The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  When Lauryn brought him home to meet her mother a couple of months later, Hillis wished her husband were alive to help. She was tired from losing her husband not yet a year before, and she made a decision to wish for her daughter’s happiness if she could not count on Lauryn’s judgment. The wedding was held in Lisbon, with a brief honeymoon at the Ritz. Hillis did not make the trip, but sent a surpassingly generous gift.

  The house Macario rented for them in Estoril faced the sea. Chalet Esperanza had been built in the sixteenth century; its terraces poured bougainvillea to the ground. The newlyweds drank coffee in the morning on the bedroom terrace, close enough to the sea to spot starfish on the beach at low tide. Macario brought his bride a tiny poodle—mostly poodle—that had hung around the track for several days. The pit crews had fed it, but no one had showed up to look for it. Lauryn named the dog Espe; she bathed it and bought the dog a wardrobe of collars. Macario took that summer to get to know his bride.

  Lauryn wrote to Hillis about the blissful days they woke to. She told her mother that she walked to the market earlier than the tourists, said she was not herself a tourist since her wedding to Macario. She said she rid herself of the flat Chicago a—she noticed this the few times she spoke her native language. She was where she was meant to be, she said, living a life that made sense.

  She was learning the history of the coastal towns, visiting the landmark churches, thriving in Estoril’s moderate summer instead of the humid heat of Illinois. She said she liked to linger in Parede, a small beach where the high iodine content in the water was said to be good for the bones; there were two orthopedic hospitals in the town. Lauryn told her mother she thought she might visit one and read to the patients in the children’s ward.

  Some days she went to Tamariz, the beach beside the Estoril Casino and Gardens, or to Praia dos Pescadores for the fish market, or to the baroque Church of the Navigators to pray that Macario would always return to her but not to the track.

  The Circuito Estoril at the Autódromo was a tricky course on the Formula 1 circuit with its bumpy straights, constant radius corners, heavy braking zones, and a tricky chicane. The month they had the chalet, July, was a month when only motorbikes raced. Unless Macario and Lauryn extended their stay, his racing pals would not be around to tempt him back onto the course.

  Each felt the other was a prize, so where was the need to continue to compete?

  Such was Lauryn’s thinking, as reported to her mother, and passed along to me. Macario, she pointed out, had filled a trophy case already; did he need to risk his life now that he had a wife, and, soon, a child?

  Though Lauryn was twenty-one years old, and I was seventeen, she treated me not like her older sister’s child, but as someone who could profit from all that she had learned. Though I could not pick up languages the way that she could, I took in other lessons.

  That summer, Lauryn started to wear loose shifts. She no longer tucked in her shirts. She took naps, and was alternately sick and ravenous. She instilled in Macario a lust for dynasty, a word she used ironically, but which he did not.

  Then she made the classic mistake of taking the exotic out of its element. She took her husband home and turned him into what she could easily have found without leaving Illinois. Macario did not hold it against her, but Lauryn came to blame him for the same things that drew her to him first.

  After the month in Estoril, Lauryn brought Macario home again. She wanted an American doctor, she wanted her mother’s help with the baby, she wanted Macario to take a job with the company her father used to run. She wanted an American husband, after all. When their son James was born, Macario pronounced it “Zhime.” Portuguese was the language they fought in.

  The first two years of motherhood were a balm for Lauryn. During the pregnancy she had stopped taking medication to lift her spirits, and she did not take it up again after the baby was born. She attributed her changes in mood to the new responsibilities, to the vigilance required to protect her child and make sure he would thrive. She talked to her mother on the phone or saw her every day. I saw her every few months when I flew in from California to get away from the life that had not yet started for me. I preferred her life, the one she talked about from before the baby was born.

  Macario helped with childcare when he came home from the office in the evening. Still, Lauryn said she needed a break from them all, from it all, and booked a flight to Lisbon on her twenty-third birthday.

  Macario would not have known there was a tape if the chief of police had not been an old friend who told him. It was not generally known that the police taped international calls placed within the capital. So when Lauryn placed the call to her mother in Chicago from a room in the Lisbon Ritz on the last night of her life, the conversation was recorded by police. The chief of police not only told Macario this, he gave him a copy of the tape.

