The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  The sun was magnificently high and away on that gray sand afternoon. I’m better than what, Winifred? Don’t you know that it was I that got you here? Made you into a lady you are sitting before your little darlings?

  Oh, Mother. We love you. But this is not you.

  I finished my ice cream sandwich and tried to give my second-born the death stare. I couldn’t, of course. I don’t have some things within me. Besides, a cadre of white people wandered past, all of them licking ice cream cones and admiring the glistening waters; it wouldn’t do to show my colors in front of them. Old habits, I suppose. Winifred, I said, I’ve always tried to do my best. I don’t abandon ship. I stand tall. I stand fast.

  Oh, Mother. No one is talking about a ship. It’s the women he’s had, some against their will. And you standing behind him.

  Naturally I stand behind him. He is our rock.

  Oh, Mother. When will the world ever see your true face?

  Hurtful words. Of course, home training has taught me to shield the world from my raging emotions, the overflowing cup of my indignations. Since that afternoon—​two years ago now—​I’ve sent Winifred weekly letters, but have yet to find an answer in my box. I sign my letters with Warmly, or All My love, or Sincerely Yours, Mother Best.

  This babe I currently swaddle, I have no idea when or where he was born, who the father. His tiny brown face is shaped like a heart, and his fingers are worse than vise grips. When she was not even out of elementary school, Joanna once told her father, I don’t care what anybody say. You are my daddy and you are not bad.

  Time for you to make amends, seeing as you didn’t hear me the first time. Such harsh words. They were written in the note pinned to the car seat, the one she parked on our front step in Aberdeen Gardens—​complete with baby—​five days ago. There was also a small Polaroid of Rochelle, whose face was against the camera. Rochelle has been put away. I don’t know if for good.

  Craw, I asked. Whatever does this mean?

  XXVIII.

  In 1956 my beloved father took us into our parlor and loomed as the comedian my future husband sipped an Italian coffee—​Mam had spent time on the Continent and was eager to show it. Now you listen, my father began. Parthenia, she is not like any regular gal off the street. She is a lady. She’s had training. Me, I’m more like you—​wrong side of the tracks and whatnot. Don’t know which fork to use and whatnot. That is not Parthenia. Her mater and I done all we could to create her into a picture of feminine charms. And I command you to treat her as such. Am I making myself clear, son?

  His broad brown hands, caked in oil; and when he spoke, he stooped. This was the voice he’d used with the young men at Union Station, the ones who needed the most Pullman training, the best guidance, my father misquoting Du Bois with nothing but love: Work is the knob to uplift the people! What I would give to hear that voice again. He would know what to do about the Complaints. He would know what to do with my soul.

  XXIX.

  Craw’s proposal under the Emancipation Oak was quick, mostly painless. There was hardly any blood. I hitched down my dress, thought about my Aunt Leah, who’d married her first cousin despite her people’s objections and then went around quoting Paul Dunbar: “This is the debt I pay, just for one riotous day.” During Literary Hour in the New Rochelle parlor, we Mahogany Maidens found that line hilarious.

  XXX.

  Craw and I had no major discussions, no mapping out of the future, no tender treading of intimate territories. When we came home from the justice of the peace, Mam served dandelion wine in tumblers bearing little umbrellas. Daddy made a show of wanting me to finish up school, but Mam said it was plenty of young colored ladies that started their families and went back later. In fact, she was even thinking of doing the same! (The liar!)

  XXXI.

  Craw Daddy is back onstage, and next to me, Eboni’s lips shine full-blown in the darkness of the curtains, like freshly baked crescent rolls. Those lips have just been loved. Was it in her will or against it? She avoids my eyes and I’m understanding suddenly that I cannot possibly know the meaning of devotion and perhaps never could.

  XXXII.

  Where were you all this time, I ask her. Have you been following the comedian my husband for an autograph?She looks away. Then says to me, I always pictured you different. Maybe it’s the black eye.

  XXXIII.

  Did I ever tell you about the time Drunky Poppy nearly mowed our small house into the ground?

