The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

Home > Other > The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 > Page 12
The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018 Page 12

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2018 (retail) (epub)


  I waxed German and philosophical as I analyzed Granddad. Potatoes. Granddad was the remainder of a real person. Red cabbage. He’d been sent home from the war like a parcel some stranger had torn open and pilfered before sending it on its way again. Meat. The precious part of Granddad, his heart, had gone forever. It couldn’t be found again—like the silverware Grandmother had buried near a tree when the Russians had marched in and couldn’t find again after the war.

  “Dinner is ready!”

  The ingredients of a good meal are like members of a biological family—opposites by nature.

  Aunt Gunhild appeared in our family like a new, polarizing character spicing up a tired TV series. She was Grandma’s cousin. Their mothers had been sisters and they had both married men called Wilhelm, but these Wilhelms had lived in cities far apart. I thought it would have been much cleverer if they had both stayed in Berlin and married men with different names.

  These two Wilhelms were the sum of my knowledge about Aunt Gunhild.

  It took a lot of carefully dosed questions to coax answers out of my mother, who, as a child of the purpose generation, liked to create work where there was none by ironing the family’s underpants.

  “Why haven’t I heard about her before?”

  Mom told me that Aunt Gunhild had moved to the Black Forest years ago. “Out of sight, out of mind.” The iron hissed and my mother wielded it like Thor’s hammer across my father’s fine-rib briefs.

  That’s when I knew.

  My mother didn’t approve of Aunt Gunhild, a single woman, who cooked only for herself. A woman who didn’t send me a girl’s weaving frame for my birthday but a bill powered by two fat zeros.

  My mother protested. “You can’t accept it! It’s too much!”

  Every night I took out the bill and felt its power crackling like electricity. Money could turn on a lamp or it could turn into a lamp. Unlike time, with its compartments of tenses, beginnings and ends, go-went-gone, money was truly liquid.

  Aunt Gunhild invited my grandparents, my mother, and me to the north coast, where she had rented a holiday house for a week. We played cards in the evening and the rough wind was roaring and rattling louder than Aunt Gunhild’s smoker’s cough. The nights were black squares in our windows.

  When we were nestling in our deck chairs on the terrace, Aunt Gunhild gave me I see you smiles. I see you smiles make the eyes of the person who sees you so small that you know they don’t really see you with their eyes but with their heart. That’s cheesy, but true—like that song “Lili Marleen” that was sung by Nazis, Allied troops, and Grandma.

  During our stay, Aunt Gunhild made me little presents and stuffed my pockets with money. I wanted to steal from her badly, but my mother was always around. All I learned was what Mom told me while we were out beachcombing. Mom wanted to walk arm in arm like the other mothers and daughters on the beach, but she was carrying her memories like a vendor’s tray around her neck. “You were so much cuter when you had pigtails!”

  It’s impossible to bond when a vendor’s tray keeps jabbing into your ribs. Also Mom didn’t want to sell Aunt Gunhild’s past in exchange for a shiny lavender seashell. She only told me that Aunt Gunhild’s husband had not returned from the war. He had given her his last name, put on a uniform, and got himself blown to bits right away.

  Blow-blew-blown.

  My fingers traced the edges of the seashells, their coats empty and hard like Granddad, who always stayed back at the house because the soft part of him had been stolen in the war.

  As Christmas approached, there was talk of Aunt Gunhild coming to stay with us for the holidays. My mother’s mouth smiled, but her eyes were as cold as the hungry north German winters she’d braved as a postwar child. The winters in which your veins showed like cracks on ice and you pushed ice around your mouth, turning it into a Christmas roast, a Bundt cake, or a fruit drop. Ice was the poor man’s liquid then.

  Aunt Gunhild usually spent the holidays on duty at the hospital where she was working as a nurse, but this time she wanted to celebrate with her family. I imagined her in the nurses’ break room, sleeping with her eyes open, taking long drags and watching the smoke unravel like her lonely psyche.

