100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  Ravenel worked with such guest editors as Joyce Carol Oates, Hortense Calisher, Gail Godwin, Raymond Carver, and Ann Beattie. “Each of the guest editors was different,” she noted. “John Updike wanted control over the Distinguished Others list. Anne Tyler wanted to know if I had a secret list of my own (I did) and how closely our two lists corresponded (80 percent). Stanley Elkin asked me to his home to discuss each of his selections and I argued him out of one and into a replacement.” Her most memorable experience may have been with John Gardner:

  Just before it was time for me to send him the tear sheets of my 120 selected stories, I broke my leg (roller skating with my kids), but I managed to Xerox all the tear sheets, package up the originals, and get them off to Mr. Gardner by my deadline . . . Two weeks later, I had a phone call: John Gardner did not like a single one of the 120 stories I had sent him and wanted me to ship him the magazines so he could do his own reading and selection. Well. That year I had subscriptions to 151 magazines. Most of them were quarterlies, though many were monthly and at least one supplied 52 issues. So there was a huge pile in our basement that I was supposed to package up and mail to John Gardner. I did it, with my husband’s help . . . As it turned out, John Gardner selected nine of my 120 and found another eleven on his own. The “100 Other Distinguished Short Stories” in the back of the 1981 volume are mine. All I can say is that all the rest of the volumes I edited were breezes in comparison.

  In 1982 Ravenel cofounded Algonquin Books, devoted to publishing new writers. She also created the series New Stories from the South. She continued the tradition of supporting small magazines and new writers in The Best American Short Stories: Lynn Sharon Schwartz, Charles Baxter, Ethan Canin, Richard Ford, Amy Hempel, and Mona Simpson all appeared in the series early in their careers.

  Divorce, addiction, and AIDS were concerns for writers in the 1980s. Others wrote of the psychological aftermath of the Vietnam War. Tim O’Brien’s story “The Things They Carried” was an unforgettable indictment of that war. As Ravenel wrote, he “has taken the plainest kind of communication, the list, and turned the form itself into the theme of his powerful story.”

  In his introduction, guest editor John Gardner bemoaned the number of authors employing the present tense in their stories, writing that “the present tense turns out to be, itself, the message: One may with great sensitivity watch things happen . . . but one is silly to expect anything. Life, if one wishes to call it that, goes on: consciousness is all.”

  Minimalism—or as John Barth referred to it, “‘K-Mart realism,’ ‘hick chic,’ ‘Diet-Pepsi minimalism’ and ‘post-Vietnam, post-literary, postmodernist blue-collar neo-early-Hemingwayism’”—was also popular in the 1980s, possibly due to a weariness from the war in Vietnam and the American culture of excess. In 1986 Anne Tyler wrote, “Even the sparest in style implies a torrent of additional details barely suppressed, bursting through the seams.” Others recoiled at the trend. In 1988 guest editor Mark Helprin stated, “No better illumination of the pitfalls of the collective impulse exists than the school of the minimalists . . . Their characters always seem to have a health problem . . . How so many people can be sitting in so many diners, trailers, and pickup trucks with so many ingrown toenails, varicose veins, corns, bunions, boils . . . is the secret of the Sphinx.”

  1980

  GRACE PALEY

  Friends

  from The New Yorker

  GRACE PALEY (1922–2007) was born in the Bronx. Her parents were Jewish socialists who had emigrated from the Ukraine. Paley’s childhood was full of people and friendship and political arguments, all of which worked their way into her later writing.

  Paley called herself a “somewhat combative pacifist and cooperative anarchist.” Over the years she lobbied for pacifism and was jailed because of her protests against war and the maltreatment of women.

  Paley wrote three collections of short stories, The Little Disturbances of Man, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute, and Later the Same Day. Her stories focused mostly on the daily lives of Jewish women living in New York. She said once, “I’m not writing a history of famous people. I am interested in a history of everyday life.” The Collected Stories of Grace Paley, published in 1994, was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. From 1986 to 1988 Paley was New York’s first official state author; she was also once poet laureate of Vermont.