  Yes. The audience has heard Drunky Poppy many times before, even on televised appearances: Johnny Carson, The Flip Wilson Show. Dinah Shore had so many tears in her eyes from laughing it was rumored she passed gas on the set.

  The crowd closes its eyes and envisions a raggedy, brown-skinned hunchback driving his summer tractor down the middle of Something Street. Forget the tobacco field, where his helpmeet and progeny stand under an unforgiving sun, covered in morning sweat. Mama Love and her twelve children will wait on that tractor unto eternity.

  Tonight is a variant of the story: It so happens that Drunky Poppy woke up later than usual, and in an effort to avoid being castigated by Mr. Woodwardward (proprietor of the tobacco farm) jumps out the house without his spectacles. Mayhem ensues. He jumpstarts the tractor and makes a series of wrong turns, first passing the moonshine shack out back the farmhouse where he and his lady friend, aka Roomy Rhonda, secretly rendezvous. Laughter. He passes women hanging laundry, rustling children, and tending garden rows—​don’t even get him started on the various names of the garden tools (he will not bring himself to say hoe, that is a part of the contemporary vernacular he despises and claims will drag us colored folk straight to hell). Another moonshine shack nearby, then another. At the beginning of Something Street, Drunky Poppy nearly plows his tractor over some little old ladies. They are on their way to the Church of the Wooden Hand.

  (Craw’s actual mother had once tried to join the order of the White Ladies of Africa before they closed their door on her face.)

  Drunky Poppy nearly flattens a group of deserving orphans playing stickball and, after that, practically kills the baker carrying the preacher’s daughter’s wedding cake—​imagine the pandemonium!—​before he careens into A. A.’s General Supply—​the entire storefront has been crashed inward, there is clearly no saving anything, from the soda cracker barrels to the ladies’ hysteria drops. Sorry bout that, Drunky Poppy calls out from the light fixture, which has crowned (but miraculously not hurt) him, but mah oman done axed me to drive her car to church n pick huh up after preacher done got done. By now everyone in the audience can smell the booze on the comedian’s lips, feel it erupt from his pores like so many miniature volcanoes. I, on the other hand, can feel Mama Love’s legs as she kicks away the biting flies in the tobacco field.

  Oh yeah? This response comes from African Andy, the “blue-black” shop owner, who, from underneath a broken barrel of self-rising (!) flour, shouts, Man, you gone pay wid yo life! (the audience goes wild!) and furthermore, you ain’t driving no car! Your mama so dumb, Drunky Poppy, she done sold her car for gasoline! Drunky Poppy puts the tractor in reverse before the good shopkeeper can collar him, then incredibly makes it to the church (pummeling over prize roses)—​now there is the gang of deserving orphans in tow, all of whom vow to avenge themselves on the “absinthetic ass.” They catch up to him, but not before Drunky Poppy runs over a fire hydrant—​which spurts upward like Niagara Falls—​and washes just about everyone clear into the doors of the church (this part of the tale does take a while to wade through, no pun intended; it has never been my favorite, it defies every law of physics) and the water carries the man and his tractor right up to the pulpit, where a shocked (and portly) Pastor Breadlove falls into the arms of the choir women, one of whom is Miss Poosy, reformed lady-o-the-night (the audience screams). This literal turn of events horrifies the preacher’s daughter, Velvet—​the poor girl falls into the arms of her own betrothed, Stanley Morehousehead (in reality, Craw Daddy has hat
ed every HBCU except Hampton), and together the lovebirds are caught up in the raging waters; their choir gowns hook in the large left front wheel, forcing the pair to be dragged alongside the tractor as it heads up the aisle. Velvet must hold fast to the scraps that are her only covering; of course, Stanley Morehousehead is too stupid to try and rip his gown from his body and shield her.

  (The audience roll from their seats into the aisles; it is too much, too much indeed!)

