The Best American Short Stories 2016

by Junot Díaz

  “You disappeared last night,” he said. Quite gently, almost as if he weren’t doing it, he rested two fingertips on her forearm.

  “I was embarrassed,” she said. “Weren’t you? I couldn’t face going back inside the parlor.”

  “I’m sure it would have been fine,” he said.

  “I don’t think so,” she said, and told him about her breakfast conversation with Daphne. “Apparently,” she concluded, “I’m banished.”

  He frowned. “I’m sure Mrs. Thaxter didn’t mean that. Your friend must have misinterpreted what she said.”

  Only a few minutes later, when Sebby left for his easel and she returned to her desk, did she realize that she might have implied that the incidents of the night before had caused a real rift. But as brusque as Daphne had been at breakfast, she was sure Daphne’s disapproval wouldn’t last; they’d had worse spats and misunderstandings over the past dozen years. Often Daphne pulled away when she was first offended, only to bounce back elastically, once she’d scared herself, across the gap she’d created. The best thing was not to argue but to wait quietly for a day or two.

  Henrietta ate her lunch alone twice more and both times made excuses for Daphne’s absence when she ran into Sebby at the letterboxes. Daphne, she explained, was working furiously on the short essays meant to introduce each phylum and class in her book, and taking her midday meal in her room.

  “Busy woman,” he said. He’d rolled up the sleeves of his white shirt, exposing his forearms and the little flecks of paint—carmine, cobalt, golden yellow—that dotted the tanned skin but not the burnished hairs. “Organizing the entertainments for Mrs. Thaxter’s guests must take a lot of time too.”

  She shrugged, pretending that wasn’t news. She knew Daphne continued to visit the cottage in the evenings, but they’d avoided talking about Mrs. Thaxter’s gatherings during their quiet dinners together: simply, Henrietta thought, Daphne being discreet.

  “The night before last, she arranged a little artificial pool and filled it with plants and creatures she’d gathered from the rock pools,” he noted. “Last night”—was he summoned there every night?—“she brought more seaweeds to mount, enough so everyone could try their hand. I sketched those, and also some of the guests. She’s good at knowing what will interest people.”

  “She is,” Henrietta said. “She’s very gifted that way.”

  “Gifted socially too,” Sebby said. Was that admiration in his voice, or a sarcastic imitation? “She’s making quite a friend of Mrs. Thaxter, and also some of her literary circle.”

  By the next day, when they met again, she’d begun to wonder if he timed his arrival to coincide with hers. They both had letters that day, and because he opened and read his little pile casually, at the counter, she did the same with her single envelope. A chatty, inconsequential letter from Mason: weather, news of a bicycling accident, a description of the agricultural society meeting in Ovid. Dr. Sturtevant gave a good talk about corn and Professor Arnold some useful notes on butter-making in winter. The best was Law on contagious diseases in animals: he talked about bacteria in a way everyone in the room could understand. Mason—balding, friendly, freckled; just a few years older than she was—being typically Mason. He’d gone to Cornell before returning to his family farm and was interested in the structure of soil and its microorganisms. He experimented with soil amendments and, when he could find the time, good-humoredly accompanied her class on field trips. Happily busy, he never begrudged her the time she needed for her work. Both her mother and Hester had hinted that this might change when he showed up with his grandmother’s opal ring—but then some other life would appear, which at least part of her had thought she wanted.

  Why, then, did she crumple the pages as Sebby looked up from his own? Why tighten her lips, stare blindly at the ground, let her eyes fill? Why, when Sebby touched her elbow and said, “What’s happened? Is everything all right?,” turn away as if she couldn’t talk? And then turn back and say, “My friend at home, Mason, the man I thought—I thought we had an understanding. But it seems he has met someone else.”

  Sebby drew his breath in sharply. “He’s breaking off your relationship?”

  She nodded.

  “In a letter?”

  She nodded again, watching sympathy and affection flood his face. He seized her hand—by now they’d stepped away from the counter—and said, “That’s terrible, what can I do?”

