The O. Henry Prize Stories 100th Anniversary Edition (2019)
Page 45
A good man, my mother would call him. Ole peckerwood, May would say. I heard both voices, responded to neither. Too busy worrying about myself. Too confused, enraged, selfish. Not prepared yet to deal with matters far worse afflicting my father, his victim, the victim’s family, all my people back home, our group that another more powerful group has treated like shit for centuries to intimidate and oppress, to prove to themselves that a country occupied by many groups belongs forever, solely, unconditionally to one group.
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My sister needs a minute or so to summon up the name, but then she’s certain, James…and I think his first name Riley…uh-huh…Riley James, she says is the name of the man our father killed. Neither of us speaks. Silence we both maintain for a while is proof she’s probably correct. Silence of a search party standing at the edge of a vast lake after the guide who’s led them to it points and says the missing one is out there somewhere. Silence because we’ve already plunged, already groping in the chill murkiness, holding our breath, dreading what we’ll recover or not from the gray water.
Thought I’d recognize the name if I heard it. That jolt, you know, when you’re reminded of something you will never forget. But James sounds right, anyway. And Riley James had kids, didn’t he. Yes, my sister says. Three. One a girl about my age, I’m pretty sure. Used to run into her before it happened.
Coming up, did you ever think we might need to have this conversation one day?
Daddy killing someone else’s daddy?
Oh, we knew. Children understand. Don’t need adults to tell them certain things. Kids supposed to listen to grown-ups, better listen if you don’t want a sore behind, but we watch them too. Kids always watching, wondering why big people do what they do. Understand a whole lotta mess out there adults not talking about. Scary mess kids can’t handle. Or maybe nobody, kid or adult, can handle it, so you better keep your eyes wide open. Don’t even know what you looking for except it’s bad. Gonna get you if you not careful. But no. Thank goodness, no. Huh-uh, I’m not standing here today saying that when I was a little girl I could see my father would kill another man. But we knew, we saw with our own eyes awful stuff happening day after day and worse just around the corner waiting to happen. Grown-ups didn’t need to tell us all that mess happening to them. We watched while it happened.
Wish I could disagree, Tish. Wish I could say no, but no, I think we probably did know. You’re remembering right again, Sis.
Will it always be like this, then? Too late. Damage done. Another victim. Trial. Funeral. Inquest. Story in the newspaper, on TV. More tears. Hand-wringing.
It’s worse now. Doesn’t seem possible, but it just might be. Not only for our family. Shit no. Not just us. Everybody. Everybody jammed up here wit us in this stinking mess. Everybody just too scared or too dumb to know it, is what our brother said with his eyes when I came to town to visit and we let go of each other when time for me to leave the prison and he has to stay where he is and nothing to do but look at each other one more time, one more sad, helpless stinking time. Clang, bang, gate shuts behind me and they still got the key.
We had talked about power during that visit. Talked in the cage. Power how long, too long stolen by the ruling group to diminish and control the ruled. Power of this political system that has operated from its start as if vast gaps dividing us from the ruling group either don’t exist or don’t matter. Same ole shit. Ask the brothers in here, our brother says. Ask the outlaws. Ask them about law supposed to protect everybody—rulers and ruled—from one another equally. Law calling itself the will of the people. Law that got all us in here blackened up like minstrels. Color, His Honor Mr. Law says, no problem. While out the other side of his mouth he’s saying color gives law power to abuse color. Look at the color around us in here. Some days I look and cry. Laugh some days. Our colors, our group. Power serves itself. Period. Exclamation point. Truth and only truth, our locked-up brother says. And he’s not wrong, our brother not wrong, so how can I be right? My empire. They slam the gate shut. Blam. Time to leave my brother’s cage, go back in mine. My maps. Ledgers. Theirs.
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Remember when I called you couple weeks ago, Sis, and asked the man’s name Daddy killed? Conversation got long, much longer than usual, nice in a way because usually conversations shortish because we skip over awful things and don’t want to jinx good things by talking too much about them, but I remember I think we both got deep into the begats, both trying to recall Daddy’s grandmother’s name and neither could, and Owens popped into my mind and I said Owens to you and you said, Sybil Owens—wasn’t she the slave from down south who came up here to found Homewood? And you were right of course, and I laughed because I was the one who wrote down the Sybela Owens story and you knew the story from my books or from family conversations. Same family conversations from which I’d learned, mostly from May, about May’s grandmother or great-grandmother Sybela, who had fled slavery with a white man who stole Sybela from his slave-plantation-owner father and settled in or near what’s now called Homewood, where one day when May was a little girl she saw, according to her, an old, old woman on a porch in a rocking chair smoking a pipe, woman in a long black dress, dark stockings, and head rag who smiled at her, and she’d hear people say later the old woman was her grandmother, maybe great-grand, and May never forgot and passed on the memory or tale or whatever to us, a story about Mom’s side of the family, not Daddy’s, and I wrote or talked my version of it and you probably heard May herself tell it like I did but years and years ago, and the best we usually do as we try to sort out the family tree and put names to branches, to people, is most likely to mix up things the way I did with “Owens” before you corrected my memory and I reminded myself and you how family stories were partly what one of us had heard live from the mouth of the one who had lived the story or heard it second- or thirdhand and passed it on but partly also stuff I had made up, written down and it got passed around the family same as accounts of actual witnesses telling stories the way May told hers about Sybela. So that day on the phone we were begatting this one from that one and so on, you said, Hold on a minute, and went up to the attic where you keep those boxes and boxes of Mom’s things, the papers and letters she saved from the old people in the family, because you believed there was an obituary in rough draft in Mom’s hand on tablet paper that might tell us Daddy’s grandmother’s name, the name I could hear my father and Aunt C saying plain as day but could not raise beyond a whispering in my ear too faint to grasp or repeat aloud to myself. And sure enough you quickly retrieved information Mom had written down long ago for a church funeral program, maybe for the colored newspaper too, a couple sheets of blue-lined school-table paper, lines and handwriting faded, creases in the paper, the obituary notice we both had remembered but neither could repeat the exact contents of. You had the folded sheets in your hand in a minute once you got up those steep-assed attic steps I worry about my little sis climbing because she’s not little sis anymore.
