The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  The logical part of my brain thought the more likely explanation was that Erika had only ever gotten together with me in the first place out of boredom and convenience (we had spent the summer working together at a frozen yogurt shop called Yotopia!) and now that FSU was back for the fall semester, it embarrassed her to be with a high school student. Sometimes, though, in the midst of one of Jan’s musings, I could almost convince myself that there had been a misunderstanding and that if I could just show Erika I was a mature and attractive person, she would, if not see that she had made a mistake, at least consider making out with me in secret.

  “When it comes to love,” Jan said, “you shouldn’t have regrets. I have regrets, and I can tell you it sucks. I never should have divorced your grandfather.”

  It was a Saturday afternoon and we were walking along a paved path through a leafy park on the east side of town. During the week it was mostly used by dog walkers and runners, but now the playgrounds were crowded with little kids and under one of the covered pavilions a family of loud, happy people were having a birthday cookout for someone named Bianca. Jan walked very fast and we were both a little out of breath. She had told me this story many times. My grandfather was a decent and hardworking man who, after years of Jan threatening divorce every time he drank too much or came home late from work, had finally called her bluff. As a result, her life had been lonely and difficult for the past forty years.

  “If you have a chance to set things right,” she said solemnly, “the least you can do is try.”

  * * *

  Jan was my dad’s mom, but he, along with his two older sisters, had a strained relationship with her. Partially because of the yelling and chaos from their childhoods and partially because of what they called her “attention-seeking tendencies”—​buying Cuisinart mixers and flat-screen televisions for people she barely knew, walking out of my cousin Trent’s high school graduation party because she felt ignored by his friends, requesting an apology from my aunt Kelly for not having been invited to visit her newborn twins in the NICU. In large groups especially, she often made provocative statements inspired by daytime television and the youthful coworkers she knew from the various crappy retail jobs she held. “Maybe I’ll go and get my stomach frozen like I heard on Dr. Oz” or “Now, what do you think it would be like to be married to Kanye West?”

  My mom, though, who had only officially been Jan’s daughter-in-law for about a year after I was born, invited her over to our house anytime there was a special occasion or holiday—​Christmas, Thanksgiving, Easter, birthdays. Jan had babysat when I was little and my mom had no money for daycare, and so as far as she was concerned, Jan was family. When my mom’s mother complained that she would like just one “family-only holiday,” my mom would smile sweetly and tell her she was welcome to visit another time. It was only after it was just the two of us that my mom would let herself flop on the couch with a glass of wine and shake her head about a cayenne-lemon-water diet Jan was trying for unspecified reasons or a horror costume involving a fake dead baby that she’d worn to a children’s Halloween party. “My god,” she would say. “What do you think goes on in her head to make her act that way?”

  * * *

  That fall my grandmother was living in a new and supposedly high-end apartment complex that came with a gym, a garage parking space, a gated entry that required a code after 9 P.M., and a twenty-five-yard outdoor swimming pool that was heated in the winter and where we spent at least two evenings a week together that fall. I was avoiding my mom’s boyfriend; Jan was trying to distract herself from the job she’d recently lost at Nordstrom and her fear that in her seventies she was too old to get hired anywhere else. The other residents were almost all college students and young professionals with seemingly endless amounts of time to splash around in the pool half naked, drinking beer out of thermoses, and playing rowdy games of volleyball, but that didn’t stop Jan from doing her water exercises, which involved a wide weighted belt she’d bought off QVC and looked kind of like moonwalking and kind of like a person feeling around in the dark for a lost object. I didn’t have an exercise belt and so would borrow one of the apartment complex kickboards and glide along beside her while she gave me advice about Erika and listened to me complain about my mother’s boyfriend, who all of a sudden, after about two years of dating my mom, seemed to be around constantly. His name was Pete, and he was a social worker at the hospital where she worked. He was a thin, very pale man with wispy yellowish hair and wire-framed glasses that were always flecked with grime. He was in his early fifties, about a decade older than she was, and divorced with two kids in college. He was relentlessly polite to me and kind to my mother, and I hated him.

  “He’s too skinny,” I would say. “And have you heard the way he coughs? In another ten years she’s going to be taking care of him.”

  I also didn’t like the way he ate—​too quickly and with appreciative, almost sexual sounds—​how he was always fiddling with his beard, how every single one of his hobbies—​nature walks, invasive plant removal, pickleball, historical biographies—​seemed like contests in withstanding boredom. Jan didn’t seem to have any issues with Pete, though I thought she usually gave men too much credit, including my father, who had followed a woman to Charlotte when I was two and been absent for most of my childhood. But she let me complain and would admit, at least, that his clothes were terrible. Clunky orthotics worn with tall white athletic socks, multiple colors of pleated chinos in the same unflattering style.

  “That’s fixable, though,” Jan would say. “If your mom wants to put in the work. Men are just like that. They always need a lot of help.”

  My mother, along with her sister, her friends, Jan, basically every other woman we knew who was over thirty-five, seemed to think that she was the lucky one to find Pete—​a single, employed guy who thanked her for all of the nice things she did for him and who didn’t mind that she had just turned forty. The fact that I was the only one who seemed to notice that she was about a thousand times better-looking than he was or that she was always the one cooking dinner filled me with a sense of righteous indignation, though on some level I knew that no matter who she dated, I would see him as a trespasser.

