The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  The next day is Friday and Dulal says he’s going to spend it with his sister, who lives in Uttara. Jesmin was hoping they could go to the market and look at the shops, but he leaves before she can ask. She takes the bus to Mohakhali. Mala’s neighbor looks Jesmin up and down and says to her, so your friend is married now. Look at her, like a queen she is. Mala’s wearing bright orange lipstick and acting like something good has happened to her. She’s talking on her mobile and Jesmin waits for her to finish. Then she asks, is it supposed to be like that?

  Mala looks up from the bed. You couldn’t do it?

  What, what was I supposed to do?

  She grabs an arm. Did he put it in?

  No.

  She curses under her breath. But I told him you would be the one.

  The one to what?

  The one to cure his, you know, not being able to.

  Jesmin struggles to understand. You told me his equipment was tip-top.

  Mala shrinks from her. It occurs to Jesmin that she never asked the right question, the one that has been on everyone’s mind. Why does a guy working in a shop, who doesn’t get his hands dirty all day, want a garments girl, especially a broken one like Mala? Jesmin stares at her until Mala can’t hold her eye anymore. Mala looks down at her hands. I paid him, she says.

  You paid him?

  Then he started asking for more, more money, and I didn’t have it, so I told him you and Ruby would fix him. That’s the only way he would stay.

  She’s got her head in her hands and she’s crying. She rubs her broken leg, and Jesmin thinks of Rana, and Mala’s brother, and her own brother, and she decides there’s nothing to be done now but try and fix Dulal’s problem, because now that they were married to him, his bad was their bad.

  What next?

  Try again, try everything. Mala hands her the tube of lipstick. Here, take this.

  That night Jesmin asks Kulsum for a few sprays from the bottle of scent she keeps in a box under the bed and Kulsum takes it out reluctantly, eyeing her while she pats some of it onto her neck. Jesmin draws thick lines across her eyelids and smears the lipstick on hard. Dulal cleans his plate and goes outside to gargle into the drain. She stands with him at the edge of the drain and after he rinses and spits, he looks up at the night. There’s all kinds of noise coming from the compound, kids screaming, dogs, a radio, but up there it looks quiet. Maybe Dulal’s looking for a bit of quiet too. Fog’s coming, she says. She asks about his sister. Alhamdulillah, he tells her, but doesn’t say, I will take you to meet her. I hate winter, he says instead, makes my bones tired.

  Winter makes her think of the sesame her mother had planted, years ago when she was a baby. The harvest was for selling, but after the first season the price at the market wasn’t worth the water and the effort, so she gave it up. But still the branches came up, twisted and pointy every year, tearing the feet off anyone who dared walk across the field. Only Amin knew how to tread between the bushes, his feet unscarred, the soles of his feet always so soft. Jesmin ran them across her cheeks and it was like his palm was touching her, or the tip of his penis, rather than the underside of his big toe, that’s how delicate his feet were. I’m only here to talk, he said, telling her the story of Laila and Majnu. From Amin she learned what it was to be swallowed by a man, like a snake swallowing a rat, whole and without effort. He pressed his feet against her face, showing her the difference between a schoolteacher and a farmer’s daughter, and she licked the salt between his toes, and when she asked when they would get married, he laughed as if she had told him the funniest joke in the world. And then his wife went to the Salish, and the Salish decided she had tempted Amin, and they said, leave the village. But not before you are punished. And into the punishing hut she went, and when she came out, she looked exactly like she was meant to look, ugly and broken. Like a rat swallowed by a snake. Just like Mala looked after they told her the search was over and she would never see her brother again. Now Jesmin is wondering if something happened to Dulal that made him feel like the rest of them, like a small animal in a big, spiteful world.

  Maybe that’s why, she offers, speaking softly into the dark. He turns to her. What did you say?

  Maybe that’s why, you know, it’s not—it’s not your fault.

