, her jumpy acrobatics embarrassing to behold. Arnetta and Octavia volleyed amused, arrogant smiles whenever Janice opened her mouth, but Janice never caught the hint, spoke whenever she wanted, fluttered around Arnetta and Octavia futilely offering her opinions to their departing backs. Whenever Arnetta and Octavia shooed her away, Janice loitered until the two would finally sigh, “What is it, Miss Caucasoid? What do you want?”

  “Oh shut up, Janice,” Octavia said, letting a fingered loop of hair fall to her waist as though just the sound of Janice’s voice had ruined the fun of her hair twisting.

  “All right,” Arnetta said, standing up. “We’re going to have a secret meeting and talk about what we’re going to do.”

  The word “secret” had a built-in importance. Everyone gravely nodded her head. The modifier form of the word had more clout than the noun. A secret meant nothing; it was like gossip: just a bit of unpleasant knowledge about someone who happened to be someone other than yourself. A secret meeting, or a secret club, was entirely different.

  That was when Arnetta turned to me, as though she knew doing so was both a compliment and a charit
y.

  “Snot, you’re not going to be a bitch and tell Mrs. Margolin, are you?”

  I had been called “Snot” ever since first grade, when I’d sneezed in class and two long ropes of mucus had splattered a nearby girl.

  “Hey,” I said. “Maybe you didn’t hear them right—I mean—”

  “Are you gonna tell on us or not?” was all Arnetta wanted to know, and by the time the question was asked, the rest of our Brownie troop looked at me as though they’d already decided their course of action, me being the only impediment. As though it were all a simple matter of patriotism.

  Camp Crescendo used to double as a high school band and field hockey camp until an arching field hockey ball landed on the clasp of a girl’s metal barrette, knifing a skull nerve, paralyzing the right side of her body. The camp closed down for a few years, and the girl’s teammates built a memorial, filling the spot on which the girl fell with hockey balls, upon which they had painted—all in nail polish—get-well tidings, flowers, and hearts. The balls were still stacked there, like a shrine of ostrich eggs embedded in the ground.