The Best American Short Stories 2013 (28 page)

Shortly before Christmas in the year 1940 there had been an uproar in the high school. It had even reached the third floor where the clamor of typewriters and adding machines usually kept all the downstairs noises at bay. The oldest girls in the school were up there—girls who last year had been learning Latin and biology and European history and were now learning to type.

One of these was Ileane Bishop, a minister’s daughter, although there were no bishops in her father’s United Church. Ileane had arrived with her family when she was in grade nine and for five years, because of the custom of alphabetical seating, she had sat behind Jackson Adams. By that time Jackson’s phenomenal shyness and silence had been accepted by everybody else in the class, but it was new to her, and during the next five years, by not acknowledging it, she had produced a thaw. She borrowed erasers and pen nibs and geometry tools from him, not so much to break the ice as because she was naturally scatterbrained. They exchanged answers to problems and marked each other’s tests. When they met on the street, they said hello, and to her his hello was actually more than a mumble—it had two syllables and an emphasis to it. Nothing much was presumed beyond that except that they had certain jokes. Ileane was not a shy girl, but she was clever and aloof and not particularly popular, and that seemed to suit him.

From her position on the stairs, when all these older girls came out to see the ruckus, Ileane along with all the others was surprised to see that one of the two boys causing it was Jackson. The other was Bill Watts. Boys who only a year ago had sat hunched over books and shuffled dutifully between one classroom and another. Now in army uniforms they looked twice the size they had been, their powerful boots making a ferocious noise as they galloped around. They were shouting out that school was canceled for the day because everybody had to join the army. They were distributing cigarettes everywhere, even tossing them on the floor where they could be picked up by boys who didn’t even shave.

Careless warriors, whooping invaders. Drunk up to their eyeballs.

“I’m no piker,” they were yelling.

The principal was trying to order them out. But because this was still early in the war and there was as yet some awe and veneration concerning the boys who had signed up, wrapping themselves so to speak in the costume of death, he was not able to show the ruthlessness he would have called upon a year later.

“Now, now,” he said.

“I’m no piker,” Billy Watts told him.

Jackson had his mouth open probably to say the same, but at that moment his eyes met the eyes of Ileane Bishop and a certain piece of knowledge passed between them.

Ileane Bishop understood, it seemed, that Jackson was truly drunk but that the effect of this was to enable him to play drunk, therefore the drunkenness displayed could be managed. (Billy Watts was just drunk, through and through.) With this understanding Ileane walked down the stairs, smiling, and accepted a cigarette, which she held unlit between her fingers. She linked arms with both heroes and marched them out of the school.

Once outside they lit up their cigarettes.

There was a conflict of opinion about this later, in Ileane’s father’s congregation. Some said Ileane had not actually smoked hers, just pretended to pacify the boys, while others said she certainly had. Smoked.

Billy did put his arms around Ileane and tried to kiss her, but he stumbled and sat down on the school steps and crowed like a rooster. Within two years he would be dead.

Meanwhile he had to be got home, and Jackson pulled him so that they could get his arms over their shoulders and drag him along. Fortunately his house was not far from the school. They left him there, passed out on the front steps, and entered into a conversation.

Jackson did not want to go home. Why not? Because his stepmother was there, he said. He hated his stepmother. Why? No reason.

Ileane knew that his mother had died in a car accident when he was very small—this was sometimes taken to account for his shyness. She thought that the drink was probably making him exaggerate, but she didn’t try to make him talk about it any further.

“Okay,” she said. “You can stay at my place.”

It just happened that Ileane’s mother herself was away, looking after Ileane’s sick grandmother. Ileane was at the time keeping house in a haphazard way for her father and her two young brothers. This was fortunate. Not that her mother would have made a fuss, but she would have wanted to know the ins and outs and who was this boy? At the very least she would have made Ileane go to school as usual.

A soldier and a girl, so suddenly close. Where there had been nothing all this time but logarithms and declensions.

Ileane’s father didn’t pay attention to them. He was more interested in the war than some of his parishioners thought a minister should be, and this made him proud to have a soldier in the house. Also, he was unhappy not to be able to send his daughter to college, on his minister’s salary, because he had to put something by to send her brothers someday. That made him lenient.

Jackson and Ileane didn’t go to the movies. They didn’t go to the dance hall. They went for walks, in any weather and often after dark. Sometimes they went into a restaurant and drank coffee but did not try to be friendly to anybody. What was the matter with them? Were they falling in love?

Ileane went by herself to Jackson’s house to collect his bag. His stepmother raised her skinny eyebrows and showed her bright false teeth and tried to look as if she was ready for some fun.

She asked what they were up to.

“You better watch that stuff,” she said, with a big laugh. She had a reputation for being a loudmouth, but people said she didn’t mean any harm. Ileane was especially ladylike, partly to annoy her.

She told Jackson what had been said and made it funny, but he didn’t laugh.

She apologized.

“I guess you get too much in the habit of caricaturing people, living in a parsonage,” she said.

He said it was okay.

That time at the parsonage turned out to be Jackson’s last leave. They wrote to each other. Ileane wrote about finishing her typing and shorthand and getting a job in the office of the town clerk. In spite of what she had said about caricatures, she was determinedly satirical about everything, more than she had been in school. Maybe she thought that someone at war needed joking.

When hurry-up marriages had to be arranged through the clerk’s office, she would refer to the “virgin bride.”

And when she mentioned some stodgy minister visiting the parsonage and sleeping in the spare room, she wondered if the mattress would induce naughty dreams.

He wrote about the crowds on the
Île de France
and the ducking around to avoid U-boats. When he got to England, he bought a bicycle and he told her about places he had biked around to see if they were not out of bounds.

Then about being picked to take a map course, which meant he would work behind the lines if there was ever such a need (he meant of course after D-day).

