The Best American Short Stories 2015

by T. C. Boyle

  That was how it happened, in the summer of 1976, just before my twelfth birthday, when Mother ran off with Brian’s guitar teacher, Allen. I don’t recall anyone telling me that it happened, or any great argument or fight between her and Claude. I just recall suddenly understanding why Brian had quit the guitar and knowing that Treason was going on the road to open for a larger band and knowing that Mother was going with the band.

  I was furious with her, much angrier—it seems to me now—than Claude was. But there’s a fogginess I feel from that period too, a disorientation that makes it hard to remember exactly how things played out. Maybe it was the shock of what ended up happening, or maybe it’s just the fog of adolescence. Since that time, I have seen this period in my own daughters—that intense dawning of self-awareness that causes teenagers to tune out the rest of the world. A child’s powers of observation must be strongest, I think, between eight and eleven; by thirteen we can’t quite see past ourselves.

  Whatever the cause, I just remember smoothly going from living with my mother and Claude to living alone with Claude. We developed a quiet, easy relationship. We ate dinner and watched TV together. On Tuesday nights, after I finished my homework, Claude would make popcorn and we’d watch Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley. When Marshall Harper asked me to “go with him” at school, Claude explained what that meant and gave me the words to tell him no, thank you. When my period arrived, Claude took me to the store for tampons and explained the basics of female reproduction and human sexuality to me, something Mother had failed to do. Thankfully, in his sex talk, he didn’t say anything about pirates or slaves or Robert Goulet.

  Brian came over a lot that year. He was taking classes at Spokane Falls Community College, and we all had dinner together at least twice a week. I was in middle school and could feel myself coming into my looks. My legs and breasts seemed to grow independently of the rest of me, my shirts becoming too tight, cuffs of my pants rising off the floor. My breasts, especially, were a great mystery and concern to me. I would lock my bedroom door and stand naked in front of the mirror, wondering: Were they too high? Weren’t they supposed to hang more? Were the nipples supposed to point out like that? Oh my God, my breasts were deformed, my nipples horribly cockeyed! It was around that time that I also became aware of boys and men watching me more attentively. I felt their heavy gazes first with surprise and with discomfort and then with a kind of familiarity. Right. This was how it felt to be her, to always be on a kind of stage, the eyes in the room drawn your way. I recalled her small mannerisms, the way she managed all that attention, the way she’d feign indifference . . . or shoot a glance at someone . . . this tilt of the head . . . that toss of the hair. In a way, it was all so natural, so easy.

  While boys began to notice me, the one boy I most wanted to notice, Brian, seemed to see me only as a little kid. I thought of him as I dressed in the morning—would Brian like this skirt, this blouse, these tight jeans? I started wearing makeup to look older. Tall, intense Clay had started hanging around again too, and if Brian didn’t notice me, Clay certainly did. “Man, someone’s growing up,” he’d say, and Brian would look at me as if noticing for the first time. Then he’d grunt with some unknown meaning: Yeah, I guess so. Or Yuck.

  And that’s how I started flirting with Clay, I guess. It was another thing I’d seen mother do—work toward the man she wanted through his friend. I’d hear them setting up Clay’s drum kit in the garage and I’d put on a pair of short shorts and go out to the garage, get on my bicycle, and pedal slowly away. “Bye, Brian. Bye, Clay.”

  Clay would watch me ride away, smiling with just half of his mouth, while Brian tuned his guitar. I could sense the eyes moving, Clay’s to me, Brian’s to Clay, then Brian’s to me. I can’t say I was intentional in this; it was not a plan, as such. But I’m sure some part of me knew instinctually, intuitively, that the way to Brian was through jealousy, through his best friend. I also knew it was weird to be in love with your own stepbrother, and I held the secret inside, ashamed and worried that it meant something was wrong with me.

  I was usually home alone for a couple of hours after school, and I’d sometimes go into Brian’s room and look through his clothes or finger through his albums, imagining him in there. Then, one day I heard the doorbell. I ran to the front door, peered through the window, and saw Clay.

