The Best American Short Stories 2017

by Meg Wolitzer

  He snapped his fingers and pointed at me. “Katherine!”

  I shook my head.

  “But it’s something with a K sound, though, right? Caroline or Cassidy or . . .”

  “Sorry.”

  He had his eyes closed, concentrating. “You work at a bar.”

  “Coffee shop.”

  “Well fuck me,” he said. “Fuck me fuck me fuck me.” He opened his eyes, as if suddenly finding out someone he’d known for years was not who he thought they were.

  “You had a lot on your mind,” I said. “And your elbow.”

  He shook his head—like, Can you believe me?

  “Don’t worry about it,” I said. “I suspect it’s harder to not be a douchebag than people think.”

  He gave a little laugh, but I think, of all the things I said, that might’ve hurt the most. The condescension and truth of it. I felt okay then, in control of things.

  “Well, thanks for understanding, Katherine,” he said, “or whatever your name is.”

  I just smiled.

  He reached into his backpack for his phone. “I should probably—” He turned on his phone and it buzzed and buzzed. He began reading messages. “Oh shit.”

  “Girlfriend?”

  “What?” He scowled. “No. No. I have an earlier call tomorrow than I thought. I’m gonna have someone come get me.”

  “Sure.”

  He pressed a number and put his iPhone to his ear. “Hey. It’s me. I’m at this girl’s house. Yeah, in Bend. I know. I know. Hey, is there any way . . .” He didn’t have to finish the sentence. I guessed there were a lot of sentences he didn’t have to finish. “Yeah. Cool. Just a sec.” He looked up at me. “Hey, what’s the address here?”

  In Been There, Done That, he has a great scene where he has a beer with the black boyfriend, who, it turns out, is super religious and has a problem with gay people. It ends with the two of them laughing together, two otherwise decent men confronting their old biases. As Hollywood pat as it sounds, the scene comes off as entirely genuine.

  I have to say, right before he left, it felt that way in my apartment, too. Genuine. Like we’d come through something. He took a quick shower, and came out dressed in the same jeans and gray T-shirt.

  He bowed. “Well, nameless queen of Bend, it was a pleasure to meet you tonight. Thank you.”

  I’d put a T-shirt on.

  “Can I kiss you goodbye?”

  I said he could.

  It would be hard being with an actor. Figuring out what’s real. That goodbye kiss he gave me—honestly, I don’t know if I’ve ever been kissed like that: one hand behind my neck, the other on my waist. It was a great, generous kiss and I felt myself opening up to him, more than I had in bed. In fact, the kiss was so good I started to think about that laughter in Been There, Done That. I mean, clearly, they weren’t really laughing like that, but in a way they sort of were. I guess in acting, you become the very thing you’re portraying. In sex scenes, if you act turned on, you get turned on. Act like something is hilarious, it becomes hilarious. And that’s how that kiss was—

  My God, if that kiss wasn’t real, I don’t even care. I’ll take fake over real any day. I’ve seen real.

  Maybe it’s that way with our lives, too. Normal people. I mean, we’re all acting all of the time anyway, putting on our not-crazy faces for people, acting like making someone a cappuccino is the greatest thrill in the world, pretending to care about things you don’t, pretending not to care about things you do care about, pretending your name isn’t Katherine when it is, acting like you have your shit together when, the truth is, well—

  I didn’t want to look out the window as he left—it seemed like such a stupid movie-cliché thing to do—but I couldn’t help myself. I looked out. He gave a small glance over his shoulder to my window, but I think the light was wrong and he couldn’t see my face. Then he flicked at his hair and jumped into the passenger seat of a blue Audi, which zipped away. I imagined his Big Bro driving the car. I imagined the Famous Actor lighting up a Natural Spirit while the car bonged at him to put on his seat belt. He hated seat belts. It was three in the morning. I wasn’t tired.

  I looked around my apartment.

