The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

I only glimpsed this and was further maddened by it and turned my back to them so I couldn’t see their fear and disapproval, and I slammed the steel against the ground with increasing force, again and again, until finally I was out of breath and the nerves of my hands were vibrating painfully from the blows. I stopped attacking the ground at last, and as my head cleared, I remembered the girls and slowly turned to say something to them, something that would somehow gather them in and dilute their grief-stricken fears. I didn’t know what to say, but something would come to me; it always did.

  But the girls were gone. I looked across the yard, past the rusting swing set toward the house, and saw the four of them disappear one by one between the house and the garage, Vickie in the lead, then Sasha holding Anthea’s hand, and Caitlin. A few seconds later, they reappeared on the far side of the house, walking up the lane toward the home of my ex-wife. Now Vickie was holding Anthea’s hand in one of hers and Caitlin’s in the other, and Sasha, the eldest of my ex-wife’s three daughters, was in the lead.

  That’s more or less the whole story, except to mention that when the girls were finally out of sight, Scooter, my black cat, strolled from the bushes alongside the brook that marked the edge of the yard, where he had probably been hunting voles and ground-feeding chickadees. He made his way across the yard to where I stood, passed by me, and sat next to Sarge’s stiffening body. The blanket around her body had been blown back by the breeze. The cold wind riffled her dense white fur. Her sightless eyes were dry and opaque, and her gray tongue lolled from her open mouth as if stopped in the middle of a yawn. She looked like game, a wild animal killed for her coat or her flesh, and not a permanent member of the family.

  I carried the body of the dog to the veterinarian, where she was cremated, and brought the ashes in a ceramic jar back to my house and placed the jar on the fireplace mantel, thinking that in the spring, when the ground thawed, the girls and I would bury the ashes down by the maple tree by the brook. But that never happened. The girls did not want to talk about Sarge. They did not spend as much time at my house anymore as they had before Sarge died. Vickie moved in with her boyfriend in town. By spring the other girls were staying overnight at my house every other weekend, and by summer, when they went off to summer camp in the White Mountains, not at all, and I saw them that summer only when I drove up to Camp Abenaki on Parents’ Weekend. I emptied the jar with Sarge’s ashes into the brook alone one afternoon in May. The following year I was offered a tenure-track position at a major university in New Jersey, and given my age and stage of career, I felt obliged to accept it. I sold my little house down the lane from my ex-wife’s home. From then on the girls visited me and their old cat, Scooter, when they could, which was once a month for a weekend during the school year and for the week before summer camp began.

  Dina Nayeri

  A Ride Out of Phrao

  IN HER LAST WEEK in America, Shirin sells or gives away all her possessions, returning to the same small parcel she carried when she first arrived—a purse full of dried fruit and extra underwear. She feels thirty again.

  She is happy to be leaving Cedar Rapids—a place that, in fifteen years, never grew to fit her strange edges—and to be sent closer to home. She is moving to a village somewhere in northern Thailand. Iran isn’t on the list of Peace Corps countries, after all, and this is a comfort. She has been away for too long and is a stranger now. Why go back and ruin the beautiful image her Tehrani relatives have of her? Still, she misses the East. She writes a letter about it to cousins in Tehran, emphasizing that the Peace Corps is a great honor, leaving out any hint of her lack of options. Months later, she suspects she misspelled the name—Peace Core, she remembers writing, a place that carries peace at its core. Is that not the meaning?

  She often reminds herself that to be accepted to the program you have to be American. As a citizen, she qualifies, though now and then it feels like a deception. Sometimes she repeats every detail of her application to herself. Was any of it a lie? No, no, it was not. At first there was some question about her age, but the man on the phone said that she had the enthusiasm of the young and that many older people volunteer every year. To this she replied that she was only forty-five. Yes, of course, the man said, which made her dislike him and look down on his so-called peacekeeping organization. But, for Shirin Khalilipour-Anderson, the Peace Corps is a solid, respectable way out of town. No one will have to know about the bankruptcy, the loss of her house, or the series of demeaning bureaucratic jobs for which she was overqualified and whose titles she often changes for her Iranian friends. Doctor of New Research, she calls the last one, in which she was paid slightly above minimum wage to sit beside three bleary-eyed researchers, filing their work according to a needlessly convoluted system.

