by Lorrie Moore
No one said anything. It was as if they were sitting in a hospital waiting room. The girl watched the Chows. The large woman stared at a green radio at her elbow broadcasting news about the war. Every so often she looked suspiciously up at the Chows. “You know me,” she said abruptly. “I’m Remora Cass.”
On her left, suspended in a swing, was the biggest, ugliest baby Mrs. Chow had ever seen. It was dozing, arms dangling, great melon head flung so far back that it appeared to be all nostrils and chins. “A pig-boy,” Mrs. Chow said in Chinese. Velvet jabbed two fingers into the baby’s rubbery cheeks. Then she sprang back from the swing and executed a feral dance, all elbows and knees. She seemed incapable of holding her body still.
She caught Mrs. Chow’s eye. “This is Ed,” she said. “He has no hair.”
Mrs. Chow nodded.
“Quit,” said Remora Cass, swatting at the girl as if she were a fly. Then the big woman looked Mrs. Chow in the eyes and said, “I know what you’re thinking, and you’re right. There’s not a baby in the state bigger than Ed; eight pounds, twelve ounces at birth and he doubled that inside a month.” She stopped, bringing her palms heavily down on her knees, and shook her wet head. “You don’t understand me, do you?”
Mrs. Chow was watching Velvet.
“Quit that!” Remora Cass slapped the girl’s hand away from the baby’s face.
“Times like this I’d say it’s a blessing my Aunt Eleanor’s deaf,” said Remora Cass. “I’ve gotten pretty good with sign language.” From her overstuffed chair she repeated in pantomime what she had said about the baby.
Velvet mimicked her mother’s generous, sweeping movements. When Remora Cass caught sight of her she added a left jab to the girl’s head to her repertoire of gestures. Velvet slipped the punch with practiced ease. But the blow struck the swing set. Everyone tensed. Ed flapped his arms and went on sleeping. “Leave us alone,” said Remora Cass, “before I really get mad.”
The girl chased down the cat and skipped toward the door. “I’m bored anyway,” she said.
Remora Cass asked the Chows questions, first about jobs and pets. Then she moved on to matters of politics and patriotism. “What’s your feeling about the Red Chinese in Korea?”
A standard question. “Terrible,” said Chow, giving his standard answer. “I’m sorry. Too much trouble.”
Mrs. Chow sat by quietly. She admired Chow’s effort. She had studied the language, but he did the talking; she wanted to move, but he had to plead their case; it was his kin back home who benefited from the new regime, but he had to badmouth it.
Remora Cass asked about children.
“No, no, no,” Chow said, answering as his friend Bok had coached him. His face was slightly flushed from the question. Chow wanted children, many children. But whenever he discussed the matter with his wife, she answered that she already had one, meaning the old woman, of course, and that she was enough.
“Tell your wife later,” the manager said, “what I’m about to tell you now. I don’t care what jobs you do, just so long as you have them. What I say goes for the landlady. I’m willing to take a risk on you. Be nice to have nice quiet folks up there like Rikki and Bok. Rent paid up, I can live with anyone. Besides, I’m real partial to Chinese takeout. I know we’ll do just right.”
The baby moaned, rolling its head from side to side. His mother stared at him as if in all the world there were just the two of them.
Velvet came in holding a beach ball. She returned to her place beside the swing and started to hop, alternating legs, with the beach ball held to her head. “She must be in some kind of pain,” Mrs. Chow said to her husband.
The girl mimicked the Chinese she heard. Mrs. Chow glared at Velvet, as if she were the widow during one of her spells. The look froze the girl, standing on one leg. Then she said, “Can Ed come out to play?”
Chow took hold of his wife’s hand and squeezed it, as he did to brace himself before the roller coaster’s forward plunge. Then in a single, well-rehearsed motion Remora Cass swept off her slipper and punched at the girl. Velvet masterfully side-stepped the slipper and let the beach ball fly. The slipper caught the swing set; the beach ball bounced off Ed’s lap.
The collisions released charged particles into the air that seemed to hold everyone in a momentary state of paralysis. The baby’s eyes peeled open, and he blinked at the ceiling. Soon his distended belly started rippling. He cried until he turned purple, then devoted his energy to maintaining that hue. Mrs. Chow had never heard anything as harrowing. She visualized his cry as large cubes forcing their way into her ears.
