100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  “Is it me? Is it me Me ME ME ME! It has to be me—but is it!”

  It is the question a thief must ask himself the night he jimmies open his first window, and it is said to be the question with which bridegrooms quiz themselves before the altar.

  In the few wild seconds it took Ozzie’s body to propel him to the edge of the roof, his self-examination began to grow fuzzy. Gazing down at the street, he became confused as to the problem beneath the question: was it, is-it-me-who-called-Binder-a-bastard? or, is-it-me-prancing-around-on-the-roof? However, the scene below settled all, for there is an instant in any action when whether it is you or somebody else is academic. The thief crams the money in his pockets and scoots out the window. The bridegroom signs the hotel register for two. And the boy on the roof finds a streetful of people gaping at him, necks stretched backwards, faces up, as though he were the ceiling of the Hayden Planetarium. Suddenly you know it’s you.

  “Oscar! Oscar Freedman!” A voice rose from the center of the crowd, a voice that, could it have been seen, would have looked like the writing on a scroll. “Oscar Freedman, get down from there. Immediately!” Rabbi Binder was pointing one arm stiffly up at him; and at the end of that arm, one finger aimed menacingly. It was the attitude of a dictator, but one—the eyes confessed all—whose personal valet had spit neatly in his face.

  Ozzie didn’t answer. Only for a blink’s length did he look towards Rabbi Binder. Instead his eyes began to fit together the world beneath him, to sort out people from places, friends from enemies, participants from spectators. In little jagged starlike clusters his friends stood around Rabbi Binder, who was still pointing. The topmost point on a star compounded not of angels but of five adolescent boys was Itzie. What a world it was, with those stars below, Rabbi Binder below . . . Ozzie, who a moment earlier hadn’t been able to control his own body, started to feel the meaning of the word control: he felt Peace and he felt Power.

  “Oscar Freedman, I’ll give you three to come down.”

  Few dictators give their subjects three to do anything; but, as always, Rabbi Binder only looked dictatorial.

  “Are you ready, Oscar?”

  Ozzie nodded his head yes, although he had no intention in the world—the lower one or the celestial one he’d just entered—of coming down even if Rabbi Binder should give him a million.

  “All right then,” said Rabbi Binder. He ran a hand through his black Samson hair as though it were the gesture prescribed for uttering the first digit. Then, with his other hand cutting a circle out of the small piece of sky around him, he spoke. “One!”

  There was no thunder. On the contrary, at that moment, as though “one” was the cue for which he had been waiting, the world’s least thunderous person appeared on the synagogue steps. He did not so much come out the synagogue door as lean out, onto the darkening air. He clutched at the doorknob with one hand and looked up at the roof.

  “Oy!”

  Yakov Blotnik’s old mind hobbled slowly, as if on crutches, and though he couldn’t decide precisely what the boy was doing on the roof, he knew it wasn’t good—that is, it wasn’t-good-for-the-Jews. For Yakov Blotnik life had fractionated itself simply: things were either good-for-the-Jews or no-good-for-the-Jews.

  He smacked his free hand to his in-sucked cheek, gently. “Oy, Gut!” And then quickly as he was able, he jacked down his head and surveyed the street. There was Rabbi Binder (like a man at an auction with only three dollars in his pocket, he had just delivered a shaky “Two!”); there were the students, and that was all. So far it-wasn’t-so-bad-for-the-Jews. But the boy had to come down immediately, before anybody saw. The problem: how to get the boy off the roof?

  Anybody who has ever had a cat on the roof knows how to get him down. You call the fire department. Or first you call the operator and you ask her for the fire department. And the next thing there is great jamming of brakes and clanging of bells and shouting of instructions. And then the cat is off the roof. You do the same thing to get a boy off the roof.

  That is, you do the same thing if you are Yakov Blotnik and you once had a cat on the roof.

  When the engines, all four of them, arrived, Rabbi Binder had four times given Ozzie the count of three. The big hook-and-ladder swung around the corner and one of the firemen leaped from it, plunging headlong towards the yellow fire hydrant in front of the synagogue. With a huge wrench he began to unscrew the top nozzle. Rabbi Binder raced over to him and pulled at his shoulder.

