100 Years of the Best American Short Stories

by Lorrie Moore

  One other trend has been undeniable. There has been a slow but steady movement toward diversity in American short stories: diversity of the gender and race and class of authors published in the series, too late when one looks back over the past 100 years; diversity of voice and structure, of style and content; finally and fortunately, diversity of format and genre and content. The history of the series and, if one is to extrapolate and generalize, of the American short story is a history of opening and acceptance. We still have a ways to go. There is plenty of room for more writers of color, as well as writers of diverse sexual and socioeconomic orientations. I wish I read more deftly handled humor, more genre-bending and experimental stories. That said, one can assert that the goals of the founders of the series—to highlight exceptional literary fiction, to provide an alternative to formulaic, commercial fiction—have certainly been and will continue to be met.

  I have relied on a number of sources in order to gather the many voices, anecdotes, and other material, not to mention the stories, that appear in this book. In addition to the 100 volumes of The Best American Short Stories, and Fifty Best American Short Stories and 200 Years of Great American Short Stories, both edited by Martha Foley, as well as The Best American Short Stories of the Century, edited by John Updike and Katrina Kenison, I consulted Roy S. Simmonds’s Edward J. O’Brien and His Role in the Rise of the American Short Story in the 1920s and 1930s; Martha Foley’s memoir, The Story of Story Magazine; and the editorial files at the office of Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and the Houghton Mifflin Archives at Harvard University. The author interviews in The Paris Review were invaluable to me, as were the New York Times and the Washington Post. I consulted a wide variety of magazines, from People to Writer’s Digest to The Daily Beast. Thank you to Edward O’Brien, Martha Foley, Shannon Ravenel, and Katrina Kenison for your invaluable work, and for paving the way for me. Thanks to the latter two for being candid and wise in speaking about your work. Thank you to Nicole Angeloro, my unfathomably capable editor at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, and to Andrea Schulz, Liz Duvall, and Laura Brady.

  Lorrie Moore met the challenge of this project with great enthusiasm and a deep knowledge of her subject. To select but a few dozen short stories that both signified and transcended their time was no small feat. Admittedly, we bumbled forward at times. We wanted this book to serve as a retrospective of a century, a march through time looking through the lens of the American short story. Moore was a serious, thoughtful guest editor, uncomfortable, as was I, with the number of landmark stories that had to fall away from the final list. No book can contain all the best stories of a century. Any attempt at such a thing has to reflect its editors’ tastes and biases. That said, I am proud of our efforts and hope that this time capsule will provide future readers a guided tour through a century. A last note: Lorrie Moore refused to include any of her own stories in this book, despite my best efforts to convince her otherwise. I had to settle for her involvement on only one level. She has my deep gratitude for introducing and coediting this book.

  H.P.

  2012

  NATHAN ENGLANDER

  What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank

  from The New Yorker

  NATHAN ENGLANDER was born on Long Island, New York, in 1970. He says, “I grew up in an Orthodox home in New York, where I had a right-wing, xenophobic, anti-intellectual, fire-and-brimstone, free-thought free, shtetl-mentality, substandard education. And so I began to look elsewhere; I began to read literature. Simple as that.” Englander graduated from the State University of New York at Binghamton and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop at the University of Iowa.

  His first book, a story collection titled For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, was published in 1999. He later published a novel, The Ministry of Special Cases, and another story collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank. He was the 2012 recipient of the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award and a finalist for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize. Englander was selected as one of “20 Writers for the 21st Century” by The New Yorker and received a Guggenheim Fellowship, a PEN/Malamud Award, the Bard Fiction Prize, the Berlin Prize, and the Sue Kaufman Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

  The New York Times Book Review said of Englander’s work, “Echoes of the two Isaacs, Bashevis Singer and Babel, can be heard throughout his pages, though Gogol is somewhere in the neighborhood too.”

  Englander lives in Brooklyn, New York, where he is Distinguished Writer-in-Residence at New York University.

