The O. Henry Prize Stories 2018

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

  But just then Sasha, who couldn’t have known that my grandfather was speaking, interrupted him. He made a series of urgent motions with his fingers, and Olga said that he wanted to thank us for the food. Everything was delicious, but especially the meat. He wanted to know the secret ingredient.

  “The secret ingredient is a lot of whacking,” my mother said.

  Olga translated this for Sasha and even punched his hand with her fist several times. That was when he laughed for the first time. His laughter sounded like a series of rumbling groans, but we were all very happy that he appreciated both the food and my mother’s humor. (Not everybody did.)

  By the end of the meal, Sasha had started to talk more. If alcohol loosens your tongue, perhaps it loosens your fingers as well. He poked his fingers into the flesh of Olga’s palms with amazing speed, and she translated for us. He talked about smells and how important they were for him, how he knew that we were good people just by the warm, homey smell of our apartment. “It’s the smell of the meat,” my mother whispered, but I saw that she was pleased. He talked about the woods his mother used to take him to when he was a child. She’d lead him to a tree or a bush and ask him to touch it, and she taught him how to pick berries. He knew how to find wild strawberries with his hands. Olga had never tried wild strawberries. Last July, when Olga had visited Moscow, Sasha had taken her to the woods and taught her how to find them.

  Then he said something else, and I wanted Olga to translate, but she said that she couldn’t, that this was too much and most of it was private. There were tears in her eyes. Suddenly she grabbed Sasha’s hands and kissed them.

  At that moment, we all felt the presence of something in the room. Well, I can’t be sure about my grandparents, but I felt it, and I know that my mother felt it, too. It was as if something enormous and grand were growing out of our dinner table, reaching up, up and up, like a cathedral breaking through the sky.

  It was like nothing else in my life up to then.

  I wish I could say that I recognized what it was, but I didn’t. What I felt was pure awe, unburdened by understanding.

  * * *

  —

  “Love is blind indeed,” my grandmother said after they left.

  “Deaf and blind,” my grandfather quipped.

  But my mother didn’t say anything. She went into her room and closed the door behind her. I went after her. She hadn’t turned the light on, so I couldn’t see, but I could hear that my mother was crying. I walked over to her bed and put out my hand hoping to find and touch hers. What I found instead was her face, all wet and slippery with tears.

  “Get in,” she whispered. I climbed into the bed and hugged her from behind as tightly as I could. I was crying into her shoulders, which were warm and shaking. I tried to squeeze them even tighter to stop the shaking, to console her.

  I pitied her. But I loved her more than I pitied her. I loved her so much that it was hard to breathe. And another thing: at that moment, I felt close to my mother in a completely new way. Not as a child but as a fellow woman, an equal.

  * * *

  —

  Sasha and Olga got married later that year, as soon as Olga’s divorce came through. As far as I know, they lived happily ever after until death did them part. Olga was the one who died. She was only forty-two. Cancer. It’s usually cancer when women die that young. Sasha remarried within a year. Strangely enough, his second wife also left her husband for him.

  But my mother—my mother never remarried.

  Jenny Zhang

  Why Were They Throwing Bricks?

  “I LOST HEARING IN THIS EAR when a horse jumped over a fence and collided against the side of my face,” my grandmother told me when she arrived at JFK. I was nine and hadn’t seen her in four years. “In Shanghai you slept with me every single night. Every week we took you to your other grandmother’s house. She called incessantly, asking for you. ‘Can’t I see my own granddaughter?’ I said, ‘Sure you can.’ But—let’s not spare any feelings—you didn’t want to see her. Whenever you were at your waipo’s house you cried and called my name and woke up the neighbors. You hated her face because it was round like the moon, and you thought mine was perfectly oval like an egg. You loved our house. It was your real home—and still is. Your waipo would frantically call a few minutes after I dropped you off asking me to come back, and I would sprint all the way there. Yes, my precious heart, your sixty-eight-year-old grandmother ran through the streets for you. How could I let you suffer for even a second? You wouldn’t stop crying until I arrived, and the minute I pulled you into my arms, you slept the deep happy sleep of a child who has come home to her true family.”

  “I sleep by myself now. I have my own bed with stickers on it,” I told her in Chinese, without knowing the word for stickers. I hugged my body against my mother, who was telling my father he would have to make two trips to the car because my grandmother had somehow persuaded the airline to let her bring three pieces of checked luggage and two carry-on items without any additional charges.

  “And did you see that poor man dragging her suitcases off the plane for her? How does she always do that?” my mother said. She shrugged me away and mouthed in English to me, “Talk. To. Grandma.”

  My father threw his hands up. “You know exactly how,” he said, and went off with the first two bags.

  “You remember how uncanny it was,” my grandmother continued, tweaking her hearing aid until it made a small shrill sound and then a shriller sound and then another even shriller sound. “They called me a miracle worker and I said, ‘No, no, I’m just her nainai,’ but everyone said, ‘You’re a miracle worker. You’re the only one who can make that child stop crying.’ They said there was no need for me to be modest. ‘This child prefers her grandmother to even her own mother and father! Why sugarcoat the truth?’ I had to stop myself from stopping other people from saying it after a while. Was I supposed to keep insulting everyone’s intelligence? Protesting endlessly? Your nainai isn’t that type of person. And the truth is, people don’t make things up out of nothing. There’s truth in every widely believed saying, and that’s just true.”