  He comes close. His breath is eggy. That’s when, out of nowhere, one side of her face explodes. When she opens her eyes she’s on the ground and everyone is standing over her, Kulsum, her kid, her in-laws, and Dulal. The kid tugs at her kameez and she stands up, brushes herself off. No one says anything. Jesmin can taste lipstick and blood where she’s bitten herself.

  In the morning Jamal takes one look at her and runs her to the back of the line. You look like a bat, he says, you should’ve stayed home. What if that inspector comes nosing around? Her eye is swollen so she has to change the thread on the machine with her head tilted to one side. Ruby’s back from her village and when she sees Jesmin she starts to cry. Don’t worry, Jesmin says, it’s nothing. She takes a toilet break, borrows a compact from Mala, and looks at herself. One side of her face is swallowing the other. When she comes out Ruby’s holding a chocbar. She presses it against Jesmin’s cheek and they wait for it to melt, then they tear open a corner and take turns pouring the ice cream into their mouths.

  They go home. Dulal isn’t there. Now look what you did, Kulsum says. They wait until the mosquitoes come in and finally everyone eats. When the kerosene lamp comes on and she’s about to bed on the floor with Ruby, Dulal bursts in and demands food. She makes him a plate and watches him belch. The food’s cold, he says. After, it’s the same, lying there facing his back, holding his small, lifeless thing, except this time Ruby’s on the floor next to Kulsum and her kid. Scratch my head, Dulal mutters. He falls asleep, and later, in the night, she hears him cry out, a sharp, bleating sound. She thinks she must have dreamed it because in the moonlight his face is as mean as ever.

  On the day of Ruby’s turn, she looks so small. When she’s cut too much thread off her machine, Jamal scolds her and she spends the rest of the day with her head down. But after lunch she goes into the toilet and when she comes out she’s got a new sari on and the ribbon is twisted into her hair like a thread of happy running all around the back of her head. Dulal comes to the gate and when he sees Ruby his face is as bright as money. Ruby says something to Dulal and he laughs. Jesmin watches them leave together, holding hands, her heart breaking against her ribs.

  Jesmin covers her ears against the sound of laughter.

  In the punishing hut, the Salish gathered. The oldest one said, take off your dress. When her clothes were on the ground he said, walk. They sat in a circle and threw words like rotten fruit. She’s nothing but a piece of trash. Amin said: her pussy stinks like a dead eel. She is the child of pigs. She’s a slut. She’s the shit of pigs. Walk, walk. Move your hands. You want to cover it now? Where was your shame when you seduced a married man? Get out now. Get out and don’t come back. Afterward, they laughed.

  Jesmin covers her ears against the sound of laughter.

  It’s Friday. She packs her things and says goodbye to Kulsum. The kid wraps his legs around her waist and bites into her shoulder. She hands money to the landlord and he waves her to the room. There’s a kerosene lamp in one corner and a cot pushed up against another. Last year’s calendar is tacked to the wall. The roof is leaking and there’s a large puddle on the floor. She sees her face in the pool of water. She sees her eyes and the shape of her head and Ruby’s clip in her hair. She opens her trunk and finds the pair of Thanks she stole from the factory. She holds it up. It makes the silhouette of a piece of woman. She pulls the door shut and the room darkens. She takes off her sandals, her shalwar. She lies on the floor, the damp and the dirt under her back, and drags the Thanks over her legs. When she stands up she straddles the pool of water and casts her eyes over her reflection. There is a body encased, legs and hips and buttocks. The body is hers but it is far away, unreachable. She looks at herself and hears the sound
of laughter, but this time it is not the laughter of the Salish, but the laughter of the piece of herself that is closed. She knows now that Ruby will fix Dulal, that she will parade with him in the factory, spreading her small-toothed smile among the spools of thread that hang above their heads, and that Dulal will take Ruby to his air-conditioned shop, and her sisters will no longer be hungry, and Jesmin will be here, joined by the laughter of her own legs, no longer the girl of the punishing hut, but a garments girl with a room and a closed-up body that belongs only to herself.