  ★

  THEY’RE IN OUR house maybe ten minutes and already Mark’s lecturing us on the Israeli occupation. Mark and Lauren live in Jerusalem, and people from there think it gives them the right.

  Mark is looking all stoic and nodding his head. “If we had what you have down here in South Florida,” he says, and trails off. “Yup,” he says, and he’s nodding again. “We’d have no troubles at all.”

  “You do have what we have,” I tell him. “All of it. Sun and palm trees. Old Jews and oranges and the worst drivers around. At this point, we’ve probably got more Israelis than you.” Debbie, my wife, puts a hand on my arm—her signal that I’m either taking a tone, interrupting someone’s story, sharing something private, or making an inappropriate joke. That’s my cue, and I’m surprised, considering how often I get it, that she ever lets go of my arm.

  “Yes, you’ve got everything now,” Mark says. “Even terrorists.”

  I look at Lauren. She’s the one my wife has the relationship with—the one who should take charge. But Lauren isn’t going to give her husband any signal. She and Mark ran off to Israel twenty years ago and turned Hasidic, and neither of them will put a hand on the other in public. Not for this. Not to put out a fire.

  “Wasn’t Mohamed Atta living right here before 9/11?” Mark says, and now he pantomimes pointing out houses. “Goldberg, Goldberg, Goldberg—Atta. How’d you miss him in this place?”

  “Other side of town,” I say.

  “That’s what I’m talking about. That’s what you have that we don’t. Other sides of town. Wrong sides of the tracks. Space upon space.” And now he’s fingering the granite countertop in our kitchen, looking out into the living room and the dining room, staring through the kitchen windows at the pool. “All this house,” he says, “and one son? Can you imagine?”

  “No,” Lauren says. And then she turns to us, backing him up. “You should see how we live with ten.”

  “Ten kids,” I say. “We could get you a reality show with that here in the States. Help you get a bigger place.”

  The hand is back pulling at my sleeve. “Pictures,” Debbie says. “I want to see the girls.” We all follow Lauren into the den for her purse.

  “Do you believe it?” Mark says. “Ten girls!” And the way it comes out of his mouth, it’s the first time I like the guy. The first time I think about giving him a chance.

  Facebook and Skype brought Deb and Lauren back together. They were glued at the hip growing up. Went all the way through school together. Yeshiva school. All girls. Out in Queens till high school and then riding the subway together to one called Central in Manhattan. They stayed best friends until I married Deb and turned her secular, and soon after that Lauren met Mark and they went off to the Holy Land and shifted from Orthodox to ultra-Orthodox, which to me sounds like a repackaged detergent—ORTHODOX ULTRA®, now with more deep-healing power. Because of that, we’re supposed to call them Shoshana and Yerucham now. Deb’s been doing it. I’m just not saying their names.

  “You want some water?” I offer. “Coke in the can?”

  “‘You’—which of us?” Mark says.

  “You both,” I say. “Or I’ve got whiskey. Whiskey’s kosher too, right?”

  “If it’s not, I’ll kosher it up real fast,” he says, pretending to be easygoing. And right then he takes off that big black hat and plops down on the couch in the den.

  Lauren’s holding the verticals aside and looking out at the
yard. “Two girls from Forest Hills,” she says. “Who ever thought we’d be the mothers of grownups?”

  “Trevor’s sixteen,” Deb says. “You may think he’s a grownup, and he may think he’s a grownup—but we are not convinced.”

  Right then is when Trev comes padding into the den, all six feet of him, plaid pajama bottoms dragging on the floor and T-shirt full of holes. He’s just woken up, and you can tell he’s not sure if he’s still dreaming. We told him we had guests. But there’s Trev, staring at this man in the black suit, a beard resting on his belly. And Lauren, I met her once before, right when Deb and I got married, but ten girls and a thousand Shabbos dinners later—well, she’s a big woman, in a bad dress and a giant blond Marilyn Monroe wig. Seeing them at the door, I can’t say I wasn’t shocked myself.

