The Best American Short Stories 2018

by Roxane Gay

  After Kirsten had basically spasmed in ecstasy into Lucy’s face, she said, “Could you tell I’d never done that?”

  It was less that Kirsten was confiding than that, with Lucy, she didn’t feel the need to feign competence. Lucy was lying on top of her, propped up on her elbows, and she seemed amused—flirtatious-amused, not mean-amused—as she said, “Seriously? Never?”

  Kirsten said, “Well, I’ve given blow jobs.”

  “Then that really doesn’t seem fair.”

  The sureness of Lucy’s hooking-up personality, the way it might even have been more confident than her regular personality, impressed Kirsten; the nearest Kirsten got to such confidence was when things felt so good that she forgot herself.

  Lucy added, “Just in case none of the recipients of your blow jobs ever mentioned it, you’re very, very fun to have sex with,” and Kirsten said, “This isn’t sex.”

  As she had by the juice dispenser, Lucy laughed.

  “I mean, it’s fooling around,” Kirsten said. “I’m not denying that.”

  “You think if there’s no penis it doesn’t count?”

  Lucy’s apparent lack of anger surprises Kirsten more in retrospect than it did at the time. Lucy explained that she was a gold-star lesbian, which meant one who’d never had sex with a guy; in fact, Lucy added proudly, she’d never even kissed a guy. Kirsten asked how she’d known she was gay, and Lucy said, “Because, even when I was in grade school, the people I always thought about before I fell asleep at night were girls.”

  That what was transpiring between them would be kept secret was both understood and probably not very realistic. Before they lay down on the red couch, Kirsten would block the door with a chair, but sometimes dim figures, other couples in search of privacy, opened the door partway. When this happened, Kirsten would freeze, and Lucy would call out sharply, “There are people in here,” and a retreat would occur. Once, someone very tall opened the door all the way and just stood there, not moving, someone else behind him, and Kirsten realized, with one of her nipples in Lucy’s mouth, that the person in front was Sean, and Kirsten’s fixation with him, a fixation that had lasted until just a few days before, seemed distant. Lucy lifted her head and said in a firm voice, “Can you please leave?” Sean and Renee did go away, but the next morning Renee asked, with what seemed more like curiosity than disapproval, “Was that you with Lucy?”

  All these years later, while driving to work and considering ruining Lucy’s life, Kirsten thinks that Renee would be her corroboration, and maybe Sean, too. Conveniently, Kirsten is Facebook friends with both of them, privy to the extremely tedious details of their separate suburban lives.

  At the time, fake-casually, fake-confusedly, Kirsten said, “With who?”

  That fall, back at school, Kirsten opened her mailbox in the student union one day to find a small padded envelope, the return address Lucy’s, the contents a brief, unremarkable note (“Hope you’re having a good semester . . .”) and a mixtape. Kirsten was surprised and very happy, which made her inability to listen to the mixtape perplexing; the first song was “I Melt with You,” and the second line of the song was “Making love to you was never second best,” and though she tried several times not to, Kirsten always had to turn off her cassette player after that line. She never acknowledged Lucy’s gift.

  The next summer, Kirsten returned to the camp, and Lucy didn’t; someone said that she was volunteering at a health clinic in Haiti. Kirsten had a boyfriend then, a guy named Ryan, who was working in the admissions office of their college and to whom she hadn’t mentioned Lucy.

  After that summer, Kirsten’s only source of camp updates was a winter newsletter that she read less and less thoroughly as the years passed. She became aware of the Prairie Wife, in the amorphous way one becomes aware of celebrities, without having any idea that Lucy Headrick was Lucy from camp, whose surname had been Nilsson. But, last December, Kirsten read the newsletter in its entirety. It was the day after Christmas, and she was trying to get Jack to take a nap, which he didn’t do much anymore, but he’d been cranky, and they were due at a potluck in the evening. She was sitting halfway up the steps of their house so as to intercept Jack whenever he tried to escape from his room; she’d pulled the newsletter from a stack of mail by the front door to occupy herself between interceptions.

