The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)

by The O Henry Prize Stories 2019 (retail) (epub)

  Stephanie Reents

  Unstuck

  LIZA WASN’T SURE when things began to change. One day it was the bed: made when she wasn’t one for making something you were going to unmake hours later. Another time, it was the walk, swept, and the dead bird that had kamikazeed in the front window weeks earlier, vanished. Then, the kitchen sink looked cleaner. Years of grease scoured, the drain as shiny as a new dime. It seemed as though someone had even taken a toothbrush to the spigot and the handles for the hot and cold. The heaped-up recycling: vamoosed, too. Even she couldn’t ignore a clean sink. She called her boyfriend Lloyd to see if this was his doing while he waited to plunge his coffee. Every Monday morning, he left at the crack of dawn to drive back to Phoenix, where he worked at a big accounting firm. They spent weekends together. This arrangement, going on fifteen years, was fine with her. Liza liked a little elbow room.

  “No, nope,” Lloyd said, “it wasn’t me.”

  “Strange,” she said. “I washed the dishes, that’s all.”

  “I seem to recall martinis,” he said.

  “They make me want to do handstands,” she said. “Cartwheels and whatnot. They don’t make me want to clean.”

  “You never know,” he suggested; but she did.

  She went into the Arizona Room—nothing in its place there—back through the kitchen and into the living room, where everything was as she remembered. Her computer was open on a stool, her coffee cup on a poetry volume—Small Animal Diagnosis—that she’d wound up using for the past decade as a coaster. Someone had lent it to her, though she could no longer remember whom. For most of her adult life—she’d be fifty-seven at the beginning of April—she hadn’t believed in things like coasters or soap dishes, or even bath mats for that matter. They seemed too specialized. Why buy a soap dish when you could use the edge of the sink? Or a large oyster shell? Or even the lid from a pickle jar? She pulled aside the thick quilt that she’d hung at the entrance to the hallway and went halfway down and into her office. Her breath bloomed. In January, it dipped into the blessed teens at night, and these houses built with little insulation and shit-for-nothing furnaces got so cold you had to get resourceful. Before he left, Lloyd flipped on the mobile radiator in the living room. Then Liza pulled it behind her like a dog, heating only her immediate vicinity.

  She was looking for something, but what suddenly escaped her. This was where she kept books, boxes of decorative papers for bookmaking, paste, the computer modem, a busted printer, climbing gear, her mother’s old Singer. Was she looking for a book? Her eyes inched across the uneven spines, mostly poetry, most of it from a period of her life where she’d had the patience for caesura, compression, broken lines. It was weird, now that she thought of it, but she’d stopped reading poetry completely after almost getting stuck in a slot canyon in southern Utah. She couldn’t concentrate. That was nine months ago. To say she’d almost been stuck wasn’t quite accurate. She’d been stuck. She was leading the way on a canyoneering trip through the Middle Fork of the Leprechaun. She knew the canyon would be tight; the night before, several of the bigger men in the group had decided to detour. But Liza was tall and lean and way under 180 pounds, which the canyoneering guide warned was the upper limit for safe passage. The rocks scraped her shoulders in several spots, and she had to climb off the canyon floor and scoot, with her back pressed against one wall and her feet against the other, to pass. She was feeling good, making good time, not that time was relevant in these tight spaces. It swept by. You could come to a technical spot—a spot where you might test dozens of different handholds, make thousands of minuscule adjustments to the angle of hips and shoulders—and an hour whooshed by. Then, without her really noticing, the canyon was suddenly so narrow above her that the space tunneled. Dropping to her hands and knees, she crawled until she ran out of room for crawling and had to lower her belly to the rock. She squirmed, tucked her chin, lowered her head, squirmed some more, tried to relax her shoulders. Her hands, straight out in front of her, frantically felt around for a nub or crack so that she could pull herself forward. She kicked with her legs. She was stuck. She couldn’t move forward, and she couldn’t move backward. “I’m stuck,” she yelled, hoping someone coming right behind her—her friend Carl, or another guy named Jim—could grab her by the ankles and ease her out.