  “Hey,” he says.

  And then Deb’s on him, preening and fixing his hair and hugging him. “Trevy, this is my best friend from childhood,” she says. “This is Shoshana, and this is—”

  “Mark,” I say.

  “Yerucham,” Mark says, and sticks out a hand. Trev shakes it. Then Trev sticks out his hand, polite, to Lauren. She looks at it, just hanging there in the air.

  “I don’t shake,” she says. “But I’m so happy to see you. Like meeting my own son. I mean it.” And here she starts to cry, and then she and Deb are hugging. And the boys, we just stand there until Mark looks at his watch and gets himself a good manly grip on Trev’s shoulder.

  “Sleeping until three on a Sunday? Man, those were the days,” Mark says. “A regular little Rumpleforeskin.” Trev looks at me, and I want to shrug, but Mark’s also looking, so I don’t move. Trev just gives us both his best teenage glare and edges out of the room. As he does, he says, “Baseball practice,” and takes my car keys off the hook by the door to the garage.

  “There’s gas,” I say.

  “They let them drive here at sixteen?” Mark says. “Insane.”

  “So what brings you here after all these years?” I say.

  “My mother,” Mark says. “She’s failing, and my father’s getting old—and they come to us for Sukkot every year. You know?”

  “I know the holidays.”

  “They used to fly out to us. For Sukkot and Pesach, both. But they can’t fly now, and I just wanted to get over while things are still good. We haven’t been in America—”

  “Oh, gosh,” Lauren says. “I’m afraid to think how long it’s been. More than ten years. Twelve,” she says. “With the kids, it’s just impossible until enough of them are big.”

  “How do you do it?” Deb says. “Ten kids? I really do want to hear.”

  That’s when I remember. “I forgot your drink,” I say to Mark.

  “Yes, his drink. That’s how,” Lauren says. “That’s how we cope.”

  And that’s how the four of us end up back at the kitchen table with a bottle of vodka between us. I’m not one to get drunk on a Sunday afternoon, but, I tell you, when the plan is to spend the day with Mark I jump at the chance. Deb’s drinking too, but not for the same reason. I think she and Lauren are reliving a little bit of the wild times. The very small window when they were together, barely grown up, two young women living in New York on the edge of two worlds.

  Deb says, “This is really racy for us. I mean, really racy. We try not to drink much at all these days. We think it sets a bad example for Trevor. It’s not good to drink in front of them right at this age when they’re all transgressive. He’s suddenly so interested in that kind of thing.”

  “I’m just happy when he’s interested in something,” I say.

  Deb slaps at the air. “I just don’t think it’s good to make drinking look like it’s fun with a teenager around.”

  Lauren smiles and straightens her wig. “Does anything we do look fun to our kids?”

  I laugh at that. Honestly, I’m liking her more and more.

  “It’s the age limit that does it,” Mark says. “It’s the whole American puritanical thing, the twenty-one-year-old drinking age and all that. We don’t make a big deal about it in Israel, and so the kids, they don’t even notice alcohol. Except for the foreign workers on Fridays, you hardly see anyone drunk at all.”

  “The workers and the Russians,” Lauren says.

  “The Russian immigrants,” he says, “that’s a whole separate matter. Most of them, you know, not even Jews.”

  “What does that mean?” I say.

  “It means matrilineal descent, is what it means,” Mark says. “With the Ethiopians there were conversions.”

  But Deb wants to keep us away from politics, and the way we’re arranged, me in between them and Deb opposite (it’s a round table, our kitchen table), she practically has to throw herself across to grab hold of my arm. “Fix me another,” she says.

  And here she switches the subject to Mark’s parents. “How’s the visit been going?” she says, her face all somber. “How are your folks holding up?”

