100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  Lowering the gun, he remembered the deer shells he had loaded. A hit with the concentrated shot would have pulverized the bird, and he was glad he had missed. He wished no harm to any creature. Then he thought of himself wishing no harm to any creature and began to feel fond and sorry for himself. As soon as he grew aware of the emotion he was indulging, he suppressed it. Pissing and moaning, mourning and weeping, that was the nature of the drug.

  The shot echoed from the distant hills. Smoke hung in the air. He turned and looked behind him and saw, far away across the pasture, the tiny blue-and-red figure of Professor Anderson motionless against the snow. Then Elliot turned again toward his house and took a few labored steps and looked up to see his wife at the bedroom window. She stood perfectly still, and the morning sun lit her nakedness. He stopped where he was. She had heard the shot and run to the window. What had she thought to see? Burnt rags and blood on the snow. How relieved was she now? How disappointed?

  Elliot thought he could feel his wife trembling at the window. She was hugging herself. Her hands clasped her shoulders. Elliot took his snow goggles off and shaded his eyes with his hand. He stood in the field staring.

  The length of the gun was between them, he thought. Somehow she had got out in front of it, to the wrong side of the wire. If he looked long enough he would find everything out there. He would find himself down the sight.

  How beautiful she is, he thought. The effect was striking. The window was so clear because he had washed it himself, with vinegar. At the best of times he was a difficult, fussy man.

  Elliot began to hope for forgiveness. He leaned the shotgun on his forearm and raised his left hand and waved to her. Show a hand, he thought. Please just show a hand.

  He was cold, but it had got light. He wanted no more than the gesture. It seemed to him that he could build another day on it. Another day was all you needed. He raised his hand higher and waited.

  1989

  DAVID WONG LOUIE

  Displacement

  from Ploughshares

  DAVID WONG LOUIE was born in 1954 and raised in New York. His parents were immigrants from China, his father entering under an assumed name and his mother, by way of Ellis Island, also claiming another’s identity. They spoke only Cantonese, so that was his language too, until TV and kindergarten stole him. He earned a BA at Vassar and an MFA at Iowa and taught for many years at multiple schools before settling at UCLA, where he has worked for more than two decades.

  Louie is the author of the novel The Barbarians Are Coming and the short story collection Pangs of Love, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Review First Fiction Award and the Ploughshares First Fiction Book Award and was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book and a Voice Literary Supplement Favorite. Louie’s work shares an interest in identity, alienation—in the psychic dislocation at the intersection of race, class, desire, and obligation. His fiction is widely taught and anthologized. Among other honors he was awarded Lannan Writing Fellowship and a Lannan residency. He lives in Venice, California, with his wife and daughter.

  ★

  MRS. CHOW HEARD the widow. She tried reading faster but kept stumbling over the same lines. She thought perhaps she was misreading them: “There comes, then, finally, the prospect of atomic war. If the war is ever to be carried to China, common sense tells us only atomic weapons could promise maximum loss with minimum damage.”

  When she heard the widow’s wheelchair she tossed the copy of Life down on the couch, afraid she might be found out. The year was 1952.

  Outside the kitchen, Chow was lathering the windows. He worked a soft brush in a circular motion. Inside, the widow was accusing Mrs. Chow of stealing her cookies. The widow had a handful of them clutched to her chest and brought one down hard against the table. She was counting. Chow waved, but Mrs. Chow only shook her head. He soaped up the last pane and disappeared.

  Standing accused, Mrs. Chow wondered if this was what it was like when her parents faced the liberators who had come to reclaim her family’s property in the name of the People. She imagined her mother’s response to them: What people? All of my servants are clothed and decently fed.

  The widow swept the cookies off the table as if they were a canasta trick won. She started counting again. Mrs. Chow and the widow had played out this scene many times before. As on other occasions, she didn’t give the old woman the satisfaction of a plea, guilty or otherwise.

