The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories

by Ben Marcus

  At home afterward: unkindred totes and carryalls arranged in wait beside the door. He poked into the closest one to see whose clothing it might be. His fingers came up with the evenglow plush and opponency of something segregatedly hers. A robe, or something in the robe family.

  One night he paid a visit to the building where the two of them lived on different floors. First the older: buttons the size of quarters sewn at chafing intervals into the back panels of what she showed him to as a seat. He had to sit much farther forward than ordinarily. He gave her money to take the younger one out for a restaurant supper. “How will I know what she likes?” she said. Then two flights up to the younger, but she was on the phone. A doorway chinning bar hangered with work smocks blocked him from the bedroom. The bathroom door was open. Passages of masking tape stuck to the plastic apparatus of her hygiene, but unlabeled, uncaptioned. Everything smacked of what was better kept to herself. When she got away from the phone, he gave her money to pick something nice out for her sister. “But what?” she said. “You’ve known her all your life,” he said. “But other than that?” she said.

  No sooner did he have the two of them turning up in each other’s feelings again than his own days gave way underneath.

  The library switched to the honor system. You had to sign the books out yourself and come down hard when you botched their return shelving. (He gawked mostly at histories, stout books full of people putting themselves out.) He recovered a gorge of hair from the bathroom drain and set it out on the soap dish to prosper or at least keep up. There were two telephone directories for the hallway table now—the official, phone-company one and the rival, heavier on front matter, bus schedules, seating charts. You had to know where to turn. He began breaking into a day from odd slants, dozing through the lower afternoon, then stepping out onto the platform of hours already packed beneath him. It should have put him on a higher footing. He started collecting sleeveless blouses—“shells” they were called. Was there anything less devouring that a woman could pull politely over herself? The arms swept through the holes and came right out again, unsquandered. He tucked the shells between the mattress pad and the mattress and barged above them in his sleep.

  The younger showed up with an all-occasion assortment of greeting cards from the dollar store. She fanned them out on the floor so that only the greetings would show.

  “Which ones can’t I send?” she said.

  “What aren’t you to her?” he said.

  “I’m not ‘Across the Miles.’ ”

  “Mail that when you’re at the other end of town, running errands.”

  Then the movie house in his neighborhood reduced the ticket price to a dollar. It was a thrifty way to do himself out of a couple of hours. He followed the bad-mouthing on-screen or just sat politely until it was time to tip the rail of the side door.

  He became a heavier dresser, a coverer.

  The older called to say that while the younger was away, she had sneaked inside to screw new brass pulls into the drawer-fronts of her bureau.

  “It’ll all dawn on her,” she said.

  Before the week wore out, the two of them came by together one night, alike in the sherbety tint to their lips, the violescent quickening to the eyelids. Identical rawhide laces around their necks, an identical paraphernalium (something from a tooth?) suspended from each. Hair toiled up into practically a bale, with elastics. High-rising shoes similar in squelch and hectic stringage. They were both full of unelevated understanding of something they had each noticed on TV—a substitution in the schedule. He had noticed it too. It hadn’t improved him.

  They were holding hands.

  Each finger an independent tremble.

  He had to tell them: “This is not a good time.”

  How much better to get the door shut against them now!

  His nights were divided three ways. This was the hour for the return envelopes that came with the bills. The utilities no longer bothered printing the rubrics “NAME,” “STREET,” “CITY, STATE, ZIP” before the lines in the upper-left corner. The lines were yours to fill out as you wished.

  Tonight: Electric.

  _______________

  _______________

  _______________

  He wrote:

  Who sees?

  Who sees?

  Who sees?

  The night his car had to be dropped off for repairs, the older one offered to give him a ride home. He faced a windshield-wiper blade braced to its arm by garbage-bag ties. Come a certain age, she was saying, you start thinking differently of the people closest to hand. You dig up what you already know, but you turn it over more gently before bringing it all the way out. It might be no more than that she catches a cold at every change of the seasons. But why had it taken you this long to think the world of it?

  He started listening to just the vowelly lining in what she said.

  He skipped the casing consonants that made each word news.

  It was carolly to him, a croon.

  * * *

  The daughters had wanted their ceremony held in the lunchroom where they worked. Other than him, it was only women who showed—a table’s worth of overfragrant, older coworkers. The officiating one, the day supervisor, wanted to first run down her list of what she was in no position to do. It was a long, hounding list of the “including but not limited to” type. (This was not “espousage”; it was not “jointure”; it was “not in anywise matrimoniously unitudinal.”) Then she turned to the daughters and read aloud from her folder to steepening effect that no matter where you might stand on whether things should come with time, it was only natural for you to want to close up whatever little space is left between you and whoever has been the most in your way or out of the question all this long while, and let a line finally be drawn right through the two of you on its quick-gone way to someplace else entirely. Nobody was twisting your arm for you to finish what you should have been screaming your lungs out for in public since practically day one.

  The kiss was swift but depthening.

  Then the reception. He was a marvel for once, waving himself loose from the greetings and salutes every time he realized anew that they were intended for the person beside him, or behind.