These letters though more prosaic than hers were always signed with love. When D-day did come, there was what she called an agonizing silence, but she understood the reason for it, and when he wrote again, all was well, though details impossible.

In this letter he spoke as she had been doing, about marriage.

And at last V-E Day and the voyage home. He mentioned showers of summer stars overhead.

Ileane had learned to sew. She was making a new summer dress in honor of his homecoming, a dress of lime-green rayon silk with a full skirt and cap sleeves, worn with a narrow belt of gold imitation leather. She meant to wind a ribbon of the same green material around the crown of her summer straw hat.

“All this is being described to you so you will notice me and know it’s me and not go running off with some other beautiful woman who happens to be at the train station.”

He mailed his letter to her from Halifax, telling her that he would be on the evening train on Saturday. He said that he remembered her very well, and there was no danger of getting her mixed up with another woman even if the train station happened to be swarming with them that evening.

On their last evening they had sat up late in the parsonage kitchen where there was the picture of King George VI you saw everywhere that year. And the words beneath it.

I said to the man who stood at the gate of the year, “Give me a light that I may tread safely into the unknown.”

And he replied, “Go out into the darkness and put your hand into the hand of God. That shall be to you better than light and safer than a known way.”

Then they went upstairs very quietly and he went to bed in the spare room. Her coming to him must have been by mutual agreement because he was not surprised.

It was a disaster. But by the way she behaved, she didn’t seem to know. The more disaster, the more frantic became her stifled displays of passion. There was no way he could stop her trying, or explain. Was it possible a girl could know so little? They parted finally as if all had gone well. And the next morning said goodbye in the presence of her father and brothers. In a short while the letters began, loving as could be. He got drunk and tried once more, in Southampton. But the woman said, “That’s enough, sonny boy, you’re down and out.”

A thing he didn’t like was women or girls dressing up. Gloves, hats, swishy skirts, all some demand and bother about it. But how could she know that? Lime green, he wasn’t sure he knew the color. It sounded like acid.

Then it came to him quite easily, that a person could just not be there.

Would she tell herself or tell anybody else that she must have mistaken the date? He’d told himself that she would make up some lie, surely—she was resourceful, after all.

Now that she was gone, Jackson felt a wish to see her. Her voice even in distress had been marvelously unchanged. Drawing all importance to itself, musical levels. He could never ask the owner what she looked like, whether her hair was still dark, or gray, and she herself skinny or gone stout. He had not paid much attention to the daughter, except on the matter of disliking the boyfriend.

She had married. Unless she’d had the child by herself and that wasn’t likely. She would have a prosperous husband, other children. This the one to break her heart.

That kind of girl would come back. She’d be too spoiled to stay away. She’d come back when necessary. Even the mother— Ileane—hadn’t she had some spoiled air about her, some way of arranging the world and the truth to suit herself, as if nothing could foil her for long?

The next day whatever ease he had about the woman passing from his life was gone. She knew this place; she might come back. She might settle herself in for a while, walking up and down these streets, trying to find where the trail was warm. Humbly but not really humbly making inquiries of people, in that spoiled cajoling voice. It was possible he would run into her right outside this door.

Things could be locked up; it only took some determination. When he was as young as six or seven, he locked up his stepmother’s fooling, what she called her fooling or her teasing when she gave him a bath. He ran out on the street after dark, and she got him in but she saw there’d be some real running away if she didn’t stop, so she stopped. She said he was no fun because she could never say that anybody hated her. But she knew he hated her even if she couldn’t account for it and she stopped.

He spent three more nights in the building called Bonnie Dundee. He wrote an account for the owner of every apartment and when and what upkeep was due. He said that he had been called away, without indicating why or where to. He emptied his bank account and packed the few things belonging to him. In the evening, late in the evening, he got on the train. He slept off and on during the night and in one of those snatches he saw the little Mennonite boys go by in their cart. He heard their small sweet voices singing.

This had happened before in his dreams.

In the morning he got off in Kapuskasing. He could smell the mills and was encouraged by the cooler air.

ANTONYA NELSON

FROM
The New Yorker

T
IRED OF TELLING
her own story at A.A., Hil was trying to tell the story of her neighbor. It had been a peculiar week. “So she comes to my house a few nights ago,” Hil began, “like around nine,
bing-bong
, drunk as a skunk, as usual, right in the middle of this show my roommate and I are watching. I go to the door and there she is, fifty-something, a totally naked lady standing under the porch light.” At the time, it had seemed designed to charm, her coy drunken neighbor sporting a plaid porkpie hat and holding a toothbrush like a flag or a flower or a torch. Choreographed, at least, and embarrassing to behold. Bergeron Love, grande dame in her own mind and all around the block.

“Looks like somebody’s not getting enough attention,” Hil had murmured as she unlocked the door. The night was soggy, Houston autumn, frogs like squeezeboxes wheezing in and out. Her neighbor’s nakedness seemed sad and enervated, breasts flat on her chest, a kind of melted look to her flesh, ankles thick on splayed bare feet. Southern belle in decline, a dismal After picture.

What had Before looked like?

“You gonna invite me in?” Bergeron demanded, raising her eyebrows flirtatiously in an attempt to rally her own outlandishness. She was known in the neighborhood for being a character—some composite of Miss Havisham, Norma Desmond, and Scarlett O’Hara—her ancient family manse, with its aspect of ruined wedding cake, fenced off as if to contain inmates, its fetid kidney-shaped pool, by which her multiple orange cats congregated. Sometimes Bergeron’s antics were whimsical—crashing a dinner or a cocktail party, for example, or hiring someone in a gorilla suit to deliver balloons—and sometimes they were a serious pain in the ass: reporting overgrown lawns or loose dogs or long-term parked cars.