The Best American Short Stories 2013

  There are few visitors visible at the hotel at this dead hour of the afternoon. Perhaps the guests are resting in their rooms in the heat of the day. Or perhaps everyone has gone down to the coast for the holidays, she thinks. The waiters stand about idly in their white uniforms, their arms dangling lifelessly, chatting to one another in low voices.

  She feels a little sick, and she has the strangest dizzy-making feeling that she doesn’t know what she is doing out here on her own with the children. Why has she made this long, arduous airplane trip out to South Africa over the Christmas holidays without her husband? Why has she come back to the place where she was a child? She thinks of the almost sleepless night in the hotel room, the baby girl up so frequently, screaming with pain. Jessamyn often has the earache.

  She holds on to her eldest child, S.P., who is squirming on her lap, but she has her eye on her youngest, who is, if the truth be told, her Favorite, her Pet, an adorable flaxen-headed baby girl only three years old who is carrying her green bucket on her arm like a handbag and tottering dangerously along the edge of the pool. “Careful, Jez, don’t fall in the water!” she calls out to her baby as her sister looks at her watch. She says she should be getting home. Her husband likes her to come home early in the afternoon.

  “Don’t go yet. Stay and have a cup of tea,” Sandra says. She feels there is something else her sister wants to say to her though she is not certain what it is.

  “I don’t have time for tea,” her sister says, but lingers on.

  It is hot, and the sun is in S.P.’s eyes. Her mother is in her blue two-piece, so that S.P. can feel her bare sticky stomach pressing against her back. S.P. is already eight years old and, she’s aware, far too big to be on her mother’s lap. She tries to make a space between herself and her mother’s soft body, but her mother pulls her closer and goes on murmuring in her ear.

  S.P. knows her mother is in serious trouble of some kind. She can feel it in the way she holds her so tightly and hear it in the over-cheerful tone of her voice, the way she makes jokes about something she doesn’t really think is funny, which is how her mother speaks when she is sad.

  S.P. would desperately like to fix things for her mother, though she is not quite certain what needs fixing. She understands that her mother finds her life, her tall husband with his little bristly mustache that scratches the child’s cheek when he kisses her, her three children too much for her. She disappears into her room as she would to an island, as a refuge from it all, and leaves S.P. alone.

  S.P. would like to keep her mother off that island. She believes that she, the eldest girl, the one who is quick, agile, and smart, is the bridge between her mother’s island and the mainland, that it is up to her to keep her mother tethered to the mainland, the real world.

  But it’s too, too hot, and S.P. doesn’t like being held so tightly. She doesn’t like being called S.P. either, and she likes being called an angel even less, because she knows she isn’t Simply Perfect or an Angel, and it makes her feel she has to try harder to be what her mother thinks she is. She has to pretend to be what her mother wants her to be, which is so difficult.

  Her mother is going on talking about her to her aunt and stroking her hair. “She’s such a whiz with her little sisters. How did you manage to keep them both so quiet for me this morning?” she asks her.

  Her mother had woken S.P. before dawn, tucking the youngest girl, who awakened very early, into her bed, and then Alice had climbed up too shortly after.

  “I told them a scary story, so you could sleep,” she tells her mother.

  “You did? Good for you!” her mother says.

  Her aunt asks, “And what was the story about, darling?”

  “About the Magic Man. He’s called Proppy, and he can do anything he wants to,” she says, and waves both her hands in the bright air in circles, magic circles—she can see the stars—to show her mother and her aunt all the magic the Magic Man can do and how he can turn you into a toad too, if he wants. She wonders if the Magic Man might just appear out here in this strange country, which seems a little like a fairy tale to her. Even the name of the hotel where they are staying seems like a fairy-tale name: the Sunnyside Hotel, it is called.

  “Well, it must be a very good story. You are such a good, good girl!” her mother says. “I don’t know what I’d do without her, my Sweet Pea,” her mother says to her aunt, giving S.P. a kiss on her cheek.

