The Best American Short Stories 2014

by Jennifer Egan

  “You go first,” Ava said.

  “I’ll go last,” I said.

  This made sense to Jack H. “Ava goes first, she’s youngest.”

  “I have two dogs!”

  “That’s not a secret,” the two Jacks chorused together.

  Ava examined the lace on her socks.

  “Jack, you’re next.”

  Jack looked at me. “Daddy has a girlfriend,” he said.

  “Barbie has a girlfriend,” Ava said. “It’s Ken.”

  “Now me,” said Jack H. “I had a wart, but the doctor burned it right off.”

  “Now the mommy!” Ava exclaimed.

  “Your turn, Mommy.”

  “I can fly,” I said. “I couldn’t always, but I can now.”

  Jack H. was already shaking his head. “Nobody can.”

  “I know,” I said. “That’s why it’s so strange.”

  My Jack looked at me nervously. “Is that a story?”

  “No.”

  “Fly,” said Ava.

  “I don’t know if I can do it now,” I said. “It only happens when I’m doing mom stuff—taking care of the house and cooking and things.”

  “Do mom stuff,” Ava said. “Do something for Jack.”

  Jack put his leg over mine and undid his sneakers. “Velcro my shoes.”

  I thought of Drew in the sunlight, one hand in his graying hair. I thought of the smile on his perfect mouth, which is also Jack’s. Brilliant needles of light came through the cracks between the boards, streaking our arms and legs. I reached down and fastened my son’s shoe, breathing deeply at the same time. The barrel smelled powerfully of cedar. There was a moment of perfect quiet, when even the voices outside on the playground seemed to fall away. Suddenly Ava screamed:

  “She did it! I saw it!”

  Both Jacks turned to correct her, but the expression on Ava’s face was so genuinely awed that neither one of them spoke. She was so convincing—so convinced—that they both looked back at me, questioning.

  “What’s going on in there?”

  One of the teachers was standing underneath the barrel on the other side, where we couldn’t see her.

  Jack H. put his finger to his lips. “Don’t tell,” he said. “Say you’re coming out.”

  My Jack and Ava obeyed. “I’m coming out!”

  “Time to line up,” the teacher said.

  Jack H. descended the ladder first, then Ava, and finally my Jack.

  “See you upstairs.” I didn’t whisper these words because I thought that would implicate me further. I planned to tell the teacher that the kids had invited me in. Then I would take her aside and say I was getting a divorce. I would tell her how I didn’t like to say no to any of Jack’s requests and that I knew I was being too indulgent. I thought it would be almost no effort to cry, if I could do it without being detected by Jack.

  But the teacher never came around to the opening of the barrel. She had moved off, presumably to corral more children, and so I sat there looking at my phone, which did not have any new messages. I stared at a picture of Jack inside a giant soap bubble at the Discovery Science Center until the children’s voices got fainter. Finally I could tell that they were inside the building. I waited until two-forty, five minutes before pickup, before I climbed out of the barrel. Now I had my story down perfectly, and I thought I could do it convincingly without crying. I was almost disappointed by the time I got upstairs, to realize that no one had even seen me.

  DAVID GATES

  A Hand Reached Down to Guide Me

  FROM Granta

  THE NAME PAUL THOMPSON won’t mean any more to you than my name would, but if you’d been around the bluegrass scene in New York some thirty years ago, you would have heard the stories. Jimmy Martin had wanted to make him a Sunny Mountain Boy, but he’d refused to cut his hair. He’d turned Kenny Baker on to pot at Bean Blossom and played a show with Tony Trischka while tripping on acid. Easy to believe it all back then. The first time I actually saw him he was onstage, wearing a full-length plaster cast on his—give me a second to visualize this—his left leg, holding himself up by a crutch in each armpit, playing mandolin with only his forearms moving. And someone had Magic-Markered the bottom of the cast to look like an elephantine tooled-leather cowboy boot. This was at an outdoor contest in Roxbury, Connecticut, in 1977, the summer I turned eighteen. The band I’d come with had finished its two numbers, and we were behind the stage, putting instruments in cases, when Paul kicked off “Rawhide.” I heard our mandolin player say, “OK, we’re fucked.”