Remora Cass picked Ed up and bounced on the balls of her feet. “You better start running,” she said to Velvet, who was already on her way out the door.
Remora Cass half smiled at the Chows over the baby’s shoulder. “He’ll quiet down sooner or later,” she said.
Growing up, Mrs. Chow was the youngest of five girls. She had to endure the mothering of her sisters, who, at an early age, were already in training for their future roles. Each married in her teens, plucked in turn by a Portuguese, a German, a Brit, and a New Yorker. They had many babies. But Mrs. Chow thought little of her sisters’ example. Even when her parents made life unbearable she never indulged in the hope that a man—foreign or domestic—or a child could save her from her unhappiness.
From the kitchen Remora Cass called Mrs. Chow. The big woman was busy with her baking. The baby was slung over her shoulder. “Let’s try something,” she said as she transferred the screaming Ed into Mrs. Chow’s arms.
Ed was a difficult package. Not only was he heavy and hot and sweaty but he spat and squirmed like a sack of kittens. She tried to think of how it was done. She tried to think of how a baby was held. She remembered Romanesque Madonnas cradling their gentlemanly babies in art history textbooks. If she could get his head up by hers, that would be a start.
Remora Cass told Mrs. Chow to try bouncing and showed her what she meant. “Makes him think he’s still inside,” she said. Ed emitted a long, sustained wail, then settled into a bout of hiccups. “You have a nice touch with him. He won’t do that for just anyone.”
As the baby quieted, a pain rolled from the heel of Mrs. Chow’s brain, down through her pelvis, to a southern terminus at the backs of her knees. She couldn’t blame the baby entirely for her discomfort. He wanted only to escape; animal instinct told him to leap from danger.
She was the one better equipped to escape. She imagined invading soldiers murdering livestock and planting flags in the soil of her ancestral estate, as if it were itself a little nation; they make history by the slaughter of generations of her family; they discover her in the wardrobe, striking matches; they ask where she has hidden her children, and she tells them there are none; they say, good, they’ll save ammunition, but also too bad, so young and never to know the pleasure of children (even if they’d have to murder them). Perhaps this would be the subject of her painting, a nonrepresentational canvas that hinted at a world without light. Perhaps—
Ed interrupted her thought. He had developed a new trick. “Woop, woop, woop,” he went, thrusting his pelvis against her sternum in the manner of an adult male in the act of mating. She called for Chow.
Remora Cass slid a cookie sheet into the oven and then stuck a bottle of baby formula into Ed’s mouth. He drained it instantly. “You do have a way with him,” said Remora Cass.
They walked into the front room. The baby was sleepy and dripping curds on his mother’s shoulder. Under the swing High Noon, the cat, was licking the nipple of an abandoned bottle. “Scat!” she said. “Now where’s my wash gone to?” she asked the room. “What’s she up to now?” She scanned the little room, big feet planted in the deep brown shag carpet, hands on her beefy hips, baby slung over her shoulder like a pelt. “Velvet—” she started. That was all. Her jaw locked, her gums gleamed, her eyes rolled into her skull. Her head flopped backward, as if at the back of her neck there was a great hinge. Then she yawned, and the walls se
emed to shake.
Remora Cass rubbed her eyes. “I’m bushed,” she said.
Mrs. Chow went over to the screen door. Chow and the girl were at the clothesline. Except for their hands and legs, they were hidden behind a bed sheet. The girl’s feet were in constant motion. From the basket her hands picked up pieces of laundry which Chow’s hands then clipped to the line.
“Her daddy’s hardly ever here,” Remora Cass said. “Works all hours, he does. He has to.” She patted Ed on the back, then rubbed her eyes again. “Looks like Velvet’s found a friend. She won’t do that with anyone. You two are naturals with my two. You should get some of your own.” She looked over at Mrs. Chow and laughed. “Maybe it’s best you didn’t get that. Here.” She set the baby on Mrs. Chow’s shoulder. “This is what it’s like when they’re sleeping.”