  Mrs. Chow ignored the widow’s busy blue hands. She fixed her gaze on the woman’s milky eyes instead. Sight resided at the peripheries. Mornings, before she prepared the tub, emptied the pisspot, or fried the breakfast meat, Mrs. Chow cradled the widow’s oily scalp and applied the yellow drops that preserved what vision was left in the cold, heaven-directed eyes.

  “Is she watching?” said the widow. She tilted her big gray head sideways; a few degrees in any direction Mrs. Chow became a blur. In happier days Mrs. Chow might have positioned herself just right or left of center, neatly within a line of sight.

  Mrs. Chow was thirty-five years old. After a decade-long separation from her husband she finally had entered the United States in 1950 under the joint auspices of the War Brides and Refugee Relief acts. She would agree she was a bride, but not a refugee, even though the Red Army had confiscated her home and turned it into a technical school. During the trouble she was away, safely studying in Hong Kong. Her parents, with all their wealth, could’ve easily escaped, but they were confident a few well-placed bribes among the Red hooligans would put an end to the foolishness. Mrs. Chow assumed her parents now were dead. She had seen pictures in Life of minor landlords tried and executed for lesser crimes against the People.

  The widow’s fondness for calling Mrs. Chow a thief began soon after the old woman broke her hip. At first Mrs. Chow blamed the widow’s madness on pain displacement. She had read in a textbook that a malady in one part of the body could show up as a pain in another locale—sick kidneys, for instance, might surface as a mouthful of sore gums. The bad hip had weakened the widow’s brain function. Mrs. Chow wanted to believe the crazy spells weren’t the widow’s fault, just as a baby soiling its diapers can’t be blamed. But even a mother grows weary of changing them.

  “I live with a thief under my roof,” the widow said to the kitchen. “I could yell at her, but why waste my breath?”

  When the widow was released from the hospital she returned to the house with a live-in nurse. Soon afterward her daughter paid a visit, and the widow told her she didn’t want the nurse around anymore. “She can do me,” the widow said, pointing in Mrs. Chow’s direction. “She won’t cost a cent. Besides, I don’t like being touched that way by a person who knows what she’s touching,” she said of the nurse.

  Nobody knew, but Mrs. Chow spoke a passable though highly accented English she had learned in British schools. Her teachers in Hong Kong always said that if she had the language when she came to the States she’d be treated better than other immigrants. Chow couldn’t have agreed more. Once she arrived he started to teach her everything he knew in English. But that amounted to very little, considering he had been here for more than ten years. And what he had mastered came out crudely and strangely twisted. His phrases, built from a vocabulary of deference and accommodation, irritated Mrs. Chow for the way they resembled the obsequious blabber of her servants back home.

  The Chows had been hired ostensibly to drive the widow to her canasta club, to clean the house, to do the shopping, and, since the bad hip, to oversee her personal hygiene. In return they lived rent-free upstairs in the children’s rooms, three bedrooms and a large bath. Plenty of space, it would seem, except the widow wouldn’t allow them to remove any of the toys and things from her children’s cluttered rooms.

  On weekends and Tuesday afternoons Chow borrowed the widow’s tools and gardened for spending money. Friday nights, after they dropped the widow off at the canasta club, the Chows dined at Ming’s and then went to the amusement park at the beach boardwalk. First and last, they go
t in line to ride the Milky Way. On the day the immigration authorities finally let Mrs. Chow go, before she even saw her new home, Chow took his bride to the boardwalk. He wanted to impress her with her new country. All that machinery, brainwork, and labor done for the sake of fun. He never tried the roller coaster before she arrived; he saved it for her. After that very first time he realized he was much happier with his feet on the ground. But not Mrs. Chow: Oh, this speed, this thrust at the sky, this UP! Oh, this raging, clattering, pushy country! So big! And since that first ride she looked forward to Friday nights and the wind whipping through her hair, stinging her eyes, blowing away the top layers of dailiness. On the longest, most dangerous descent her dry mouth would open to a silent O and she would thrust up her arms, as if she could fly away.

