The Best American Short Stories 2012

by Tom Perrotta

  “All right,” Ginny says. “Just this once. Because we’re here. But not if there’s a line.”

  “Yeah!” the girls say. Olivia takes Maggie’s hand and leads the way. Ginny watches them step onto the escalator with their identical ponytails, their small shoulders, their fleeces tied around their waists. From the moment they were born, they looked like her or they looked like their father, or sometimes they looked like a combination of both: her hair and his eyes, his mouth and her nose, her chin and his smile. But from behind now they look just like little girls: sisters in a portrait, or Renoir’s beauties in flat black hats, poppies sprung from their ballet shoes. They are timeless somehow, though too fast growing. “Zoom Zoom is shrinking,” Maggie had said. “Wasn’t Zoom Zoom once bigger?” They ascend and Ginny feels the catch of love unbearable: she never imagined this, she thinks, her heart suddenly thudding, as if stepping down a stair or two, hard, and then a pause and then another thump, or a clump, her heart clumping down the stairs—caffeine, maybe, or nerves.

  She follows them up but they are already out of sight. The crowds thick, people speaking different languages, laughing, dancing with the employees. Where is she? What is this? At the top of the stairs, Olivia waits to show her. “Look!” she says, holding up a green Statue of Liberty M&M. “You pull the torch.”

  “Cool,” Ginny says.

  “Are you looking?” Olivia says. “The torch!”

  “I saw,” Ginny says. “It’s cool.”

  “And they have purple ones.”

  “Cool.”

  “Can we get some?”

  “Where’s your sister?”

  “With the guy. Can we get some?”

  “What?”

  “The purple ones! They’re grape!”

  She and the girls’ father had discussed at length how to explain it to them. He had thought it best to be as honest as possible, to sit them down and simply tell them that he was moving out. “They’re old enough,” he had said.

  They’re too young, she’d said. She could barely look at him. He was all secrets; they slid around beneath his expression like tectonic plates. He was all the things he wouldn’t say to her that she wanted to know, all deception and cunning. It made her crazy to look at him and so she stared at her feet, at her ubiquitous galoshes. At least she should find some more contemporary ones, the ones with the thick matching socks turned down over the top, the ones in strong solid colors that came from the British Isles or somewhere—Brittany?—and suggested other lives, lives spent mucking stalls or milking cows, or even striding with a fishing rod and a rough-hewn basket through streams where the trout still ran as they once had, before, in other places, they grew strange scales and forgot to spawn; lives spent striding and oblivious of the wet, oblivious of the hard stones that would have pierced the soles of lesser girls. Boots that suggested strength or, at the very least, a day’s catch.

  “It’s not like they don’t get the concept,” he had said.

  She looked up at his face and squinted, and the girls were there too: in his eyes, his eyebrows.

  “Maggie!” Ginny shouts. She can’t see her. The line for a photograph with the M&M is endless, and she can’t see Maggie anywhere.

  “What guy?” Ginny asks, turning to Olivia. “What do you mean, ‘the guy’?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Olivia said. “I don’t know. She was here a minute ago.”

  “Where?”

  “Right here,” Olivia says, and starts to cry.

  “Don’t,” Ginny says. “We’ll find her. Please. She wouldn’t just disappear. She’s got to be somewhere. Maggie!”

  “Maggie!” Olivia says.

  “Maggie!” Ginny says.

  There are too many people in M&M World. There should be some requirements, some restrictions. She’s quite sure that numerous fire codes are being broken. She plans to write a letter, to get someone’s attention—she’ll call 311. There are hundreds of people, if not thousands, in this place. How can anyone see a thing? She looks around at the racks, the ascending columns of stuff, the stacks and piles beneath the garish lights, and she suddenly thinks she spots Maggie, but it’s not her; it’s another child. She yanks Olivia here and there. “Maggie!” she calls. She is trying to remain calm. She’ll find an employee in a minute; there must be an intercom system. “Maggie!” This must happen all the time, as it does at Disney World and places like that. The store can automatically lock the doors. “Maggie!” She sees an employee, a girl no more than seventeen or eighteen in M&M green, with a pierced nose and spiky blond hair. “My daughter,” she says, breathless, flagging her. “She’s gone.” The girl’s name tag says Wendy, Kalamazoo, Michigan. Thank God, a Midwesterner.