  S.P. wonders, indeed, what her mother would do without her. She knows it is her father who should help her mother get everyone up in the morning, making sure that she and Alice, who is five, are ready for school. Her mother always tells the children that their father has book business in Brussels, which is what takes him away from them so often and gives him that distant look in his eyes, as though he were not really there, when he drives the lawn mower across the grass. S.P. has long ago decided Brussels is not where her father goes, though she doesn’t know where it is. Her father is a slim Frenchman who comes and then disappears bewilderingly. He seems to S.P. to be very bored with his duties as a father and husband.

  On the weekend and during the holidays, it is S.P. who takes both her sisters out into the garden, keeps them quiet with her stories, as she did this morning, going out into this green and pleasant place and sitting under the trees.

  S.P. asks her mother why they don’t live out here in the sunshine all the time, with her grandmother and her aunt nearby, but her mother says her father doesn’t want to live in the country where S.P.’s mother was born, that he doesn’t think it is a good place to bring up children.

  “Do you think he’s right?” S.P. asks.

  “What do you think?” her mother asks her aunt, who says, “I do think he’s right. It’s a terrible country!” with so much anger in the voice it surprises the child.

  Then her aunt leans forward to whisper something to her mother, which S.P. cannot hear, and her mother looks indignant and whispers something back. The aunt says, “Would you go for me?”

  And her mother says, “But what good would that do in the end?” Then her aunt says she has to go, she’ll see them all later that evening, and she gets up. She is wearing a cream sundress, and as she waves goodbye the sleeves fill with air like little wings, and S.P. notices a purple bruise on her smooth, plump arm.

  The sun glints off the water, and the shadows of the leaves shift in a slight breeze. S.P. would so much like to jump down and wander off across the smooth green lawn and find someone her own age to play with, perhaps even a little boy—she is rather tired of girls—but she knows her mother needs the comfort of her body on her lap, her presence beside her.

  She would like to explore the big garden with all its sunlight and shadows. She watches a shadow in the trees in the distance. She sees someone moving between the trees and wonders if it’s a little boy who might play with her. She wriggles around on her mother’s soft, clammy lap, shifting her hips in her new pink two-piece swimsuit, which has little rosebuds where her breasts are supposed, one day, to appear.

  Then she has an idea of how she might escape for a moment.

  “I need to wee,” S.P. says, and the mother lets her get down from her lap. “Can you find your way?” she asks, for the bathrooms are up the bank and in the thatched-roofed changing huts, which are among the trees at some distance from the pool.

  “Of course,” S.P. predictably says, and the mother lies back with relief on her plastic chaise longue. She feels the child could find her way out of a labyrinth. She smiles proudly at her eldest, who has such an excellent sense of direction and can already read so well. She is the one who holds the directions when they are in the car and tells the mother where to turn. Indeed, the mother feels, the child has a better sense of direction than she does herself.

  She watches S.P. wander up the bank, going toward the changing rooms, and she calls out to her loudly, “Be quick, S.P.,” and then closes her eyes, just for a moment, on the bright light, the pool, her little ones.

  She wonders
how on earth they could possibly have gone from there to here. She still thinks of herself and her younger sister as those shy, light schoolgirls—she can see them clearly in their green tunics, the striped ties, the short-sleeved shirts, the lace-ups, the long green socks, and the panama hats on the back of their pale curls, sitting with their arms around their knees, reading their books, propped up against each other’s backs under the old oak tree at boarding school, reading poetry, Blake or Keats or Wordsworth, and looking up at the light between the leaves, dreaming of becoming poets.

