The Best American Short Stories 2015 (3 page)

Which begs the question, eternally batted about by critics, theorists, and editors of anthologies like this one: what, exactly, constitutes a short story? Is it solely length (the 20,000-word maximum that the how-to manuals prescribe)? Is it intention? Is it a building beyond the single scene of the anecdote or vignette but stopping short of the shuffled complexity of the novel? Lorrie Moore, in her introduction to the 2004 edition of this series, quipped, “A short story is a love affair; a novel is a marriage.” And: “A short story is a photograph; a novel is a film.” Yes, true enough, and best to get at any sense of definition metaphorically rather than try to pin down the form with word and page limits. For my part, I like to keep it simple, as in Norman Friedman's reductive assertion that a short story “is a short fictional narrative in prose.” Of course, that brings us back to the question of what, exactly, constitutes “short.” Poe's criterion, which gives us a little more meat on the bones, is that a story, in contrast to a novel, should be of a length to be read in one sitting, an hour's entertainment, without the interruption that the novel almost invariably must give way to: “In the brief tale . . . the author is enabled to carry out the fullness of his intention . . . During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control.”

There's an undeniable logic to that—and a mighty power too. What writer wouldn't want the reader's soul held captive for any space of time? But Poe, for all his perspicacity, couldn't have foreseen how shrunken and desiccated that hour has become in the age of the 24/7 news cycle and the smartphone. We can only hope to reconstitute it. Ultimately, though, beyond definitions or limits, I put my trust in the writer and the writer's intention. If the writer tells me that this is a short story and if it's longer than a sentence and shorter than, say,
The Brothers Karamazov
, then I'm on for the ride. I have never had the experience of expanding a short story to the dimensions of a novel or shrinking a novel to the confines of a short story. I sit down, quite consciously, to write a story or to write a novel and allow the material to shape itself. “The more you write,” as Flannery O'Connor pointed out, “the more you will realize that the form is organic, that it is something that grows out of the material, that the form of each story is unique.”

Certainly the most formally unique piece included here is Denis Johnson's “The Largesse of the Sea Maiden,” a story about stories, about how we're composed of them and how they comprise our personal mythologies. Johnson builds a portrait of his distressed narrator through the stories he tells and absorbs. At one point, the narrator picks up the phone to hear one of his ex-wives, through a very poor connection, telling him that she's dying and wants to rid herself of any lingering bitterness she still has for him. He summons up his sins, murmurs apologies, but at some point realizes that he may in fact be talking not to his first wife, Ginny, but to his second, Jenny, and yet, in a high comic moment of collateral acceptance, realizes that the stories are one and the same and that the sins are too. In a similar way, Sarah Kokernot's “M & L” switches point of view midway through the story to provide two versions of events, both in the present and the past, which makes the final shimmering image all the more powerful and powerfully sensual. And Justin Bigos's “Fingerprints” employs a fractured assemblage of scenes to deepen the emotional charge of the unease the protagonist feels over the stealthy presence of his estranged father, who haunts the crucial moments of his life.

There are others I'd like to flag for you too, but since this is merely the preliminary to the main event, I'll be brief. Kevin Canty's “Happy Endings” gives us McHenry, a man widowed, retired, freed from convention, who is only now coming to terms with that freedom in a way that makes luminous what goes on in the back room of a massage parlor, while Laura Lee Smith's “Unsafe at Any Speed” plays the same theme to a different melody, pushing her middle-aged protagonist out onto the wild edge of things just to see if he'll give in or not. Smith plays for humor and poignancy both, as does Louise Erdrich in “The Big Cat.” Edrich's story came to me as a breath of fresh air, the rare comic piece that seems content to keep it light while at the same time opening a window on the experience of love and containment. In contrast, Thomas McGuane's “Motherlode” presents us with a grimmer sort of comedy and a cast of country folk as resolutely odd as any of Flannery O'Connor's.