  “I mean, she was with me. And now I don’t know where she is.”

  “Was she here?” Wendy says.

  “Yes, she was. With me. And I can’t—” Ginny breaks away. “Jesus, is there someone else?”

  “I’ll help you find her,” Wendy says.

  “Is there a manager?”

  “Don’t panic,” Wendy says.

  “I’ve got to—”

  “Barbara,” Wendy is saying into some kind of apparatus she’s wearing around her neck.

  She and the girls’ father sat across from each other at the kitchen table, the light above them harsh, the hour late. From time to time, an ambulance sirened by, or someone shouted in the street; it was the weekend. The girls slept in the other room, Olivia with the quilt wrapping her ankles—she tossed and turned—and Maggie with Zoom Zoom and her other animals positioned around her. Zoom Zoom in the doll cradle, perhaps, or tucked in a towel on the floor, its head on a pincushion or a neatly folded Kleenex.

  He talked and talked. She needed a change in subject; she needed to go to bed. It was all so banal, wasn’t it? So ordinary? Predictable? An intern? A true love? She looked down at her unvarnished nails: in college she had worn leather moccasins and, on occasion, feathers in her ears; she’d won a prize for her dissertation. Most days, she carried a tote bag, black, with the name of her favorite nonprofit in white.

  She listened for a while, and then she did not. Then she said, “Maybe we could tell them it’s like what happens when they argue about the fort. How they each want to push the other out of the fort, how there’s never enough room in the fort. We could tell them you’re taking a break from the fort,” she said.

  “All right,” he said.

  “This, of course, makes me the fort,” she said.

  “You are not the fort,” he said.

  “I was joking,” she said.

  Outside, a bottle shatters.

  “But they might understand the thing about the fort,” she said.

  “All right,” he said.

  “They might,” she said.

  “That’s good,” he said.

  “Maggie!” Ginny yells. She feels Wendy touch her arm, right behind her.

  “Don’t leave,” Wendy says. “That’s the first thing.”

  “What?”

  “Don’t go out of sight.”

  “She’s out of sight,” Ginny said. “My daughter. She’s five years old.” Olivia cries beside her. “I’m sorry,” Olivia says. “It’s my fault.”

  “It’s not your fault,” Ginny says. “Sweetheart, it’s not your—Maggie!” Now Ginny’s screaming, her voice swallowed by the wall of sound, the same song, the same rapper, repeatedly singing. Customers stop browsing, unsure what to do. They step back and multiply, as if viewing an accident.

  Wendy is speaking into the gadget around her neck. She looks up. “Barbara’s on her way,” she says, as if delivering good news. “She was in inventory.”

  After the whale swam away—disappeared, really—Ginny couldn’t quite explain to the girls’ father why she hadn’t called him immediately. He had promised to call her, he said, so why hadn’t she called him? He had been just on the other side of the boat; he had the camera, after all. He hadn’t seen a thing, he said. By the time he heard the othe
r tourists shouting, the hubbub, the whale was gone and Ginny was standing there, red-handed. “You were red-handed,” he teased her afterward. “A whale hoarder.”

  “Was not a whale hoarder,” she’d said.

  “Uh-huh,” he said. “Whale hoarder.”

  And for a while, in the early years of their marriage, when she spent too much time reading, or rose early to walk alone in the Park or drifted off when the two were having dinner in a restaurant, he’d kick her ankle and say it again. “Whale hoarder,” he’d say. And she’d laugh and then she would not. She’d remember the whale’s expression, how it lay on its side and drifted in the current, how it had been so close that she could see the raised scars of its skin, the mottled gray color of it and the sheen of evaporating water, and its massive head, how the whale’s eye, onyx black, had looked directly at her, unblinking, and she had thought, If I can stand here long enough, if I can just look hard enough, I’ll understand. What, she wasn’t sure, but she felt it was something she was meant to know, something beyond the noise of everything else, something as clear as the sounds carried across the ocean. “What?” she had said to the whale. “What?”