  That’s right. She was looking for sunglasses. She was sure she had an extra pair with her climbing gear. She’d misplaced her everyday ones. They were probably in the car, but she hadn’t been able to find them, though she also hadn’t looked very carefully. In the closet, among her mess of backpacks, carabiners, chalk bags, and climbing shoes, her ropes hung coiled from a hook. She never hung up her ropes. She slid the closet door back in place. In the living room, she opened the novel she was reading, had a sip of coffee. It was cooler than she liked, but she couldn’t risk going back into the kitchen and noticing something else amiss. Best to stay put.

  * * *

  —

  From the very beginning seventeen years ago, she’d disliked the house. She’d bought it because she was sick of the landlord she had back then. Sometimes he showed up in the middle of the night, too high to remember that he no longer lived there. Sometimes he came by to fix something and his dogs, two Dobermans, broke something else. The last time, the dogs were barking at the foot of her bed, and her landlord was yelling, “Goldilocks! Goldilocks!” when she woke up. Her mother gave her $17,500, and within a month she was out. The house was located in what was at the time a new development west of the city, the streets named after women (Shannon, Jennie, Sheryl) and famous racehorses (No Le Hace, Riva Ridge, Flying Fox). This was long before the resort and golf course went in. She could walk five minutes to the end of W. San Juan Drive, which was an exception to the names rule, and be in desert. This was the only thing she liked.

  The house itself was a nondescript desert ranch with three bedrooms and one and a half baths. It had a carport and a paved driveway. In the front yard stood a saguaro and a blue agave that eventually shot up a twenty-foot-high flower and died. This seemed ominous. A screened-in porch ran along the back. The poured-concrete floors were covered in linoleum, except in the master bedroom, which was carpeted; the ceilings were popcorned; the windows rattled in their metal frames when the front door was opened. The builder had spared no expense, installing a cheap electric stove, hollow-core doors, ugly fake-wood kitchen cabinets, laminate counters, and a plastic bathtub. The rooms were small and claustrophobic; the flat roof was covered in black tar. Even the exterior bricks were fake—just a scrim of stone applied over Sheetrock.

  She valued her house so little that she couldn’t imagine anyone else buying it. This, along with other idiosyncratic habits of thought, was how she wound up staying for so long and letting so many things go. She rarely vacuumed, and she never scoured the whole tub, only the inside, because she did enjoy a good long soak. She didn’t dust. She didn’t wash the windows, didn’t wash the sliding glass door between the kitchen and the screened-in porch, she neglected the grout around the kitchen sink. Water dripped into one of the closets, but she never fixed the crack in the plaster. When it rained, which wasn’t too often, she just moved a garbage can into the closet and tried to ignore the irregular ticking. Her mother would have pitched a fit; she was the kind of woman who dusted her lightbulbs and cleaned the refrigerator once a week. But her mother only came to visit once, and that was long before the kitchen linoleum grew brown and sticky and her utensil drawers became so chaotic it could take ten minutes to find a garlic press.

  * * *

  —

  She had coffee with her friend Jan at a coffee shop that had changed hands several times. The French country loaf and baguettes were good but the carrot cake and other desserts had gone downhill. That was the problem with living in a place for a long time. You saw that change almost never truly represented progress, just trade-offs.

  “I think my house
is haunted,” Liza said.

  “Yeah?” Jan said, sounding not especially surprised. She tipped a straw of sugar into her cappuccino, but did not stir. She liked her foam to have crunch. She and Jan had been having coffee for decades, and there was almost nothing they hadn’t talked about. They’d met at the university swimming pool, where each dutifully swam seventy-two laps every morning. Jan sometimes wore two suits to create more drag, which impressed Liza, even though she would have preferred to do her workout naked.

  “Little things are weird,” Liza said. “Someone took out the recycling and scrubbed the sink.”

  Jan snorted. “You have a ghost that cleans? Where do I get one?”

