The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  “You know about Margaret Bourke-White?” I said.

  “I read autobiographies, Anna. It’s all there in her book.”

  “Well, I thought Christine did a very good job, talking about how Bourke-White got into the workforce, and—”

  “Getting the job done is what’s important. Not how you got the job.”

  “You’re too hard on her,” I said.

  She looked at me. “Do you think so? I just don’t have much patience with anecdotes.”

  “She was explaining that Margaret Bourke-White had a lot of sadness in her life, just like the rest of us.”

  “Yes, I think we could assume that everyone experiences sadness,” Lucia replied.

  I thought: why do you never offer to pay, like you’re a princess? Why not arrange your own transportation in the city? Why don’t you cook your own Thanksgiving dinner for fewer people, rather than having two Mexican women in the kitchen all day, and you making only your perfect apple tarts?

  My face must have clouded over; she put her hand on my arm and said, “Sit down for a second. We’re friends, you and I. I have something important to tell you.”

  I sank, rather than sat. Was she going to tell me she was sick? She had seated herself one chair in, giving me the aisle, gesturing grandly, as if the seat were a gift. The last cluster of students stood talking to Christine.

  “You’re a writer. Writers have become celebrities, haven’t they? Whether they want to be or not. Well, the visiting writer did want to be the center of attention, it seemed to me. Writers are so often insecure. So let me tell you: in my one conversation with him, it seems he’d never even heard that Bruce Chatwin hadn’t told the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. Didn’t know Chatwin had made things up—including the information about what killed him, we now know. If I’d talked about James Frey, I suppose I could have made some of the same points. From what the visiting writer revealed about himself, I thought he was a literary lightweight. I wouldn’t have offered him, and his wife, my house. But that’s neither here nor there. Edwina, my friend, has been taking one of those mood-altering drugs, and she’s calmer now, so she understands she isn’t responsible, but you know, she’d gotten to the point where she imagined him and his wife in her house. She imagined them sitting by the fireplace, she looked at her window and saw the shattered glass even though it had been replaced, she saw the dead woman standing in the kitchen doing dishes—she didn’t really see her, she’s not crazy, but she imagined her. I told her, Come to my house. Get out of there; get out of that environment for a while. I guess I did just what she did, didn’t I, offering my house? But she was impulsive, and I was her friend of more than twenty-five years. So it came as quite a surprise to both of us that we fell in love. We did. Your eyes are as big as saucers, Anna. If we did, we did.”

  I nodded, registering the beginning of a faint headache as I narrowed my eyes.

  “Writers like to surprise readers, but they don’t like to be surprised, I’ve found.” She grasped my wrist. “Here is why I’m telling you: I’m going to tell Christine about it and I think it’s going to come as something of a shock for her, so I wanted you to know, before we have our drink. You knew we were going to the Carlyle, where I’m staying tonight, the three of us, to have a drink?”

  “I don’t think she told me,” I said, though as I spoke, I vaguely remembered Christine saying something. More as a possibility, though. Her phone call to me a couple of days before had been on the run, pleading: “I’ve got to teach, then run home and walk Walter, then get back to give the talk, so can you please, please, meet her train and see that she gets there okay?”

  Lucia could book a room at an expensive hotel, but not offer to pay for the car? She wanted … what? For me to be prepared, in case her daughter became (improbably) a basket case, when she told her? I wished she hadn’t told me. I wasn’t pleased about knowing this information before Christine did. It would make a liar of me if I pretended what I was hearing was news, and I’d be her mother’s confidante if I let on that she’d already told me.

  “This is private. It’s between you and your daughter,” I said. “I’m going to go home and let you two talk.”

  “No, Anna, you have to join us,” she said.

  “You want an audience, just like those writers you’re so suspicious of,” I said. “I’d wonder, if I were you, whether he ever slept with your friend, or whether that wasn’t her imagination, too. You hear about it when a person has a reputation for sleeping around,” I said. “I doubt that it’s true.”