  “Hey, Tanya,” he said when I opened the door, his eyes traveling up and down me, like he was watching someone yo-yo.

  “Brian’s not here,” I said. “He’s at his mom’s.” I tried to be cooler than usual, since Brian wasn’t around to make jealous. But later I would wonder: Did I tilt my head too much, give the slightest shift to my hip? Was it my fault?

  “Oh,” Clay said. Then, “Shit.” He glanced back at his blue Nova, skulking in our driveway. “So you’re here alone?”

  I stared at my shoes. “Um, yeah . . . But Claude will be home from work pretty soon.”

  He asked if he could use our phone and when I said yes, he followed me into the house, a bit too close, it seemed, and when we got to the kitchen, I took the phone off the wall, turned, and handed it to him. But he hung the phone up. “I forgot the number.” Then he moved closer to me, backing me up until I was against the wall.

  “Clay . . .” I put my hand on his chest, the way I remembered Mother doing—a way of touching someone that also kept a bit of distance, I thought.

  But he just kept coming closer, pressing me against the wall. He kissed me, not the way boys my age had kissed me, but hungrily, with his tongue, as if he was trying to crawl inside me. I closed my eyes and tried to imagine I was kissing Brian, but it wasn’t right. I didn’t imagine Brian kissing like this. Clay’s hands moved over me.

  And I thought: Does he know I’m only thirteen? What boy would want to do this with someone who is only thirteen? I pushed a little harder on his chest. “Clay,” I said, “I don’t . . .”

  But he just kissed me harder, mashed my lips against my teeth. He sucked at my neck and said into it, “Don’t tell me you don’t want it. The way you look?”

  The structure of the sentence threw me for a second. Don’t tell? Want what? Look how? What?

  Later, of course, you torture yourself, asking, Was I allowing this? Did I do something? It was all so fast. His hands were insistent, quick, aggressive. It was like fighting a war on two fronts. I would stop his right hand from mashing my left breast and his left hand would be moving up my right inner thigh, the whole time his tongue was stuck deep in my mouth. Don’t tell . . . don’t want . . . way you look. He pulled me to the kitchen floor, his weight on top of me. I tried to stop long enough to think, but there seemed to be no time for thoughts at all, just those hands, the battle of those hands: I stopped the right and the left undid my bra; I stopped the left and the right jammed itself down the front of my jeans. I gripped his right forearm but his fingers moved over my bare pelvis. I gasped. No one had ever touched me there. It was like being jolted with clammy electricity, his strong hand trying to move up and inside me. Thankfully my jeans were very tight, and I squeezed my legs together and that’s when a clear thought formed, I do NOT want this, but the distance between my mind and my mouth suddenly seemed daunting and his tongue was keeping me from talking and I felt a panic go through me, that he would choke me with that thick tongue, and that’s exactly when I heard the voice of God descend from heaven and rain down like fire upon the carpeted floor of that 1970s mauve kitchen.

  “You little goddamn shithead creep!” In my memory, the dishes rattled and the windows shook and birds scattered at the very moment Claude came home from work, opened the door from the garage to the kitchen, and saw Clay wrestling with his stepdaughter on the floor. Clay recoiled from the thundering boom of Mr. Voice, his wrist catching on my zipper as he yanked his hand out of my pants: “Get your hands off of her! She’s thirteen, for God’s sake!”

  There was much scrambling, one swift kick (Claude’s) and a great deal of apologizing (Clay’s) and a bit of cr
ying (mine) and then Claude grabbed Clay by the neck and pushed him out the door. “Don’t you ever come to this house again!”

  I went to my room and curled up on the bed as the Nova rumbled to life and backed out of our driveway.

  I was in there for a long moment alone; I think Claude had a stiff drink to fortify himself—I could smell it on him when he appeared in my doorway. “Are you OK?”

  I nodded.

  “Look, I didn’t . . . I don’t know if . . .” He looked pained. “I have to ask . . . is it something . . . you wanted to happen?”

  “I don’t know.” I started crying. “I don’t think so.”

