The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (7 page)

I lead him to the back of the house, down the hallway which still feels more familiar to me than any I know. My bedroom, with its teal carpet and pale pink walls, looks small. Barren. At first, it is so quiet my teeth ache. My ears strain.

I'm sad that you lived here, Ike says, still crying.

It wasn't that bad, honey, I say. This was a beautiful house.

The crown molding my father installed is still up, though one piece is loose and sags. I remember him getting up early so that he could work on it before heading to the factory. It was my mother's birthday present—crown molding for my room.

My father died on the steps of the tool manufacturing plant, not ten minutes down the road. A heart attack. The doctors said it was a birth defect, that he was born with a weak heart. And now the building is empty, abandoned, as if all his work was for nothing. Mom's grief was as long as a river, endless.

I walk back to the kitchen and climb onto the green plastic countertop. Ike watches me, curious and confused. I remove the valances Mom made in the early eighties, dried bugs falling from the folds of the fabric into the sink below. These are the things with which she made a home. Her contributions to our sense of place were humble and put forth with great intent, crafts which took weeks of stitching and unstitching, measuring, cutting, gathering. I realize how much in the home was done by hand and sweat. My father had laid the carpeting and linoleum. Mom had painted and reupholstered the same dinner chairs twice, sewed all the window treatments. My parents were quick-fix-averse, always in for the long haul. When the country road in front of their house had been widened to a highway, they complained but never entertained the idea of moving.

I scan the kitchen and picture Mom paying bills, her perfect script, the way she always listed her occupation with pride: homemaker.

I pull scraps of peeling wallpaper from unglued seams and corners. It comes off slow and steady like skin after a sunburn; the old adhesive gives easily.

Mementos, I tell Ike. I close my eyes. Now I can hear my mother everywhere—in the kitchen, in my bedroom, on the front porch.

Turn off the television.

Warm up the stove.

Brush your hair.

Put your father's shoes where I can't see them. In the trash.

On Sunday, as promised, my realtor arrives a half-hour before the potential buyers and their home inspector.

Your house should look as perfect as possible, he'd said before I left for the weekend. Ask yourself, What would Jackie Onassis do?

Ike and I had come home to a spare house; some of our chairs, photographs, and Ike's art had been relocated, as the realtor had suggested, to "let the space breathe."

When I see the realtor's convertible in the driveway, I ask Ike, Think you can box up the mini NASCARs and finger puppets?

Sorry I'm late, our realtor says. He rushes to the kitchen, as if he has immediately sensed disorder. He strokes the valance over the kitchen window. I remembered last night, as I was hanging it, that Mom had found the pattern in
Southern Living.

Is this velvet? he says. Are these ... cobwebs?

I have placed scraps of rogue wallpaper next to my stove and another in the bathroom—a repeating pattern of pale brown cornucopias and faded fruit I took from my mother's house.

These must come down, the realtor says. Now.

He pinches the curling shreds with his thumb and forefinger.

Leave it, I say. They add charm.

You'll never sell this house, he says, shaking his head in despair. Crickets on speed and a valance that Elvis made in home economics class. Get serious.

Apple pie? I ask, pulling out a day-old pastry I had purchased from the market's discount bread bin that morning.

I've steeled myself against critique. There are too many things I can't fix.

A couple in a minivan pulls up in front of the house, followed by the home inspector in a pickup truck. They come to the door, their faces already twisted with scrutiny. She is small and blond and he is thick like an old football player.

Hi, I say. Welcome. We're about to head out; the house is all yours.

I stuff some magazines and soda into a canvas bag and look around for Ike. I hear him running up the basement steps. He presents a scrap of siding that is covered in glue and cricket exoskeletons. The couple exchange a glance. The inspector scribbles a note.

I crouch down to the floor and touch Ike's cheeks. You're brave, I say. Thank you.

Ike grins. Together, we can make a solid grilled cheese, prune shrubs, clean house. Together, maybe we're the housewife this house needs. Maybe our best life is here. On a good day, we're just one man short of a catalog-worthy family.

A week before she left for the nursing home, we packed my mother's belongings—robes, slippers, and lotions that could do little good for her sagging face. Her diminished vision made it hard for her to read the labels on the boxes.