  I had met his wife at a fund-raiser. She’d quickly confessed she felt out of place, and didn’t know what to talk about. Her pin had fallen on the floor, that was how we’d met. I’d bent to pick it up, and had helped her fasten it to the collar of her silky black shirt again. When her husband the writer saw us talking, he came up to us. I could tell by the way he put his arm around his wife’s shoulder that he worried I might be too much for her, in some way. They’d both grown up in the Midwest, and I’d grown up on the Upper West Side—which was no doubt why Pennsylvania had seemed like Siberia to me in my college days. I’d liked the writer’s protectiveness, and I’d picked up on the fact that he wanted his wife to talk to people on her own, but the minute she did, he wanted to make sure she was comfortable. When he saw that we were giggling and talking about jewelery, he’d gone away.

  “Anna?” Lucia said. “You seem to have turned your attention inward. If I didn’t know you so well, I might think I’d surprised you.”

  “I don’t care who you have a relationship with,” I said. “If you really care what I think about lesbianism, I approve of whatever relationship brings people happiness.”

  I walked away, up the aisle. When I was younger, I would have bought into it, assumed I was involved, just because someone older insisted I be. Now, I thought how nice it would be to listen to music I wanted to listen to, instead of the tinkling piano at the hotel. I wouldn’t feel I had to offer to pay for my own drink, because I’d already paid earlier in the week, when I bought myself a bottle of Grey Goose I could pour from, into my favourite etched glass I’d bought at a stoop sale in Brooklyn. What would Christine think of me disappearing? Maybe that I was smart. I wondered how Lucia would lead into the subject. By criticizing Christine for being “anecdotal,” then zinging her with an important fact? Lucia was self-important and manipulative, and if Christine didn’t know that by now I could mention the obvious, by way of consolation, later.

  Outside, I turned the corner and went into my favorite Chinese restaurant. There were only two tables, both taken, so I went to the counter for takeout. “Anna!” Wang, the waiter, said, turning the paper menu toward him, pencil poised delicately, like a conductor’s baton, to circle what I wanted.

  “You don’t know she wants shrimp fried rice?” his brother, who was now known as James, said. James was taking night classes at NYU and sometimes asked me for help with his homework. “Once, twice a month she has chicken with broccoli, but tonight she doesn’t want that. This is her look when she’s in a hurry. In a hurry, always shrimp fried rice.” He smiled a big smile and circled the correct item and handed the piece of paper through the opening into the kitchen. “Great reading in my course. The poetry of William Butler Yeats. Next time we’ll talk,” James said.

  Wang had walked away from the counter and was standing at one of the tables, where a customer with his hands folded on top of his violin case on the shiny tabletop seemed to be giving him a bad time about the beer not being cold enough.

  When I left, I held the paper bag away from my coat (I always worried I’d stain it). I’d splurged on the coat three years before, a mid-calf cashmere coat I’d resolved I’d take good care of and wear for years. Every time I slipped into it, it felt possible something good could happen.

  In my apartment, no husband, no Walter the dog awaited me. Instead of a pet, I had a terrarium with small plastic knights inside, some on horseback, some felled, some still fighting on
AstroTurf sprinkled with red nail polish—a gift from a boyfriend who’d been a disaster, though he’d had a great sense of humor. I took off my coat, reached in the pocket, ripped up the receipt for the car and threw it in the trash, so I wouldn’t be tempted to do something mean, like send it to Lucia. Christine was still my friend, though I was free of her mother now. I’d been without a family for almost ten years, and I didn’t want a replacement, with all the inevitable surprises and secrets. The more I thought about it, the more sure I was that the writer hadn’t slept with Lucia’s friend, but that Lucia’s neighbor/lover was on the make, and if she couldn’t have the writer, she’d decided to move on to Lucia. I was glad he’d thrown a brick through her window, glad she’d had at least a moment of fear, that someone had created a little havoc in her so-well-intentioned Princeton life.

