100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  1950–1960

  In 1951 series editor Martha Foley wrote, “Our tragedy today is a general and universal physical fear so long sustained by now that we can even bear it. There are no longer problems of the spirit. There is only the question: When will I be blown up?” The Cold War saw a return to formulaic, or “safer” and more sentimental, fiction, the kind popular during and just after both world wars. Foley saw “little reason for the upsurge of conservatism in the country to also be reflected in the few remaining publications for the creative writer. Here is where change and experiment should be.” Many stories featured children or adults from a child’s point of view. Also common were stories with a religious bent or, as Foley called it, “religiosity because of its artificial nature.”

  Still, some writers began to explore new territory with fresh voices. Bernard Malamud attracted notice, along with Philip Roth, Saul Bellow, and Harvey Swados. As Foley noted, “Once it was the New En­gland writer that predominated, then came the Middle Western, then the Southern, and now it is the Jewish.” Indeed, Jewish writers introduced a new comic sensibility and energy in the 1950s and 1960s.

  Perhaps because of the “Hollywoodization” of short fiction and a growing disdain for writers who were thought to have sold out, certain writers became fiercely private and, as they grew more successful, denied Foley permission to reprint their stories in the series. After granting permission for Foley to reprint “A Girl I Knew,” J. D. Salinger refused all future requests for permission, even though Foley had first published his fiction in Story. These refusals had the unexpected effect of benefiting other writers. Vladimir Nabokov refused Foley permission to reprint a story, and at the last minute she replaced his with “Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?” by Raymond Carver. It was Carver’s first appearance in the series. He wrote, “People used to call it that—simply, ‘The Foley Collection’ . . . the day the anthology came in the mail I took it to bed to read and just to look at, you know, and hold it, but I did more looking and holding than actual reading. I fell asleep and woke up the next morning with the book there in bed beside me, with my wife.”

  Foley had a contentious relationship with Houghton Mifflin. Her editors grew frustrated by how frequently she missed deadlines and wondered about the breadth of her taste. They suggested that she share the editorship with two other people, but she refused and threatened to take the series to another house. She frequently demanded early payments; she struggled financially throughout her life and felt that she was never paid enough for her work. In order to support herself and her son, she taught fiction writing at Columbia University. She became known for her pragmatism—she insisted that everything the students wrote be submitted to magazines. She passed along her insights about the writing life; her student Barbara Probst Solomon explained, “She advised the women writers not to fall in love with writers and spend [their] lives typing their manuscripts for them.” Despite her editorship, her teaching job, and miscellaneous freelance assignments, Foley continued to struggle financially, and in 1959 the IRS issued a tax lien and levy on her royalties. From then on, 20 percent of her earnings went directly to the U.S. government. Years later Foley wrote, “[My editor] once figured out that I receive far less than a cleaning woman for my time and work.”

  1957

  TILLIE OLSEN

  I Stand Here Ironing

  from the Pacific Spectator

  TILLIE OLSEN (1912–2007) was born in Nebraska, the daughter of Russian Jewish immigrants. She dropped out of high school at fifteen and worked as a waitress, factory worker, and maid. She became politically active and eventually joined the American Communist Party. She later moved to San Francisco, which became her home for most of her life.

  Tell Me a Riddle, Olsen’s first book, was a collection of short stories mostly narrated by mothers. Olsen wrote relatively little during her career, but her stories did bring awareness of the plight of exploited people.

  Olsen taught at colleges such as Amherst College and Stanford University and was the recipient of nine honorary degrees, a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts fellowships, and the Rea Award for the Short Story, in 1994, for a lifetime of achievement. She died at the age of ninety-four.

  ★

  I STAND HERE IRONING, and what you asked of me moves tormented back and forth with the iron.

  “I wish you would manage the time to come in and talk with me about your daughter. I’m sure you can help me understand her. She’s a youngster who needs help and whom I’m deeply interested in helping.”

  “Who needs help?” Even if I came what good would it do? You think because I am her mother I have a key, or that in some way you could use me as a key? She has lived for nineteen years. There is all that life that has happened outside of me, beyond me.

  And when is there time to remember, to sift, to weigh, to estimate, to total? I will start and there will be an interruption and I will have to gather it all together again. Or I will become engulfed with all I did or did not do, with what should have been and what cannot be helped.

  She was a beautiful baby. The first and only one of our five that was beautiful at birth. You do not guess how new and uneasy her tenancy in her now-loveliness. You did not know her all those years she was thought homely, or see her poring over her baby pictures, making me tell her over and over how beautiful she had been—and would be, I would tell her—and was now, to the seeing eye. But the seeing eyes were few or nonexistent. Including mine.

  I nursed her. They feel that’s important nowadays. I nursed all the children, but with her, with all the fierce rigidity of first motherhood, I did like the books said. Though her cries battered me to trembling and my breasts ached with swollenness, I waited till the clock decreed.

  Why do I put that first? I do not even know if it matters, or if it explains anything.