  He nodded. “You do know . . . you don’t ever have to do what you don’t want to do. With a boy. They can be . . . insistent. You just keep saying ‘No,’ pushing him away. He doesn’t have the right to—”

  But before he could finish, I started crying again. “It was confusing. He said . . . I wanted it. The way I looked.” I wept into my hands.

  Claude came in and sat on the bed.

  “He’s wrong. You know that, don’t you?”

  I nodded, but I couldn’t stop crying.

  “Do you want to know what you look like? To me?” Claude lifted my chin. He ran his index finger around the length of my head. “You look like Tanya. This is Tanya’s face. Understand? It doesn’t belong to some boy. And listen to me: it’s not her face either.”

  We both knew who he meant by her.

  “This is Tanya’s face.”

  I stared up into his bulging eyes, veins running up his balding forehead, gray hair wiring off in all directions. “Claude?”

  “Yes?”

  “Do we have to tell Brian?” I asked quietly.

  “Brian? What’s—” He cocked his head, looked at me, and, not for the first time, I could see that Mr. Voice knew a lot more than he ever let on. “Oh,” he said. “Oh. Brian.”

  “I don’t want him to think I did something wrong.”

  He smiled, and if he thought I was a creep for having a crush on my stepbrother, Claude certainly didn’t show it. “You didn’t do anything wrong. And don’t worry about Brian.”

  Of course, it wasn’t long after that day that I came to realize something else, again without much fanfare: Brian was gay. Claude must’ve already known. He was much more open-minded than many of the men of his age: he accepted this fact as easily as he had once accepted that Brian would like girls. And so, when Brian started bringing boyfriends around the house, Claude welcomed them without so much as a hitch in that deep voice. “More London broil, Kevin?”

  We talked about this quality the other day, Brian and I, at Claude’s funeral, how Mr. Voice was constantly surprising you, how his goofy looks and odd manner could cause you to miss what a good man he was. There was an obituary in the newspaper about his death, not as big as the story of his wedding, but still nice, talking about the period when he was known as the voice of Spokane. Claude’s books-on-tape business turned out to be a big failure, mostly because his lawyer partner hadn’t actually secured the rights to the books that he read. Claude settled the lawsuits and spent the next twenty-five years doing voice work, but his heyday was clearly behind him. He got remarried late in life, long after I was gone (college, Denver, two marriages, a career) to a nice woman named Karen, who always talked in a whisper, but who sobbed loudly throughout the funeral.

  There was a reception after the service for Claude, and I sat with Brian and his husband, a tall, quiet man named Joey, and their two adopted kids. My second husband, Everett, couldn’t make it to the funeral and my older daughter, Brittany, was away at college so I brought Meaghan, who was seventeen, and who did me the favor of taking out her various facial piercings and wearing a dress that covered most of her tattoos.

  “What a beautiful girl you are,” Joey said to Meaghan. “Like your mother.”

  I looked at Brian and we smiled at each other. I was filled with nostalgia and warmth for Brian, my first love. I thought too of how many times I’d heard that myself growing up—you look like your mother—and how it suddenly stopped.

  It’s another of those things that I barely recall. I was fourteen and it was not long after the incident with Clay. I remember Claude picking me up from school and taking me home in his Lincoln Continental, but a teacher or my principal must’ve already broken the news to me because I seemed to know when I got in the car; all I remember is him telling me how it happened. She’d been gone two years by then. We’d talked on the phone a few times, and there was some discussion of my going to Los Angeles for the summers, but Treason was doing well in Southern California and it was clear that Mother wasn’t coming back to Spokane anytime soon, and the road was no place for a girl.

  Allen wasn’t driving. Claude thought maybe it was the drummer who fell asleep at the wheel. Whoever was at fault, the Treason tour van crossed the center line and hit another car on the highway outside some town called Victorville. I used to say the town’s name in my head, like an incantation: Victorville. Three people died, the driver of the other car, the bass player, and my mother. “She was killed instantly,” Claude said, which, I could tell by the way he said it, was supposed to be good news.