  I sipped the vodka, admiring the glass, enjoying the taste. And then—though this is merely anecdotal—I picked up the phone, called information, and asked for Arthur’s number in Pennsylvania from an operator who said, “Please hold,” followed by an automated voice that gave me the number. He still lived in the same place. Imagine that: he was where he’d been all his adult life.

  Arthur’s wife answered on the second ring. She answered pleasantly, the way people did years ago, when there was no screening of calls, no answering machine to kick in. “Hello,” she said, and I thought: she is completely, completely vulnerable. The winter landscape of the little town outside Pittsburgh where she lived came back to me: the whited-out sky; the frozen branches always about to snap. If I hung up, she probably wouldn’t even know there was such a thing as hitting *69 to find out who the caller was. Or maybe she would, and she’d call back. Maybe she and I would talk, and become fierce enemies, or even best friends—why not, if neighbors in their sixties became lovers? But that couldn’t really happen, because she and I were just two voices on the telephone. I didn’t have anything against her. Back then, all I’d had against her was that she had him.

  “That necklace,” I said, realizing immediately that I needed to raise my voice and speak clearly. “The one with the lapis lazuli. I was your husband’s student—it doesn’t matter who I am. I’m calling to explain. I returned it to you in 1994 because I found it on the floor of his office, and knew it must be yours. He didn’t see me pick it up. I was poor, and I wanted to keep it, but I figured it was yours, so I sent it back.”

  I hung up, crossed the floor and reached into the terrarium. I bent the knees of one of the warriors and put him back in his saddle, atop a shiny black plastic horse. I slipped a shield over another’s head, inadvertently toppling him. I delicately stood the figure upright. I decided against a second vodka.

  The phone did not ring. I got into bed, under the duvet, then spread my coat on top, the soft collar touching my chin, as I listened to jazz I wanted to hear, long into the night. When the storm started some time after midnight, I imagined the sleet was hard little notes from a piano way across town that had come to pelt my window, telling me to come out. To come out and play, please.

  L. Annette Binder

  Lay My Head

  BABIES WEREN’T FRIGHTENED OF her face. They didn’t yet know sickness. They saw only her eyes, how big they were. There was a baby girl before her in the aisle. A little round-faced girl, no older than two. Her ponytail went straight up like a paint brush, and her mother had tied a pink ribbon around it. The girl stood up on the seat while her mother read magazines. Angela smiled at her. She set aside her book and covered her eyes with her fingers and uncovered them again. The little girl giggled at that. She grabbed the fabric of the headrest and squealed. She reached for Angela and for the stewardess who was pushing the drinks cart up the aisle. Her mother patted her on the bottom. Felicia Marie, she said. You better hush. People are trying to sleep. The girl squealed again, and her cheeks were dimpled and shiny like apples. The mother looked between the seats then. Her face went dark when she saw Angela. Get down here, young lady, the mother said. Get down here right now, and she moved quickly. She pulled her little girl away from the headrest. She held her baby against her. She held her there and didn’t let her squirm.

  The roundness in Angela’s cheeks went first. Her skin went from olive to yellow. She’d spent all those mornings on her deck, but the sun didn’t warm her, not even in September when L.A. was hottest. She’d shivered and watched the neighbor kids splash around in the pool. They worked their squirt guns and wrestled in the water, and they were happy even when their parents fought. How little children need to be happy. How little it takes, and still things go wrong. She watched them all summer and into fall, and the roundness was gone and from one day to the next the veins popped out on her forearms. Her hands were spotted like her grandma’s had been. Liver spots, Grandma called them, and Angela had wondered why.

  Her belly grew round like a pregnant lady’s. Like Mr. Hogan from the old neighborhood who drank beer every morning and tossed the cans onto his wife’s compost heap. In the last few weeks the bones in her throat had started to show. There was a hollow between them, and her mother would notice this right away. She’d see it and know. Thirty years married to a U.S. soldier, and her mother still thought like a German farm girl. She’d been right about Angela’s father. She knew he was sick from the smell of his breath. He’s got the mark, she’d said. She knew it months before the doctors did, and she’d see the mark on Angela now, too. Her girl who’d been pretty once. She should be a model, that’s what all the people said. And what did it matter. Every day brought another loss, and her prettiness was the least of them. It fell away like the burden it was.