  “You can laugh,” Liza said, “but I’m seriously freaking out. What if it’s the same one that…” It was the first time she’d made the connection. Something mysterious had happened in Leprechaun Canyon. She preferred not to dwell on it.

  “Your guardian angel is back?” Jan said.

  “More like meddling angel,” she said. “I like my house the way it is.”

  “You like your house? That’s the first positive thing I’ve heard you say about it in years.” Jan suddenly smiled and waved to someone over Liza’s shoulder.

  “Who was that?” Liza asked.

  “Bill,” Jan said, her face resuming its natural state.

  “Oh jeez. Is he coming over?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jan said, “but so what if he does? He doesn’t bite.”

  “He owes me money,” Liza said.

  “What?”

  “I didn’t tell you I lent him $2,300?”

  “When was this?”

  “Months ago. He needed to rent a truck that he could drive across the border. He was picking something up in Oaxaca.”

  “For $2,300?” Jan asked.

  “What’s he doing now?”

  “Talking to a woman. The new girl who works behind the counter.”

  “The old new girl? Or the new new girl?”

  Jan laughed. “The one with the snake tattooed…Oh god.”

  “What?”

  “He just kissed her.”

  Liza still hadn’t turned around. “Bill’s been a horndog since the beginning of time.”

  “He’s probably got thirty years on her.”

  “Go, Bill, go!” Liza said. “Get it up!”

  Jan groaned.

  “What do you care?” Liza asked. “You’re a lesbian.”

  “It’s just such a cliché: the old guy and the girl. And the girl’s thinking, This is no cliché, we’re different than everyone else. But they’re not. Her guy is just like every other old guy—he wants to stick his pecker in some yummy, preferably hairless pussy.”

  “Whoa,” Liza said. She thought she knew Jan, and then Jan would come out with something so totally surprising. This was another reason they’d remained friends for as long as they had. “I dated an older man once, but I wasn’t particularly young. Does that count?”

  “It’s all relative,” Jan said. “When I was thirty-one, I dated a guy who was forty-eight. You know what he told me? He said, ‘You’re the oldest woman I’ve ever been with.’ Then he stuck a pencil under my breasts to prove they were already sagging.”

  “You dated men?” Liza said. “I thought you’d always been a lesbian.”

  “Basically, yeah. Except for a couple years in my early thirties when I decided that women were such head cases. But it turned out to be a grass-is-always-greener kind of thing because men are head cases, too. And they’re assholes. And their stuff is bigger and takes up all the room in the dresser. And they have penises.”

  “I think it’s peni.”

  “Seriously?”

  Liza giggled. “No, not really. I made that up.”

  “The only thing that men have on women is that they’re better at fixing stuff.”

  “I wish Lloyd were more like that.” Lloyd was handy enough, but he preferred sorting out people’s problems with money.

  “But now your ghost or guardian angel has followed you back to Tucson,” Jan said.

  “Don’t laugh,” Liza said. “The whole thing is unnerving.”

  “Maybe you’ve been cleaning things in your sleep.”

  “Are you kidding?” Liza couldn’t believe how upset she was, even though Lloyd had suggested as much. “I hate cleaning.”

  * * *

  —

  Liza was reluctant to go home. A handful of other times things had spooked her, and she’d wished she wasn’t mostly on her own. A fire at the house diagonal to hers had killed the old man who lived there. For weeks afterward, if she wanted to go for a walk, she went out her back door and took the long way to the path that led out into the desert, but there was no detour when she was driving, and it required serious discipline not to stare at the charred La-Z-Boy and cowboy boots that remained in the driveway. Another time, a white pit bull found its way into her fenced yard—she never could figure out how—and killed her cat, Stelley. She told people that she’d had to stand by and watch the whole sickening thing. But the truth was that after she called 911, she crouched in the closet.

  The most unsettling thing was also totally mundane: those times, especially over the past year, when she’d wake with no idea where she was. Nothing looked familiar—not the French wardrobe that she’d inherited from her mother, not the red stool that she used as a bedside table, nor the room itself with windows on one side and a mirrored closet on the other. She’d look at a shape in the wall, wondering what it was. It might be dark or light, depending upon a number of factors. When sense trickled back and showed her that the rectangular shape was a door, she’d puzzle over where it might lead, whether someone might come through it. It was terrifying to feel so disoriented, so in the wrong place. She blamed the house; it had never been quite right.