  Paley died at the age of eighty-four. Her obituary in the New York Times noted, “To read Ms. Paley’s fiction is to be awash in the shouts and murmurs of secular Yiddishkeit, with its wild onrushing joy and twilight melancholy . . . Her stories, many of which are written in the first person and seem to start in mid-conversation, beg to be read aloud.”

  ★

  TO PUT US at our ease, to quiet our hearts as she lay dying, our dear friend Selena said, Life, after all, has not been an unrelieved horror—you know, I did have many wonderful years with her.

  She pointed to a child who leaned out of a portrait on the wall—long brown hair, white pinafore, head and shoulders forward.

  Eagerness, said Susan. Ann closed her eyes.

  On the same wall three little girls were photographed in a schoolyard. They were in furious discussion; they were holding hands. Right in the middle of the coffee table, framed, in autumn colors, a handsome young woman of eighteen sat on an enormous horse—aloof, disinterested, a rider. One night this young woman, Selena’s child, was found in a rooming house in a distant city, dead. The police called. They said, Do you have a daughter named Abby?

  And with him, too, our friend Selena said. We had good times, Max and I. You know that.

  There were no photographs of him. He was married to another woman and had a new, stalwart girl of about six, to whom no harm would ever come, her mother believed.

  Our dear Selena had gotten out of bed. Heavily but with a comic dance, she soft-shoed to the bathroom, singing “Those were the days, my friend . . .”

  Later that evening, Ann, Susan, and I were enduring our five-hour train ride home. After one hour of silence and one hour of coffee and the sandwiches Selena had given us (she actually stood, leaned her big soft excavated body against the kitchen table to make those sandwiches), Ann said, Well, we’ll never see her again.

  Who says? Anyway, listen, said Susan. Think of it. Abby isn’t the only kid who died. What about that great guy, remember Bill Dalrymple—he was a noncooperator or a deserter? And Bob Simon. They were killed in automobile accidents. Matthew, Jeannie, Mike. Remember Al Lurie—he was murdered on Sixth Street—and that little kid Brenda, who O.D.’d on your roof, Ann? The tendency, I suppose, is to forget. You people don’t remember them.

  What do you mean, “you people”? Ann asked. You’re talking to us.

  I began to apologize for not knowing them all. Most of them were older than my kids, I said.

  Of course, the child Abby was exactly in my time of knowing and in all my places of paying attention—the park, the school, our street. But oh! It’s true! Selena’s Abby was not the only one of the beloved generation of our children murdered by cars, lost to war, to drugs, to madness.

  Selena’s main problem, Ann said—you know, she didn’t tell the truth.

  What?

  A few hot human truthful words are powerful enough, Ann thinks, to steam all God’s chemical mistakes and society’s slimy lies out of her life. We all believe in that power, my friends and I, but sometimes . . . the heat.

  Anyway, I always thought Selena had told us a lot. For instance, we knew she was an orphan. There were six, seven other children. She was the youngest. She was forty-two years old before someone informed her that her mother had not died in childbirthing her. It was some terrible sickness. And she had lived close to her mother’s body—at her breast, in fact—until she was eight months old. Whew! said Selena. What a relief! I’d always felt I was the one who’d killed her.

  Your family stinks, we told her. They really held you up for grief.

  Oh, people
, she said. Forget it. They did a lot of nice things for me, too. Me and Abby. Forget it. Who has the time?

  That’s what I mean, said Ann. Selena should have gone after them with an ax.

  More information: Selena’s two sisters brought her to a Home. They were ashamed that at sixteen and nineteen they could not take care of her. They kept hugging her. They were sure she’d cry. They took her to her room—not a room, a dormitory with about eight beds. This is your bed, Lena. This is your table for your things. This little drawer is for your toothbrush. All for me? she asked. No one else can use it? Only me. That’s all? Artie can’t come? Franky can’t come? Right?

  Believe me, Selena said, those were happy days at Home.