  The door opens. Jesmin turns to the smell of biscuits.

  ANDREA BARRETT

  Wonders of the Shore

  FROM Tin House

  I.

  The sea-shore, with its stretches of sandy beach and rocks, seems, at first sight, nothing but a barren waste, merely the natural barrier of the ocean. But to the observant eye these apparently desolate reaches are not only teeming with life, they are also replete with suggestions of the past. They are the pages of a history full of fascination for one who has learned to read them.

  THE COVER IS a faded olive, not flashy; not the first thing you’d pull from a bookshelf. Wonders of the Shore. Black type, black decorations: a small silhouette of a fiddler crab; a pair of stylized starfish bracketing the author’s name. Coiled snails frame the “Wonder” while sea anemones frame the “Shore.” Actually it is attractive, in a sober, subtle way. Someone labored over that design. And over the photographs too, reprinted from many sources but freshly labeled and crowded on thick, glossy paper, which makes the book heavy.

  The writing is old-fashioned, more detailed than we’re used to now; it was published in 1889. The author, Daphne Bannister, thanks a long list of people at the end of her preface. Some are professors at places like Harvard and Barnard, others curators or—the women—assistants at the Smithsonian. Especially thanked are Celia Thaxter, “whose kind invitations to Thaxter Cottage made my working visits to the Hotel such a pleasure,” and “my dear friend and stalwart companion, Miss Henrietta Atkins.” Henrietta’s great-niece, Suky Marburg, left the book behind with her other things, and for a long time no one looked at it.

  II.

  It is hoped that this book will suggest a new interest and pleasure to many, and that it will serve as a practical guide to this branch of natural history, without necessitating serious study. Marine organisms are interesting acquaintances when once introduced, and the real purpose of the author is to present, to the latent naturalist, friends whom he will enjoy.

  Celia Thaxter is easy to trace; she wrote a book of poems, a collection of pieces about the beloved island where she was raised, a book about her garden. There are letters too, and portraits and photographs, and a couple of biographies. Among her well-known friends were Whittier, Sarah Orne Jewett, and the painters William Morris Hunt and Childe Hassam. Nathaniel Hawthorne visited her island cottage. Major Greely claimed her poems comforted him during his disastrous Arctic voyage. She met Dickens and Robert Browning.

  Daphne, who wrote under two different names, is harder to classify, but she had her day as well, and people in Hammondsport noticed her: a woman, visiting repeatedly, traveling on her own. At the drugstore, at the theater. Walking along the lake with her friend, pale hair improbably thick above her sharp features and delicate neck, or skating—she had tiny feet, but was very fast—in a costume showing more leg than was usual in this part of upstate New York. Some were annoyed by her manners. After one visit, the Crooked Lake Gazette reported:

  Among those arriving last week by train from Bath was Miss Daphne Bannister, here for one of her frequent stays with our esteemed biology teacher, Miss Henrietta Atkins. A well-known authoress, Miss Bannister has written guides to the insect pests, the wildflowers of Massachusetts (where she makes her home), and the birds of the fields and farms. She traveled from the Cornell campus, where she presented a talk on parasitic nematodes.

  That one, the gossips said. Henrietta’s friend. All around Keuka Lake, people were aware of Henrietta. Mention of her in the Gazette goes back as far as grade school: “Winner of the Spelling Bee.” “Student Fossil Collection Impresses Visitors.” “Sisters Show Off Lake Trout Caught in Fishing Derby.” Later articles note her departure for Oswego, where she went for her teacher training, and the grant she received when she finished. She met Daphne after she graduated, at a summer school for the study of natural history run by Louis Agassiz. After that she came back home to teach biology at the Hammondsport high school. She established the Natural History Club, the Fossil Collector’s Club, an ice-skating group, a reading group. Several times she won teaching awards. Each year she pulled a few promising students into her investigations, which ranged from aiding the local farmers’ experiments with breeding cows and corn, to studies of fish, the development of other uses for wine grapes during Prohibition, and a new method for producing the membrane used to make balloons and rigid airships impermeable to gas.