Before leaving, the Chows went to look at Rikki and Bok’s apartment. They climbed up the stairs. No one was home. Rikki and Bok had barely started to pack. Bok’s naked man, surrounded by an assortment of spears and arrows, was still hanging on the living room wall. Bok had paid good money for the photograph: an aboriginal gent stares into the camera, he’s smiling, his teeth are good and large, and in his palms he’s holding his sex out like a prize eel.
Mrs. Chow looked at the photograph for as long as it was discreetly possible before she averted her eyes and made her usual remark about Bok’s tastes. Beyond the building’s edge she saw the manager’s cottage, bleached white in the sun. Outside the front door Remora Cass sat in a folding chair, her eyes shut, her pie-tin face turned up to catch the rays, while Velvet, her feet anchored to the asphalt, rolled her mother’s hair in pink curlers. Between the big woman’s legs the baby lay in a wicker basket. He was quietly rocking from side to side. Remora Cass’s chest rose and fell in the rhythm of sleep.
Driving home, they passed the boardwalk, and Mrs. Chow asked if they might stop.
Chow refused to ride the roller coaster in the daytime, no matter how much Mrs. Chow teased. It was hard enough at night, when the heights from which the cars fell were lit by a few rows of bulbs. As he handed her an orange ticket, Chow said, “A drunk doesn’t look in mirrors.”
The Milky Way clattered into the terminus. After she boarded the ride, she watched Chow, who had wandered from the loading platform and was standing beside a popcorn wagon, looking up at a billboard. His hands were deep in the pockets of his trousers, his legs crossed at the shins. That had been his pose, the brim of his hat low on his brow, as he waited for her finally to pass through the gates of Immigration.
“Go on,” an old woman said. “You’ll be glad you did.” The old woman nudged her young charge toward the empty seat in Mrs. Chow’s car. “Go on, she won’t bite.” The girl looked back at the old woman. “Grand-muth-ther!” she said, and then reluctantly climbed in beside Mrs. Chow.
Once the attendant strapped the girl in, she turned from her grandmother and stared at her new companion. The machine jerked away from the platform. They were climbing the first ascent when Mrs. Chow snuck a look at the girl. She was met by the clearest eyes she had ever known, eyes that didn’t shy from the encounter. The girl’s pupils, despite the bright sun, were fully dilated, stretched with fear. Now that she had Mrs. Chow’s attention, she turned her gaze slowly toward the vertical track ahead. Mrs. Chow looked beyond the summit to the empty blue sky.
Within seconds they tumbled through that plane and plunged downward, the cars flung suddenly left and right, centrifugal force throwing Mrs. Chow against the girl’s rigid body. She was surprised by Chow’s absence.
It’s gravity that makes the stomach fly, that causes the liver to flutter; it’s the body catching up with the speed of falling. Until today, she had never known such sensations. Today there was a weightiness at her core, like a hard, concentrated pull inward, as if an incision had been made and a fist-sized magnet embedded.
Her arms flew up, two weak wings cutting the rush of wind. But it wasn’t the old sensation this time, not the familiar embrace of the whole fleeting continent, but a grasp at something once there, now lost.
Chow had moved into position to see the riders’ faces as they careened down the steepest stretch of track. Whenever he was up there with her, his eyes were clenched and his scream so wild and his grip on his life so tenuous that he never noticed her expression. At the top of the rise the cars seemed to stop momentarily, but then up and over, tumbling down, at what appeared, from his safe vantage point, a surprisingly slow speed. Arms shot up, the machine whooshed past him, preceded a split second earlier by the riders’ collective scream. And for the first time Chow thought he heard her, she who loved this torture so, scream too.
As she was whipped skyward once more, her arms were wrapped around the little girl. Not in flight, not soaring, but anchored by another’s being, as her parents stood against the liberators to protect their land.
Some curves, a gentle dip, one last sharp bend, and the ride rumbled to rest. The girl’s breath was warm against Mrs. Chow’s neck. For a moment longer she held on to the girl, whose small ribs were as thin as paintbrushes.
The Chows walked to the edge of the platform. He looked up at the billboard he had noticed earlier. It was a picture of an American woman with bright red hair, large red lips, and a slightly upturned nose; a fur was draped around her neck, pearls cut across her throat.
“What do you suppose they’re selling?” he asked.
His wife pointed at the billboard. She read aloud what was printed there: “No other home permanent wave looks, feels, behaves so much like naturally curly hair.”