  “There’s no fire . . .”

  The fireman mumbled back over his shoulder and, heatedly, continued working at the nozzle.

  “But there’s no fire, there’s no fire . . .” Binder shouted. When the fireman mumbled again, the rabbi grasped his face with both hands and pointed it up at the roof.

  To Ozzie it looked as though Rabbi Binder was trying to tug the fireman’s head out of his body, like a cork from a bottle. He had to giggle at the picture they made: it was a family portrait—rabbi in black skullcap, fireman in red fire hat, and the little yellow hydrant squatting beside like a kid brother, bareheaded. From the edge of the roof Ozzie waved at the portrait, a one-handed, flapping, mocking wave; in doing it his right foot slipped from under him. Rabbi Binder covered his eyes with his hands.

  Firemen work fast. Before Ozzie had even regained his balance, a big, round, yellowed net was being held on the synagogue lawn. The firemen who held it looked up at Ozzie with stern, feelingless faces.

  One of the firemen turned his head towards Rabbi Binder. “What, is the kid nuts or something?”

  Rabbi Binder unpeeled his hands from his eyes, slowly, painfully, as if they were tape. Then he checked: nothing on the sidewalk, no dents in the net.

  “Is he gonna jump, or what?” the fireman shouted.

  In a voice not at all like a statue, Rabbi Binder finally answered. “Yes. Yes, I think so . . . He’s been threatening to . . .”

  Threatening to? Why, the reason he was on the roof, Ozzie remembered, was to get away; he hadn’t even thought about jumping. He had just run to get away, and the truth was that he hadn’t really headed for the roof as much as he’d been chased there.

  “What’s his name, the kid?”

  “Freedman,” Rabbi Binder answered. “Oscar Freedman.”

  The fireman looked up at Ozzie. “What is it with you, Oscar? You gonna jump, or what?”

  Ozzie did not answer. Frankly, the question had just arisen.

  “Look, Oscar, if you’re gonna jump, jump—and if you’re not gonna jump, don’t jump. But don’t waste our time, willya?”

  Ozzie looked at the fireman and then at Rabbi Binder. He wanted to see Rabbi Binder cover his eyes one more time.

  “I’m going to jump.”

  And then he scampered around the edge of the roof to the corner, where there was no net below, and he flapped his arms at his sides, swishing the air and smacking his palms to his trousers on the downbeat. He began screaming like some kind of engine, “Wheeeee . . . wheeeeee,” and leaning way out over the edge with the upper half of his body. The firemen whipped around to cover the ground with the net. Rabbi Binder mumbled a few words to somebody and covered his eyes. Everything happened quickly, jerkily, as in a silent movie. The crowd, which had arrived with the fire engines, gave out a long, Fourth-of-July fireworks oooh-aahhh. In the excitement no one had paid the crowd much heed, except, of course, Yakov Blotnik, who swung from the doorknob counting heads. “Fier und tsvansik . . . finf und tsvansik . . . Oy, Gut!” It wasn’t like this with the cat.

  Rabbi Binder peeked through his fingers, checked the sidewalk and net. Empty. But there was Ozzie racing to the other corner. The firemen raced with him but were unable to keep up. Whenever Ozzie wanted to he might jump and splatter himself upon the sidewalk, and by the time the firemen scooted to the spot all they could do with their net would be to cover the mess.

  “Wheeeee . . . wheeeee . . .”

  “Hey, Oscar,” the winded fireman yelled, “what the hell is
this, a game or something?”

  “Wheeeee . . . wheeeee . . .”

  “Hey, Oscar—”

  But he was off now to the other corner, flapping his wings fiercely. Rabbi Binder couldn’t take it any longer—the fire engines from nowhere, the screaming suicidal boy, the net. He fell to his knees, exhausted, and with his hands curled together in front of his chest like a little dome, he pleaded, “Oscar, stop it, Oscar. Don’t jump, Oscar. Please come down . . . Please don’t jump.”

  And further back in the crowd a single voice, a single young voice, shouted a lone word to the boy on the roof.

  “Jump!”

  It was Itzie. Ozzie momentarily stopped flapping.