  What was she doing? Her lips were trembling, her hands as well; the story she’d invented without thinking felt almost true and Sebby was as responsive as she’d somehow known he would be, his interest in her sharply fanned. That whiff of her needing help and leaning on him was hitting him like brandy.

  “Nothing,” she said. She ran a palm over both eyes.

  “Nothing?”

  “I don’t know—maybe I could sit with you this afternoon and work on my notes while you paint? Daphne’s busy and I don’t want to brood by myself.”

  They spent the afternoon together, she in a chair drawn near the easel he’d set up on a flat rock overlooking the harbor, he moving between his canvas and her. Several times he rested his hand on her arm or her shoulder and once she reached her hand back to rest it on his. They parted at teatime, and, after Henrietta worked for a while, she answered the knock on her door to find Daphne holding a sheaf of pages, her expression cheerful and energetic.

  “I did the overall introduction to the Coelenterata,” she said. “And then smaller ones for the Hydrozoa, the Scyphozoa, and Actinozoa, and the Ctenophora—I got so much done! Will you read them for me and see how they strike you?”

  “Of course,” Henrietta said: her apology, as the pages were Daphne’s. She read swiftly; she took notes. She suggested several cuts and a new opening for the piece about the ctenophores. Two hours later they went down to dinner together, Daphne by then asking Henrietta about her sundews and proposing an alteration in one of the experiments. In the lobby, they ran into Sebby.

  “How are you feeling?” he asked Henrietta, looking at her intently. “I meant what I said, I am so sorry—”

  Daphne froze. “What happened?”

  “That wretched man,” Sebby said.

  “Mason,” Henrietta clarified. Of course Sebby assumed she’d already told Daphne—and she’d meant to right away, to confess the impulsive lie and maybe even what was driving her to pull Sebby closer: but she and Daphne had been so caught up in the relief of working together again that she hadn’t had time.

  “What,” Daphne said now, “did Mason do?”

  “To dismiss her in a letter,” Sebby said indignantly. “To tell her she’s been replaced . . .”

  Daphne’s face reddened as Henrietta stumbled through a quick version of the story she’d told Sebby. “What an idiot!” Daphne said. “So stolid and unoriginal and slow, so—”

  They’d met several times; when she and Henrietta had visited his farm last summer, she’d spoken admiringly of his ducks and his orchard and claimed to like him. “He doesn’t hold a candle to you, I never knew what you saw in him. Really, you’re well shed of him.”

  She put her arm around Henrietta’s waist. “Just like him too, to tell you he’s met someone else in a letter. Coward.”

  For a moment Henrietta felt properly put-upon—and then, as Daphne continued to rant, amazed to learn how much her friend had disliked Mason all along. Sebby listened, made sympathetic noises, fanned Daphne’s indignation. He asked if he could join them for dinner and when Daphne encouraged him, offered his arm to Henrietta.

  V.

  As each wave retreats, little bubbles of air are plentiful in its wake. Underneath the sand, where each bubble rose, lives some creature. By the jet of water which spurts out of the sand, the common clam Mya arenaria reveals the secret of its abiding-place. Only the lifting of a shovelful of sand at the water’s edge is needed to disclose the populous community of mollusks, worms, and crustaceans living at our feet, just out of sight.

  Celia Thaxt
er died in 1894, nine years after the August day on which Henrietta and Daphne sailed from the island back to Portsmouth, and just a few months after she published the handsome volume about her gardens that we still read.

  The other day, as I sat in the piazza which the vines shade with their broad green leaves and sweet white flowers climbing up to the eaves and over the roof, I saw the humming-birds hovering over the whole expanse of green, to and fro, and discovered that they were picking off and devouring the large transparent aphides scattered, I am happy to say but sparingly, over its surface . . .

  That tangle of honeysuckle, hops, wild cucumber, and clematis, impossible to separate, is where Henrietta and Sebby met—but the vines are gone, and the piazza too; the hotel and Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage burned in 1914, leaving only the foundations. A marine biological laboratory occupies most of the island now. College students visit throughout the summer, studying the same creatures Daphne and Henrietta collected, sampling the tidal pools and each other. A group of ardent gardeners has rebuilt Mrs. Thaxter’s garden on its original site. Hollyhocks, sunflowers, poppies, roses, the old-fashioned favorites of midsummer, which she surely would have enjoyed.

