The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)
Page 31
The woman was glad that her parents were being nice, as it dispelled the cliché of difficult Asian parents. Previously she had explained to the man that her parents had a tendency to be cold, but the coldness was more a reflex from years of being underdogs than their natural state. When her parents turned out not to be cold at all, the woman was glad, but then she wondered why they hadn’t been more difficult. Why hadn’t her father been more like a typical American dad and greeted the man at their cookie-cutter door with a cookie-cutter threat?
By the end of the weekend, her mother had pulled her aside to say that she should consider moving to New York. The man had thrown the idea out there, and the woman didn’t know how to respond.
I’m not sure yet, she told her mother. But we’re going to look for jobs in both places.
Her mother nodded and said, Good. Then she reminded the woman that a man like that wouldn’t wait around forever.
* * *
—
For their last piece of omakase, the chef presented them with the classic tamago egg on sushi rice. The egg was fluffy and sweet. How was that? the chef asked. He asked this question after every course, with his shoulders slumped forward, and their response—that it was the best tamago egg on sushi rice they’d ever had—pushed his shoulders back like a strong wind.
The Japanese way, the woman thought. Or perhaps the Asian way. Or perhaps the human way.
Dessert was two scoops of mocha ice cream. For the remainder of the meal, the man kept asking the chef why he’d been fired. Another bottle of sake had arrived.
It’s nothing interesting, the chef said.
I doubt that, the man said. Come on. We’re all friends here.
Though neither he nor the woman knew the chef’s name, and vice versa. During the meal, no one else had come into the restaurant. People had stopped by the window and looked at the menu but had moved on.
Management, the chef finally said. He was done making sushi and had begun to clean the counter. He would clean the counter and wash his rag. Then he would clean the counter again.
His purpose wasn’t to clean anymore, the woman decided. It was to look as if he had something to do while he told the story.
What happened? she asked. At this point, she might as well know.
I was fired three weeks ago, the chef said. The manager had booked a party of fifty for a day that I was supposed to have off. Then he called me in. I initially said no, but the party was for one of our regulars. I said I couldn’t serve a party of fifty on my own and he would need to call in backup. He said OK, and an hour later I showed up. But there was no backup, just me. The manager was Chinese, and said that he had called other chefs but no one had come.
The chef stopped cleaning for a moment to wash his rag. I’m not an idiot, he continued. I knew that was a lie. So I only made sushi for two people. I refused to make sushi for the other forty-eight, and eventually the entire party left.
Bold, the man said.
The woman didn’t say anything. There was a piece of egg stuck between her molars and she was trying to get it out with her tongue. When she couldn’t, she used a finger. She stuck her finger into the back of her mouth. Then she wiped the piece of egg—no longer yellow and fluffy but white and foamy—on her napkin.
I’m Chinese, the woman said reflexively, the way her parents might have.
The chef went back to cleaning his counter. The man cleared his throat. He said, not specifically to the woman or the chef but to an invisible audience, That’s not what the chef meant.
I know, the woman said. She was looking at the man. I know that’s not what he meant. I just wanted to put it out there. I don’t mean anything by it, either.
The man rolled his eyes and a spike of anger went through the woman. Or maybe two spikes. She imagined taking two toothpicks and sticking them through the man’s pretty eyes to stop them from rolling. Then she imagined making herself a very dry martini with a skewer of olives.
Sorry, the chef said. He was now rearranging the boxes of sesame seeds and bonito flakes. He was smiling but not making eye contact. In a moment, he would start humming and the woman would not be able to tell if he was sorry for what he’d said or sorry that she was Chinese. A mix of both? She wanted to ask which one it was, or how much of each, but then she would sound insane. She didn’t want to sound insane, yet she also didn’t want to be a quiet little flower. So there she was, saying nothing but oscillating between these two extremes. In truth, what could she say? The chef was over sixty years old. And the Chinese, or so she’d heard, were the cheapest of the cheap.
The man never called her sweetheart. Sweetheart, he said, I think you’ve had enough to drink. Then he turned to the chef. Time to go, methinks.
The chef spoke only to the waitress after that. He called her over to help the couple settle the bill. The woman put her credit card down while the man pretended not to notice. She tipped her usual twenty percent.
What was that? the man said once they were outside. It had got colder. It would take them fifteen minutes to walk home.