  The camp had been owned by the same family for several generations, and an eccentric great-uncle who taught archery wrote the newsletter. The item about Lucy was just a paragraph and not particularly fawning—“It’s always fun to see what former camper and counselor Lucy ‘the Prairie Wife’ Headrick née Lucy Nilsson is up to”—but Kirsten couldn’t believe it. Though she didn’t own any of Lucy Headrick’s cookbooks and had never seen her television show, she knew enough about her to find it hilarious. She knew that Lucy Headrick was gorgeous (she had long blond hair and magnificent cheekbones), was married to a man, and was, in some conservative-flavored way, religious. Kirsten was so excited to tell Casey that she let Jack get out of bed. They went into the den, where Casey and Ian were watching football, Kirsten carrying the camp newsletter. But it turned out that, although Kirsten had mentioned Lucy to Casey, Casey had never heard of the Prairie Wife, so Kirsten’s ostensible bombshell was less satisfying to drop than she’d anticipated.

  That might have been that—a funny coincidence—except that a week later, at the digital-map-data company where she works, Kirsten passed Frank’s office while he was watching Lucy Headrick make chicken-and-dumpling soup online. “I’m decompressing,” Frank said. “I just turned in a test tally.”

  Kirsten held up her palms and said, “Hey, no judgment.” She almost didn’t say it, but then, pointing at the computer screen, she did. “I kind of know her.”

  Frank raised one eyebrow, which was a gesture Kirsten suspected that he had, in his adolescence, practiced at great length as part of shaping his persona. Frank was her age, the son of Thai immigrants, and he was married to a white guy who was a dermatologist. Kirsten liked Frank O.K.—she respected his attention to detail—but she didn’t really trust him.

  Frank said, “Do go on.”

  She tried to think of reasons that not trusting Frank mattered and couldn’t come up with any. Once, she had considered her interactions with Lucy to be her most damning secret, but now, ironically, they were probably the most interesting thing about her, even if Casey had been underwhelmed.

  “I haven’t seen her since the mid-nineties, but we worked at a camp a few hours north of here,” Kirsten said, then added, “We slept together a bunch of times.”

  “No. Fucking. Way.” Frank looked elated. He made a lascivious “Mm-mm-mm” sound, and said, “You and the Prairie Wife as baby dykes. I love it.”

  “Actually,” Kirsten said, “I looked it up, and I’m pretty sure Lucy lives about forty-five minutes west of St. Louis. Which, for one thing, that’s not exactly the rural farmlands, right? And, also, it’s been a while since I took social studies, but is Missouri even a prairie state?”

  “She’s a fraud,” Frank said happily. “A fraudulent butter-churning bitch.”

  That was three months ago, and, since then, without really meaning to, Kirsten is pretty sure that she and Frank have become close friends. The reassuring part is that, if anything, he monitors Lucy’s activities more avidly than Kirsten does—surely his avidity has egged on her own—and Lucy represents ninety percent of all discussions between them. The unsettling part is that Frank also follows several other celebrities as enthusiastically yet spitefully; Kirsten isn’t sure where he finds the time.

  When Kirsten arrives at work twenty-five minutes late, Frank appears on the threshold of her office and gleefully whispers, “There. Is. A. Shit. Storm. Brewing.”

  Calmly, Kirsten says, “Oh?” This is the way Frank greets her approximately twice a week. But it turns out that a shit storm is brewing: someone on Kirsten’s team stored sample data, data belonging to a national courier company, in the area of the server where
production can access it, even though the agreement with the courier company hasn’t yet been formalized. Their boss, Sheila, is trying to figure out who messed up, whether anyone from production has used the data, and, if so, how to remove it.

  As Kirsten steels herself to speak with Sheila, Frank, who is still standing there, says, “Has your copy of your girlfriend’s book arrived?”

  “I didn’t pre-order it. I’m stopping at the store on the way home.”

  “Well, as soon as you finish give it to me. Because I am not putting one penny in the coffers of that whore.”

  “Yeah, so you’ve said.” Kirsten squeezes past him.