Ike had just started kindergarten. Leaving him at a friend's house to spend time with Mom on a Saturday was a miserable tradeoff. I wanted to soak up every last bit of innocence he had left, answer every question, scoop him up for hugs when he'd allow it. But I was the only person Mom would allow in the house; there was no one else around to help.

I held up various tchotchkes for Mom's approval.

Take or toss? I asked.

Mom sat in her recliner. She wore a light blue dress she'd made herself. The fabric was so worn it was nearly transparent. Carnie rested comfortably on her shoulder. I worried that his talons would break her thinning skin, but she moved as if she hardly noticed his weight.

I held up a box of ornaments, plastic apples I'd hand-painted for her as a child.

Toss 'em, she'd said.

I began to wrap her glassware in newspaper.

Make sure to leave plenty of print for lining Carnie's cage, she said.

My mother cupped Carnie with both hands and brought him to her lap. She crossed her legs, then scratched the finger-wide point between Carnie's wings. His eyes, like little black seeds, fell to half-mast as she stroked him. They were accustomed to each other, a pair of sad habits. He was more familiar with her voice and touch than I, more dear to her everyday existence. His transgressions—dirty cage, the occasional nip of her finger—were met with gentle understanding.

Don't call here again, he said. Don't call.

Remember, I told my mother. I'm not
obligated
to look after that bird.

Well, she said, I'm not obligated to look after you.

You are, I'd thought at the time, her words a splinter in my chest. You have to be.

In that moment, I withered. I hated her for her coldness, her stubborn rationale, her ability to come up big in a fight even when she was dog-tired and bird-boned and couldn't see the food on the end of her fork.

There she sat, outmoded in her homemade dress, bird in her lap, shit on her shoulder. Steamrolled by the world, but in the face of defeat, she threatened us all.

Carnie moved back to her shoulder and buried his head into her thin hair. It occurred to me that with her voice inside of him, he would always have more of her to remember.

You don't want to keep these? I asked, giving her a second chance on a box of photographs.

My heart, she'd said. I can turn it off.

For years, I'd believed her.

But I know the truth now. What maniacs we are—sick with love, all of us.

FROM
Agni

"S
O
,"
HE SAID
, after having vacuumed up a plate of penne all'arrabiata, drunk in three swallows a glass of Nero D'Avola, and single-handedly consumed half a basket of breadsticks, "do you want to hit another church or see the Borghese Gallery?"

She had plunged her fork exactly ten times into her strawberry risotto and taken two birdfeeder sips from the glass of Gewürztraminer that her waiter (a genius, clearly) had recommended pairing with it. She glanced up and smiled at him (more or less) genuinely. The man put away everything from foie gras to a Wendy's single with the joyless efficiency of a twelve-year-old. He never appeared to taste anything. The plate now before him looked licked clean. When he return-serve smiled, she tried not to notice his red-pepper-and-wine-stained teeth or the breadcrumbs distributed throughout his short beard. They were sitting on the AstroTurfed outdoor patio of an otherwise pleasing restaurant found right behind the American Embassy in Rome. They had been married for three and a half days.

Again she pushed her fork into the risotto and watched steam rise from its disturbed center. "Think I may be a little churched out."

He snapped up another breadstick, leaned back, and rubbed his mouth. This succeeded, perhaps accidentally, in clearing the perimeter of breadcrumbs around his mouth. He had small eyes whose irises were as hard as green marbles, a crooked wide nose, and an uncommonly large chin. His thick and tinder-dry brown hair sat upon his head with shaggy indifference due to how quickly they had cleared out of their hotel room this morning after his rushed shower. She did not mind that he had overslept. The only reason she had not overslept was that she had never fallen asleep to begin with. His plum-colored linen shirt was unbuttoned to his sternum, showcasing a pearl-white chest covered in pubically corkscrewed hair. She felt a sudden urge to lean forward and button him up but did not want the doing of such small tasks ever to fall to her.

He bit the end off his breadstick. "It's not a church, strictly speaking. It's more like a crypt." Now that he was gesturing, the breadstick resembled a wand. "Mark Twain wrote something really funny about it when he visited Rome. Apparently it's decorated with the bones of all the monks who've lived there. Like four centuries' worth. The chandeliers are bones, the gates, everything. All bones. It's supposed to be really creepy."