  She was fired for doing too many “extra” things: for making suggestions to the other employees; bringing baghlava for everyone; tuning out when the boy who hired her spoke. The boy called it downsizing, apologized, then made a backhanded recommendation that she seek work someplace that would appreciate her special kind of initiative. At the next meeting of her church’s widows group—an organization she joined despite the very alive state of both her ex-husbands—Shirin told the other ladies that she had quit her job because of exhaustion. She added that she had spent a week training her replacement—which wasn’t strictly true, but she would have done it, if they had asked.

  After a short training program in Washington, DC, she travels to Phrao, a village two hours outside the big city of Chiang Mai. She lives alone. There are no other Peace Corps volunteers in this poverty-stricken town of barely two thousand. She chafes against her new living standards—a hut, no furniture except a small table and a sleeping mat. No air-conditioning. She works under two young Thai bureaucrats, offering medical services in a one-room clinic. Soon she will begin a second job teaching children a few words of English a day. She begins to relish the rigors of it. The Thai people are strange, their every custom a struggle, but Shirin enjoys their company. They seem cold at first. She learns that they aren’t naturally effusive to strangers, as Iranians are. To Persians, a dramatic show of unearned love—hugs and kisses and empty offers—aren’t falsehoods so much as necessary illusions of warmth and community. Privately, Shirin finds it tiresome, though she would never betray her native culture by saying so. Besides, there are the good parts; the face-saving parts—Iranians give each other room to pretend. (Yes, I have a second home in Shiraz. Yes, my son has a PhD. Yes, yes, yes.)

  Thai people are restrained. No hugs. They bow and bow.

  American, she says when introducing herself to her new neighbors, and they nod, easily accepting this. They ask, New York? She smiles and says yes. It’s close enough; her daughter lives there. She misses Leila, twenty now and studying psychology in the world’s top city. It’s a shame none of their Tehrani relatives can see the woman Leila has become, her beauty and charm, her ability to relate to Americans, to make them love her so easily. Leila has many men, and Shirin overlooks this, though it is a sin. The girl is just like her father, so addicted to being adored that he stayed in Tehran among his many lovers rather than risk exile, knowing that a new land would spit him out.

  Oh, but Leila…she succeeded at becoming American in less than one year. What a thing to have done! Fifteen years and Shirin has yet to complete this task. And so she wants to show Thailand to her New York daughter—here she seems to have clicked into place somehow. She has written her daughter several times, inviting her to visit. Leila has never written back, and in truth, she hasn’t spoken to Shirin in a year. But that isn’t important—they’ve had a fight, that’s all. Leila often overreacts when Shirin doesn’t spell out every detail in a way that Leila considers “candid.” Now Shirin doesn’t even remember what she is supposed to have lied about—something small like the value of her house, or how many credit cards she had before the bankruptcy. At least a small part of it was over the decision to move to Thailand. Running away, Leila called it.

&nbs
p; Young people often travel to Thailand—maybe she will come. Shirin wants Leila to notice that the villagers don’t hear her accent, and, at work, her bosses defer to her because she is older. And if she makes suggestions, they make a show of complying. She marvels at this. How could it be so easy? Later, when her Thai is better, her neighbor, a tiny speckle-faced woman, asks her about her history and she mentions having been a doctor in Iran, then a housewife in America, and then a Manager of Advanced Research. From then on her neighbor calls her “Dr. Rin,” which is a wonder for so many reasons.

  The name catches on, and she lets it.

  Her early days are spent gradually acquiring this and that. Pots and pans. Sanitary pads. Proper spoons. Conditioner. Toothpaste without salt. (Salt in toothpaste. What a repulsive thing!) A rice cooker is easy to find. She adapts easily to the Thai style of eating rice, happily slicing mango in her bare hands, letting the sticky yellow juice flow through her fingers as she relishes the strange new taste of consuming dry rice, no butter, with fruit. She wipes her hands on her Thai clothes, cheap cotton tunics made for soiling.