  Facts, said Ann, just facts. Not necessarily the truth.

  I don’t think it’s right to complain about the character of the dying or start hustling all their motives into the spotlight like that. Isn’t it amazing enough, the bravery of that private inclusive intentional community?

  It wouldn’t help not to be brave, said Selena. You’ll see.

  She wanted to get back to bed. Susan moved to help her.

  Thanks, our Selena said, leaning on another person for the first time in her entire life. The trouble is, when I stand, it hurts me here all down my back. Nothing they can do about it. All the chemotherapy. No more chemistry left in me to therapeut. Ha! Did you know before I came to New York and met you I used to work in that hospital? I was supervisor in gynecology. Nursing. They were my friends, the doctors. They weren’t so snotty then. David Clark, big surgeon. He couldn’t look at me last week. He kept saying, Lena . . . Lena . . . Like that. We were in North Africa the same year—’44, I think. I told him, Davy, I’ve been around a long enough time. I haven’t missed too much. He knows it. But I didn’t want to make him look at me. Ugh, my damn feet are a pain in the neck.

  Recent research, said Susan, tells us that it’s the neck that’s a pain in the feet.

  Always something new, said Selena, our dear friend.

  On the way back to the bed, she stopped at her desk. There were about twenty snapshots scattered across it—the baby, the child, the young woman. Here, she said to me, take this one. It’s a shot of Abby and your Richard in front of the school—third grade? What a day! The show those kids put on! What a bunch of kids! What’s Richard doing now?

  Oh, who knows? Horsing around someplace. Spain. These days, it’s Spain. Who knows where he is? They’re all the same.

  Why did I say that? I knew exactly where he was. He writes. In fact, he found a broken phone and was able to call every day for a week—mostly to give orders to his brother but also to say, Are you O.K., Ma? How’s your new boy friend, did he smile yet?

  The kids, they’re all the same, I said.

  It was only politeness, I think, not to pour my boy’s light, noisy face into that dark afternoon. Richard used to say in his early mean teens, You’d sell us down the river to keep Selena happy and innocent. It’s true. Whenever Selena would say, I don’t know, Abby has some peculiar friends, I’d answer for stupid comfort, You should see Richard’s.

  Still, he’s in Spain, Selena said. At least you know that. It’s probably interesting. He’ll learn a lot. Richard is a wonderful boy, Faith. He acts like a wise guy but he’s not. You know the night Abby died, when the police called me and told me? That was my first night’s sleep in two years. I knew where she was.

  Selena said this very matter-of-factly—just offering a few informative sentences.

  But Ann, listening, said, Oh!—she called out to us all, Oh!—and began to sob. Her straightforwardness had become an arrow and gone right into her own heart.

  Then a deep tear-drying breath: I want a picture, too, she said.

  Yes. Yes, wait, I have one here someplace. Abby and Judy and that Spanish kid Victor. Where is it? Ah. Here!

  Three nine-year-old children sat high on that long-armed sycamore in the park, dangling their legs on someone’s patient head—smooth dark hair, parted in the middle. Was that head Kitty’s?

  Our dear friend laughed. Another great day, she said. Wasn’t it? I remember you two sizing up the men. I had one at the time—I thought. Some joke. Here, take it. I have two copies. But you ought to get it enlarged. When this you see, remember me. Ha-ha. Well, girls—excuse me, I mean ladies—it’s time for me to rest.

  She took Susan’s arm and continued that awful walk to her bed.

  We didn’t move. We had a long journey ahead of us and had expected a little more comforting before we set off.

  No, she said. You’ll only miss the express. I’m not in much pain. I’ve got lots of painkiller. See?

  The tabletop was full of little bottles.

  I just want to lie down and think of Abby.

  It was true, the local could cost us an extra two hours at least. I looked at Ann. It had been hard for her to come at all. Still, we couldn’t move. We stood there before Selena in a row. Three old friends. Selena pressed her lips together, ordered her eyes into cold distance.

  I know that face. Once, years ago, when the children were children, it had been placed modestly in front of J. Hoffner, the principal of the elementary school.