  She was cremated. We had a small service in Spokane. Mother’s two cruel sisters came up from Oregon. I’d met them only a few times; they hadn’t bothered to come for the wedding. They clucked and disapproved and said, “Linda never had her shit together.” They stared at me and said, “It’s crazy how much you look like her,” and “You’re the spittin’ image,” as if this meant I was destined for trouble too. They offered to let me come live with them. I asked Claude if I had to.

  “Of course not,” he said. “Tell them you have a home.”

  There’s not much else, at least not to Mother’s story. My own story isn’t hers, just like my daughters’ stories aren’t mine, just like—as Claude said all those years ago—my face isn’t hers, and their faces aren’t mine. You make a life for yourself and mine has been a good one—I became a special-ed teacher, then assistant principal, and now am principal of a middle school. I had one good husband, one not so good, lots of friends, good health—what can you say about a decent life? Mother’s loss affected me less and less as the years went on and I probably thought of her most when my own daughters got older and came into the family looks—that same thick brown hair, same sharp cheeks, same arched brows, same stares from men. I vowed never to say anything like what Mother had said to me, about their looks being a bank account, especially not to Meaghan, who has the other thing Mother had, a danger, a smokiness, a quality that causes men to stop in their tracks.

  When Meaghan got the tattoos and piercings, I was angry at first—I had to be, it’s a mother’s job—but I can’t say that I blamed her. I always wanted my girls to be their own people, not to think their fate was tied to bone structure, or to looking like their mother, or to waiting for some man. Nobody gets to tell you what you look like, or who you are.

  But back then, back when I was fourteen, I still wasn’t sure. I saw her face in my sleep at night. And then, a few weeks after she died, Allen brought Mother’s things over to Claude’s house—some clothes, jewelry, a purse, some pictures, a makeup bag. It wasn’t much. Allen was wearing a cast with pins through his arm and shoulder, jeans, and a denim vest. One of his eyes was messed up from the wreck, all red and bleary. He kept pushing his shaggy, dirty blond hair out of his eyes and staring at me. “Goddamn, you look like her,” he said. “Freaks me out how much. There’s maybe a little bit a me in there, but not as much as she always said.”

  And that was it. Somehow, it didn’t really matter, finding out. Two years earlier, it would have changed my life. But on that day, I suppose the only thing I felt was some small measure of contentment for her: that he had, indeed, come back for her, just like she always said he would. They were different after all, destined to be together. I thanked Allen for bringing her things, watched him ride away on his motorcycle, and went inside to have di
nner with my father.

  Contributors’ Notes

  MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN was raised in North Carolina and now lives in Vermont. She studied anthropology at Wake Forest University and completed graduate degrees at Duke University and Bennington College. She is the author of Birds of a Lesser Paradise, Almost Famous Women, and a forthcoming novel. In 2015, she was awarded the Southern Fellowship of Writers’ Garrett Award for Fiction and a fellowship at the American Library in Paris.

  • I’ve always been interested in unusual women with power, and when I first read about Joe Carstairs, I couldn’t stop thinking about her: her early days as an ambulance driver and companion of Dolly Wilde, and then her later days as commander in chief of a small island in the Bahamas. I admire islands as settings—they have their own peculiar, highly specific pressures and can function as a character in the narrative. While writing the story, I became obsessed with researching Whale Cay, through Kate Summerscale’s excellent biography of Joe (The Queen of Whale Cay), and through maps and real estate sites. I wanted its mostly unspoiled and wild character to envelop the reader and provide a lush backdrop for the antics of the passionate women who lived there.

  When thinking about Joe Carstairs, an independently wealthy woman who loved to race boats and control others, I wanted to imagine the life of someone in her orbit. I’m fascinated by the way we treat others, and how power dynamics reveal so much about characters and values. I came up with the character of Georgie, a girl from the small-town South who ended up as one of Joe’s many girlfriends on Whale Cay. There are islanders in the story who are also at Joe’s mercy; it was important to me not to romanticize her actions. She was interesting, but she was also flawed.