The O. Henry Prize Stories 2013

by Laura Furman

  Ted’s summer school had all the students who’d flunked, and he was stuck with seventh grade (which he wasn’t even licensed for), a nightmarish age. Squirming, untamed creatures. He could not get them interested in the poetry of Oliver Wendell Holmes or the need for verb agreement. They were always talking, eating candy, passing notes, exploding into illicit laugher over who-knew-what.

  One evening, Ted said he had worked out a “plan for dominance.” He’d told the class that any student who reported on another student eating in class or passing a note would be rewarded with an extra tenth of a point toward his or her grade.

  “You’re training them to rat on each other?” I said.

  “I’m teaching them to be loyal to me above all.”

  “That’s fascism,” I said. He laughed.

  In my family, ratting was the lowest of the low. My father had survived in prison by not breaking solidarity with other inmates and refusing special favors from the warden, lest people think he was a spy, and in the years since, more than one friend had gone to prison (and not for just a few months either) rather than give names of people who belonged to so-called communist fronts.

  “So you bribe them to turn each other in,” I said, “and you’re going to give them a false grade, with padded points?”

  “You know absolutely nothing about keeping control in the classroom,” he said. “You have no idea. Do you?”

  Ted came home the next day and said, “Hah! It’s working.” Three boys were turned in for eating a bag of Tootsie Rolls. He’d sent the three to the principal’s office while Ricky, the kid who reported them, crowed in his seat and was full of himself all day.

  When the boys came back to class the following day they stole Ricky’s shoes, ripped his shirt, and then claimed to find a half-eaten Milky Way on his desk. “Here’s the evidence! You said we had to have evidence!”

  Ted walked all four of them, whining in protest, to the principal. All was calm, except the principal came by after school to ask why Ted was having so much trouble.

  “Uh-oh,” I said.

  “I have to think of other punishments.”

  He had to what? I saw that I didn’t know him very well, which made me feel extremely stupid. I hadn’t seen him this way before because I hadn’t seen him up close when he was losing. He was losing this class, I could tell.

  The punishment he “invented” was docking their grades, and the summer became a tournament of shaved points up and down, a mess of calculations and pettiness and futile warfare. He explained its progress often, and I could never follow what he was saying. I felt sorry for him, with his bluster and his vain efforts. Who was he kidding?

  I felt increasingly sorry for me. Not that there was much to do about it, but why did I wait at the end of every day, with dinner on the stove, for a conversation I only wanted to get away from? The system didn’t work if I didn’t believe in him. Everything seemed ridiculous, including the drapes I’d been so tickled with.

  And who did I think I was? Feet of clay, anyone would’ve said if I had complained about my husband. A mere bump in the long and winding road of marriage. My mother guessed (and I didn’t want her to guess), I could tell by the way she peered at me and patted my hand. I told my mother I wasn’t pregnant, if that’s what she was worried about.

  We were still having sex, and I didn’t hate the sex either. It was now a more private set of excitements, as if I were crying out to myself. What a liar I was becoming, on all counts, scared and selfish both. Ted half-knew, but only half. Some women stayed in love with their husbands long after the men began to beat them or cheat on them or publicly shame them. Ted was hardly guilty of anything worse than being a new and incompetent teacher. I knew that, I told myself that.

  Once summer school was over, Ted had a brief spell of holiday in the hottest part of August. He dragged a kitchen chair out to the fire escape and sat in his undershirt, reading. Didn’t he want to go to the beach? Maybe just uptown to Central Park? He didn’t want to do anything. “What’s the point?” he said. He read the newspapers all day, he read magazines written for stupider people. “Go swim with your friends,” he said. “I’m fine here.”

  When the pool closed for its annual week of maintenance, I sat with Ted on the fire escape, but he didn’t want any chatting. And he didn’t want the radio blaring from the kitchen either. No Tchaikovsky, no Fats Domino. “I guess that job really made you tired,” I said.

  “What do you care?” he said.

  I had brought about this state of irritated sorrow, this defeat. He did know.

  I’d always been taught the truth sets you free, but it wasn’t doing that here. Here was a man who could hardly move from the weight of the truth. His sweating body was hunched over the page as he read. Hours passed when he didn’t raise his head. Who had made him suffer? I wanted to punch this person in the nose.

  “Didn’t you used to fish in the park with your dad?” I said. “Don’t you want to go to the lake some time?”

  “I bet your dad never fished. I bet he didn’t want to kill a single minnow.”

  “Anarchists used to be very violent, some of them. My father is an evolved form.”

  “Why didn’t you marry him then?”

  I gasped and stared at him. “Very funny,” I said.

  “You think he’s this great hero,” Ted said. “But he let my father die. He didn’t help him.”

  I was furious then at Ted’s father, who’d been killed at Anzio—a hearty man with boorish tendencies, in Ted’s stories. It was just as well I had nothing to say against him because I might’ve said it. A decade had passed, a whole other inexplicable war had happened since then—the “action” in Korea was just over that summer—what was making Ted bring this up now?

  “What do you want from me?” I said.

  “Admit he’s a failure.”

  “Who?”

  “Your father.”