  The Famous Actor was in a serial killer movie, too. It’s called Over Tumbled Graves and he plays this young cop, the love interest of the girl detective hunting a serial killer. It might be the only movie of his that I’ve never seen—because of Megan, I guess. If you suffer night terrors and insomnia you sort of learn to avoid serial killer movies. Not that I begrudge him being in it. We all make choices. And he generally makes good ones. I just read that he is getting a franchise superhero in one of those reboots. And that he’s engaged to the girl who is going to play Blue Aura in the same movie.

  I’m really glad for him. He’s been through a lot the last year. It wasn’t even two weeks after the postapocalyptic movie finished production in Bend that I read that the Famous Actor was going back into rehab. Of course, I might have been the least surprised person in the world.

  The morning he left, I rubbed lotion on my arms so that I wouldn’t start scratching. I cried for a while, then I cried for crying. I went back to bed but I couldn’t fall back to sleep. I had to be at the coffee shop at six. I repeated the steps: Get out of bed. Keep moving. Take care of yourself. I got up to take a shower. That’s when I noticed my medicine cabinet door was slightly ajar. I opened it all the way. He had cleaned it out. The Zoloft I take for depression. The Ativan I take for anxiety. The Ambien I sometimes have to take to sleep. But not just that. He took the Benadryl and the Advil and the Gas-X. He even took the Lysteda I sometimes take when I get these ungodly heavy periods. I can’t imagine what he thought he was going to do with that one. Two days later I got a visit from a nice young woman from the production company. I signed the nondisclosure documents without negotiating. She gave me a check for $6,000. All I had to do was promise never to mention his name. But what’s a name anyway?

  That morning, as I stood there, staring at that empty medicine cabinet, I felt the strangest sense of pride in him. Warmth. Love, even. Well, look at you, I thought, you are normal—as normal as the most fucked-up barista in Bend, Oregon. Relax, Terrific Todd, wherever you are, you’re one of us.

  Contributors’ Notes

  Chad B. Anderson is a writer and editor living in Washington, DC. Born and raised in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley, he earned his BA from University of Virginia and his MFA in creative writing from Indiana University where he served as fiction editor for Indiana Review. He has been a resident at the Ledig House International Writers’ Colony, and his fiction was published in Salamander, Black Warrior Review, and Nimrod International Journal. He has also published nonfiction with The Hairsplitter and several articles and reports on higher education.

  ■ “Maidencane” started as a feverish and spontaneous writing exercise one morning in fall 2015 when I wasn’t writing fiction as much as I wanted. I began with a kind of synecdoche for rambunctious, rural childhood: the scraping of sneakers on soil, the snatching of hands, cloudbursts of red dirt. I drew the camera backward, answering a series of questions: Who do the feet and hands belong to? What are they snatching? Where are they? By the end of that morning, I had these characters, somewhere in the South, but it wasn’t a fully formed story and I didn’t know it was a character’s memory. It was just a kid’s perfect day, and of course, I decided to destroy it: the brother gone, the neighbor girl dead, and the protagonist’s childhood in the distant past. Gradually, over several months and several drafts, the story expanded from there.

  At the time, the only writing I was doing was nonfiction in my personal journal, and I had fallen into this habit of writing in second person, speaking to myself, but also, in some ways, distancing myself from my own experiences, actions, and feelings, for better or for worse. The second person just slipped into “Maidencane” by accident, and I always intended to change it. But at some point, I realized the second person fit because this
was an introspective but distant character who wasn’t fully attached to anything: emotion, family, lovers, work. The protagonist only seems attached to this memory of a person who would otherwise be a footnote in anyone else’s history. At the same time, “Maidencane” is a very introspective story, mostly (re)played in the protagonist’s head, the way we all replay and repackage experiences internally, creating our own narratives of who we and others are, which may or may not be the truth.