  Macario listened to it once, and then put it in his strongbox at the bank. He did not tell Hillis there was a tape of the last conversation she had had with her daughter, or that he had listened to Lauryn as she made less and less sense after taking the pills. But he did tell me.

  Hillis and I drank coffee on her terrace on the eighteenth floor of her apartment building, close enough to Lake Michigan to smell diesel fuel. She had mostly quit caffeine when Lauryn died; it fought the medication she had taken since then to calm her. But you could not lose everything at once, she maintained, and continued to drink coffee in the morning, as before. In the years since Lauryn died, she had lost her view from the terrace. It had been largely blocked by the John Hancock building, which she had watched go up from her living room across from the office and residential tower.

  Hillis did not want to talk about Lauryn, but she seemed to enjoy my visits when I came back to Chicago from the coast. Though there was not any glamour to the work that I did, my grandmother asked for particulars. In an uneasy near-coincidence, I edited articles for medical publications. It was a job I knew I would leave as soon as something better appeared.

  I am sure that if Lauryn had wanted a doctor to come and pump her stomach she would have phoned the front desk of the Ritz Hotel and told them to send one up to her room. She wanted to talk to her mother, and hear her mother tell her from thousands of miles away that James was sleeping in the guest room in his crib, and that it was hard to make out what she was saying—could she speak up?—and that she would feel better when she woke up in the morning, and then ask her mother to stay on the line while she sang herself to sleep.

  Macario did not let me listen to the tape; I had to take his word for what was on it when he took me aside at James’s tenth birthday party and gave me this ugly gift. Why tell me then? He had no answer when I asked him.

  This morning I thought to make a tape recording of my own. I wanted to tell my aunt about the party I went to in Malibu last night. The fellow who answered the door was not the host, but the French actor, the rake who played a rake in his film debut, who seduced my aunt in Madrid so many years before. He had aged pretty well; he still had it, I thought.

  I had wanted to play something out, so I trailed him through the house, then asked if he would step outside and show me the night sky. I introduced myself as Lauryn, and spelled out where the y replaced an e. Did I expect him to flinch? With his arm around my shoulders, he narrated what we looked up and saw. I would not have known if he was right about the constellations. His accent almost worked on me. But when he stopped talking, and leaned in for the kiss, I ducked, and said, “You can remember me as the girl you showed the new moon to.”

  “But darling,” he said, “there’s a new moon every month.”

  Still, I wanted to tell my aunt. The days of tape cassettes were over, but the equipment must be somewhere to be found, and when I was the one who found it, wouldn’t I record a tape on which I told her the story? Wouldn’t I mail it off to Macario in a suitable felt bag so he could take it to the bank in Lisbon and unlock the strongbox and place it beside the tape of his wife chattering
away in the vault.

  NOY HOLLAND

  Tally

  FROM Epoch

  I knew a sober man whose brother had died driving drunk on the high windy plains. The living brother, the sober brother, took to drink straightaway. He was belligerent and incompetent, drunk, and a gentle, almost girlish man, sober. He drank schnapps of every flavor and hue.

  It was my job to pour and to tally, to feed a coin now and then into the jukebox when the quiet was too much to bear. Merle Haggard, Garth Brooks, Emmylou. “I got friends in low places”—every variation of that town and time is for me ferried by this one dumb song.

  The man, the men—the sober man, the dead man—had a sister, inscrutable as a turtle. She appeared each night and drove her living brother home, for months in the same floral blouse. And then she didn’t. She had given up, or gone elsewhere. And so the sober brother drove home wildly, drunk, the long way around, making turns that were not in the road.

  One night after several months of this I let myself accompany him home. I drove us out to the turn his brother had missed and we lay in the grass for the stars. I felt pity, yes, and alluring. Enchanted by a grief that wasn’t mine. We heard a bird in the dark we couldn’t see. Meteor, meteoroid, meteorite, we remembered. Sedimentary, igneous, metamorphic.