There's a whole multiplicity of effects on display here, which is as it should be, each of the best stories being best in its own way. Shobha Rao's “Kavitha and Mustafa” is a riveting, pulse-pounding narrative that allies two strangers, an unhappily married young woman and a resourceful boy, during a brutal train robbery in Pakistan, while Aria Beth Sloss's “North” unfolds as a lyrical meditation on a life in nature and what it means to explore the known and unknown both. In “About My Aunt,” Joan Silber contrasts two women of different generations who insist on living their own lives in their own unconventional ways and yet, for all their kinship, both temperamental and familial, cannot finally approve of each other. Ben Fowlkes's “You'll Apologize If You Have To” was one of my immediate first-round choices, an utterly convincing tough-guy story that wouldn't have been out of place in Hemingway's canon and ends not in violence but in a moment of grace. So too was Jess Walter's “Mr. Voice,” a story about what it means to be family, with one extraordinary character at the center of it and a last line that punched me right in the place where my emotions go to hide. Which brings me to the most moving story here, Maile Meloy's “Madame Lazarus.” I read this one outdoors, with a view at my command, but the view vanished so entirely I might as well have been enclosed in a box, and when it came back, I found myself in the mortifying position of sitting there exposed and sobbing in public. An old man, the death of a dog, Paris. What Meloy has accomplished here is no easy thing, evoking true emotion,
tristesse
, soul-break, over the ties that bind us to the things of this world and the way they're ineluctably broken, cruelly and forever, and no going back.

We've come a long way from the forced effects of Benjamin Rosenblatt's “Zelig” and Mary Boyle O'Reilly's hammer and anvil pounding out the lesson of “In Berlin.” I can only imagine that this series' founding editor, Edward J. O'Brien, would be both amazed and deeply gratified.

T. C. B
OYLE

MEGAN MAYHEW BERGMAN

FROM
The Kenyon Review

G
EORGIE WOKE
up in bed alone. She slipped into a swimsuit and wandered out to a soft stretch of white sand Joe called Femme Beach. The Caribbean sky was cloudless, the air already hot. Georgie waded into the ocean, and as soon as the clear water reached her knees she dove into a small wave, with expert form.

She scanned the balcony of the pink stucco mansion for the familiar silhouette, the muscular woman in a monogrammed polo shirt, chewing a cigar. Joe liked to drink her morning coffee and watch Georgie swim.

But not today.

Curious, Georgie toweled off, tossed a sundress over her suit, and walked the dirt path toward the general store, sand coating her ankles, shells crackling underneath her bare feet. The path was covered in lush, leafy overhang and stopped in front of a cinder-block building with a thatched roof.

Georgie looked at the sun overhead. She lost track of time on the island. Time didn't matter on Whale Cay. You did what Joe wanted to do, when Joe wanted to do it. That was all.

She heard laughter and found the villagers preparing a conch stew. They were dancing, drinking dark rum and home-brewed beer from chipped porcelain jugs and tin cans. Some turned to nod at her, stepping over skinny chickens and children to refill their cans. The women threw chopped onions, potatoes, and hunks of raw fish into steaming cauldrons, the insides of which were yellowed with spices. Joe's lead servant, Hannah, was frying johnnycakes on a pan over a fire, popping pigeon peas into her mouth. Everything smelled of fried fish, blistered peppers, and garlic.

“You're making a big show,” Georgie said.

“We always make a big show when Marlene comes,” Hannah said in her low, hoarse voice. Her white hair was wrapped. She spoke matter-of-factly, slapping the johnnycakes between the palms of her hands.

“Who's Marlene?” Georgie asked, leaning over to stick a finger in the stew. Hannah waved her off.

Hannah nodded toward a section of the island invisible through the dense brush, toward the usually empty stone house covered in hot pink blossoms. Joe had never explained the house. Now Georgie knew why.

She felt an unmistakable pang of jealousy, cut short by the roar of Joe pulling up behind them on her motorcycle. As Joe worked the brakes, the bike fishtailed in the sand, and the women were enveloped in a cloud of white dust. As the dust settled, Georgie turned to find Joe grinning, a cigar gripped between her teeth. She wore a salmon-pink short-sleeved silk blouse and denim cutoffs. Her copper-colored hair was cropped short, her forearms covered in crude indigo-colored tattoos. “When the fastest woman on water has a six-hundred-horsepower engine to test out, she does,” she'd explained to Georgie. “And then she gets roaring drunk with her mechanic in Havana and comes home with stars and dragons on her arms.”

