The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  I realized then that her hair was a wig, and a cheap one. For some reason that made her seem even crazier. I held my gun hand against my body to hide the tremor.

  “Come on, honey,” she said. “Go for it.”

  Like a star, a red dot appeared in the white of her left eye. The normal place and the other place were turning into the same place, quick but slow, the way a car accident is quick but slow. I stared. The blood spread raggedly across her eye. She shifted her gaze from my face to a spot somewhere outside the car and fixed it there. I fought the urge to turn and see what she was staring at. She shifted her eyes again. She looked me deep in the face.

  “Well,” she said, “are you going to do it or not?”

  Words appeared in my head, like a sign reading I DON’T WANT TO.

  She leaned forward and turned on the emergency flashers. “Get out of my car,” she said quietly. “You’re wasting my time.”

  As soon as I got out, she hit the gas and burned rubber. I walked into the field next to the road, without an idea of where I might go. I realized after she was gone that she could call the police, but I felt in my gut that she would not—in the other place there are no police, and she was from the other place.

  Still, as I walked I took the bullets out of the gun and scattered them, kicking snow over them and stamping it down. I walked a long time, shivering horribly. I came across a drainage pipe and threw the empty gun into it. I thought, I should’ve gut-shot her, that’s what I should’ve done. And then got her to the abandoned house. I should’ve gut-shot the bitch. But I knew why I hadn’t. She’d been shot already, from the inside. If she had been somebody different I might actually have done it. But somehow the wig-haired woman had changed the channel and I don’t even know if she meant to.

  The fly bobbing on the brown, gentle water. The long grasses so green that they cast a fine, bright green on the brown water. The primitive fish mouth straining for water and finding it as my son released it in the shallows. Its murky vanishing.

  The blood bursting in her eye, poor woman, my poor mother. My mother died of colon cancer just nine months ago. Shortly after that it occurred to me that the woman was wearing that awful wig because she was sick and recovering from chemo. Though of course I don’t know.

  The hurts of childhood that must be avenged: so small and so huge. Before I grew up and stopped thinking about her, I thought about that woman a lot. About what would’ve happened if I’d gotten her there, to the abandoned house. I don’t remember anymore the details of these thoughts, only that they were distorted, swollen, blurred: broken face, broken voice, broken body left dying on the floor, watching me go with dimming, despairing eyes.

  These pictures are faded now and far away. But they can still make me feel something.

  The second time I put my hand on Doug’s shoulder, he didn’t move away inside; he was too busy tuning in to the line and the lure. Somewhere in him is the other place. It’s quiet now, but I know it’s there. I also know that he won’t be alone with it. He won’t know I’m there with him because we will never speak of it. But I will be there. He will not be alone with that.

  ROXANE GAY

  North Country

  FROM Hobart

  I HAVE MOVED to the edge of the world for two years. If I am not careful, I will fall. After my first department meeting, my new colleagues encourage me to join them on a scenic cruise to meet more locals. The Peninsula Star will travel through the Portage Canal, up to Copper Harbor, and then out onto Lake Superior. I am handed a glossy brochure with bright pictures of blue skies and calm lake waters. “You’ll be able to enjoy the foliage,” they tell me, shining with enthusiasm for the Upper Peninsula. “Do you know how to swim?” they ask.

  I arm myself with a flask, a warm coat, and a book. At the dock, there’s a long line of ruddy Michiganders chatting amiably about when they expect the first snow to fall. It is August. I have moved to the Upper Peninsula to assume a postdoc at the Michigan Institute of Technology. My colleagues, all civil engineers, wave to me. “You came,” they shout. They’ve already started drinking. I take a nip from my flask. “You’re going to love this cruise,” they say. “Are you single?” they ask.