  “Go ahead, Ozz—jump!” Itzie broke off his point of the star and courageously, with the inspiration not of a wise-guy but of a disciple, stood alone. “Jump, Ozz, jump!”

  Still on his knees, his hands still curled, Rabbi Binder twisted his body back. He looked at Itzie, then, agonizingly, back to Ozzie.

  “OSCAR, DON’T JUMP! PLEASE, DON’T JUMP . . . please please . . .”

  “Jump!” This time it wasn’t Itzie but another point of the star. By the time Mrs. Freedman arrived to keep her four-thirty appointment with Rabbi Binder, the whole little upside-down heaven was shouting and pleading for Ozzie to jump, and Rabbi Binder no longer was pleading with him not to jump, but was crying into the dome of his hands.

  Understandably Mrs. Freedman couldn’t figure out what her son was doing on the roof. So she asked.

  “Ozzie, my Ozzie, what are you doing? My Ozzie, what is it?”

  Ozzie stopped wheeeeeing and slowed his arms down to a cruising flap, the kind birds use in soft winds, but he did not answer. He stood against the low, clouded, darkening sky—light clicked down swiftly now, as on a small gear—flapping softly and gazing down at the small bundle of a woman who was his mother.

  “What are you doing, Ozzie?” She turned towards the kneeling Rabbi Binder and rushed so close that only a paper-thickness of dusk lay between her stomach and his shoulders.

  “What is my baby doing?”

  Rabbi Binder gaped at her but he too was mute. All that moved was the dome of his hands; it shook back and forth like a weak pulse.

  “Rabbi, get him down! He’ll kill himself. Get him down, my only baby . . .”

  “I can’t,” Rabbi Binder said, “I can’t . . .” and he turned his handsome head towards the crowd of boys behind him. “It’s them. Listen to them.”

  And for the first time Mrs. Freedman saw the crowd of boys, and she heard what they were yelling.

  “He’s doing it for them. He won’t listen to me. It’s them.” Rabbi Binder spoke like one in a trance.

  “For them?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why for them?”

  “They want him to . . .”

  Mrs. Freedman raised her two arms upward as though she were conducting the sky. “For them he’s doing it!” And then in a gesture older than pyramids, older than prophets and floods, her arms came slapping down to her sides. “A martyr I have. Look!” She tilted her head to the roof. Ozzie was still flapping softly. “My martyr.”

  “Oscar, come down, please,” Rabbi Binder groaned.

  In a startlingly even voice Mrs. Freedman called to the boy on the roof. “Ozzie, come down, Ozzie. Don’t be a martyr, my baby.”

  As though it were a litany, Rabbi Binder repeated her words. “Don’t be a martyr, my baby. Don’t be a martyr.”

  “Gawhead, Ozz—be a Martin!” It was Itzie. “Be a Martin, be a Martin,” and all the voices joined in singing for Martindom, whatever it was. “Be a Martin, be a Martin . . .”

  Somehow when you’re on a roof the darker it gets the less you can hear. All Ozzie knew was that two groups wanted two new things: his friends were spirited and musical about what they wanted; his mother and the rabbi were even-toned, chanting, about what they didn’t want. The rabbi’s voice was without tears now and so was his mother’s.

  The big net stared up at Ozzie like a sightless eye. The big, clouded sky pushed down. From beneath it looked like a gray corrugated board. Suddenly, looking up into that unsympathetic sky, Ozzie realized all the strangeness of what these people, his friends, were asking: they wanted him to jump, to kill himself; they were singing about it now—it made them that happy. And there was an even greater strangeness: Rabbi Binder was on his knees, trembling. If there was a question to be asked now it was not “Is it me?” but rather “Is it us? . . . Is it us?”

  Being on the roof, it turned out, was a serious thing. If he jumped would the singing become dancing? Would it? What would jumping stop? Yearningly, Ozzie wished he could rip open the sky, plunge his hands through, and pull out the sun; and on the sun, like a coin, would be stamped JUMP or DON’T JUMP.

  Ozzie’s knees rocked and sagged a little under him as though they were setting him for a dive. His arms tightened, stiffened, froze, from shoulders to fingernails. He felt as if each part of his body were going to vote as to whether he should kill himself or not—and each part as though it were independent of him.