  Before she died, she apparently also enjoyed Daphne’s Wonders of the Shore. She kept copies in the hotel library, and a personal copy, inscribed by Daphne, in her parlor; she gave others as gifts to cherished visitors. The hotel declined after Mrs. Thaxter’s death, as other, more modern resorts and hotels sprang up along the Maine and New Hampshire coasts, emulating and improving on the place Henrietta and Daphne knew—but all of them stocked Daphne’s book for their guests. Many visitors bought copies; teachers used it in their classes. Daphne built on that success with shorter books, more richly illustrated and less technical: one specifically about the seaweeds, another about the common shells. And when she arrived once more in Hammondsport, on an August day in 1901, she brought those, as well as copies of the most recent edition of Wonders of the Shore, as gifts for Henrietta, her sister, and her nieces. Marion, almost eight by then, tall and round-eyed and particularly cherished after two stillbirths, took her copy as eagerly as a girl from a different family might have taken a new doll. Caroline, who was five, pointed at the title and said, “I can read!” Elaine, only a few months old, kept her thoughts to herself.

  Along with the books and the rest of her luggage, Daphne also brought a large flat package wrapped in brown paper, which Henrietta noticed at the train station but then forgot to ask about. They cooked and ate a simple meal in the kitchen that still, two years after Henrietta’s mother’s death, seemed oddly empty; they went to a meeting of the Fossil Collector’s Club; they went to sleep early. The next day they had a pleasant excursion to the Grove Springs Hotel, lunch with some visitors from Elmira, and then a hectic dinner at Henrietta’s sister’s house. Nothing out of the ordinary—Elaine, a fussy baby, was distracted by the company and slow to nurse; Ambrose was out at a meeting; in their father’s absence the older girls careened around the house as they vied for attention—but Henrietta, who came almost daily to help, was startled to see how uncomfortable this made Daphne. During earlier visits, before the baby was born, she’d been more relaxed and had even helped Henrietta put the girls to bed, but now she blushed at the sight of Hester’s breast and flinched when Caroline knocked a cup from the table, a dark stream of coffee shooting from the pale china shattered on the floor.

  They left immediately after dessert and when they reached Henrietta’s house, Daphne collapsed in a chair on the porch. “Sorry to be so feeble,” she said apologetically. “I’m not used to that much noise anymore.”

  “They were excited to see you,” Henrietta said, taking a seat on the glider. The wisteria she’d planted years ago had climbed the pillars and fanned across the scrollwork, filtering the glow from the streetlights through the leaves. For a few minutes they sat and said nothing. Then Daphne went inside and returned with the parcel, which she handed to Henrietta.

  “This came last month,” Daphne said, fiddling with the edge where she’d torn the paper open. “But it was meant for you, and you should have it.”

  She stood with one hand on the railing. Still slight, still very erect: the resilient, resourceful person who, when Henrietta had first known her, taught herds of little boys. Her hair still golden in the leafy light and not half gray (Henrietta’s by then was completely gray) and her crushed-paper skin returned to youthful smoothness.

  “Do you envy your sister her life?” Daphne said. “Even when they’re squabbling, they look like what everyone seems to think a family should look like. And you’re so good with your nieces, it makes me wonder . . .”

  Henrietta shrugged. “That’s because they’re my nieces,” she said. “I’m not responsible for them all the time, just when I choose—it’s easy to be good when you just dip in now and then. But no: I love those girls, but I wouldn’t want Hester’s life. I’m glad I avoided it.”

  “Me too,” Daphne said. Did that mean, I too am glad you avoided that life? Or I’m glad I avoided that life myself? Neither of them mentioned Mason. Daphne retreated to the room that had once been Hester’s, which was where she always stayed, and Henrietta went to her own room and unpacked the parcel. First she looked at the letter addressed to Daphne.

