The Best American Short Stories® 2011 (31 page)

"America," she said that month. "All right. Your turn. Show me America." For the three years of their courtship and marriage they'd moved every few months. Berlin, Paris, Galway, near Odense, near Edinburgh, Rome, and now a converted stone barn in Normandy that on cold days smelled of cowpats and on hot days like the lost crayons of tourist children. Soon enough it would be summer and the barn would be colossally expensive and filled with English people. Now it was time for Maine, where Stony had accepted a two-year job, cataloguing a collection of 1960s underground publications: things printed on rice paper and Popsicle sticks and cocktail napkins. It fell to him to find the next place to live.

"We'll unpack my storage space," he said. "I have things."

"Yes, my love," she said. "I have things too."

"You have a duffel bag. You have clothing. You have a saltshaker shaped like a duck with a chipped beak."

She cackled a very European cackle, pride and delight in her ownership of the lusterware duck, whose name was Trudy. "The sole exhibit in the museum. When I am dead, people will know nothing about me." This was a professional opinion: she was a museum consultant. In Normandy she was helping set up an exhibition in a stone cottage that had been owned by a Jewish family deported during the war. In Paris, it had been the atelier of a minor artist who'd been the longtime lover of a major poetess; in Denmark, a workhouse museum. Her speciality was the air of recent evacuation: you knew something terrible had happened to the occupants, but you hoped it might still be undone. She set contemporary spectacles on desktops and snuggled appropriate shoes under beds and did not overdust. Too much cleanliness made a place dead. In Rome she arranged an exhibit of the commonplace belongings of Ezra Pound: chewed pencils, drinking glasses, celluloid dice, dog-eared books. Only the brochure suggested a connection to greatness. At the Hans Christian Andersen House in Odense, where they were mere tourists, she lingered in admiration over Andersen's upper plate and the length of rope that he traveled with in his suitcase in case of hotel fire. "You can tell more from dentures than from years of diaries," she'd said then. "Dentures do not lie." But she herself threw everything out. She did not want anyone to exhibit even the smallest bit of her.

Now Stony said, solemnly, "I never want to drink out of Ikea glasses again. Or sleep on Ikea sheets. Or—and this one is serious—cook with Ikea pans. Your husband owns really expensive pans. How about that?"

"I am impressed, and you are bourgeois."

"Year lease," he said.

"I am terrified," said Pamela, smiling with her beautiful angular un-American teeth, and then, "Perhaps we will afford to have a baby."

She was still, as he would think of it later, casually alive. In two months she would be, according to the doctors,
miraculously
alive, and, later still, alive in a nearly unmodifiable twilight state. Or too modifiable:
technically
alive. Now she walked around the barn in her bra, which was as usual a little too small, and her underpants, as usual a little too big, though she was small-breasted and big-bottomed. Her red-framed glasses sat on her face at a tilt. "My ears are not plumb," she always said. It was one of the reasons they belonged together: they were flea-market people, put together out of odd parts. She limped. Even her name was pronounced with a limp, the accent on the second syllable. For a full month after they met he'd thought her name was Camilla, and he never managed to say it aloud without lining it up in his head beforehand—paMILLa, paMILLa—the way he had to collect German words for sentences ahead of time and then properly distribute the verbs. In fact he did that with English sentences too, when speaking to Pamela, when she was alive.

He e-mailed the woman who'd listed the house—she was not the owner, she was working for the owners—and after a month of wrangling (she never sent the promised pictures; he was third in line, behind a gaggle of students and a clutch of summer people; if they rented for the summer they could make a lot more money), managed to talk her out of a yearlong lease, starting June 1.

The limp, it turned out, was the legacy of a stroke Pamela'd had in her early twenties that she'd never told him about. She had another one in the barn two weeks before they were supposed to move; she hit her head on the metal counter as she fell. Stony's French was good enough only to ask the doctors how bad things were, but not to understand the answer. Pamela spoke the foreign languages; he cooked dinner, she proclaimed it delicious. In the hospital her tongue was fat in her mouth and she was fed through a tube. Someone had put her glasses on her face so that she would look more herself. A nurse came in hourly to straighten them. They did this as though her glasses were the masterpiece and all of Pamela the gallery wall—palms flat and gentle, leery of gravity. He sat in a molded green chair and dozed. One night he woke to the final nurse, who was straightening the glasses and then the bed sheets. She turned to Stony. The last little bit of French he possessed drained out through the basin of his stomach.