  She surprises herself each time her sticky hand reaches for her shirt hem as it would a dishrag. At her widows’ group meetings she often wore her nicest silk blouse, a lavender Chanel piece that she had preserved for ten years, ironing it for fifteen minutes after every hand wash. The blouse had an ugly seam just above the hip, an imperfection she took great care to hide, tucking and re-tucking it into her skirt every so often.

  Never let your seams show, she used to tell her daughter when she was young.

  At church functions, she turned down every good appetizer for fear of soiling that blouse. Now she thinks that this is the greatest sign that she was a stranger there. They’re not your people until you share a meal with some ease. She has never been comfortable eating with Americans. In Iran friends and neighbors ate together on a cloth on the floor, spending hours in one another’s company. They interacted with food and with each other in the most basic and intimate ways.

  She finds that Thai stores have all her Persian spices and utensils. Barely any bread, though. When she asks people where to find bread, they say, eyes full of sympathy, “Don’t you have rice to eat?” This makes her chuckle. She answers in clunky Thai, “Just my strange American tastes.”

  Her house stands just off the ground, on short stilts hidden here and there by patches of shrubbery. It has a roof shaped like a straw hat, so that from far away, the hut looks like a squatting woman, head down so that her hat falls over her eyes, her skirt of shrubs lifted, exposing her bare legs in two or three places. The image amuses her. It seems to signal the house’s greatest difficulty—the toilet is a hole in the ground, like in Iran. But her bladder is American now and so it takes an hour of squatting to squeeze a few drops. Afterward she’s elated with herself, adapting like a young person.

  Most of the meat here is pork. She’s no Muslim, but don’t the Thai people realize that this vile animal eats the flesh of its own species? Evil. A lot of things in Thailand carry the sensation of evil. She doesn’t like the Buddha shelf in her house. She considers Buddhism idol worship. And every morning she wakes up under her mosquito net, eye-to-eye with a new kind of enormous lizard. On the first night she killed one. Its guts are still on her bedroom wall. Each night she scrubs it, in a strange ritualistic way that is starting to feel like penance, and so she has come to a kind of truce with the creatures. The Thai people often talk of demons. Maybe her pretty new house has spirits and they visit her in an endless line of lizards. Now one is dead and the others mourn it, a reptile community, arriving every night to that same spot, flicking their wretched tongues, taunting her. You asked for this, didn’t you?

  “Filthy little beasts,” she answers when she is alone and sleepy and she wants to hear the music of Farsi words, even the ugly ones, spoken aloud.

  —

  On the morning she begins her job at the local school, a hot rain soaks the village and she glimpses her neighbors eating a wordless morning meal on the floor. Their window is barely three feet from hers, so that she can examine their food, hear some of their whispers, breathe in the sharp scent of their incense. The rain blurs the lines of their faces and bodies, and their movements become dreamlike. They remind her of her parents, the way they broke fast quietly, always on the floor, and as a teenager she often gave them fifteen minutes before she joined with her cup of tea.

  She eats breakfast alone, black tea and purple sticky rice with mango and banana. She adds some coconut milk and mung beans, thinking, How authentic it seems. She has allotted too much time for breakfast, so she peels rambutan and mangosteen, not because she’s hungry, but for the pleasure of peeling. She is enthralled by the strange, sensuous fruits of this country. When you peel a mangosteen, for example, it is impossible to stay clean because there are inner membranes to remove. If you cut it sloppily, you will get a mouthful of the foul along with the sweet. In almost all her favorite fruits, a sticky seam divides the best from the worst. It reminds her of the persimmons of Iran, with their four watery petals tucked inside a bitter stinging jelly, the thin skin between them the difference between an exquisite flavor and a repellent one. Separating the two parts is an art, requiring a steady hand and a tiny spoon.

  In early mornings when she misses Iran and the knowledge of a long-impending loneliness hits, like a brick suddenly falling into both arms, she forces herself to think of her early years in Cedar Rapids. She was married then—to this man who gifted her with Anderson—for only six months when she was a new immigrant, thirty and lonely and clueless about how to relate to an American husband. Why did he marry me, she wonders, thinking of herself in those days, how hopeless she seemed with her five-year-old daughter and her damaged hair and her ragged tote full of dried fruit and extra underwear in case at any moment she should need to flee the country again. What did he want with such a mess of a woman? After a while, she always dismisses this question and gathers her backpack of Peace Corps essentials. She was very beautiful then—of course.

