The Best American Short Stories 2013 (30 page)

“I love you,” Boyd put in.

“But,” Bergeron said, taking a few breaths, “sometimes? Sometimes, it’s like Allistair might as well be dead, for as often as I see him. For as often as he seems to think of me.”

Janine cleared her throat quietly.

“He thinks of you,” Jeremy said.

“Bless your heart,” Bergeron told him, “but how in the world would you know?” She then turned to Boyd. “And as for you, Boyd,
you
just learned how to say the
words
‘I love you.’ I taught you those three words, and how I wish I hadn’t. I might as well live with a parrot, for all they mean to
you
. Hey, where’s your dad, anyway?” Bergeron asked Jeremy. “What ever happened to him? How’d you end up with this big gal in your house instead?”

“Hey, now,” Hil said. “No need to be bitchy, Bergeron. You can be naked, and you can interrupt our TV program, but no getting flat-out rude.”

Poor Jeremy. What would he tell those hugging teenagers at the next Al-Anon meeting?

Jeremy took a seat next to Janine on the couch, loyal to his late-night gaming buddy. As for Janine, she was studying the coffee table, the part in her hair a bright, humiliated red. Like many an obese woman, she tended to her hair and makeup fastidiously. Hil tried to remember if this was the same coffee table that she and Jeremy’s father had brought with them when they moved into the house, twenty years ago. Was it the same one on which Bergeron Love had stood during her first visit to them, to deliver her city council campaign speech? Perhaps.

“Do you remember when you were running for city council?” Hil asked.

“Which time?” Boyd said. “She’s run more than once. And lost,” he added quietly, somehow vindicated.

“A real reformer is never popular!” Bergeron declared.

“Nineteen-ninety or so,” Hil said. “You guys were canvassing the street. Bergeron was stumping for herself on the Democratic ticket, and you, Boyd, were signing up Republicans. You got up on this very table to give your speech, Berge.” Boyd had stood aside with his clipboard, as if he knew that Bergeron was a perfect argument for the opposition.

Jeremy and Janine laughed.

“Oh, make fun,” Bergeron said. “Go ahead, Bergeron Love’s a crackpot and a nuisance.” She struggled out of the blue chair now, glass of ice in one hand, toothbrush in the other. “Nobody was ever grateful for anything I did, nobody—not you homeowners or your kids, not you, Boyd, you damn cringing mynah bird, not even my own son, Allistair, not even
Allistair!
Everybody’s a fucking ingrate. Why run for office? Why give a shit? Why have children?” she demanded of Jeremy, who blinked at the force of her fervor.

“Well,” he said, taking a moment to put it politely, “it’s not exactly like he asked you to do it.”

At the meeting that was mostly men, mostly professional men in the medical district, the story of the naked social call had got some laughs. The men had appreciated the ludicrous image, the backstory details of previous drunken escapades featuring that wild card Bergeron Love. They had even admired Jeremy’s visit-ending remark. That innocent teenage observation had defused poor Bergeron Love, and Boyd had then been able to rise from the chair he’d been occupying so ineffectually and guide her limply out the front door.

“Wow,” Janine had said. “Talk about true crime.”

“Yeah,” Jeremy said. He seemed to be studying the paused image on the television screen.

At the front door, Hil had hugged Bergeron Love, taken into her arms that molten clammy body. She’d never held a naked woman before.

“Don’t tell Allistair, will you?” Bergeron had said into Hil’s ear, no longer angry, no longer an incendiary force, no longer anything but tired. “Don’t tell my boy.”

After Hil had finished her story and acknowledged the A.A. members’ applause, that mild smile still on the blind man’s face, she and her friend Joe went, as usual, to their favorite Mexican restaurant to debrief.

Joe said, “You didn’t share the part about Bergeron Love being dead now.”

“Yeah, well, that part would kind of ruin the fun, wouldn’t it? Everybody would get all ashamed when they found out they were laughing about a dead person, right? Five days after the naked visit she was dead.”

“Short shelf life for a crazy story.”

“Exactly.” Joe didn’t care that Hil ordered a beer at Chuy’s. It was his opinion that beer didn’t actually count, since it took so much of it to provide a buzz. He hadn’t had a drink in five years, but it had been only two hours since he’d downed a Xanax. He was checking his watch to see when he could have another.

