The Best American Short Stories 2013 (45 page)

The students rarely embark on a difficult or painful subject without some sort of rhetorical exit strategy. There is almost no sorrow they can’t disown with an immediate laugh. In that case—in the case of a quick student laugh—the professor is not supposed to know that she has been permitted to glimpse serious emotion. After many years as a professor it still strikes her as unnatural that students, that
people
fear what she might think: who the fuck is she? But they watch her eyes for what she’s thinking. Will she say something actually useful to them, or something they in their desperation (because sometimes it is desperation) can
twist
into usefulness, which will be more useful for seeming to have come from her, the professor? What can she tell them about what comes next?

In the corner of the couch with a light titanium-sheathed machine balanced partly on the arm of the couch and partly on one raised knee, the professor clicks through the forests and clearings of a few contested acres. Mild and unevocative except for being somewhat forlorn, these acres, sad in the way of woods that don’t thrive, lacking the cannons, the plaques, the bronze generals on horseback that tell you blood was shed here. The Wilderness, this battlefield is called, capital T, capital W. Walmart wants this particular scrap of The Wilderness for a supercenter whose aisles will be lined with toys for the children of tourists drawn to other already-protected acres of battlefield. There is no telling from these unphotogenic scantily wooded fawn-colored hills that her great-great-grandfather almost died here. If he had died he would have been one among thirty thousand, and she, of course, would never have existed. He lived: the War Department records his new status as prisoner of war, sent by train to Camp Delaware, also known as Pea Patch Island. The professor both likes and hates the irony, the sunny
potager
promised by the name Pea Patch Island and the reality of filth and exposure and fever and starvation, tainted water and maggoty flour, befalling him at nineteen. Was he
as alive
to himself as she is to herself, did he feel
as real
—if he stretched out his hand and flexed its fingers and turned it to study the lines intersecting and diverging in the palm, did he marvel? The deepest despair, the blackest pitch of disillusion about humankind: those are what she imagines, imagining his emotions, but these conjectures could be wrong. He is remote in time and culture. He could have done improbably well, inwardly—could have come through with all his F-A-C-U-L-T-I-E-S intact. Consolations that seem to her the most childish lies and self-deceptions might have been his salvation. Not books, but Book. He might, if time were transcended and he could know her and what she thinks and what she teaches her students and her preference for ambiguity over conviction and her godlessness, turn his savage Civil War eyes on her, his billy-goat beard, his cavalryman’s uprightness, his gaunt authority renouncing her, his distant child. A cousin sent the professor the only known photograph of him, a slouch-hatted elderly figure astride a sorrel horse, and even in this photo, no bigger than a matchbook, and even in extreme old age, he is clearly someone to reckon with. So, she thinks, love me.
Want
me to come into existence. From the year 2012 she gazes into the pixels that comprise his gaze. Back to the homepage of the historical trust fighting Walmart, and with several clicks of the mouse, she buys an acre of these woods where he lay wounded, and her inbox
dings
with instant thanks from a computer in the trust’s distant offices. It’s
his
thanks she wants to come dinging in. She is amused at herself, though there are tears in her eyes. Through mouseclicks she had hoped to connect to that long-ago, unknowable, very likely hostile old man. Who she’s somehow as lonely for as if she had once been a child cradled in his arms, as if, leaning his head down so his mouth was close to her ear, he had said her name, and then said
listen
, and then told her the story that was the story within all the other stories of her life, the oldest and most beautiful and farthest back, the one that would elude death forever and ever and ever amen.

Me
. Say you lived at least partly for
me
.

This is the story that must exist somewhere; this is what she can’t find to read.

JOAN WICKERSHAM

FROM
Glimmer Train

T
HE NEWS FROM SPAIN
is terrible. A bomb under a park bench in a small town near Madrid. Fifteen people have been killed and dozens injured. Harriet tells the aide, who crosses herself; the nurse, who says, “It makes you want to stay home and never leave the house—but that would just be giving in to terrorism”; and her daughter Rebecca, who says, “Why do you spend all day watching that stuff?”