  The schoolroom is stifling and ripe with a sour milk smell. Rows of eight-year-olds with greasy, bluish black hair giggle and stare at Shirin, overwhelmed by her foreignness. She has been told that the Thai people are suspicious of strangers and that it is important to answer all their questions, even if they seem nosey. Often as she bikes through rice fields, wearing her straw hat and wraparound fisherman pants to blend in, fellow bicyclists stop her and ask strange things. What is your name? How old are you? What have you eaten today? Though at first she thought she had misunderstood, now she presses her hands together as in prayer, greeting them with a sawat-dee-kha before answering simply, I am Shirin. Forty-five. Much rice today. All is well.

  She doesn’t lie about her age—this is how they decide how much respect to show.

  The schoolchildren ask the same intimate questions as their parents. How old are you? Where did you come from? How much was your tunic? In the weeks that follow, she teaches them English words by talking about Leila, showing photos of her life in New York and describing each item: Woman. Books. City. Man with glasses. Man with yellow hair. Man in jeans. The children love Leila’s photos, fighting over them as if she were a starlet.

  One child, Boonmee, always lingers by the wall. He has a sleepy expression, his eyes so small they are obstructed on both ends by fleshy cheeks and heavy eyelids. His thick rosebud lips seem ever swollen, as if he is constantly having an allergic reaction. He rarely smiles. He sits in a corner by himself, saying nothing. When he laughs, it is always in strange moments, as if at his own thoughts, his eyes opening suddenly just a crack like an oyster shell so that she can see the dark glimmer inside. Shirin comes to like him best.

  Each morning she asks in English, “Boonmee, how are you?” He never answers, so to illustrate, she answers herself, “Fine, thank you.”

  One day, Shirin finally hears Boonmee’s voice. When a new child points at Shirin, and shouts, “Farang!” the Thai word for foreigners,
Boonmee looks up from his corner and speaks for the first time: “That is no farang. That is Dr. Rin!”

  She imagines this is the beginning of a secret understanding between them. Somehow, this boy knows that foreignness is her burden.

  “Thank you, Boonmee,” she says in Thai. He shrugs and looks away.

  In her fourth week of teaching, Boonmee is absent twice. Then, on the third day, he shows up hand-in-hand with the regular schoolteacher, Sawat, the only person in town who can speak decent English. He hangs his head, his chin tucked so that she can only see the black of his hair and the outline of his cheeks. He refuses to look up, his gaze fixed on his sandals. “What’s wrong?” Shirin asks.

  Sawat kneels beside Boonmee and says something in Thai. The boy doesn’t look up from his feet. Then Sawat wipes her thick bangs from her forehead, smiles at Shirin in that deferential way, and—never taking her hands off Boonmee’s shoulders—says, “All fine. Let’s learning English?”

  All through class Shirin can’t keep from glancing in Boonmee’s direction. He seems to be hiding something, slumped and folded over himself, his right side turned toward the wall. His breathing is strange, his stomach contracting and expanding in a sad tempo. When she can no longer tolerate the mystery, Shirin tells the class to practice copying letters from the board and goes over to him. She tries to turn his face, but his body goes rigid and he pushes against the wall. A strange noise, like a chirp or a high-pitched howl, escapes his throat. Sawat gets up from her chair, whispers in Thai, “Let’s go outside.” She takes Boonmee’s hand and leads him away from Shirin. This annoys her, angers her, like Sawat has just taken her own child from her arms.

  She follows them into the half-covered walkway outside where the rain has soaked the orchids, blending the sweet scent with the stench of a nearby aloe tree. Something about the way Sawat kneels beside the boy, the condescension in the act, reminds Shirin of her own parents, who never knelt but always sat. So she drops down onto her haunches on the concrete, cross-legged as if ready for a night with the water pipe. She tries again to turn Boonmee’s face toward her. She can see that whatever he is hiding is shameful to him, in front of the foreign doctor. “It’s okay,” she says. “Let me see.” When he finally looks up, his rosebud mouth is quivering and a yellowish bruise covers half his right cheek and his upper neck.