The Best American Short Stories 2020

by Curtis Sittenfeld

  The little girl sharpens Karan’s pencils for him and drops Quality Street candies onto his desk, until she sees that he simply throws them away unacknowledged.

  Even with glasses, Anuj has to sit up in the front now to see the chalkboard. He bumps into desks; he walks half his face smack into the doorframe, clutches his head, lets out a noise lost somewhere between moan and scream.

  The girl goes back to reading books at recess. She draws Minnie Mouse again and again, but with long mustaches and batlike teeth.

  * * *

  One day he isn’t at school. And then the next. And the next. And the next. And the next. And the next.

  “Excuse me, Ma’am, where is Anuj, please?” the girl asks, voice shaking a little, when she brings up her penmanship for inspection.

  Mrs. Tareen says that Anuj has to go to a special school now, that he won’t be coming back.

  * * *

  In fourth grade they all have numerous alien subjects to study, and their old class sections are shuffled, so no more Karan. The girl opens her new geography textbook. (We pronounced it JOG-reff-ee.) On its flyleaf is printed a quote from Mohandas Gandhi. It says,

  I will give you a talisman. Whenever you are in doubt, or when the self becomes too much with you, apply the following test:

  Recall the face of the poorest and the weakest man whom you may have seen, and ask yourself if the step you contemplate is going to be of any use to him. Will he gain anything by it? Will it restore him to a control over his own life and destiny? In other words, will it lead to swaraj (freedom) for the hungry and spiritually starving millions?

  She feels like this is the beginning of an answer, a tranquilizer dart to the thick, muscled limbs of the stalking creature within. She copies it again in her purple-ruled notebook, the curls of the word talisman shining in wet ink.

  Later the girl will become a person who learns, wearily, that Gandhi was racist against the blacks of Africa, that he liked sleeping next to naked nubile girls to test his willpower, that he fought to keep the caste system in place—​pin the poorest and the weakest exactly where they were in the scheme of things.

  * * *

  Please listen. I grew up in a place that I cannot return to. When I search for my old home on Google Maps, it says Result Not Found. Shake me, and the past rattles like broken circuitry. I make myself a mug of tea and close my eyes. Heat radiates through the ceramic and into my palms.

  I wake up in the middle of the night, sweating heavily, go sit at my computer, and type out a story. I title it “The Nature of Evil, The Nature of Good.” I send the story in to my writing group. They are mystified and slightly uncomfortable. Why is the little girl the only one left without a name, they ask. They are nervous about how to pronounce everything.

  “The relevance of this seems grounded in a kind of cultural specificity that the narrator doesn’t include the audience in on,” one man says carefully.

  Part of me wants to give the story over to someone in my group to write, start over, make their own in clarity and directness. Maybe someone would set down, clean and loud, right at the start, “The first friend I ever made went blind.”

  After talking about my story, they discuss the solar eclipse that is days away. Some of them will take off work, drive to something they call the path of totality. The rest mull over how to buy glasses to stare at the sun in supposed safety. The man says he will order them in bulk for us.

  “You in?” he asks me, and I shake my head: no.

  * * *

  In fourth grade the girl’s father buys the family their first computer. After school she turns the machine on and sits in front of the bright, hot screen. Her parents are away at work. She marvels at how it lets her erase sentences without using rubbers, so clean and easy, no debris left behind. She stares at the upright, blinking line that is the door for words to walk out of, lifts her fingers to the keys, and pushes down.

  ELIZABETH MCCRACKEN

  It’s Not You

  FROM Zoetrope: All-Story

  Hotels were different in those days. You could smoke in them. The rooms had bathtubs, where you could also smoke. You didn’t need a credit card or identification, though you might be made to sign the register, so later the private detective—​just like that, we’re in a black-and-white movie, though I speak only of the long-ago days of 1993—​could track you down. Maybe you anticipated the private detective, and used an assumed name.

