100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  After Oates stumbled upon the fact that one of her stories had been cited in the honor roll of The Best American Short Stories, she assembled the fourteen stories in her first book, By the North Gate. It was the first of almost seventy books. In addition to short stories and novels, she regularly publishes poems, plays, literary criticism, and essays. Of her prolific nature, she once said, “A writer who has published as many books as I have has developed, of necessity, a hide like a rhino’s, while inside there dwells a frail, hopeful butterfly of a spirit.” Among her numerous awards are the National Book Award, the Rea Award, the PEN/Malamud Award, the Bram Stoker Award, and five lifetime achievement awards.

  Oates was once asked, “What is the function of violence in your work?” She replied, “Given the number of pages I have written, and the ‘violent’ incidents dispersed throughout them, I rather doubt that I am a violent writer in any meaningful sense of the word . . . Real life is much more chaotic.”

  Oates has taught at Princeton University since 1978.

  ★

  HELEN THOUGHT: “Am I in love again, some new kind of love? Is that why I’m here?”

  She was sitting in the waiting room of the Yellow Bus Lines station; she knew the big old room with its dirty tile floor and its solitary telephone booth in the corner and its candy machine and cigarette machine and popcorn machine by heart. Everything was familiar, though she had been gone for four months, even the old woman with the dyed red hair who sold tickets and had been selling them there, behind that counter, for as long as Helen could remember. Years ago, before Helen’s marriage, she and her girl friends would be driven in to town by someone’s father and after they tired of walking around town they would stroll over to the bus station to watch the buses unload. They were anxious to see who was getting off, but few of the passengers who got off stayed in Oriskany—they were just passing through, stopping for a rest and a drink, and their faces seemed to say that they didn’t think much of the town. Nor did they seem to think much of the girls from the country who stood around in their colorful dresses and smiled shyly at strangers, not knowing any better: they were taught to be kind to people, to smile first, you never knew who it might be. So now Helen was back in Oriskany, but this time she had come in on a bus herself. Had ridden alone, all the way from the city of Derby, all alone, and was waiting for her father to pick her up so she could go back to her old life without any more fuss.

  It was hot. Flies crawled languidly around; a woman with a small sickly-faced baby had to keep waving them away. The old woman selling tickets looked at Helen as if her eyes were drawn irresistibly that way, as if she knew every nasty rumor and wanted to let Helen know that she knew. Helen’s forehead broke out in perspiration and she stood, abruptly, wanting to dislodge that old woman’s stare. She went over to the candy machine but did not look at the candy bars; she looked at herself in the mirror. Her own reflection always made her feel better. Whatever went on inside her head—and right now she felt nervous about something—had nothing to do with the way she looked, her smooth gentle skin and the faint freckles on her forehead and nose and the cool, innocent green of her eyes; she was just a girl from the country and anyone in town would know that, even if they didn’t know her personally, one of those easy, friendly girls who hummed to themselves and seemed always to be glancing up as if expecting something pleasant. Her light brown hair curled back lazily toward her ears, cut short now because it was the style; in high school she had worn it long. She watched her eyes in the mirror. No alarm there really. She would be back home in an hour or so. Not her husband’s home, of course, but her parents’ home. And her face in the mirror was the face she had always seen—twenty-two she was now, and to her that seemed very old, but she looked no different from the way she had looked on her wedding day five years ago.

  But it was stupid to try to link together those two Helens, she thought. She went back to the row of seats and sat heavily. If the old woman was still watching, she did not care. A sailor in a soiled white uniform sat nearby, smoking, watching her but not with too much interest; he had other girls to recall. Helen opened her purse and looked inside at nothing and closed it again. The man she had been living with in the city for four months had told her it was stupid—no, he had not used that word; he said something fancy like “immature”—to confuse herself with the child she had been, married woman as she was now, and a mother, adulterous married woman . . . and the word adulterous made her lips turn up in a slow bemused smile, the first flash of incredulous pride one might feel when told at last the disease that is going to be fatal. For there were so many diseases and only one way out of the world, only one death and so many ways to get to it. They were like doors, Helen thought dreamily. You walked down a hallway like those in movies, in huge wealthy homes, crystal chandeliers and marble floors and . . . great sweeping lawns . . . and doors all along those hallways; if you picked the wrong door you had to go through it. She was dreamy, drowsy. When thought became too much for her—when he had pestered her so much about marrying him, divorcing her husband and marrying him, always him!—she had felt so sleepy she could not listen. If she was not interested in a word her mind wouldn’t hear it but made it blurred and strange, like words half-heard in dreams or through some thick substance like water. You didn’t have to hear a word if you didn’t want to.