Rebecca is tired. Harriet has been sick on and off for years, more than a decade. Rebecca has just driven four hours from Boston to get to the Connecticut nursing home where Harriet now lives. She is taking two days off from the small bookstore she owns, paying her part-time assistant extra to cover for her. She’s brought a shopping bag full of things Harriet likes: rice pudding with raisins, shortbread, fresh figs, and a box of lamejuns from a Middle Eastern bakery. She has walked into the room, and Harriet has barely looked away from the TV to say hello.

What Harriet says is “They just interviewed a man whose granddaughter died in his arms.”

Rebecca puts down the shopping bag and kisses the top of her mother’s head. Someone has given Harriet a haircut, a surprisingly flattering one. Her head smells faintly of shampoo.

Harriet puts up a hand and feels for Rebecca’s face, briefly cupping her chin. “They think it was a Basque separatist group.”

Rebecca nods, and goes down the hall to the kitchen, to put the rice pudding and lamejuns in the fridge. The hallway is full of wheelchairs, a straggly becalmed flotilla of gray people just sitting there, some with their head lolling on their chest. On the way back to her mother’s room, she runs into the social worker assigned to Harriet’s case. Today is Halloween; the social worker is wearing a pirate hat and an eye patch. “How do you think your mom is doing?” she asks Rebecca.

“I think she’s still angry about being here,” Rebecca says. Harriet moved into the nursing home a month ago, after the rehab hospital said she had “plateaued” and the assisted-living place said they couldn’t take her back.

“I know,” the social worker says. “But they adjust.”

When she goes back into her mother’s room, Harriet is watching for her. The TV is off. “I’m so glad you came,” Harriet says.

“I just ran into the social worker in the hall. She says you’re adjusting.”

“Bullshit,” Harriet says. “Did you bring stuffed grape leaves?”

“I didn’t remember that you liked them.”

“I love them.”

“Next time,” Rebecca says. She pulls over a chair and sits facing her mother. Harriet is in a wheelchair, paralyzed again—it has happened before, she has some rare chronic spinal disease, but this time the neurologist says it is permanent. Rebecca had listened while he talked to Harriet about suffering and acceptance, about how what was happening to her was truly terrible, worse than what anyone should have to go through. Rebecca liked the doctor’s humanity and thought it might be somewhat comforting to Harriet; certainly Harriet has always found it gratifying to be admired for her bravery. But Harriet was furious. “He’s talking philosophy when what I really want to hear about is stem-cell research.”

Rebecca feels guilty about not making it down to see her mother more often. Harriet is always mentioning something she needs—lavender talcum powder, or socks, or an afghan to put over her legs when they wheel her outside, or, she sighs, “Just a really good turkey club sandwich.” Rebecca mails what she can, alternately touched by and annoyed by the many requests. (Are they wistful or reproachful? Both, she thinks.) (But they are also simply practical. These are the small things we live with, and Harriet now has no way to get hold of them.) She has talked to Harriet about moving to a nursing home in the Boston area. “It would be more convenient.”

“For you, you mean,” Harriet said. She is adamant about staying in this particular nursing home because the man she’s in love with is in the assisted-living place next door, and comes over to visit her nearly every day. Rebecca thinks it’s great that her mother has someone, though she could do without some of Harriet’s more candid reports. (“Ralph called me this morning and said, ‘I wish I could make love to you right now.’”)

“How is Ralph?” Rebecca asks now.

Harriet shrugs. “He thinks I’m mad at him because he didn’t give me a birthday present.”

“Are you?”

“Yes.” They laugh. They talk. Rebecca heats up some lamejuns in the kitchen microwave and makes Harriet a cup of tea. They hear the woman in the room next door say loudly, angrily, “Who washed my floor?” A low murmuring answer; then the angry woman again: “In the future I must ask that you not wash my floor without first giving me notice.”

Rebecca looks at Harriet. Harriet says, “That’s all she ever says, on and on, day and night, about the floor.”

Some lamejun has fallen onto the front of Harriet’s sweatshirt; when she finally notices and brushes it off, it leaves a spot. “Damn it.” She wipes furiously away at it, but in the midst of the fury is also grinning ruefully at Rebecca—
Can you believe it? How does it happen every single time?
She’s a very large woman, and she’s been dropping food on her shirt for as long as Rebecca can remember. The last time Rebecca visited, on the day Harriet moved to the nursing home, the aide swathed Harriet’s front in an enormous terrycloth bib before bringing in her dinner tray. Harriet allowed it, looking at Rebecca with a kind of stunned sadness; of all the enraging indignities of that day, this was the one that undid her. “She doesn’t need that,” Rebecca told the aide.