I’m not mad at him, the woman said.
And you shouldn’t be. He was just telling a story.
Again, I’m not mad at him.
The man understood. They walked in silence for a while before he said, Look, I wasn’t the one who told the story and you have to learn not to take everything so personally. You take everything so personally.
Do I?
Also, you have to be a little more self-aware.
Aware of what?
The man sighed.
Aware of what?
The man said, Never mind. Then he put a hand on her head and told her to stop overthinking it.
Caoilinn Hughes
Prime
WE’D ONLY JUST ENTERED Miss Lynch’s classroom the summer after Johnnie died. Mister Lynch left, mid-funeral, on a boat. On the Atlantic too, but not facedown. He got on a boat and left. We thought Miss Lynch would do the same. Or be let go from the school to spare her the torture of our easy continuation. But she didn’t.
In Clifden town, she swapped her wedding ring for a border collie that could fetch rabbits for supper. You can teach a border collie sign language. How to tie a tourniquet. How to separate the dill from the fennel. But you lot? She wanted more from us. We wanted more to give her. We made a bonfire on the beach of Johnnie’s desk and chair. Splinters festered in us. The dog ate a feast of deadly web-cap mushrooms in the field and died. Are there snakes in my hair? she asked, on her ragged knees. It wasn’t our place to act, besides rising above her expectations.
Death billows out like a stone plonked in water. We knew that. But we didn’t know if the safe thing was to step back out of its ripples. We surrounded Miss Lynch like a net seven souls wide. She taught us from the east side of the room to the middle to the west. Shifting at the start of each year—fourth, fifth, sixth. Three years, three meters’ lateral movement. The walls are a freeze-frame of slanting rain: the pencil evidence of our growth spurts. She logs our depth and breadth and height without saying what the figures add up to. We equal greatness. We are not quantifiable. We know how to be dealt an inch and to make a mile of it. But today is our last day. Out the window is the only lateral movement left.
We hear the wind whine at the glass. It lifts the whispery hair of our forearms. Our legs jiggle beneath our desks. Wild garlic Tara brought in for a thank-you bouquet stinks out the room from the sink at the back. The stuff grows rude and rampant in the graveyard soil so we all know where it came from. The spirit emits a smell as it leaves the body. The white-petaled bursts are the freeing of souls. Miss Lynch teaches us such things. Things that are difficult to know.
Out in society, she says. Out in the wide world. Light rain begins to sound like the rustling of someone drifting around a big empty house in a wedding dress. You should all know by now that m
ercy is an artificial flower. It looks very convincing and nice. But it has no nectar. Her eyes skim over us to the window panels. Don’t assume mercy to be real.
Out of the seven in sixth class, she knows some won’t bother with secondary school and will head straight for the till or the tractor or, for Liam that looks old enough, the quarry. Tara might sweep floors in the hairdresser’s in town if her auntie’ll have her. Queer sort of hay baling.
We bought Miss Lynch the biggest sunglasses on the whirly rack in the shop when she came to work after the funeral. When she put the glasses on, she asked if the insect they made her resemble (a big-eyed bug whose Latin name flew in one ear and out the other) was winged or not. Was it predator or prey? It made us ashamed, to see how fast and sloppy we did things. She wasn’t trying to shame us. She was grateful for us. Today, she lifts the glasses from her marram-grass hair, folds in the arms and sets them on the desk. The sun’s off gallivanting in another galaxy, we notice, so it’s good to see the glasses: it means there’s still light getting in that she wants to temper. Her eyes are bloodshot.
By the blackboard, the laminated WHAT TO DO IN CASE OF EMERGENCY is on the floor alongside its thumbtack. We try to be observant. Anything and everything can be symbolical and significant—can go to show how order isn’t always the way of things. The centuries-old stone wall doesn’t come natural to the farmer who wants the fertile soil on its far side, away from the rocks. To want such a thing all your life and never to get it because of paper. Deeds. Death certificates. Olden customs. The challenge is to see cruelty and kindness not as opposites, she’d said, but as two sides of the same coin.
Crystal.
Yeah, miss?