  He’d said, No! Without training you cannot tutor these kids. There are real problems. You have to know how to teach.

  Our PTA had decided to offer some one-to-one tutorial help for the Spanish kids, who were stuck in crowded classrooms with exhausted teachers among little middle-class achievers. He had said, in a written communication to show seriousness and then in personal confrontation to prove seriousness, that he could not allow it. And the board of ed itself had said no. (All this no-ness was to lead to some terrible events in the schools and neighborhoods of our poor yes-requiring city.) But most of the women in our PTA were independent—by necessity and disposition. We were, in fact, the soft-speaking tough souls of anarchy.

  I had Fridays off that year. At about 11 A.M. I’d bypass the principal’s office and run up to the fourth floor. I’d take Robert Figueroa to the end of the hall, and we’d work away at storytelling for about twenty minutes. Then we would write the beautiful letters of the alphabet invented by smart foreigners long ago to fool time and distance.

  That day, Selena and her stubborn face remained in the office for at least two hours. Finally, Mr. Hoffner, besieged, said that because she was a nurse, she would be allowed to help out by taking the littlest children to the modern difficult toilet. Some of them, he said, had just come from the barbarous hills beyond Maricao. Selena said O.K., she’d do that. In the toilet she taught the little girls which way to wipe, as she had taught her own little girl a couple of years earlier. At three o’clock she brought them home for cookies and milk. The children of that year ate cookies in her kitchen until the end of the sixth grade.

  Now, what did we learn in that year of my Friday afternoons off? The following: Though the world cannot be changed by talking to one child at a time, it may at least be known.

  Anyway, Selena placed into our eyes for long remembrance that useful stubborn face. She said, No. Listen to me, you people. Please. I don’t have lots of time. What I want . . . I want to lie down and think about Abby. Nothing special. Just think about her, you know.

  In the train Susan fell asleep immediately. She woke up from time to time, because the speed of the new wheels and the resistance of the old track gave us some terrible jolts. Once, she opened her eyes wide and said, You know, Ann’s right. You don’t get sick like that for nothing. I mean, she didn’t even mention him.

  Why should she? She hasn’t even seen him, I said. Susan, you still have him-itis, the dread disease of females.

  Yeah? And you don’t? Anyway, he was around quite a bit. He was there every day, nearly, when the kid died.

  Abby. I didn’t like to hear “the kid.” I wanted to say “Abby” the way I’ve said “Selena”—so those names can take thickness and strength and fall back into the world with their weight.

  Abby, you know, was a wonderful
child. She was in Richard’s classes every class till high school. Goodhearted little girl from the beginning, noticeably kind—for a kid, I mean. Smart.

  That’s true, said Ann, very kind. She’d give away Selena’s last shirt. Oh, yes, they were all wonderful little girls and wonderful little boys.

  Chrissy is wonderful, Susan said.

  She is, I said.

  Middle kids aren’t supposed to be, but she is. She put herself through college—I didn’t have a cent—and now she has this fellowship. And, you know, she never did take any crap from boys. She’s something.

  Ann went swaying up the aisle to the bathroom. First she said, Oh, all of them—just wohunderful.

  I loved Selena, Susan said, but she never talked to me enough. Maybe she talked to you women more, about things. Men.

  Then Susan fell asleep.

  Ann sat down opposite me. She looked straight into my eyes with a narrow squint. It often connotes accusation.

  Be careful—you’re wrecking your laugh lines, I said.

  Screw you, she said. You’re kidding around. Do you realize I don’t know where Mickey is? You know, you’ve been lucky. You always have been. Since you were a little kid. Papa and Mama’s darling.

  As is usual in conversations, I said a couple of things out loud and kept a few structural remarks for interior mulling and righteousness. I thought: She’s never even met my folks. I thought: What a rotten thing to say. Luck—isn’t it something like an insult?

  I said, Annie, I’m only forty-eight. There’s lots of time for me to be totally wrecked—if I live, I mean.