  “Failed how?” I said.

  “To do anything. Ever.”

  “Like what?”

  “Did he stop the war by getting arrested? Did he bring an end to all governments?”

  “It isn’t about that,” I said.

  “It’s all gestures,” he said. “Showing off.”

  “It is not.”

  “You sit on your can all day and you think you know about the real world, but you don’t.”

  “Who do you think you’re talking to?”

  “The queen of fake purity.”

  I went inside the apartment to get away from him, and then I kept going, out the door, down the five flights to the street. How far away could I get? The street had the summer smell of ripe garbage and incinerated soot. Our sweltering block was at its quietest, with all the Jewish shops shuttered for Saturday, but on one stretch of sidewalk the Puerto Rican kids were playing, yelling and chasing each other and calling out dares. I’d made a great mistake in marrying Ted. Nothing could be clearer. What was I going to do now? I walked east, block after faded-brick block, till I got to where the streets ended, and past the bank of seared grasses, the glaring water of the river rose like a mirage. I’d fought so hard to get him. There were clues all along but I had no use for them, I might’ve paid attention but I didn’t want to. I thought the world was love-love-love.

  And if I left his bed and board, how would I live? Back to the bakery? I was so dazed and stricken that I sat thinking about Boston Cream Pie and peanut butter cookies, soothing thoughts, brainless dreams, until the fading light scared me and I walked home.

  When I got back to the apartment, Ted was lying in bed, face down. He turned when I came in. “If you want to leave, just leave,” he said. “You can go back to your parents. That’s the simplest thing.”

  How reasonable he sounded, how hoarse and desperate.

  I could be free in an instant if I wanted to be. As I was taking this in, I heard myself crying, loud as an infant; I made horrible sounds of real anguish. “Don’t make me leave,” I managed to say. How choked a
nd pathetic my voice was. I said weepy things about how I loved him, I said we were meant for each other and he knew it too, didn’t he?—I knew he did. The words flew out of me, as if they were true. Was I lying? The whole time I was speaking, I felt that I had to put this over, I had to act with as much conviction as I could. Did I believe it? I did and I didn’t.

  And I made Ted happy. Under my wails and moans and tears, he softened. His eyes lost their stunned, dead look and took on their old, intelligent shimmer. I was pulling us back from a very dangerous precipice. We could be safe, we could be. A bliss of relief went through both of us.

  All that suffering had a good effect on us in bed, as if we had been through a battle together as comrades, not enemies. Our natures were more fully bared to each other. We had only to take off our clothes to be our more audacious, less naïve selves. We knew more, we went further. It startled us both, and we laughed in astonishment after.

  When Ted went back to school in September, he was given an extra class—could his day be any fuller?—and I was outraged for him, which he liked. When he had to appear at Meet the Teachers Night, I decided to be eager to be in the audience. I sat with other wives in the big wood-and-linoleum auditorium, surrounded by a sea of parents, while our spouses stood and explained their educational goals. Ted said he hoped to bring students to an understanding of the power of the English language. A Mr. Sloan, whose wife was next to me, said he believed that algebra refined all thinking. “Well, they have to say something,” she whispered.

  “Or take the Fifth,” I said. A Latin teacher in the school had been fired for taking the Fifth Amendment when asked about communists in the teachers’ union, and I suddenly thought this was not my best joke. Not funny to me. But the woman smiled.

  “At least they’re not talking about locking the bad students in the closet,” she murmured. “They used to do that when I was a kid.”

  “Some of them need it now.”

  “I’ll say,” she said.

  “My husband bribes them to rat on each other,” I said. “He gives them rewards for it.”

  “Does he?” she said.

  Someone shushed us, and I flinched in my seat—it was right to shut me up. What sort of person had I become now, with spite leaking out of me? If Ted had started baiting and buying off his ninth graders, what did it matter to me? I had to hope she would forget my words, why would she bother to remember, and I got away from Mrs. Sloan when we all filed into the gym for punch and cookies. “You were excellent,” I said to Ted.

  “Aw, shucks,” he said.

  • • •

  But I knew what I was. At the slightest opportunity, at the first instant that offered, I’d informed on my husband, just like that. Speaking against him had been very easy. Every day people were hounded for refusing to bear witness against someone—they were fired or arrested or blacklisted for being un-American and still they kept their mouths shut, on principle. And me? I leaped at the chance to spread a small bit of damage about the man I slept with every night.

  Mr. Sloan was, in fact, the vice principal, I later found out. This was not good news. Ted was on a one-year contract, and if they dropped him, what school would take him? I had never been like this before I knew Ted. Who knew what I would blurt out next? Look what love has done to me, I thought.

  One night, after we’d had perfectly good sex and Ted fell asleep and I lay awake for hours, it struck me with horror that I had never been a good liar but now I was. I could scarcely take off my clothes and turn to my husband without some degree of fraudulence and calculation. I, who’d been raised to be always truthful, had somehow taught myself to be one of those women who lure and lie for their survival. How had this happened? This is what gives carnal relations a bad name, I thought, cracking a joke to myself about it, a bad joke.