“I've never had that kind of night,” Georgie said.

“You will,” Joe said, laughing. “I'm a terrible influence.”

Joe planted her black-and-white saddle shoes firmly on the dirt path to steady herself as she cut the engine and dismounted.

“Didn't mean to get sand in your stew,” Joe said, smiling at Hannah.

“Guess it's your stew anyway,” Hannah said flatly.

Joe slung an arm around Georgie's shoulders and kissed her hard on the cheek. “Think they'll get too drunk?” she asked, nodding toward the islanders. “Is a fifty-five-gallon drum of wine too much? Should I stop them from drinking?”

“You only make rules when you're bored,” Georgie said, her lithe body becoming tense under Joe's arm. “Or trying to show off.”

“Don't be smart, love,” Joe said, popping her bathing-suit strap. The elastic snapped across Georgie's shoulder.

“Hannah,” Joe shouted, walking backward, tugging Georgie toward the bike with one hand. “Make some of those conch fritters too. And get the music going about four, or when you see the boat dock at the pier, OK? Like we talked about. Loud. Festive.”

Georgie could smell fresh fish in the hot air, butter burning in Hannah's pan. She wrapped her arms around Joe's waist and rested her chin on her shoulder, resigned. It was like this with Joe. Her authority on the island was absolute. She would always do what she wanted to do; that was the idea behind owning Whale Cay. You could go along for the ride or go home.

Hannah nodded at Joe, her wrinkled skin closing in around her eyes as she smiled what Georgie thought was a false smile. She waved them off with floured fingers.

“Four p.m.,” Joe said, twisting the bike's throttle. “Don't forget.”

At quarter to five, from the balcony of her suite, Joe and Georgie watched the
Mise-en-scène
, an eighty-eight-foot yacht with white paneling and wood siding, dock. Georgie felt a sense of dread as the boat glided to a stop against the wooden pier and lines were tossed to waiting villagers. The wind rustled the palms and the visitors on the boat deck clutched their hats with one hand and waved with the other.

Every few weeks there was another boatload of beautiful, rich people—actresses and politicians—piling onto Joe's yacht in Fort Lauderdale, eager to escape wartime America for Whale Cay, and willing to cross 150 miles of U-boat-infested waters to do it. “Eight hundred and fifty acres, the shape of a whale's tail,” Joe had said as she brought Georgie to the island. “And it's all mine.”

Georgie scanned the deck for Marlene and did not see her. She felt defensive and childish, but also starstruck. She'd seen at least ten of Marlene's movies and had always liked the actress. She seemed gritty and in control. That was fine onscreen. But in person—who in their right mind wanted to compete with a movie star? Not Georgie. It wasn't that she wasn't competitive; she was. Back in Florida she'd swum against the boys in pools and open water. But a good competitor always knows when she's outmatched, and that's how Georgie felt, watching the beautiful people in their beautiful clothes squinting in the sun onboard the
Mise-en-scène
.

Joe stayed on the balcony, waving madly. Georgie flopped across the bed. Her tanned body was stark against the white sheets.

“Let's send a round of cocktails to the boat,” Joe said, coming into the room, a large, tiled bedroom with enormous windows, a hand-carved king bed sheathed in a mosquito net. Long curtains made of bleached muslin framed the doors and windows, which were nearly always open, letting in the hot air and lizards.

“I'm going to shower first,” Georgie said, annoyed by Joe's enthusiasm.

Joe ducked into the bathroom before heading down, and Georgie could see her through the door, greasing up her arms and décolletage with baby oil.

“Preening?” she asked.

“Don't be jealous,” Joe said, never taking her eyes off herself in the mirror. “It's a waste of time and you're above it.”

Georgie rolled over onto her back and stretched her legs, pointing her painted toes to the ceiling. She could feel the slight sting of sunburn on her nose and shoulders.

“My advice,” Joe called from the bathroom, “is to slip on a dress, grab a stiff drink, and slap a smile on that sour face of yours.”

Georgie blew a kiss to Joe and rolled over in bed. It wasn't clear to her if they were joking or serious, but Georgie knew it was one of those nights when Joe would be loud and boastful, hard on the servants. Maybe even hard on her.