  We sit in a cramped booth, drinking Rolling Rocks. Every few minutes one of my colleagues offers an interesting piece of Upper Peninsula trivia such as the high incidence of waterfalls in the area or the three hundred inches of snow the place receives annually. I take a long, hard swallow from my flask. I am flanked by a balding, overweight tunnel expert on my right and a dark-skinned hydrologist from India on my left. The hydrologist is lean and quiet and his knee presses uncomfortably against mine. He tells me he has a wife back in Chennai but that in Michigan, he’s leaving his options open. I am the only woman in the department and as such, I am a double novelty. My new colleagues continue to buy me drinks and I continue to accept them until my ears are ringing and I can feel a flush in my cheeks, sweat dripping down my back. “I need some fresh air,” I mumble, excusing myself. I make my way, slowly, to the upper deck, ignoring the stares and lulls in conversation.

  Outside, the air is crisp and thin, the upper deck sparsely populated. Near the bow, a young couple makes out enthusiastically, loudly. A few feet away from them a group of teenagers stand in a huddle, snickering. I sit on a red plastic bench and hold my head in my hands. My flask sits comfortably and comfortingly against my rib cage.

  “I saw you downstairs,” a man with a deep voice says.

  The sun is setting, casting that strange quality of light rendering everything white, nearly invisible. I squint and look up slowly at a tall man with shaggy hair hanging over his ears. I nod.

  “Are you from Detroit?”

  I have been asked this question twenty-three times since moving to the area. In a month, I will stop counting, having reached a four-digit number. Shortly after that, I will begin telling people I have recently arrived from Africa. They will nod and exhale excitedly and ask about my tribe. I don’t know that in this moment, so there is little to comfort me. I shake my head.

  “Do you talk?”

  “I do,” I say. “Are you from Detroit?”

  He smiles, slow and lazy. He’s handsome in his own way—his skin is tan and weathered and his eyes are almost as blue as the lake we’re cruising on. He sits down. I stare at his fingers, the largest fingers I’ve ever seen. The sweaty beer bottle in his hand looks miniature. “So where are you from?”

  I shove my hands in my pockets and slide away from him. “Nebraska.”

  “I’ve never met anyone from Nebraska,” he says.

  I say, “I get that a lot.”

  The boat is now out of the Portage Canal and we’re so far out on the lake, I can’t see land. I feel small.

  “I better get back to my colleagues,” I say, standing up. As I walk away, he shouts, “My name is Magnus.” I throw a hand in the air but I don’t look back.

  In my lab, things make sense. As a structural engineer, I design concrete mixes, experiment with new aggregates like fly ash and other energy byproducts, artificial particulates, kinds of water that might make concrete not just stronger but unbreakable, permanent, perfect. I teach a section of Design of Concrete Structures and a section of Structural Dynamics. I have no female students in either class. The boys stare at me, and after class, they linger in the hallway just outside the classroom. They try to flirt. I remind them I will assess their final grades. They make inappropriate comments about extra credit.

  At night, I sit in my apartment and watch TV and search for faculty positions and other career opportunities closer to the center of the world. There’s a pizza restaurant across the street and above the restaurant, an apartment filled with loud white girls who play rap loudly into the middle of the night and have fights with their boyfriends who play basketball for the university. One of the girls has had an abortion and another isn’t speaking to her father and the third roommate has athletic sex with her boyfriend even when the other two are awake; she
has a child but the child lives with her father. I do not want to know any of these things.

  Several unopened boxes are sitting in my new apartment. To unpack those boxes means I will stay. To stay means I will be trapped in this desolate place for two years, alone. I rented my new home—a former dry-cleaning business converted into an apartment—over the phone. There are no windows, save for the one in the front door. The apartment, I thought, as I walked from room to room when I moved in, was like a jail cell. I had been sentenced. My new landlady, an octogenarian Italian who ran the dry cleaner’s for more than thirty years, gasped when she met me. “You didn’t sound like a colored girl on the phone,” she said. I said, “I get that a lot.”