"A crypt made of monk bones. Why didn't you say so? Let's do that."

His smile softened in a pleased way that made her realize how falsely polite his earlier, larger smile had been. "Funny girl," he said. The thing he liked most about her, he enjoyed telling people when she was in earshot, was her sense of humor. He was the only man who had ever said she was funny, and she wondered, suddenly, if that was one of the reasons why she married him. She was, in fact, very funny.

It had been a good morning, uncontaminated by the reactor-leak conversation of the previous night. They had hardly talked about things today, but she knew both of them were aware they would have to. It was the lone solid thing in their day's otherwise formless future. It was the train they would have to catch.

"Okay," he said, setting down his breadstick with an air of tragic relinquishment, "I'd really like to see the creepy bone crypt."

She put her hands on her only slightly rounded belly and gave it a crystal-ball rubbing. "Let the record show that the pregnant lady would like to see the Borghese Gallery."

The single drum of his fingers on the tabletop made a sound like a gallop. "One way to settle it."

She slammed her fork to the table with mock finality. "I'm not playing. Seriously. I won't do it."

He was nodding. "One way to settle it."

The man loved games of all kinds. Obscure board games, video games manufactured prior to 1990, any and all word games, but he also enjoyed purely biophysical games such as rock, paper, scissors—the "essential fairness" of which he claimed to particularly admire. He was, however, miserably bad at rock, paper, scissors, the reason being that he almost always took paper. She had once been told, as a girl, by some forgotten Hebrew school playmate, that while playing rock, paper, scissors you were allowed, once in your life, the option of a fourth component. This was fire, which was signified by turning up your hand on the third beat and wiggling your fingers. Fire destroyed everything. That this thermonuclear gambit could be used only once was a rule so mystically stern that its validity seemed impossible to question. She had told him of the fire rule when he first challenged her to rock, paper, scissors on their earliest date, which was not that long ago. At issue had been what movie to go see.

Now she said to him, "You do realize you always lose? You're aware of this."

He readied his playing stance: back against the chair, eyes full of blank concentration, right fist set upon the small shelf of his left hand.

She picked up her fork again and began to eat. Probably she would indulge him. "I'm not playing because it's boring. And it's boring because you always pick paper."

"I like its quiet efficiency. I could ask you why you always take scissors."

"Because you always take paper!"

"I am aware that you believe that, which means I'm actually taking paper to psych you out. Statistically I can't keep it up."

"But you
do.
The last time we played you took paper
four
throws in a
row.
"

"I know. And I can't possibly keep it up. Or can I? Now, best out of three. No. Five. Three. Best out of fthree." He was smiling again, his teeth no longer quite so stained by the wine and pepper oil. She loved him, she had to admit, a lot right now.

He threw paper for the first two throws. She threw rock for her first just to make the game interesting. After his second paper she fished an ice cube out of her hitherto untouched water glass and threw it at him. On the third throw she was astonished to see her husband wiggling his fingers.

"Fire," he said, extending his still-wiggling fingers so that they burned harmlessly beneath her nose. What he said next was sung in hair-metal falsetto: "Motherfucking fire!"

She pushed his hand away. "You didn't even know about fire until I told you about it!"

"Look on the bright side," he said. "I can never use it again, and you've still got yours."

"Please, honey,
please
button your shirt."

They descended in silence the zigzag stairs of the apricot building she now knew was called the Capuchin Crypt, passing a dozen American student-tourists sitting on, around, and along its stone balustrade. The boys, clearly suffering the misapplications of energy that distinguished all educational field trips, spoke in hey-I'm-shouting voices to the bare-shouldered and sort of lusciously sweaty girls sitting two feet away from them. She was upsettingly conscious of the adult conservatism of her thinly striped collared shirt and black skirt—she was not yet showing so much that her wardrobe required any real overhaul—and her collar, moreover, had wilted in the heat. She felt like a sunbaked flower someone had overwatered in recompense, and wondered how much older she was than these girls, who seemed less young to her than another species altogether. And yet she was only twenty-six, her husband thirty-four. Two once-unimaginable objects, the first incubating in her stomach and the second closed around her ring finger, made her, she realized, unable to remember what being nineteen or twenty had felt like. Looking into the anime innocence of these American girls' faces was to discover the power of new anxieties and the stubbornness of old ones.