  It is Olivia who spots Zoom Zoom after Barbara has arrived and the doors have been manned, after Ginny has sunk to the floor with her head between her legs, after the tourists, English-speaking and those with no idea, have come forward, rallying around the woman with the missing child and the child that remains, a gorgeous girl, freckled, tall, her hair loosened from its ponytail, her face puffed with tears. It is Olivia who sees Zoom Zoom’s ear, and then Maggie’s shoes, or the bottoms of them, beneath the dressing-room curtains, Maggie covered by a heap of discarded M&M wear, an M&M beach towel over her head. She hadn’t heard her mother or her sister, she said, howling. She thought they’d gone too.

  “Too?” Ginny says, hugging her youngest to the floor, hugging her small arms and legs, folding her into her own arms as tightly as she can bear. “Too?” she says, crying, laughing, pulling Olivia in as well, so that the three form a kind of solid thing, a weight, a substance, as round as a boulder, which, for the moment, fills in the empty space that was there just before. And suddenly everything returns: the buzzy air, the lemony chocolate scent piped through the store, the rapper’s song, the rainbow wall of colors, the crowds.

  “Let’s go,” Ginny whispers. The girls are sniffling, their faces hot. She stands then, a daughter gripped in each hand. They ride the escalator down in silence, staring out the large windows toward Broadway, toward the familiar thickening rush-hour crowd, until they reach the bottom and step off. Ginny lets go first, leading them, pushing hard on the glass door against the wind, against what has become more than a blustery day, because in truth it is not yet spring, exactly; there is still the possibility of a freeze.

  She squats to zip the girls’ fleeces to their chins, to kiss their cheeks—their eyes still wet with tears—then pulls them close to her, again. How soon the whale dissolved into its darkening sea. How soon she was left at the side of the boat, alone.

  JESS WALTER

  Anything Helps

  FROM McSweeney’s

  BIT HATES GOING to cardboard.

  But he got tossed from the Jesus beds for drunk and sacrilege and has no other way to get money. So he’s up behind Frankie Doodle’s, flipping through broken-down produce boxes like an art buyer over a rack of prints, and when he finds a piece without stains or writing he rips it down until it’s two feet square. Then he walks to the Quik Stop, where the fat checker likes him. He flirts her out of a Magic Marker and a beef stick.

  The beef stick he eats right away, and cramps his gut, so he sets in on the counter while he writes on the cardboard, carefully, in block letters: Anything Helps. The checker says, You got good handwriting, Bit.

  The best spot, where the freeway lets off next to Dick’s, is taken by some chalker Bit’s never seen before: skinny, dirty pants, hollow eyes. The kid’s sign reads Homeless Hungry. Bit yells, Homeless Hungry? Dude, I invented Homeless Hungry. The kid just waves.

  Bit walks on, west toward his other spot. There are a few others out, stupid crankers—faces stupid, signs stupid: some fifty-year-old baker with Vietnam Vet, too dumb to know he wasn’t born in time for the war, and a coke ghost with tiny writing—Can You Help Me Feed My Children Please. They’re at stupid intersections too, with synced lights so the cars never stop.

  Bit’s headed to his unsynced corner—fewer cars, but at least they have to brake. Streamers off the freeway, working people, South Hill kids, ladies on their way to lunch. When he gets there he grabs the light pole and sits back against it, eyes down—nonthreatening, pathetic. It feels weird; more than a year since he’s had to do this. You think you’re through with some things.

  He hears a window hum and gets up, walks to the car without making eye contact. Gets a buck. Thank you. Minute later, another car, another window, another buck. Bless you.

  Good luck, the people always say.

  For the next hour, it’s a tough go. Cars come off the hill, hit the light, stop, look, leave. A woman who looks at first like Julie glances over and mouths, I’m sorry. Bit mouths back: Me too. Most people stare straight ahead, avoid eye contact.

  After a while a black car stops, and Bit stands. But when the windows come down it’s just some boys in baseball caps. Worst kind of people are boys in baseball caps. Bit should just be quiet, but—

  Get a job, you stinking drunk.