  So she had telephoned her father the night before and told him the three-fifteen bus and now it was three-thirty; where was he? Over the telephone he had sounded slow and solemn, it could have been a stranger’s voice. Helen had never liked telephones because you could not see smiles or gestures and talking like that made her tired. Listening to her father, she had felt for the first time since she had run away and left them all behind—husband, baby girl, family, in-laws, the minister, the dreary sun-bleached look of the land—that she had perhaps died and only imagined she was running away. Nobody here trusted the city; it was too big. Helen had wanted to go there all her life, not being afraid of anything, and so she had gone, and was coming back; but it was an odd feeling, this dreamy ghostliness, as if she were really dead and coming back in a form that only looked like herself . . . She was bored, thinking of this, and crossed her bare legs. The sailor crushed out a cigarette in the dirty tin ashtray and their eyes met. Helen felt a little smile tug at her lips. That was the trouble, she knew men too well. She knew their eyes and their gestures—like the sailor rubbing thoughtfully at his chin, now, as if he hadn’t shaved well enough but really liked to feel his own skin. She knew them too well and had never figured out why: her sister, four years older, wasn’t like that. But to Helen the same man one hundred times or one hundred men, different men, seemed the same. It was wrong, of course, because she had been taught it and believed what she had been taught; but she could not understand the difference. The sailor watched her but she looked away, half-closing her eyes. She had no time for him. Her father should be here now, he would be here in a few minutes, so there was no time; she would be home in an hour. When she thought of her father the ugly bus station with its odor of tobacco and spilled soft drinks seemed to fade away—she remembered his voice the night before, how gentle and soft she had felt listening to that voice, giving in to the protection he represented. She had endured his rough hands, as a child, because she knew they protected her, and all her life they had protected her. There had always been trouble, sometimes the kind you laughed about later and sometimes not, that was one of the reasons she had married Paul, and before Paul there had been others—just boys who didn’t count, who had no jobs and thought mainly about their cars. She had called her father from a roadhouse sixty miles away once, when she was fifteen; she and her best friend Annie had gotten mixed up with some men they had met at a picnic. That had been frightening, Helen thought, but now she could have handled them. She gave everyone too much, that was her trouble. Her father had said that. Even her mother. Lent money to girls at the telephone company where she’d worked; lent her girl friends clothes; would run outsi
de when some man drove up and blew his horn, not bothering to get out and knock at the door the way he should. She liked to make other people happy, what was wrong with that? Was she too lazy to care? Her head had begun to ache.

  Always her thoughts ran one way, fast and innocent, but her body did other things. It got warm, nervous, it could not relax. Was she afraid of what her father’s face would tell her? She pushed that idea away, it was nonsense. If she had to think of something, let it be of that muddy spring day when her family had first moved to this part of the country, into an old farmhouse her father had bought at a “bargain.” At that time the road out in front of the house had been no more than a single dirt lane . . . now it was wider, covered with black top that smelled ugly and made your eyesight shimmer and sweat with confusion in the summer. Yes, that big old house. Nothing about it would have changed. She did not think of her own house, her husband’s house, because it mixed her up too much right now. Maybe she would go back and maybe not. She did not think of him—if she wanted to go back she would, he would take her in. When she tried to think of what had brought her back, it was never her husband—so much younger, quicker, happier than the man she had just left—and not the little girl, either, but something to do with her family’s house and that misty, warm day seventeen years ago when they had first moved in. So one morning when that man left for work her thoughts had turned back to home and she had sat at the breakfast table for an hour or so, not clearing off the dishes, looking at the coffee left in his cup as if it were a forlorn reminder of him—a man she was even beginning to forget. She knew then that she did not belong there in the city. It wasn’t that she had stopped loving this man—she never stopped loving anyone who needed her, and he had needed her more than anyone—it was something else, something she did not understand. Not her husband, not her baby, not even the look of the river way off down the hill, through the trees that got so solemn and intricate with their bare branches in winter. Those things she loved, she hadn’t stopped loving them because she had had to love this new man more . . . but something else made her get up and run into the next room and look through the bureau drawers and the closet, as if looking for something. That evening, when he returned, she explained to him that she was going back. He was over forty, she wasn’t sure how much, and it had always been his hesitant, apologetic manner that made her love him, the odor of failure about him that mixed with the odor of the drinking he could not stop, even though he had “cut down” now with her help. Why were so many men afraid, why did they think so much? He did something that had to do with keeping books, was that nervous work? He was an attractive man but that wasn’t what Helen had seen in him. It was his staring at her when they had first met, and the way he had run his hand through his thinning hair, telling her in that gesture that he wanted her and wanted to be young enough to tell her so. That had been four months ago. The months all rushed to Helen’s mind in the memory she had of his keen intelligent baffled eyes, and the tears she had had to see in them when she went out to call her father . . .

  Now, back in Oriskany, she would think of him no more.

  A few minutes later her father came. Was that really him? she thought. Her heart beat furiously. If blood drained out of her face she would look mottled and sick, as if she had a rash . . . how she hated that! Though he had seen her at once, though the bus station was nearly empty, her father hesitated until she stood and ran to him. “Pa,” she said, “I’m so glad to see you.” It might have been years ago and he was just going to drive back home now, finished with his business in town, and Helen fourteen or fifteen, waiting to go back with him.

  “I’ll get your suitcase,” he said. The sailor was reading a magazine, no longer interested. Helen watched her father nervously. What was wrong? He stooped, taking hold of the suitcase handle, but he did not straighten fast enough. Just a heartbeat too slow. Why was that? Helen took a tissue already stained with lipstick and dabbed it on her forehead.