  HISTORIES OF THE UNDEAD

  KATE BRAVERMAN

  When Erica took a leave of absence to complete her research she knew almost immediately that she would fail. She devised lists of people to telephone, penciled in a schedule of interviews and columns with questions. Her handwriting seemed small and bruised. She called no one.

  She remembers now, in the long mornings when Flora and Bob are gone, that she always detested fragments. Or more accurately, the need to order them, to invent a spine, a progression, a curve that resolves.

  She is, at her core, too nervous, restless, and cynical. There is something within her that can only say no. It’s odd that she thought she had subdued this, found her own rain forest, slashed and burned it to the last acre of cold ash. She wonders if she should be grateful. Perhaps somewhere on a balcony, in a permanently ocher-tinted city she isn’t certain of, there is more air for someone, a woman standing mute and confused in a scented dusk, a woman searching for something.

  It was late morning. Day was elbowing clouds above glazed roofs of orange tiles, and she feels startled and amazed. Seen from the right angle, the city is a sequence of seashells, glistening abalone, their bellies an offering of mother-of-pearl. She became aware of the fact that she wasn’t worried about abandoning her project or the implications this might have on her tenure profile. She had always sensed a rainy day coming. It would be an afternoon in winter when some massive typhoon would speak her name. There would be a new fluid language, a kind of cursive rendered in acid. Then it would invade her lungs, she would be singed, and it would be the time of the drowning.

  It occurred to her that the suddenness with which her behavior altered had a predestined quality. It was as if she had been secretly engaged in a dress rehearsal for precise
ly this abandonment and divestiture all of her life. This knowledge entered her with a fierce urgency. It felt perpetual and alluring, like sin or revelation. It was inescapable. She recognized it as a kind of return. It had always been there. This was the cove where she was meant to anchor.

  This must be what she was thinking about at traffic lights, why she didn’t play her car radio and was never bored, why the static in the air seemed a kind of hieroglyphic she tried to decipher. This must be why she would walk out of theaters and not remember the title of the play, the setting, or even the genre. Had it been a musical, a love story, or a comedy? She would walk across a parking lot shaking her head.

  Perhaps she had been tuned into another station entirely. There was something on the margin that attracted her, something in the extreme edge of the register where you couldn’t be certain of dates or motives or outcome. She could never understand, really, why the motion picture was more interesting than sitting in the lobby with the carpet that looked like stained glass in reverse, deco blood petals, panels of crimson and lime that marked not translucency but rather the end of the line. Here couples glared at each other above the too-yellow popcorn and all things were random, vaguely metallic and swollen. She thought of hooks that were swallowed. And why was this less significant than the other images, the ones you sat in dark rooms for, sat as if a subliminal force were fattening you for a harvest or a kill.

  Erica realized that time would pass and her grant would expire. The questions she had planned to examine seemed distant and trivial. She wondered if it were possible to be defined by refusal. Certainly the most brilliant of her subjects would listen to her questions, run a slow hand across a soft mouth, and remain silent. She was looking out the kitchen window when she realized this. There were five pigeons on a strip of grass, and the red bands around their necks were exactly the same shade of corrupted pink as the red no stopping lines painted on the curb in front of their house. Had she finally discovered something?

  She began to sleep past eight o’clock. She could not drive her daughter to school. She was no longer reliable. Now she called a taxicab for her daughter the night before, gave Flora ten dollars, told her to wait outside, and to keep the change. She reminded Flora not to mention this to Bob. She squeezed Flora’s shoulder with her fingers when she said this.

  When Erica woke up late she made a second pot of coffee, put brandy in it, ate an extra piece of toast, layered it with jam. She turned on the stereo. The concept of rock and roll in the morning by sunlight was stunning.

  Her husband came home for lunch. She hadn’t expected him. She was looking out the kitchen window. There was a tarnish in the air, a sort of glaze.

  Perhaps it was part of a complicated cleaning solution with invisible ammonia. It was designed to bring out the shine, but the sky was overcast.

  “You seem troubled,” Bob said. He put his briefcase on the table. Its proportion seemed monumental. “Is it the research?”

  She shook her head, no. It was nearly noon. It was the hour the workingmen sat on lawns smoking cigarettes and eating lunches that looked too meager to sustain them. They leaned close to one another, planning burglaries and trading lies about women.

  “You aren’t yourself,” Bob decided. He paused and studied her face. “I don’t have to go to Seattle. Christ. I don’t even have a paper to present.”

  Erica said, “Don’t be silly. I’m perfectly fine.”

  Later, she stood in the backyard where the bushes were trimmed and resembled elongated skulls. She had forgotten he was going to a conference. Now that she knew he would be gone this night and the next, she wondered if his absence mattered. Was it fundamental, was it definitive, would there be change? She leaned against the side of the house. These were the stark fragments that bruised, made you fall, made you hoarse. It was best to create methods of walking with your eyes shut.

  Bob noticed that she was different but his conclusion was wrong. He could observe but not interpret. She was merely in transition. She was returning to a version of a former self. And Erica wondered how she would devise a process of clarification, how she would problem-solve this small confusion of who she was.

