The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  She handed over the clothes, and I peeled off my dirty ones. I didn’t even have my tights off when the mother yanked the boy’s head toward her chest, and it took me a second to realize I’d gotten so used to bathing around everyone in the forest that it hadn’t seemed strange to strip down in front of this family.

  Henia, Isaac hissed from the doorway, where he and your grandfather were standing. Let’s go.

  But I couldn’t, not yet. As I sat at the table and tied a clean sock around my ankle, bruised and puffy but possibly only sprained, I looked at the math problems the boy had printed out neatly on lined white paper and imagined, for just a second, what it would be like to have homework again. Not that I’d even liked math—it had been my worst subject, the one my father had to spend close to an hour correcting every evening. But to be at a table again with my mother, to have class work and meals and chores—I had wished for my family every day in the forest, but never before had what I’d lost been flaunted so vividly in front of me. I was filled with a sudden rage at this boy. This kid who had so little, whose father could be dead or at war or just not around, whose school was certainly shut down, and whose mother was probably trying to keep up some semblance of routine by making him practice math in the middle of this chaos—at that moment I resented them both.

  What was for dinner? I asked them.

  Soup, the mother said.

  What kind?

  Potato.

  Fill three bowls for me.

  It’s gone, the mother said. She held up the empty pot she’d just dried.

  What do you have? I said.

  She handed over a potato and three turnips.

  I pocketed the food as I walked the length of the room, opening cupboards, rifling through drawers, feeling under sweaters and pants for a hidden stash of something.

  I need your money, I said.

  We don’t have any, the mother said.

  Why should I believe you? I opened their closet, overturned pillows, shook out blankets.

  I promise you, the mother said, looking at me pleadingly. It was already stolen—everything was.

  You’ll be sorry, I said, if you don’t give me your money. It took me two tries to pull back the slide, but it didn’t matter, I realized, when I was the only one holding a weapon. I grabbed the boy, circled an arm around him, and pressed the gun to his cheek. He was shaking, and his fine brown hair was damp with sweat. He felt like such a child next to me, his skinny arms tight at his sides, his breath coming out in short, hot gasps.

  The mother was blinking quickly, and she kept looking at her son, then back at me. A sound came out of the boy’s throat, squeaky and remote, and I pressed the pistol more firmly against his skin. The mother closed her eyes. Then she crawled under the bed, ran her hand along the bottom of the mattress, and pulled out a thin stack of bills. It was a small amount, enough for maybe two weeks of food.

  Give it to me, I said.

  We’ll starve, she said. Leave us something. Please.

  Give it to me, I said again, and when she did, I let go of the boy. I waited for him to run to his mother’s arms, but it was like his feet were nailed to the floor. The room was so quiet I could hear a horse’s hooves clicking by outside. I walked backward with the pistol still cocked, out to the stairs, where Isaac and your grandfather were waiting.

  They wouldn’t talk to me as we made our way through the bakery and out the door, where the cold air chilled me through my new coat. We were halfway down the road when your grandfather said, That family did nothing to you.

  He grabbed my shoulders and shook me, like a box my voice might fall out of.

  How could you take everything they had?

  But I kept walking. I don’t know how to explain it except that a haziness washed over me where I could hear his words but they suddenly meant nothing to me. I will always mark that as the moment I stopped listening to your grandfather, and also as the day Isaac started looking at me with a curious, cautious respect. We were back in town, the same route we took in, and as we passed that row of gutted shops, I caught my reflection in a broken window. There I was, thirteen years old and stumbling around in someone else’s boots, looking more hideous than I could have imagined. I hadn’t been in front of a mirror since back home with my parents, I realized, and in that time I had become an ugly girl. My hair was greasy and knotted and so beaten by the elements it had turned a shade lighter. Black circles rimmed my eyes, scabs dotted my chin and forehead and lips, my teeth had gone as rotten and brown as tree roots. In only a couple months I had become a medusa, a monster, a creature from the forests of a fairy tale.

