“Excuse me,” says a smiling young woman.
“Yes,” says Isabel.
“Are you saved?” The young woman is wearing a T-shirt with the word GOD over one breast and ME over the other, and a red heart in between, more or less where her own thumping, pumping, flesh-and-blood heart is located.
“In what sense?” says Isabel. She has taken a professional interest in this young woman.
Something like the momentary disintegration of a digital image transpires on the young woman’s face, and her smile intensifies. “Did I talk to you yesterday?”
“No,” says Isabel.
The sheer confidence of Isabel’s denial causes another disintegration in the area of the young woman’s lightly freckled nose.
“‘Saved’ in what sense?” says Isabel.
“You know: Have you been saved by Jesus?”
“No, I haven’t.”
This answer seems to restore the young woman’s confidence. Her smile engages in a delicate pas de deux with the sympathetic and sorrowful uptilting of her eyebrows. “Would you like to be?”
“What would I have to do?” says Isabel.
“Just let Jesus into your heart!” There is no sun out, but sunbeams ricochet off the young woman’s whitened teeth.
“Is that difficult?” asks Isabel.
“It’s the easiest thing in the world!”
“Are you saved?” Isabel asks.
“Of course!”
“How do you know?”
The sunbeams disappear from the young woman’s teeth. Her uptilted eyebrows sink and collide. “I just do.”
“What if I told you that I know that you are not saved?”
The young woman is silent. The whole time she and Isabel have been talking, she has been clutching a stack of glossy brochures in her right hand. The brochures depict periwinkle-blue skies, white doves flying, a steeple, and the faces of happy children. The young woman lifts the brochures to cover the inscription across her chest.
“I’m sorry to disturb you,” she says.
“You’re not disturbing me. I just want to know what you think.”
“About what?”
“If I were to tell you that I know you are not saved, what would you think?”
“I would think that you are wrong.”
“But how can you say that? What makes you so sure that what I ‘just know’ is any less reliable than what you ‘just know’?”
The young woman straightens her back and lifts her chin. The closest she comes to smiling now is a sarcastic curl at the corner of her mouth. “If you have to ask me that question, then I feel sorry for you.”
“Why?” asks Isabel.
But the young woman has turned and is walking toward the other exit of the Food-Star. She is wearing periwinkle sweatpants, with a single word across the twin grapefruits of her buttocks—a word that would seem to render a rather intimate detail about the condition of her genitals.
Force of Habit
Isabel and Ivy’s father is a tilted man. His left eye is lower than his right; ditto the arrangement of his shoulders. And no matter what the right side of his mouth might be doing, the left is always down-turned, flaccid. He is sitting crookedly in a wing chair, looking at Ivy with his cow-brown eyes. Her mother sits in an identical chair, back straight, head upright, hands clutching the chair’s upholstered arms, as if she is on a roller coaster waiting for the ride to start. Her eyes are the color of kidney beans.
“I don’t understand what you are saying,” says Ivy’s mother.
“Fact!” says her father. “Fact! You question fact?!”
“I’m not questioning it,” says Ivy. “I am only saying that, from a statistical point of view, the odds of all six having such pale eyes are so staggeringly low that sometimes, when I look at the children, I have to fight to convince myself that they are not hallucinations.”
Kama Sutra
Isabel is sixteen. “How did you do it?” she asks. Ivy is fourteen. “It was easy,” Ivy says.
Isabel and Ivy are sitting on a bench in Carl Schurz Park. Through a row of vertical wrought-iron bars they can see horizontally gradated strips of bluish, yellowish, and gray—with the gray being the river. Isabel is not looking at Ivy. She can’t because Ivy does not look like herself. Ivy is smiling the way teenage girls smile in tampon ads.
“I knew right off the bat it had to be a loser or a nerd,” says Ivy. “Neil Madbow would have been nice, but I had to be practical. Of course, I also had to be sure he was straight.”