  That’s good advice, Bit says. Thanks.

  A couple of dimes fly out the window and skitter against the curb; the boys yell some more. Bit waits until they drive away to get the coins, carefully. He’s heard of kids heating pennies in their cigarette lighters. But the dimes are cool to the touch. Bit sits against his pole. A slick creeps down his back.

  Then a guy in a gold convertible Mercedes almost makes the light but has to skid to a halt.

  I think you could’ve made it, Bit says.

  The guy looks him over. Says, You look healthy enough to work.

  Thanks. So do you.

  Let me guess—veteran?

  Yep. War of 1812.

  The guy laughs. Then what, you lost your house?

  Misplaced it.

  You’re a funny fucker. Hey, tell you what. I’ll give you twenty bucks if you tell me what you’re gonna buy with it.

  The light changes but the guy just sits there. A car goes around. Bit shields his eyes from the sun.

  You’ll give me twenty bucks?

  Yeah, but you can’t bullshit me. If I give you a twenty, honestly, what’re you gonna get?

  The new Harry Potter book.

  You are one funny fucker.

  Thanks. You too.

  No. Tell me exactly what you’re going to drink or smoke or whatever and I’ll give you twenty. But it’s gotta be the truth.

  The truth. Why does everybody always want that? He looks at the guy in his gold convertible. Back at the Jesus beds they’ll be gathering for group about now, trying to talk each other out of this very thing, this reverie. Truth.

  Vodka, Bit says, because it fucks you up fastest. I’ll get it at the store over on Second, whatever cheap stuff they got, plastic bottle in case I drop it. And I’ll get a bag of nuts or pretzels. Something solid to shit later. Whatever money’s left—Bit’s mouth is dry—I’ll put in municipal bonds.

  After the guy drives off, Bit looks down at the twenty-dollar bill in his hand. Maybe he is a funny fucker.

  Bit slides the book forward. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows.

  What’s a hallow, anyway? he asks.

  The clerk takes the book and runs it through the scanner.

  I guess it’s British for hollow. I don’t read those books.

  I read the first one. It was pretty good. Bit looks around Auntie’s Bookstore: big and open, a few soft chairs between the shelves. So what do you read?

  Palahniuk. That’ll be twenty-eight fifty-six.

  Bit whistles. Counts out the money and
sets it on the counter. Shit, he thinks, seventy cents short.

  The clerk has those big loopy earrings that stretch out your lobes. He moves his mouth as he counts the money.

  How big are you gonna make those holes in your ears?

  Maybe like quarter size. Hey, you’re a little short. You got a discount card?

  Bit pats himself down. Hmm. In my other pants.

  Be right back, the kid says, and leaves with the book.

  I’m kind of in a hurry, Bit says to the kid’s back.

  He needs to stop by the Jesus beds, although he knows Cater might not let him in. He likes Cater, in spite of the guy’s mean-Jesus rules and intense, mean-Jesus eyes. It’s a shame what happened, because Bit had been doing so good, going to group almost every day, working dinner shifts and in the yard. Cater has this pay system at the Jesus beds—you serve meals or clean or do yard work and get back these vouchers you can redeem for snacks and shit at the little store they run. Keeps everything kind of in-house and gets people used to spending their money on something other than getting fucked up. Of course, there’s a side market in the vouchers, dime on the dollar, so over time people save enough to get stewed, but Bit’s been keeping that under control too, almost like a civilian. No crank for more than a year, just a beer or two once a month, occasionally a split bottle of wine.

  Then last weekend happened. At group on Thursday, Fat Danny was bragging again about the time he OD’ed, and that made Bit think of Julie, the way her foot kept twitching after she stopped breathing, so after group he took a couple bucks from his stash—the hollow rail of his bed—and had a beer. In a tavern. Like a real person, leaned up against the bar watching baseball. And it was great. Hell, he didn’t even drink all of it; it was more about the bar than the beer.

  But it tasted so good he broke down on Friday and got two forties at the Quik Stop. And when he came back to the Jesus beds, Wallace ran off to Cater and told him Bit sold his vouchers for booze money.