  I still see glimpses of that ugliness now. At the salon, when the hairdresser finishes my blowout and spins me around to face the mirror. Or sometimes on the subway, when the person across from me gets up, and I’m shocked to see that same terrifying beast staring back at me in the scratched, blurred glass.

  But I want you to know it wasn’t that way for everyone. Your grandfather did the same things, lost the same things, watched that same boy doing math at the table—and responded by patiently sitting with your mother the entire time she was growing up, helping her with algebra and history and even with spelling, though it pained him to sound out words in a language he barely knew. I’d watch the two of them hunched over her homework at the kitchen table and wish I was the kind of person who could be grateful I was still in the world to join them, rather than always standing a few feet from everybody else, slouched in a doorway.

  Your grandfather, once the biggest loudmouth I knew, became a quiet, almost invisible man in America, stumbling over his English, bashful in public, shy to ask directions on the street after hearing some teenagers singsonging his accent. He was rejected for every job he tried to get—an immigrant without even a junior high school education. I was the one who found work first—in a clothing factory, if you can believe it, back in a hot room sewing in seams and zippers. Your grandfather was humiliated that he could provide for the brigade but not for his own family, humiliated when he finally did find a job, making deliveries for a beer distributor, just another tired man dozing on his subway ride to work.

  Still, he found small parts of his life to genuinely appreciate: growing tomatoes on the patio, listening to the radio after dinner, taking the train to the city on weekends. And yet none of those things I could ever teach myself to love. Your mother and I may not have the easiest time together, but I’ll admit when she’s right. And though it pains me to say it, she told me something once that I know is true: I never stopped thinking people wanted to hurt me, even when they no longer did, and that rage would rumble through me during even the nicest times: Walking in the park with your grandfather on the first real day of spring, eating at a good restaurant on our honeymoon in Atlantic City. On vacation in Israel, almost forty years ago, when we could finally afford to go. Finally your mother met that side of her family, finally your grandfather visited his parents’ graves, finally he saw his brothers, middle-aged by then, with wives and children and grandchildren. I remember sitting in your great-uncle Natan’s backyard in Ramat Gan, drinking orange soda and eating cashews, and right away your grandfather started asking about Chaya Salavsky. I hadn’t heard his voice climb so high since his speeches in the dugout. Did they still see her, what was she up to? He assumed after all these years she’d married?

  His mouth quivered on that last word, and when his brother said she’d died a couple years ago, rather than taking my husband’s hand and murmuring condolences while he blinked back tears, I started chewing on my lip the way I always did before saying something risky.

  How dare you ask about her with me right beside you! I yelled, in front of all my new in-laws, in the backyard surrounded by the grapefruit and lemon trees your grandfather had dreamed about for so long. Get over yourself, I continued, though I wasn’t actually angry, or jealous of a dead woman I’d never met, a woman he hadn’t seen since he was a boy. I was simply filled with an urge to fight, so electric and imme
diate I felt my face flush. So I carried on, even as your grandfather cleared his throat and looked at his shoes and rattled the ice in his empty glass.

  And no, I won’t tell you the rest. You can guess. You can go to the library and read about the sixty-four soldiers killed that night in Haradziec, in a train explosion engineered by an unknown anarchist group. You can waste full days in the research room, ruining your eyes scrolling through microfilm. You can read about the attacks that followed—eight more before the war ended—about how your grandfather and I missed the quota to Palestine and were loaded instead on a boat to the States, not an option either of us had ever considered. The place didn’t feel real even as we docked at the immigration port and saw Manhattan glittering in front of us. You can even find stories about Isaac, killed a year after we left for New York when his homemade bomb went off prematurely, still on his way to some unknown mission—one of those kids who couldn’t imagine living anywhere but Europe even once we were allowed to leave. Maybe because he was addicted to the fighting, maybe because he could finally go home but no one was there. Search for his story in the library—for that and everything else. But you won’t learn what happened to that mother and son I robbed, because believe me, I’ve looked and looked and there’s just no way to find out whether those people survived the coldest year of their lives.