  Deb is very interested in Mark’s parents. They’re Holocaust survivors. And Deb has what can only be called an unhealthy obsession with the idea of that generation being gone. Don’t get me wrong. It’s important to me too. All I’m saying is there’s healthy and unhealthy, and my wife, she gives the subject a lot of time.

  “What can I say?” Mark says. “My mother’s a very sick woman. And my father, he tries to keep his spirits up. He’s a tough guy.”

  “I’m sure,” I say. Then I look down at my drink, all serious, and give a shake of my head. “They really are amazing.”

  “Who?” Mark says. “Fathers?”

  I look back up and they’re all staring at me. “Survivors,” I say, realizing I jumped the gun.

  “There’s good and bad,” Mark says. “Like anyone else.”

  Lauren says, “The whole of Carmel Lake Village, it’s like a D.P. camp with a billiards room.”

  “One tells the other, and they follow,” Mark says. “From Europe to New York, and now, for the end of their lives, again the same place.”

  “Tell them that crazy story, Yuri,” Lauren says.

  “Tell us,” Deb says.

  “So you can picture my father,” Mark says. “In the old country, he went to heder, had the peyes and all that. But in America a classic galusmonger. He looks more like you than me. It’s not from him that I get this,” he says, pointing at his beard. “Shoshana and I—”

  “We know,” I say.

  “So my father. They’ve got a nice nine-hole course, a driving range, some greens for the practice putting. And my dad’s at the clubhouse. I go with him. He wants to work out in the gym, he says. Tells me I should come. Get some exercise. And he tells me”—and here Mark points at his feet, sliding a leg out from under the table so we can see his big black clodhoppers—“‘You can’t wear those Shabbos shoes on the treadmill. You need the sneakers. You know, sports shoes?’ And I tell him, ‘I know what sneakers are. I didn’t forget my English any more than your Yiddish is gone.’ So he says, ‘Ah shaynem dank dir in pupik.’ Just to show me who’s who.”

  “Tell them the point,” Lauren says.

  “He’s sitting in the locker room, trying to pull a sock on, which is, at that age, basically the whole workout in itself. It’s no quick business. And I see, while I’m waiting, and I can’t believe it—I nearly pass out. The guy next to him, the number on his arm, it’s three before my father’s number. You know, in sequence.”

  “What do you mean?” Deb says.

  “I mean the number tattooed. It’s the same as my father’s camp number, digit for digit, but my father’s ends in an eight. And this guy’s, it ends in a five. That’s the only difference. I mean, they’re separated by two people. So I say, ‘Excuse me, sir.’ And the guy just says, ‘You with the Chabad? I don’t want anything but to be left alone. I already got candles at home.’ I tell him, ‘No. I’m not. I’m here visiting my father.’ And to my father I say, ‘Do you know this gentleman? Have you two met? I’d really like to introduce you, if
you haven’t.’ And they look each other over for what, I promise you, is minutes. Actual minutes. It is—with kavod I say this, with respect for my father—but it is like watching a pair of big beige manatees sitting on a bench, each with one sock on. They’re just looking each other up and down, everything slow. And then my father says, ‘I seen him. Seen him around.’ The other guy, he says, ‘Yes, I’ve seen.’ ‘You’re both survivors,’ I tell them. ‘Look. The numbers.’ And they look. ‘They’re the same,’ I say. And they both hold out their arms to look at the little ashen tattoos. To my father I say, ‘Do you get it? The same, except his—it’s right ahead of yours. Look! Compare.’ So they look. They compare.” Mark’s eyes are popping out of his head. “Think about it,” he says. “Around the world, surviving the unsurvivable, these two old guys end up with enough money to retire to Carmel Lake and play golf every day. So I say to my dad, ‘He’s right ahead of you. Look, a five,’ I say. ‘And yours is an eight.’ And my father says, ‘All that means is he cut ahead of me in line. There same as here. This guy’s a cutter. I just didn’t want to say.’ ‘Blow it out your ear,’ the other guy says. And that’s it. Then they get back to putting on socks.”