  After a time we stood up and he kissed me. In his hair the pods of a seed caught—feathery, silver, like something spit from a galaxy, space junk—luck—that sought and found him.

  His place was tiny, the bathtub dragged into the kitchen—the longest clawfoot I’d ever seen. You could lie in that tub without bending, sink beneath the glistening meringue of foam and entirely disappear. He went under. You cannot believe for how long. I couldn’t see his face but his eyes showed, drastic, dark, sprung open. One eye disappeared, appeared again. He was winking at me slowly, the minutes slow in passing.

  In bed, he moved as if blind. He was precise, and maddeningly patient. Once he whistled—one note—as to a dog.

  The body opens, can be opened, a marvel, and still we live.

  When he had finished, he filled the bath again. Carried me to it—not a word. Again the soap foamed up, great billowing mounds. It smelled of berries. In my cunt, a burning balloon.

  The window glass shook. Water sloshed in the tub. We thought we’d caused it. We had lain in his drunk brother’s ashes, in grass where he had gone ahead. It had not been my grief but I had claimed it. The mountains shuddered. The horizon bucked, it buckled—the boulders strewn and the grasses, erratic, the path of the glacier plain. This isn’t metaphor. This was an earthquake, a moving ripple—ground I had thought of as solid warped, and returning to liquid again.

  SONYA LARSON

  Gabe Dove

  FROM Salamander

  I met Gabe Dove when I was sad and attracting men who liked me sad.

  There was the jeweler with goopy eyes, the lawyer who overtexted. Men with lotioned hands, combed beards, tight jeans. Many had allergies. Few ate bread. Inside of two coffees, they were chronicling the history of their itchy and unrested bodies. I listened. I was too weak to protest. All of our hearts had recently been destroyed. They brought me tulips, sent me jokes from the Internet. I think they enjoyed observing somebody sadder than them. They thought me gentle, soft, easy on their hearts.

  “Enough of these limpdicks,” said Angela, unwrapping a beef sandwich on her desk. I stole a fry. Angela was admin like me, ten years younger, and generally exasperated from repeating her own advice. “You’ve got to meet someone normal,” she said. “Someone from Shelby.”

  Shelby was Angela’s neighborhood. Shelby was where my mom played mahjongg in a hair salon. Shelby wasn’t the kind of place I’d go looking for a man. “But these uptown guys,” I said, pressing ketchup from a packet. “At least they have money.”

  “They’re snobs,” said Angela. She licked a trail of beef juice from her wrist. “Go on—I can’t finish. Look. Do you want a good one or not? Or just sleep with someone, why don’t you. You’ve got to break the seal.”

  I described my latest dream to Angela. Tunnels of blood, winds, the sensation that I’d been murdered. Sure it’s sleep, but how is it rest? The fry sagged in my fingers. “It’s just that I can’t stop thinking about him. I can’t stop thinking about—”

  “Hold up,” said Angela, raising her hand. “Remember? His name is Mr. Fuckbag.”

  Mr. Fuckbag. Right.

  “Practice saying it,” she said. “I want you to say it twenty times a day.” She put down her sandwich and looked me squarely in the eye. “Fuckbag. Fuckbag. Fuckbag.”

  I wanted a good one. I was ready. But I knew that these things don’t happen right away. You have to go through some months. You have to go through some people. Who knows why, but that’s how the universe works: it doesn’t cough up your people right away.

  In the meantime, there are some opening acts. Some vaudeville.

  Some asked about my triathlon stuff. Some did not. A lot were the type who liked Asians. Their googly eyes were too enchanted, too soon. They marveled at my tiny frame, my hairless arms, how they could wrap their fingers all the way around my wrist. They liked me small.

  Fuckbag was funny, but I couldn’t laugh about this stuff, I’m sorry. Not about Ex.

  I’d slept with none of them. I don’t know. I could have. But I thought like maybe I would be hurting Ex if I did that, like somehow he would know. Did you get what you want, Chuntao? Did it solve all your problems?