  That slight girl, with her small waist and long, dark eyelashes that shaded big blue eyes that filled with tears at the slightest pretext, the mention of any suffering or sorrow, still seems more familiar to her than this woman in whose heavy body she finds herself now. That girl is much more who she still is, surely, with her somewhat confused mind—she was never any good at math, dreamed her way through science, blowing up Bunsen burners and weeping over the dead rabbit they were supposed to eviscerate. She had no idea of geography—“Where was Sri Lanka?”—but starred at English composition—“What imagination!” Mrs. Walker said—and at history. For some reason she remembered in great detail, their exploits marked indelibly, painfully, on her impressionable mind, the lives of Richard III, Peter the Great (using an innocent serf to show off some machine of torture), Catherine of Russia, Louis XVI and his unfortunate queen (appealing to the mothers in the crowd when accused of incest with her own beloved boy), tales of violence, mayhem, and murder.

  Though she no longer reads poetry much except for A Child’s Garden of Verses to the children, surely that slender, pale sixteen-year-old in her school uniform with her tender heart is more she than this plump, pink-skinned woman in her late thirties lying staring up at the blue sky in her blue two-piece, her stomach bulging.

  Languidly, she lies on her back, blinking with bewilderment at the blue sky, and then turning to speak to the middle child, Alice, who comes over complaining about something the little one has done or said, whining and tugging on her hand. She wants her to come and play with them. She murmurs that Mummy is still so sleepy, that she is still very, very tired, she’s been up all night with baby. Laughing, she tells the child that she feels weighted down with stones. She is incapable of dragging her heavy body off the chaise longue.

  How has her body grown so heavy, the mother thinks, when the child has resumed her game with her little sister by the pool, so that it is no longer possible from her appearance, her plump stomach, the rounded arms, the swollen ankles, to tell if she is at the beginning stages of pregnancy or recovering from a former one? How has she put on so much weight? She was always good at games, a fast swimmer, even on the hockey team—she had played goalie, for goodness sake!—rushing out bravely to stop the hard ball, albeit much of the time in terror and with her eyes shut.

  S.P. is walking barefooted across the grass with her eyes shut, her arms out before her. She likes to pretend she can’t see and walk a few steps in darkness, feeling her way blindly, her feet in the coarse grass, going up the bank toward the shade of the trees in her new pink bikini. She feels the cool breeze on her bare skin and hears the rustle of the palm fronds above her. She wiggles her hips a little and spreads out her arms and feels she is flying as she does through the trees in her dreams, swooping up and down, not quite in control, like breathing in and out. She is happy to have escaped the burden of her mother, her aunt, and her sisters, to be on her own in the garden, filled with the pure pleasure of being alive in this lovely place.

  It is December and yet so strangely hot out here, when it would be freezing and raining in France, where they normally live, in a house in a suburb of Paris. On Christmas Day, they all ate a turkey sitting outside in her grandmother’s garden, sweating in the heat, the flame on the Christmas pudding hardly visible in the bright light.

  Now the child hears her mother saying something to Alice about feeling tired, but she keeps on walking, though she opens her eyes.

  It’s at that moment that S.P. is brought back to reality and realizes that it was not a little boy at all in the shadows of the thick oak tree, but a man who is standing there. She is not certain immediately that he’s the Magic Man, for he’s not the way she had imagined he would be at all, with black hair, a black cloak, and perhaps a star on his high hat. Instead he’s wearing, of all things, white shorts, as if he has been playing tennis, and tennis shoes, as her father does in the summertime, and long socks, and he doesn’t have a hat. Instead he wears sunglasses, which cover his eyes and bend back at the sides like a mask. As he moves out of the shadows, his blond hair shines so brightly in the sun, S.P. blinks. She sees him only for a second, and then he disappears again behind the trunk of a tree.

  How have they both become wives rather than the poets they dreamed of being, Sandra thinks, and in her case the wife of a well-known French writer, an intellectual star, someone who has been hailed by the French press as a magician with words, a bright, slim, energetic man who comes and goes fast, and has by this time in the morning and even if it is a Sunday, probably written several obscure chapters—she is not always quite sure she understands his work—of his latest book. How has she become the wife of a man with such thick dark hair, a perfect profile, a strong jaw, and intelligent steel-blue eyes, an athletic man, on top of everything else, a tennis player, a golf player, a runner, with a hard-muscled abdomen and slender hips, a man of enterprise and ambition, who is gone in the morning, often before dawn, scattering pebbles, roaring down the driveway in his green Porsche long before she wakes, and speeds back up the driveway late at night, most of the time long after she has retreated to bed, unable to take another moment with a child climbing all over her or asking for yet another bedtime story.