  Maybe all marriages, if you looked too hard at them, were riddled with corrupting compromises. Maybe other people had a higher tolerance for the bargains they struck, and that was just the way of it. I was going to have to live with this particular insight. It wasn’t something I wanted to shout from the rooftops to anyone. I had a long, bad night, with Ted’s steady breathing next to me in the bed and the noise of trucks going by in the street below. In the books I liked to read, and in the politics of my parents, people changed once they got hold of a new way to see things, but I wasn’t going to change. I wasn’t.

  • • •

  In the spring Ted got official word that his contract wasn’t being renewed. No reason was given—they would only say another teacher was filling the spot—and a number of people thought it was because my parents were communists, even if they weren’t. Someone said the vice principal had been especially against Ted. I was so upset I could barely tell people, my voice broke when I gave the news—while Ted, to my complete surprise, went in for cheerful irony. “We don’t need to eat, what’s so great about eating?” he said, and “I love a character-building experience,” and (his favorite) “Exploited today, fired tomorrow.”

  How little I knew him. This wisenheimer flintiness, this hearty valor, was not at all what I might have expected. I was the vile, small-minded, petty, treacherous one. I was the one who had burned our ticket to a decent, straightforward life. And now I gave long speeches about how we lived in tainted times, with goodness smeared by fear, and how all the higher-ups were jealous of Ted’s star teaching. “Hey,” Ted said. “We’ll get by. Not the end of the world.” He comforted me, my husband who’d been robbed.

  What could I do? I kept seeking him out in bed, trying to lavish myself on him and to dower him with oblivion. I hardly let him rest, I kept drawing him back and wanting to begin again. It seemed the very least I could contribute to our dreary situation. The spell of it worked on me too; I’d emerge still half-delirious, bruised and spent, out of myself. I whispered to him, “Best of all husbands.”

  “You’re my girl.”

  “They have no idea who you really are,” I said.

  “Forget ‘them,’ ” he said. “Nobody’s here. Just us.”

  In our room, a single light flickered from a candle I’d set by the bed.

  “My father’s a failure,” I said.

  “What?”

  “He is.”

  “Why are you saying that?”

  “I want to.”

  “Shush,” he said. “Be calm, okay? It’s all right.”

  If he no longer wanted to hear any such thing, there were other things he wanted. He wanted complete silence while he read for hours, he wanted to win any argument about any topic, from Tolstoy’s translators to the post-armistice in Korea, and I let him. When my parents fed us nourishing suppers, he kept up his darkly blithe quips about his prospects. “Exploited today, fired tomorrow,” he said (yet again). They all laughed. They liked him better now. My sister said, “I wish you were a teacher in my school.” My father poured beer for him and talked to him about purges and backlash and touched his shoulder, which Ted seemed to like. He didn’t, after all, have a father of his own.

  But what were we going to do and what about me? My mother let me use the typewriter in her office to tap out Ted’s job-seeking letters to states where he wasn’t known. What a mess I had made. Ted’s paychecks stopped in June.

  I told him I was going to ask if they needed anyone at the bakery, and I was a little surprised when he didn’t object. It was humbling to return to Mrs. Plymouth’s as a married woman—“Didn’t think we’d see you,” customers said—but I still liked the buttery smells, the doilies on glass shelves, even the striped aprons and the silly hairnets, that orderly, sugary version of home.

  My mother said there was no dishonor in being short of cash. “Au contraire,” Barbara said. I brought home crumbled cookies and soggy Danish that stuffed us and made us feel poorer.

  Ted suggested I bring boxes of day-old cake to the Ramirez family down the hall, and their kids adored us after that. I liked my poor husband better than I ever had. He was oddly improved by being broken—I’d read
of that happening, but I’d never seen it before in real life. He told Maxie, “I couldn’t pick a better girl than Louise to be unemployed with.”

  But I told Ruthie I wasn’t, actually, sure I could get through this part on love alone. I was having a Popsicle with her in the park, near a grassy patch we’d always liked. “What if I have to follow him into exile in Siberia?” I said. Ted had just sent an application to Provo, Utah, which we could not resist calling the Steppes.

  “You would ditch him when he was down?” she said. Nobody we knew did that. In Hollywood, in trashy magazines, but not in our neighborhoods.

  “No,” I said. “But I’d hang on without my heart in it. I’d be one of those sour wives, all martyred and sarcastic.”

  “No. Not you. You love Ted,” Ruthie said. She had a boyfriend now and hoped their dating would end in marriage, and I was alarming her.

  I thought of my mother saying, “sold to the first bidder,” when she wanted to warn me against leaping too fast into love. But if love didn’t make the world go around, what did?

  A month later, I found myself packing, not for Utah but for Okinawa. The one job that came through for Ted was teaching English to American kids on an air force base in Japan. Ted said all the Americans liked it over there, and there were thousands of Americans still in Japan. With children who needed my husband’s attentions. My mother was very upset.

  “You’ll be living inside the U.S. military,” she said. “Do you want that? You don’t want that.”

  “I’ll learn Japanese!” I said. Although they said people hardly left the base, I dreamed of myself making new sounds. “I have to be with my husband,” I told her.