  On the way home he drove oddly, as if the steering wheel, heated by the sun, were too painful for him to hold. “No more trouble with the car, huh?” Helen said.

  “It’s all right,” he said. They were nearly out of town already. Helen saw few people she knew. “Why are you looking around?” her father said. His voice was pleasant and his eyes fastened seriously upon the road, as if he did not dare look elsewhere.

  “Oh, just looking,” Helen said. “How is Davey?”

  Waiting for her father to answer—he always took his time—Helen arranged her skirt nervously beneath her. Davey was her sister’s baby, could he be sick? She had forgotten to ask about him the night before. “Nothing’s wrong with Davey, is there, Pa?” she said.

  “No, nothing.”

  “I thought Ma might come, maybe,” Helen said.

  “No.”

  “Didn’t she want to? Mad at me, huh?”

  In the past her mother’s dissatisfaction with her had always ranged Helen and her father together; Helen could tell by a glance of her father’s when this was so. But he did not look away from the road. They were passing the new high school, the consolidated high school Helen had attended for a year. No one had known what consolidated meant or was interested in knowing. Helen frowned at the dark brick and there came to her mind, out of nowhere, the word adulterous, for it too had been a word she had not understood for years. A word out of the Bible. It was like a mosquito bothering her at night, or a stain on her dress—the kind she would have to hide without seeming to, letting her hand fall accidentally over it. For some reason the peculiar smell of the old car, the rattling sun shades above the windshield, the same old khaki blanket they used for a seat cover did not comfort her and let her mind get drowsy, to push that word away.

  She was not sleepy, but she said she was.

  “Yes, honey. Why don’t you lay back and try to sleep, then,” her father said.

  He glanced toward her. She felt relieved at once, made simple and safe. She slid over and leaned her head against her father’s shoulder. “Bus ride was long, I hate bus rides,” she said. “I used to like them.”

  “You can sleep till we get home.”

  “Is Ma mad?”

  “No.”

  His shoulder wasn’t as comfortable as it should have been. But she closed her eyes, trying to force sleep. She remembered that April day they had come here—their moving to the house that was new to them, a house of their own they would have to share with no one else, but a house it turned out had things wrong with it, secret things, that had made Helen’s father furious. She could not remember the city and the house they had lived in there, but she had been old enough to sense the simplicity of the country and the eagerness of her parents, and then the angry perplexity that had followed. The family was big—six children then, before Arthur died at ten—and half an hour after they had moved in the house was crowded and shabby. And she remembered being frightened at something and her father picking her up right in the middle of moving, and not asking her why she cried—her mother had always asked her that, as if there were a reason—but rocked her and comforted her with his rough hands. And she could remember how the house had looked so well: the ballooning curtains in the windows, the first things her mother had put up. The gusty spring air, already too warm, smelling of good earth and the Eden River not too far behind them, and leaves, sunlight, wind; and the sagging porch piled with cartons and bundles and pieces of furniture from the old house. In that old dark house in the city, the grandparents had died—her mother’s parents—and Helen did not remember them at all except as her father summoned them back, recalling with hatred his wife’s father—some little confused argument they had had years ago, that he should have won. That old man had died and the house had gone to the bank somewhere mysterious, and her father had brought them all out here to the country. A new world, a new life. A farm. And four boys to help, and the promise of such good soil . . .

  Her father turned the wheel sharply. “Rabbit run acrost,” he said. He had this st
range air of apology for whatever he did, even if it was something gentle; he hated to kill animals, even weasels and hawks. Helen wanted to cover his right hand with hers, that thickened, dirt-creased hand that could never be made clean. But she said, stirring a little as if he had woken her, “Then why didn’t Ma want to come?”

  They were taking a long, slow curve. Helen knew without looking up which curve this was, between two wheat fields that belonged to one of the old, old families, those prosperous men who drove broken-down pickup trucks and dressed no better than their own hired hands, but who had money, much money, not just in one bank but in many. “Yes, they’re money people,” Helen remembered her father saying, years ago. Passing someone’s pasture. Those ugly red cows meant nothing to Helen, but they meant something to her father. And so after her father had said that—they had been out for a drive after church—her mother got sharp and impatient and the ride was ruined. That was years ago, Helen’s father had been a young man then, with a raw, waiting, untested look, with muscular arms and shoulders that needed only to be directed to their work. “They’re money people,” he had said, and that had ruined the ride, as if by magic. It had been as if the air itself had changed, the direction of the wind changing and easing to them from the river that was often stagnant in August and September, and not from the green land. With an effort, Helen remembered that she had been thinking about her mother. Why did her mind push her into the past so often these days, she only twenty-two (that was not old, not really) and going to begin a new life? Once she got home and took a bath and washed out the things in the suitcase, and got some rest, and took a walk down by the river as she had as a child, skipping stones across it, and sat around the round kitchen table with the old oil cloth cover to listen to their advice (“You got to grow up, now. You ain’t fifteen anymore”—that had been her mother, last time), then she would decide what to do. Make her decision about her husband and the baby and there would be nothing left to think about.