The O. Henry Prize Stories 2015

by Laura Furman

  “Come in, come in,” I said to them all. “Give me your coat,” I said to my sister. “I like your coat.”

  Et cetera.

  I was trying to distract them from the smell.

  “Give me your coat, give me your bags,” I said. “Give me all of it—I’ll put it up in the room. How was the drive?”

  They didn’t give me any of it. “Don’t be so formal,” Sam said. “We’ll take it up, no problem.”

  But the smell, I told myself. But you don’t want to act weird, I answered myself. “Whatever,” I said.

  While they went upstairs to put their bags down, Mara wandered around the living room, picking up various objects—a snow globe on the television, a framed photo of me and my ex that I couldn’t bring myself to take down—and setting them down again. She wore enormously thick eyeglasses, and her hair was done up in a pair of uneven pigtails. Glasses aside, she looked strikingly similar to how Priya had looked as a child, despite Mara’s bland-faced whitey of a father.

  I suddenly remembered another part of what had happened between morning and evening.

  “Hey, kiddo,” I said, “you want to see a buffalo?”

  “I’ve seen one,” she said.

  “Are you sure?” I said. “A real one?”

  “They have them at the zoo,” she said.

  “This is different,” I said. “These ones are in the park.”

  —

  Because that’s what I had been going to do that morning. I was on this kick. I had been treating myself to the sights of San Francisco that I had been too busy to visit during my working life. When I got off the bus, I stopped and bought a little bottle of bourbon. The smallest, cutest bottle. A child could hold it in one fist. The bourbon glowed from within like liquid sun. It took all my willpower to put the bourbon back in its paper bag and to hold that bag tight till I got to where I was going. Good God, it was hot. When I got to the paddock, I was drenched in sweat. There were supposed to be nine of them—three adults, six children, all female, because the park had moved the males when they figured out the obscene amount of humping all the males and females were doing—but I saw only one. She had the top-heavy build of a boxer—this barreled chest, these thick shoulders, this impenetrable wall of a forehead, all balanced on top of four matchstick legs. For her to stand on those legs and get from one place to another should have been impossible. It defied all good sense. Yet that’s what she did. She walked with great grace, as if nothing mattered but to walk. Her shoulders pumped with strength. Her legs, truth be told, tottered a little. When she came to a patch of yellow grass where some wildflowers had sprouted, she stopped and lowered her head as if for benediction. She was massive and shaggy and humpbacked and ancient. Her grace made me feel like the smallest of creatures. She ate the flowers.

  I pressed my face to the grid of the wire fence, cool against my skin, and I called out to her. “Hey, girl,” I said. “Hey.”

  She ignored me. Truly, it was as if I wasn’t there. And maybe I wasn’t, I started to feel. There was not another human being in sight. Only me and the great animal. Who was I to allege that I existed? For what reason should I exist? Where was the proof?

  And it’s true that it was hot that day. And it’s true that I was sipping from my bottle. But the strangest thing happened. Having eaten, the buffalo raised her head again, and I felt a great top spin of joy at this. She continued her walk in my direction. She was so close I could see her eyebrows, and this, too, seemed miraculous. An instant later, she tumbled to the ground on her side as if felled. Her body sent up a puff of brown dirt. In that moment, I had a really strange experience. I felt as if I had fallen to the ground myself. I could taste the dust in the air. Every muscle in my body relaxed. I was not a thinking being. I was free. This lasted for only an instant. Then the buffalo rolled onto her feet and stood, and I was myself again. I stood there gripping the fence waiting for the feeling to return, but it didn’t.

  —

  Mara came across as very comfortable in her own skin, the way child actors often do.

  “You want to know something interesting?” she said.

  “What?”

  “The Donners ate each other. You know them? The Donner Party?”

  I was taken aback. I hadn’t remembered her being this gruesome. By the time I thought of what to say—“Not personally,” I wanted to say, to be a little funny—Mara had moved on. She was wandering around the room, every once in a while asking a question: “Who’s this?” Or, pointing the remote control at the TV, “How does this work?” She moved really fast. I couldn’t keep up.