  Her mother was waiting at the luggage carousel. She carried the same winter coat, the extra one she kept for guests because it was cold even in November. Angela didn’t remember that old plaid coat until she saw her mother standing there in her winter boots. She’d brought it along every Christmas when Angela came home from college. Look how you’re dressed, she’d say back then. You’re always in short sleeves. You need to cover up. Angela would pretend she didn’t feel the wind when they went through the sliding glass doors. She’d say she was warm in her sandals or those loafers she wore without socks. Anything was better than letting her mother be right.

  The coat smelled like mothballs. It was years between visits now. Years when it used to be months. Her mother walked too quickly at first. Angela couldn’t keep up, and the air outside was sharp in her throat. It squeezed her chest. She’d forgotten how thin the air could be up here. This was probably how fish felt when they were pulled from the water. She slowed and stopped and set her hand against the retaining wall where the juniper bushes grew. Her mother stopped, too. She came close and fixed the collar on the old plaid coat. She took her scarf off and wrapped it around Angela’s neck, and her eyes were black when she spoke. “You need to cover your mouth,” she said. “The wind’s picking up. All those years in California and you’ve forgotten how it blows.” They walked slowly to the car. Her mother always parked in one of the farthest spots, out by the long-term lot. There were patches of ice in places. Angela slipped and caught herself, and the mountains were dark already against the sky.

  Her bed was the same and the feather quilt, but her books were gone and most of her posters and ribbons. Her mother had packed these things in plastic boxes and set them in the closet. The bookshelves were full with her mother’s art books now and porcelain figurines, and up at the top there was the yellow book of fairy tales her mother had brought from Germany. She’d read it to Angela when she was little. She read to her in German, and Angela understood. Struwwelpeter with his wild hair and Hans im Glück who was happiest when all his gold was lost. She knew the stories and her mother’s voice, and that was the last thing she heard that night and the first thing in the morning.

  Her body was healthy in every way but one. She wasn’t even forty and her heart was healthy and her lungs were clear and everything was perfect except for the thing that wasn’t.

  • • •

/>   She held a cup of tea in her lap. Whitethorn and lemon balm because they were good for the circulation, that’s what her mother told her. Her mother had set the redwood chaise in the middle of the yard. She’d brought out blankets, too, and wrapped them around Angela’s knees. It was almost forty degrees out, and it felt even warmer. The sun was shining on her head. It was bright as California outside, mountain bright, and she should have worn her sunglasses. Two little girls played in the front yard at the old Meyer house. They tunneled into the melting snow. One of them was wearing a skirt without any tights, and even from across the street Angela could see the pink of her legs.

  The Meyers had moved years before and who knew what happened to Patty, fat Patty who was round as a bowling ball but completely flat-chested. They called her Fatricia at school. Angela did, too. Only once but it was wrong and she knew it even then. She did things when she was young as if she had no choice. A couple of the girls painted Patty’s face one day in gym class. Close your eyes, they’d told her. Stand real still, and Patty waited for them to make her pretty. Calm as a Buddha while she stood there by the mirror. She waited for them to melt the eyeliner. They used Bic lighters back then to get the flow just right, and Angela didn’t want to look. She put her jeans back on, those extra-slim Jordache jeans that cut high across her waist. She combed her hair and waited by the lockers for the bell to ring. They were working on Patty’s eyes. They nudged each other and laughed at the enormous arches they drew and the red circles they put across her cheeks, and Angela saw it all and she didn’t stop them and she didn’t say a thing, not even to Patty, who stood there with a crooked dreamy smile. She left before Patty opened her eyes. She went out of the locker room and into the courtyard where the smokers waited between classes.