  Nobody was looking for me. I didn’t use an assumed name, though I wasn’t myself. I’d had my heart broken, or so I thought, I’d been shattered in a collision with a man, or so I thought, and I went to the fabled pink hotel just outside the midwestern town where I lived. The Narcissus Hotel: it sat on the edge of a lake and admired its own reflection. Behind, a pantomime lake, an amoebic swimming pool, now drained, empty lounge chairs all around. January 1: cold, but not yet debilitating. In my suitcase I’d brought one change of clothing, a cosmetic bag, a bottle of Jim Beam, a plastic sack of Granny Smith apples. I thought this was all I needed. My plan was to drink bourbon and take baths and feel sorry for myself. Paint my toenails, maybe. Shave my legs. My apartment had a small fiberglass shower I had to fit myself into, as though it were a science fiction pod that transported me to nowhere, but cleaner.

  I would watch television too. In those days I didn’t own one, and there was a certain level of weeping that could be achieved only while watching TV, I’d discovered—​self-excoriating, with a distant laugh track. I wanted to obliterate myself, but I intended to survive the obliteration.

  It wasn’t the collision that had hurt me. It was that the other party, who’d apologized and explained enormous deficiencies, self-loathing, an unsuitability for any kind of extended human contact, had three weeks later fallen spectacularly and visibly in love with a woman, and they could be seen—​seen by me—​necking in the public spaces of the small town. The coffee shop, the bar, the movie theater before the movie started. I was young then, we all were, but not so young that public necking was an ordinary thing to do. We weren’t teenagers but grown-ups, late twenties in my case, early thirties in theirs.

  New Year’s Day in the Narcissus Hotel. The lobby was filled with departing hangovers and their owners. Paper hats fell with hollow pops to the ground. Everyone winced. You couldn’t tell whose grip had failed. Nothing looked auspicious. That was good. My New Year’s resolution was to feel as bad as fast as I could in highfalutin privacy, then leave the tatters of my sadness behind, along with the empty bottle and six apple cores.

  “How long will you be with us?” asked the spoon-faced, redheaded woman behind the desk. She wore a little white name tag that read EILEEN.

  “It will only seem like forever,” I promised. “One night.”

  She handed me a brass key on a brass fob. Hotels had keys in those days.

  * * *

  I had packed the bottle of bourbon, the apples, my cosmetic bag, but forgotten a nightgown. Who was looking, anyhow? I built my drunkenness like a fire, patiently, enough space so it might blaze.

  * * *

  You shall know a rich man by his shirt, and so I did. Breakfast time in the breakfast room. The decor was old but kept up. Space-age, with stiff, Sputnikoid chandeliers. Dark-pink leather banquettes, rosy-pink carpets. Preposterous but wonderful. I’d eaten here in the past: they had a dessert cart, upon which they wheeled examples of their desserts to your table—​a slice of cake, a crème brûlée, a flat apple tart that looked like a mademoiselle’s hat.

  I had my own hangover now, not terrible, a wobbling threat that might yet be kept at bay. I had taken three baths; my toenails were vampy red. I had watched television till the end of broadcast hours, which was a thing that happened then: footage of the American flag waving in the breeze, then here be monsters. In my other life, the one that happened outside the Narcissus Hotel, I worked in the HR department of a radio station. I lived with voices overhead. That was why I didn’t have a television. It would have been disloyal. I’d
found a rerun on a VHF station of squabbling siblings and then wept for hours, in the tub, on one double bed, then the other. Even at the time I knew I wasn’t weeping over anything actual that I’d lost, but because I’d wanted love and did not deserve it. My soul was deformed. It couldn’t bear weight. It would never fit together with another person’s.

  The rich man sat at the back of the breakfast room in one of the large horseshoe booths built for public canoodling. His pale-green shirt, starched, flawless, seemed to have been not ironed but forged, his mustache tended by money and a specialist. His glasses might have cost a lot, but twenty years before. In his fifties, I thought. In those days, fifties was the age I assigned people undeniably older than me. I never looked at anyone and guessed they were in their forties. You were a teenager, or my age, or middle-aged, or old.