  “Sheila?” she said after some time.

  “Yeah?”

  “What’s that smell?” she said.

  “What smell?” I said. “Must be your upper lip.”

  —

  Over dinner, they explained that Mara’s audition was for a film about the Oregon Trail. Mara had been doing her research to get into character—getting Priya to take her to the local library and read to her from musty hardcovers. That was how she had discovered the story of the Donners, who had eaten each other.

  “Gross,” Priya said.

  “I wouldn’t eat you,” I said to Mara, “unless I was really hungry.”

  “Come on!” Priya said.

  I chewed on a pizza crust, took a swig of beer, and grabbed another slice. I had fled Mara’s question about the smell by giving my flippant answer, then running to the kitchen to put the pizzas in the oven. Now all seemed nice again. We’ll go see the buffalo tomorrow, I thought. Maybe tomorrow the others will be out. I would say to Mara, “Did you know that the American buffalo is the largest mammal in North America? Technically, they’re bison. At one point there were sixty million of them in the United States alone. That was before the United States existed. Then people showed up and hunted them so bad that there were only a couple hundred of them left. They were about to go completely extinct. So some people decided to save the bison. They got together and put a bunch of them in Golden Gate Park, and maybe some other places, too, and all these bison had a bunch of babies, and now they’re not even close to going extinct.” All of this was true. I had been surprised by this information, which I’d found on a big, faded tablet in the park.

  “Do you know what extinct means?” Priya asked Mara. “It’s when every single animal of one kind of animal dies.”

  “Yeah, like the Donner Party,” Mara said.

  “Oh, God,” Priya moaned. “Sam.”

  “She does this great cannibalism routine,” Sam said. He took a giant bite of his pizza and chewed with his mouth open. Spit and cheese sprayed from between his teeth. “Nom-nom-nom,” he said, and when he finished, he patted his stomach. I laughed. He had grown one of those soft, domestic paunches. My own, lost man had one of those. A place to cup your hand at night. A place consistent with the truth if ever there was such a place. My God, I had lost it. “Method acting,” he said—this other man, Priya’s man, said this.

  “Don’t make fun of me!” Mara clattered her fork against her plate. It seemed she would cry, but she started laughing shyly.

  “Don’t mess around, you guys,” Priya cried. “Sheila, Sheila, this gruesome streak of hers, it’s actually sort of freaking me out.”

  At first, I felt a surge of pride that my little sister would still confide in me, after all that had happened. Then I wondered if my sister was implying something else. The truth was this: I had been a dark and gruesome child. I would persuade my poor baby sister to watch as I stretched a live worm with my fingertips until the tiny creature snapped in two or allowed a mosquito to rest on my thigh and fill itself up with my blood before thwacking my palm onto the sucker and smearing the resultant brown gunk across Priya’s face. But our parents had ignored this, in light of my excellence at school and in piano lessons, and had focused on berating Priya for her learning difficulties and clumsy-fingered musical efforts.

  Now, I recognized what was happening: Priya must have been waiting to find
me in a moment of weakness. Now, here was that moment, and here was Priya’s chess move: “this gruesome streak”—the implication being that there was a direct line, one that our parents had willfully ignored, between my own childhood gruesomeness and my recent fall from grace.

  Oh, that.

  Fine.

  I might as well tell you about it: the so-called fall from so-called grace. My scandal involved a high-profile, married client. He had been in San Francisco on business for a day and a night, and we had agreed to meet for a drink at the martini bar atop his hotel. We were supposed to discuss a case involving asbestos in a housing complex in the Western Addition, but after a few drinks, we discovered that we had both spent part of our twenties in Shanghai, and all of a sudden, we were trading obscenities in Mandarin. I turned to look out at the sunset. This was a historic hotel, the kind of place at which girls were said to have sat in their sailors’ laps before sending them off into the cold Pacific mist, and, thinking of this, I slid my hand across the table until my fingertips rested atop his own.

  I don’t know what to say.

  I was in a sort of fix with respect to my man.