  As for Erika, Jan’s main advice was to wear revealing outfits and to behave as if my life without her was surprising and wonderful. I should be friendly in an easy, casual way that showed I didn’t need her, and I certainly shouldn’t ask her to go out with me again.

  “Of course not,” I said, though in fact I had called and texted Erika so many times in the past two weeks begging her to reconsider that she had blocked me on social media and was now switching shifts at Yotopia! to avoid me. I understood exactly how pathetic this made me look, since it was approximately the same way that my ex-boyfriend AJ had reacted when I’d finally broken up with him in July, after I’d already been messing around with Erika for two months. But I was having trouble controlling myself. Being around Erika electrified my skin, my body, the air in the room. Didn’t this mean something?

  “When do you work together again?” Jan said, squinting up at me while she bobbed along the deep end. “Find out and look good that day.”

  “Okay.”

  “And remember. Easy breezy. Lemon squeezy.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know that one? Customer Service 101. If you feel yourself getting moody or sentimental, you just chant that in your head, and it’ll get you back on track.”

  * * *

  The next time I was supposed to work with Erika, she got her shift covered, but I saw her again the following Friday night. She worked the back cash register by the drive-through and I worked up front with the face-to-face customers. Because of the three-for-one Decadent Shakes promotion, which I was pretty sure Gina, the owner, was losing money on, we were slammed. Families with kids, college students, a Little League baseball team along with about a dozen of their parents and coaches. There wasn’t much I could do to look nicer—​w
e all had to wear latex gloves, khaki aprons, and teal polo shirts with the company logo on the pocket (YOTOPIA! and a swirl of pink yogurt that looked like smoke rising out of a chunk of kiwi)—​but I thought about Jan’s advice and tried to seem happy and outgoing.

  Wooing the customers wasn’t too complicated—​you just smiled at their kids and offered them free samples—​but being within a few feet of Erika made me queasy and stupid. There was her dark hair tucked behind her ears, her pink, slightly puffy lips, the tiny circle tattooed on the inside of her wrist. While I made Decadent Shakes and parfaits and refilled the yogurt machine, my head swam with all the possible things I could say to her, but then whenever there was a brief lag between customers, I wasted it. Finally, around 8:30, things slowed down and we both found ourselves up front, sneaking crushed-up candy bars from the bins of toppings with tasting spoons and doing just enough side work to look busy. I was sweeping; she was wiping down tables. I knew that if I didn’t say something soon, I’d miss my chance.

  “Hey, can I ask you something?” I said finally.

  She looked up at me from the plastic shield over the display freezer that she was wiping down with Windex.

  “Okay.”

  I could tell she thought I was going to ask why she didn’t love me or why, given our obvious chemistry, she hadn’t actually slept with me, but the truth was I hadn’t yet decided what I was going to say. I thought about apologizing for harassing her or suggesting friendship. I wanted to work St. George Island into the conversation, so she’d remember the afternoon we’d spent there with our coworkers, the two of us lying side by side on a beach blanket, nearly touching. Making each other crazy until we’d snuck away to a changing room in the women’s bathroom, wet sand everywhere, shivering out of bikini tops. But then I thought of Jan chanting Easy breezy lemon squeezy and took a different tack.

  “Why do you think there were five cherry-flavored Skittles in the urinal?”

  Erika squinted at me a little, but her face softened, and I could see that she was going to play along. “How do you know they were cherry-flavored?”

  “Aren’t the red ones always cherry?”

  “Yeah,” she said. “Maybe.” And then a few minutes later, she nodded at the tip jar out front, which we would split at the end of the night, and told me I was on a roll.

  “Nice work, Jules,” she said. “The people love you.”

  I shrugged. “Decadent Shake special.”

  Pretty soon after that we hit another rush, and it stayed too busy to say much else to each other, but something had shifted between us. The ice had broken, and though things weren’t exactly normal again, Erika no longer seemed like she wanted to avoid me. When I reported back to Jan later that week, she said, “Of course it worked. Why wouldn’t it have worked?”

  * * *

  After that Friday night, Erika stopped giving away so many of her shifts, and for the next month or so, I got to see her two, sometimes three times a week. It was my senior year and I was busy with the AP math and science classes that I’d taken in hopes of getting a scholarship to one of the liberal arts schools in cold, unfortunate cities like Grinnell, Iowa, and Richmond, Indiana, where my guidance counselor thought other students might not want to go. Working, especially when Erika was there, began to feel like a break from worrying about the future. Where would I go to college? How would I pay for it? What would my life would be like if—​when?—​I went away to school and my mom and Pete moved in together? His house was nicer than ours—​a creaky two-bedroom house, buried under a thicket of live oaks and pollen that always smelled damp. He lived on the very edge of Betton Hills, which was the fanciest neighborhood in Tallahassee, in a small bright ranch house with new counters and appliances, a slate roof, and bright pink azaleas out front, but even though I knew it was babyish to feel this way, the thought of moving out of the house I’d grown up in made me want to cry.