  It is not likely you will remember me but we met some years ago on Appledore Island, where over the course of several weeks we were both welcomed into Mrs. Thaxter’s parlor for her evening entertainments. I hope you will not think me vain if I say I was the painter of the watercolors you claimed to admire—Mrs. Thaxter’s garden, the roses and sunflowers and so on. You were there with a friend but she came only once or twice to the evenings and I confess I can no longer recall her name. She is actually the one I am trying to find.

  I was there with a friend too—one of my roommates, another painter—whose name was Sebby Quint. Sadly, he passed away earlier this year after a peculiar accident. Disposing of his few belongings has been complicated (he was estranged from his family, and never married) and as the contents of his studio passed to me I am presently trying to find homes for the work that mattered so much to him. Hence this package. There are a number of sketchbooks, but the contents date this one to the summer we all met. A few pages are of such a personal nature that I felt the entire book should go to your friend. I am hoping that you two are still in touch, and that you can convey this to her along with my best wishes and hopes that she is well.

  May I just say here that I have enjoyed your Wonders of the Shore very much, and that I remember some of what you so generously showed our motley crowd during those happy evenings? The place is, sadly, very much changed since Mrs. Thaxter’s death but I hope you too remember it fondly.

  Henrietta couldn’t read the signature—a short first name, a last name beginning with a P? Sebby had had two roommates; she couldn’t picture either one: Why should this person know about Sebby’s death, when she did not? Although they’d not stayed in touch, for sixteen years he’d been as present to her imagination as Daphne, leaping to mind unexpectedly when a wave lapped at a hull with a particular sound, or a cedar branch shook off the raindrops beading up on its needles.

  For a minute she tried to absorb the enormous fact of Sebby’s death: hopeless. He was gone, yet the image of him in her mind remained the same, his voice still humming in her ear, his touch still warming her skin. The sketchbook, opened, smelled of him and of the sea. There were the cliffs, waves foaming through the trap dike. Rock pools, landing dock, breakwater protecting the bathing pool from the rougher sea; within the pool, some children on a raft. Three girls dressed alike in blue, regarding a little boy. A mass of vines enfolding a porch, the vine leaves themselves, some small white flowers and twisted stems. A man—she remembered that man!—frowning intently as he drew a bow over his violin strings. A blank page and then . . .

  A woman’s hand, wrist, and forearm. A woman’s naked back, rising in a powerful curve from the skirts heaped around it. On a ledge deeply cut into th
e cliffs, a woman with her face hidden by her raised arms, the rest of her exposed to the sun. A pair of woman’s legs dangling over the edge of a rowboat. Did she want those to be hers, or did she not? She looked again at the penciled lines, the deft light strokes, the delicate shading. On one of the bare calves, a scar curved where hers did: her legs, then. Her arms, her back. Her self. As Sebby’s friend had realized. And as Daphne must have realized too.

  How little, after all, she’d kept secret from Daphne. Only the letter, perhaps; perhaps not even that.

  After she lied about Mason’s letter, she and Daphne had spent their evenings apart. Daphne continued to visit Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage—pushing forward, she admitted, with her conquest of that circle of painters, literary men, and musicians; no one but Henrietta understood how much she depended on such connections for the success of her work. Henrietta was less frank about her pursuit of Sebby, but no less determined. When Mason’s letters continued to arrive, she ostentatiously threw them out unread. She cut up Mason’s hat. She pretended grief and let Sebby comfort her. She pretended confusion and let Sebby seduce her when in fact, and despite her ignorance, she seduced him. Soon he stopped going to Mrs. Thaxter’s cottage, telling his friends that he was making a set of night paintings but instead spending the hours after dinner with Henrietta. On that tiny island, smaller than Henrietta’s village and densely populated by summer guests and the staff who looked after them, she and Sebby still found secret spots where they curled into each other. On a pile of kapok life-vests, in the corner of a boathouse. In the nooks of the northern headlands. During the day, as they worked together, Henrietta listened to Daphne disparage Mason, congratulate her for shedding him, reiterate (she herself had already shed several suitors) the enormous advantages of the single life. Then at night Henrietta undid Sebby’s buttons with fingers so deft they seemed to have practiced without her knowledge.