  We had been together for ten years. But recently he had proposed to me, and after this, I had found myself hating him. I hated him for wanting to commit himself to me forever. He was the only person who knew me to my core. Yet he would have himself committed to me forever. Was he some kind of idiot?

  I had accepted, of course.

  But now this.

  Before long, my client and I were back in his hotel room, and I was sharing with him several lines of cocaine, and I flirted with him by admitting that for other clients—who I at least had the good sense not to name, though all that came out in the end—I charged a lot of money for my drugs.

  Then we were jumping on the bed. We were touching the ceiling with our fingertips. We were having so much fun. I was sucking on his thigh. This was a foreplay trick that my man with the dog liked. My client was making these sounds. My client sounded different from my man. He also looked different. He had this massive orb-like stomach and a pink coloring to my man’s slim brown self.

  I was considering this when I realized that my client was sobbing. The sight embarrassed me, especially because I had mistaken his boyish little gasps for noises of anticipatory pleasure.

  “Could you just hold me?” he whispered.

  The fun seemed over much too quickly. But I shimmied up the bed’s twisted sheets and allowed him to lay his bearded head on my chest and whisper about how little he loved his wife, whom he respected for her intellect but with whom he had no romantic chemistry. His tears and snot salted the valley between my breasts. But the kids were still young. They were all he had. He pulled his phone from his pocket. Would I like to see some pictures? On Facebook? Maddie at the beach. Rico on his birthday. It was for them that he made his living taking advantage of the vulnerability of undocumented immigrants, because, we might as well both face the facts, lawyer and client, this was what we were doing. “I plead guilty!” he said. “Ha-ha!”

  At this, my horror was complete. I finally stood and brought a hand towel from the bathroom and dabbed forcefully at his tears and snot.

  “This didn’t happen,” I said. “I swear to God.”

  My indiscretion was discovered within days: Due to a slip of the finger, the client accidentally sent a drably suggestive e-mail meant for me (he wanted me to know that he couldn’t stop thinking about my mouth) to the office manager in my firm, who was also named Sheila. Soon after that, the client confessed all—I have no idea why he did such a thing, but he did. I was fired. Of course, I had to tell my man. You know the rest, about his departure with the dog, and the emptiness.

  It was the cocaine that turned them all against me. I guess it was his first time. People could say about the other behavior: Well, it happens to the best of us. But the best of us don’t operate side businesses selling drugs to law clients. The best of us—maybe you’re among them—feel that if attorneys, who take an oath to behave in a manner consistent with the truth, go around selling drugs, then everything is permissible. Well, what if it is? Can there be a fall, I ask you, if there is no grace?

  —

  I went to the sink to refill the pitcher of water. “That’s how kids are,” I said. And I feinted: “In fact, just this morning on the bus, a little kid tried to throw a fake grenade at me.” After freezing like a little statue, his arm pulled back, the boy had dropped his hand to his thigh. While his mother had spoken, he’d filled his cheeks with air and slowly expelled it, meanwhile drumming his fingers on his leg.

  “It’s shocking,” Priya said, “how many irresponsible adults there are in this world.”

  None of us spoke. We bent our heads over our pizzas, we munched our crusts from end to end, we pinched between our fingers the bits of sausage and pepper that had fallen to our plates and ate those, too.

  Sam sighed and went to the fridge for a second beer.

  Priya burped. “Oh, God,” she said. “I’m tipsy.”

  “Are you kidding?” I said. “You’re not drunk.”

  I hated those women who would have two drinks and claim to be drunk. Ooh, my delicate constitution. I couldn’t believe my little sister had turned into one of them. And she used to be the one our parents worried about. Keep an eye on her, they told me. She’s not studying. And now you looked her up online, and she had this great social media presence. She wrote about being a stage mom, or whatever you call it. She got invited to write these guest posts on these blogs. Meanwhile, an online search for my name turned up reams of lurid detail. I held out hope that other, more prominent Sheila Reddys would soon overtake me. Most of them seemed unlikely candidates: a self-published poet in Virginia, a doctor in Detroit, and three engineers—two in San Jose, one in the Seattle area. But some seemed promising. I had my eye on the freelance journalist who had recently published an essay in Marie Claire and the marketing vice president at Procter & Gamble who, according to LinkedIn, had been slowly moving up the managerial chain. I prayed for the rise of those Sheilas.