  Some nights as the Chows waited in line, a gang of toughs out on a strut, trussed in denim and combs, would stop and visit: MacArthur, they said, will drain the Pacific; the H-bomb will wipe Korea clean of the Commies; the Chows were to blame for Pearl Harbor; the Chows, they claimed, were Red Chinese spies. On occasion, overextending his skimpy English, Chow mounted a defense: he had served in the U.S. Army; his citizenship was blessed by the Department of War; he was a member of the American Legion. The toughs would laugh at the way he talked. Mrs. Chow cringed at his habit of addressing them as “sirs.”

  “Get out, get out,” the widow hissed. She brought her fist down on the table. Cookies broke, fell to the floor.

  “Yes, Missus,” said Mrs. Chow, thinking how she’d have to clean up the mess.

  The widow, whose great-great-great-grandfather had been a central figure within the faction advocating Washington’s coronation, was eighty-six years old. Each day Mrs. Chow dispensed medications that kept her alive. At times, though, Mrs. Chow wondered if the widow would notice if she were handed an extra blue pill or one less red.

  Mrs. Chow filled an enamel-coated washbasin with warm water from the tap. “What’s she doing?” said the widow. “Stealing my water now, is she?” Since Mrs. Chow first came into her service, the widow, with the exception of her hip, had avoided serious illness. But how she had aged: her ears were enlarged; the opalescence in her eyes had spread; her hands worked as if they were chipped from glass. Some nights, awake in their twin-size bed, Mrs. Chow would imagine old age as green liquid that seeped into a person’s cells, where it coagulated and, with time, crumbled, caving in the cheeks and the breasts it had once supported. In the dark she fretted that fluids from the widow’s old body had taken refuge in her youthful cells. On such nights she reached for Chow, touched him through the cool top sheet, and was comforted by the fit of her fingers in the shallows between his ribs.

  Mrs. Chow knelt at the foot of the wheelchair and set the washbasin on the floor. The widow laughed. “Where did my little thief go?” She laughed again, her eyes closing, her head dropping to her shoulder. “Now she’s after my water. Better see if the tap’s still there.” Mrs. Chow abruptly swung aside the wheelchair’s footrests and slipped off the widow’s matted cloth slippers and dunked her puffy blue feet into the water. It was the widow’s nap time, and before she could be put to bed, her physician prescribed a warm foot bath to stimulate circulation; otherwise, in her sleep, her blood might settle comfortably in her toes.

  Chow was talking long distance to the widow’s daughter in Texas. Earlier the widow had told the daughter that the Chows were threatening again to leave. She apologized for her mother’s latest spell of wildness. “Humor her,” the daughter said. “She must’ve had another one of her little strokes.”

  Later Mrs. Chow told her husband she wanted to leave the widow. “My fingers,” she said, snapping off the rubber gloves the magazine ads claimed would guarantee her beautiful hands into the next century. “I wasn’t made for such work.”

  As a girl her parents had sent her to a Christian school for training in Western-style art. The authorities agreed she was talented. As expected she excelled there. Her portrait of the king was chosen to hang in the school cafeteria. When the colonial Minister of Education on a tour of the school saw her painting he requested a sitting with the gifted young artist.

  A date was set. The rumors said a successful sitting would bring her the ultimate fame: a trip to London to paint the royal family. But a month before the great day she refused to do the minister’s portrait. She gave no reason why; in fact, she stopped talking. The school administration was embarrassed, and her parents were furious. It was a great scandal; a mere child from a country at the edge of revolution but medieval in its affection for authority had snubbed the mighty British colonizers. She was sent home. Her parents first appealed to family pride, then they scolded and threatened her. She hid from them in a wardrobe, where her mother found her holding her fingers over lighted matches.

  The great day came and went, no more momentous than the hundreds that preceded it. That night her father apologized to the world for raising such a child. With a bamboo cane he struck her outstretched hand—heaven help her if she let it fall one inch—and as her bones were young and still pliant, they didn’t fracture or break, thus multiplying the blows she had to endure.

  “Who’d want you now?” her mother said. Her parents sent her to live with a servant family. She could return home when she was invited. On those rare occasions she refused to go. Many years passed before she met Chow, who had come to the estate seeking work. They were married on the condition he take her far away. He left for America, promising to send for her when he had saved enough money for her passage. She returned to Hong Kong and worked as a secretary. Later she studied at the university.