  To kill time, she went to Whole Foods, a store she loved to hate, but as soon as she stepped under the buzzing fluorescent lights and heard “Purple Rain” playing in the background she couldn’t think of a thing she needed. She was surprised management hadn’t done a study that showed that playing Prince so soon after his death was a bummer and dampened middle-aged women’s desire to buy $14 pieces of blue cheese. Was she even middle-aged? She didn’t want to think about it. At the front of the store, a man was giving away free samples of mint-flavored water. It was dumb to use plastic cups the size of thimbles, but Liza grabbed one anyway, took a sip, and promptly spit it out.

  “You don’t like it?” sample man said. He had a John Deere cap and one of those big bushy beards that were favored by hipsters. The Sunday funnies were tattooed on his arms.

  “What’s the point?”

  “Refreshment,” the man said. “Enjoyment.”

  It was hard to read his tone: Ironic? Sincere? “It tastes like cheap gum.”

  His beard bobbed up and down as he frowned. “Look, lady, I’m just the messenger.”

  “When did plain water stop being refreshing?”

  “Consumers’ taste buds have evolved.”

  “Boy, you drank the Kool-Aid,” she said.

  He looked blankly at her.

  “Never mind,” she said, handing him back the cup. “You’re too young. Be sure to upcycle that.”

  She left the store with two apples that she hoped would be crisp, a handful of firm red grapes that she knew were good because she’d sampled them, a small block of really sharp cheddar, and walnuts.

  * * *

  —

  When Liza arrived home, she was thinking about how irritated the checkout people at Whole Foods became when they saw that she had not bagged her fruit. They also despised her for using paper bags for bulk and not writing down the bin numbers. (They had to make themselves useful in some way.) But plastic bags were overrated and ecologically hazardous, and what was the point w
hen she could stash the grapes in her crisper or even a bowl with a plate for a lid. Or leave them on the counter, because the more she read about refrigeration, the more she was beginning to think it was overrated, too. After she put away the groceries, she poured herself a glass of water (it was filtered water, okay, she wasn’t perfect) and threw herself down on the couch. By midafternoon, she was better off dealing with fictional characters who were more interesting and less predictable than actual people. She couldn’t remember the name of the novel she’d been reading that morning—that happened a lot, it was annoying, she had to write things down—but it was about a man who believed that his wife was poisoning him. They’d had a long and happy marriage, though lately the man, who’d quit working earlier than most (just like she had) and had started building exquisite little wooden boxes in his many spare hours, suspected his wife of having an affair. When she went to the grocery store, she wore a dress. When she came in with the mail, she was smiling. Most damning, she told the man day and night that she loved him. He had no real proof she was poisoning him, only that she’d started serving him soft things like chocolate mousse and lemon pudding for dessert, and his mind often felt fuzzy. It wasn’t Liza’s usual kind of book, but it was entertaining. She had a hunch the wife wasn’t having an affair, and the husband was losing his mind. But that also seemed too obvious, especially since she was only midway through. There had to be a twist. She sometimes worried that Lloyd had a lady on the side. She didn’t really know how he filled his free time up in Phoenix. But then she thought about how much they loved each other, and the idea seemed ludicrous. As she’d grown older, she’d gotten better at wriggling out of the grip of her fears. She sat up to get her novel, but it wasn’t there (on the side table, on one of the three stools she used as ad hoc coffee tables, anywhere where she would have normally left it). Now that she looked around, she saw that all her books were gone. Her novel. The other books stacked in a precarious pile. Vanished. They were library books, damn it. They were overdue, yes, but she’d worked out a deal with the circulation librarian where she brought Mexican wedding cakes, when she remembered, and her fines disappeared. Now what would she do? Tell the librarian they’d been carried off by a mysterious intruder? She called Lloyd.