  His band—older longhairs, except the fiddle player, a scary guy with a marine buzzcut—won first prize, as they had the year before. But we placed second, and he lurched over to me on his crutches and said he’d liked the way I’d sung “Over in the Gloryland.” It was Paul Thompson saying this. I suppose I was a good singer, for a kid just out of high school; I thought of Christian songs simply as genre pieces in those days, but I had the accent down. I said, “Thanks, man,” and refrained from embarrassing myself by complimenting him back. We ended up singing a few songs together out by the cars—I remember him braced up against somebody’s fender—and I think it surprised him that I knew so much Louvin Brothers stuff: “Too Late,” “Here Today and Gone Tomorrow,” “Are You Afraid to Die?” I let him sing Ira’s tenor parts; now that he’d stopped smoking, he said, he could get up there in the real keys. He was taller than me, and his cheekbones made him look like a hard-luck refugee in a Dust Bowl photograph; he had white hairs in his sideburns, though he must only have been in his thirties. He told me he’d broken the leg playing squash; naturally I thought it was a joke.

  We’d both come up from the city that afternoon, me in a van with the banjo player in my band and his wife and kids, Paul driven by his girlfriend. As we were packing up, he asked me how I was getting back, and could I drive stick. The girlfriend got pissed at him, he said, and went off on the back of somebody’s motorcycle, and now here he was up in East Buttfuck, Connecticut, and no way to get himself home. His car turned out to be an old TR6, with so much clutter behind the seats we had to tie my guitar to the luggage rack with bungee cords; all the way back to New York he played the Stanley Brothers on ninety-minute cassettes he’d dubbed from his LP collection. We didn’t talk much—I had to wake him up to ask directions once we hit the West Side Highway—but I did note that he said man dolin, not mandolin, and I’ve taken care to say man dolin ever since.

  He lived in a big old building on West End around 86th; because it was Saturday night I had no trouble finding a space on his block. He said he’d figure out some way to deal with the car on Monday. Did I want to come up, have a few more tunes, smoke some dope? He hadn’t given that up. But it was late to be taking my guitar on the subway, and I already had enough of a Paul Thompson story to tell.

  Most of us were just weekend pickers, and only little by little did you learn about other people’s real lives. Our banjo player taught calculus at Brooklyn College; the fiddler in Paul’s band (the one native southerner I ever ran across in New York) managed a fuel-oil business in Bay Ridge; another guy you saw around, good Dobro player, was a public defender. I was working in a bookstore that summer before starting NYU, where I planned to major in English. And Paul Thompson turned out to be a science writer at Newsweek. One day I saw him in the subway at Rockefeller Center, and I had to think a minute to figure out where I knew him from: he was wearing a blue oxford shirt and a seersucker blazer, with jeans and cowboy boots. Somebody told me he’d published a novel when he was in his twenties, which you could still find at the Strand.

  A couple of years later, Paul brought me into his band when their lead singer moved to California, and we also played some coffeehouses as a duet, calling ourselves the Twofer Brothers. I went to the University of Connecticut for graduate school but I drove down to the city a couple of times a month, and every so often Paul would put the band back together for some party where they’d place hay bales around the room. Afte
r these gigs we’d go up to his place, get high and listen to music, or drink and talk books. He told me he loved “Jimmy Hank” and gave me a copy of The Ambassadors from his collection of pristine old Signet paperbacks; it had a price of fifty cents. By then I’d decided to specialize in the nineteenth century, and I resented Jimmy Hank for his review of Our Mutual Friend— “poor with the poverty not of momentary embarrassment, but of permanent exhaustion.” But I’ve still got that book: the cover illustration shows a top-hatted gent seen from behind in a cafe chair, with wineglass and cane. I imagine it’ll be on my shelves, still unread, when I die.