  The waiter went to the man’s table and murmured. The man answered. At faces I am terrible, but I always recognize a voice.

  “Dr. Benjamin,” I said, once the waiter had left. He looked disappointed, with an expression that said, Here, of all places. With a nod, he recognized my recognition. “I listen to you,” I told him.

  He had an overnight advice show, 11 P.M. to 2 A.M., on another AM channel, not mine. He had a beef bourguignon voice and regular callers. Stewart from Omaha. Allison from Asbury Park. Linda from Chattanooga.

  “Thank you,” he said. Then added, “If that’s the appropriate response.”

  “I’m in radio too,” I said. “Not talent. HR.”

  The waiter stood by my table, a tall, young man with an old-fashioned Cesar Romero mustache. When I looked at him, he smiled and revealed a full set of metal braces.

  “I will have the fruit plate,” I said. Then, as though it meant nothing to me, an afterthought, “and a bloody Mary.”

  It is the fear of judgment that keeps me behaving, most of the time, like the religious. Not of God, but of strangers.

  “Hair of the dog,” the radio shrink said to me.

  “Hair of the werewolf,” I answered.

  “You could be. On air. You have a lovely voice.”

  In my head I kept a little box of compliments I’d heard more than once: I had nice hair (wavy, strawberry blond), and nice skin, and a lovely voice. I didn’t believe the compliments, particularly at such times in my life, but I liked to save them for review, as my mother saved the scrapbooks from her childhood in a small town, where her every unusual move—​going on a trip to England, performing in a play in the next town over—​made the local paper.

  * * *

  Who in this story do I love? Nobody. Myself, a little. Oh, the waiter, with his diacritical mustache above his armored teeth. I love the waiter. I always love the waiter.

  * * *

  The bloody Mary had some spice in it that sent a tickle through my palate into my nose. A prickle, a yearning, an itch: a gathering sneezish sensation. One in ten bloody Marys did this to me. I always forgot. I took another drink, and the feeling intensified. Beneath the pressure of the spice was a layer of leftover intoxication, which the vodka perked up. I thought, not for the first time, that I had a sixth sense and it was called drunkenness.

  “No good?” the radio shrink asked me.

  “What?”

  “You’re making a terrible face.”

  “It’s good,” I said, but the sensation was more complicated than that. “What are you doing in this neck of the woods?”

  “Is it a neck?” He touched his own with the tips of his fingers. “I like the rooms here.”

  “You probably have a nicer room than I do. The presidential suite. Honeymoon?”

  “I’m neither the president nor a honeymooner.”

  “Those’re the only suites I know,” I said. It was possible to be somebody else in a hotel; I was slipping into a stranger’s way of speaking. “Still, far from Chicago.”

  “Far from Chicago,” he agreed. He picked up his coffee cup in both hands, as though it were a precious thing, but it was thick china, the kind you’d have to hurl at a wall to break. “Business,” he said at last. “You?”

  “I live here.”

  “You live in the hotel?”

  “In town.”

  “Oh, you’re merely breakfasting, not staying.”

  “I’m staying.” I started to long for a second bloody Mary, like an old friend who might rescue me from the conversation. “Somebody was mean to me,” I said to the radio shrink. “I decided to be kind to myself.”

  He palmed the cup and drank from it, then settled it back in the saucer. The green shirt was a terrible color against the pink leather. “It’s a good hotel for heartache. Join me,” he said, in his commercial-break voice, deeply intimate, meant for thousands, maybe millions.

  * * *

  There were other radio hosts in those days, also called “Doctor,” who would yell at you. A woman who said to penitent husbands, You better straighten up and fly right. A testy man—​No, no, no, no: Listener—​he called his listeners “Listener”—​Listener, this is your wake-up call.