  The produce is always rotten at the local grocery store—we’re too far north to receive timely food deliveries. I stand before a display of tomatoes, limp, covered in wrinkled skin, some dotted soft white craters ringed by some kind of black mold. I consider the cost to my dignity if I move in with my parents, until I feel a heavy hand on my shoulder. When I spin around, struggling to maintain my balance, I recognize Magnus. I grab his wrist between two fingers and step away. “Do you always touch strangers?”

  “We’re not strangers.”

  I make quick work of selecting the least decomposed tomatoes and move on to the lettuce. Magnus follows. I say, “We have different understandings of the word stranger. You don’t even know my name.”

  “I like the way you talk,” he says.

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  Magnus reddens. “Exactly what I said. Unless we have different understandings of the words I, like, the, way, you, and talk.”

  I bite the inside of my cheek to keep from smiling.

  “Can I buy you a drink?”

  I look at the pathetic tomatoes in my basket and maybe it’s the overwhelming brightness of the fluorescent lighting or the Easy Listening being piped through the store speakers, but I nod before I can say no. I say, “My name is Kate.” Magnus says, “Meet me at the Thirsty Fish, Kate.” On the drive there, I stare at my reflection in the rearview mirror and smooth my eyebrows. At the bar, Magnus entertains me with the silly things girls like to take seriously. He buys me lots of drinks and I drink them. He flatters me with words about my pretty eyes. He says he can tell I’m smart. I haven’t had sex in more than two months. I haven’t had a real conversation with anyone in more than two months. I’m not at my best.

  In the parking lot, I stand next to my car, holding on to the door, trying to steady myself. Magnus says, “I can’t let you drive home like this.” I mutter something about the altitude affecting my tolerance. He says, “We’re not in the mountains.” He stands so close. The warmth from his chest fills the short distance between us. Magnus takes my keys and as I reach for them, I fall into him. He lifts my chin with one of his massive fingers and I say, “Fuck.” I kiss him, softly. Our lips barely move but we don’t pull apart. His hand is solid in the small of my back as he presses me against my car.

  When I wake up, my mouth is thick and sour. I groan and sit up, and hit my head against something unfamiliar. I wince. Everything in my head feels loose, lost.

  “Be careful. It’s a tight fit in here.”

  I rub my eyes, trying to swallow the panic bubbling at the base of my throat. I clutch at my chest.

  “Relax. I didn’t know where you lived, so I brought you back to my place.”

  I take a deep breath, look around. I’m sitting on a narrow bed. I see Magnus through a narrow doorway standing near a two-burner stove. My feet are bare. A cat jumps into my lap. I scream.

  Magnus lives in a trailer, and not one of those fancy doublewides on a foundation with a well-kept garden in front, but rather an old, rusty trailer that can be attached to a truck and driven away. It is the kind of trailer you see in sad, forgotten places that have surrendered to rust and overgrown weeds and cars on cinder blocks and sagging laundry lines. The trailer, on the outside, is in a fair amount of disrepair, but the inside is immaculate. Everything has its proper place.

  “You should eat something,” he says.

  I extricate myself from the cat and walk into the galley area. Magnus invites me to sit at the table and he sets a plate of dry scrambled eggs and a mug of coffee in front of me. My stomach rolls wildly. I wrap my hands around the coffee mug and inhale deeply. I try to make sense of the trajectory between rotten tomatoes and this trailer. Magnus slides onto the bench across from me. He explains that he lives in this trailer because it’s free. It’s free because his trailer sits on the corner of a parcel of land his sister Mira and her husband, Peter, farm. The farm is twenty minutes outside of town. There’s no cell phone reception. I can’t check my email, he tells me, as I wave my phone in different directions, desperate for a signal. I ask him why he lives this way. He says he has a room in his sister’s house he rarely uses. He likes his privacy.

  “You took my shoes off.”

  Magnus nods. “You have nice feet.”

  “Can you take me to my car?”

  Magnus sighs, quickly drains the rest of his coffee into the small sink.

  On the drive back to town I sit as far away from Magnus as possible. I try to re-create the events that happened between standing in the parking lot and waking up in a trailer with a cat in my lap. I refuse to ask Magnus to fill in the blanks. At my car, he grips the steering wheel tightly. I thank him for the ride and he hands me my keys. He says, “I’d love your phone number.”