"No?" he said.

This nurse was a small brown rabbit. Even her lips were brown. She wobbled on her feet as though deciding whether it would be better if the mad husband caught and ate her now or there should be a chase. Then she shrugged.

When someone dies it is intolerable to be shrugged at. He went back to the barn to pack. First his suitcase, an enormous green nylon item with fretful, overworked zippers. Then Pamela's, that beige strap-covered duffel bag that looked like a midcentury truss. He had to leave France as soon as possible. He stuffed the bag with the undersized bras and oversized pants, her favorite pair of creased black patent-leather loafers, an assortment of embroidered handkerchiefs. He needed a suitcase and a computer bag and then any number of plastic bags to move from place to place, he collected souvenirs like vaccinations, but all of Pamela's belongings fit in her bag. When he failed to find the duck, he remembered the words of the lovely Buddhist landlady in Edinburgh, when he'd apologized for breaking a bowl: "We have a saying—it was already broken." Even now he wasn't sure if
we
meant Buddhists or Scots. He would leave a note for the landlady concerning the duck, but of course the loss of the duck could not break his heart.

The weight of the bag was like the stones in a suicide's pocket. Stony e-mailed his future boss, the kindly archivist, asked if he could straighten things out with the real estate agent—he would come, he would definitely come, but in the fall.
My wife has died
, he wrote, in rotten intelligible English. He'd wept already, and for hours, but suddenly he understood that the real thing was coming for him soon, a period of time free of wry laughter or distraction. The bag he put in the closet for the French landlady to deal with. The ashes from the mortuary came in an urn, complete with a certificate that explained what he was to show to customs officials. These he took with him to England, where he went for the summer, to drink.

The Not Owner of the house was a small, slightly creased, ponytailed blond woman in a baseball cap and a gleaming black exercise suit that suggested somewhere a husband dressed in the exact same outfit. She waved at him from the front porch. For the past month she'd sent him cheerful e-mails about getting the lovely house ready for him, all of which came down to this: What did he need? What did he own?

Books, art, cooking equipment. And a collection of eccentric but unuseful tables. That was it. He'd chosen this house because it was not a sabbatical rental: even before—a word he now pronounced as a spondee, like
BC
—he'd longed to be reunited with his books, art, dishes, the doctor's table, the old diner table, the various card catalogs, the side table made from an old cheese crate. He didn't want to live inside someone else's life, and sabbatical houses were always like that. You felt like a teenager who'd been given too much responsibility. Your parents were there frowning at you in the very arrangement of the furniture.

The house wasn't Victorian, as he'd for some reason assumed, but an ordinary wood-framed house painted toothpaste blue. Amazing, how death made petty disappointments into operatic insults.

"Hello!" The woman whooshed across toward him. "I'm Carly. You're here. At last! It seems like ages since we started talking about you and this house!"

The porch was psoriatic and decorated with a series of lawn chairs.

"I'm glad you found summer people," said Stony.

Carly nodded. "Yes. The last guy moved out this morning."

"Ah," said Stony, though they'd discussed this via e-mail over the last week. It was his ingratiating way, as a lifelong renter, to suggest unnecessary, helpful things, and he had said he'd arrive on the fourth instead of the third so she'd have more time to arrange for cleaners.

"Fireplace," she said. "Cable's still hooked up. Maybe you'll be lucky and they won't notice." A round-jawed teenager sat on a leather settee with a hand-held video game, frowning at the screen like a Roman emperor impatient with the finickiness of his lions. "It's a nice room. These old houses have such character. This one—do you believe it?—it's a Sears, Roebuck kit. You picked it out of the catalog and it was delivered and assembled."

He could hear Pamela's voice: this is not an old house. The barn in Normandy was eighteenth century, the apartment in Rome even older. The walls were lined with homemade bookshelves, filled with paperback books: Ionesco, the full complement of Roths.