  All of this is noted in the Gazette. Henrietta, so firmly rooted wherever she stands that she looks tall unless she’s next to someone else, ages silently in the photographs; her skirts narrow, then rise, then give way to voluminous slacks. Her sleeves are always pushed back from her sturdy wrists and blunt-fingered hands, lines appearing as her hair grays and metamorphoses from a mass pinned at the back of her head to a neat crop just below her ears. Grateful students mention her as they in turn appear in the newspaper for one thing or another. Appreciative colleagues thank her as they retire. The tone is invariably kind—except for the notes about Daphne’s visits, which are colored by something that wouldn’t be there if either of the women had married. Now they seem to point at something. They might not have read that way then.

  III.

  Every coast-line shows the destructive effects of the sea, for the bays and coves, the caves at the bases of the cliffs, the buttresses and needles, are the work of the waves. And this work is constantly going on. The knotty sticks so commonly seen on the beach are often the hearts of oak or cedar trees from which the tiny crystals of sand have slowly cut away their less solid outer growth.

  In August of 1885, Henrietta was thirty-three and had been teaching high school for twelve years. Although her sister, Hester, was almost a decade younger, she’d married two years earlier and left Henrietta alone at home with their mother. This had suited Henrietta very well until her friend Mason Perrotte, an ambitious farmer whom she’d known for some time, began to court her attentively. Confusingly. Now, after seven months of thinking one way about this in the morning and another in the afternoon, she knew he was about to propose. She was fond of him, as was her mother. If she was going to change her life and start a family, it was surely time. But to leave her job, after all she’d put into it—no point to that unless she could do more work, not less, as Daphne had after leaving her own teaching job. And her mother’s argument that Henrietta would be teaching her own children wasn’t wholly convincing.

  She and Daphne had shared a vacation every summer since they’d met, which didn’t always mean Daphne visiting Henrietta: sometimes Henrietta went to the little town in western Massachusetts where Daphne, having pried herself free from her parents and her brothers, had bought herself a tiny white house. And twice they’d managed to stay at a resort. Once in the White Mountains, once in Rhode Island: what luxury, to have their meals cooked and their rooms cleaned! Henrietta had been Daphne’s guest both times, which might have been awkward if instead of pointing out that the income she made from her books was much greater than Henrietta’s small salary, Daphne had not insisted graciously that those books wouldn’t exist without Henrietta’s help, so the treat was simply Henrietta’s due. This year, having done especially well, Daphne had offered three weeks at the hotel on Appledore Island, a few miles off the New Hampshire coast.

  On the day before Henrietta began her journey to the island, Mason came from his farm in Pulteney with a tin of gingersnaps for the train ride and a big white canvas hat that tied with two strips of muslin
under her chin. He was wearing the blue-checked shirt he knew she particularly liked. She could feel him trying to get her alone, but instead she sat steadfastly with her mother at the table, making lists of what she should bring and what she would read during this stretch of uninterrupted time. She’d been catching up with Darwin’s work since Daphne first led her, years ago, to an acceptance of his great theory. Reading slowly and carefully as her interest deepened, filling pages with notes, repeating some of his experiments and adapting them for her students. But there was no catching up to Daphne.

  Daphne wrote to Darwin, and was answered. Daphne wrote to Asa Gray. Daphne wrote about climbing plants and burrowing spiders, publishing more and more articles and then a book, and another and another, earning enough money from those (and also from the part of her writing life she kept quiet) to stop teaching at the academy where she’d been working when they met. Henrietta fell even further behind. Not giving up; but working more slowly than she wished. Only in the summers could she pursue her own investigations wholeheartedly, keeping the thread alive during the school year by stealing an hour or two at night, after her lessons were prepared.