  “What?” I said. “I don’t understand Chinese that good.”

  “I knew you wouldn’t forget a moment of your real life, your real home—the place you come from. Have you learned English yet?”

  “That’s all I speak. It’s America.”

  “Your nainai is so proud of you. One day your English will catch up. It’s such a gift to be here now with you. You don’t know how many lonely nights I’ve spent dropping tears for you. It was wrong of me to let you go. Remember how you called for me when you let go of my hand and boarded the airplane with your mother? Remember how you howled that you wanted to take me with you? Four years ago, your father wrote to me, ‘You can’t keep my own wife and child away from me any longer. I’m sending for them immediately.’ I wanted to know if he ever considered maybe you and your mother simply didn’t want to go to America? In those days, you would’ve rather eaten a basement full of rats than be separated from your nainai. Your father’s also stubborn, but I’m not the type to insult the spoonful of food nourishing me. You see what I mean? I won’t say any more. I’m living in his house now and even though he has only made fatally wrong choices, we still have to listen to him. But remember how at the airport you cried and said, ‘Nainai, I love you the most of everyone. I want to stay with you. I don’t want to go to America.’ ”

  “I don’t remember that,” I said to my grandmother. “Sorry.”

  “You remember everything, don’t you? But it hurts too much to dredge up bad memories.” Her hearing aid buzzed again and she twisted its tiny hidden knob with her thumb and index finger. “This thing works for a moment and then it goes dead for days. Your father said he would get me a proper hearing aid so I can hear your beautiful voice. You speak up now and let your grandmother look
at you. She’s only missed you every minute of every hour of every second of every single iota of a time unit that’s elapsed since you last slept with your nainai every night, refusing to even close your eyes unless I was in the bed with you. You know what everyone’s favorite joke was? ‘Who’s the mom? You?’ Oh, I laughed.”

  “That’s not a joke.”

  “That’s right. It was the plain truth,” she continued. “They all asked me, ‘Doesn’t your granddaughter ever want to sleep with her mother and father?’ And I had to tell them—not in a bragging way, just in an informing way—‘No. Her father is in America learning how to build computers and her mother works late at the factory and even if her mother didn’t come home from work so late, my granddaughter has made it clear she can only sleep with me. I know it’s not proper while her mother sleeps alone in another room under the same roof, but when a child wants something, how can you look her in the eye and deny her?’ ”

  My grandmother lived with us in America for a year. She taught me how to knit, and after school I watched her make dinner and do dishes and sew curtains. At first I wouldn’t let her sleep with me in my bed. She cried and came every night to my bedroom and sat at the edge of the bed saying nothing. She had small red eyes and no teeth at night, except for four on the bottom row and a couple in the back. She ate daily bulbs of garlic so she’d live to be 117 and see me grow for another forty-five years, and the first few times she brought it up, I imagined myself running away from home just to get a few years to myself. But after a month, the smell was comforting, and I needed it near me before I could close my eyes, and just when I started to call for her more than she called for me, my parents announced that she had to move back to China to be with her dying husband. “Your grandfather,” my grandmother said with disgust, “says the only proper way for a man to leave this world is in his own home with his wife by his side. Have you ever heard anything so spineless?”

  My grandfather had been begging her to come back for six months. He had been diagnosed with lesions in his throat and he didn’t want to die without her. For a year, I had slept in her bed, pressed up against her like she was my bedroom wall, and after she left, I stayed in her bed for two weeks, refusing to return to my own bed even after my mother threatened to push me off if I didn’t get out.

  “This room reeks,” she said. “It smells like several people have died. You still want to sleep in here?”

  I nodded.

  “On sheets that haven’t been washed for weeks?”

  I nodded. “She said she’s coming back after Grandpa dies.”

  “She also said you’d learn English in middle school. She said she learned to drive in her dreams and that’s how she’ll pass the driving test and take you to Mount Rushmore for your birthday. You believe everything she says? Have you gone back in time and lost all sense?”

  I shook my head. Finally, she and my father dragged me out, my arms wrapped around the cheap white lacquered bed frame as my father held my legs and my mother pried my fingers free.

  “You’re going to sleep on your own,” my mother said. “Like you did before she came around.”

  “You hear your mother?” my father said, wiping the tears from my face and blowing softly on my hot red cheeks. “Just a day at a time.”

  “Don’t indulge this,” my mother said.

  “You want to beat the sadness out of her?” my father said. “Because that’s what your mother wants. For us to be the bad guys and her to be the hero when she comes back.”

  “I’m not inviting her back,” my mother said.

  * * *

  —

  My grandmother came back two years later. I was in middle school, and my pathetic puberty struck like a flash of lightning in the middle of the night—I suddenly saw all my surroundings for what they were: hideous and threatening. I had no friends, social life, interests, talents, breasts, straight teeth, likability, normal clothes, or charm, and every day I came home weighed down with dread. I started to fake illnesses so I could stay home with my two-year-old brother. I followed him around everywhere, crawling when he crawled and walking on my knees when he learned to walk so that we were the same height.