  She definitely isn’t the one who failed to sequester the sample data, but it’s unclear if Sheila believes her. They have a forty-minute conversation that contains about two minutes’ worth of relevant information and instruction and thirty-eight minutes of Sheila venting about how at best they’ve embarrassed themselves and at worst they’re facing a copyright lawsuit. When Kirsten has a chance to check Lucy’s various websites, she finds that they’re all filled with book promotions. On Twitter and elsewhere is a selfie of Lucy and the host of The Mariana Show in the greenroom; their heads are pressed together, and they’re beaming.

  After two meetings and a conference call, Kirsten gets lunch from a sandwich place around the corner, and it’s while she’s waiting in line for turkey and Swiss cheese on multigrain bread that she receives Frank’s text: a screenshot from the website of a weekly celebrity magazine, with a headline that reads, “Prairie Wife Comes Out as Bisexual.” The first one and a half sentences of the article, which is all that’s visible, read, “Sources confirm that cookbook writer and television personality Lucy Headrick, known to fans as the Prairie Wife, revealed during today’s taping of The Mariana Show that she has dated multiple women. The married mother of three, who—”

  Another text arrives from Frank. It reads, “OMFG!”

  Back in the office, Frank says, “Do you think she mentioned you?”

  “No,” Kirsten says, though, since receiving Frank’s text, she has felt very weird, almost nauseated.

  “What if she’s carried a torch for you all this time and she looks directly at the camera and says, ‘Kirsten, please make haste to my quaint rural farmstead, pull off my muslin knickers, and lick my evangelical pussy’?”

  “Jesus, Frank,” Kirsten says. “Not like there’s anything private about what I told you.”

  Her phone rings, and she can see on the caller ID that it’s Casey. To Frank, she says, “I need to answer this.”

  “Ian has strings practice after school, and he forgot his violin,” Casey says. “I know this is annoying, but could you get it? I have a meeting with the superintendent.”

  “I don’t think I can,” Kirsten says. “Sheila’s in a really bad mood today. Anyway, maybe Ian should deal with the consequences. You want him to develop grit, right?”

  “You think he should just sit there while everyone else practices?”

  “I can imagine more traumatizing childhood experiences.” Kirsten is nevertheless about to relent when Casey says, “God damn it, Kirsten.”

  “I thought we didn’t swear anymore,” Kirsten says. There’s a silence, and she asks, “Did you just hang up on me?”

  “No,” Casey says. “But I need to prepare for my meeting. I’ll see you at home.”

  Which, if either of them, is delivering the violin? This is how Casey wins, Kirsten thinks—by not insisting on resolution, which compels Kirsten toward it. On a regular basis, Kirsten wonders if Casey is using middle-school pedagogical techniques on her.

  She stews for the next ninety minutes, until she has to go home and get the violin or it will be too late, then she stands and grabs her purse. Like an apparition, Frank is back in her office.

  He says, “If we leave now, we can go to Flanagan’s and watch Lucy on Mariana. And I do mean on.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be online later today.”

  “Don’t you want to know if she mentions you?”

  Kirsten hesitates, then says, “Fuck it. I’ll come with you.”

  “For realsies? What were you about to do instead?”

  Kirsten sighs. “Good question.”

  It is seven minutes to three when Kirsten and Frank enter Flanagan’s Ale House. Four other patrons are there, two old men sitting side by side at the bar and two younger men sitting by themselves at tables.

  Frank gestures toward the TV above the bar and says to the bartender, “Can you change the channel to The Mariana Show?”

  “We’ll buy drinks,” Kirsten adds. But then the thought of returning to the office with beer on her breath makes her wonder if Sheila will fire her, and she orders seltzer water and French fries; Frank asks for a gin and tonic, and when their drinks are in front of them he clinks his glass against hers and says, “To lesbians.”

  Kirsten has only ever seen clips of The Mariana Show, and it turns out that there’s a lot to get through before Lucy appears—Mariana’s monologue, then a trivia contest among audience members, then a filmed segment in which Mariana takes a belly-dancing class. Plus endless commercials. As the minutes tick by, the afternoon is drained of the caperlike mood it had when she and Frank left the office. They speak intermittently. She says, “I don’t think she could mention me, even if she wanted to. Like, from a legal perspective, since I’m a private citizen. And I’m sure she was involved with other girls.”