  I have a memory of hurting an adult cousin’s feelings with an unintentionally offhanded comment when I was seven years old. Although it was a minor incident occurring decades ago, the memory sticks with me and it stings. It shaped the way I interact with others into adulthood. And yet, there are bigger family events I barely remember. Why—like the protagonist with that memory of the girl on the dock—do I cling to this memory? Around the time that I was writing “Maidencane,” my family and I experienced a series of challenging events, including the death of my grandfather. During those difficult times, through our many and sometimes profound differences, we clung to what we hoped were shared memories, seeking connection to him, to each other, and to ourselves. In some ways, we succeeded, and in others, we failed. “Maidencane,” in part, is an attempt to capture that experience, one that I suspect all families grapple with in some form or another.

  T. C. Boyle is the author of twenty-eight books of fiction, including The Terranauts (2016) and The Relive Box and Other Stories, due out this fall. He published his collected stories in two volumes, T. C. Boyle Stories (1998) and T. C. Boyle Stories II (2013), and was awarded the PEN/Malamud Award for his short fiction in 1999 and the Rea Award for the Short Story in 2014. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  ■ In my long career and even longer life on this earth, I have come to one conclusion: things always get worse. The deniers and revisionists have seized control of Washington, the hundred-year storms are coming once a week, the seas are rising and the polar bears paddling toward a distant horizon that will suck them down into the void of extinction any day now. In the absence of God, we look to science for hope. But science has now given us perhaps the most frightening agent of change yet, CRISPR-Cas9 gene-editing technology. Reports of it are all but inescapable, and, just as in “Are We Not Men?,” we are now barraged with ads for DIY kits to enable us to toy with evolution over the kitchen sink. Is this a good idea? Well, again, as in the story, science croons to us in the most reasonable of voices, telling us of the great boon such technology promises humanity by way of permanently editing inherited disorders out of the germline, but once the dogcat is out of the bag . . . So. I am a satirist, I am a wise guy, I am a nudger and winker. In the face of the horror, what else is left to us but to laugh?

  Along these lines, I should say that the suite of transgenic creatures mentioned so casually toward the end of the story includes but two of my own invention—the aforementioned dogcat and the crowparrot. The other five are already among us. And tell me, what parent, eager for his/her offspring to have a little head start in life, won’t renounce the old dirty way of mixing genes between the sheets, when science offers us a shining new way to personhood? Or no, not simply personhood, but super-personhood? What do I say? Good luck.

  Kevin Canty’s eighth book, a novel called The Underworld, was published by W. W. Norton in March 2017. He is also the author of three previous collections of short stories (Where the Money Went, Honeymoon, and A Stranger in This World) and four novels (Nine Below Zero, Into the Great Wide Open, Winslow in Love, and Everything). His short stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Esquire, Tin House, GQ, Glimmer Train, Story, New England Review, The Best American Short Stories 2015, and elsewhere; essays and articles in Vogue, Details, Playboy, the New York Times, and the Oxford American, among others. He lives and writes in Missoula, Montana.

  ■ The literal roots of this story are neither surprising nor interesting: I was working at my dining table, right by my open door, on a sunny, warm summer day. The table sits in front of a big window with a view of the mountain half a block away; I have an office and a desk but I often prefer to sit here for the view. When the proselytizers came to the door, though, I was in plain sight. I couldn’t pretend that I wasn’t home.

  It was a woman and a boy and the boy never spoke. The woman was kindly, measured, and very sincere. Did I take the pamphlet? I can’t remember. I often do, meaning to be kind, though I discard them unread. The encounter was over quickly and uneventfully.

  When they were gone, though, I found myself thinking of a passage I had read by Annie Dillard, about looking down at the singers in the street, bearing witness with their songs, and how much more interesting it would be to be inside the circle looking out, rather than outside looking in. I have no idea if I am remembering this accurately; it’s been years since I read the essay, and I didn’t go back to try to find it. But this was the version I remembered in the moment, and this set the story in motion. What was that boy’s life about? What did it feel like?