But sweet still. Yes. This is your eldest brother speaking to you, girl. Two of our brothers gone, just us two left and our brother in the slam and when you read me Mom’s notes for her father’s obituary they included Daddy’s name but did not mention our father’s mother’s mother so of course they solved nothing, just deepened the puzzle of how and why and where and who we come from and here we are again, and whatever we discover about long ago, it never tells us enough, does it. Not what we are or what comes next after all that mess we don’t even know maybe or not happened before…well, we try…and after I listened to you reading bits of information the note compiled, I thought about the meaning of long ago, and how absolutely long ago separates past and present, about the immeasurable sadness, immeasurable distance that well up in me often when I hear the words “long ago,” and on another day, in another conversation, I will attempt to explain how certain words or phrases reveal more than I
might choose to know, an unsettling awareness like seeing an ugly tail on an animal I know damn well has no tail or a tail negligible as the one people carry around and can’t see, and I will ask you, Tish, what if I’m trying to imagine long ago and a shitty, terrible-looking tail appears, a tail like the one I’m sure doesn’t belong on a familiar animal but grows longer, larger and hides the animal. Wraps round and round and takes over. Will there be nothing left then? I will ask you. Nothing. Not even wishful thinking. The life, the long ago, once upon a time I am trying to imagine—gone like the animal not supposed to own a tail and the tail I inflicted upon it.
Reading The O. Henry Prize Stories 2019
The Jurors on Their Favorites
Our jurors read the twenty O. Henry Prize stories in a blind manuscript. Each story appears in the same type and format with no attribution of the magazine that published it or the author’s name. The jurors don’t consult one another or the series editor about their decision. Although the jurors write their essays without knowledge of the authors’ names, the names are inserted into the essays later for the sake of clarity. —LF
Lynn Freed on “Omakase” by Weike Wang
I have read any number of metaphors for the difference between novels and short stories. The one I favor concerns plum pudding. If the novel is the whole pudding, the theory goes, then the short story is the piece with the coin in it. Certainly, when I read a short story, I want to come away a bit richer.
I also like to come away surprised, as if by a truth I have known and forgotten. This is to say that a story requires, on the reader’s part, some exercise of imagination. And I love a story sure-footed enough to take for granted the world in which it takes place.
We are much subject these days—especially in the academy, but also in the literary world—to a rather cloying reverence for diversity. The broadening of horizons seems to be the point. And so one encounters a preponderance of horizon-broadening customs, exotic foods, crazy aunties, elders confounded by America, England, etc. And then, occasionally, one comes upon a story that quickly, without tricks and manipulations, takes the reader into a world both new and familiar, and does so with the divine relief of irony. “Omakase” is, for me, such a prize.
It does not start out with a bang. “The couple” is going out for sushi. “The woman,” daughter of Chinese immigrants, is a rather introverted research analyst at a bank (“She was…the kind to create an Excel spreadsheet of everything she owned and send it to him, so that he could then highlight what he also owned and specify quantity and type”). “The man” is an extroverted American ceramic-pottery instructor, given to rolling his eyes, as if in jest, at what he wishes to distance himself from. But, in the restaurant, when the woman feels herself marooned by his eye-rolling, “a spike of anger went through [her]. Or maybe two spikes. She imagined taking two toothpicks and sticking them through the man’s pretty eyes to stop them from rolling. Then she imagined making herself a very dry martini with a skewer of olives.”
One of the brilliant aspects of this story lies in the matter-of-fact nature of the narration, the way it moves through the territory of the story as if from one stepping stone to the next, trusting the reader to follow. Another is the voice—deadpan, wry, sharp, relentless, and clearly, despite the fact that it is written in the third person, the woman’s. It is also, clearly, Chinese, never mind that the woman herself “didn’t want to be one of those women who noted every teeny tiny thing and racialized it.” The fact is, race is at work throughout this story, from the start of the affair to the end of the omakase. It is endemic to the romance itself, informs her embarrassment at the man’s relentless probing of the Japanese chef, is at play in his visit to her parents (“who had been taught to loathe the Japanese”), and then in the Japanese chef himself and his swipe at the Chinese.