  Finally, after more commercials, Mariana introduces Lucy, and Lucy walks out to energetic cheering and applause. She sits on a purple armchair next to Mariana’s purple armchair, and the cover of Dishin’ with the Prairie Wife is projected onto an enormous screen behind them.

  Lucy looks great—she’s wearing a short-sleeved, belted blue dress with a pattern of roses—and she’s also palpably nervous in a way that Kirsten finds surprisingly sympathetic. Lucy is smiling a lot, but she keeps widening her eyes in an oddly alert way, and she appears to be shaking.

  Lucy and Mariana discuss a recipe in the memoir for raccoon stew; Lucy says that she personally isn’t crazy about it but that it was given to her by her mother-in-law.

  “You weren’t raised on a farm,” Mariana says.

  “I wasn’t,” Lucy says. “I grew up in the suburbs of Phoenix. My dad was an engineer, and my mom was a teacher.” Her matter-of-factness also elicits Kirsten’s sympathy. Even if her fame is country-fried, even if she speaks in a nebulous drawl, Kirsten cannot remember ever seeing Lucy outright lie. “A few years after college, I enrolled in social-work school at the University of Missouri,” Lucy continues. “It was while I was doing field work way out in the country that I met my husband. And that was it for both of us. I never expected to fall in love with a farmer, and he never expected to fall in love with a food blogger.”

  As the image on the screen behind them changes from the book to a photograph of Lucy and a handsome man wearing a checked shirt and a cowboy hat, Mariana says, “Something in your book—and it’s a fantastic read—but something that surprised me is before you got married to the Stud in Overalls, as we fondly refer to him, you describe how you dated women.”

  Lucy nods and says both matter-of-factly and shakily, “I did, in my late teens and early twenties. I consider myself bisexual.”

  “Oh yeah, you do, bitch,” Frank says. “Booyah!”

  “Can you not talk over her?” Kirsten says.

  Mariana, who Kirsten hopes is feigning naïveté for her viewers, says, “But if you’re married to a man you’re not still bisexual, are you?”

  “Well, my husband and I are monogamous, but I think even if your circumstances change your core identity remains. Like, heaven forbid, if my husband passed away I’d still be madly in love with him.”

  Really? Kirsten thinks. Madly?

  Mariana asks, “Do you worry about how your fans will react to this news?”

  “I love my fans,” Lucy says, and turns and waves at the studio audience, who explode in applause.
Though, surely, an audience in Southern California is not representative of Lucy’s base.

  Over the cheering, Mariana says, “This is just a hunch, but it seems like they love you, too.” More thunderous cheering ensues.

  “Really,” Lucy says. “I gave this serious thought. I prayed on it, I talked to my preacher, I talked to my family. And obviously things are a lot better now for the LGBT community than they once were, but you still hear about teenagers taking their lives, or being made to feel like they’re less than. So I decided to let them know, Hey, you’re not alone.”

  Kirsten thinks of Lucy at the camp-counselor orientation in 1994, and then she thinks, What if Lucy isn’t a greedy, phony hypocrite? What if she’s still herself, as surprised by the turns her life has taken as Kirsten sometimes is by hers? In Flanagan’s, it occurs to Kirsten that she might be witnessing a genuinely important cultural moment, which makes her wish that she were with someone other than Frank.

  “I’m so verklempt,” he says. “I need a hug.” She assumes he’s being sarcastic, but when she glances at him he’s teared up for real. He makes a sheepish expression and says in a thick, wet voice, “I can’t believe your girlfriend is ruining my mascara.”

  What choice does she have? In her arms, he smells like gin and some leathery cologne, and she’s still holding him when he lets loose with a huge, guttural sob.

  “Oh, Frank,” Kirsten says.

  After she leaves work, Kirsten doesn’t stop to buy Lucy’s book. When she arrives home, the boys greet her at the front door.

  “Mama, how many tickles do you need to make an octopus laugh?” Jack says.

  “I don’t know, how many?”

  “I forgot my violin, but Mom brought it to me,” Ian says.

  “I hope you thanked her,” Kirsten says.

  “You need ten tickles,” Jack says.