“Couldn’t you just take your chances?”
“No,” says Ivy. “I didn’t want to waste any time. So I came up with a test.”
“A test?” Isabel looks sideways at her sister. Her eyes are like two ice balls that have rolled downhill and gotten clamped under her brow.
“Yeah. Gay guys like shoes. So I started carrying around that issue of D-Tox with the picture of Jessamine Duff on the cover. I figured if I showed it to a guy, and he started talking about her shoes, I’d go find someone else.”
“How did it work?”
“Well, I only tried it on Vince Lopez.”
“Vince Lopez!” Isabel opens her nostrils and crinkles her brow. All the girls call Vince Lopez “Thermometer” because he is so skinny and his whole face is just one red zit. Isabel thinks of saying something, but doesn’t.
“Yeah.” Now Ivy is the one not looking at her sister.
“Did he pass?”
“Of course he passed. I wouldn’t be telling you this if he didn’t pass.” That tampon smile is back on Ivy’s face. Isabel looks away.
“So then what?” says Isabel.
“I asked him if he thought Jessamine Duff was wearing thong panties.”
“What did he say?”
“He didn’t say anything at first. Then he said she probably was. So then I asked him if he liked thong panties. He said he guessed he did. ‘Why?’ I said. And he said he didn’t know, he just did. So then I asked him what was his favorite part of a girl’s body.”
“Don’t you think that was a little too obvious?” says Isabel.
“I did worry about that a bit. Especially when he laughed and said that was a stupid question. But I decided it was too late to turn back, so I said, ‘No, really, I’d just like to know.’ And he said, ‘Which part do you think?’ And when he said that—you remember that book we found in Aunt Tessa’s drawer? The one about the cowboy?”
“The Hot Gun?”
“Right. Remember that line about how his gaze locked with hers?”
“No,” says Isabel.
“Well, that was exactly what happened. When Vince said, ‘Which part do you think?’ his gaze locked with mine. I couldn’t believe it.”
“So then what did you do?”
“I asked him why he liked it. And this time he didn’t laugh. Just looked a little sick. Then he said, ‘Because it feels good.’ ‘How do you know?’ I asked. ‘How do you think?’ he said. ‘Have you ever done it?’ I said. He looked like he didn’t know whether to vomit or run away. So I decided I had to make him relax and feel better. ‘Well, I never have,’ I said.”
“Did it work?”
“I guess so. He started smiling then. So of course I had to go. I’d been thinking about all this for a really long time, and it was clear to me that, even though it would have been simpler to get everything over at once, the only way I was really going to get him to do what I wanted was to make him suffer. So I said I had to go to history. That was lunchtime. I saw him again last period when he was on his way to gym. He gave me this big smile. I gave him one back. But I made sure to get out of school the instant the bell sounded, because I had to make him wait twenty-four hours or it wouldn’t work.”
“How did you know?”
“It’s obvious. Just look at any book or movie—the ones in which the boy is the hero, I mean. The boys always have at least one sleepless night before they get the girl. Anyhow, the next day I saw him in homeroom and he
looked miserable, like he was afraid to look at me. I didn’t say anything to him then, but when I ran into him in the hallway I told him he had a nice shirt. He didn’t know what to do. His red face just got redder. ‘Bye,’ I said, and I walked away. Then after school I walked by his locker as if by accident. ‘Hi,’ I said. ‘Hi,’ he said. ‘What you doing?’ ‘Nothing much.’ ‘Me neither.’ After that it was easy. He pretended he was inviting me up to his apartment so I could listen to the Misfits, but he’d already told me his mother wouldn’t be home until dinnertime. The only problem was he didn’t know how to get it into me. I finally had to grab hold of it and stick it in myself.”
“What was it like?”
“Well, it was really different than I thought it was going to be. It hurt more. But still, it was interesting. I’ll probably do it again. They say you don’t really get the full effect until you’ve done it a few times.”