"Fireplace work?"

"There was a squirrel incident," said Carly vaguely. She swished into the dining room. "Dining room. The lease, I'm sure you'll remember, asks you to keep the corner cupboard locked."

The cupboard in question looked filled with eyecups and egg cups and mustache cups. In the corner, a broken Styrofoam cooler had been neatly aligned beneath a three-legged chair; a white melamine desk had papers stuck in its jaw. Kmart furniture, he thought. Well, he'd have the movers take it down to the basement.

"Kitchen's this way."

The kitchen reminded him of his 1970s childhood, and the awful taste of tongue depressors at the back of the throat. It looked as though someone had taken a potting shed and turned it inside out. A pattern of faux shingles crowned the honey-colored cupboards; the countertop Formica was patterned like a hospital gown. A round, fluorescent light fixture lit up a collection of dead bugs. High above everything, a terra-cotta sun smiled down from the shingles with no sense of irony, or shame, whatsoever.

The smell of Febreze came down the stairs, wound around the smell of old cigarettes and something chemical, and worse.

"Four bedrooms," said Carly.

She led him up the stairs into one of the front rooms, furnished with a double mattress on a brown wooden platform. It looked like the sort of thing you'd store a kidnapped teenage girl underneath. The café curtains on the windows were badly water-stained and lightly cigarette-burned.

"Listen!" said Carly. "It's a busy street, but you can't even hear it! Bedclothes in the closets. I need to get going," she said. "Tae kwon do. Settle in and let me know if there's anything else I can do for you, all right?"

He had not stood so close to a woman all summer, at least not while sober. He wanted to finger her ponytail and then yank on it like a schoolyard bully.

"Can I see the artist's studio?" he asked.

"Forgot!" she said. "Come along."

They walked through the scrubby backyard to a half-converted garage.

"Lock sticks," said Carly, jiggling a door with a rice-paper cataract over its window. "Looks dark in here till you turn on the lights."

The art studio was to have been Pamela's: she was a sometime jeweler and painter. Stony did not know whether it made things better or worse that this space was the most depressing room he'd ever seen. The old blinds seemed stitched together from moth wings. A picture of Picasso, clipped from a newspaper, danced on a bulletin board to a smell of mildew that was nearly audible. Along one wall a busted door rested on sawhorses, and across the top a series of shapes huddled together as though for warmth. Pots, vases, bowls, all clearly part of the same family, the bluish gray of expensive cats. He expected them to turn and blink at him.

"My father was a potter," said Carly.

It took him a moment. "Ah! Your parents own this place?"

"My mom," said Carly. "She's an ob-gyn. Retired. She's in New York now. You can't go anywhere in this town without meeting kids my mother delivered. She's like an institution. There's a wheel, if you're interested. Think it still works. Potter's."

"No, thank you."

She sighed and snapped off the light. They went back to the house. "All right, pumpkin," she said, and the teenager stood up and revealed herself to be a girl, not a boy, with a few sharp, painful-looking pimples high on her cheeks, a long nose, and a smile that suggested that not everything was right with her. She shambled over to her tiny mother and the two of them stood with their arms around each other.

Was she awkward, just? Autistic? Carly reached up and curled a piece of hair behind her daughter's ear. It was possible, thought Stony, that all American teenagers might appear damaged to him these days, the way that all signs in front of fast-food restaurants—
MAPLE CHEDDAR COMING SOON! MCRIB IS BACK
—struck him as mysterious and threatening.

"You okay?" Carly asked.

The girl nodded and cuddled closer. The air in the Sears, Roebuck house—yes, he remembered now, that was something he would normally be intrigued by, a house built from a kit—felt tender and sad. My wife has died, he thought. He wondered whether Carly might say something. Wasn't now the time?
By the way, I'm
sorry. I'm so sorry, what happened to you.
He had that thought sometimes these days. It wasn't grief, which he could be subsumed in at any moment, which like water bent all straight lines and spun whatever navigational tools he owned into nonsense—but a rational, detached thought: wasn't that awful, what happened to me, one, two, three months ago? That was a terrible thing for a person to go through.