  But Dr. Benjamin practiced compassion, with that deep voice and his big feelings. Once you forgive yourself, you can forgive your mother, he would say. Or perhaps it was the other way around: your mother first, then you. He told stories of his own terrible decisions. Unlike some voices, his had ballast and breadth. For some reason I’d always pictured him as bald, in a bow tie. I pictured all male radio hosts as bald and bow-tied, until presented with evidence to the contrary. Instead he had a thatch of silver hair. The expensive shirt. Cowboy boots.

  I listened to his show all the time, because I hated him. I thought he gave terrible advice. He believed in God and tried to convince other people to do likewise. Sheila from Hoboken, Ann from Nashville, Patrick from Daly City. On the radio it didn’t matter where you lived, small town or suburb or New York City (though nobody from New York City ever called Dr. Benjamin): you had the same access to phone lines and radio waves. You could broadcast your loneliness to the world. Every now and then a caller started to say something that promised absolute humiliation, and I’d have to fly across the room to snap the dial off. My husband cannot satisfy me, Doc—.

  * * *

  So long ago! I can’t remember faces, but I can remember voices. I can’t remember smells, but I can remember in all its dimensions the way I felt in those days. The worst thing about not being loved, I thought then, was how vivid I was to myself.

  Now I am loved and in black and white.

  * * *

  Up close he seemed altogether vast. Paul Bunyan-y, as though he’d drunk up the contents of that swimming pool to slake his thirst, but he didn’t look slaked. Those outdated glasses had just a tinge of purple to the lenses. Impossible to tell whether this was fashion or prescription, something to protect his eyes. His retinas, I told myself. He’d slumped to the bottom of the hoop of the horseshoe, his body at an angle. I sat at the edge to give him room.

  He said, “Better?”

  “Maybe,” I said. “Are you a real doctor?”

  He stretched then, the tomcat, his arms over his head. His big steel watch slipped down his wrist. “Sure.”

  “You’re not.”

  “I’m not a medical doctor,” he allowed.

  “I know that,” I said.

  “Then, yes. Yes, I’m a doctor.”

  The table had an air of vacancy: he’d eaten his breakfast, which had been mostly tidied away, except for the vest-pocket bottles of ketchup and Tabasco sauce and a basket filled with tiny muffins. I took one, blueberry, and held it in the palm of my hand. The waiter delivered a bloody Mary I hadn’t ordered, unless by telepathy. “You have a PhD,” I said.

  “Yes.”

  “It’s strange.”

  “That I have a PhD?”

  “That we call people who study English literature for too long the same thing we call people who perform brain surgery.”

  “Oh dear,” he said. “Psychology, not English literature.”

  “I’d li
ke to see your suite.”

  He shook his head.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m married,” he said. “You know that.”

  Of course I did. Her name was Evaline. He mentioned her all the time: he called her Evaline Robinson the Love of My Life.

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said, and I tore the little muffin in half, because maybe it was what I’d meant. No, I told myself. Every time I walked down a hotel hallway, I peered into open doors. Was there a better room behind this one? A better view out the window of the room? Out of all these dozens of rooms, where would I be happiest—​by which I meant, least like myself? I only wanted to see all the hotel rooms of the world, all the other places I might be.

  I was waiting to be diagnosed.

  He said, “You’re a nice young woman, but you won’t cut yourself a break.” He said, “All right. Okay. We can go to my suite. They’ve probably finished making it up.”

  * * *

  Even the hallways were pink and red, the gore and frill of a Victorian valentine: one of those mysterious valentines, with a pretty girl holding a guitar-sized fish. The suite was less garish, less whorehouse, less rubescent, with a crystal chandelier, that timeless symbol of One’s Money’s Worth. The two sofas were as blue and buttoned as honor guards. A mint-green stuffed rabbit sat in a pale-salmon armchair.

  “What’s that?” I asked.

  He looked at it as though it were a girl who’d snuck into his room and undressed, and here came the question: throw her out, or . . . not.