  When my grandmother moved in for the second time, she told us that this time she wasn’t leaving. She was going to apply for a green card and raise my brother until he was old enough to be on his own—eighteen, maybe nineteen.

  “We’ll see about that,” my father said in Chinese, and then to me and my mother in English, “Let Grandma believe what she wants to believe. My gut says we’ll be back at the travel agency in March, or my name is not Daddy, problem solver of this house.”

  I laughed at him. “But that isn’t your name.”

  I made a point of telling my grandmother that I’d been sleeping by myself this whole time. “I also know how to cut my own toenails and braid my hair and make my own snacks.” My mom was looking at me without pleasure. “Hi, Grandma. I missed you,” I added.

  Then she was babbling, hugging me up and down and side to side. “Nainai xiang ni le,” she said. “Grandma missed you, oh, Grandma missed you, oh, Grandma missed you—”

  “ ’Kay, got it,” I said.

  She stepped back and took my hand. “Baobei, you can sleep with your nainai if you want, but your brother will, too. I don’t know if three will fit, but I’m very happy to try. Does anything make your nainai happier than having her two grandchildren by her side? Your brother will sleep with me until he’s old enough to sleep in his own bed. Most people say thirteen is the age when a child learns to sleep on their own but most people are selfish and looking out only for themselves. Not me. I say sixteen. I say seventeen. I say eighteen. And if he needs me to, I’ll gladly sleep with your brother until he’s twenty-one!”

  I laughed. “Allen’s not going to do that. It’s different here. We wrote you about this.”

  My grandmother pulled me in so close I faked choking noises to make my point known. “Oh, baobei, I missed you. My hearing has gotten worse. In China doctors are crooks and charlatans. They take your money and make everything worse, or if you’re lucky, exactly the same. I lost my hearing in this ear running away from boys who were throwing bricks. Why were they throwing bricks? Who knows. There was a violence back then no one can understand now. And where did those boys get the bricks? That’s the real question. In those days no one had brick houses. Everyone lived like animals. You wouldn’t have been able to tell your nainai had skin as white as a porcelain doll because she was covered in dirt. These rotten boys chased me until I tripped over a fence and a sharp spike of wood pierced my eardrum. I lay there for a night until the shepherd’s daughter found me, curled up like a child.”

  “I thought you lost your hearing when a horse ran over a fence and trampled you.”

  “They took me to the village doctor and he grafted skin from my knee to my ear. I was bleeding so much I thought I would die. That was the worst I’ve ever experienced, and I’ve experienced awful things. Your nainai has lived through two wars and saw her own mother gunned down by Japanese soldiers. No child should see their mother die. But do you know what was worse than lying there in the mud with blood in my ears? Worse than seeing my own brother come back from war with only half a leg and no right arm? It was living in China with your grandfather, who didn’t have the decency to die like he said he would, and being thousands of miles apart from you and your brother. I was hurting for your brother so much I told your lowlife grandfather that unless he died right this instant, he would have to learn to leave this world just as he came into it—without me. What could he do? Stop me from going to America? I said to him, ‘Come with me if you need me around so badly.’ ‘But no,’ he says. ‘I’m comfortable here. This is our home. You should want to live in it with me. These are our golden years.’ Blah blah blah. My home is where you and your brother are. Oh, I’ve missed him like I miss the skin from my knee.
”

  “You just met him today.”

  “Speak louder, my heart, so your nainai can hear you.”

  “My mom says I can only call my grandmother on my dad’s side nainai, and you’re actually my waipo.”

  “Your father said he’s going to replace this hearing aid. I might as well have kept that spike of wood in here. They wouldn’t know technology from the inside of their asses in China. And it’s filthy over there. Can you imagine some illiterate doctor with dirty hands touching your nainai’s ear? This is why I couldn’t stay in China. I missed your brother’s birth because your grandfather said he was dying, and then I go back and guess who isn’t dying? Guess who’s walking around the garden and smoking? Every day he goes to the lao ganbu huodongshi to gamble. Does that seem like a man on his deathbed to you, my sweetheart, my baobei? Do you think your grandmother will forgive your grandfather for making her miss the birth of her one and only grandson? Will your grandmother fall for his bluff again? Not ever. I’ll be here until I pass to another realm, my baobei.”

  “I’m not going to call you nainai.”

  “All of my grandchildren call me nainai because nainai is the dearest, closest name you could call a person in your family. You refused to call me waipo when you were little. You said to me, ‘You’re not my waipo, my waipo is that strange lady over there who feeds me food I don’t like and who has a cold bed.’ Remember how you said that? Where’s your brother now? I missed him so much. I pray hummingbirds peck my eyes and leave their droppings in my pecked-out sockets before I have to experience this heartbreak again. But I’m healing already. When I see your brother’s precious face, I’ll never know sadness again. My heart will be overrun with joy until my last dying breath. Where’s your brother, baobei?”

  * * *