  Now, Mara spoke again. “Sheila, seriously—what’s that smell?”

  Priya and Sam turned to look at me, and I stood to clear the table, making a noisy pile of the plates and then going to the sink to slide the scraps into the garbage disposal. I could feel pinpricks under my arms, and I wondered if I was visibly sweating. “What?” I said, but even as I spoke, I knew I sounded stupid. I had to confess. “The smell?” I said, still standing at the sink. I said, like it was nothing, “I threw up somewhere.”

  “Oh, Sheil,” Priya said. I didn’t know which was worse—my sister’s passive aggression minutes ago, or her pity now.

  “I don’t know where it is,” I said, feeling smaller than the smallest person ever to have existed. “It’s weird,” I said.

  There was silence. Then Sam said, “That’s okay!” He grinned. “That’s okay, Sheil! It happens to everyone.” Priya opened her mouth as if to protest—it does not happen to everyone—but Sam had already scraped back his chair and rolled up his sleeves. “We’ll help you,” he said.

  —

  I wandered around the kitchen. Priya was drawn to the laundry room. Mara went upstairs by herself.

  “Found it!” she called out to us. We went scrambling up the stairs to where she stood peering down into the laundry chute. That dark limbo space of the house.

  “Mara, move it!” Priya cried out. This was dirty business. Grown-ups only. Mara stepped back in alarm at the sharpness of her mother’s tone, and the rest of us crowded around the laundry chute.

  The vomit had dried middrip along one side of the chute into a purplish brown crust of yellowtail, tuna, and fish eggs, decorated with rice globules and seaweed bits.

  “Whoa,” Sam said. And suddenly—just like that—I remembered. I had found myself, after visiting the buffalo, in the BART station downtown. How had I gotten there? That I don’t remember. It had been rush hour. This had felt strange,
I remembered, to be there among you working people—you weary, bow-backed working people, your fingers working your phones as if they were rosary beads: You whom I once had been. You were not identical. I don’t mean to suggest that you were. You were in fact quite the opposite—each of you so very different from one another, your private concerns yours alone. One woman perched in the hollow of a phone booth with an accounting textbook open in her palm. She pressed the other hand to her forehead and mouthed the words as she read. People passed by and didn’t notice her, nor did she notice them. You were like trees to one another, or pylons in an obstacle course. You had once been trees and pylons to me, too.

  But now, I was undergoing a change. I felt ghostlike that morning, as if I had left the world of the living and was now paying an invisible visit. I stood in one of the long and orderly lines and when the train screeched and shuddered into place, I closed my eyes against its wind and opened them only when the air stilled and I heard groans and sighs of frustration among my line mates. The door where we’d lined up was stuck shut—USE ANOTHER DOOR, said a sign—and now we all scrambled to the next car, and when I entered that car along with everyone, instead of staying put, I pushed open the door to the first one—the shut one—so that I could be in there alone.

  There was a handful of others in the car, and we exchanged looks of complicity. And over the course of the ride I came to think of them all as my friends and was sorry when I left. I raised a hand in parting. Some of them raised hands back. And by the time I returned home, I’m pleased to admit: I was happy. Yes. Happy. I’d stopped to pick up some sushi and wine. Then I set the radio to play through all the speakers in my house, and I went to lie down on my bed. There was a French song on the radio. I don’t speak French, but it was a nice song. The lyrics went something like “Eska poo poo yay yay yay! Vuh shashay la moonay pay!” And I stripped and dropped my clothes to the floor, and I went through the closet, putting on outfit after outfit. I stood before the mirrored closet door and shimmied and sang. “Eska poo poo yay yay yay! Vuh shashay la moonay pay!” I stood in my pile of clothes, and I trembled and sweated and felt joyful. I lifted my breasts and felt the cool air on their undersides. And then I felt nauseated.