Isabel doesn’t say anything for almost a minute. Then she asks if she can borrow the D-Tox. The next day she does everything that Ivy did, and it seems to be working perfectly. But then, when she is alone in the boy’s room and her panties are already around her ankles, he tells her he doesn’t want to take advantage of her.
“Maybe that’s the problem,” Ivy says later that night. “You can’t do it with a nice guy. You have to choose someone who’s a real jerk and doesn’t mind taking advantage of you. That’s why I chose Vince. Not only is he a nerd, but he’s a total asshole.”
Isabel keeps trying, but she can’t get anyone to take advantage of her until she is twenty and she meets Walter Tedesco. Ivy does it three times with Vince. After that, she figures she’s gotten the full effect and doesn’t do it again until Isabel announces her engagement to Walter. That very night Ivy goes to a frat party and shows her D-Tox to a business school student she has never met before, Paul Henberry. He doesn’t want to take advantage of her either. But eventually he changes his mind, and six months later he and Ivy are engaged. The sisters arrange a joint wedding.
The End Is Near
Isabel and Ivy have a private language. You might not notice at first, but if you pay close attention you will find that many of their words only resemble English. “Hope,” for example, is a profoundly embarrassing word to both sisters, and “discipline” has the cozy feel of a puppy asleep in front of a fireplace.
Their language does contain wholly invented words, however, the earliest being “lubby,” a noun for a tiny part of their bodies that—when they were five and three—they thought no one possessed but themselves. (“Lubby” also refers to the feeling evoked by touching that part.) In elementary school, they invented “humpless,” a word for that condition—experienced most intensely at birthday and pajama parties—of not knowing who is crazy: everybody in the room or you. A related but more recent term is “herd dreaming,” which refers to a mass of people being possessed by the same delusion: fainting epidemics, or nationalism, or the craze for teeth whitening. The sisters also apply this term to the peculiar phenomenon of grown men and women—repositories all, ostensibly, of the capacity for rational thought—sitting in the dark, watching light flicker through strips of celluloid, and gasping, laughing, and weeping, not merely as if they are witnessing the tribulations of real people, but as if they are actually living those tribulations themselves. The sisters always feel ridiculous when they accompany other people to the movies. And bored. Though Ivy sometimes also feels panicky.
To Isabel and Ivy, the approaching hurricane is nothing so much as an intense instance of herd dreaming. In a part of the country where hurricanes rarely do more than blow the dead wood out of elderly maples, flood a few basements, and leave a solitary street without power, people are hurriedly X-ing their windows with duct tape and filling pasta pots, buckets, and bathtubs with water. Pickup trucks loaded with sandbags, plywood, and jerrycans of gasoline are dopplerizing day and night, up and down along the two-lane road in front of the Soros house, and everyone is telling hurricane horror stories: a woman is pulverized when a willow falls on her car; a farmer is electrocuted by the high-tension cable writhing in his field, spewing blue-white sparks; a six-year-old is lacerated by an imploding window. People’s faces are dark with seriousness as they tell these stories; their voices are urgent and low—and yet they are elated. You can see it in their every word and gesture. It’s the same all over town. People dart in and out of stores with the lightest of steps. No one seems ever to have had a cynical thought; not a single heart has ever been touched by sorrow. Even Isabel and Ivy’s own parents look a decade younger, and their father has regained the capacity to distinguish t from d when he speaks, and s from sh.
But if either sister even hints that catastrophe might not be looming, people’s brows ding with irritation. “Have to run,” they mutter. “No time to talk.” Or they say, “Better safe than sorry.” Or “You can’t be too careful.” Or sometimes they just regard the sisters with slack-jawed incomprehension.