  Whenever she encountered enormities, Erica could only think of walking beside water, a bay or a rocky stretch of coast, or finding her daughter, holding Flora and breathing in the scent of her black hair, which was the spiced essence of night rivers. They were the only two manifestations in the landscape that were indisputable, like a certain sequence of spires, of bridges or plazas. This was how she could know where she was. Geography would form a rudimentary net, the first in a series of coordinates. Later she could build a landing strip.

  Erica walks into the early afternoon, uncertain of where she is going. There is only a sense of fluid depth and the realization that she is again thinking about her sister Ellen. Her sister has two best friends and both of them are dying. These two other women, barely nodding acquaintances, have somehow achieved a massive presence in Erica’s life. Often her sister will telephone with frantic updates on the brutal unravelings of the other women. It is curious how Lillian and Babette seem more vivid to Erica than her actual friends.

  Erica is given the details of their deterioration and she absorbs these fragments without effort. They arrange themselves, as if she has an innate capacity for this ordering. She understands these proportions, their facets, how they must be viewed and composed. She envisions Babette, the French skier, frail now, ninety-three pounds. Babette, who never married or had children, who chose instead an intimacy with mountains, a life of suitcases and hotels facing ridges of white, is now confined to a wheelchair.

  Erica has memorized the saga of Lillian, shunned by her oncologist, left without a referral for three months, and finally sent to an experimental chemotherapy program. The doctor tells her they expect the treatment to fail.

  In the long mornings of waxy stray sunlight across the camellias, she finds herself waiting for Ellen to telephone, to recite the most recent conversations, to impart the medical data and the second and third opinions. How Lillian, only a year before the vice president of a stock brokerage, a woman with 275 employees, called in the predawn, terrified. They had removed the plug from her arm. They wanted her to get out of bed and into a wheelchair.

  “They’re dismissing me, and I’m too sick to go home,” Lillian realized and wept. “I’m afraid. I keep drifting off.”

  “What did you do?” Erica asks. She can see part of the street from her living room window. The leaves on the orange trees look artificial, landscaped beyond recognition. They are not trees, but someone’s concept of how trees should look.

  “I tracked down the resident. He said Lillian could die any minute. She doesn’t have a month left.” Her sister sounds broken. “I told him Lillian lives alone. I said he couldn’t send her home alone, not like this.”

  She imagines Lillian, whom she has only met twice and cannot clearly remember, as a tall woman with white hair and a straw hat with yellow silk flowers. Now this Lillian is shrunken, ordered into a wheelchair and pushed to the front of a building she cannot recognize. She has no hair, she is too weak to fasten her wig, it’s become too complicated. A nurse who barely speaks English—is from the Philippines or Guatemala—deposits the wheelchair at the curb where a taxi attempts to take Lillian to an apartment she cannot provide adequate directions to.

  After all, north or south of Wilshire are an immensity of possibility, everything writhes, stung by citrus and pastel, who could draw the line? Lillian knows there are indications. Poinsettias in a cluster might be December. There are lilies at Easter. That comes in April. Of course vegetation is a kind of compass that rises from the ground. There is always a chorus of pigments. This is why we believe in resurrection. And Lillian couldn’t get out of a taxi, walk across a lobby, wait for an elevator, open the many locks of the heavy front door she had insisted on. And there’s no food there, there hasn’t been food in weeks. She just eats through a plug. She can’t remember how
to turn on appliances or who she gave her cat to.

  Erica wonders if these are parables. Is this what happens to women who dare to live alone, even the good ones, like Lillian, a churchgoer who doesn’t sin, ever? Her sister is adamant. Lillian is from the South for God’s sake, she wears gloves and gives money to an organization to protect stray animals.

  The air smells scrubbed, polished, and detoxed. It is a winter that has been taught a lesson. And Erica doesn’t want Flora to be left like this, in some remote time, when she can’t be there to protect her, to make sure about release forms, wheelchairs, plugs, the administration of morphine, a bed with a view of the tops of palms, the secret avenues in the air where they open their fans and do their ancient naked dance that has nothing to do with love.

  Suddenly Erica remembers when she decided to murder her daughter. They were living in northern California. It was the winter it never stopped raining. It would be the coldest and wettest winter on record. She was going to graduate school and they didn’t know anyone in the county. Erica was still smoking three packs of cigarettes a day. She had bronchitis again. It was her fourth bout of bronchitis that year and she refused to take a chest X-ray. The doctor in the student clinic said she was killing herself, pointed his long white arm at the door, placed her chart on the counter next to her purse, turned his back, walked away.

  Erica was convinced she had lung cancer. She could sense the blue particles like a glacial stream, trickling and widening. The rain made them grow. They were sensitive to water. She could feel inside her veins to a fluid she imagined was the color of chilled larkspur. She was certain she wouldn’t survive this California winter.

  It was before she married Bob. She lay awake listening to the rain and considering her daughter Flora without her, a four-year-old orphan, a ward of the state. A child to be adopted by foster parents who would sexually abuse her, fail to provide piano lessons and poetry. A child to be raised in apartments where she was the entertainment for the brothers and uncles, and the television set was always on.