  She was a beautiful baby. She blew shining bubbles of sound. She loved motion, loved light, loved color and music and textures. She would lie on the floor in her blue overalls patting the surface so hard in ecstasy her hands and feet would blur. She was a miracle to me, but when she was eight months old I had to leave her daytimes with the woman downstairs to whom she was no miracle at all, for I worked or looked for work and for Emily’s father, who “could no longer endure” (he wrote in his goodbye note) “sharing want with us.”

  I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression. I would start running as soon as I got off the streetcar, running up the stairs, the place smelling sour, and awake or asleep to startle awake, when she saw me she would break into a clogged weeping that could not be comforted, a weeping I can hear yet.

  After a while I found a job hashing at night so I could be with her days, and it was better. But it came to where I had to bring her to his family and leave her.

  It took a long time to raise the money for her fare back. Then she got chicken pox and I had to wait longer. When she finally came, I hardly knew her, walking quick and nervous like her father, looking like her father, thin, and dressed in a shoddy red that yellowed her skin and glared at the pockmarks. All the baby loveliness gone.

  She was two. Old enough for nursery school they said, and I did not know then what I know now—the fatigue of the long day, and the lacerations of group life in the kinds of nurseries that are only parking places for children.

  Except that it would have made no difference if I had known. It was the only place there was. It was the only way we could be together, the only way I could hold a job.

  And even without knowing, I knew. I knew the teacher that was evil because all these years it has curdled into my memory, the little boy hunched in the corner, her rasp, “Why aren’t you outside, because Alvin hits you? That’s no reason, go out, coward.” I knew Emily hated it even if she did not clutch and implore “Don’t go, Mommy” like the other children, mornings.

  She always had a reason why we should stay home. Momma, you look sick, Momma. I feel sick. Momma, the teachers aren’t there t
oday, they’re sick. Momma there was a fire there last night. Momma it’s a holiday today, no school, they told me.

  But never a direct protest, never rebellion. I think of our others in their three-, four-year-oldness—the explosions, the tempers, the denunciations, the demands—and I feel suddenly ill. I stop the ironing. What in me demanded that goodness in her? And what was the cost, the cost to her of such goodness?

  The old man living in the back once said in his gentle way, “You should smile at Emily more when you look at her.” What was in my face when I looked at her? I loved her. There were all the acts of love.

  It was only with the others I remembered what he said, so that it was the face of joy, and not of care or tightness or worry I turned to them—but never to Emily. She does not smile easily, let alone almost always, as her brothers and sisters do. Her face is closed and somber, but when she wants, how fluid. You must have seen it in her pantomimes, you spoke of her rare gift for comedy on the stage that rouses a laughter out of the audience so dear they applaud and applaud and do not want to let her go.

  Where does it come from, that comedy? There was none of it in her when she came back to me that second time, after I had had to send her away again. She had a new daddy now to learn to love, and I think perhaps it was a better time. Except when we left her alone nights, telling ourselves she was old enough.

  “Can’t you go some other time, Mommy, like tomorrow?” she would ask. “Will it be just a little while you’ll be gone?”

  The time we came back, the front door open, the clock on the floor in the hall. She rigid, awake. “It wasn’t just a little while. I didn’t cry. I called you a little, just three times, and then I went downstairs to open the door so you could come faster. The clock talked loud, I threw it away, it scared me, what it talked.”

  She said the clock talked loud again that night I went to the hospital to have Susan. She was delirious with the fever that comes before red measles, but she was fully conscious all the week I was gone and the week after we were home when she could not come near the baby or me.

  She did not get well. She stayed skeleton-thin, not wanting to eat, and night after night she had nightmares. She would call for me, and I would sleepily call back, “You’re all right, darling, go to sleep, it’s just a dream,” and if she still called, in a sterner voice, “Now go to sleep, Emily, there’s nothing to hurt you.” Twice, only twice, when I had to get up for Susan anyhow, I went in to sit with her.

  Now when it is too late (as if she would let me hold and comfort her like I do the others) I get up and go to her at her moan or restless stirring. “Are you awake? Can I get you something?” And the answer is always the same: “No, I’m all right, go back to sleep, Mother.”

  They persuaded me at the clinic to send her away to a convalescent home in the country where “she can have the kind of food and care you can’t manage for her, and you’ll be free to concentrate on the new baby.” They still send children to that place. I see pictures on the society page of sleek young women planning affairs to raise money for it, or dancing at the affairs, or decorating Easter eggs or filling Christmas stockings for the children.

  They never have a picture of the children so I do not know if they still wear those gigantic red bows and the ravaged looks on the every other Sunday when parents can come to visit “unless otherwise notified”—as we were notified the first six weeks.

  Oh it is a handsome place, green lawns and tall trees and fluted flower beds. High up on the balconies of each cottage the children stand, the girls in their red bows and white dresses, the boys in white suits and giant red ties. The parents stand below shrieking up to be heard and the children shriek down to be heard, and between them the invisible wall “Not to Be Contaminated by Parental Germs or Physical Affection.”