  Some days I’d say I was working from home. I’d steal Oreos from my new roommates and guiltily replace them, measuring the columns in their crinkly plastic trays. Outside, the sidewalks rippled with people. Sometimes I put on real pants and walked among their swishing hair, their sniffing dogs. But the feeling always came back. The park, the office, the bench under the trees: there was nowhere I could go where I would feel okay.

  In my latest dream, Ex lifted my dangling leg and swallowed me like a pill. I bumped along his mute red veins. The rumbling I heard was his voice.

  I tried swimming in the river. Coach had said, Stay in the pool, take it easy, don’t push. But pushing’s the whole point—you want to feel it, don’t you? So I did the ninety minutes in the cold and craggy waves. In the river there were no other swimmers: just hunched men in dinghies, a speedboat or two. Lily pads clogging the shores. Floating branches to push out of the way.

  But always there was Ex. Even with my face in the water, ears plugged all the way to my brain: Ex was there. It was for Ex that I glossed my nails, for Ex that I curled my hair, for Ex that I tried on twenty scratchy blouses in the litter of the fitting room. I could not decide. What did I want? I wanted him to see. To see me and rethink how things had gone.

  Sometimes, in the river, I had this sensation that I was drowning. Ridiculous, I know—I’m an ace, I’m an expert. I was all-state three times. But I tell you: I couldn’t breathe. Once I had to stop. I was choking, I had to curl myself over a branch like a kid in her very first lesson, the one who still needs plastic floaties, the one nobody wants to be.

  Angela said, “I know him from church.” And I guess—because Angela and because church—I was expecting a white guy.

  She thumbed his number into my phone. “Gabe . . . Dove,” she said. “Don’t be surprised if he takes a while. He’s a doctor.” She nodded approvingly.

  Our texts were brief, all logistics. At home I watched an episode of Spy 25, but only half. I put on my orange twisty dress. I did my hair.

  I waited by the hostess stand. He’d agreed to come to my neighborhood, to a bar called The Vault. It was a nothing place, a comfortable place. The walls were covered with autographed photos of local celebrities: Popovich, Robinson, Duncan doing a lay-up. I commented on the hostess’s cool necklace—she always wore the best jewelry. She thanked me and I laughed. I was nervous, I guess because of Angela. I liked Angela. She took the time.

  So in walk these guys in baseball caps and shorts. I search their faces but they’re going straight
for the bar, not for me. Then the revolving door spins and suddenly, in a cold gust of air, there’s this guy in a suit. The whole works—tailored cuffs, pressed pants, shiny shoes. All wrong for this bar. He’s searching the room, neck stretched, holding the handle of a small suitcase on wheels. He looks like somebody’s dad.

  “Are you . . . ?” he said. He dipped toward me, extending his hand. “You must be Chuntao. Hello!”

  We shook, him sandwiching my hand like I’m some long-lost friend. “Hi,” I said, eyeing the suitcase. “Were you on a trip?” He explained that ha, if only, everybody asks him that, but no—he just doesn’t want to ruin his back. I nodded at Gabe Dove. He followed me to the bar, shoes clicking behind me, the suitcase rolling so loudly that I could hear the hostess staring.

  He was Asian. Did Angela pick him because of that? Maybe she had that on her mind. Maybe like that would make us more compatible. But what about the rest of me, Angela? What about all that? These were my thoughts as Gabe Dove excused himself to wash his hands.

  “I see you’re getting back out there,” said the bartender, who winked and poured my usual.

  “Just pretend you don’t know me, please,” I said. On the mirrored wall behind the bottles my watery arms were adjusting my ponytail. All that time I’d spent blending my eye shadow—I could have been finishing my show.

  Gabe Dove returned. We sipped. Me, my Bud Light, him, brandy on ice. Brandy—like an old person. We discussed my job (admin at Livagon Insurance) and his (ear, nose, and throat). He worked at Veterans. TV was not his thing. Despite his weird suit, he rested his elbows comfortably on the sticky bar, his eyebrows very interested in the stuff I was saying. He had an accent I didn’t know, lilting up at the ends of sentences, making them sound like questions. A Rod Seeger song came on, my fave, and I got distracted—Gabe Dove’s explaining face, lit green and white by the flashes of a soccer game.