  I don’t understand you. All your life you’ve been like this, pulling someone into a corner at every family party, asking so many questions it’s no wonder you’ve always had a difficult time making friends. It’s a beautiful day. Your grandfather’s on the patio grilling hamburgers, your mother’s new boyfriend is already loud off beer, she’s hooked up the speakers and is playing her terrible records. Why don’t you go out in the sun and enjoy yourself for once, rather than sitting inside, scratching at ugly things that have nothing to do with you? These horrible things that happened before you were born.

  Lynne Sharon Schwartz

  The Golden Rule

  IT STARTED INNOCENTLY ENOUGH. Could Amanda pick up a few groceries—it was raining so hard. Mail a letter (addressed in such light pencil that Amanda doubted it would ever arrive)? Program Maria’s new alarm clock—digital, baffling—for the hours of her medication? Amanda thought nothing of it. It was the sort of thing you do for a frail old neighbor. They lived on the same floor of a solid downtown building where Maria, it seemed, had occupied her apartment since the dawn of time. The other neighbors were newer, young families, everyone running off to work and school, the building left to nannies and maids. How could she refuse?

  Over the last month or two, though, the phone calls had become more frequent, their tone more pressing. Would Amanda fetch a prescription at the drugstore, have something copied at the local shop? In mid-October, Maria opened her door as Amanda was coming in—she’d taken a rare half-day off to do some shopping—and handed her a set of keys to her apartment. Just in case, she said, her voice obsequious, petulant. “And do you have a minute to come in and call the doctor for me? I can’t cope with his new phone system, pressing all those buttons, and in the end you don’t even get a real person.”

  “Sure, I’ll just get rid of these packages and be right back.”

  When Amanda and Jack moved in twenty years ago, Maria had been the age Amanda was now, and quite able to manage her own errands as well as attend the nearby church most mornings. Even then she was tiny, birdlike, a bird without feathers or song, who spoke in whispers as if she feared eavesdroppers. She had an unlisted phone number, she’d told Amanda, in a tone that suggested lurking menace. She always wore a navy-blue kerchief tied under her chin—Amanda would rather have died than be seen in such a thing—and white Peter Pan–collared blouses, dark skirts and stockings, oxford shoes. Slacks, never, even in the coldest weather. Over the years her costume had remained the same, but her voice had grown weaker, though no less tinged with complaint.

  —

  Amanda had never been in Maria’s apartment before. Its gloom was startling: moss-colored drapes on the windows, massive dark furniture, and a stale, sequestered smell, reminding her of grottos she’d visited in Italy long ago. Bits of paper littered the dining room table, jotted notes in a prim, upright handwriting, like a convent schoolgirl’s. The doctor’s phone number, when Maria finally located the scrap of paper, was written in that maddening number four pencil, so faint that Amanda had to read it under one of the fringed lamps.

  Returning home was like coming out of an afternoon movie to the stun of brightness. Amanda’s own apartment was splashed with color, open to the light. After Jack’s death five years ago, she had immersed herself in redecorating projects. She’d also made sure to keep her clothes in order, get her hair cut regularly, not let things go. It had been disheartening, at first, to look at her face in the mirror: It wasn’t so much the minuscule lines or the no-longer-glowing skin—she was familiar with the concoctions to remedy those. It was the somber resignation in the eyes, the slackening of the profile, the downward slant of the mouth that suggested disappointment and an unappealing severity. She felt herself in a permanent battle with time and nature, and though in the end she would lose, as everyone does, she resolved to fight valiantly to the death. She had the means and the will.

  —

  Several weeks later Maria called at six in the morning to say she had terrible pains in her stomach.

  Ben, who’d slept over because of a thunderstorm, rolled over and grunted irritably, so Amanda took the phone into the living room. “Did you call the doctor?”