“You could tell the dead part next time, like it just happened. A follow-up on the first story. Chapter Two.”

“Could do. You know, if it weren’t for you and blind Jim, I’d quit this meeting.”

Hil had first chosen the meeting because it was near the medical center and coincided with happy hour. She’d thought she might meet a doctor. Instead, she’d found Joe, a guy she’d known in high school, gay, also looking for a doctor. “I wanted to meet doctors because my dad was a doctor, and I like the fact that these guys are just like him, and yet also, hello, they’re no better than me.”

“A syllogism,” Hil had supplied. “It makes perfect sense.”

“Sort of. And maybe you can tell me why I’ve chosen to live with a porno addict?” he then said.

“Same reason I live with a morbidly obese woman? It’s good to have somebody else’s bad habits around to put your own in perspective?”

“Agreed. Also to compare and contrast. To get a little clarity.”

“I should have known doctors wouldn’t think of A.A. as a dating opportunity. In fact, the opposite.”

“Live and learn,” Joe said. “Or live and don’t.”

It had been an unusually clear Wednesday when the emergency vehicles had screamed into the early-morning quiet, halting at the gates of Bergeron Love’s beautiful ruin. Boyd the boyfriend had come out to unlock three generations of fence: the faded white picket one that matched the house, the black iron one with its spiky tips, and the hideous yet effective chain-link with concertina wire, the enclosure of most recent vintage. Bergeron Love had been wheeled out on a gurney, feet first, just as she might have predicted she’d exit that formerly lovely home, the place where she’d been born, raised, loved, and abandoned. Suicide, Hil had guessed at the time—Bergeron Love’s last jaunt had been a kind of farewell tour of the neighborhood, exposing herself, putting herself at risk because she no longer cared what happened.

Also watching the action was the man who’d been reported for abuse, the man who might simply have been bathing his child. What was going through his head? Hil wondered.
Good riddance, racist wore
.

Hil lied at A.A. meetings. There she led a life of sobriety; there she had not had a drink for eleven months now. Soon she would reach her fictitious one-year mark. When she told Bergeron’s story, she was at least telling the truth. But was it a story? Twenty years’ worth of half-known information, neighborhood gossip. She’d told it at two different meetings, starting at different places: the naked visitation, the phone call to Child Protective Services. She could also have told a version that began with Bergeron campaigning for city council, using Hil’s coffee table as a soapbox, she and her husband both horrified and amused by their new neighbor, still newlyweds themselves, their moving boxes barely unpacked, their son a few years in the future. Or she could have begun with the homeless man who’d been discovered lying beside Bergeron’s kidney-shaped swimming pool one night, the man who’d somehow breached the various fences, empty bottle of isopropyl alcohol in hand, and who would have died, had Bergeron not summoned an ambulance, had she not moved with surprising speed to get him aid. Or Hil could have begun with the cocktail party that Bergeron had once interrupted, pushing into Hil’s house in an ivory evening gown and trying to seduce her husband. “He’s flirting with me!” she’d gaily shrieked, laying her head on Hil’s husband’s chest. “Look out, Boyd, you’ve got competition! Careful, Hil! You’ll lose him!” Hil and her husband had laughed about it later in bed. As if he would be attracted to the likes of Bergeron Love! Or to
anybody
else, he’d declared then tenderly to Hil, holding her close and naked, romantic, affectionate, still hers.

It was not a suicide, the neighborhood learned from Boyd after the vehicles had driven soundlessly away, their emergency lights extinguished. A heart attack, very sudden, there in bed. She’d grabbed his earlobe, he told one neighbor, illustrating by grabbing it himself, his face a shocked white, mousier than ever. She couldn’t speak, Boyd said. That neighbor told the rest of them, and that was the end. Everybody went back inside.

Allistair would come home, Hil thought. He’d have to. It would be up to him to decide what to do with the Love estate, the squalid monument in which he’d been raised, the mosquito-ridden pool, those many cats, the lingering boyfriend.

Meanwhile, Hil had found a new meeting to go to, one so close to her house she could walk there. Handily, there was a pub situated on the route home. Maybe at this meeting she’d start the story of her eccentric neighbor by talking about the son as a teenager, Allistair trying to keep his mother from trouble at two or three or four in the morning, calling to her uselessly, “Please come back inside, Mom!
Please
get out of the street!”