Could you take the wasp that’s on your copybook outside? Miss Lynch smoothens her homemade clothes over her no hips. She’s the shape of a long, straightish banana, so the main challenge of dressmaking is cutting straight lines in the curtain fabric. Avoiding moth holes. Her winter coat is made of carpet. When hems fall, she staples them up. Oh to be a choirmaster! she says, as the dulcet tones of Mister O’Malley’s disciples come through the rear wall. (Jesus saw something inside me that I didn’t see inside myself…) The commotion of our skittering stirs the wasp and it flies around berserk in this world of chalk and flesh and varnishes.
Duck, Bríona! shouts Shannon. You’re allergic—
I am not!
—she’ll go anafletic and even if we drive her to town it’ll be too late!
Bright-red Bríona is standing on her tiptoes at her desk in fifth, willing the wasp to sting her. The pale brown wisps of her hair are a net. I said HORNETS! Hornets can kill you!
It’s not your fault if—
Oisín whispers down the back: Shannon has a thing for Bríona. He does bashing scissor fingers. In response, Shannon slips a finger inside her veiny jellyfish cheek and makes a pop like soup in the microwave. Miss Lynch talks quiet so that only us who lean in can hear her: The wasp doesn’t understand this bland nectarless brightness—all this wasteful, contrary movement, not in the direction of the wind.
Miss Lynch should have established order by now. Put fourth class to work so they don’t get cranky. It’s Father’s Day in Ghana, she might say. Find Ghana in the atlas, then write cards, making no mistake as to where the apostrophe goes in your fathers. Make fifth class play Trivial Pursuit, where each team’s given a set of encyclopedias and they’re not allowed to pass on any questions and there’s no time limit. (Her father was an encyclopedia salesman, so we have two full sets.) But today, she seems to be waiting for something. Denying orderliness. Or is she waiting for the hymn in the next room to end?
The fact of the matter is…, she says finally, not a single child in this school will go to heaven, however angelic their voice. She pauses. Because every single one of you spends three years with me before you leave. Three is the magical number. The devil, though, has no horns. So you needn’t fear him. He has no body at all. Only a shadow.
The whole class hushes. Outside, the cloud cover thickens. Rain ups the ante. The wasp lands on Declan Quinlan’s hand, which is delicate and lucent as suds in a bath. He shares the front desk in fifth with Bríona, who has stiff white snail trails down her face. Others will cry later at the notion of the Shadow Devil. Declan is breathing shallow and fast.
Now, Declan, Miss Lynch says. You have a choice. Don’t mind Newtonian mechanics. She waits and takes a step forward, toward the wasp or the boy, and we’re all too riveted to ask, What?
A THWACK announces a choice made. But it wasn’t Declan’s. The scream is his, though. Piercing and harrowing as a baby banshee’s. Clasping our ears and eyelids tight, we see rocks shattering windows, which is the sound of suffering the consequences. Mister O’Malley is soon stood in the doorway, crying, What’s going on.
Don’t worry, Mister O’Malley. We wouldn’t let you miss an exorcism. Miss Lynch doesn’t take her eyes from Bríona, who’d brought her hardback copy of A Wrinkle in Time down with emotional force on Declan’s hand, fracturing a network of bones inside it. The wasp is wasabi. Declan Quinlan has been spared a wasp sting.
Then why on earth is he bleeding all over his desk?
Miss Lynch turns to her coworker with a look of beguilement. Was that iambic pentameter, Mister O’Malley?
Is that disrespect, he wonders (readable as a tombstone). He huffs at the mounting evidence that her job could be his. The woman is clearly affected. He regards us like a rock pool full of periwinkles, determining if there’s enough for a seafood linguini. I’ll get the first aid kit.
You’re very good, says Miss Lynch. And would you mind taking fourth class for me, while we clean up here and consider the death of the wasp?
Like ants, unsurprised by the load they’ve been given to carry, the children of fourth pack their bags and file out of the room, glancing sidelong as they go.
No, we inform them with our eyes. You won’t be like us. Not in two years. Not in ten. You weren’t with her in the pitch-black times. Through the boxes of what to keep and what to get rid of. By the flameproof wick, through the window, on the dwindling pile of rocks.
* * *
—
God is a circle whose center is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere. Miss Lynch is short of breath from stooping down. Have you ever heard such nonsense?