  While I was finishing my dissertation, I got married to the first woman I’d ever lasted with for more than a month. Diane, I might as well admit, was my student when I was a TA, and why bother trying to extenuate it, all these years later, by telling you that we started sleeping together only after the semester was over? Or that in our History-of-Us conversations, we could never decide who’d made the first move? She’d go to festivals and parties with me to be the cool girlfriend with the cut-off jeans, and we promised each other that when we got out of married-student housing we’d live in the country somewhere, in a house full of books, no TV, and raise our own food. I’d grown up in Park Slope, but my father was an old folkie—he used to hang around Washington Square in the fifties—and when I was twelve or thirteen I began listening to his LPs and fixating on the photos of ruined grampaws on their falling-down porches; even the mean, sad bluegrass guys in business suits and Stetsons, holding thousands of dollars’ worth of Martins and Gibsons, had been posed by abandoned shacks in the mountains. Everybody in our little scene thought of themselves as secret country boys. My old banjo player, the one I rode up to Roxbury with, quit his teaching job and moved to the Northeast Kingdom, where I hear he makes B-string benders in his machine shop and plays pedal steel in a country band. Our bass player left the East Village for Toast, North Carolina, to sit at the feet of Tommy Jarrell. Even my father, in his bourgie-folkie way. He was an engineer at Con Edison for thirty years; when he retired he and my mother built a solar house up near Woodstock.

  I found a teaching job at a small college in New Hampshire and Diane got accepted at the Vermont Culinary Institute. We bought a fixer-upper farmhouse, with a wood stove, a barn, and twenty acres, on a dirt road, equally inconvenient to my school and hers. I put a metal roof on the old henhouse—Diane had always wanted to keep chickens—rototilled our garden patch every spring, and bought a chainsaw and a splitter, as well as a rusty Ford 8N, the pretext being that we needed to keep the fields from growing back to brush. Our neighbor, a man in his seventies, kept the thing going for me; he liked us because I was so helpless and Diane was so pretty. In the spring he and I would work up the next winter’s wood together, sharing my splitter and running his buzz saw off the tractor’s PTO. I don’t know how I did all this while teaching three and three and working on my book; when the old man finally went into a home I started buying cordwood. My parents drove up a couple of times a year, and my father always brought his single-O Martin, the guitar on which he taught me my first chords. He and I would sit around playing the half-dozen finger-picking songs—“Lewis Collins,” “Spike Driver’s Moan”—that he’d never cared to get beyond. They seldom stayed more than a day or two. The wood stove didn’t keep the guest room warm enough in fall or winter, and my mother got bitten to death by mosquitoes in the summer.

  Every July Diane and I threw an outdoor music party and pig roast; she’d cook the whole week before, and her friends from Boston and my friends from New York brought tents and sleeping bags and tried to dance to the ad-hoc bands that formed in the corners of the field behind the house. Paul Thompson always turned up with his mandolin, some good weed, and a younger woman, never the same one twice.

  For a few years, he’d drive that summer’s woman to catch a bus in White River Junction and stay on until Tuesday or Wednesday. Diane liked him—what woman didn’t, at first?—and he was no trouble to have around. He took walks in the woods by himself; he spent hours reading in the hammock on the porch, and didn’t mind when we went up to bed and left him downstairs with his weed and his headphones. “A man could die happy up here,” he used to say. He told me he liked hearing the rooster at first light, because it made him feel safe to go back to sleep. When he finally got up, he’d go out to the henhouse, gather eggs, and cook his own breakfast—and clean up afterward. Diane usually picked eggs early in the morning, but she’d leave a couple for him to find. Once, when he’d been out there for what seemed like a long time, I went to check on him, and I saw him through the window, squatting on his hams, his cowboy boots the only part of him touching the floor. He was talking and nodding to himself, or to the hens, who came right up to him as they never did for me. I sneaked back to the house and I don’t think he heard me.

  But most of the time, Paul wasn’t anybody I thought about much, though I know now that he was thinking about me.