The Illusion of Choice
Little Jerry is standing in the darkness beside Ivy’s bed. The house is like a cardboard box in the middle of a field in which a pack of wolves is having a silent wrestling match. The sound of the wind against the sides of the house is exactly like the sound of wolf fur against cardboard. The sound of the wind in the trees is exactly like wolves breathing through their teeth. The big branches falling onto the roof and lawn sound exactly like the thumping of paws as the wolves tumble, pounce, and rear. For Jerry, barefoot on the bare floor beside his mother’s bed, there is next to nothing between the darkness where he stands and the frenzy of the universe.
“What are you doing here?” Ivy asks in her sleep.
“I’m scared.”
“Why?”
“Because the wind is scary.”
Ivy is not asleep now, but she has not moved from the position she was in when she was asleep. “Were you brave enough to come down here all by yourself?”
Jerry doesn’t answer.
“Answer me.”
His answer is too quiet for Ivy to hear. She tells him so.
“I’m sorry,” he says.
“Of course you were brave enough to come down here all by yourself. You wouldn’t be here if you weren’t. And if you are brave enough to come down here all by yourself, you are brave enough to go back up to bed and go to sleep.”
“I want to sleep in your bed.”
“You know that’s not allowed.”
Jerry says nothing. Ivy cannot see him, except as a thumb shape of perfect black in the gloom of a moonless night.
“There’s nothing to be afraid of,” says Ivy. “It’s only the wind.”
“Is this the hurricane?”
“No. The hurricane won’t be here until the morning.”
“Are we going to die?”
“Of course we’re going to die. But not in the hurricane. The hurricane is nothing. The hurricane is just a way for the television stations to expand their audiences so that they can sell advertisements for more money. It’s also a way for people who have boring lives to feel that their lives are not boring. It’s a fairy story, that’s all it is, and fairy stories aren’t real. So go back to bed.”
“Paulette says the trees are going to fall on the roof and we are all going to die.”
“Paulette is an idiot. Go back to bed.”
“I’m scared.”
Now Ivy is sitting up. She is breathing in a way that is not unlike the breathing of the wolves. “Listen, Jerry, we’ve been through all this before. Some children allow themselves to become afraid because of irrational ideas. But you’re not going to be like those children, are you?”
Jerry makes a very small noise in his throat, but it is nothing like a word.
“Fear is an entirely useless emotion,” says Ivy. “And if I were to let you come into my bed, I would be acting as if there actually were something for you to be afraid of, wouldn’t I? And, on top of that, your being in my bed with me would not change one single thing. It would st
ill be the middle of the night. The wind would still be blowing. And whatever is going to happen would still be going to happen.”
“But if the trees fall on the roof, they won’t hit me if I’m down here with you.”
“The trees are not going to fall on the roof.” Ivy had been speaking in a fierce whisper, but now her voice is loud enough to be heard in other rooms. She doesn’t care. “Go back to your bed this instant.”
For a long time Jerry does nothing at all. Then there is a shifting in the darkness, and she can hear his sweat-sticky feet making kissing noises along the floorboards. The door opens, then closes softly. The latch slides back into the door plate with a minute sproing.
Where Jerry was standing, there is now a larger thumb shape of perfect black. It is Ivy’s mother in her nightgown.
“How could you treat your little boy like that?” says Ivy’s mother.
“I’m doing it for his own good.”
“I never spoke to you so heartlessly,” she says. “I would never have done that in a million years. I was always careful to be sure you and Isabel knew I loved you with all of my heart.”
“Do you think that made any difference?”
For a long time the only sounds in the room come from the wind against the walls. Ivy closes her eyes. When she opens them her mother is gone.
This Is This
Isabel and Ivy’s father slides his left shoe along the floor as if it is filled with sand and stitched to the bottom of his empty pant leg. He moves his left arm mainly by whipping it with his shoulder. He can push the power button on the radio, but he can’t turn the knob to tune in the signal. That’s why the announcer sounds like he is talking through wax paper. “Hear that?” her father says, as Isabel comes into the room.
The Best American Short Stories 2014 Page 35