  “It’s too early. They’re not in yet. Anyway, he’s out of town and I don’t like the substitutes.”

  “But even so…Do you want me to call?”

  “No, I told you.” Maria’s voice was becoming a whimper. “I didn’t get any sleep all night, the pain was so bad.”

  The emergency room, Amanda declared. She’d get dressed and take her.

  “No, no emergency room. They make you wait for hours, and you have to sit with all kinds of people.”

  “I’ll call an ambulance, then. They’ll take you right away.” This she knew from Jack’s heart attack. Arrive in an ambulance and you get first-class treatment.

  No, those doctors were just students. She didn’t trust them. And no, she didn’t want Amanda to come over.

  “Well, I don’t know what else I can do.” She struggled to keep her voice even, her impatience in check. “I’ll phone you later from work. If it gets any worse, call 911.”

  “Her again?” Ben muttered, throwing an arm over Amanda. And after she explained, “So if she won’t let you help, then why’d she call?”

  “Not to be alone with it, I guess.” She knew what that felt like. She’d often been tempted to call friends at the slightest change in Jack’s condition, simply not to bear the information alone, as if she were in a narrow space with a large package and needed help carrying it—not that it was so heavy, only very hard to maneuver. She’d given in to the urge, though it hadn’t helped much. Her daughter, Jessica, had phoned daily—she was in Spain then, with a new baby. She’d flown back in time for the funeral. “Tell her you can’t be her personal assistant—you have a business to run.” He couldn’t see why Amanda capitulated: She should do what was convenient and refuse the rest. Ben, a vigorous sixty-eight, was ten years older than Amanda and prided himself on not being “needy”—he liked to show he was up on current buzzwords. Of course he wasn’t needy, Amanda thought: He had a housekeeper and a secretary. But she knew better than to say that. He was easy and compliant. Best of all, he was firmly settled in his own place uptown and busy with his accounting practice, leaving her free to spend long hours at the shop. Jack, whom she had loved to distraction, hadn’t been easy in any way, especially near the end. But he’d never talked smugly about neediness. He would have understood why she gave in to Maria, would even have been amused. Always into self-improvement, he used to tease. Is that so bad? she asked. Not bad, he said, just a whole lot of work. He would have understood Maria’s
strategy, too: the cunning tyranny of the weak. And grasped that in Amanda, so clearly strong—large, firm-voiced, competent, occupying space with the authority of ownership—Maria had found the perfect foil.

  “She probably just has gas pains,” Ben said, and rolled over. Was that what he’d say if she woke up one morning in agony? Kindness, Amanda thought, but didn’t care to explain to him at six fifteen in the morning, shouldn’t depend on convenience, or even affection. If it did, it couldn’t be called kindness. She was following the Golden Rule, after all, doing unto others…

  Did Maria follow the Golden Rule? Not very likely. She was mean-spirited, bigoted. She whispered carping comments about the neighbors, and the things she said about their West Indian cleaning women made Amanda shudder. Everything about her was scant and pinched, plus she hardly ate—a refusal of life that irked Amanda—and her clothes were dreadful, though this, Amanda knew, was hardly relevant; she noted it in her inventory only because she thought about clothes all the time—she owned a selective upscale boutique and chose every item herself.

  Of course none of this should matter. Charity need not be deserved, nor should it be offered grudgingly, in bad faith. Her objections, Amanda knew, were more than uncharitable. They were suspect, rising as they did from the pit of her own dread.

  She couldn’t sleep anymore—the call had left her jittery. She moved closer to Ben and asked, “Do you still think I’m beautiful? Or am I becoming an old lady?”

  “Of course you’re beautiful. Why do you even ask?”

  “It’s good to hear it once in a while.”

  “You’re beautiful. This part is beautiful, and this, and this.” At first he sounded tired, mechanical, but as he went on his voice gathered enthusiasm. He moved his hands down her body, enumerating, making it a game. “I can’t get anywhere below the knee from this position, and I’m too comfortable to move.”