  The light took an unexpected click down and the new darkness, like a gag, hushed the friends singing for this and the mother and rabbi chanting for that.

  Ozzie stopped counting votes, and in a curiously high voice, like one who wasn’t prepared for speech, he spoke.

  “Mamma?”

  “Yes, Oscar.”

  “Mamma, get down on your knees, like Rabbi Binder.”

  “Oscar—”

  “Get down on your knees,” he said, “or I’ll jump.”

  Ozzie heard a whimper, then a quick rustling, and when he looked down where his mother had stood he saw the top of a head and beneath that a circle of dress. She was kneeling beside Rabbi Binder.

  He spoke again. “Everybody kneel.” There was the sound of everybody kneeling.

  Ozzie looked around. With one hand he pointed towards the synagogue entrance. “Make him kneel.”

  There was a noise, not of kneeling, but of body-and-cloth stretching. Ozzie could hear Rabbi Binder saying in a gruff whisper, “. . . or he’ll kill himself,” and when next he looked there was Yakov Blotnik off the doorknob and for the first time in his life upon his knees in the Gentile posture of prayer.

  As for the firemen—it is not as difficult as one might imagine to hold a net taut while you are kneeling.

  Ozzie looked around again; and then he called to Rabbi Binder.

  “Rabbi?”

  “Yes, Oscar.”

  “Rabbi Binder, do you believe in God?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you believe God can do Anything?” Ozzie leaned his head out into the darkness. “Anything?”

  “Oscar, I think—”

  “Tell me you believe God can do Anything.”

  There was a second’s hesitation. Then: “God can do Anything.”

  “Tell me you believe God can make a child without intercourse.”

  “He can.”

  “Tell me!”

  “God,” Rabbi Binder admitted, “can make a child without intercourse.”

  “Mamma, you tell me.”

  “God can make a child without intercourse,” his mother said.

  “Make him tell me.” There was no doubt who him was.

  In a few moments Ozzie heard an old comical voice say something to the increasing darkness about God.

  Next, Ozzie made everybody say it. And then he made them all say they believed in Jesus Christ—first one at a time, then all together.

  When the catechizing was through it was the beginning of evening. From the street it sounded as if the boy on the roof might have sighed.

  “Ozzie?” A woman’s voice dared to speak. “You’ll come down now?”

  There was no answer, but the woman waited, and when a voice finally did speak it was thin and crying, and exhausted as that of an old man who has just finished pulling the bells.

  “Mamma, don’t you see—you shouldn’t h
it me. He shouldn’t hit me. You shouldn’t hit me about God, Mamma. You should never hit anybody about God—”

  “Ozzie, please come down now.”

  “Promise me, Mamma, promise me you’ll never hit anybody about God.”

  He had asked only his mother, but for some reason everyone kneeling in the street promised he would never hit anybody about God.

  Once again there was silence.

  “I can come down now, Mamma,” the boy on the roof finally said. He turned his head both ways as though checking the traffic lights. “Now I can come down . . .”

  And he did, right into the center of the yellow net that glowed in the evening’s edge like an overgrown halo.

  1960–1970

  In keeping with series editor Martha Foley’s notion that the best writing about war usually arrives years later, little reference to Vietnam was made in the fiction that appeared in The Best American Short Stories during the 1960s. As after World War II, stories about fantasy and the supernatural, as well as dreams, crowded magazines. “Ghosts, talking animals, werewolves and the like . . . [and] dreams,” Foley wrote. “Not, thank heaven, the old device of a character having an extraordinary adventure and waking up to find it was only a dream but dreams as a more tangible part of the story.”

  During this time writers also began to explore the hidden complexities of the 1950s “happy family.” Two very different writers were included frequently in the series in these years: John Updike, who was criticized for featuring too little violence in his work, and Joyce Carol Oates, who was criticized for featuring too much.

  With the rise of a new counterculture came a new sexual frankness in short fiction. Foley wrote, “The editors of this volume do not believe in censorship, and the stories here represented have been chosen for their literary merits only. Actually, the stories in this volume happen to be more restrained in their use of sex than most of the pieces appearing.”