  For whatever reason, I never wanted children. Not a crime against humanity—arguably quite the opposite—but of course this became an issue when Diane turned thirty. That and suspicions about me and my students, which I should have seen coming as well, and about one student in particular. (The wrong one, as it happened.) Diane and I lasted ten years, and after she left I drank myself to sleep every night for a month. Didn’t that argue that I wasn’t cold-hearted? She’s remarried now, has her own catering business, and her older daughter’s applying to colleges—better schools than the one where I teach. We’re on good enough terms these days that she sends me pictures. At the time of the divorce, though, she held out for money in return for her share in the house, and I had no prospect of a better-paying job. My book, Cathy’s Caliban: Sex, Race, and the Sublime in Wuthering Heights—a rewrite of my dissertation—got only one notice, in Victorian Studies, whose reviewer (from some other no-name college, in Missouri) called it “by turns perverse and pedestrian.” The book got me tenure, since nobody else in the department had published in the past ten years, but only a two-thousand-dollar raise. So I went back to working up my own wood, until—God, must we? Until I was able to sell my father’s house.

  Diane had already left the last time he came up, the fall after my mother died. He had his Martin with him, as usual, but he didn’t feel like playing. Could he leave it with me? The strings felt stiff; maybe I could take it to the guy who worked on my guitar? It didn’t feel any different to me, but I told him I’d see if Brad could bring the action down a little. Hell, I thought, he’s seventy-eight, his fingers might not be as strong as they used to be. This turned out to be what Harold Bloom might call a weak misreading.

  I set the chessboard up on the wooden factory spool Diane and I had used for a coffee table—he mostly kicked my ass—and poured glasses of the Jameson he always brought. While I was considering whether or not to move a rook, he picked up a photo from the table beside the sofa: Diane and I sitting at a café in Barcelona, the one time we went to Europe.

  “What are you, running a museum?” he said. “Look, I liked Diane. Your mother had her opinion, fine. Me, I think you were crazy to let her go. But you made your choice, right?”

  “You could call it that.”

  “And you still got all her hair shit in there.” He flipped his thumb in the direction of the bathroom, where Diane had left behind mostly empty bottles of conditioners, moisturizers, and lotions.

  “Don’t think I don’t see what you’re up to.”

  “What, throw you off your game? You fucked yourself two moves back.” I looked the board over again, then got up and put another couple of logs in the stove.

  “What I’d do?” he said. “Find some sucker who wants to be—who’m I trying to think of? Thoreau. Then buy yourself a nice little place where you don’t have to do that nine months a year. You want to be living like this when you’re my age?”

  “I seem to recall you couldn’t wait to get out of the city.”

  “Not to live like a sharecrop
per. You even get cable up here?”

  “We don’t have a TV.” I sat down again and took another look at the board.

  “Interesting,” he said. “And who’s the ‘we’?”

  “Yeah, OK. I get it.”

  “Anyway, now your mother’s gone and I’m staring at trees all day. You could have a life. You meeting anybody?”

  I laid my king on its side. “Pop. It’s been a month.”

  “That’s my point.” He looked out the window. “These trees are gonna kill you.”

  By the time Janna moved in, I’d been living in New Hampshire for longer than I had in the city, though I still wasn’t fooling the locals any. You could see another house by then: an A-frame up on the rise catty-corner across the road. Diane and I could have bought that parcel along with the land on this side, but we hadn’t been able to come up with the extra ten thousand dollars. I hated to look over there.

  Janna worked at Century 21, near my college in the old downtown. Yes, I met her at the bar where I’d started going after classes. She’d gotten her job just by walking in and asking for it, and her boss liked the tricks she’d picked up on some website: putting bowls of lemons and Granny Smith apples on kitchen counters, fanning out copies of Country Journal on coffee tables. I thought she was too bright to have ended up here: she had an MA in political science from Tufts. But she said she’d found her place in the world. I suppose I had too.

  She told me right from the beginning that she didn’t want to be the Second Wife, and she’d put a bumper sticker on her Subaru reading COPULATE, DON’T POPULATE.

  Her apartment had track lighting, good oriental rugs, and a gas fireplace, but she seemed to feel at home in my house. Aside from repainting the living room—a yellow she said would feel warmer than the white Diane and I had gone with—all she did was move the sofa over to where the armchair had been and find us a pine blanket chest for a coffee table. She was fine with dial-up and no TV—she’d let corporate media waste too much of her time, she said—and she even claimed the rooster didn’t wake her, though she refused to go into the henhouse herself. After five years, we still had sex more days than not: I’d made peace with her chubby knees; presumably she’d made peace with my loose belly and my too-small hands.