KIRSTIN VALDEZ QUADE

FROM
Narrative Magazine

T
HERE IS A PICTURE
of me standing with my cousin Nemecia in the bean field. On the back is penciled in my mother’s hand,
Nemecia and Maria, Tajique, 1929
. Nemecia is thirteen; I am six. She is wearing a rayon dress that falls to her knees, glass beads, and real silk stockings, gifts from her mother in California. She wears a close-fitting hat, like a helmet, and her smiling lips are pursed. She holds tight to my hand. Even in my white dress I look like a boy; my hair, which I have cut myself, is short and jagged. Nemecia’s head is tilted; she looks out from under her eyelashes at the camera. My expression is sullen, guilty. I don’t remember the occasion for the photograph, or why we were dressed up in the middle of the dusty field. All I remember of the day is that Nemecia’s shoes had heels, and she had to walk tipped forward on her toes to prevent them from sinking into the dirt.

Nemecia was the daughter of my mother’s sister. She came to live with my parents before I was born because my Aunt Benigna couldn’t care for her. Later, when Aunt Benigna recovered and moved to Los Angeles, Nemecia had already lived with us for so long that she stayed. This was not unusual in our New Mexico town in those years between the wars; if someone died, or came upon hard times, or simply had too many children, there were always aunts or sisters or grandmothers with room for an extra child.

The day after I was born my great-aunt Paulita led Nemecia into my mother’s bedroom to meet me. Nemecia was carrying the porcelain baby doll that had once belonged to Aunt Benigna. When they moved the blanket from my face so that she could see me, she smashed her doll against the plank floor. The pieces were all found; my father glued them together, wiping the surface with his handkerchief to remove what oozed between the cracks. The glue dried brown, or maybe it dried white and only turned brown with age. The doll sat on the bureau in our bedroom, its face round and placidly smiling behind its net of brown cracks, hands folded primly across white lace, a strange and terrifying mix of young and old.

Nemecia had an air of tragedy about her, which she cultivated. She blackened her eyes with a kohl pencil. She spent her allowance on magazines and pinned the photographs of actors from silent films around the mirror on our dresser. I don’t think she ever saw a film—not, at least, until after she left us, since the nearest theater was all the way in Albuquerque, and my parents would not in any case have thought movies suitable for a young girl. Still, Nemecia modeled the upward glances and pouts of Mary Pickford and Greta Garbo in our small bedroom mirror.

When I think of Nemecia as she was then, I think of her eating. My cousin was ravenous. She needed things, and she needed food. She took small bites, swallowed everything as neatly as a cat. She was never full and the food never showed on her figure.

She told jokes as she served herself helping after helping, so that we were distracted and did not notice how many tortillas or how many bowls of green-chili stew she had eaten. If my father or little brothers teased her at the table for her appetite, she burned red. My mother would shush my father and say she was a growing girl.

At night she stole food from the pantry, handfuls of prunes, beef jerky, pieces of ham. Her stealth was unnecessary; my mother would gladly have fed her until she was full. Still, in the mornings everything was in its place, the wax paper folded neatly around the cheese, the lids tight on the jars. She was adept at slicing and spooning, so her thefts weren’t noticeable. I would wake to her kneeling on my bed, a tortilla spread with honey against my lips. “Here,” she’d whisper, and even if I was still full from dinner and not awake, I would take a bite, because she needed me to participate in her crime.

Watching her eat made me hate food. The quick efficient bites, the movement of her jaw, the way the food slid down her throat—it made me sick to think of her body permitting such quantities. Her exquisite manners and the ladylike dip of her head as she accepted each mouthful somehow made it worse. But if I was a small eater, if I resented my dependency on food, it didn’t matter, because Nemecia would eat my portion, and nothing was ever wasted.

I was afraid of Nemecia because I knew her greatest secret: when she was five, she put her mother in a coma and killed our grandfather.

I knew this because she told me late one Sunday as we lay awake in our beds. The whole family had eaten together at our house, as we did every week, and I could hear the adults in the front room, still talking.

“I killed them,” Nemecia said into the darkness. She spoke as if reciting, and I didn’t at first know if she was talking to me. “My mother was dead. Almost a month she was dead, killed by me. Then she came back, like Christ, except it was a bigger miracle because she was dead longer, not just three days.” Her voice was matter-of-fact.