  Velvet grabs her fiancé and together the (still unwed) couple allow themselves to be pulled along like a dog on a leash, her good cream-clotted skin turning red with humiliation, his dusky hue growing nightier by the minute. They flow out the church all the way to Buck River. There the bridegroom catches hold of a tree (a weeping willow, of course) and frees himself from the flood, from Velvet. My mother always warned me about girls like you, he cries. Velvet is last seen washing along Buck River’s tides toward the tobacco field, where the workers have long since elected to carry out their day.

  (The audience is an utter paroxysm. Heads go rolling off the slippery slopes of shoulders, brassieres snap open, revealing breasts as deflated as summer pies. Pure unadulterated laughter. Madness, even. No one is remotely thinking about the Complaints.)

  XXXIV.

  You know what he likes to do, don’t you, the girl whispers. He’s been doing it all week. I thought right up to now I liked it.

  The look on her face. There were the regular places for the eyes, nose, and mouth, and yet they been washed away, as in one of those old spiritualist photographs of the nineteenth century. Later in court I would learn that he was only tryna show her a new way to please her husband. Men can be fickle, Craw Daddy had assured her. With me what you see is what you get, baby.

  XXXV.

  I’d been having thoughts.

  XXXVI.

  More thoughts, new thoughts. Just this morning over breakfast I looked into the baby’s eyes and then went over to Craw in the living room, fast asleep. We can’t keep him, I say. We have no right. He is not yours. He is not mine.

  Craw Daddy laughed in my face. I’ve always wanted a son, he said. What’s wrong with that? Hell with Joanna and that other girl. They both gone crazy, you ask me.

  They’re not girls, I say. They haven’t been girls for a long time.

  Last I checked that Rochelle was nothing but a slut! Craw is silent after admitting this. I don’t understand.

  XXXVII.

  We can’t keep this baby, I said again to Craw Daddy on the drive over here. Clarence the driver in the front seat. Craw raised his eyebrows. I put my hand on his shoulder. We just can’t. We have no right.

  My husband the comedian craned his neck toward our driver up front. You hear that, Clarence? You hear this fool woman? Thinking I’m not good enough to raise my own so-called flesh and blood?

  Clarence remained driving. It was a light rain in the trees, a balminess settling over the windshield like a bassinet cover.

  We have to do the right thing, I said. Remembering the sound of the word so-called.

  A deal is a deal, he answered.

  What if this baby is no deal, I asked. I was not even sure what I was meaning.

  Silence. I don’t know if he waited one or two minutes before slapping me. I do know the car swerved, that Clarence opened his door, jumped out, pulled Craw behind him. We just need some fresh air, Clarence said, wiping his forehead with an old-fashioned handkerchief. He looked into my eyes and turned away. I had no idea men still carried those sorts of things.

  XXXVIII.

  Eboni says, You tell your husband when the show’s done my husband’ll be out back. We want to show him what he means to us.

  XXXIX.

  The baby shifts in the pram, even tries to claw its way up to the hood. I quickly push it down, ignoring its cries, and head toward the stage door in back. I make noise as I clatter us out onto the neat cobbles of the pedestrian path just steps away from the river. The baby becomes more and more unruly, shirking at my touch. Can infants do such things? I wonder. I push that pram along the cobbles to the rocky breaker blocking the rushing water; as I do, I long to pick up one of the cigarette butts at my feet. If I were a different kind of grandmother-type, I might stow this baby in a pie safe and run off looking for a tobacco field of my own.

  XL.

  And here’s Clarence clomping toward me, sans driving cap, his shirt partially undone, faux-tortoiseshell buttons; likely he’ll think I’m mad at him from before—​nobody likes a lady with a black eye. My mouth feels dry and my throat aches. You want me to push that for you, ma’am? he asks, huffing beside me. Clarence had looked much slimmer from the backseat. Now I take in his large stomach, his saggy legs. I shake my head, unable to move my lips. He does not hear me choke for breath.

  Don’t do anything rash, ma’am. You see, I could hear you all the way from the car. Come away from that river. I wouldn’t want you to do anything rash.

  XLI.