  And then, inevitably, my own Catholic boyhood came into play—that moment in particular when the saintly eleven-year-old was turning into a twelve-year-old pervert. So I made the boy a little older than he had been in real life and gave him strong unresolvable feelings: real faith, real desire. You can’t be both at once. And yet he is. The tables are tipped a bit by the fact that he loves an abstract God but an actual breathing girl. But the tension of these two elements is where I found the story.

  Jai Chakrabarti was born in Kolkata, India, and grew up between India and half a dozen American states. He was a 2015 Emerging Writer Fellow with A Public Space and received his MFA from Brooklyn College. His work has appeared in A Public Space, Barrow Street, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and other publications. He lives with his family in Brooklyn, New York.

  ■ When I walk through my grandparents’ house in Kolkata, a sprawling colonial built at the turn of the last century, I can sense the stories that these old walls must have seen. On the bottom floor lived the maids, the cleaners, the cooks, as well as their children, and on the floors above, an extended family whose ghosts now roam from the kitchen to the parlor. With its crumbling verandahs and empty rooms, the house of Nikhil echoes my family’s grand home gone to disrepair. When I climb the steps to the rooftop and see how closely the buildings lean on each other, a clothesline running from one family’s roof to the next, I imagine Nikhil’s perilous journey, up those same steps and into the humid air that feels at once constricting and full of possibility.

  Emma Cline is the author of The Girls, which was a finalist for the National Book Critic Circle’s John Leonard Prize. Her stories have appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, Tin House, and Paris Review. In 2014, she was the winner of the Plimpton Prize.

  ■ This story really began with the setting: a certain kind of farm that is very familiar to me from growing up in Northern California, the kind of place where there always seems to be blue tarps everywhere. At the same time that the landscape of these places is so idyllic, the isolation and separation breeds the possibility of great violence. I liked exploring that idea of beauty or innocence, and its latent darkness—Heddy is still childish, in so many ways, with her lists and college classes, but her relationship with Otto, and their history together on the farm, is unsettling, bordering on perverse. Those are the parts of Heddy that ensure she will forever remain unknowable to Peter, and that is maybe the biggest loss in the story—the people we love will always, in some fundamental way, be beyond our reach.

  Leopoldine Core was born and raised in New York’s East Village and graduated from Hunter College. She is the author of the poetry collection Veronica Bench and the short story collection When Watched, which was a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award. Her fiction and poetry have appeared in Joyland, Open City, PEN America, and Apology Magazine, among others. She is the recipient of a 2015 Whiting Award for fiction, as well as fellowships from the Center for Fiction and the Fine Arts Work Center. She lives in Ne
w York.

  ■ I had been writing dialogue between two women for months—just talking, no descriptions of any kind. I must have written a hundred pages of their banter. And they revealed themselves to me—Kit and Lucy did. It seemed at first to be a moral story, but then I realized that it was actually about the construction of morality—how fixed states of virtue and evil are falsely projected onto people, much the way gender is. I wanted to portray a deep bond between women in what might be considered the most unlikely of circumstances—the sex industry—and watch them come to understand how rare friendship is—much rarer than lust, in my opinion. This is a story about the early life of the writer—that moment of becoming obsesses me—maybe because in some way it never ends. And a young writer, especially if they are a marginalized individual, is not encouraged—they have to write in spite of being routinely demoralized. And somehow they do—many do. I wanted to track some of the ways misogyny is internalized by women—and watch Kit and Lucy deconstruct the experience out loud. I wanted to show how fluid identity really is—how the self in each case consists of many, often conflicting parts. No one is all good or all bad. Everyone has the capacity to violate others—and be violated. We are all so fragile, really.

  Patricia Engel is the author of Vida, a finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award and a New York Times Notable Book, It’s Not Love, It’s Just Paris, winner of the International Latino Book Award, and most recently, The Veins of the Ocean, named a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Her books have been widely translated and her short fiction has appeared in The Atlantic, A Public Space, Boston Review, and ZYZZYVA, among other journals, and anthologies including The Best American Mystery Stories 2014. She lives in Miami.