  Dad and Aunt Gunhild were like chemicals that didn’t mix—no matter how hard you shook the test tube. He avoided her, his eyes searching the TV set for more than it could give him. Aunt Gunhild had strong opinions about many things and sometimes her opinions were so strong that they erupted in a smoker’s cough and loud voices that pulled me from sleep. The night before, Aunt Gunhild had come charging topless into the living room to ask Grandma for her hairspray. Dad had called for Mom, ashen, pieces of salted peanuts clinging to his lower lip, hanging open like the flap of my piggy bank when I was listening to the crackling of the bills.

  That’s when I knew.

  The emperor’s thumb was at six o’clock.

  Aunt Gunhild wouldn’t be invited again.

  Fall-fell-fallen.

  No more I see you smiles and caramels.

  Then, one night, I stepped out on the balcony, and she joined me.

  The air smelled like soggy leather shoes. The temperature was too mild for snow.

  “Winters aren’t what they used to be!” Mom had said, her ice-blue eyes melting a little with regret.

  Aunt Gunhild lit a cigarette and flipped the HB packet on the ledge. It was a brand that nobody else I knew smoked.

  “HB—Hanging Breasts,” she said with a hoarse snicker.

  “Thanks again for the ski suit,” I said. Not that I had ever been skiing, but the suit had the right sort of flashy pink Mom would never have bought me. At thirteen I felt unprepared for most things. Breasts, bras, boys. The ski suit’s soft shell had the silky sound of Allied parachutists landing behind enemy lines in war movies.

  I loved it.

  We looked at the stars.

  “Do you have a boyfriend?” Aunt Gunhild asked, her lips twitching a little as if she were counting the stars under her breath.

  I thought about the boy I’d stopped being friends with this summer. We’d grappled with each other like we had since kindergarten. Suddenly he’d been on top of me as if I were a raft on a river he’d wanted to explore.

  “Uh, no.”

  “What do you want to do with your life?” she asked, still counting the stars, her voice sounding like gravel crunching under the feet of dinner guests as they walk out into the night.

  I shrugged. Life scared me. Part of me wished for a past without the need to fill in the present, but I was too ashamed to tell her that.

  “Did you always want to be a nurse?” I asked, thinking that a house has more than one way in and that a thief needs to be flexible.

  “Not at all. You’re so very lucky to be growing up in this day and age.”

  Her raspy voice and the shadow of her rotund, blow-dried hair shut me up. Something had happened to Aunt Gunhild.

  Her past—it had been stolen a long time ago.

  It was like flicking through the newspaper only to find that someone has cut out the article you were looking for. Who had done this to her?

  A true thief, not some thirteen-year-old collector of pressed flowers, but someone who knew what they were taking, ripping out the plants roots, juice, and all.

  Aunt Gunhild nodded at the stars, scattering ash while her cigarette glowed like an afterthought.

  “Stars are the perfect landmarks,” she said. “They never change, but every time we look at them, we see them with different eyes. We can measure the distances we’ve traveled inside ourselves. Isn’t that wonderful?”

  I gave Aunt Gunhild an I see you smile, and then I looked through the glass door, seeing the solemn constellation of my grandmother, mother, and father on the living room sofa.

  Aunt Gunhild left with Grandma a few days later and we all
went back to our normal routine like a string quartet sitting down after an interlude. School was due to start again, and I looked through my things, trying to prepare myself for Laura, the boob pincher, and the hollow-eyed World War II soldiers lying on the side of the road on page 135. Question: Why is it important that stories are recorded for the future?

  It was then that I started missing things. Little things like pencils, erasers, a rubber ball.

  I asked my mother if she’d seen them, expecting icy-blue eyes for not taking care of my stuff. Instead she steered us toward the two uncomfortable rattan seats no one ever sat in—it was here we’d had our birds-and-bees talk a few months back.

  Mom: What do you know about sex?

  Me (blushing): Err, everything one needs to know.

  Mom: Good, then tell me.

  Did she think that unpleasant topics might be absorbed by uncomfortable furniture?

  “We didn’t want to tell you, but Aunt Gunhild took some things,” she said. “Cheap little things like tea candles and so on.”