  As early as 1962, Time magazine described my husband, Crawley Stevenson, as “The Only Wonder of the World That Will Make You Double Over . . . in Fits of Laughter!” In 1963 the Amsterdam News wrote, “The Negro Genius That Will Bring White Folks to Their Knees!” In 1967 the Buffalo Challenger: “Craw Stevenson Is More than Meets the Eye!” The “reporters” of the September 1968 Hampton Cotillion Broadside called him “Our Favorite Mystery Date” and dared any woman on the planet to go up to my face and ask me what was my secret.

  XLII.

  Los Angeles 2010. The Complaints did indeed vex me, but I raised my right hand to God and swore that the testimony I was about to give was the whole truth. For the courtroom I chose the Halston halter-neck Craw had bought in Beverly Hills just the month before; he’d told me he liked nothing better than seeing a strong black woman in a great dress turn all evil whites on their heads.

  Complaint 1, August 1965: Craw was with me in Las Vegas, the Sands. We slept together in the same room. Craw went out briefly for smokes. How could he have done anything like that woman said he did—​and in such a short time? Complaint 2, June 1979: Craw literally had to beat the fans off him—​men and women alike—​as he mounted that Little Rock stage. They wouldn’t stop. Far as I’m concerned, you reap just what you sow. Complaint 3, April 1980: She stalked me, called the house more than once, even breathed heavy into the phone with her accusations. Craw had to put an end to those shenanigans. End of story. Complaint 4 (date unknown): Politically incorrect, yes, but it’s the truth: she was not his type. Nothing could’ve happened. She was not even remotely yellow. Complaint 5 (date unknown): Can you blame him for placing five thousand dollars in an envelope and slipping it to the Atlanta concierge? How could he have known that cameras had been trained upon him? People will do anything to blackmail a good black man for a little extra cash. Complaint 6 (date unknown): Can he help it if he is so famous, so beloved? Complaint 7, November 1977: Things were rough, plus the girls all grown and hating me for no good reason. I spent time tending to my parents’ home in Mount Vernon, and when I got back to Pensacola, Winifred is up here telling me about the two heifers that had moved in the moment I left, playing house in my kitchen, using my utensils, cooking his food. Marquita claimed she saw them suck his privates! And I slapped her—​He is still your father, I said, come hell or high water. Joanna over in the corner: At least if we was in high water we could drown (to which I slapped her as well). Complaint 8, December 1977: This tramp in question was the daughter of someone at Links—​do you know Links? They sent me a letter. Please don’t bother to ask, Mrs. Stevenson. We are a family-oriented organization, we only want credits to our race. Complaints 9 and 10, both in December 1991: No comment, on advice of counsel. Complaint 11, somewhere June or July 1999. We all grew back together, branches on the proverbial family tree. Except without the branches. Never again answered the phone at night, never spoke to reporters. Never again raised my hand in protest, never again found anything missing from my kitchen.

  XLIII.
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br />   Clarence is steering the pram by my side. Smart Van Heusen shirt with hideous Haband trousers. I think he could be in love with men. Why, I want to ask him. Why?

  XLIV.

  That is not the question, however. I ask Clarence if he could keep the baby overnight at his house, possibly longer, definitely longer, maybe forever? He looks at me crazy. What you mean, Mrs. Craw Daddy, he asks. I repeat myself: Take the boy home. Your wife will know what to do. He can’t belong to us anymore. He never has.

  Heavens, I ain’t married, Mrs. Craw Daddy! I couldn’t take no child, it’s just me and my cousin Junius.

  I think for a moment. Mr. Clarence, I say. I’m not opposed to two men raising the tyke. I’ve never been opposed. Please excuse my husband the comedian for anything he might’ve said in the past that would indicate we are narrow-minded, Mr. Clarence. All God’s children are free to love—​

  What you talking about, Mrs. Craw Daddy?

  Just know that I want you and your cousin Junius to take this child. His mother has run out of steam. And Craw and I are a jeopardy.

  This ain’t right, Mrs. Daddy.

  I bow my head: this will take longer than expected. And so—​with the memory of those long-ago Sable-Tea matrons that tried so very hard to instill in us a greater sense of truth, justice, and liberty for all—​I begin.