  There was a tiny girl who always stood hand in hand with Emily. Her parents never came. One visit she was gone. “They moved her to Rose Cottage,” Emily shouted in explanation. “They don’t like you to love anybody here.”

  She wrote once a week, the labored writing of a seven-year-old. “I am fine. How is the baby. If I write my letter nicely I will have a star. Love.” There never was a star. We wrote every other day, letters she could never hold or keep but only hear read—once. “We simply do not have room for children to keep any personal possessions,” they patiently explained when we pieced one Sunday’s shrieking together to plead how much it would mean to Emily to keep her letters and cards.

  Each visit she looked frailer. “She isn’t eating,” they told us. (They had runny eggs for breakfast or mush with lumps, Emily said later, I’d hold it in my mouth and not swallow. Nothing ever tasted good, just when they had chicken.)

  It took us eight months to get her released home, and only the fact that she gained back so little of her seven lost pounds convinced the social worker.

  I used to try to hold and love her after she came back, but her body would stay stiff, and after a while she’d push away. She ate little. Food sickened her, and I think much of life too. Oh she had physical lightness and brightness, twinkling by on skates, bouncing like a ball up and down up and down over the jump rope, skimming over the hill; but these were momentary.

  She fretted about her appearance, thin and dark and foreign-looking at a time when every little girl was supposed to look or thought she should look a chubby blond replica of Shirley Temple. The doorbell sometimes rang for her, but no one seemed to come and play in the house or be a best friend. Maybe because we moved so much.

  There was a boy she loved painfully through two school semesters. Months later she told me how she had taken pennies from my purse to buy him candy. “Licorice was his favorite and I brought him some every day, but he still liked Jennifer better’n me. Why Mommy why?” A question I could never answer.

  School was a worry to her. She was not glib or quick in a world where glibness and quickness were easily confused with ability to learn. To her overworked and exasperated teachers she was an overconscientious “slow learner” who kept trying to catch up and was absent entirely too often.

  I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn’t working. We had a new baby, I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home from school, too, to have them all together.

  Mostly Emily had asthma, and her breathing, harsh and labored, would fill the house with a curiously tranquil sound. I would bring the two old dresser mirrors and her boxes of collections to her bed. She would select beads and single earrings, bottle tops and shells, dried flowers and pebbles, old postcards and scraps, all sorts of oddments; then she and Susan would play Kingdom, setting up landscapes and furniture, peopling them with action.

  Those were the only times of peaceful companionship between her and Susan. I have edged away from it, that poisonous feeling between them, that terrible balancing of hurts and needs I had to do between them, and did so badly, those earlier years.

  Oh there are conflicts between the others too, each one human, needing, demanding, hurting, taking—but only between Emily and Susan, no, Emily toward Susan that corroding resentment. It seems so obvious on the surface, yet it is not obvious. Susan, the second child, Susan, golden and curly-haired and chubby, quick and articulate and assured, everything in appearance and manner Emily was not; Susan, not able to resist Emily’s precious things, losing or sometimes clumsily breaking them; Susan telling jokes and riddles to company for applause while Emily sat silent (to say to me later: that was my riddle, Mother, I told it to Susan); Susan, who for all the five years’ difference in age was just a year behind Emily in developing physically.

  I am glad for that slow physical development that widened the difference between her and her contemporaries, though she suffered over it. She was too vulnerable for that terrible world of youthful competition, of preening and parading, of constant measuring of yourself against every other, of envy, “If I had that
copper hair,” or “If I had that skin . . .” She tormented herself enough about not looking like the others, there was enough of the unsureness, the having to be conscious of words before you speak, the constant caring—What are they thinking of me? What kind of an impression am I making?—there was enough without having it all magnified unendurably by the merciless physical drives.

  Ronnie is calling. He is wet and I change him. It is rare there is such a cry now. That time of motherhood is almost behind me when the ear is not one’s own but must always be racked and listening for the child cry, the child call. We sit for a while and I hold him, looking out over the city spread in charcoal with its soft aisles of light. “Shuggily” he breathes. A funny word, a family word, inherited from Emily, invented by her to say comfort.

  In this and other ways she leaves her seal, I say aloud. And startle at my saying it. What do I mean? What did I start to gather together, to try and make coherent? I was at the terrible, growing years. War years. I do not remember them well. I was working, there were four smaller ones now, there was not time for her. She had to help be a mother, and housekeeper, and shopper. She had to set her seal. Mornings of crisis and near-hysteria trying to get lunches packed, hair combed, coats and shoes found, everyone to school or Child Care on time, the baby ready for transportation. And always the paper scribbled on by a smaller one, the book looked at by Susan then mislaid, the homework not done. Running out to that huge school where she was one, she was lost, she was a drop; suffering over the unpreparedness, stammering and unsure in her classes.