“We do it for everybody.”

“Right, but my mother doesn’t need it.”

So that was one small battle that Rebecca was there to win for Harriet. Without Rebecca, Harriet could have won it just fine for herself. Both of them knew this—and yet, between them, love has always had to be proved. It is there; and it gets proved, over and over. Some of their worst fights, confusingly, seem to both prove and disprove it: two people who didn’t love each other couldn’t fight like that—certainly not repeatedly. Still, Rebecca has often wished for something quieter with Harriet. Are there mothers and daughters who can be happy together without saying much?

“You know,” Harriet says now, frowning, clearly resuming an argument she’s been conducting in her own head, “you jump on me about watching the news all the time, but it’s not because I’m just some morbid tragedy hound, it’s—”

“I know why it is,” Rebecca says.

Rebecca’s younger sister, Cath, disapproves of the relationship between Rebecca and Harriet. She thinks it’s unhealthily close. She says she is tired of giving Harriet inches and having her take miles. (Rebecca, who has never seen Cath give Harriet an inch, finds this declaration both funny and infuriating.) Cath is a sculptor who lives in Denver. She thinks Harriet is a monster. She thinks—and here Rebecca agrees with her—that their father, a quiet, scholarly, self-deprecating man who drank, had ended up drinking more and walling himself up more and dying lonely because Harriet took up so much room. Harriet always had another man, single, recently divorced, or widowed. “She had affairs,” Cath said. “She broke Daddy’s heart.”

“You think those were affairs?” Rebecca asked, remembering all those wistful, mostly handsome, young men who had always seemed to her to be intruding—What were they doing at the Thanksgiving table? Why were they hanging around on Christmas Eve?—eagerly passing the cranberry sauce and trying brightly and unsuccessfully to engage her father in conversation.

“Not
consummated
affairs,” Cath said, with exasperated authority. “Mom was never brave enough, or radical enough, to actually sleep with anyone else. Those affairs were all about noble renunciation of actual sex. They were all about deprivation and suffering.”

She has said, more recently, to Rebecca over the phone: “She’s going to live to be a hundred, you know. People like that, who only care about themselves, live forever, because every ounce of energy they have goes into preserving the organism.”

Rebecca and her mother had begun to get close only when, nearly fifteen years ago, Harriet seemed to be dying.

She was diagnosed with stage four colon cancer just when the revelations broke about the rotten marriage of the Prince and Princess of Wales. Rebecca was going through her own fierce divorce at the time (it had started amicably, with a mediator, and then escalated to the point where the lawyers’ bills had become so horrifying, so disproportionate to whatever it was that she and Steve had been fighting over, that the two of them had met for a drink one night and agreed to do everything the mediator had suggested in the first place).

But when Harriet got sick, Rebecca picked up the phone and called her soon-to-be-ex-father-in-law, who was on the board of a famous cancer hospital. She believed that Steve’s father, who had never liked her much and never done much to conceal it, was nonetheless fundamentally ethical and would do what he could to help. (Another belief, both bitter and accurate, was that he liked to remind himself of his own power by pulling strings and making things happen.) He got Harriet admitted to the hospital, and the surgeon who was supposed to be brilliant lived up to his billing.

The doctor came and spoke to Rebecca after Harriet’s surgery, which took an entire day. “I got it all,” he said, and went on to list all the places where he’d found it: pretty much everywhere, as far as Rebecca could tell.

“So what’s her prognosis?” Rebecca made herself ask, though she felt she already knew.

The surgeon looked seriously at her. “I have no idea,” he said.

Rebecca wanted to hug him for that, and would have hugged Steve’s father, if he had been there. She did hug Steve, who had showed up unexpectedly at the hospital and sat in the waiting room with her all day. They had spent most of the time hunched over a book of Sunday
New York Times
crossword puzzles; they screwed up each one irreparably, in ink, and then they would make a big blue
X
on it before moving on to the next one.