She then gave a quick translation and asked what he thought of her curling her hair.
He made no reply. For some time now he couldn’t lift his eyes from her.
“I won’t do it,” she said, “but what do you say?”
She turned away from him and stared a long time at the face on the billboard and then at the beach on the other side of the boardwalk and at the ocean, the Pacific Ocean, and at the horizon where all lines of sight converge, before she realized the land on the other side wouldn’t come into view.
1990–2000
AT THE END OF 1989, SHANNON RAVENEL RESIGNED as the series editor, moved to Chapel Hill, North Carolina, and continued her work with Algonquin Books. Again Houghton Mifflin had to find a replacement. They chose Katrina Kenison, a young in-house editor. She said, “Reading wasn’t something I did as a child, it was who I was.” After graduating from Smith College, Kenison
got a job at Macy’s selling lingerie . . . One day an article in the Sunday New York Times caught my eye: a feature about a small literary imprint of Houghton Mifflin Company being launched in New Haven, where we were living. I looked up the editor in chief in the phone book, typed a letter saying I would do anything, and mailed it to his home address. Within a week I was installed on a stool in the kitchen (the offices were in a newly renovated Victorian house), with scissors, a stack of news clippings, and a jar of rubber cement . . . It wasn’t long before I was writing jacket copy, copy editing manuscripts, and reading the slush pile. And when I found a first novel that was good enough to publish, I was allowed to edit it.
She spent nine years working as an editor for Houghton Mifflin, first in New Haven, then in New York, and finally in the Boston office.
Kenison’s first son was only a month old when she became the fourth series editor of The Best American Short Stories. She said, “I hired a baby sitter, bought my first computer, and learned to use FileMaker Pro so I could keep track of the more than 200 magazine subscriptions I’d suddenly inherited.”
Ravenel told Kenison, “Read everything. Stay open-minded. Never write someone off just because you’ve read twenty-five of his stories and none of them has worked; the twenty-sixth might be wonderful.” When she sent her first volume of stories to Houghton Mifflin, Kenison included a letter suggesting that someone look into two new writers she had come across in her reading: Robert Olen Butler and Charles D’Ambrosio.
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Kenison reinstated the series editor’s foreword. In her first foreword, she defined her taste almost as broadly as Foley had: “A good story has a way of announcing itself, rendering irrelevant any preconceived maxims of standards of excellence.” She assured readers that any fears of the homogenization of literary short fiction because of the proliferation of writing programs were unfounded, that “our best fiction writers are in no danger.”
Like Foley, Kenison kept a file card for every story she read: “Title, author, magazine, date, plot synopsis, opinion. I ripped out and filed the stories I liked most and piled the magazines I was done with into boxes in the basement to make room in my small home office for the next mail delivery. Failing to stay on top of the tide was to drown in unread literary journals.”
The 1990s saw a return to straight realism in literary fiction. Kenison noted that “this fiction was largely rooted in the middle range of the American experience—a critic might have judged it ‘safe,’ a reader might have gratefully called it a return to tradition, or to our roots.” These were also the years in which annual sales of The Best American Short Stories hit their peak. Kenison guessed that this return to the mainstream “can be seen as a natural response to the antirealism of the late sixties and seventies, the nonlinear, stylistically and structurally experimental fiction of the seventies, the minimalism and metafiction of the eighties. American writers will always experiment, they will continue to nudge at the boundaries of the form, they will try anything once—but the one generalization I’d venture to make is that realism was and still is the bedrock of our literature.”
Many short stories remained topical, although concerns were changing. The faltering state of our natural environment was addressed by Rick Bass, while humankind’s relationship to our wilderness was explored by Annie Proulx and T. C. Boyle. Stories by Jamaica Kincaid, Akhil Sharma, and Lan Samantha Chang explored rituals of family and love in other countries. Advances in technology crept into short fiction as well; the Internet, e-mail, and cell phones began to make appearances. Stories by realists such as Mary Gordon and Antonya Nelson were published beside work by more voice-driven writers such as Denis Johnson and Junot Díaz. The shadowy line between humor and desolation was explored with no small amount of irony by writers like Lorrie Moore, Tim Gautreaux, and Thom Jones.