  But the most surprising, the most unbelievable thing is that she is the mother of three children, for God’s sake, and all under nine! A gaggle of girls: S.P., Alice, and the baby, named after her mother, Jessamyn—and all of them beautiful! beautiful! beautiful! though none quite as beautiful as her baby, she thinks, looking at the little one who is pouring water over her sister’s head now, her baby girl, who looks like a Fra Angelico angel, with her large blue eyes and plump, edible cheeks, her crown of haloed spun-gold hair, a child she thinks of almost as a holy child, the child who has told her she wants to climb up on the sunflowers to reach the Baby Jesus in the sky.

  The man comes striding toward her as she had expected the Magic Man would, as though he knows her, of course, and knows she knows all about him. He beckons to her, grins at her, and flicks back his forelock of blond hair. His teeth are small and a little yellow. In some strange way, he seems familiar to her, as though they have already met, which in a way they have, in her stories. She approaches shyly, wondering what he will say. “Proppy?” she says.

  “I beg your pardon?” He looks down at her politely, seeming a little puzzled.

  “Isn’t your name Proppy?” she asks.

  He smiles a slow, pleased smile and nods his head. “And how did you guess?” he says, and seems delighted at her knowledge. She holds out her hand politely, as she has been taught, and bobs a little curtsy, as he shakes it with enthusiasm. “And you are S.P.,” he says, for he knows her, of course, knows all about her.

  Then she remembers a moment when she was quite little, before her sisters were born, or perhaps she has seen a photograph of the moment with her father, who is, unusually, kneeling beside her in the grass in a panama hat and her mother is kneeling behind in her flowered dress. And she remembers how her father had said at that moment, “You are my Special Person, my S.P.,” and she realizes that that is what her name means. And she is a Special Person, she thinks, as she shakes the Magic Man’s hand, the best in the class at reading, the only one whose little pipe-cleaner man reached the top of the ladder.

  “Would you like to come with me to play with my little boy?” the Magic Man asks her in a kind, soft voice.

  S.P. hesitates for a moment because she does remember her mother
telling her never, never to go off with strange men, but the Magic Man is not a stranger to her, after all, and he has somehow thought of exactly what she would like to do. Of course, the Magic Man knows everything everyone thinks and wishes and can make it all come true, if he wants it to. Still, she says nothing, just looking up at him and then through the trees and down the bank, back across the lawn, where she can still see her mother, who looks rather small and far away, lying beside the pool on the chaise longue. Then she looks back at the Magic Man, who takes off his sunglasses so that she can see he has blue eyes, which glitter like gems, and a rather pointed nose, and thin lips.

  He says, “My little boy has no one to play with, and he’s very lonely. You are a lucky girl with your two sisters, after all.” S.P. nods her head and feels sorry for his little boy, who is all alone when, it is true, she has her two sisters to play with, though there are times like the present moment when she is happy to be rid of them.

  “Where is your little boy?” she asks warily, and he waves his hand in the direction of the changing rooms, where the bathrooms are too, which is where she was going anyway.

  The mother is thinking of the conversation she had with her own mother, to whom she mistakenly confided in a moment of desperation on Christmas Day. Her mother could not see why she can’t just get up and leave her husband, why she goes on having babies with him. Her mother sees things in an entirely practical way.

  “What’s important here, it seems to me, is money. And you are the one with the means! So just kick the bastard out! Throw his fancy clothes out the window! What purpose does he serve, in the end? You’re still young and pretty and . . .” her mother said, but she interrupted.