  “How do you know it was her?”

  “She took some stuff when she was visiting Grandma in the spring. It’s all very childish. We think she might be a kleptomaniac.”

  Aunt Gunhild never visited again, but every time I opened my closet, I caught a flash of pink in the corner of my eye, like fluorescent roadkill. The ski suit hung limply in its corner, a deflating memory, soon too small for me. I was liquid too, adjusting to my different bodies, new gravities.

  The following year, the Berlin Wall came down in a fall so mild that January brought hazelnuts and primroses.

  The present was another country.

  Strangers were hugging strangers in the streets. There was dancing. Every person was a crowd, and the crowd was one country.

  My parents cried about their past.

  It was history.

  Everything was liquid.

  Thomas Bolt

  Inversion of Marcia

  “YOU AWAKE?” Alicia asked. No answer.

  I opened my eyes: Alicia stood there in the dark, watching my sister sleep. After a minute she leaned over Marcia’s bed and whispered, “Hey. It’s chilly. I’m getting in with you.” Bracelets jingled. The bed squeaked. I heard her kiss my sister’s cheek and say a few words in Italian, probably a joke. They began to whisper, too quiet for me to hear.

  Great. Now if I made a noise they’d say I’d been pretending to be asleep so I could lie in the next bed and listen. I kept so still I wasn’t there at all, and thought about building a tiny house in the woods one day out of silvery lumber; about how Dad kept missing the turnoff and driving us through the same ancient arch; about painting my nails, which were disgustingly bitten and chipped and had last been painted in the United States. (I’d happily try some random Italian color, but we were out in the country, sort of, and you couldn’t walk on these roads.)

  Marcia whispered something and they laughed. Fine: I didn’t want to know.

  Mom called this place a villa, but really it was a cross between an old hotel and a school. There were sandpapery towels and glass doors with golden coats of arms, but also rows of coat hooks and a library. Anyway, Dad’s friend Ian had gotten us a deal, and it was obvious why, since we were the only people here. But you could see the Gulf of Naples from your room (unless it was the Mediterranean). It looked close enough to walk to, though I was the only one who wanted to try.

  The whispering went on and on and on, like rain falling so softly you wonder if it’s rain at all. I woke from a wild dream about kids with flashlights racing through a construction site: still dark. Marcia’s bed was empty. That interested me: where else was there to go?

  The big tiles were cool underfoot. You could feel how old they were, uneven and smooth.

  At the end of a long hallway, I saw their backs: they were standing out on a balcony, sharing a blanket. I wondered what they were doing till I saw the smoke.

  My feet were freezing, so I went back to bed. Anyway…we’d only been in Italy a few days and already it felt completely normal, as if this was the way things ought to be and it was everything else that was strange. I’d never been out of the United States before; never heard of Cuma, where we were staying. My dad said it was where the alphabet came ashore in Italy, but he said things like that. Whatever it had been thousands of years ago—famous religious center, Greek colony, biggest city in Italy—it was off the main highway now.

  So was I: I’d been “asked” not to bring my computer, and my phone was the wrong kind, so I couldn’t even text. Mom and Dad probably thought it was “healthy for Mary to take a break,” but they didn’t understand: it was like my friendships were these tiny twinkling lights and they’d yanked the plug. I put my earbuds in and skipped from song to song until I realized I didn’t want to listen to anything, not even silence: I listened to the wind. Where was it coming from? Probably the whole building was infiltrated by any breeze that really took an interest.

  We were going to Pozzuoli and Pompeii—both close by, out there in the dark somewhere; then back to Naples to see more churches and museums, shop, and eat more amazing food; then north for a bit; and back to Connecticut. Simple, but fine with me. I liked it here. Even the villa was interesting, all curves and scrolls, with odd little balconies. Our room looked out onto an orange grove that was just there, and the trees—with real fruit you could actually eat—grew on a sloping, stepped hollow that exactly followed the shape of the amphitheater buried underneath. Beyond that some olive trees that got a faint silvery look when the wind blew, something industrial, a stretch of absolute darkness, a few lights, and the black of the sea (unless it was the gulf). Across the water was Naples, a crazy city with traffic worse than New York. The pizza there was completely different from anything we had in Norwalk or even the city, but it happened to be perfect: these people knew exactly what they were doing. All you had to do was forget what you already knew and just go along with it.