  At work, though, all of this disappeared behind the swell of pop music and the rush of customers. When Erika was there, I tried to demonstrate how likable I could be—​chatting and flirting with customers, smiling so hard my face hurt. At school I barely spoke to anyone but my friend Paloma and never managed to talk in class without my entire chest and face going hot and red, but at Yotopia! no one seemed to guess that this friendly, confident person was a lie. That you could just decide to be a different person, that you didn’t have to actually change to convince people, felt like a revelation.

  In the lulls between customers, Erika told me about how her parents were pressuring her to major in marketing instead of studio art or, at the very least, to pursue an internship they’d found at an insurance company through one of their South Florida accountant friends. She thought this was selling out, but she was worried about being broke. Usually I didn’t add much about my life, because it was boring and because I didn’t want to say anything that would remind her that I was in high school, but I did sometimes talk about AJ, who was eager for me to admit I was bisexual.

  “I think he thinks me being gay makes him a virgin or something,” I said one day. “He’s seriously freaking out about it.”

  I tried to make it seem like our relationship hadn’t mattered, but I knew this wasn’t true. There had been three years of inside jokes, flash drives of indie music slipped into each other’s bookbags. He had told me that he’d peed his bed until he was five, that his father had made him quit soccer because he was slower than the other kids, too embarrassing to watch; and I told him that I collected photos from social media of my dad, who, according to his wife’s page, was a good father to his new family in North Carolina but just not to me. AJ and I had made out and given each other orgasms and lain naked in his bedroom many times before the spring of our junior year, when we’d finally had sex, and all of this too had seemed like easy, uncomplicated happiness. Now, though, in comparison to Erika, nothing with AJ felt real.

  “Well, it’s probably hard for him,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean you have to be the one to listen.”

  * * *

  By October the awkwardness between me and Erika had all but gone away, but it was also making me crazy to be around her. My friend Paloma thought I should quit my job and concentrate on getting into a good liberal arts school, which would undoubtedly be filled with lesbians who were even hotter and cooler than Erika; Jan said I should make up another girl who had a crush on me and look for reasons to casually touch Erika or invade her space.

  “Does that actually work?”

  “Oh yes,” she said. “At least on men. Remember Gabriel?”

  “No.”

  “Yes, you do. He looked like a chubby George Clooney. Dark hair and a beard. We almost got married.”

  I didn’t remember him but nodded.

  “I fixed his tie on a Tuesday and by Saturday I had a date.”

  I wasn’t fully convinced about this plan, but I also knew that fro-yo season was coming to a close and that Gina would probably soon stop scheduling two people on weekdays.

  The next time I saw Erika, I started a group chat with three of my classmates about chemistry homework and grinned stupidly at my phone every time it lit up with a reply. Finally, after about two hours, she asked what was happening.

  “Nothing,” I said. “Probably nothing. I met someone at Lake Ella and now she’s texting me.”

  Erika smiled in a way that seemed a little forced.

  “She wants to teach me how to skateboard.”

  “Are you going to go?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Is she cute?”

  My face burned. I wasn’t used to making things up, and it felt dangerous and unsavory. It was hard to believe the lie wasn’t obvious. I looked down at the tile floor between us, sticky with dried pools of frozen yogurt and covered with napkins and little bits of candy, nuts, and fruit smashed into the grout.

  “Good for you, Julie,” she said. “Text her back.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “I don’t know if I feel like it.
”

  Two hours later, when the store closed, I found Erika in the supply closet of tall wire shelves where we stocked the dry goods and paper products, reaching for a box of latex gloves. When I slid behind her, I put my hand on her back and asked her to throw down a box of paper towels. Except for a dull amber light bulb, the closet was dark.

  “I already changed those,” she said. “Both bathrooms and the kitchen.”

  “Okay, thanks,” I said, but I didn’t move my hand.

  “Also, you shouldn’t touch me like that.”

  I stepped back and she turned to face me. There wasn’t much space in the supply closet and we were maybe a foot apart. She had taken off her polo shirt and was now wearing an FSU T-shirt cut up into a tank top that showed the sides of a black sports bra.

  “I’m sorry—” I said, but then she turned toward me and brushed my hair away from my face with both hands and then we were kissing. Fast and hard, more breathless than it had been before. I slid my hands under her shirt and against her back; she pulled me against her and grabbed my butt. I thought, If she tries to take off my clothes, right here, I will let her, but then we heard Gina arrive to count the money and lock up, and Erika stepped back. I thought she was going to tell me she regretted it, that she’d made a mistake, but instead she squeezed my hand. “Let’s clean up and get out of here, okay?”

  The next half hour of side work was a slow, delicious ache. Erika looking over at me, blood thrumming in my ears. It was happening finally—​the two of us—​though I wasn’t exactly sure what “it” was. All summer she’d treated me more gently and carefully than I’d wanted. We’d make out, roll around half naked, but if I reached for her pants, she’d stop me. Tonight, though, things felt different. Was it really possible that Jan knew how to make someone fall for you?