We shake our heads at the egg carton of her spine as she draws a huge circle on the floor around all our desks in permanent marker. She’d tried chalk but it was useless on the linoleum. Please consider the circle to be done in chalk, as permanency is not the point. Not at all the point. But a lesser point is that you make do with the materials at your disposal, so. And disposal brings us back to impermanence. Every thing in this world is cyclical. You’ll find yourselves at the end of your lives thinking of the uterus, thinking of the buttons on your bedsheets, the conch you brought your ear to again and again like a lover’s chest, and you’ll be wishing, I bet my life on it, you’ll be wishing you’d left a neat and perfect zero in your bank account. She caps the marker and catches her breath. Nothing and nowhere isn’t worth saving for.
We don’t doubt it. We don’t question the circle. It is very comfy sitting inside it. Rain on the windows sounds like rice thrown in a pot. Sure to swell.
On the other side of the room, fifth class is cloistered around a Guinness Book of World Records with the task of coming up with five of their own breakworthy records, each. Miss Lynch had asked them to give us space. Next year it will be their turn, they tell themselves. And that future—in which they will be her luminaries—is only one meter away. They could spit that distance.
Chewing on her cheeks, Bríona finishes administering first aid (the verb “to administer” is part of their lesson) and Declan’s blood-heavy dressing sits in a bucket (from the kiddies’ sandpit) so as to contain the mess. (The verb “to congeal” is a part of their lesson.) The bucket is in his lap an
d he’s resting his head on his other arm on the desk, whimpering. He may go home if he so wishes, said Miss Lynch, who once relocated her own shoulder. He’s staying put and his classmates are being gentle. They are offering him the low-hanging world-record fruit.
Liam, Shannon, Crystal, Tara, Oisín, Macdara, Stephen…
The rest of the room fades out now. All there is is Miss Lynch and the inside of our circle. Her teeth are an open matchbook, the front two twisted as though she’d thought of teasing them out and setting fire to something, but had changed her mind. I’d like you to close your eyes.
It’s a kaleidoscope, the smashed mirror shards of our shut eyes. The crackle of readiness, heel lift and the whirr.
Envision an outdoors place, where you feel calm and content. A beach, a forest, a field of baled hay, a country lane, a currach in a still ocean, sitting perched on a cliff edge like a cormorant—an imaginary place or a real one, but you must be willing to be there alone. A place where you are self-possessed. Where you can take a measure of yourself. Away from people and duties and belongings, the external ways you understand your social standing. Are you there?
Humming. We are on rocks, connecting one beach to the next. It is our shortcut. We rockrun. Slant across the granite like the Milky Way across the universe. Like a Milky Way inside a Milky Way inside another one. From the band of us flashing to the freckle belt on our cheeks to the silver ways we alight in the rare sun. Outsiders go the long paved way. The road way. Only we know how the submerged stones keel and slither. We know where to step and where to jump.
Remember, you’re alone.
How does she know this? That we’d been together in our heads?
You are alone and contentedly so. Aren’t you?
We hear the stir of nodding over the rain.
See your place. With every breath, become immersed in your place. With every exhalation, it surrounds you. You are there. Where you need to be, for now. Your destination is very close. You have to move toward it. You can see up ahead where you want to go. The path is just wide enough for walking. It’s unpaved. As you move slowly through it, you’re a duck in water, leaving a V channeling behind you. That’s your effect on this place. You’re calm and the place is grateful in turn. Because you’re so relaxed, you move easily. Your arms swing by your sides. It’s cool but comfortable. You admire the scenery. It’s calming. Nothing surprising. As you approach your place, you see a small wooden box, in a clearing. You continue walking through your place, keeping an eye on the plain wooden box. It has no keyhole or latch. There are no barriers here in your place. There’s no need to keep any aspect of yourself out. You keep walking, approaching the box. The ground is springy as moss and you leave footprints. If there are trees, you smell bark, sap, lichen. If there is water, you smell salt. If salt had no smell, how would dogs know not to drink seawater? You smell oxygen. Oxygen smells very clean and good. It is what keeps us breathing. Any aches in your body disperse. You’re cozily tired and heavy and glad to arrive at the box and to take it in your hands and, without thinking at all, to open it…Without thinking at all, you see what’s there. You look at it. If you need, you may take it from the box to examine it, but there’s no real need. It is what it is. You don’t question it. Only see what’s there. No need to change it. Do not change it. It’s what you were meant to find and it is all that you’ve found. Now open your eyes.