  Marcia was really taking her time. Getting high, fine—but Alicia was in college; my sister wasn’t even sixteen until next month, so it was a little weird the way they were hanging out so much. And a bit insulting, since the way Alicia probably saw it, there was no one else to hang out with but me. I closed my eyes. I could always sneak down to the library and pick through the beach novels, old board games, random histories (“the emperor’s pallor worried his advisers”), guidebooks from before I was born, and rows of serious scholarly thingies bound in red or green, by or about people like Chrysippus, Lucretius, and Philo of Megara. There was even a book called The Tenth Muse: A Life (as if muses were real? I loved it). Whole shelves were in Latin or Greek, some with no English at all…

  They were never coming back.

  Actually, Alicia was all right. She had this little philosophy book that proved that whatever you thought (though she had no idea what that might be) was wrong—as much a part of the past as whatever was in those red and green books. Her blond hair was cut short in a way that made her seem almost tough, but had a cute flip to it. Her lips were big and soft-looking like a wilty flower, one of those huge blossoms with droopy clinging petals, so she’d start to look all pretty and romantic—but then would say something hilarious and sharp and her eyes would squeeze almost shut, and if she laughed she wouldn’t make any noise at all. She had a nice body—her breasts were very proud of themselves. Anyway, you have to be careful not to dislike people for no reason.

  I turned on my side. When I opened my eyes it was bright out; Marcia hadn’t come back.

  No sign of Mom and Dad. I followed the smell of coffee down to the kitchen. Alicia and Marcia sat at the end of the long table reading my guidebook. They looked up as if it were their kitchen and their book and I’d interrupted some secret discussion, and would I please go away? I screamed like the goddess Alala until they turned to stone and cracked and crumbled to dust and sifted away, pou
red myself a glass of blood-orange juice, and sat twisting my bracelet, the one I loved, with the irregular beads of blue and amber glass. “Good morning?”

  Alicia yawned. “I need a shower.” She winced, pursed her soft, soft lips, and took about four years to slide her leg off the bench. It was like watching someone do physical therapy—only her disability was laziness. She smiled at me and skipped off up the stairs.

  Marcia lifted her tiny cup. She had Alicia’s lipstick on, deep red with flecks of blue-black sparkle. “Hey,” I said. “Where are Mom and Dad?”

  The dark lips formed a smile. “Like it? It’s called Glitterjack. She’ll let you try it. Just ask.”

  “Thanks?” I wasn’t going to ask. “Hey, are they going north without us or something? Did Mom say anything?” For some reason we were skipping Rome, and Rome was what I really wanted to see—though the way Dad kept getting lost, we might end up there anyway.

  “Actually…Alicia’s going to stay with us for a few days. In Dad’s friend’s place, in Siena.”

  While our parents took off for Florence, Ravenna, and Venice: great. And my role would be to make my sister, who was barely nineteen months older than me, feel sophisticated and adult, just by being myself. She’d done her fingernails, too: she looked Alicia’s age.

  “We’ll have the car. She’ll drive us anywhere we want. After all, she’s our babysitter.” Marcia poured herself the last of the coffee. “Oh—sorry. You’re welcome to make more.” She slid the faceted metal pot my way. “You know how, don’t you?”

  “I thought you drank coffee with lots of sugar and milk.”

  “When I was ten. I like espresso; it’s bitter, like my heart. Oh, by the way, we’re going to see the Sibyl of Cumae. Her cave’s still there—cut into the living rock.”

  “Thanks for the information you got from my guidebook.” I headed back upstairs.

  “And we’re going out for cinghiale,” she called after me. “Wild pig! Alicia says it’s delicious.”

  “Alicia should know,” I said, but not out loud. You don’t have to say everything you think.

 

‹ Prev