Throughout, some of the most cogent moments take place in the woman’s head, in silence. “She wanted to say to the waitress, You have no idea how hard some of us worked so that you could dye your hair purple and pierce your lip.” And it is left to the reader to make (perfect) sense of it.
In the hands of a comedian, much of this material could be rendered as hilarious shtick. In the hands of a master of fiction, it delivers riches.
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Lynn Freed’s books include six novels, a collection of stories, and a collection of essays. Her work has appeared in Harper’s Magazine, The New Yorker, The Atlantic, and The New York Times, among others. She is the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Anne Porter Award in fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, two O. Henry Prizes, and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts and the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, among others. Born in Durban, South Africa, she now lives in Northern California.
Elizabeth Strout on “Girl of Few Seasons” by Rachel Kondo
What a magnificent story this is! From the very beginning I knew I was in the presence of a quiet and gracious authority—that the author knew what she was doing and would deliver me with safe hands. And I was delivered; I kept thinking about this story a long time after I put it down.
I think this is because it is beautifully written—but what does that mean? It means there was one truthful sentence after another and that I felt these sentences instinctively to be true. I knew the pigeons in the coop were real, I felt Ebo’s distress at having to kill the last one, I knew that the house was true, his mother, and also Daddy. Just true.
It also means that there were continual small—and large—surprises in the work, that as I rode the waves of the loveliness of it I was always slightly or largely shaken by one of these surprises, which never seemed gratuitous. And it means that the story unfolded without a hitch; there was a wonderful sense of its rolling forward at its own pace; the way it handled time was seamless, a peek ahead, a real glance backward, but always staying on course. The very first paragraph gives us a huge amount of information, but in a soft and tight way, each sentence flowing so naturally from the one before it. It means there was a clarity to it all, that I never felt outside of the setting and the globe it put me into.
Mostly, though, the emotional truthfulness of this story is what makes it so exquisite. One can utterly feel the experience of Ebo, and we are with him right through the unexpected and glorious ending.
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Elizabeth Strout is the author of six books of fiction. Her first novel, Amy and Isabelle, won the Chicago Tribune’s Heartland Prize and was also shortlisted for the Orange Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award. Strout is the author of Abide with Me; Olive Kitteridge, which won the Pulitzer Prize in 2009; and The Burgess Boys, nominated for the Harper Lee Prize in fiction. Her latest book is a novel, Anything Is Possible. She was born in Portland, Maine, and lives in New York City.
Lara Vapnyar on “Funny Little Snake” by Tessa Hadley
“The child was nine years old and couldn’t fasten her own buttons.”
I was bothered by this first sentence, because it made me immediately dislike the child in question, and I couldn’t understand why. All we’re given is bare facts, the age of the child and her inability to fasten buttons at that age. Immediately after that we’re told that this was a Victorian-type dress with hundreds of buttons. This information should have redeemed the child in my eyes (who among us can boast of ease with Victorian buttons!), but instead I noticed that my initial dislike was steadily growing into squeamish disgust. There was the smell of the child: “she still smelled of something furtive—musty spice from the back of a cupboard.” The physical description: “a doll—with a plain, pale, wide face, her temples blue-naked where her hair was strained back, her wide-open gray eyes affronted and evasive and set too far apart.” Or the creepy scene of her playing with her poorly made toys:
One voice was coaxing and hopeful, the other one reluctant. “Put on your special gloves,” one of them said. “But I
don’t like the blue color,” said the other. “These ones have special powers,” the first voice persisted. “Try them out.”
But by that time it was clear to me that the disgust I felt was communicated to me through the narrator: Valerie, the young stepmother of the child, forced to be her caregiver because the child’s father didn’t express any interest in performing his functions. Valerie is very honest about her reluctance to spend time with the child.
She didn’t really want the child around. But Robyn was part of the price she paid for having been singled out by the professor among the girls in the faculty office at King’s College London, having married him and moved with him to begin a new life in the North.
Valerie is just as clear-eyed about the feelings of her husband, the child’s father. “He might have found fatherhood easier, Valerie thought, if his daughter had been pretty.”
It was this line that pricked me with guilt. I realized that I felt more than simply invested in the story, I felt implicated along with the main character for disliking the child, even though nothing really warranted it, except for her lack of beauty, liveliness, or pleasant manners.
This was when I understood that I was in the presence of true greatness.
When I read about the child treating her new pajamas as her most precious possession, insisting on holding on to them during a meal at a restaurant, I felt both heartbroken and ashamed—ashamed because of my initial squeamishness. As I proceeded to read the story, getting to know more and more about the horror of the child’s situation, about the true scope of the neglect, what I experienced wasn’t simple compassion but true heartbreak, because I felt responsible now.