  I force myself to smile. I say, “Thank you for not letting me drive last night.” I say, “I don’t normally drink much, but I just moved here.” He says, “Yes, the altitude,” and waits until I drive away. I remember the pressure of his lips against mine, their texture.

  In my lab, things make sense. The first snow falls in late September. It will continue to fall until May. I tell my mother I may not survive. I tell her this so many times, she starts to worry. I test cement fitness. I fill molds with cylinders of concrete. I experiment with saltwater and bottled water and lake water and tap water. I cure and condition specimens. I take detailed notes. I write an article. I turn down three dates with three separate colleagues. The hydrologist from Chennai reaffirms the openness of his options in the United States. I reaffirm my lake of interest in his options. I administer an exam that compels my students to call me Battle-Ax. I attend a campus social for single faculty. There are seven women in attendance and more than thirty men. The hydrologist is there too. He doesn’t wear a wedding ring. I am asked thirty-four times if I am from Detroit, a new record for a single day. I try to remember where Magnus lives and all I recall is a blurry memory of being drunk, burying my face into his arm as we drove, and him, singing along to Counting Crows. I love Counting Crows.

  There once was a man. There is always some man. We were together for six years. He was an engineer too. Some people called him my dissertation adviser. When we got involved, he told me he would teach me things and mold me into a great scholar. He said I was the brightest girl he had ever known. Then he contradicted himself. He said we would marry and thought I believed him. A couple of years passed and he said we would marry when he was promoted to full professor and then it was when I finished my degree. I got pregnant and he said we would marry when the baby was born. The baby was stillborn and he said we would marry when I recovered from the loss. I told him I was as recovered as I was ever going to be. He had no more excuses and I no longer cared to marry him. I spent most of my nights awake while he slept soundly, remembering what it felt like to rub my swollen belly and feel my baby kicking. He told me I was cold and distant. He told me I had no reason to mourn a child that never lived. He amused himself with a new lab assistant who consistently wore insensible shoes and short skirts even though we spent our days working with sand and cement and other dirty things. I found them fucking, the lab assistant bent over a stack of concrete bricks squealing like a debutante porn star, the man thrusting vigorously, literally fucking the lab assistant right out of her hig
h heels, his fat face red and shiny. He gasped in short, repulsive bursts. The scene was so common, I couldn’t even get angry. I had long stopped feeling anything where he was concerned. I returned to my office, accepted the postdoc position, and never looked back. I would have named our daughter Emma. She would have been beautiful despite her father. She would have been four months old when I left.

  Snow has been falling incessantly. The locals are overjoyed. Every night, I hear the high-pitched whine of snowmobiles speeding past my apartment. There are things I will need to survive the winter—salt, a shovel, a new toilet seat, rope—so I brave the weather and go to the hardware store. I am wearing boots laced high over my calves, a coat, gloves, hat and scarf, thermal underwear. I never remove these items unless I am home. It takes too much effort. I wonder how these people manage to reproduce. I see Magnus standing over a display of chainsaws. I turn to walk away but then I don’t. I stand still and hope he notices me. I realize that dressed as I am, my own family wouldn’t recognize me. I tap his shoulder. I say, “What do you plan on massacring?”

  He looks up slowly, shrugs. “Just looking,” he says.

  “For a victim?”

  “Aren’t you feeling neighborly?”

  “I thought I would say hello.”

  Magnus nods again. “You’ve said hello.”

  I swallow, hard. My irritation tastes bitter. I quickly tell him my phone number and go to find a stronger kind of rope. As I pull away, I notice Magnus watching me from inside the store. I smile.

  In my lab things make sense. I teach my students how to make perfect concrete cylinders, how to perform compression tests. They crush their perfect cylinders and roar with delight each time the concrete shatters and the air is filled with a fine dust. There’s a lot to love about breaking things.