  Now as she talked about leaving the widow, it wasn’t the chores or the old woman that she gave as the reason, though in the past she had complained the widow was a nuisance, an infantile brat born of an unwelcomed union. This time she said she had a project in mind, a great canvas of a yet undetermined subject. But that would come. Her imagination would return, she said, once she was away from that house.

  It was the morning of a late spring day. A silvery light filtered through the wall of eucalyptus and warmed the dew on the widow’s roof, striking the plums and acacia, irises and lilies, in such a way that, blended with the heavy air and the noise of a thousand birds, one sensed the universe wasn’t so vast, so cold, or so angry, and even Mrs. Chow suspected that it was a loving thing.

  Mrs. Chow had finished her morning chores. She was in the bathroom rinsing the smell of bacon from her hands. She couldn’t wash deep enough, however, to rid her fingertips of perfumes from the widow’s lotions and creams, which, over the course of months, had seeped indelibly into the whorls. But today her failure was less maddening. Today she was confident the odors would eventually fade. She could afford to be patient. They were going to interview for an apartment of their very own.

  “Is that new?” Chow asked, pointing to the blouse his wife had on. He adjusted his necktie against the starched collar of a white short-sleeved shirt, which billowed out from baggy, pin-striped slacks. His hair was slicked back with fragrant pomade.

  “I think it’s the daughter’s,” said Mrs. Chow. “She won’t miss it.” Mrs. Chow smoothed the silk undershirt against her stomach. She guessed the shirt was as old as she was; the daughter probably had worn it in her teens. Narrow at the hips and the bust, it fit Mrs. Chow nicely. Such a slight figure, she believed, wasn’t fit for labor.

  Chow saw no reason to leave the estate. He had found his wife what he thought was the ideal home, certainly not as grand as her parents’ place, but one she’d feel comfortable in. Why move, he argued, when there were no approaching armies, no floods, no one telling them to go? Mrs. Chow understood. It was just that he was very Chinese, and very peasant. Sometimes she would tease him. If the early Chinese sojourners who came to America were all Chows, she would say, the railroad wouldn’t have been constructed, and Ohio would be all we know of California.

  The Chows were riding in the widow’s green Buick. As they approached the apartment buil
ding Mrs. Chow reapplied lipstick to her mouth.

  It was a modern two-story stucco building, painted pink, surrounded by asphalt, with aluminum windows and a flat roof that met the sky like an engineer’s level. Because their friends lived in the apartment in question the Chows were already familiar with its layout. They went to the manager’s house at the rear of the property. Here the grounds were also asphalt. Very contemporary, no greenery anywhere. The closest things to trees were the clothesline’s posts and crossbars.

  The manager’s house was a tiny replica of the main building. Chow knocked on the screen door. A radio was on and the smell of baking rushed past the wire mesh. A cat came to the door, followed by a girl. “I’m Velvet,” she said. “This is High Noon.” She gave the cat’s orange tail a tug. “She did this to me,” said Velvet, throwing a wicked look at the room behind her. She picked at her hair, ragged as tossed salad; someone apparently had cut it while the girl was in motion. She had gray, almost colorless eyes, which, taken with her hair, gave her the appearance of agitated smoke.

  A large woman emerged from the back room carrying a basket of laundry. She wasn’t fat, but large in the way horses are large. Her face was round and pink, with fierce little eyes and hair the color of olive oil and dripping wet. Her arms were thick and white, like soft tusks of ivory.

  “It’s the people from China,” Velvet said.

  The big woman nodded. “Open her up,” she told the girl. “It’s okay.”

  The front room was a mess, cluttered with evidence of frantic living. This was, perhaps, entropy in its final stages. The Chows sat on the couch. From all around her Mrs. Chow sensed a slow creep: the low ceiling seemed to be sinking, cat hairs clung to clothing, a fine spray from the fish tank moistened her bare arm.